must_ have gone in a constant terror about
spiritual penalties, which we seldom associate in thought with the
"blithe" and careless existence of the ancient peoples. In every line of
Lucretius you read the joy and the indignation of the slave just escaped
from an intolerable thraldom to fear. Nobody could well have believed on
any other evidence that the classical people had a gloomy Calvinism of
their own time. True, as early as Homer, we hear of the shadowy
existence of the souls, and of the torments endured by the notably
wicked; by impious ghosts, or tyrannical, like Sisyphus and Tantalus. But
when we read the opening books of the "Republic," we find the educated
friends of Socrates treating these terrors as old-wives' fables. They
have heard, they say, that such notions circulate among the people, but
they seem never for a moment to have themselves believed in a future of
rewards and punishments.

The remains of ancient funereal art, in Etruria or Attica, usually show
us the semblances of the dead lying at endless feasts, or receiving
sacrifices of food and wine (as in Egypt) from their descendants, or,
perhaps, welcoming the later dead, their friends who have just rejoined
them. But it is only in the descriptions by Pausanias and others of
certain old wall-paintings that we hear of the torments of the wicked, of
the demons that torture them and, above all, of the great chief fiend,
coloured like a carrion fly. To judge from Lucretius, although so little
remains to us of this creed, yet it had a very strong hold of the minds
of people, in the century before Christ. Perhaps the belief was
reinforced by the teaching of Socrates, who, in the vision of Er, in the
"Republic," brings back, in a myth, the old popular faith in a
_Purgatorio_, if not in an _Inferno_.

In the "Phaedo," for certain, we come to the very definite account of a
Hell, a place of eternal punishment, as well as of a Purgatory, whence
souls are freed when their sins are expiated. "The spirits beyond
redemption, for the multitude of their murders or sacrileges, Fate hurls
into Tartarus, whence they never any more come forth." But souls of
lighter guilt abide a year in Tartarus, and then drift out down the
streams Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon. Thence they reach the marsh of
Acheron, but are not released until they have received the pardon of the
souls whom in life they had injured.

All this, and much more to the same purpose in other dialog