Ancient & modern
Last week, we observed ancient attitudes to wanting to live for ever. Being against it, the ancients developed many ways of dealing with death.
Since there were no scriptures or creeds in the pre-Christian world, there could have been as many beliefs about death as there were believers. What generally emerges from ancient Greek literature is that religion was all about success and failure in this life, and success depended on having the gods on your side. Consequently, if one dishonoured the gods by e.g., refusing to acknowledge them, one would not have to wait till the afterlife for punishment — it would be visited on you at once. Further, the gods, being immortal, had no part to play in the transition from life to death: only the god Hades had an interest in it. Greeks therefore did not evince much interest in or concern about the afterlife: the underworld was not generally seen as a place of punishment or reward, where a reckoning had to be faced. That said, mystery religions did offer 'bliss' to initiates, and some writers express the view that really heinous crimes would be punished after death.
It fell to the philosophers to prepare one for death. The Roman philosopherpoet Lucretius argues that since the world and its gods are all atoms, then from atoms we come and to atoms we shall return, and that is that. Seneca says that we should try to die as happily as we tried to live, and that means dying gladly, i.e., not pointlessly fighting the inevitable, for that will merely make the experience miserable: 'there is only one chain that binds us to life, and that is the love of life'. Cicero thinks of death in old age in terms of a fruit reaching its ripeness and falling naturally from the tree, and of a man reaching land after a long voyage. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius reminds us 'how trivial life is: yesterday a drop of semen, today a mummy or ashes. Spend therefore these fleeting moments as Nature would have you spend them, and then go to your rest with a good grace, as an olive falls in season, with a blessing for the earth that bore it and a thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life'.
A character in one of Euripides' tragedies puts it rather differently: 'I can't stand people who try to prolong life with foods and potions and spells to keep death at bay. Once they've lost their use on earth, they should clear off and die and leave it to the young.' Admirable!
Peter Jones
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