Roman Afterlives and Aftermortalities #1

It is difficult, perhaps impossible to speak of a specifically Roman view of what happens after death. One idea that was current, of course, was that of a subterranean realm ruled by Dis (or Orcus) and Proserpine. But Proserpine is in origin the Greek goddess, Persephone, via the Etruscan Persipnei; and Dis takes much of his characteristics from the Greek god of the underworld, Hades. (This equivocation can be seen, among many other things, from the fact that Dis takes the byname Pluto, from Greek Plouton, which is another name of Hades; this has somehow led to the modern misconception that Pluto is the Roman equivalent of Hades.) Unlike the Etruscan conception of the underworld, which is populated by many beings unique to that culture, when the Roman poets describe the realm of Dis – which is usually called inferi, ‘those below, the dead’, by metonymy –, they name almost exclusively Greek figures, like the ferryman Charon, the three-headed dog Cerberus, and the snake-haired Furies. Although Furiae is a Latin term, meaning ‘ragings, wraths’, there is very little about them that does not exactly correspond to the Greek Erinnyes/Eumenides.

One wonderful evocation of this view of the underworld is the opening of Claudian’s Against Rufinus, written in the late 4^th century CE:

Dire Allecto once kindled with jealous wrath on seeing widespread peace among the cities of men. Straightway she summons the hideous council of the nether-world sisters (infernas sorores) to her foul palace gates. Hell’s (Erebi) numberless monsters (pestes) are gathered together, Night’s children of ill-omened birth. Discord, mother of war, imperious Hunger, Age, near neighbour to Death; Disease, whose life is a burden to himself; Envy that brooks not another’s prosperity, woeful Sorrow with rent garments; Fear and foolhardy Rashness with sightless eyes; Luxury, destroyer of wealth, to whose side ever clings unhappy Want with humble tread, and the long company of sleepless Cares, hanging round the foul neck of their mother Avarice. The iron seats are filled with all this rout and the grim chamber is thronged with the monstrous crowd. Allecto stood in their midst and called for silence, thrusting behind her back the snaky hair that swept her face and letting it play over her shoulders. Then with mad utterance she unlocked the anger deep hidden in her heart. (Against Rufinus I.25–44, transl. M. Platnauer 1922)

But this is poetry, and in any event has nothing to do with the dead. Nevertheless, the notion of the dead as being “those below”, in contrast to “the gods above”, the dii superi, is a specifically Roman way of speaking, even if it was articulated and contextualized largely in Greek terms – by which I mean not only the set dressing of the underworld as described in mythological poetry, but also significant parts of the terminology. The originally poetic word umbra, literally “shade, shadow,” for the dead either as they exist among the inferi or as they appear to the living (what we would call a ghost or an apparition) is modelled on the Greek skia. The same goes for a range of words along these lines, phantasma and idolon being taken directly from Greek, imago and simulacrum being loan translations. Whereas “shade” refers more to the state of existence of the dead (which are, so to speak, only shadows of themselves), these latter describe the primarily visual appearance of something, whether real or imagined, whether authentically what it appears to be or the trick of a daemon. Pliny the Younger’s hesitation in the opening to Letter 7.27 is representative:

Therefore I would very much like to know whether you believe that phantasmata exist and have their own shape and a sort of numen (divinity) or that empty nothingness (inania et vana) takes on a shape out of our fear. (my translation)

Incidentally, it is not only daemons who can trick people into thinking that the dead have appeared to them (this is mentioned as a possibility somewhere in Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, and of course the idea is familiar from the deceptive gods of the Iliad, who appear in dreams under pretended shapes). The soul of a dead person, especially one that has died a premature death and therefore still haunts the earth, may also fool the living by appearing as a god. I know of no examples of this in Latin, but it is an idea of the Roman period:

Likewise the famous Iamblichus, as I have handed down in my account of his life, when a certain Egyptian¹ invoked Apollo, and to the great amazement of those who saw the vision, Apollo came: “My friends,” said he, “cease to wonder; this is only the ghost of a gladiator.” So great a difference does it make whether one beholds a thing with the intelligence or with the deceitful eyes of the flesh. (Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers 473, transl. Wilmer C. Wright) 

¹ i.e. an Egyptian priest (or sorcerer, depending on your perspective).

