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Chapter 8: The Undead and Eternal

Introduction

The most ancient Greek literature—the Iliad and the Odyssey, archaic epic poems from the

eighth century B.C.E.—foreshadowed what would become highly diverse Greek thoughts about

the nature of death. Even these earliest works indicated a belief that, when the physical body

ceases to function, ‘an essential element has departed.’1 This element, sometimes referred to as

the psyche (ψυχή), was what made a person a distinct individual; unlike the body, the psyche was

intangible and insubstantial, but without it the body was just an empty shell. 2 That is, nearly

three thousand ago, the Greeks were already struggling with the question of what ‘individual

existence’ really means and whether death, that profoundly disturbing reality, was the utter end

of that existence or whether some sort of postmortem fate awaited everyone.3 The concept of

separation of body and soul was an important and enduring one, and throughout the seventh and

sixth centuries B.C.E., pre-Socratic philosophers theorized various types of existence for the soul

apart from the body, even allowing for the soul to depart from a living body, travel around the

earth, and commune with a spirit world. By the fifth century B.C.E., the previous three centuries’

worth of thinking on the theme of death began to infiltrate philosophical dialogue more strongly,

culminating with Plato’s discussions on the nature of the soul and personhood.4 Yet ancient

Greek and Roman beliefs about the survival of the soul after death remained extraordinarily

varied, ranging from ‘the completely nihilistic denial of after-life, through a vague sense of

souls’ ghostly existence, to a concept of the individual soul’s survival and of personal survival in

a recognisable form.’5 No single orthodoxy prevailed, and within these polytheistic societies

people were, to a certain extent, free to engage in philosophical speculation and to adhere to
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various individual sects and religions such as Epicureanism, Stoicism, Mithraism, Judaism, and,

eventually, Christianity.6 Some of these groups, however, gradually came under scrutiny as their

differing eschatological beliefs presented challenges to the traditional pagan system of the ruling

authorities.7 This was especially true during the periods of Roman expansion and imperialism,

centuries that saw the Roman government attempting to control various religions, resulting in the

persecution of adherents to those beliefs—until Rome itself adopted Christianity and outlawed

paganism.

Archaic Greek beliefs about the soul and afterlife

The early Greeks seem to have connected the soul with the body’s breath, as evidenced by

descriptions in the Iliad: ‘A man’s psyche does not return, once it has passed the barrier of teeth’

(e.g. 4.408-9). That is, in the moment of death, the distinction between body and psyche was

clearly evident when, from the mouth or from a gaping wound a tiny fragment of breath or wind

passed out of the body, ‘small and unnoticed,’ but often sadly or reluctantly.8 This psyche was

the life force—what gave the body vitality—if not actually the ‘soul’ as moderns conceive of it.

Yet this psyche might manifest itself as an eidolon or ‘image’ of the dead person, appearing to

the living in dreams (as the psyche of Patroclus does to Achilles at Iliad 23.66-82) or, as in Book

11 of the Odyssey, as a ‘shadow’ or apparition of the former person, now in Hades, conceived of

early on as a realm where spirits of the deceased continue an existence, albeit in Homer a very

gloomy one (both physically and spiritually). But whereas Greek art and literature from seventh-

and sixth-century Greece mostly agreed upon a clear distinction between body (σῶµα) and

psyche, the question, even as early as those Homeric poems, concerned the nature of that

survival: the Greeks disagreed as to the physicality of the departed soul. Even between the Iliad

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and Odyssey there was no consensus as to the fate the psyche would meet after departing the

body. Did the psyche, often depicted in Greek art as a winged homunculus [Figure 8.1], fly off

happily to some glorious, shining realm? Or did it regret leaving the bodily life behind,

‘mourning its fate’ (e.g. Il. 16.857-8)? Or did the psyche exist merely as an apparition of the

former person in a grey, gloomy afterlife as described in Odyssey 11, when Odysseus visits

Hades?

The visible spirits of the dead Odysseus encounters in Hades have no substance; he cannot

embrace ‘the psyche of his dead mother,’ which looks exactly like her but ‘flutters’ away ‘like a

shadow or dream’ (Od. 11.206-7). Yet even in this earliest Greek representation of an afterlife

the spirits of those who had behaved wickedly in life—including Tityos, Tantalus, and

Sisyphus—are punished with ‘harsh torments’ (κρατερ᾽ ἄλγε᾽, Od. 11.582 and 593), suggesting a

belief that some pain could be felt after death.9 The inhabitants of Hades can also remember a

great deal about their lives on earth (e.g. Od. 11.489-91), and they could feel emotions such as

joy, sorrow, or resentment.10 Archaic eschatology included varying conceptions of Hades itself:

Whereas in the Iliad, the realm of the dead ‘stretches out with no exact boundaries below the

surface of the earth,’ in the Odyssey, Hades is in the far west, where the sun sets (a metaphor for

death), and souls of the dead wander in fields of asphodel.11

In the seventh and sixth centuries, when the belief prevailed that the soul and body were

separate and that the soul departed the body at death, a number of pre-Socratic philosophers were

attributed with the power to manipulate their own souls and, in some instances, even those of

others. These Greek ‘shamans’ could supposedly detach their souls from their bodies and send

them on voyages of exploration, in a process similar to what we might think of as astral

projection or an out-of-body experience.12 A seventh-century philosopher, Aristeas of

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Proconnesus, was reported to have sent his soul wandering out of his body into the air, so that it

could observe ‘everything beneath: land, sea, rivers, cities, people, their experiences, and the

natural world.’13 His body, meanwhile, would lie still, barely breathing, until the soul returned

from its journey and re-entered the body, animating it again, whereupon Aristeas would tell the

stories of what his soul had seen and heard during its travels. The sixth-century philosopher

Hermotimus of Clazomenae supposedly had the same ability: he sent his soul wandering from

his body, sometimes for years, during which it would travel the world. His body lay still until the

soul returned to it. But upon one of these occasions Hermotimus’ wife disobeyed his instructions

to keep others from viewing his body while his soul was absent: ‘Some people came into the

house . . . and observed Hermotimus lying on the floor naked and motionless. They brought fire

and burned him, in the belief that, when the soul came back and no longer had anything to re-

enter, he would be completely deprived of life. This is exactly what happened.’14

Hermotimus, according to the Greek writer Lucian, was a Pythagorean, which elucidates

his beliefs, and perhaps makes the destruction of his physical body less tragic (in theory) than the

story suggests, given the broader scope of Pythagorean beliefs. Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570-495

B.C.E.—his body, anyway), perhaps the most familiar of the pre-Socratic philosophers, believed

that his soul was immortal, that it had existed before coming into his body, and that it would

exist in another bodily form after it departed his. That is, Pythagoras espoused the doctrine of

metempsychosis, or transmigration of the soul, and he and his followers concerned themselves

with the continued existence of a person’s essence after death. They theorized not only that the

soul was what distinguished the animate from the inanimate, but also that it included what we

would call the ‘personality’—the mental characteristics that give us our individual identities.15

And in these respects, the Pythagoreans believed that, rather than being restricted to humans, the

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soul might also be a property of animals and even plants—anything that was born, grew, and

died. A younger contemporary of Pythagoras, the philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon,

recorded a story illustrating Pythagoras’ belief in metempsychosis: one day, while the

philosopher was out walking, he saw a dog being beaten, and cried, ‘Stop, do not beat it; for it is

the soul of a friend that I recognized when I heard it.’ Pythagoras believed that the soul of an old

friend now resided in the animal.16

Regarding transmigration and the Pythagoreans, we also have an interesting passage from

Herodotus. The historian-ethnographer, who records the burial rituals of many cultures but rarely

mentions their religious beliefs, uncharacteristically provides such a comment about the

Egyptians: ‘they were the first people to assert that the psyche is immortal, and that when the

body dies the soul enters another living creature as that creature is being born. Then, after

passing through all creatures of land, sea, and air, it again enters a human body at birth. This

cycle takes three thousand years. Various Greeks—some earlier, some later— adhere to this

theory as if it were their own. Though I know their names, I do not record them’ (2.123.2-3). The

unnamed writers are the Pythagoreans and the Orphics, but they almost certainly did not owe

their doctrine of the transmigration of souls to the Egyptians.17

Orphism was a set of beliefs that may have begun as early as the sixth century B.C.E. in

Greece and adjacent Thrace and slowly gained in popularity over the subsequent two hundred

years.18 The Greeks ascribed the origins of this religion to the poet Orpheus, well known from

myth but considered by many in ancient Greece to have been a historical figure. Orpheus was

believed to have travelled to Hades in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring his wife

Eurydice back to the land of the living. Since he himself survived the trip, however, the Greeks

attributed to him unique insight into the existence awaiting mortals after death. Orpheus had

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(supposedly) written down his observations and introduced certain initiation rituals into his cult.

Those who were initiated into Orphism believed that, according to those writings, they would be

accorded certain advantages in the afterlife,19 such as communion with the gods, particularly

Persephone and Dionysus, both of whom had also descended into Hades and returned. These

deities’ visitation to and return from Hades represented, in part, physical death and resurrection

in nature (of crops, for example), as well as the death and rebirth of the soul; Orphics, like

Pythagoreans, believed that human souls were immortal and travelled through a succession of

bodily lives before gaining eternal bliss.20

Orphism was only one of many ancient so-called ‘mystery’ religions—sects whose rituals

and full beliefs were revealed to those willing to undergo an initiation ceremony, with a certain

level of secrecy surrounding the nature of such ceremonies.21 That is, ‘Mysteries were initiation

rituals of a voluntary, personal, and secret character that aimed at a change of mind through

experience of the sacred’; the rituals promised to achieve a closeness of the individual to the

deity.22 But it was not always clear whether this involved belief in the survival of the soul or, if

so, in what form or realm such survival might manifest itself. Nevertheless, in contrast to the

general polytheistic Greek and Roman religions, which allowed for worship of many different

deities with domains over various practical aspects of life—for example, you might worship

Zeus Xenios regarding issues of hospitality, or Artemis Agrotera as patroness of hunters—what

many mystery cults (as facets of polytheistic societies) offered to their initiates was characterized

by a spiritual dimension, a hope of a better life following that of this world.

