ROMAN ROADS: LUCRETIUS’S CLEARANCE, CICERO’S ROUNDABOUT, AND VIRGIL’S HIGHWAY

In Rome, the conflict played out between philosopher-poets Lucretius (c. 96–55 BCE) and Virgil (c. 70–19 BCE). Cicero (c. 106–43 BCE) mediated with prejudice. Rome had a dazzling variety of hopes and customs relating to the dead, reaching out to other cultures to import Isis or Osiris or to secure initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries. The neighboring Etruscans celebrated a banquet of the dead atop their cineraria. Roman funerary practice often supposed a shadow life in and near the tomb, where survivors came to share meals at Parentalia, the main festival for the dead ancestors, 13–21 February. In May at Lemuria graves were again visited for a meal for kinless hungry ghosts, and at Rosalia, flowers were laid.226 Some expected to mingle with the earth as flowers; others anticipated reunions with husbands, children, friends.²²⁷ Ovid observed in the Fasti 2.547–56 that spirits turn nasty if neglected.²²⁸ Some Romans were not in their tombs at all (NF NS NC, non fui non sum non curo), but others insisted on continuing to drink, and pipes sent down libations. From Narbonne in southern Gaul, Lucius Runnius Pollo still claims, “I drink continuously all the more eagerly in this monument of mine because I must sleep and remain here forever.”²²⁹ The logic of simultaneous sleeping and drinking need not be pressed, but Lucretius sneers at those for whom death is endless thirst.

Amidst all these possibilities, Cicero and Virgil gang up against Lucretius’s Epicurean skepticism. Through fictive afterlives that materialism derides as illogical, narcissistic folly, they enforce a commitment to public life from which the Epicurean withdraws. Who won? Cicero lost, but Lucretius and Virgil continue to make powerful claims on the imagination, whether to the sense of reality, or the obligation to aspire.

In his six-book philosophical poem, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things/DRN, c. 55 BCE), Lucretius (c. 96–55), a poet of the Republic, denied every afterlife myth with Epicurus as his muse. Venus reigned as goddess, mother of the Aeneadae, fertility, and love (I.1), instigator of the natural processes through which men and animals come into being. All things, Lucretius held, are made of atoms, combining and recombining in the void; the gods exist but are indifferent to man; the highest good is the study of natural causes—the nature of things—disdaining ambition’s tormented pursuits of power, wealth, fame. Death is mere dispersal of atoms, nothing to fear.

Cicero (c. 106–43 BCE), pleader, consul, author, novus homo ambitious of power and fame, wanted something better than dispersal for souls of manly virtue. His brother admired Lucretius’s work; Cicero shied tactfully off. He detested Epicureans’ cocky withdrawal from public affairs and rewrote Plato’s Republic for Rome, replacing Er’s myth with Scipio’s dream.²³⁰ He ended murdered on Mark Antony’s orders, his head and hands set up in the Forum where he often spoke. Point to Lucretius.

Virgil (c. 70–19 BCE), child of civil war, shifted allegiance from Epicurean withdrawal to heroic action as the favored poet of Augustus. A decade after Cicero’s murder, Augustus destroyed Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and Caesarion, Julius Caesar’s son. Echoing Lucretius in his early eclogues and georgics, Virgil turns apostate in the Aeneid.231 His friend Horace (65–8 BCE) called himself “good for a laugh, a hog from Epicurus’s herd” (Epistles I. 4, l.16) and disclaimed addressing Caesar or painting bristling war (Sat. 2.1). Those grander topics Virgil yearned after in his pastorals (Eclogue 6) and seized in the Aeneid. In Book 6 Aeneas travels through the underworld at the center of Virgil’s challenge to Greek epic hegemony and Epicurean ideology. Dazzlingly, Virgil synthesizes popular traditions, psychological interpretation, rational adjustments to traditional views, poetic revisioning, philosophical seriousness, historical highlights, and political commentary. No afterlife quite covers the bases the way Virgil’s does, and without the challenge presented by Lucretius and the Epicureans, Virgil might not have been so thorough. Going well beyond Plato, he provides an afterlife Christians could find comfortable and correct in most points, saving the gods. When Dante chose Virgil for his guide, he chose the poet who had already mapped the underworld and transformed it into an ethical, philosophical, historical, and political space.

