Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

mortal life. It would, therefore, appear a necessary preface to such a review to examine some of the conceptions of the state of the departed which the mis

ruth, and goodness, which is his highest conception of God. But not only does religion necessarily colour the conception of the eternal state: it may also furnish the warrant for a belief in it. And a religion which can give men a firm ground for that faith will have an immense advantage over others which are less clear and confident as to another world. It is generally admitted that the long array of philosophic arguments for immortality have by themselves little convincing power. They are

vision of the life beyond the tomb than that which was vouchsafed to Plato, Cicero, Virgil, or Plutarch. "We know not what we shall be," is the answer of every seer of every age. Something will always "seal the lips of the Evangelist," as the key of the Eumolpidae closed the lips of those who had seen the vision of Eleusis.2509 The pagans of the early Empire were thus, in the absence of dogma and ecclesiastical teaching, free to express, with perfect frankness, their unbelief or their varying conceptions of immortality, according to the many influences that had moulded them. Nor could these influences be kept apar

. The departed spirit was believed to linger in a dim existence in the vault or grave near the familiar homestead.2511 The tomb is not a temporary prison, but an everlasting home,2512 and often provides a chamber where the living members of the family or clan may gather on solemn days around the ashes of the dead.2513 Provision is made for the sustenance of this spect

to be, how far it involved a more or less vivid consciousness of what was passing in the world above, how far it was a numb repose, almost passing into "the eternal sleep," seems to be uncertain. The phrases on the tomb in all ages are apt to pass into conventional forms, and personal temperament and imagination must always give varying colour to the picture. Such phrases as "eternal sleep," however, did not probably at any time imply complete unconsciousness. The old Latin faith that the Manes had a real life and some link of sympathy with the living was still strong and vivid in an age which was eager to receive or answer voices from the world beyond the senses. The wish to maintain, in spite of the severance and shock of death, a bond of communion between the living and the departed was one of the most imperious instincts of the Latin race. It was not a mere imagination, projected on far distant years, which craved for the yearly offering of violets and roses, or t

will stop an instant and read the legend; "may the earth lie light upon them when they too depart."2526 The horror of the lonely soul, cut off from the kindly fellowship of the living, and lingering on in a forgotten grave, to which no loving hand should ever more bring the libation or the violets in spring, which should one day awake no memory or sympathy in any human heart, was to the old Roman the worst terror in death. This passion for continued memory, especially in great benefactors of their kind, is used by Cicero as an argument for immorta

days anterior to orderly devotion to the dead.2530 The Lemures were a name of fear. They [pg 489]were dark, malevolent spirits who craved for blood, as they had departed this life by a violent end. Their festival, the Lemuria in May, was quite distinct from the fes

seen world.2532 The spread of cremation instead of burial gradually led to a new conception of the spirit as having a separate existence from the body, now reduced to a handful of grey ashes.2533 And spirits no longer clung to the body in the family vault, but were gathered in a dim region near the centre of the earth, where, according to gloomy Etrurian fancy, they were under the cruel care of the conductor of the dead, a brutal figure, with wings and long, matted beard, and armed with a hammer, who for ages appeared in human form to close the las

ad revealed to him the gulf of Tartarus, the infernal rivers, and been even able to recognise some of the ghosts below.2538 On another day, as he lay upon his bed reading the Phaedo, his "sainted wife," who had recently died, appeared and reproached him because, among all the finery which had been burnt upon her pyre, a single gold-spangled shoe, which slipped under the wardrobe, had been forgotten.2539 Plutarch reports, apparently with perfect faith, the appearance of such spectral visitors at Chaeronea.2540 The younger Pliny consulted his friend Sura as to the reality of such apparitions, and reveals his faith in the gruesome tale of a haunted house at Athens, where a restless ghost, who had often disturbed the quiet of night with the clank of chains, was tracked to the mystery of a hidden grave.2541 Suetonius, of course, welcomes tales of this kind from every quarter. Before Caligula's half-burnt remains were borne stealthily to a dishonoured burial, the keepers of the Lamian Gardens had been disturbed each night by ghostly terrors.2542 The pages of Dion Cassius abound in similar wonders. [pg 491]Wh

m, and the vision is moralised, and also confused, by elements drawn from Pythagoras or Plato.2549 The scene of Aeneas's descent to the underworld is laid by the lake of Avernus, where, buried amid gloomy woods, was the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl. Cumae was the oldest Greek colony in the West. Its foundation was placed long before the days of Romulus. Rich, prosperous, and cultivated, at a time when the Romans were a band of rude warriors, it must have early transmitted Greek [pg 492]ideas of religion to the rising power on the Tibe