Probably the earliest mystery religion that flourished during the Archaic period in

Greece, and which continued in popularity for hundreds of years, was the Eleusinian mystery

devoted to Demeter and her daughter Persephone.23 Whereas Demeter herself was independently

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worshipped as a goddess of agriculture (to whom you might pray for a good harvest), the

Eleusinian mysteries, organized mainly by the city of Athens, initiated thousands of members

every year at a secret rite that apparently ‘held the promise of “better hopes” for a happy

afterlife,’ suggesting a level of spiritual survival and even reward after death.24 The same period

that saw the rise of the Eleusinian mysteries also heralded the growth of mysteries for Dionysus,

though there was no one main site for Bacchic mysteries, in contrast to the city of Eleusis and its

specially built initiation hall, the Telesterion.25 Rather, Bacchic mysteries appeared all over the

ancient world, from the Black Sea to Egypt and from Asia Minor to Italy. Dionysus was said to

have died and been reborn in his infancy, and also to have later travelled to Hades and back, thus

representing death and resurrection both physically and spiritually. His worship thus held the

same promise ‘of eternal bliss in the beyond’ for initiates that seems to have been characteristic

of both Orphism and the Eleusinian beliefs.26 Again, in this respect such mysteries differed from

the more practical, general polytheistic religions by providing a ‘major human strategy for

coping with the future’ with the promise of an afterlife free from the suffering so characteristic of

daily life.27

The optimism of these mystery religions contrasted with the widespread and enduring

belief, persistent from well before the Archaic period, that souls of the dead had the potential to

be surprisingly active in this world. The Homeric epics describe appearances of the dead to

request proper burial, as Patroclus’ psyche does to Achilles (Il. 65-71); restless spirits were

believed to manifest themselves to the living both in dreams and in person until the cause of

their disquiet was discovered and resolved. Spirits of those who were unburied (ataphoi), who

died by violence (biaiothanatoi), and who died young (aoroi) were only three of many types that

might haunt or take vengeance on the living. Dead and buried ancestors, lest they express

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displeasure in similarly untoward ways, were appeased with regularly scheduled rituals as proof

that the living still remembered and revered them.28 Dead heroes and heroines, when properly

worshipped, were believed to respond to requests by the living.

Popular belief also held that spirits of the deceased, rather than acting on their own, could

be controlled by and coerced into performing tasks for the living. They could be summoned for

prophetic and other occult purposes at various ‘oracles of the dead’ situated throughout the

ancient world, though intentionally disturbing the dead via necromancy was generally considered

to be a strange and even desperate move, and literary ghosts summoned this way often expressed

displeasure.29 Literature from the Archaic period through the Roman empire also presented a

specific type of necromancy, corpse reanimation, that reflected the belief in separation of body

and soul: a long departed psyche could re-enter its own corpse, either voluntarily or, more

commonly, via necromancy, though such a phenomenon rarely turned out well for any of the

parties involved.30 More commonly, the living might try to control the dead via curse tablets and

binding spells that requested or ordered spirits of the dead to carry out the will of the living.

Curse tablets (defixiones), with the binding spells written upon them, were often placed in graves

of those who had died young or by violent means (or both), because ‘it was believed that their

souls remained in a restless condition near the graves until their normal life-span had been

reached.’31 Yet the function of these spirits of the dead in the binding spells is not always clear;

perhaps the restless spirits, as liminal beings existing neither in this world nor the next were

intended somehow to transmit the petition of the tablet to the gods, or perhaps they were

expected to carry out the spell themselves. In some cases the restless souls were promised respite

from their liminal and unhappy fate once they carried out the appointed task.32 Many defixiones

also include the names of chthonic deities such as Persephone and Hermes who are asked to

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enact the curse, and many of the tablets also reference an ‘underworld’ or ‘underground’ where

such deities and the souls of the dead were believed to reside.

Greek eschatology during the Classical and Hellenistic Periods

By the mid-fifth century B.C.E., beliefs about the nature of the soul and its afterlife varied so

much that no particular view prevailed in mainstream Greek culture. Rather, during this time

conceptions concerning the possibility of life after death were diffuse and unclear, and from the

end of the fifth century down into the fourth century philosophers continued to debate and refine

their theories about the soul.33 Underworld mythology, too, continued to evolve, with literary

conceptions of Hades growing more specific and presenting a more appealing picture of the land

of the dead than had appeared in Homer. It was during the sixth century that Hades became more

firmly situated underground (rather than at the western edge of the known world), where it

remained from the fifth century down through the Roman period and into medieval times.

Several grottos in various locations around Greece and southern Italy claimed to be home to the

entrance to Hades, such as Cape Taenarum in the southern Peloponnese and Lake Avernus near

Naples. And by the fifth century most of the now-familiar elements of Hades’ kingdom were

firmly settled, including its five rivers, the ferryman Charon, and a three-headed Cerberus as

guardian.34 These elements seem intended to symbolize a definite and distinct separation

between life and death, but various aspects of ancient Greek culture indicate that these

boundaries were surprisingly fluid, perhaps reflecting a hope that death was not, in fact, an

absolute. Hence the on-going popular beliefs that communication with the dead was possible,

that spirits of the dead could intervene on behalf of the living, that restless spirits might take

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vengeance upon the living, and that rituals to appease and honour the dead should be undertaken

regularly.

By the fifth century, too, Greek thought had developed more concrete ideas regarding

punishment or honour after death, depending on whether one had offended the gods or led a

worthy life: your behaviour in this life determined your fate in the next life. The basics of these

ideas had appeared as early as Odyssey 11 where, once admitted to Hades, the dead had to face

judgement.35 Several underworld judges, famous as lawgivers during their lives, were tasked

with assigning newly arrived souls to the appropriate places within Hades. Those to be rewarded

were assigned to Elysium, a place of eternal delight that, in the Archaic period, was imagined to

be separate from Hades and was reserved for mortals related to the gods as well as for heroes

who had fought and died gloriously in battles such as the Trojan War. But by the fifth century

B.C.E. Elysium was described as a part of Hades itself, as a place where the souls of the good

were rewarded by leading blissful afterlives.

Souls of sinners, however, did not enjoy a pleasant afterlife in Hades. In Homer’s Hades,

where most of the dead mingled (Elysium aside), the infamous transgressors subject to torture

were not confined to a separate location. But by the fifth century, Tartarus, originally conceived

of by Hesiod as an amorphous and ambiguously placed abyss that served as a prison for the

Titans (Theog. 721-819), had become a segment of Hades in which the wicked were punished,

many of them mortals who, like Tantalus, had been favoured by the gods but then offended the

immortals (in Tantalus’ case, by trying to feed them human flesh). Stories of men and women

who overstepped their limits represented the Greek belief, in place well before the Classical

period, that people were responsible for their behaviour in this life, and that immoral acts carried

a price—if not in this life, then in the next.36

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The god Hades himself, unlike the Olympian deities, had virtually no cult following,

rarely appears as a major character in myths, and was depicted far less frequently in Greek art

than his Olympian siblings.37 Indeed, Hades was more feared than worshipped, because of the

on-going Greek uncertainty about what death meant, when death would come, and whether it

was final: the Greeks feared what Hades represented, and were reluctant to call upon him by

name.38 Yet Hades himself did not cause death. Even the figure of Death himself was not an

important character in Underworld mythology: Thanatos, Death personified, rarely appears in

Greek literature, and when he does his twin brother Hypnos (‘Sleep’) usually accompanies him.39

Unlike Death in other world mythologies, Thanatos in Greek myth and religion rarely has an

active role and does not kill people or take their souls. Rather, one’s life essence departs the body

on its own at the moment of physical death. Thanatos and Hypnos might accompany the soul to

Hades, but more often the god Hermes serves this function in his role of psychopomp, ‘conductor

of souls.’

Other chthonic deities helped Hades keep his kingdom in order. Among these was

Hecate, an Underworld goddess who, though initially benign (Hesiod, Theog. 409-452) became

closely associated with restless souls, over whom she was believed to have control: she could

restrain or release them as circumstances demanded.40 More menacing than Hecate were the

Erinyes, also known as the Furies—vengeful female spirits born from the earth where drops from

the blood of Ouranos’s castration fell. They were believed to reside beneath the earth, in Hades,

and to punish people who had sinned against their own relatives. Their most well known

appearance in Greek literature comes in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, where they hound Orestes for

the murder of his mother Clytemnestra until they drive him insane. Despite being appeased by

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the end of the play, the Furies continue to appear in Greek and Roman literature as terrifying

avengers of murder, especially matricide.41

During the late fifth century and into the fourth, Greek philosophers continued to debate

the nature of the soul, its properties in relation to personhood, whether it survived bodily death,

and, if so, what sort of continued existence it might have. Such highly rarefied philosophical

debate did not reflect or address the more mainstream and widespread beliefs in restless and

malleable spirits and methods of communication between the living and dead. Rather than

addressing popular perceptions of spirits, philosophers in the Classical and Hellenistic periods

refined their theories about the nature of the soul and the afterlife. Most prominent among these

is Plato’s theory of the soul, but Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics were also highly

influential on later thinking about the subject.