More surprising now than Lucretius’s system is that Cicero and Virgil felt impelled to answer it and to erect an alternative. Epicurus’s thirty-six volumes of writings had not yet been mislaid by the Christian tradition, nor had Plato and Aristotle acquired their subsequent dominance within that tradition. NF NS NC was inscribed on tombs, to be collected among Latin inscriptions and disparaged by modern Christian scholars.²³² If popular superstition maintained its hold, so did popular skepticism, the “practical atheism” Plato attributed to most people.²³³ One public-spirited Epicurean of the second century CE, Diogenes of Oinoanda, inscribed his Epicurean tenets in thousands of words on an 80-foot wall in the center of his obscure town in Asia Minor, southwestern Turkey.²³⁴ Cicero’s brash Epicurean Velleius often leads off dialogues, the better to be disputed later (speaking first, Cicero knew, was a disadvantage). “[A]s is usual with that school,” Cicero sighs, “Velleius,” the Epicurean spokesman, always displays “no lack of confidence.”²³⁵ In the second century CE, even the Stoic Marcus Aurelius never managed to shake off the suspicion that chance and atoms might rule. He could not determine whether he would be transmuted by death or dispersed and returned to atoms, to be recombined.

The simplicity and logic of Epicurean atomism were seductive. In death things clearly break apart, creating new life, as maggots wriggle out of a corpse. Easier to challenge was the atomist doctrine of creation by atoms’ combining. From Cicero through Savonarola to Thomas Creech, Lucretius’s seventeenth-century translator, that idea seemed patently ridiculous: “An Opinion so absurd, that even the bare mentioning of it confutes it.”236 Like most of Epicurus, Lucretius was mislaid in the Christian era, but the Renaissance saw DRN rise. Atomic theory had the same exhilarating effect on early natural scientists that it had had on Lucretius himself, awed by his sense of piercing through “the walls of the world” to ultimate reality. Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, the story of Lucretius’s recovery, testifies to Lucretius’s enduring power to liberate. Of his views on death—the absurdity of concern for burial, the futility of life spent half asleep, the vacancy of the period before one’s birth, as after death—many were transmitted, less scandalously, in Pliny’s Natural History, Book 7, chap. LV, “Man.” Telling tales of souls’ travel outside the body, Pliny mocks a future life, but without the sting of Lucretius’s insistence that the soul dies, just like the body. Lucretius jabs the unthinkable in the eye:

What has this bugbear, death, to frighten man,

If souls can die as well as bodies can?

(Dryden, ll. 1–2; DRN III.830–31: Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum, quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur.)

So dangerous was the idea of a dead soul that Dante literally put a lid on it.

Cicero Dante places with the virtuous pagans, Lucretius he does not know, but Epicurus “and his followers”—who make the soul die with the body—he places in gaping tombs that will be sealed at the Last Judgment, their bodies joining their souls beyond the last death (Inferno, x. 14–15: “con Epicuro tutt’i suoi seguaci,/ che l’anima col corpo morta fanno”). They will spend eternity buried alive.

At Dante’s threat, Lucretius laughs. Death ends the third book of DRN, the midpoint of Lucretius’s six, where Homer and later Virgil also set their katabasis. Lucretius knows that he does not know what “soul” is. It ought not to be immortal, since coupling an immortal with a mortal thing defies logic (DRN III, 800–805). It is palpably bodily, sickening and fretting and recovering along with the body. Soul and body make the self that death annihilates by separating them, each dying its own death:

we are only we

While souls and bodies in one frame agree.

Should the dance of atoms reconstitute that body, bringing precisely those atoms back together, that body is a different self. You, cloned, would not be you. (Nor would your mind running on another computer be you, somewhere in the cloud.) Identity requires memory of the union of body and soul. Death creates “a gaping space…where memory lies dead” (ll. 17–26, 38–39, 47; DRN III, 839–42, 847–51, 860). Should soul migrate from one body to another, its animating a new body creates a new being with no connection to the earlier embodied self. Body is dominant over soul, yet it is soul that is conscious of the bodily self. We feel no concern for those preexisting selves (Lucretius does not address Shirley MacLaine or Pythagoras). This life, then, is the only one any self has. It should be improved by natural study and frank pleasures (W. B. Yeats thought Dryden’s translation of Book 4, on love, the finest description of sexual intercourse ever written). The common pursuits of wealth, honor, and power are better avoided for learning and simple “undisturb’ d delight” (Dryden, “Beginning of the Second Book,” l. 21). Disengaged and uninvolved, one regards from afar, on shore, ships caught in tempests at sea, or troops on the march, engaged in “the brutal business of the war” (Dryden, “Beginning of the First Book,” l. 41). Death is nothing to fear, but part of a necessary and natural cycle. Life is something given to us, through which we pass, and then it passes on to others:

All things, like thee, have time to rise and rot,

And from each other’s ruin are begot,

For life is not confin’d to him or thee;

‘Tis giv’n to all for use, to none for property.

