Ancient & modern
A conference in Berlin studying the DNA of 90-year-olds has raised the prospect of our living for ever. What a dreadful thought. The idea of cheating death informs much ancient myth. Gilgamesh goes down to the underworld to seek immortality, while the goddess Calypso offers it to Odysseus if he will stay with her and not return to Penelope. Thetis tries to save her son Achilles from death by dipping him in the river Styx — all, that is, but his heel — and Orpheus charms his way down to Hades in an attempt to bring back his beloved Eurydice. The witch Medea claims to be able to rejuvenate Pelias but merely boils him alive.
The point is that all these efforts fail. Greeks had no illusions in this respect. For them, there was one chasm that could not be bridged, and that was the chasm separating mortal from immortals (though one man, the superman Heracles, did manage it). The ultimate hubris was to attempt it — a sure way to guarantee the fate that you were trying to avoid. The myth of Eous (the goddess Dawn) and her mortal lover Tithonus demonstrated that even the gods got it wrong: she gave him eternal life, but forgot at the same time to give him eternal youth.
There were three ways round the problem. The first was to seek an immortal reputation so that one lived for ever on the lips of men — the epic kleos that heroes like Achilles strove for. The second was to argue for the immortality of the soul, as Plato did. The third was to point out what a relief death was.
For the great Roman poet Lucretius (who thought that the mortality of the soul was man's greatest comfort), it is men's eternal desire for novelty that makes life such hell. The problem is that fulfilling any desire does not offer satisfaction; man immediately starts to gawp after something else. Cicero argues that each age has its particular pleasures, but these fade over time. Even the pleasures of old age eventually pall. Why lead a joyless existence?
That, surely, is the real point. As the historian Herodotus made the sage Solon say, 'Call no man happy till he is dead' — because, up till then, disaster can strike at any time. Only if one can be guaranteed eternal happiness will immortality be endurable — and science cannot (so far) guarantee that. On the other hand, if it cannot do away with death, might it one day do away with that other inevitability, taxes? Now that really would be research worth pursuing.
Peter Jones
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