Phoenician Dido, who, with stony silence and averted gaze, plunges into the darkness of the wood.2555 As the dawn is breaking, they find themselves before the prison-house of the damned, rising amid the folds of the river of fire, with walls of iron and adamant, its portals watched by a sleepless Fury in blood-red robe.2556 From within are heard the cries of anguish and the clank of chains, as the great rebels and malefactors of old-world story-Ixion, Salmoneus, and the Titans-are tortured by lash and wheel and vulture.2557 And with them, sharing the same agony, are those who have violated the great laws on which the Roman character was built.2558 Through other dusky ways and Cyclopean portals they at last reach the home of the blessed, as it was [pg 493]pictured long before in the apocalypse of Pindar-the meads and happy groves of Elysium, under

memory of it, now await the call of Destiny to a new life on earth.2561 This theory of life and death, coming down from Pythagoras, and popularised by Platonism, with some Stoic elements, had gained immense vogue among educated men of the last period of the Republic. Varro had adopted it as a fundamental tenet of his theology, and Cicero had embalmed it in his dream of Scipio, which furnished a text for Neo-Platonist homilies in the last days of the Western Empire.2562 [pg 494]A fiery spirit animates the material universe, from the farthest star in ether down to the lowest form of a

n, not of the rigorous dogmatist. But a great poet like Virgil not only expresses an age to itself: he elevates and glorifies what he expresses. He gives clear-cut form to what is vague, he spreads the warmth and richness of colour over what is dim and blank, and he imparts to the abstract teaching of philosophy a glow and penetrating power which may touch even the unthinking mass of men. The vision of the Sixth Book, moreover, like the Aeneid as a whole, has a high note of patriotism. Beside the water of Lethe are gathered, waiting for their call to earthly life, all t

men will always seek for concrete imagery to body forth their dim spiritual cravings. They always live in that uncertain twilight in which the boundaries of pictured symbolism and spiritual reality are blurred and effaced. Lucian was a pessimist as to spiritual progress, and he may have exaggerated the materialistic superstition of his time; he had ample excuse for doing so. Yet, artist as he was, his art would have been futile and discredited in his own time, if it had not had a solid background in widely accepted beliefs. And we cannot refuse to admit his testimony that the visions of the grim ferryman over the waters of Styx, the awful judge, the tortures of Tartarus, the asphodel meads, and the water of Lethe, the pale neutral shades who wandered expectant of the libation on the grave, filled a large space in the imagination of the crowd.2567 Plutarch, who sometimes agrees with Juvenal and Seneca as to the general incredulity, at others holds

ombstone are sometimes a sincere utterance of real affection and faith. They are also not unfrequently purely conventional, representing a respectable, historic creed, which may not be that of the man who erects the slab. Just as a Frenchman, who has never from infancy entered a church, may have his wife interred with all the solemn forms with which the C

ternity" was not irradiated with the golden splendour of Pindar's Happy Isles; it was grey and sad and calm. But that it was felt to be a real existence is shown by the insistent demand on scores of monuments for the regular service of the living. Every possible precaution is taken by the testator that his family or his club shall maintain this sympathetic observance for ever.2574 With the idea of prolonged existence, of course, is blended the imaginative hope of having a continued memory among men. And probably the majority of the funerary inscriptions express this feeling chiefly. But the same is true of the monuments of every age, and warrants no conclusion as to the opinions about immortality held by those who raised them. There is abundance of the purest affection expressed on these memorials, and sometimes, although not very often, there is the hope of reunion after death. The wife of a philologus at Narbonne confidently expects to meet him, or a mother prays her son to take her to himself.2575 Such expressions of a natural feeling, the same from age to age, have really little value as indications of religious belie

