iii. cap. 3.

33 Ibid. lib. iv. cap. 21.

34 Plutarch, Plac. Phil. iv. 7.

35 Tusc. Quast. lib. i. cap. 32.

in his works; but his preponderant authority, upon the whole, is
that the soul and the body perish together.36 At one time he says,
"The day thou fearest as the last is the birthday of eternity."
"As an infant in the womb is preparing to dwell in this world, so
ought we to consider our present life as a preparation for the
life to come."37 At another time he says, with stunning bluntness,
"There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing."

Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil. 38

Besides the mystics, like Plotinus, who affirmed the strict
eternity of the soul, and the Stoics, like Poseidonius, who
believed that the soul, having had a beginning, must have an end,
although it might endure for a long period after leaving the body,
there were among the Greeks and Romans two other classes of
believers in a future life, namely, the ignorant body of the
people, who credited, more or less fully, the common fables
concerning Hades; and an educated body of select minds, who, while
casting off the popular superstitions, yet clung tenaciously to
the great fact of immortality in some form or other, without
attempting to define the precise mode of it.

There was among the illiterate populace, both Greek and Roman,
even from the age of Eumolpus to that of Augustus, a good deal of
firm faith in a future life, according to the gross scheme and
particulars preserved to us still in the classic mythology. A
thousand current allusions and statements in the general
literature of those times prove the actual existence of a common
and literal belief in Hades with all its accompaniments. This was
far from being, in the average apprehension, a mere myth. Plato
says, "Many, of their own accord, have wished to descend into
Hades, induced by the hope of there seeing and being with those
they have loved."39 He also says, "When a man is about to die, the
stories of future punishment which he had formerly ridiculed
trouble him with fears of their truth."40 And that frightful
accounts of hell really swayed and terrified the people, even so
late as the time of the Roman republic, appears from the earnest
and elaborate arguments employed by various writers to refute
them.

The same thing is shown by the religious ritual enacted at
funerals and festivals, the forms of public and private worship
observed till after the