(ll. 171–75; DRN III, 964–71)

The Etruscan banquet of the dead, the Roman funerary meals among the graves at Parentalia and Lemuria, Lucretius recognizes as the living remembering the dead, and his personified Nature appropriates. She tells us, clinging to life, that life is a feast and feasting has rules. Guests never stay forever, nor gracious guests too long. Henry Fielding praised the “good supper” he had in Lisbon when he said farewell to his life and his readers in A Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1754). Dryden makes Nature’s speech on limits a challenge to limits. Her cornucopia and his couplet overflow:

For if thy life were pleasant heretofore,

If all the bounteous blessings, I could give,

Thou hast enjoy’d; if thou hast known to live,

And pleasure not leak’d thro’ thee like a sieve;

Why dost thou not give thanks as at a plenteous feast,

Cramm’d to the throat with life, and rise and take thy rest?

(Dryden, III, 126–31)

So much has Nature given us, that Dryden’s usual five-beat, ten-syllable couplet spills over to a third line—sign both of nature’s generosity, overwhelming the couplet, and our leakiness, dribbling over. The next couplet thrusts in two extra syllables and crams a trochee down our throats: the lines are longer than they should be, a pair of six-beat, twelve-syllable Alexandrines. The heroic couplet, overstuffed, bursts with life’s good things in every dimension.

Life is given to all for use, but Lucretius’s ground is the privileged individualism of the body. The body is within a community, but it no longer needs that community in its death: burial does nothing for the dead. The embodied mind, its memories, insights, and activity, understands and should not be perturbed by its own always pending dissolution. Empathic identification with the body underground or abandoned above ground, Lucretius understands as psychological process. Dryden’s rhymes make utterly contemptible such concern for “[t]he lifeless lump uncoupled from the mind” (Dryden, III, 10). Anyone trembling

That after death his mould’ring limbs shall rot,

Or flames, or jaws of beasts devour his mass,

Know he’s an unsincere, unthinking ass…

The fool is to his own cast offals kind.

(Dryden, III,50–55)

Bodily empathy makes traditional funerary customs equally horrifying: embalming is “to be at once preserv’d and chok’d”; tombs asphyxiate; sculptures crush, Dryden’s baroque addition: “Or crowded in a tomb to be oppress’d/ With monumental marble on thy breast?” (Dryden, III, 71, 74–75). Dante anticipated that one.

Plato detested poets’ “dismal tales” (Dryden, III,. 183) as terrorizing. Lucretius understands their psychological resonance, but overthrows them as simply false. Gone is the elaborate stage set of the afterlife, the tortures, flames, and rivers that Hesiod displayed, popular tradition elaborated, and Aristophanes parodied. Those underground torture chambers do not exist and never have:

As for the Dog, the Furies, and their snakes,

The gloomy caverns, and the burning lakes,

And all the vain infernal trumpery,

They neither are, nor were, nor e’er can be.

(Dryden, III, 221–24)

The familiar punishments Lucretius decodes as allegory. The rock impending over Tantalus’s head is fear of chance or the irrational punishments of imaginary gods (Dryden’s embellishment). Tityus’s nine-acre, regrowing liver stabbed by vultures is anyone tormented by passion, regrowing in his vitals. Rolling that stone, Sisyphus is an unsuccessful politician, sweating to please the crowd, straining to secure his place. The fifty foolish virgins carrying water in sieves embody unfulfilled desire, hopelessly questing new pleasures, aimlessly seeking satisfaction.

Yet without post-mortem torture chambers, how is morality to be enforced? Plato argues metaphysics and myth: retribution works itself out in this life’s justice, and a thousand-year torture chamber lies down and off to the left. Lucretius responds with social institutions. Positive law, the actual arrangements men make, enforces behavior through penalties inflicted on the bodies of wrongdoers:

But here on earth the guilty have in view

The mighty pains to mighty mischiefs due;

Racks, prisons, poisons, the Tarpeian rock,

Stripes, hangmen, pitch, and suffocating smoke.

(Dryden, III, 226–29)

A surviving precept of Epicurus observes that until the guilty are dead—when they know nothing—they cannot know that they will not be caught.237 Fear of detection dogs them always, making life the hell others anticipate. For Lucretius, the guilty project their fears forward into eternity’s imagined afterlives.

Yet if our lives are merely a point between a past we did not experience and a future that stretches to eternity without us, what did our being here mean? Curiously, Lucretius never considers an afterlife a source of hope. Unlike Pliny, he does not even ridicule consolatory folly.238 Those we most admire have died before us: how should we be exempt?

Consider Ancus great and good is dead;

Ancus, thy better far, was born to die,

And thou, dost thou bewail mortality?

(Dryden, III, 236–39)

This argument even Lucretius’s admirers rarely repeat, though perhaps better than any other it reconciles us to our own mortality. After Ancus follow Xerxes, Scipio Africanus, Homer, Democritus, and finally the master. Here alone Lucretius names Epicurus, invoked in every book. Naming the name, Lucretius presents a sign of the thought that enabled his own. Why should we be alive when those who created our lives’ meanings are dead? Why begrudge the only thing we share with them? Most of us are half dead anyway, lives snored or trafficked away in trivialities and twittering.