Like many before him, Plato retained the traditional idea of soul as distinguishing the

animate from the inanimate,42 also expressing a belief in the immortality of the soul and

contemplating the nature of its existence. Plato’s theories about the soul appear in many of his

works, and a detailed discussion of them is beyond the scope of this chapter, but we can consider

some examples of his evolving theories. In sections 40c-41c of Plato’s Apology (ca. 380 B.C.E.),

a subdued Socrates contemplates the death sentence just handed down to him by the Athenian

court, and theorizes two possible states following bodily death. The first is a state of non-

existence: a person who has died has no consciousness, no perception or feeling of anything at

all; death is like a sleep with no dreams, or like one long endless night, and has the advantage of

being free from all of life’s pain and suffering. The second possible result of death is that the

soul, seen as having an existence separate from the physical body, undergoes a change and

migration (µεταβολή καὶ µετοίκησις, 40c) from this place to another, one inhabited by everyone

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who has ever died. Socrates says that such an existence would be wonderful, because you could

converse with all the famous people who had gone before you, such as Homer and Hesiod.

Socrates imagines a lively intellectual existence after death, where he could continue to be able

to engage in intense philosophical debate.

Whereas the afterlife described by Socrates in the Apology suggests a belief that

personality and intelligence survive bodily death, some of Plato’s other theories say less about

individual personality and more about the abstract nature of the soul. In Plato’s Meno (ca. 380

B.C.E.), for example, Socrates cites the view of Pindar and other early poets: ‘They say that a

man’s psyche is immortal, and at one time reaches an end, which they call dying, but at another

time comes into existence again, and is never destroyed,’ and so one ought to live one’s life with

a sense of duty towards other people and with honour toward the gods (81b). And since the soul

is immortal, has been reborn often, and has observed all events occurring both in this world and

in Hades, ‘there is nothing the soul has not learned’; the soul has memory of everything it knew

before (81c). Similarly, in the Phaedo (ca. 360 B.C.E.), often referred to in antiquity as On the

Soul, Plato assures us that nihilism is not the case: ‘men fear that when the soul departs from the

body, it no longer exists anywhere, but rather that on the day a man dies the soul, too, is

destroyed and perishes, and immediately upon being released from the body dissipates like

breath or smoke and does not exist anywhere at all,’ but it can be proven that ‘when a man has

died, his soul exists and retains agency and intelligence’ (70a-b).43

Plato’s most well known speculation about the afterlife may be the Myth of Er, which

concludes his Republic (ca. 360 B.C.E.). In this story, sometimes described as one of the earliest

accounts of a ‘near-death experience,’44 the brave warrior Er has died in battle. But when the

corpses of the fallen were collected from the field, Er’s body was found undecayed, and as it lay

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on the funeral pyre ready to be set alight, he came to life again and told the astonished onlookers

what he had seen while his psyche had been absent from his body (614a-b). His soul had joined

many others gathered on some sort of spiritual plane, in which a panel of judges directed those

who had been righteous during life to proceed on a path on the right-hand side and upward, while

those who had been guilty of wrongdoing were directed to the left and downward (614c). He

observed that souls newly arrived from earth appeared dirty and dusty, while souls coming down

from above were shiny clean. Er himself was told that he was to be the messenger to the world of

the living as to what awaited them in the afterlife, and he reported that those who had done

wrong would be punished in accordance with the severity of their crimes and might eventually

be released from punishment, while those who had lived just lives would be duly rewarded.

The Myth of Er includes an explanation of reincarnation and transmigration of the soul,

and adds that souls were allowed to choose their next incarnation and that they often did so based

on experiences in their previous life. The soul of Agamemnon, for example, tired of the

sufferings he had undergone in his life, chose to return as an eagle. The story thus suggests, as

Plato also expressed in the Apology, Meno, and Phaedo, that the soul retains some aspects of

personality and intelligence—though whether the animal containing a reincarnated human soul

retains any of that is unclear. But Plato is more concerned with the moral aspects of postmortem

survival: he concludes the Republic by saying, ‘the soul is immortal and able to endure all sorts

of evil and all sorts of good’; thus, we should always hold to the upward path and practice justice

and pursue wisdom, so that we may be dear to the gods both during this life and the next (621c).

Overall, the Republic explicitly integrates several central features of the ordinary notion of soul,

namely, ‘responsibility for the life of an organism (that is, in the human case, responsibility for

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its being and remaining alive as a human being), for cognitive and (especially) intellectual

functions, and for moral virtues such as courage and justice.’ 45

Plato’s theories greatly influenced later thinking about the nature of the soul and survival

after death. Aristotle, in De Anima (350 B.C.E.), continued his own investigation of Plato’s

ideas, delving into the question of not whether but how the soul is the essence of life, the spark

that animates living beings. He was less concerned with the question of life after death.46 Like

Plato, though, Aristotle did believe that the soul was non-corporeal—separate from the body—a

belief that continued to prevail in the fourth and third centuries B.C.E. During this time the

Greeks still told stories about shaman-like abilities similar to those of the pre-Socratics. One

such tale supposedly influenced Aristotle:

Here is a proof that it is possible for the soul to leave the body and enter it again: the man

in Clearchus who used a soul-drawing wand [psuchoulkos rhabdos] on a sleeping lad and

persuaded the great Aristotle, as Clearchus says in his books On Sleep, that the soul

separates from the body and enters it again and treats it as a sort of hotel. For the man

struck the boy with his wand and drew out his soul. Leading the soul some distance from

the body with the stick, he demonstrated that the body remained motionless and was

preserved unharmed and was unable to feel anything when pricked, as if it were dead. In

the meantime the soul was at some remove from the body. But when the wand was

brought back into association with the body and it re-entered it the boy described

everything in detail.47

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Such beliefs coexisted yet contrasted strongly with those of other Hellenistic schools of

thought such as the Epicureans and Stoics. Both schools adhered to the doctrine that, even if the

soul existed separately from the body, the soul had a corporeal existence of its own. The Greek

philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.E.) and his followers adopted the nihilistic view that the

soul, being made up of physical particles, could no more survive after death than the body, and

so dies along with it as the particles disperse. All sensation ceases at death; there is,

consequently, nothing to fear from an afterlife, as no punishment exists after death. ‘Death is

nothing to us, since when we exist, death does not, and when death exists, we do not,’ wrote

Epicurus in his Letter to Menoeceus.48 The Stoics, a school founded by the philosopher Zeno in

the early third century B.C.E.,49 also believed that the soul was mortal, but that it could survive

the death of the body it ensouled. Nevertheless, though believing that the soul was thus liberated

from the body, the Stoics said little about the nature of the soul’s independent existence—

including where it might exist and for how long—after this separation.50 By the end of the

Hellenistic period, the various philosophical schools had provided distinctly different

eschatological perspectives, many of which would influence Roman thought, while mainstream

(non-elite-philosophical) culture continued to express a wide range of beliefs about the nature

and behaviour of spirits of the dead.

Evolving eschatological views during the Roman Republic and Empire

The influence of Greek philosophers on Roman eschatological thought became particularly

evident in the late Republican period. In the first century B.C.E., for example, Cicero, influenced

by Plato, discussed the likelihood of life after death, while Lucretius, preferring the Epicureans,

tended toward nihilism. Vergil, in his Aeneid, added details to past descriptions of Hades. But

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what the scholarly philosophers debated and what most of the population thought probably

different considerably. Popular belief in the agency of restless spirits continued to be evidenced

in curse tablets, magic spells, and lurid stories about revenants and reanimated corpses, and the

Roman period also saw the spread of mystery cults that seemed to promise bliss for initiates in a

way that abstract philosophical theories did not. The cults of Mithras and Isis (among others)

became particularly popular while, at the same time, the beginnings of Christianity took root. In

short, Roman beliefs, like Greek beliefs, varied considerably and ranged ‘from the idea that

death was a complete end, to a well-developed geography for a separate world of the dead,’ and

no single view prevailed.51

The sixth book of Cicero’s De re publica (51 B.C.E.) contains the Dream of Scipio,

modelled after Plato’s Myth of Er. In it, the Roman general Scipio Africanus describes not a

death-like out-of-body experience but an intense, mystical dream in which his disembodied soul

travels beyond the earth and views the cosmos in all its glory. He learns that the souls of those

who serve their country well and live their lives with virtue and honour will receive the reward

of eternal joy, but the souls of those who give themselves over to pleasures of the body remain in

a sort of limbo indefinitely (6.29). In his treatise on old age (De senectute, 44 B.C.E.), Cicero

echoes Plato’s Apology in suggesting that there are two possibilities at death: ‘Death is either

something to be indifferent to, if it extinguishes the soul (animum) utterly; or it is to be hoped

for, if it leads the soul to a place where the soul will exist eternally. There is no third possibility’

(66). Cicero expresses no horror at the possibility of eternal oblivion; rather, he says, ‘What

should I be afraid of, if after death I will either be free from misery or will be eternally happy?’

(67). Like Plato, Cicero ultimately argues for the immortality of the soul, with the soul retaining

its memory of things past and having an ability to foresee the future. Similarly, like the

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Apology’s Socrates, Cicero’s narrator in De Senectute imagines an afterlife in which he will be

able to converse with all the distinguished men who have gone before him. And, in keeping with

Plato’s concept of morality, Cicero concludes, ‘if our souls were not immortal, it is unlikely that

the souls of the best men would strive so greatly to attain immortal glory’ (82).

Conversely, in his epic didactic poem De rerum natura (ca. 50 B.C.E.) Cicero’s

contemporary Lucretius describes the soul in Epicurean atomistic terms: everything that exists,

including the soul, is made up of constantly moving, indivisible particles too small to see. On

this basis, he argues that the soul is corporeal and that the body and soul are intertwined to such

an extent that they cannot exist apart from each other (3.166-7 and 332-46). Consequently, the

soul is mortal (3.417-18), and when the body dies, the soul likewise perishes, dissolved back into

its primal elements. When it is apart from the body, the soul cannot have eyes, nose, hands,

tongue, or ears; hence the soul can have neither sensation nor existence once separated from the

body (3.624-41). Further, he argues, if the soul were immortal, implying transmigration, why do

we not remember our previous lifetimes (3.670-73)? Clearly, the soul is not exempt from death,

but is born and dies just as the body does (3.711-12). Lucretius uses this argument to explain

why it is foolish to fear death: since we will not be able to feel anything at all ever again, death is

nothing and should not concern us (nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum, 3.831). It is

not the soul that is eternal, but death itself (mors aeterna, 3.1091). Like Lucretius, the Roman

philosopher Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 B.C.E-65 C.E.) believed that death was nothing to fear.