; non sum, non curo." Another adds "non mihi dolet."2580 The subjects of some of these epitaphs seem to have obeyed literally the counsel of their master Lucretius, though in a sense different from his, and to have risen up sated with the banquet of life. They express, with cynical grossness, their only faith in the joys of the flesh, and their perfect content at having made the most of them. [pg 499]"Balnea, Vina, Venus," sums up the tale.2581 "What I have eaten, what I have drunk, is my own. I have had my life."2582 And the departing voluptuary exhorts his friends to follow his example: "My friends, while we live, let us live"; "Eat, drink, disport thyself, and then join us."2583 A veteran of the fifth legion records, probably with much truth, that "while he lived he drank with a

eal of an evangelist, Lucretius sought to relieve his countrymen.2588 The pictures of Tartarus had burnt themselves into the popular imagination. And no message of Epicurus seems to his Roman interpreter so full of peace and blessing as the gospel of nothingness after death, the "morningless and unawakening sleep" which ends the fretful fever of life. As we felt no trouble when the storm of Punic invasion burst on Italy, we shall be equally unconscious when the partnership of soul and body is dissolved, even in the clash and fusion of all the elements in some great cosmic change.2589 The older Stoicism permitted the hope of a limited immortality until the next great cataclysm, in which, after many ages, all things will be swallowed up.2590 But Chrysippus admitted this prolonged existence only for the greater souls. And Panaetius, in the second century B.C., among other aberrations from the old creed of his school, abandoned even this not very satisfactory hope of immortality.2591 Aristotle, while he held the permanence of the pure thinking principle after death, had given little countenance to the hope of a separate conscious personality. And the later Peripatetics, like Alexander Aphrodisias, had gone farther even than their master in dogmatic denial of immortality.2592 Whatever support the instinctive craving of humanity for prolonged existence could obtain from philosophy was offered by the [pg 501]Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean schools. And their influence grew with the growing tendency t

on many other questions of high moment, is not steady and consistent. In moments of spiritual exaltation he is filled with apocalyptic rapture at the vision of an eternal world. At other times he speaks with a cold resignation, which seems to have been the fashion with men of his class and time, at the possibility of extinction in death. To the toil-worn spirit, weary of the travail and disappointments of life, death will be a quiet haven of rest.2596 The old terrors of Charon and Cerberus, of the awful Judge and the tortures of Tartarus, are no longer believed in even by children.2597 And stripped of its mythic horrors, death, being the loss of consciousness, must be the negation of pain and desire and fear. It is, in fact, a return to the nothingness from which we come, which has left no memory. Non miser potest esse qui nullus est.2598 The literary men and men of the world in the age of the Flavians, like their successors ever since, probably occupied themselves little with

of ancient religion both in the East and West. The East particularly attracted him by its infinite fecundity of superstition. He came to see whether there was anything in these revelations of the unseen world; he went away to mock at them. His insatiable curiosity had an endless variety of moods, and offered an open door to all the influences from many creeds. The restorer of ancient shrines, the admirer of Epictetus, the dabbler i

he had absorbed the teaching of Musonius.2605 He received his freedom, but lived in poverty and physical infirmity till, in the persecution of Domitian's reign he was, with the whole tribe of philosophic preachers, driven from Rome,2606 and he settled at Nicopolis in Epirus, where Arrian heard his discourses on the higher life.

e wind or earth or fire from which you come. You will not exist, but you will be something else of which the world now has need, just as you came into your present existence when the world had need of you. God sent you here subject to death, to live on earth a little while in the flesh, to do His will and serve His purpose, and join in the spectacle and festival. But the spectacle for you is ended; go hence whither He leads, with adoration and gratitude for all that you have seen and heard. Make room for others who have yet to be born in accordance with His will.2613 Language like this seems to give slight hope of any personal, conscious life beyond the grave. Epictetus, like the pi

ndria, while they gave him a wide range of sympathy, account for the mingled and heterogeneous character of his philosophic creed, which contains elements from every system except that of Epicurus.2616 The result is a curious hesitation and equipoise between conflicting opinions on the greatest questions. He is particularly uncertain as to the nature of the soul and its relation to the body. The Platonic doctrine that the soul is an immaterial essence, independent of corporeal support, seems to Galen very disputable. How can immaterial essences have any separate indi

out Italy from which it did not recover for ages. The slaves were called to arms as in the Punic invasion, along with the gladiators, and even the brigands of Dalmatia, and the massing of the forces on the Adriatic only concentrated the malignity of the plague.2619 Galen remained with the army for some time, lending his skill to mitigate the horrors of the disease. He returned to Rome in 170, and was left there in charge of the youthful Commodus. The philosophic Empero