For Lucretius, life’s project is to understand life, to “study Nature well, and Nature’s laws” (Dryden, III, 296), to search for the causes of things. Analyst of endless desire, he recognizes—and sketches—the motor of human insatiability that made Rome a great city, rich, prosperous, crammed with poor people and slaves, wealth and corruption, law and crime. While others crave the thick of things, the Epicurean condemns participation in favor of contemplation, withdrawal from the pursuits that animate the common run of men, in favor of philosophic enlightenment. Superstition and fear vanish before Epicurus and reason. Lucretius dedicates his poem to Venus, the “delight of humankind, and gods,” parent of Rome, who breeds all things born, bringing life wherever life exists. To the goddess of love, he brings a devotion that loves life back (“Beginning of the First Book,” ll. 1–6). All the meaning anyone needs is found looking through the cosmos to what the world is, understanding one’s momentary part in the continuously recombining whole.

Yet for all his brilliance, Lucretius continues to terrify some readers, beginning with Cicero. He shows why we should not fear death—and we agree. He shows traditional tales are fables—and we learn more about human psychology. He shows that the desire for eternal life is part of human insatiability and discontent of spirit, never contented with the present, always desiring the absent—and we understand ourselves better for it. He spiritedly mocks the identification with the body that underlies funerary ritual and afterlife imaginings. But I am not sure we change; I do not think desire ceases; it may even increase under Lucretius’s ministrations. Certainly the terror of the open vowel, long, lonely, unending, has never echoed more powerfully than in Dryden’s last lines.239 Nor has the “length of death” ever seemed longer than that assonance makes it. These lines end Dryden’s translation as the thought ends Lucretius’s Book III; but who ever read them without turning the page to see, surely, if there is not just a little more?

Nor, by the longest life we can attain,

One moment from the length of death we gain,

For all behind belongs to his eternal reign.

When once the Fates have cut the mortal thread,

The man as much to all intents is dead

Who dies today, and will as long be so,

As he who died a thousand years ago.

Cicero could not bear it, and he was not one for silence. In 54 BCE he replied to his brother Quintus’s praise for DRN carefully: “The poetry of Lucretius is, as you say in your letter, rich in brilliant genius, yet highly artistic” (emphasis added).²⁴⁰ That compliment accommodated to someone else’s praise, Cicero never repeats, and he never again names Lucretius.²⁴¹ Cicero claimed—in both voices in one dialogue—to prefer to go wrong with Plato than right with anyone else. In his Tusculan Disputations “A,” unlike Socrates, considers death evil, but asked if he fears Cerberus and Acheron, “A” sneers. He fears no three-headed dogs in hell; nobody believes such things.²⁴² His opponent “M” then jeers those famous philosophers who preen themselves on discovering the falsity of what nobody believes. They also fail to address what people do fear about death—ceasing to exist or the suffering that may accompany death. Cicero almost certainly has Lucretius in view, and his poisonous point is sharp.

Self-consciously Romanizing Plato’s myth of Er to end his own Republic, Cicero aimed a Dream of Scipio against Epicureans’ deriding the immortal soul as incredible fables.243 As a dream, Cicero’s lacks the reality claim of Er’s near-death experience, but appropriates the liminal space between this world and the other. Less egalitarian, more historical, aggressively heroic, it adopts the perspective of a privileged spectator far above the earth, viewing the Milky Way, mapping the cosmos. Personal and familial identities, the city and the heavens confirm each other, simultaneously aggrandizing and diminishing individuals.

After a long day’s journey and an evening’s conversation about his grandfather Scipio Africanus (237–183 BCE), victor in the second Punic War, the younger Scipio Aemilianus Africanus (185–129 BCE) dreams his grandfather, resembling his bust, speaking.²⁴⁴ He learns his own history: that the Carthage his grandfather defeated under Hannibal, he himself will burn to the ground, triumphing in the third Punic War. He will save Rome from the Gracchi and die assassinated. Reunited with his father Paulus, Scipio embraces and kisses him, not eluded by a shade. They share a vision of the cosmos, giant stars and Milky Way, the earth barely visible, the spheres making music, the stars returning upon themselves in the cosmic year. Among the stars, looking down at earth, Scipio learns that his immortal soul derives from the eternal fires of the constellations, much as we are now told that we are made of stardust. City-preserving souls come from and return to heaven. Small as the earth is, across its banded zones the inhabitants forget or never learn of each other: Scipio’s fame will not reach the Ganges.