Seneca was a Stoic, but like most Stoics, said little about the soul’s continued consciousness and

advised that death brought with it no evils, because ‘the stories that make the underworld

terrifying to us are just that—stories; no darkness awaits the dead, no imprisonment, no rivers

blazing with fire, no stream of Oblivion, no judges, no trials. . . . The poets make that nonsense

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up and trouble us with false fears. No: Death is a release from all our sorrows and a boundary

beyond which our troubles cannot pass; Death restores us to that quietude we had before we were

born.’52

Whereas Lucretius and Seneca explain the folly of fearing the prospect of eternal

nonexistence, the Roman poet Catullus (84-54 B.C.E.) uses this philosophy to introduce a

‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ urgency into his verses.53 In poem five, Catullus’ narrator

both playfully and seriously stresses to his lover the importance of living in the moment, because

‘once our brief light goes out, night is one eternal sleep’ (cum semel occidit brevis lux, / nox est

perpetua una dormienda, 5.5-6). Similarly, the poet Horace (ca. 65-8 B.C.E.), whose works often

expressed the Epicurean philosophy that this life is all there is and that we cannot know the

number of our allotted days on earth, famously urges his audience to ‘seize the day’ (carpe diem,

Odes 1.11.8). Unlike these lyric poets, the epic poet Vergil (70-19 B.C.E.) presents a more

traditionally Homeric view of an afterlife in which the soul survives death. Vergil provides a

detailed description of Hades in Aeneid 6, where Aeneas travels to the underworld to meet with

his dead father Anchises, who will foretell the great future of Rome, the city that Aeneas’s

descendants are destined to found. Though introducing the Underworld as a place shrouded in

gloom (6.267), and ‘a place for ghosts, and for sleep and drowsy night’ (6.390), much like

Homer’s version, Vergil designs his Hades with many more separate sections, each intended for

certain categories of the dead depending on how they died—a geography that ultimately

influenced Dante’s Inferno. For example, Vergil describes how the souls of those who did not

receive a proper burial (the ataphoi) cannot yet cross over into the afterlife; rather, they wander

the shores of the Styx aimlessly for a hundred years, but then may at last enter Hades (6.325-30).

Also stuck in this liminal place are those who died before their time (the aoroi), such as babies

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and suicides,54 and Vergil constructs the Lugentes Campi, the ‘Sorrowful Fields,’ for those who

died of unrequited love—which, in this case, includes suicides such as Dido (6.441). As in

Homer, these shades of the dead have not forgotten their lives, but rather retain their memories

and emotions. There is also a place for renowned warriors who died in battle; gruesomely, their

spirits appear as mangled in the afterlife as their bodies did at the moment of death.

In passages that seem indebted to Plato’s Myth of Er, Vergil’s Sibyl explains that the

road to Aeneas’ right leads down to Hades’ palace and Elysium, but the path on the left leads

wicked souls to their punishment in Tartarus (at laeva malorum / exercet poenas, et ad impia

Tartara mittit 6.542-3). Vergil paints a particularly hellish picture of these punishments: the

guilty (such as adulterers) are ringed by a river of fire, imprisoned, chained, whipped, and

subjected to various tortures similar to those inflicted upon more infamous sinners such as

Sisyphus and Ixion. In Elysium, however, souls lead afterlives of bliss: rosy skies; shining lands

of woods and green lawns and sandy banks; music, singing, dancing, feasting. The great heroes

of Troy abide here, along with those who looked after their fellow men during life rather than

behaving wickedly toward them. From these descriptions, it seems that the souls of the dead—as

in earlier versions of Hades—are conceived of as being able to feel physical sensation, despite

also being described as insubstantial; like Odysseus at Od. 11.204-7, Aeneas tries three times to

embrace his parent’s ghost (imago, 6.701), only to grasp thin air. Yet Anchises retains his

personality and memory and has gained occult knowledge, explaining to Aeneas the process of

transmigration. Souls in Hades, he says, are predestined to be reincarnated. Those who were

wicked in life undergo punishment for a time until they are purged and can enter Elysium; from

there, after a long time, they (and others that were in Elysium initially) drink from Lethe, the

river of forgetfulness, and return to earth in corporeal form.

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The extent to which most Romans, including Vergil, believed in any of these versions of

an afterlife—or in any afterlife at all—is impossible to determine. As ever, a wide variety of

beliefs coexisted.55 Perhaps reflecting the influence of Epicurean beliefs (as in Horace), memento

mori decorative motifs grew in popularity between the first century B.C.E. and first century C.E.,

particularly floor mosaics depicting skulls and skeletons accompanied by aphorisms such as

‘Know Thyself’ [Figure 8.2]. Such décor, often found on dining room floors, suggests a belief

that anything resembling bodily existence—with all of its five senses, personality, and

intelligence—ceases at death, in contrast to Vergil’s descriptions of feasting in Elysium, for

example. At the same time, the vast majority of curse tablets discovered so far date to the Roman

period, suggesting a widespread belief in the existence and agency of spirits. Stories of ghosts

and reanimated corpses also became increasingly popular at this time. Politician and writer Pliny

the Younger (ca. 61-113 C.E.) included several ghost stories in his correspondence, specifically

inquiring into the nature of such apparitions in letter 7.27.1: ‘I should very much like to know

whether you think there are such things as ghosts,’ he writes to his friend Licinius Sura, ‘and

whether they have their own shapes and some kind of divine existence, or whether they are

unreal images that take their forms from our own anxieties.’ Expressing personal scepticism, he

nevertheless records what has become the most famous ghost story from antiquity, describing a

haunted house where a chain-rattling, emaciated phantom finds rest only when his bones are

discovered and properly buried (7.27.5-11). In addition to stories of hauntings, in which ghosts

voluntarily visit the living for various purposes,56 literary scenes of necromancy and corpse-

reanimation, with spirits of the dead summoned against their will from an indeterminate afterlife,

appeared with increasing frequency. The most gruesome of these appears in Lucan’s Pharsalia

(ca. 65 B.C.E.): Erictho—a notorious Thessalian witch—performs a necromantic ceremony, but

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rather merely summoning up the ghost of the dead man, she forces the reluctant spirit back into

its corpse. In this case, the spirit cannot communicate with the living without a physical body to

give it voice.57

The Roman interest in lurid, sensationalistic stories such as these was reflected in

paradoxographical collections of mirabilia (‘marvels’) such as that of Phlegon of Tralles (second

century C.E.), a Greek freedman of the emperor Hadrian. Described as the closest thing the

Romans had to tabloid journalism,58 Phlegon’s text includes tales expressing various and

contradictory views about the nature of the soul and afterlife, but these views were likely not

meant to reflect any specific doctrine or serious thought, in contrast with the musings of Cicero

or Lucretius or even Pliny. One story is about a revenant—an unmarried girl who, after her

bodily death, somehow returned to life, reanimating her own corpse in order to experience sex.

Soon after seducing a young man, she died again (1).59 In another story, a dead man returns to

life, wishing to devour the body of his young son (2). These two stories present close ancient

equivalents to vampires and ‘zombies,’ and they do not address philosophical notions concerning

the presence or absence of a soul as an animating force or as anything else.60

Nevertheless, the rising popularity of ghost stories and other supernatural tales during the

first two centuries C.E. may have reflected growing concerns about what happens after we die.

The Roman period saw not simply a resurgence in but also an apex of the popularity of certain

mystery sects, particularly those of the Great Mother (Magna Mater), Isis, and Mithras.61 All of

these had existed for centuries but became particularly popular under the Roman Empire for

various reasons. Egypt, for example, had become a Roman province in 30 B.C.E., causing an

increased awareness and interest in the cult of the goddess Isis, a cult that received official status

in Rome.62 The Greeks had already given special prominence to the Egyptian deities Isis and

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Osiris as early as the Archaic period, identifying them with Demeter and Dionysus and the

symbolism of death and rebirth both in nature and of the spirit.63 But by the second century C.E.

followers of Isis were widespread across the Empire.64

The Mithraic mysteries became especially popular from the first through fourth centuries

C.E. Mithras was a very old Indo-Iranian deity, though the exact nature of his worship origins

has never been entirely clear.65 Worshippers—men only66—met in small temples in underground

caverns for initiation ceremonies and sacrificial meals in the presence of a tauroctony, a

representation of Mithras in the act of slaying a bull for the sun god Sol [Figure 8. 3]. Exactly

what the mysteries promised to initiates remains unclear, but they may have assured some kind

of ‘transcendent salvation’ such as a blissful afterlife for souls of the righteous, a concept already

well established in the Zoroastrian tradition from which the Roman worship of Mithras probably

descended.67 The cave, in addition to providing a level of privacy, may have been metaphorical

for the underworld; Greek pre-Socratic ‘shamans’ were known to meditate in caves in their

attempts to communicate with the spirit world.68

It is also possible that mystery cults gained in popularity under the Roman Empire

because of the increasingly repressive and dictatorial nature of the state religious authority,

which sometimes felt threatened by the competition from various mysteries. The traditional

polytheistic religion apparently did not offer a sufficiently optimistic eschatological view, and

many inhabitants of the empire, beset by frequent wars and consequently often burdened by

difficult economic circumstances, hoped for a better life after this one. Although the Roman

government during most of the Republic and Empire was somewhat tolerant of different beliefs

and deities imported from other cultures, it preferred assimilation. Thus, occasionally, because of

their perceived potential for disobedience, certain religions and sects faced persecution from the

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Roman authorities.69 As early as the second century B.C.E., for example, the Roman senate

issued a decree restricting certain aspects of Bacchic worship.70 But it was Judaism and,

eventually, Christianity that proved most challenging to traditional Roman religious views.