uild a great cosmic system, he seems to have had but little sympathy.2620 His is the crowning instance of philosophy leaving the heights and concentrating itself on conduct, which becomes not merely "three-fourths of life," but the whole, and his philosophy is really a religion. It is a religion because it is founded on the great principle of unquestioning, un

like the child from the womb."2623 He does not dogmatise on a subject so dark. But his favourite conception of death is that of change, of transformation, of dissolution into the original elements. An Infinite Spirit, of which the individual soul is an emanation, pervades the universe, and at death the finite spirit is reabsorbed by the Infinite.2624 With this is coupled the doctrine of the dark Ephesian philosophy, which through Platonism had a profound influence on later tho

es of time, for any sphere for the completion of ineffectual lives, where the crooked may be made straight and the perverted be restored. He has, apparently, no sympathy with the sadness so often felt by the noblest minds, at having to go hence with so little done, so little known. The philosopher seems to have no wish to explore in some coming life the secrets of the universe, to prolong under happier conditions the endless quest of the ideal in art and knowledge and thought, which seems so cruelly baffled by the shortness of the life here below. The affectionate father and husband and friend seems to have no dream of any reunion with kindred souls. Above all, this in

tiny clod in the universe.2628 Life is so little a thing that death is no evil.2629 Yet, looked at on another side, the daemon, the divine spark within each of us, may, by its irresistible power, create a moral whole in each human spirit which, during its short space of separate being, may have the rounded harmony and perfectness of the whole vast order-it may become a perfect miniature of the universe of God.2630 This consummate result, attainable, though so rarely attained, is the ideal which alone gives dignity to human life. The ideal of humanity lies not in any future life or coming age; it may be, were the will properly aroused to its divine strength, realised here and now in our short span of forty years of maturity.2631 Get rid of gross fears and hopes, aim only at the moral ends which the will, aided by the daemon within, can surely reach, dismiss the fear of censure from the ephemeral crowd around us, the craving for fame among ephemeral generations whom we shall not see,2632 let the divine impulse within us gravitate to its

e Germans on the Danube, and bear the anxieties of solitary power, but who had to endure the keener anguish of a soul which saw the spiritual possibilities of human nature, but also all its littleness and baseness. The Emperor needed all the lessons of self-discipline and close-lipped resignation which he had painfully learnt for himself, and which he has taught to so many generations. There have been few nobler souls, yet few more hopeless. Like the arch mocker of the time, although from a very different point of view, he sees this ephemeral life, with its transient pleasures and triumphs, ending in dust and oblivion.2635 And its fragility is only matched by its weary sameness from age to age. The wintry torrent of endless mutation sweeps all round in an eternal vortex.2636 This restless change is a movement of cyclic monotony.2637 Go back to Vespasian or [pg 511]Trajan: you will find the same recurring spectacle, men plotting and fighting, marrying and dying.2638 The daughter who watches by her

which seem often to make a mockery of the noblest effort and aspiration of man, demanded a servility of submission in human nature, and called upon it to disown a large part of its native powers and instincts. Man, a mere ghost of himself, attenuated to a bloodless shade, finds himself in presence of a power cold, relentless, unmoral, according to human standards, a power which makes holocausts of individual lives to serve some abstract and visionary ideal of the whole. The older Stoicism provided no object of worship. For worship cannot be paid to an impersonal law without moral attributes. You may in abject quietism submit to it, but you cannot revere or adore it. It is little wonder that the Stoic sage, who could triumph over all material obstructions by moral enthusiasm, was sometimes exalted above the Zeus who represented mere passionless physical law. Such an idea-for it cannot be called a Being-has no moral import, it supplies no example, succour, or inspiration. The sage may for a moment have a superhuman triumph, in his defiance of the temptations or calamities with which Nature has surrounded him, but it is a lonely triumph of inhuman pride.2642 It may be the divine elem

ons. The apparent calamities which they have to suffer are only a necessary discipline, for, "whom He loves He tries and hardens by chastisement."2645 God can never really injure, for His nature is love, and we are continually loaded with His benefits.2646 In his view of the constitution of man, Seneca has deviated even further from the creed of his school. He appears indeed to assert sometimes that the soul is material, but it is matter so fine and subtle as to be indistinguishable from what we call spirit. And the ethical studies of Seneca compelled him to abandon the Stoic doctrine of the simple unity of th