From Plato’s Phaedrus Cicero argues soul’s immortality from its motion. Since soul makes body move, soul is god to the body and so immortal. Souls given to sensual pursuits and pleasures are tossed to and fro (like Epicurean atoms) for ages of banishment before they return heavenward. Punitively, Epicurean “hog[s]” grovel, close to earth, denied the sublime vision granted Scipio, preserver of his country. Cicero had not yet learned that they also escape the assassination of a Scipio or a Cicero.

Like Cicero, Virgil knew nonexistence would never do. Seventeen years old when Lucretius died, Virgil knew Lucretius’s poem well. Bernard Knox calls Virgil a “devotee” of Epicurean philosophy; Philip Hardie has shown how Lucretius permeates not only the deliberately Epicurean Eclogues and Georgics, but also the anti-Epicurean Aeneid. Henri Bergson saw Lucretius’s phrases playing everywhere in Augustan literature, though least in Horace, a softer avowed Epicurean.245 Virgil’s second Georgic sounds the distinctive Lucretian note—ambitious to search out nature’s laws while indifferent to fortune or fate. Desired are natural knowledge and “a soft secure inglorious life.”²⁴⁶ The first book of the Aeneid ends with Iopas’s Epicurean song celebrating natural knowledge and the origins of things. Twenty-seven when Cicero was assassinated, Virgil matured during the murderous chaos of Rome’s republic-destroying civil wars. Stability imposed by Augustus, Virgil shifted to the active engagement represented in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio. When Aeneas, puzzlingly, leaves the underworld through the gate of false dreams after hearing a history of Rome, Virgil gestures to Cicero’s Dream of Scipio as well as Ennius’s “Dream of Homer.”²⁴⁷

Aeneas’s underworld travel occurs at the poem’s center. It is the pivot where the action turns, the womb from which the history of Rome emerges, spilling over the limits of Aeneas’s era into the living present of Virgil, Augustus, and the already dead Marcellus, once Augustus’s heir. On it, Virgil lavishes reason, invention and philosophy to transform Homer’s infantine afterlife into a powerful machine of Roman propaganda and ideology.

The surest sign of cognitive control, Virgil’s afterlife can be mapped.²⁴⁸ At entry crowd the causes of death: sickness, grief, famine, war, and strife. Beyond looms the great elm of terrifying dreams and premonitions. (Scipio’s dream predicted assassination by his relations.) Aeneas boats with Charon over the river to Cerberus, walks past the Mourning Lovers and the Warriors, where the road forks left to Tartarus and right to the Fields of the Blessed. The direction “to the right, to the sacred meadows and groves of Persephone” occurs in mystery initiation texts from Thuroi, associated with the kid in the milk.²⁴⁹ Making no blood sacrifice or first-fruits offering, Aeneas bears a sacred golden bough to Persephone’s groves. Otherwise, Virgil’s afterlife is thoroughly rationalized. Like Odysseus, Aeneas draws his sword to slash at terrifying chimeras, but he is advised by the Sibyl to put up his useless sword, for these are only phantoms. Bodiless shades no longer shy from weapons they cannot feel. Longing for burial (Odysseus’s Elpenor) is mathematized and motivated (Aeneas’s Palinurus). The unburied must wander a hundred years before finally resting in the underworld. R. G. Austin finds no source for Virgil’s hundred-year figure. The round number arousing and allaying anxiety over the body may be the poet’s invention.²⁵⁰

Twitting the enlightened, Virgil makes a place for every belief Cicero and Lucretius scorned. The Sibyl throws a sop to Cerberus as the erstwhile Epicurean loads up “the Dog, the Furies, and their snakes,/The gloomy caverns, and the burning lakes,/And all the vain infernal trumpery.” Not one item is left out of the familiar catalogue.

As Aeneas makes his way through the underworld, every encounter transforms and intensifies a Homeric moment. Homer’s parade of beautiful women, mothers of heroes and lovers of gods, becomes a domain of lovelorn, passionate victims of their own intense sexual desires, Virgil’s Fields of Mourning. There Dido mimes the hero Ajax’s fury (and Cleopatra’s defeat). As Odysseus’s dead Greek heroes followed the famous women, so Aeneas next encounters gender-segregated warriors. Mutilated Deiphobus reimagines Agamemnon’s murder, victims of guilty sisters (Helen and Clytemnestra), who abandoned one man and took another. In Tartarus’s torture chamber, Virgil shows off: Tityos’s vultures celebrate Rome’s superior grisliness. Homer’s vultures flock in a long shot over the recumbent body. Virgil moves into the body cavity where a single vulture gropes, beak and talons inside pulling at the liver (6.595–600).

