orseback, prance before it in beautiful
bravery, wheeling to and fro in the dizzy measures of the Pyrrhic
dance. Also, in a stately manner, purple clothed charioteers,
wearing masks which picture forth the features of the most famous
worthies of other days to the reverential recognition of the
silent hosts assembled, ride around the form of their descendant.
Suddenly a torch is set to the pile, and it is wrapped in flames.
From the turret, amidst the aromatic fumes, an eagle is let loose.
Phoenix like symbol of the departed soul, he soars into the sky,
and the seven hilled city throbs with pride, reverberating the
shouts of her people. Thus into the residence of the gods "Sic
itur ad astra" was borne the divinely favored mortal; "And thus we
see how man's prophetic creeds Made gods of men when godlike were
their deeds."

For it was only in times of degradation and by a violent
perversion that the honor was allowed to the unworthy; and even in
such cases it was usually nullified as soon as the people
recovered their senses and their freedom. There is extant among
the works of Seneca a little treatise called Apocolocuntosis, that
is, pumpkinification, or the metamorphosis into a gourd, a sharp
satire levelled against the apotheosis of the Emperor Claudius.
The deification of mortals among the ancients has long been
laughed at. When the great Macedonian monarch applied for a decree
for his apotheosis while he was yet alive, the Lacedemonian
Senate, with bitter sarcasm, voted, "If Alexander desires to be a
god, let him be a god." The doctrine is often referred to among us
in terms of mockery. But this is principally because it is not
understood. It simply signifies the ascent of the soul after death
into the Olympian halls instead of descending into the Acheronian
gulfs. And whether we

73 Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. 12.

74 Lib. iv.

consider the symbolic justice and beauty of the conception as a
poetic image applied to the deathless heroes of humanity ensphered
above us forever in historic fame and natural worship, or regard
its comparative probability as the literal location of the
residence of departed spirits, it must recommend itself to us as a
decided improvement on the ideas previously prevalent, and as a
sort of anticipation, in part, of that bright faith in a heavenly
home for faithfuls souls, afterwards established in the world by
Him of whom it was written, "No man hath ascended up to heaven but
he that