ion to universal law will not shrink from a fate which awaits the universe by fire or cataclysmal change. Its future fate can only be either to dwell calmly for ever among kindred souls, or to be reabsorbed into the general whole.2651 But in moments of spiritual exaltation, such an alternative does not satisfy Seneca. He has got far beyond the grim submission, or graceful contempt, of aristocratic suicide, or even the faith in a bounded immortality. He has a hope at times apparently more clear than any felt by the Platonic Socrates on the last evening in prison. Death is no longer a sleep, a blank peace following the futile agitations of life: it is the gateway to eternal peace. The brief sojourn in the body is the prelude to a longer and nobler life.2652 The hour, at which you shudder as the last, is really the birth

with Pindar or Virgil, the spirits basking in Elysian meads and fanned by ocean breezes. We are far on the way to the City of God, cujus fundamenta in montibus sanctis. And indeed Seneca has probably travelled as far towards it as any one born in heathendom ever did.

ples, taught Seneca to abstain from animal food.2656 We may be sure that no Pythagorean teacher of that age would fail to discuss with his pupil the problem of the future life. It is true that Seneca only once or twice alludes to the doctrine of a previous life, and he only mentions the Pythagorean school to record the fact that in his day it was without a head.2657 But that does not preclude the supposition that he may have felt its influence in the formative years of youth. And the Pythagoreans of the early empire were a highly eclect

had indeed in Plato's day been sadly cheapened and degraded by a crowd of mercenary impostors.2665 And even the venerable rites of Eleusis may have contained an element of coarseness, descending from times when the processes of nature were regarded unveiled.2666 But philosophy and reason, which purged and elevated religion as a whole, did the same service for the mysteries, and Orphic and Pythagorean became almost convertible.2667 The systems represent a converging effort to solve those great questions which lie on the borderland of religion and philosophy, questions on which the speculative intellect is so often foiled, and has to fall back on the support of faith and religious intuition.2668 In an age which had forsaken curious speculation, whose whole interest was concentrated on the moral life, an age which longed for spiritual vision and supernatural support, an essentially religious philosophy like the new Pythagoreanism was sure to be a great power. Gathering up impartially whatever suited its main end from the ancient schools, maintaining a scrupulous reverence for all the devotion of the past, it shed over all a higher light, issuing, as its votaries believed, from the lands of the dawn.2669 Keeping a consecrated place for all the gods of popular tradition, linking men to the Infinite by a graduated hierarchy of spirits with their home in the stars, it rose to the conception of the One, pure, passionless Being to whom no bloody sacrifice is to be offered, who is to be worshipped best by silent adoration and a life of purity. And in cultivati

with practical morality, and the reform or restoration of ritual where it had fallen into desuetude and decay.2673 Penetrated as he was with the faith in a spiritual world, he seems to assume as a postulate the eternity of the soul, and its incarnation for a brief space on earth. During its sojourn in the flesh, it is visited by visions from on high, [pg 519]and such revelations are vouchsafed in proportion to its ascetic purity.2674 What conception of the life to come Apollonius entertained we cannot say; but its reality to him was a self-evident truth. We are surrounded by the spirits of the departed, although we know it not. Sailing among the islands of the Aegean, he once gratified his disciples by the tale of his having met the shade of Achilles at his tomb in the Troad.2675 Men said that the hero was really dead, and in the

mong them who had vainly besought the departed philosopher to return from spiritland and dispel his doubts as to the future life. At last one day he fell asleep among his companions, and then suddenly started up as one demented, with the cry-"I believe thee." Then he told his friends that he had seen the spirit of the sage, that he

r birth. Death is the great healer, in the words of Aeschylus, the deliverer from the curse of existence, whether it be an eternal sleep or a far journey into an unknown land. The prospect of blank nothingness offers no terrors; for the soul only returns to its original unconsciousness. But this was hardly a congenial mood to the author, and before the close, he falls back on the solace of mystic tradition or poetic vision, that, for the nobler sort, there is a place prepared in the ages to come, after the Great Judgment, when all souls, naked and stripped of all trappings and disguises, shall have to answer for the deeds done in the body.2681 The same faith is professed by Plutarch to his wife in the Consolation on the death of their little daughter, which took place while Plutarch was from home. The loss of a pure bright young soul, full of love and kindness to all, even to her lifeless toys, was evidently a heavy blow.2682 But Plutarch praises his wife's sim