Aeneas meets Anchises, his father, the goal and end of his journey, inverting Odysseus’s unexpected, unwished encounter with Anticleia, his mother, at his beginning. Homer’s bodily pathos recurs in the parent’s elusive shade. Virgil’s narrative then turns: a philosophical statement on the nature of being flows effortlessly into history and the present. Odysseus’s story of Achilles’ son becomes the pageant of Aeneas’s descendants. Odysseus’s encounter with Hercules augurs his personal destiny, the terrible bow he will wield against the suitors. Virgil’s stories about the dead become the story of the future, not as in Homer the heroic individual’s future, but the state’s.

Virgil’s new metaphysic makes space for more than Homeric imitation and popular folklore. Improving on the mysteries, he inscribes justice from multiple perspectives. Entering the underworld, Aeneas encounters the untimely dead: wailing infants, those unjustly condemned in human courts, and suicides. The children are remembered, but not consoled. The silent condemned are judged again by Minos. The suicides echo Achilles: they long for poverty and hard labor if only they could view the sun again (“nunc et pauperiem et duros perferre labores!” 6.437). Rethinking Plato’s orders, Virgil does not strike the line but reassigns it. No longer Achilles’ experience as best of the dead, aching for the life thrown away now persuades against suicide, a hostility shared with Cicero (and Plautus).251 Cultivating death’s terrors, unlike Cicero, Virgil amplifies Plato’s retributive punishments and casts a slyly sardonic glance at Lucretius’s prisons.

Homer’s and Hesiod’s Tartarus, yawning twice as far below the earth as earth from the sky (Aeneid 6.577–79), Virgil turns into a gigantic prison, specialized as a place of punishment. Racks and wheels and iron scourges, groans, lashes, and dragging chains echo dismally, too horrid for description. No longer restricted to god-defying heroes, punishment strikes crimes in Rome, against one’s fellow men, in a list far longer than Plato’s. Yet most of the crimes Virgil enumerates are not punishable by law. Lucretius’s “Racks, prisons, poisons, the Tarpeian rock” could not touch them.

Adding to Homer, Virgil catalogues the usual god-defying suspects: the Titans, Salmoneus, twin sons of Aloeus, Tityos, the Lapithae Ixion and Pirithous, with a rock hanging over their heads, and forbidden laden tables. To them he adds behaviors Romans wanted to control: those who hated their brothers, struck their fathers, defrauded a client, failed to share wealth with relatives (huge numbers of those); those slain for adultery, those who warred against their own country and betrayed their lords. Some sold their country for gold, others foisted a tyrant on the people, some passed or repealed laws for money, others raped their daughters (6.608–24). A sociology of the city and a glancing rebuttal of Lucretius, most of these acts, antisocial though they are, are not crimes amenable to law. No legal sanction punishes those who fail to share wealth with relatives or hate their brothers, and men killed for adultery are already dead.²⁵² Implicitly, Virgil addresses Lucretius’s criticism that all we need is law, by pointing to behaviors, moving from wrong to unimaginably monstrous, “immane nefas” (6.624), that the law does not address. Justice for these wrongs takes place only in another world.

Virgil also encourages specific good behaviors. Leaving tortures behind, Aeneas and the sibyl arrive at the realm of reward, the “Blissful Groves” (“Fortunatorum Nemorum,” 6.639) or “Elysium” (6. 744). A sun and stars appear. Wrestling, games, grappling, dancing, and singing occupy the happy, while Orpheus plays his lyre amid traces of his mysteries. Horses browse, unyoked for a while from the nearby chariots, lances stuck in the earth. Nor is feasting forgotten, and a chant rises within a fragrant laurel grove. Enjoying these happy exercises of the body are Trojan ancestors and those whose behaviors deserve praise and should provoke emulation: men who suffered wounds for their country (they did not need even to die); holy priests, poets worthy Apollo; those who discovered truths useful to mankind, and those who served their fellows through acts of beneficence. Warfare, religion, song, science, arts, philosophy, and service: all support the state and its purposes among the famed and the anonymous. The freedom of movement characteristic of earlier afterlives finds spaces worth moving through, groves, meadows, streams (6.672–75). In just such terrain Dante places his virtuous pagans, including the Muslims Averroes and Avicenna.

So superior in design is Virgil’s underworld that it induces critics to fault its arrangements: why is Dido not among the suicides? Why is Sychaeus, her husband, with her in the field of mourning lovers, since he died beloved and faithful to the end? Why are the Trojan warriors not among those who incurred wounds for their country in Elysium with Teucer’s line? Spatial fluidity characterized Homer’s and other afterlives. Once across the river, shades not tied down to tortures could be found anywhere. Outside the rarely visited court of Hades and Persephone, the geography recapitulated the random gathering of shades at the brink, tumbling pell-mell from life. When Virgil imposes order on his underworld, moments that violate the design stand out. The text systematizes traditional received ideas, integrating them with grander concepts, reshaping the present to control the future, too successfully. A tribute to the rationalizing impulse the text creates in the reader, the reader arriving from the future demands more rigor.