A brief look at Judaic eschatology

Despite being monotheistic, Judaism did not adhere to one consistent set of eschatological beliefs

any more than the polytheistic Greek and Roman religions did. Throughout antiquity, Judaism

‘developed and changed repeatedly through contact with other world civilizations, so Jewish

afterlife teachings evolved rapidly’ and continued to do so up through the modern era, presenting

many parallel and even conflicting ideas on life after death.71 Nevertheless, by the Hellenistic

period, two main concepts had emerged in Jewish eschatological tradition: belief in a ‘world-to-

come’ (olam ha-ba), and the resurrection of the dead.72

From the early biblical period—the time of Abraham through the Exodus from Egypt, ca.

1800-1250 B.C.E.—no written philosophical speculation about any postmortem existence

survives. But funerary traditions such as burial in ancestral tombs, feeding the dead, and forms of

necromancy all suggest an ongoing concern with the existence of the dead in some sort of

subterranean netherworld, though there was not yet any concept of a heaven. From the twelfth

century on, after the Exodus and settlement in Canaan, new notions of life after death emerged

among the Israelites. The conception of an underworld, known as Sheol, slowly grew more

specific, initially exhibiting characteristics similar to the archaic Greek Hades: both were gloomy

abodes where all the dead resided, regardless of their moral behavior during life.73 During this

period Judaic afterlife philosophy was characterized mainly by a belief in Sheol and specifically

understood death not as a complete annihilation of existence, but as a diminution of energy, a

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loss of vitality, a depletion of the nefesh—a concept comparable to the archaic Greek psyche in

terms of referring to the life force, though not ‘soul’ or ‘spirit.’ A difference between body and

soul, with the latter exiting the body at death, was not expressed in early biblical times. Rather,

the nefesh after death was seen as a ‘depotentiated psychophysical entity’ that continued an

existence in Sheol, but in a weakened, faded condition, much like the dead in Homer’s Iliad.74

Like those Greek dead, the ghostlike inhabitants of Sheol were not utterly inert, but possessed

awareness of themselves and the power to interact with the living, as in the necromantic scene at

1 Samuel 28 (the Witch of Endor)—though as in Greek belief, intentional interaction between

the living and the dead was generally condemned as a violation of nature. Between the tenth and

eighth centuries B.C.E. there was still no conception of postmortem judgement and no

philosophy of the individual soul.75

But during this middle biblical period—often referred to as the ‘preexilic’ period, the

time from the settlement in Canaan to the Babylonian exile, ca. 1250-586 B.C.E.—the shift from

worship of multiple Canaanite deities (such as Baal, Asherah, and Yahweh) to monotheistic

worship of Yahweh (YHVH) led to major changes in afterlife philosophy. Sheol came under

Yahweh’s control and became a place of punishment for the wicked, indicating the notion of a

spiritualized, individual life after death.76 At the same time, drastic sociopolitical changes

following the Assyrian conquest of Israel, the Babylonian conquest of Judah (Israel’s southern

neighbor), and the subsequent exile of the Jews to Babylonia led to diversification of Judaic

eschatological beliefs in the later biblical period—the ‘postexilic’ time from the Babylonian exile

through the Hellenistic era, ca. 586-200 B.C.E. Partially influenced by Zoroastrianism, which

included belief in divine judgement, conceptions of Sheol shifted as one result of the exile was

the philosophical concern of how to account for the suffering of good people. This question was

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addressed by the Book of Job, and texts such as Ezekiel 18:20 and Jeremiah 31:29-30 introduced

the concept of moral retribution: individuals are punished or rewarded in the next life in direct

proportion to their behaviour during life.77 In this later biblical period, a particularly significant

change in Jewish eschatology was the emergence of the doctrine of resurrection—the belief that

the dead will live again at some future time and be united with their physical bodies to

participate in a divine kingdom on earth at the end-of-days. Consequently, over the course of

several centuries, Sheol became not only a place of punishment and permanent abode for the

wicked, but also an intermediate resting place for souls of the righteous awaiting the coming

kingdom of YHVH.78 The doctrine of resurrection, along with that of divine retribution based on

moral behaviour, became crucial to the concepts of heaven and hell in later Judaism and,

eventually, in Christianity.

During the apocryphal period, a postbiblical era bridging biblical and rabbinic Judaism

(ca. 200 BCE-200 CE), Judaic literature exhibited increasingly diverse thinking on the nature of

the soul and life after death, influenced in part by the spread of Hellenistic culture during the

time of Alexander (mid-fourth century B.C.E.).79 A more defined notion of the soul, different

from the nefesh, became clearly distinguished from the body, and this increased insistence on the

individual soul—on the survival of the human personality as a distinct, disembodied entity—led

to an increased diversification and description of postmortem worlds, particularly in the dualistic

conception of the hereafter.80 Sheol, now also called Gehenna became a place reserved for

punishment of the wicked, while the entirely new concept of Paradise or Heaven became the

abode of the righteous. Apocryphal literature such as the Book of Enoch and other texts

produced during the Second Temple period (ca. 530 B.C.E. -70 C.E.) also presented increasingly

elaborate descriptions of both places. Images of torture in Sheol/Gehenna included fire, chains,

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darkness, and an ‘abyss of complete condemnation,’ while Paradise/Heaven, comprised of

several different levels and often depicted as a delightful garden, becomes the final resting place

of the righteous.81 It also becomes a place for a new, third category of human souls, those who

had sinned but who, though tainted, could be purified of their iniquity in time for the resurrection

in a kind of purgatory.

Variations in Judaic eschatological thinking appeared throughout the Roman Empire,

particularly during the late Second Temple Period. Whereas much Palestinian Jewish philosophy

adhered to the belief in bodily resurrection during an end time, the Alexandrian Jewish

community in Egypt, heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, expressed a strong belief in the

immortality of the soul that precluded the notion of a last judgement and resurrection:

immediately after death the souls of the righteous enter into God’s presence for eternity. Yet

even within Palestinian Judaism no eschatological consensus existed, as evidenced by the works

of Flavius Josephus (37-ca. 100 C.E.), a Jew from Jerusalem who initially fought against Roman

rule of the province of Judea but later changed sides and was granted Roman citizenship. He

provides details about three main Jewish philosophical schools. According to Josephus, the

Sadducees, a sect comprised mainly of upper class Jews, rejected the possibility of an afterlife,

doing away with any idea of the permanence of the soul and the notion of punishments and

rewards in Hades. Rather, the Sadducees believed that ‘the soul perishes together with its

body.’82 The Essenes, an ascetic sect, expressed a perspective clearly tied to Platonism,

describing a mortal body with an immortal soul that is released from the body at death. They

established an unambiguous link between moral behavior in this life and one’s fate in the

hereafter: souls of the righteous receive a reward in the afterlife, but souls of the wicked are

doomed to eternal punishment. The Pharisees, perhaps the most popular sect, agreed with the

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Essenes that all souls are immortal, but they envisioned a form of corporeal existence for the

souls of the righteous—though Josephus does not mention the concept of bodily resurrection.83

Despite the influence of Greek teachings on the immortal soul as seen both in

Alexandrian and in Essene philosophy, it was ultimately the Pharisees’ philosophy, including the

belief of unity of body and soul, that became the basis for the eschatological beliefs of rabbinical

Judaism.84 ‘Rabbinical’ refers to Judaism during the centuries immediately following the Roman

destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. and exile of the Jews from Roman Judea; the

Romans attacked Jerusalem and razed the Temple because of Jewish uprisings that were due in

part to lack of Roman regard for Jewish religious customs.85 With the physical center of Jewish

religious practice gone, and the Jewish people forming an increasingly diffuse Diaspora, the

Rabbis (teachers and interpreters of the Torah) became spiritual leaders for the Jewish people.

The main texts from this period, the late-second-century Midrash and its commentary, the

Gemara (compiled in the third through fifth centuries), together formed the Talmud, a collection

of diverse teachings on Jewish law and spirituality.86 The Rabbis also developed another

important body of literature, the Midrash, comprised of many texts commenting on the Torah.

Both the Talmud and the Midrash contain extensive collections of Jewish eschatological

teachings, though, as in biblical and apocryphal texts, ‘nowhere in rabbinic literature do we find

a single, systematized statement on the Jewish understanding of life after death,’ but rather

thousands of individual rabbinic teachings on various facets of the hereafter.87 The Rabbis

debated, for example, the extent to which the dead were aware of the living, and wrestled with

the issue of necromancy. Jewish folk-belief indicated that, in the days immediately following

death, the soul remained in the vicinity of the body, trying to reenter it, until its physical

decomposition prompted the soul to continue its postmortem journey. Such souls could

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eavesdrop on the living, learning how their families and friends were faring.88 Regarding

necromancy, the Rabbis seem to have maintained a non-committal attitude, ‘not officially

accepting it as a formal practice within the canon of Jewish law, but at the same time not overtly

discrediting the practice of necromantic incantation, which probably did have folk-level

support.’89

The notion of an Angel of Death also develops during this time, and diverse

characteristics of Gehenna are expanded to include snow, hail, brimstone, and smoke; Gan Eden

in heaven, in addition to its proliferation of flora, acquired gates of ruby, thousands of

ministering angels, and white robes for the righteous. But because they were especially focused

on providing guidelines for religious practice rather than on debating metaphysical doctrine, the

Rabbis were more interested in the doctrine of divine judgement, with its system of postmortem

reward and punishment, than in the nature of the soul itself. They concerned themselves with

ethical behaviour in daily, embodied life.90 Building on previous Judaic eschatology, rabbinic

literature maintains Gehenna as the realm of postmortem punishment, but, in some texts, as only

a temporary purgative abode where souls remain no longer than twelve months. Some souls are

purified there during that period, and then ascend to divine bliss in Gan Eden, after which they

participate in the collective resurrection of both body and soul at the end-of-days.91 Teachings

regarding souls of the very wicked varied considerably: some texts say that, after the twelve-

month period in Gehenna, souls of the wicked are utterly annihilated and cease to exist; others

say that certain classes of sinners—such as heretics and adulterers—are eternally condemned.