tion that it does not matter, as they are bound to drive upon the rocks.2688 The great promise of Epicurus was to free men from the spectral terrors with which poetic fancy had filled the scenery of the under world. But in doing so, he invested death with a new horror infinitely worse than the fabled tortures of the damned. It was a subtle fallacy which taught that, as annihilation involves the extinction of consciousness, the lamented loss of the joys and vivid energy [pg 522]of life was a mere imagination projected on a blank future where no regret could ever disturb the tranquillity of nothingness2689. Plutarch took his stand on psychology. The passion for continued existence is, as a matter of fact, the most imperious in our nature. With the belief in immortality, Epicurus sweeps away the strongest and dearest hopes of the mass of men. This life is indeed full of pain and sorrow; yet men cling to it passionately, merely as l

s on to the thought of another tribunal which may terribly correct the injustices of time.2694 The doctrine of Divine providence and [pg 523]the doctrine of immortality stand or fall together.2695 God could not take so much care for ephemeral souls, blooming for a brief space and then withering away, as in the women's soon-fading gardens of Adonis.2696 Above all, Apollo would be the greatest deceiver, the god who has so o

ntuition, its possible eternal degradation through ages of cyclic change, all this, together with kindred elements, perhaps from the Semitic east, had left a profound effect on religious minds. The greatness of S. Augustine is nowhere more apparent than in his frank recognition of the spiritual grandeur of Plato. And that great spirit, so agile in dialectic subtlety, so sublime in its power of rising above the cramping limitations of our mortal life, is also, fr

poetic imagination peoples the dim regions of a world beyond the senses. The visions of Timarchus and Thespesius in Plutarch are, like the Nekuia of the Phaedo and of the Republic, an effort of the religious imagination to penetrate the

, who swept along in wild disordered movements, uttering strange cries of wailing or terror. The soul of an old acquaintance then hailed him and became his guide, pointing out that the souls of the really dead cast no shadow, being perfectly pellucid, surrounded by light. Yet some of them are marked with scales and weals and blotches. Adrasteia is the inevitable judge of all, and, through three ministers, three great classes of criminals receive their proper doom. Some are punished swiftly on earth, another class meet with heavier judgment in the shades. The utterly incurable are ruthlessly pursued by the Er

assed, till they came to a crater which received the flow of many-coloured streams, snow-white or rainbow-hued,2702 and hard by was the oracle of Night and Selene, from which issue dreams and phantoms to wander among men. Then Thespesius was dazzled with the radiance which shot from the Delphic tripod upwards to the peaks of Parnassus; and, blinded by the radiance, he could only

itness fresh scenes of torment. The hypocrite who had hidden his vices under a veil of decorum was forced, with infinite pain of contortion, to turn out his inmost soul. The avaricious were plunged by daemons by turns in three lakes, one of boiling gold, one of freezing lead, and one of ha

the moon. Styx is the boundary between this lunar kingdom and the low world of matter, sin, and death. The three realms beneath the highest correspond to the three elements of our composite nature,-mind, soul, and body.2706 This mortal life is a temporary and unequal partnership of the Divine reason with the lower appetites, which have their roots in the flesh. It is an exile, an imprisonment; it is also a probation of the higher part of human nature, and its escape comes to it by a twofold death. [pg 527]The first, imperfect and incomplete, is the severance of soul from body in what men call death, the falling away of the gross wrappings of matter. This death is under the sway of Demeter. The second, under the care of Persephone, is a slower process, in which the ethereal reason, the true eternal personality of man, is finally released from association with the passionate and sensitive nature, which is akin to the bodily organism. After the first corporeal death, all souls wander for a time in the space between the moon and earth. In the vision of Timarchus, he saw over the chasm of darkness a host of stars with a curious variety of motion. Some shot up from the gulf with a straight decided impetus. Others wavered in deflexions to right or left, or, after an upward movement, plunged again into the abyss. These motions, as the invisible guide expounded, represent the various tendencies of souls, corresponding to the strength or weakness of the spiritual force

ortures, its beatitude are described in terms which might seem fitting only to a corporeal nature. All this is true; and yet the answer which Plutarch would probably have made to any such cavils is very simple. How can you speak of pure disembodied spirit at all, how can you imagine it, save in the symbolism of ordinary speech? Refine and subtilise your language to the very uttermost, and it will still retain associations and reminiscences, however faint and distant, of the material world. Myth and symbol are necessary to

g