Once Aeneas meets Anchises and the shade flits thrice through the living arms that would embrace it, the Homeric underworld, with its moralized Platonic additions, is finished. Poor Anticleia explained no more than the soul’s flying as the body burns to ash. Anchises explains the nature of the universe, in terms of the Stoic doctrine of anima mundi, the world spirit or mind from which all things come, to which all things go, and in which all things participate. Transposing Anticleia’s pathetic vision of a wasted, weakened soul fleeing the fire, Anchises rears before the mind’s eye a vision of the universe as fire.

Know, first, that heav’n and earth’s compacted frame,

And flowing waters, and the starry flame,

And both the radiant lights, one common soul

Inspires and feeds, and animates the whole.

This active mind, infus’d thro’ all the space,

Unites and mingles with the mighty mass.

Hence men and beasts the breath of life obtain,

And birds of air, and monsters of the main.

Th’ ethereal vigor is in all the same,

And every soul is fill’d with equal flame.

(Dryden, 6. 980–89)

Father for mother and philosophical transcendence for acceptance of common fate: Virgil systematically trades up elements. Against Lucretius’s atoms, swerving in the void, Virgil raises a philosophic alternative in Stoic-Ciceronian fire that consumes those atoms, denies their difference, and subtends them.

With philosophy transcending the popular fables he has just retold, Virgil launches into Roman history, politics, and purpose. Nothing could be further from Epicurean withdrawal than this energetic account. Rejected are the seductive ethics of contemplative disengagement for an ideology of action in history, the progress of the Roman art of empire. From Aeneas’s earliest descendants through Augustus himself, from Romulus and Numa to the tragic civil war between Caesar and Pompey, Virgil rewrites Cicero’s history of Rome and its heroes to end in his own present, with Marcellus. The dead heir of Augustus and Livia is wept as Aeneas weeps when he sees the story of Troy on Dido’s walls, “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt” (1.462; [here too] are tears for things and mortal sufferings touch the mind).

Cicero’s Scipio had been advised that the Ganges will never hear his name, nor the rising or the setting sun. Fame lasts barely a year in mortal minds, and Cicero recalls Lucretius’s evocation of the eons before one’s birth, “of what importance is it to you to be talked of by those who are born after you, when you were never mentioned by those who lived before you.”253 Cicero, for once, is judged too modest. To Augustus Virgil promises an empire and fame past Africans and Indians, “Garamantas et Indos” (6.794), beyond the stars and solar year of Scipio’s dream (6.795–96). Left far behind is Epicurean contempt for public life. Fame is desirable, wide-spread, and as enduring as the imperial justification Virgil creates for Rome and every Latin-reading empire since:

tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento

(hae tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere morem,

parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

6.851–53

(You rule by command the peoples, Roman, remember /(these will be your arts) peace and custom to impose,/ to spare the subjugated and to break the proud.)

This Pax Romana, the imperial credo, the civilizing mission rejects utterly the Lucretius who mocked sweating Sisyphus as the active politician of the Roman republic.

Not content with reversing values, Virgil jabs at what Lucretius explicitly valued. Virgil’s attack on Ancus has puzzled numerous commentators, who suspect Virgil may have confused one king or Ancus with another.254 Ancus, the fourth king of Rome, is routinely praised, his paternity questioned, by Cicero (Republic II, xviii, 33, p.141). Horace linked Ancus with Numa, as a casualty of death like ourselves. The Forum may see you now, but you will have to go where Numa and Ancus have gone: “ire tamen restat Numa quo devenit et Ancus” (Epistles I.6.27). In Lucretius, Ancus holds a privileged position: he begins the list of worthy dead that Epicurus will end. As a public, political character he is followed by the doomed, unnamed Xerxes who paved the seas to his own destruction, and so figures ironically, and then by the “son of the Scipios,” thunderbolt of Carthage, as predictable as those who follow him: Homer, Democritus, and Epicurus. The praise of Ancus is generous:

Consider Ancus great and good is dead;

Ancus, thy better far, was born to die,

And thou, dost thou bewail mortality?

(Dryden, 236–39)

As rare as Lucretius’s praise is Virgil’s condemnation. Uniquely among the Roman fathers, he charges “bragging Ancus” with panting after the popularity Lucretius scorns in Sisyphus:

Whom Ancus follows, with a fawning air,

But vain within, and proudly popular.

(Dryden, 6.1115–16)

quem iuxta sequitur iactantior Ancus,

nunc quoque iam nimium gaudens popularibus auris.