This was not the predominant view, however, and ‘eternal punishment was never accepted as a

doctrinal belief in rabbinic Judaism.’ 92 Rather, the period of twelve-month purgation and

purification was the more generally accepted view.

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Conclusion: Heading into Christianity and Islam

This rabbinical lack of belief in eternal punishment contrasts sharply with the Christian notion of

hell and damnation. Whereas the Rabbis described a transitional, purgative experience for the

soul in Gehenna, early Christian writers emphasized the notion that sin leads to eternal suffering

in hell. Moreover, in contradistinction to the rabbinical focus on moral behaviour and on

religious law and practice in this life, Christian tradition elevated the afterlife to a position of

supreme importance, seeing existence in the here-and-now as only a brief, dimly experienced

preparation for life beyond the grave.93 And whereas the two main Judaic eschatological

principles—belief in olam ha-ba and in the resurrection of the dead—took centuries to emerge,

Christianity, which evolved in the second to fifth centuries C.E. from ‘a marginal Jewish sect to

the dominant religious authority in the Roman world,’ maintained from the start relatively

consistent beliefs about eternal life, hell, and heaven, particularly 'paradise to anyone who

repented in the name of Jesus Christ.’94

Christianity began during the first century C.E. as a denomination of Second Temple

Judaism. Its earliest adherents were Jews and fellow Judeans.95 They followed the Hebrew Bible

but differed from other Jews in seeing Jesus as their leader and revering him as if he were a

god.96 This distinction caused a gradual split of Christians from Jews in the mid-first century, a

rift that widened after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. The New Testament, an

anthology including various Gospels, Acts, and Epistles, arose around 80 C.E. as a codification

of specifically Christian beliefs focused on the teachings of Jesus and on God’s kingdom, with

adherence to the former a prerequisite for attainting the latter. Christian doctrine, like Judaism,

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included belief in the resurrection, divine judgement, and eternal life, but dependent on

acceptance of Christ as the Messiah.

The Roman government, initially on edge about the growing popularity of Christianity

and its potential threat to official state paganism and Imperial Cult, tried various methods to

suppress the religion, including making Christianity illegal and allowing executions of its

adherents, a practice that continued sporadically until the early fourth century C.E. Then, the

Roman emperor Constantine (ca. 285-337 C.E.), convinced of the superiority of the Christian

God, openly rejected paganism and converted to Christianity. This was, among other things, the

beginning of the end for Greek and Roman mystery cults: they had been ‘options within the

multiplicity of pagan polytheism’ and ultimately disappeared with it.97 But it was St. Augustine’s

highly influential City of God (early fifth century) that provided the basis for subsequent

Christian eschatology. Augustine vigorously defended the concept of eternal damnation, while

stressing that mankind must accept Jesus’s divinity so that humans may be liberated from sin and

given hope of a blissful afterlife.98 Consequently, for almost two thousand years eternal life,

heaven, and hell have been the predominant themes of Christian doctrine.99

Both Judaic and Christian eschatologist strongly influenced Islamic conceptions of the

afterlife, as reflected in the seventh-century C.E. Qur’an, the holy text of Islam believed to be the

word of God as transmitted to the prophet Muhammad (ca. 570-632 C.E.). Islam’s ‘urgent

emphasis upon strict monotheism’ shaped Muslim notions of the afterlife, which included an

underworld, belief in angels, and an anticipation of the Last Day, when the world and history

will end, and all the dead will be resurrected and judged.100 When Allah announces the

judgement, the condemned—those who oppose Allah and conduct themselves wickedly—‘will

be consigned to burn forever in the fires of hell,’ while the redeemed—those who believe in

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Allah and behave righteously—‘will be ushered into a heavenly paradise, restored to the fate

God originally intended for humanity.’101 Notably, both realms will be experienced physically as

well as spiritually: the condemned will feel the torture of physical fire but also the inner fires of

fear, guilt, shame, and hopelessness, and the righteous will experience ‘unimaginable physical

pleasures’ as well as the spiritual enjoyment of life in Allah’s presence.102 The strict, clear

eschatological doctrine set forth in the Qur’an has influenced Muslim belief for centuries since.

A number of common themes about the soul and eternity ultimately emerged from

religions ranging from the ancient Near East up through seventh-century Islam. First, belief in an

afterlife played an important role in allaying human anxieties about the nature of death. But then

an underworld, and particularly a gloomy, ill-defined existence in such a place, did not suffice.

What benefit was there to a dismaying, hopeless afterlife—what sort of existence was that to

look forward to? Before long, as belief in the separation of body and soul became increasingly

prevalent, the question of why good people are allowed to suffer while the wicked reap rewards

on earth was answered by the expanding concept of divine justice after death. The wicked would

be punished—perhaps even for all time—and the righteous would experience eternal bliss. The

difficulty is that each religion believes its own eschatological view to be the correct one, and the

definition of wickedness and righteousness depends on one’s cultural perspective.

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References

Albinus, Lars (2000), The House of Hades: Studies in Ancient Greek Eschatology, Aarhus:

Aarhus University Press.

Bowden, Hugh (2010), Mystery Cults of the Ancient World, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton

University Press.

Bremmer, Jan N. (1983), The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, Princeton: Princeton University

Press.

Bremmer, Jan N. (2014), Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World, Berlin: Walter de

Gruyter.

Burkert, Walter (1987), Ancient Mystery Cults, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cooper, Jerrold S. (1992), ‘The Fate of Mankind: Death and Afterlife in Ancient Mesopotamia,’

in Hiroshi Obayashi (ed.), Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions, 19-34, New

York: Praeger.

Cumont, Franz (1922), After Life in Roman Paganism, New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Edwards, Catharine (2007), Death in Ancient Rome, New Haven and London: Yale University

Press.

Ellens, J. Harold (2013a), ‘Afterlife and Underworld in the Bible,’ in Harold J. Ellens (ed.),

Heaven, Hell, and the Afterlife: Eternity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Vol. 1, 1-5, Santa

Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Ellens, J. Harold (2013b), ‘The Underworld in Islam Compared with Jewish and Christian

Traditions,’ in Harold J. Ellens (ed.), Heaven, Hell, and the Afterlife: Eternity in Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam, Vol. 3, 53-6, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Erasmo, Mario (2008), Reading Death in Ancient Rome, Columbus: The Ohio State University

Press.

Felton, D. (1999), Haunted Greece and Rome, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Felton, D. (2007), ‘The Dead,’ in Daniel Ogden (ed.), A Companion to Greek Religion, 86-99,

Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Forger, Deborah (2013), ‘Shifting Views of Heaven, Hell, and the Afterlife in the Second

Century C.E.,’ in Harold J. Ellens (ed.), Heaven, Hell, and the Afterlife: Eternity in Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam, Vol. 2 61-81, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

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Gager, John G. (1992), Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, New York and

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Garland, Robert (2001), The Greek Way of Death, second edition, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press.

Hansen, William (1996), Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of Marvels, Exeter: University of Exeter

Press.

Hope, Valerie M. (2007), Death in Ancient Rome: A Sourcebook, London and New York:

Routledge.

Hopkins, Keith (1983), Death and Renewal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnston, Sarah Iles (1999), Restless Dead, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lorenz, Hendrik, ‘Ancient Theories of Soul,’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

(Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/ancient-soul/>.

Luck, Georg (2006), Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds,

second Edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Mirto, Maria Serena (2013), Death in the Greek World, trans. A.M. Osborne. Norman, OK:

University of Oklahoma Press.

Murnane, William J. (1992), ‘Taking It With You: The Problem of Death and Afterlife in

Ancient Egypt,’ in Hiroshi Obayashi (ed.), Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions,

35-48, New York: Praeger.

Ogden, Daniel (2001), Greek and Roman Necromancy, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton

University Press.

Ogden, Daniel (2009), Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds, second

edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Raphael, Simcha Paull (1994), Jewish Views of the Afterlife, Northvale, New Jersey: Jason

Aronson, Inc.

Rodgers, Peter R. (2013), ‘Heaven, Hell, and the Text of the New Testament,’ in Harold J. Ellens

(ed.), Heaven, Hell, and the Afterlife: Eternity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Vol. 2, 1-7,

Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Rohde, Erwin. (1966 [1925]), Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the

Greeks, trans. W.B. Hillis. New York: Harper & Row.

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Schwarz, Hans (2000), Eschatology, Grand Rapids, Michigan: W. B. Eerdmans.

Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane (1981), ‘To Die and Enter the House of Hades: Homer, Before

and After.’ in Joachim Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of

Death, 15-39, New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Ulansey, David (1989), The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vermeule, Emily (1979), Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, Berkeley, Los

Angeles, London: University of California Press.

Von Ehrenkrook, Jason (2013) ‘The Afterlife in Philo and Josephus,’ in Harold J. Ellens (ed.),

Heaven, Hell, and the Afterlife: Eternity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Vol. 1, 97-118,

Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

1
Vermeule, 2; see also Bremmer 2002, 1-2, and Sourvinou-Inwood, whose essay concentrates on the

Greek Dark Age and eighth-century eschatology. Throughout this essay, I use Albinus’ understanding of

eschatology: “referr’ng to human afterlife within a perspective of what is generally beyond space and

time in the world of mortals’ (5). More broadly, eschatology, as a theological and philosophical term

derived from the Greek eschatos (ἔσχατος, ‘last,’ ‘furthest’), is the study of religious and philosophical

teachings concerned with that which occurs at ‘the end of days,’ the time furthest from the present. Thus,

eschatology can include not only such topics as life after death (e.g. reincarnation and post-mortem

survival of the soul), but also last judgement, messianic redemption of the world, and the ultimate destiny

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of the entire universe (Raphael, 18; see also Schwarz, 26). As such, eschatology is often broken down into

subcategories: ‘individual’ eschatology focuses on the destiny of the individual human being after death;

a ‘collective’ eschatology takes into consideration the destiny of all of humanity; and a ‘cosmic’

eschatology goes beyond the scope of humanity to include the earth itself and the entire universe

(Schwarz, 26). Individual and collective eschatologies often overlap, as is the case in this essay.
2
The psyche is a very complicated concept in ancient Greek thought, and a discussion is beyond the

bounds of this chapter. For detailed discussions see Rohde, Bremmer 1983, Albinus 43-56, and Mirto 10-

15. He notes, ‘Homeric language does not inhabit a one-word equivalent to the modern concept of soul or

mind, even though the ancient word has long since been borrowed to denote it.’ In ancient Greece, the

psyche was vague in terms of its location, importance, and function.