The gladiator who has died a violent death is the prototypical untimely dead, or in Greek, biothanatos, ‘alive-dead’; Servius explains (on Aeneid 4.386):

The natural philosophers (physici) say that the souls of the biothanati are not received back to their (place of) origin until they complete the timespan allotted by fate (legitimum tempus fati) in roaming about. (my translation)

These roaming souls were nevertheless thought to cling to their gravesite, although perhaps for a different reason. As Plato had taught:

[I]f when [the soul] departs from the body it is defiled and impure, because it was always with the body and cared for it and loved it and was fascinated by it and its desires and pleasures, so that it thought nothing was true except the corporeal, which one can touch and see and drink and deat and employ in the pleasures of love, and if it is accustomed to hate and fear and avoid that which is shadowy and invisible to the eyes but is intelligible and tangible to philosophy—do you think a soul in this condition will depart pure and uncontaminated? [… S]uch a soul is weigend down by this and is dragged back into the visible world, through fear of the invisible and of the other world, and so, as they say, it flits about the monuments and the tombs, where shadowy shapes of souls have been seen, figures of those souls which were not set free in purity but retain something of the visible; and this is why they are seen. (Phaedo 81, transl. Harold North Fowler)

But did Pliny mean these sorts of sorry beings when he asked whether phantasms have a numen, divine power? Here I take him to be thinking less of the divine nature of the soul, which we can also read about in Plato, but of the Roman appellation dii manes for the dead: the manes, the dead, are a kind of dii, gods. This is why Roman tomb inscriptions begin with DM, an abbreviation for “to the dii manes”. Importantly, these are the manes gods of the one person whose tomb it is – the word manes does not have a singular form.

We should not think too rigidly here, however, as if shades and manes and souls were all clearly delineated from each other. In poetry particularly, even the distinction between the corpse and the manes is blurred, with shades arriving in the underworld still showing the wounds that killed them, and “the ashes or manes” of someone are interred. It is only the business of commentators to want to make clear sense of this:

And he very appropriately diminishes [the word manes?] by speaking not the soul, but the ashes and manes as interred. And he says this in line with the Epicureans, who say that the soul dies with the body. (Servius on Aeneid 4.34)

And in a different context:

“Dejected, life withdraws through air to the manes” (Aeneid 10.819): Life, i.e. the soul. And it is said inappropriately, since an image (simulacrum) rushes to those below, not the soul.

The background for this distinction lies in the Odyssey. One of the last figures Odysseus encounters in his journey to the underworld is Heracles; but three lines seem to have been inserted to distinguish what he is meeting from the Heracles who has received a place among the gods of Olympus:

And after him I marked the mighty Heracles—his [image (eidôlon)]; for he himself among the immortal gods takes his joy in the feast, and has to wife Hebe, of the fair ankles, daughter of great Zeus and of Here, of the golden sandals.—[etc.] (Odyssey 11.601–604, transl. A. T. Murray)

But these kinds of fine distinctions are academic. The dii manes are not usually unstood as something cleary different from souls, but it may be said that they belong to two different ways of thinking that only partially overlap. One solution for the problem of the singularity of the soul and the plurality of the manes is to identify the person only with the former, and identify the latter with a different kind of entity:

When we are born, we are alloted two genii; there is one who encourages good things, another who corrupts us (to do) bad things. According to their testimony (?), we are given a better life or convicted to a worse after our death; through this, we either merit (temporary) freedom (from the body) or a return to the body. Therefore what he calls manes are the genii, who we are allotted with life. (Servius on Aeneid 6.743)

This is a solution for one particular passage, and fits badly with most other ideas connected to the manes. Moreover, a person’s genius is again identified with the soul by some authors. (I use the singular here because the idea of a good and bad daemon is Greek in origin and not often applied to the Latin genius, to my knowledge.)

A better fit between philosophical thinking about the soul and the Roman discourse about manes is made in Servius’ commentary on Aeneid 3.63:

Manes are souls in that (period of) time in which, after having withdrawn from their former bodies, they have not yet went into the next. But they are noxious, and are named by antiphrasis [from the opposite meaning]: for manum […] means ‘good’.

But ancient scholars were usually happier with multiple explanations than with a single one, so even here he gives some alternatives:

Others understand the manes to be named from manare, ‘flowing’, since the places between the lunar and earthly sphere are full of souls, and they flow down from there. Some hand down that the manes are the gods below (deos infernos). Others say that the manes and the gods below are distinct; most have handed down that as (the) celestials (are the) gods of the living, so (the) manes (are) of the dead. Others, that the nocturnal manes are of that space which is between the heaven and the earth, and therefore have power over the moisture that falls at night; and that the morning (mane) is for this reason also called from these manes.

Here we can see that pagans even until the very end of antiquity were ambivalent about whether there really was a subterranean underworld, or whether all that was said about it by the poets should instead be referred to the sphere between the earth’s surface and the moon. If Servius is any indication, people seem to have held both conceptions with different degrees of conviction. At any rate it is clear enough that, at least in historical times, the reason for the exclusively plural manes was not that a dead person was imagined to become one with the anonymous ancestors, as some scholars would have it.

Although more could be said about the manes, I have already been quite prolix. In my next post, I will go on to discuss aftermortal fates from a broader perspective.