(6.815–16)

Virgil mocks in Epicurean satiric terms, as vain, petty, and would-be popular, a figure the Epicureans Lucretius and Horace conspicuously and persistently praise. Ancus, Cicero notes, had divided among the citizens the lands he conquered. He also made the forests of the sea coast, his conquests, public property.255 Respect for public things clung to his memory. There may be some other secret reason for Virgil’s unique depreciation of a Roman father, but the jab marks Virgil’s contesting Lucretius’s history and Ancus’s public donations, before there was a republic, before Augustus’s principate. Perhaps only Horace, another Epicurean, would have noticed.

With Virgil, the afterlife has acquired the characteristics and structure that Christianity will absorb when its time comes, in less than a century. Augustus, son of a God (the deified Julius Caesar), will restore the golden age (“Augustus Caesar, Divi genus, aurea condet/saecula” 6.792–93). Suicides chastised, infants in limbo, punishment, reward, purgation, and rebirth of souls: all eventually enter Christian doctrines and fantasies. Revelation’s heavenly city is remote from Virgil’s pastoral fields, nor does Virgil envision the destruction of his Rome, “Babylon, that great city” that rules the world from her seven hills (Rev. 17.5, 9, 18). Yet Virgil maps the underworld that later medieval writers will revisit, as they follow his trajectory through myth to transcendence.²⁵⁶ Dante knew whom he needed for a guide.

Did Virgil believe any of it? Of an afterlife so clearly constructed from others’ bits and pieces, one should probably follow one of Virgil’s sources. To repeat Plato’s observation in Phaedo, it is “not fitting to say something like this is true, but fit to say something ought to be like it” (114de). Facing the dead Marcellus, Virgil has only an “unavailing gift” (Dryden, 6. 1226), “inani/ munere” (6.885–86), less than the “tristi munere” Catullus offered his brother (Carmen, 101). The monsters and chimeras flocking the entry to the underworld fade before this unborn image of a man already dead. So, too, to John Jortin’s dismay, Aeneas leaves the underworld through the gate of false dreams.

An episode commenced by invoking the gods to “let me tell what I have heard” and reveal the secrets of the depths (6.264–67) shifts from represented action to mere dream, and a false dream rather than a true one. As Edward Gibbon observed before he became Rome’s historian, many think the ivory gate wrecks Book 6: “the common opinion, that by six unlucky lines, Virgil is destroying the beautiful System, which it had cost him eight hundred to raise. [Jortin] explains too this preposterous conduct, by the usual expedient of the Poet’s Epicureism. I only differ from him in attributing to haste and indiscretion, what he considers as the result of design.”257 Tactfully, the skeptical Gibbon lets the cleric Jortin conclude Virgil at heart an Epicurean. As to others’ belief in Virgil’s system, a modern student of Roman death and burial finds echoes only in poetic epitaphs, not in prose or funerary art.²⁵⁸ Like Lucretius, propagandizing for the study of nature as Virgil for civic action, Virgil seems to care enough about truth as matter of fact to mark his vision false, even though it has told many truths.

Lightly presented here, running across several millennia, is the human imagination working over and developing its conceptions of what happens after death, responding to social change, generating new ideologies in reimagined spaces of the dead. Most of the work is anonymous, and much of it popular, but from Homer to Virgil the luck of literary survivals lets us see purposeful bricolage in action. Justice, long absent, is vigorously stitched in, and such imaginary afterlives as Plato’s and Virgil’s are manifestly intended to shape the behavior of the living, regardless of the dead. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers, wriggling free of a thousand years of Christian hegemony, blamed priests for successful mind control; they did not think to blame their beloved poets and philosophers.

Of two enlightenment revolutions in the afterlife, one followed Lucretius and denied an afterlife on rationalist, materialist principles, a position associated with David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and some deists. The second revolution is perhaps more interesting: the afterlife was undermined from within by the desire to improve it, to create a happier and better future state than was currently on offer, even in Christianity. When an afterlife is predicated upon its being empirical fact, as the Christian afterlife is, can it both change and remain true at the same time?

That afterlives originate in the human mind and serve social purposes is, of course, no proof of their falsity, any more than religion’s origins and development disprove God. Any God worth believing can surely oversee the evolution of appropriately worshipful creatures, and countless other beings both indifferent and inimical to man, as He informs Job. So, too, the Christian’s delayed parousia demands a concept of progressive revelation. The world having not come to its promised end, God adapts and is adapted to changes in human psychology and society, taking on the ideal configuration of the changing human face. (Or, with Christopher Hitchens, its diabolism.) In the British enlightenment, the afterlife came to originate in the mind, serve social purposes, and reflect the human image, all without disturbing orthodoxy. A good God, his benevolence unchallenged, would not give people false ideas.

Before eternity takes this final twist, however, let us follow Scipio’s gaze towards the Ganges. What afterlife or lives could he expect there? Related but alternative logics flourish in a vast, cyclically generating and self-destroying cosmos, where no eternity is permanent, except the flame of a blown-out candle.