3
See Albinus, 5 and 43.
4
Vermuele, 5.
5
Hopkins 1983, 226-7.
6
Ibid.
7
Before the Greeks, Near Eastern cultures struggled with the concept; an early version of a netherworld

appears in the epic poem Gilgamesh. See Cooper, 24-29, for ancient Mesopotamian beliefs about the

afterlife.
8
Vermeule, 7.
9
Both words are typically used of physical pain. This scene of sinners being tortured reflects the

ambiguity in early Greek thought regarding the physical/spiritual nature of afterlife existence. Divine

punishment is alluded to in the Iliad, but, unlike in the Odyssey, does not have a specific relation to Hades

(Albinus, 77). The Odyssey also contains an allusion to the Elysian plain, a place of reward for heroes, at

the edge of the world (4.563).

10
See Albinus, 52, and 70-5 on whether the spirits regain mental awareness only after drinking the

sacrificial ram’s blood, and for discussion of ‘the unheeding dead’ at Od. 11.475-6. For the Deutero-

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nekuia that opens Od. 24—the slaughtered suitors’ departure to Hades and subsequent conversations

there—see Albinus 82-6. Regarding emotions, Achilles’s psyche feels joy at being told of his son’s

glorious deeds (11.538-40); many of the dead are sorrowful (11.542), and Ajax’s psyche is still angry

with Odysseus over Achilles’ armour (11.543-5).

11
Albinus, 67 and 81: The Homeric mythologem of Heracles, on the other hand, represents ‘an

exceptional fate as regards the afterlife.’ The Homeric Hades may have been influenced by the

Mesopotamian conception of an afterlife: the entrance to their ‘land of no return’ was on the western

horizon, where the sun set; spirits of the dead were judged by the netherworld queen Ereshkigal and her

consort Nergal, and assigned to an appropriate station in Irkalla, the dark and gloomy realm of death. As

in Greek thought, only spirits of the properly buried were admitted to the netherworld. See, for example,

Cooper, 24-5, and von Ehrenkrook, 97. Regarding asphodel, the fields appear in Odyssey 11.573 and

24.13. The Greeks traditionally associated white asphodel with death and mourning.
12
Ogden 2009, 9; Bremmer, 1983, 24-43. Although the soul was believed to be separable from the body,

a number of sixth- and fifth-century philosophers believed that the soul had a physical existence of its

own. Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535-475 B.C.E.), for example, theorized that the soul, when it resided in

the body, was ‘composed of an unusually fine or rare kind of matter’ (Lorenz).
13
Ogden 2009, 12. Cf. Herodotus 4.14-16.
14
Ogden 2009, 14. Proconnesus and Clazomenae were Greek settlements in Asia Minor.
15
Lorenz.
16
Xenophanes, fragment 7.
17
The belief more likely moved west to Greece from India through Persia; see Albinus, 131 and 131n1.

The ancient Egyptians left a large body of monuments, artefacts, and written records attesting to views

toward death and the afterlife over a period of more than three thousand years (Murnane, 35), but a belief

in transmigration of the soul from body to body, though present, was not a major theme. As with many

cultures, Egyptian views varied widely and were often ambiguous: death was total annihilation, or it was

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existence in a realm of darkness where one might be subject to torment depending on one’s sins in life, or

death brought a new existence in an afterlife. The preservation of the body via mummification was

important for the deceased to enjoy an alternate life beyond the tomb. The Egyptian concepts of Ka and

Ba were crucial to the afterlife: the former was that aspect of the person that stayed in the tomb owner’s

statue—a sort of decoy for tomb robbers, among other things—while the latter symbolized ‘the

deceased’s capacity to move about in the world beyond the tomb’ (Murnane, 40). Another element of the

personality, the Akh, was a kind of ‘(illuminated) spirit’ that lived in the next world (Murnane, 41).
18
As Albinus notes (101), the Orphic tradition might even stretch back to the seventh century B.C.E., but

‘most of the surviving fragments and references stem from informants of Hellenistic or Roman times.’
19
Orphism was the only ancient religious sect to have a substantial written text upon which its rituals and

beliefs were based. See Bremmer 2014, 58-70.

20
See Albinus 112-17. Not enough evidence exists to determine whether Orphism influenced

Pythagoreanism or vice versa, or whether both of these groups were influenced by near eastern religions

with transmigratory beliefs (what Albinus calls ‘continuity of being,’ 117-21). The nature of this eternal

bliss in Orphic belief is unspecified.

21
As Albinus notes, in Classical times the word mystery (µυστήριον) referred to a rite that was secret

(155). See also Bremmer 2014, vii-viii.

22
Burkert, 7-8. But Burkert abandons the concept of mystery religions, saying, ‘Initiation at Eleusis or

worship of Isis or Mithras does not constitute adherence to a religion’ in the modern sense, that is, in the

sense of being mutually exclusive of other beliefs in the way that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are (3).

Rather, ‘In the pre-Christian epoch the various forms of worship, including new and foreign gods in

general and the institution of mysteries in particular, are never exclusive; they appear as varying forms,

trends, or options within the one disparate yet continuous conglomerate of ancient [polytheistic] religion’

(4).

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23
Albinus notes, ‘The popularity of the Eleusinian mysteries was perhaps unparalleled in the ancient

Greek world’ (156). See also Albinus 156-64 on Orphic versions of Demeter, and 165-91 on the

Eleusinian myth and cult rituals. A number of other mystery religions, including the cult of Magna Mater,

began to flourish during this period. See Bowden 40-67 and 83-104, and Bremmer 2014, 21-54.
24
Burkert, 4. At the same time, as Albinus points out, there is no direct evidence that the Eleusinian

mysteries suggest immortality of the soul or metempsychosis (196-7). See also Bowden 26-48, and

Bremmer 2014, 18-20 (discussion of eschatological v. fertility aspects of Eleusinian mysteries).

25
Burkert, 5. See also Bowden 105-36.
26
Burkert, 5. Examples: Dionysus’ death and rebirth as an infant, Pseudo-Hyginus Fab. 167 and Nonnos,

Dion. 5-6; Dionysus’ rescue of his mother Semele from Hades, Pseudo-Apollodorus Bibliotheca 3.38
27
Burkert 1987, 13 and 23. Given the altered states of consciousness described in many of these stories,

the question has arisen as to the possible role of entheogens in these rituals, but nothing has been proven.

Cf. Bowden, 45 and Luck 479-88.

28
On restless spirits, see Johnston 1999, Felton 1999, and, for rituals to honour and appease the dead, X’s

essay in this volume.

29
For attitudes toward necromancy in ancient Greece and Rome, see Ogden 2001, 263-68.
30
Corpse reanimation seems to have had no ill effects in the cases of Empedocles’ resuscitation of a

woman who had been dead for thirty days. See Ogden 2001, xxix-xxx, 118 (Empedocles), and especially

202-7.
31
Gager, 19.
32
Gager, 19-20. The earliest defixiones, however, dating to the sixth and fifth centuries C.E., were very

simple, often containing only the name of the curse’s target (Gager, 5).
33
Lorenz.
34
The five rivers, which were already present in archaic literature, are the Styx, Acheron, Cocytus,

Phlegethon, and Lethe. Charon was sometimes thought of as a monstrous creature, but in much of fifth-

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century Greek art and literature he was depicted simply as an older man unhappy with his job (e.g.

Euripides Alcestis 252-9; Aristophanes Frogs 138-40, 180-269). Regarding Cerberus, Hesiod ascribed

fifty heads to the dog (Theogony 312), but later tradition settled on three.
35
Minos appears as a judge at Od. 11.568; Rhadamanthus, as ruler of Elysium, at Od. 4.561.
36
For details of life in Hades in archaic and classical Greek beliefs, see Garland, 48-74.
37
See Garland, 53. The Greeks built no massive temples to Hades as they had for Zeus, Athena, Apollo,

and others. His only real worship site seems to have been in southern Greece, where the Eleans built a

temple him. At Mt. Minthe near Elis was a temenos, or district sacred to Hades (Pausanias 6.25.2; Strabo

8.3.14-15).
38
Often using a euphemism, Plouton (‘The Rich One’); see Garland 53.
39
Perhaps their most famous appearance is in the Iliad, where Zeus orders them to carry the body of his

son Sarpedon, slain in battle, home to Lycia (16.667-83) [See Figure X.Y?] Note that this Thanatos is not

a fearful figure but rather swift and gentle. Thanatos also appears as a character in Euripides’ Alcestis to

claim the queen, but here Heracles beats Thanatos in a wrestling match and brings Alcestis back to the

living. See also Garland 56-9.

40
Johnston 1999, 204-5. Because of this power, Hecate became the patron goddess of magicians and of

such sorceresses as Medea. Hecate appeared late at night, carrying torches to light her way, and

accompanied by monstrous dogs. She was originally associated with crossroads—liminal locations

particularly conducive to magic—where statues and other votive offerings were often left in her honour.

Hecate was frequently invoked on curse tablets and in binding spells.

41
Examples include one of the Erinyes driving Alcmeon mad for killing his mother, Eriphyle (Pseudo-

Apollodorus 3.7.5), and Suetonius, Nero 34.4, where the emperor, who had killed his mother Agrippina,

describes being hounded by his mother’s ghost and by the whips and torches of the Furies. See also

Felton 2007, 90-2.

42
Lorenz; and see, for example, Plato’s Phaedo 105c: ‘What is it in the body that allows the body to be

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alive?’ ‘The soul.’

43
Lorenz notes that despite the assertion here, the arguments in the Phaedo ‘do not necessarily succeed in

proving’ that disembodied souls have intelligence, can contemplate truths, and generally continue

philosophizing when separated from their bodies.

44
For example, Bremmer, 89-91.
45
Lorenz. In the Republic, Book 4, Plato also introduces his complex tripartite theory of the soul: reason,

spirit, and appetite.

46
In De Anima 1.2-5 Aristotle provides a summary of previous views about the soul, including the

thoughts of the Pythagoreans and many other pre-Socratics, and of Plato.

47
Ogden 2009, 171.
48
Letter to Menoeceus 125: ὁ θάνατος οὐθὲν πρὸς ἡµᾶς, ἐπειδήπερ ὅταν µὲν ἡµεῖς ὦµεν, ὁ θάνατος οὑ

πάρεστιν, ὅταν δὲ ὁ θάνατος παρῆ, τόθ᾽ἡµεῖς οὐκ ἐσµέν.

49
In the Stoa Poikile (“painted stoa”) in the Athenian agora—hence the name ‘Stoics.’
50
Hope, 212.
51
Hope, 211; also Edwards, 13. The seminal work on ancient Roman eschatology remains Cumont 1922.
52
De Consolatione ad Marciam (Consolation to Marcia) 19.4-5: quae nobis inferos faciunt terribiles,

fabulas esse, nullas imminere mortuis tenebras nec carcerem nec flumina igne flagrantia nec Oblivionem

amnem nec tribunalia et reos . . . . luserunt ista poetae et vanis now agitavere terroribus. Mors dolorum

omnium exsolutio est et finish, ultra quem mala nostra non exeunt, quae nos in illam tranquillitatem, in

qua antequam nasceremur iacuimus, reponit. The consolatio or ‘consolation’ belonged to a rhetorical

tradition stretching back to at least the fifth century B.C.E., and was a type of speech or essay designed to

comfort people during times of loss. Marcia was mourning the death of her son.
53
From ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), just one of many such

‘carpe diem’ poems from seventeenth-century British poets (cf. Andrew Marvell [1621-78], ‘To His Coy

Mistress’), many of whom were influenced by the Roman lyric poets.

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 D. Felton 2015

54
As Hope notes (32), ‘Voluntary death (mors voluntaria; the word suicide is not derived from Classical

Latin) was a cause of ambivalent attitudes in the ancient world. In Roman popular belief the souls of

suicides achieved no rest; they were among the discontented dead.’ At the same time, suicide and the

manner in which one faced it could be considered a noble step, as for example when one was condemned

to death by the emperor and given the option of (or order to commit) suicide. See, for example, Martial

1.13.3, Tacitus, Annales 15.62-4, and discussion of the latter at Erasmo 2008, 27-33
55
And were also satirized, e.g. Lucian, True History 2.4-31 and On Funerals 2-9. Hope notes that

although the extent to which people ‘subscribed to the idea that how one lived in life affected how one

“lived” after death is hard to evaluate,’ some surviving Roman epitaphs suggest belief in afterlife justice

(221). Overall, though, they rarely provide any direct indication of beliefs; the thousands of epitaphs

beginning with the invocation Dis Manibus seem to do so out of convention rather than overt belief (226).

Moreover, some epitaphs dismiss Hades entirely, and some even express the belief that death is indeed an

absolute end (229). See, for example, the Epicurean epitaph at CIL XIII 530: non fui, fui, non sum, non

curo, ‘I did not exist; I existed; I do not exist; I don’t care’ (cf. CIL VIII 3463 and Hope, 230).
56
For various stories of hauntings in ancient Greece and Rome, see Felton 1999.
57
For necromancy in the Roman period, see also Ogden 2001, 149-59 and 2009, 189-204.
58
Hansen, 12, who explains that paradoxography (‘writing about marvels’) arose as a special form of

literature in the early Hellenistic period (2-3).

59
This story directly influenced Washington Irving’s ‘The Tale of the German Student.’
60
A better ancient equivalent to the modern vampire is the Greco-Roman folklore figure known as Lamia,

but she is a supernatural, shape-shifting creature, not a mortal returned from the dead. Regarding

‘zombie,’ the word originated in Haitian culture with different meanings from the modern pop-culture

sense of a brain- and flesh-eating reanimated corpse.

61
On the Magna Mater, see note 22 above.
62
Burkert, 1.

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63
Burkert, 6.
64
The Roman author Apuleius (second century C.E.) provides the most extensive extant description of the

mysteries of Isis in the last book of his Metamorphoses. See also Bowden, 156-80 and Bremmer 2014,

110-25.
65
Burkert, 6-7; also Ulansey, passim; Bowden, 181-98; and Bremmer 2014, 125-9.
66
But not just mainly soldiers in the Roman army, as scholars believed for many decades (Bremmer 2014,

132).
67
The evidence is controversial. See Burkert, 27 and Ulansey, 8-11.
68
See Ogden 2009, 10-11 and Bremmer 2014, 129-31 on the uses of the cave.
69
Whereas in fourth-century Greece Plato had advocated tolerance toward such mysteries, Cicero and

other Romans urged repression of private cults, concerned about potential anarchy (Burkert 1987, 11).
70
The Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus of 186 B.C.E. appears to have been aimed at potential

conspiracies rather than at religious activity. Bowden notes, ‘Precisely what was being forbidden and

what was being allowed by the decree is not absolutely clear, but it does not appear to outlaw long-

established religious rites in honour of Dionysus,’ and instead forbade large numbers of men from

gathering in one place (124).

71
Raphael, 3.
72
Von Ehrenkrook, 98.
73
Raphael, 41 and 74; Ellens 2013a, 2-4. The early Hebrew view was probably influenced by that of other

Near Eastern cultures, including Mesopotamia and Egypt.

74
Raphael, 55.
75
Raphael, 57.
76
Ibid.
77
On the development of individual responsibility and moral retribution, see Raphael, 62-3.
78
See Raphael, 60-5.

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79
The main Jewish collections of writings during this period were the Apocrypha and the

Pseudepigrapha. The former refers to those texts excluded from the Hebrew canon but included in the

Greek translation of the Bible (the Septuagint), later incorporated by St. Jerome into the Vulgate Bible,

and canonized by the Council of Trent in 1546. The latter refers to those texts that never received

canonical status within either Judaism or Christianity. See Raphael, 79.

80
Raphael, 83.
81
Raphael, 90 and 97. Heaven becomes associated with Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden), but as a

heavenly abode associated with the Divine Presence (Shekhinah), not as the original garden of Genesis.
82
τὰς ψυχὰς . . . συναφανίζει τοῖς σώµασι (Antiquitates Judaicae 18.16).
83
Von Ehrenkrook, 109-11. See, for example, Josephus, Bellum Judaicum 2.154-7 and Antiquitates

Judaicae 18.18 (ἀθάνατόν τε ἰσχὺν ταῖς ψυχαῖς πίστις αὐτοῖς εἶναι καὶ ὑπὸ χθονὸς δικαιώσεις τε καὶ τιµὰς

οἷς ἀρετῆς ἢ κακίας ἐπιτήδευσις ἐν τῷ βίῳ γέγονεν, καὶ ταῖς µὲν εἱργµὸν ἀίδιον προτίθεσθαι, ταῖς δὲ

ῥᾳστώνην τοῦ ἀναβιοῦν).

84
Raphael, 103 and 114.
85
Although Rome allowed many Jewish communities in the Empire to remain autonomous, the Romans

were watchful for Jewish uprisings after the institution of the Imperial Cult. But the insurgencies were

also caused by disagreements between Jewish factions, such as Galileans and Samaritans.
86
There were two separate Talmuds, one in Babylonia and one in Palestine, arising from two separate

centers of learning. The Babylonian Talmud is considered the more authoritative. See Raphael, 119.
87
Raphael, 120.
88
Cf. the story of Aristeas of Proconnesus, above.
89
Raphael, 139-40.
90
Ibid. The mysteries of the soul emerged as a predominant focus of Jewish thought in the medieval

kabbalistic period, however.

91
Raphael, 160.

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92
Raphael, 144.
93
Von Ehrenkrook, 98.
94
Raphael, 27.
95
Jesus referred to himself and his colleagues as Israelites, Galileans, and Nazarenes, but not as

Christians. Members of this new sect also did not refer to themselves as ‘Jewish Christians’ or as

‘Christian Jews.’ See Forger, 67-8. The term ‘Christian,’ meaning a follower of Jesus Christ (χριστός,

‘anointed’), came into use in the late first century, appearing in Acts 11:26: ‘They first called the

followers “Christians” at Antioch’ (χρηµατίσαὶ τε πρώτως ἐν Ἀντιοχεία τοῦς µαθητὰς Χριστιανούς).

96
Cf. Pliny the Younger Epistula 10.96 (ca. 112 C.E.). Judaism also incorporated messianic beliefs, but

did not accept Jesus as a resurrected Messiah.

97
Burkert, 114. In the fourth century C.E. the Christian Prefect of Rome destroyed one of the main

sanctuaries of Mithras; decrees from 391-9 by the emperor Theodosian forbade pagan worship; in 410,

Goths sacked Rome, a final blow to mystery cults in the Greco-Roman world. See Bowden, 198.
98
Rodgers, 1; Forger, 70.
99
Raphael, 27.
100
Ellens 2013b, 54-5.
101
Ellens 2013b, 55.
102
Ibid.

47