Greco-Roman Afterlife Beliefs
(avg. read time: 5–9 mins.)
As a supplement to my recent series on Roman literature, I would like to explore more fully something I only hinted at in that series. Namely, I want to look at Greco-Roman afterlife beliefs as a context for early Christian resurrection belief. Due to differences in quality of life and life expectancy compared to the contemporary West, death was a more tangible force that was perceived to be able to strike at any time, which made it a more present and urgent metaphysical matter to address, hence the many ways of addressing it in religion and philosophy. Infant mortality was incredibly high, hence the need to have many children and the impetus for women to marry young. But there, too, was a great risk of fatality, as many women died in childbirth. Only 50% of children made it to their tenth birthday. Only 40% made it to their twenty-fifth birthday. This is not to perpetuate the misconception that a thirty-five-year-old would be considered “old” in that time because that was approximately the average life expectancy.1 An old person was then what an old person is today. But much fewer people made it to their elderly days than make it today.
Most people do not seem to have expected an after“life” for themselves, per se. Based on ancient practices and the foundational mythologies of the culture, they expected continued existence after death, perhaps in the form of insubstantial shades (eidoloi) in Hades or at least in the vicinity of their tombs. People would leave meals and offerings at the tombs of the dead in order to continue upholding a relationship with the dead and to keep them satisfied to prevent them from haunting the living. But especially in the Homeric age and onward, when mythological cosmologies became consolidated, the expectation of continued existence in Hades became more prevalent.
The popular myths of the day—most famously conveyed by Homer’s Odyssey 11—presented pictures of the typical afterlife in which some part of the dead continues existing, but whatever is left after death is not truly living.2 In this account, Achilles stated that it was better to be the lowest living slave than to be the king of the dead (Homer, Od. 11.487–491). Many did not follow Homer’s idea of what happened to Achilles, but the idea that even heroes would subject to such a dead-end fate ensured all the more that the average person would have no clear expectation of after“life,” much less of a positive variety. Dag Øistein Endsjø, quoting Euripides (Andr. 1255–1256), states that the classical view was that to become immortal was to become divine, not simply to continue existing (cf. the much later Plutarch, Pel. 16.5; Rom. 27.3-28.8 on the purported translation of Romulus).3 The average person, on the basis of traditional beliefs and reinforced by these myths, did not expect to receive such immortality. In contrast to certain philosophical views, which drew a sharp distinction between the body and what remains after death, these stories portrayed these post-mortem shades as participating in embodied mortality, so that their continued existence is not truly immortality; they are the residue of the dead. In fact, these phantoms/shades/souls are identifiable because of their resemblances to specific bodies.4 But for the vast majority of people, even the renowned figures of the myths, this resemblance was the closest they would come to inhabiting bodies again, as any resurrection—much less an eschatological resurrection—was not expected (Homer, Il. 23.75–79; 24.550-551; Od. 11.210-222; Euripides, Herc. fur. 718-719; Sophocles, El. 137-139; Aeschylus, Eum. 647-648).5
This is why petitions to the gods and foci of worship were not eschatological concerns, but rather concerns about this life. They looked for provision of harvest, fair winds for crucial transports, protection for travel, shielding from curses, appeasement for perceived grounds of divine wrath that would result in death, and healing from disease. Indeed, these interests may explain why people sometimes treated the emperor as a god, a son of a god, or a god-in-waiting. The emperor could provide for many of these daily concerns by conquering more lands, bringing in more food and supplies, wrangling pirates, securing and improving travel routes, serving as the Pontifex Maximus before the gods, and, on some occasions, apparently demonstrate extraordinary divine powers.
But even the gods (with the occasional exception of Zeus/Jupiter) were subject to Fate, and even they could not ultimately prevent a person from dying, except on rare—heroic—occasions. For the average person, there was no hope of eschatological salvation or even of translation to the Isles of the Blessed, the Elysian Fields, or to Olympus/Palatine, where those who had undergone apotheosis would reside.
People sometimes consulted magicians to transcend the boundary of death and life. Some served as mediums, purportedly speaking the words of the dead to the living. Others claimed to be able either to bring the dead back to life (i.e., reanimate their corpses) temporarily or to be able to summon the spirits/ghosts of the dead.
While these beliefs persisted, by the time of the New Testament, some important developments had taken place. One, certain philosophers, motivated by Orphism, supplied more developed portrayals of the afterlife in line with more developed metaphysics and cosmology. Two, they differentiated good and bad fates, linking ethics to the afterlife, unlike in popular religion. Three, the mystery religions extended the expectation of good post-mortem fates to their adherents via union with the cultic subject. For example, the Isis mystery cult involved the initiate reenacting the story of Osiris with his coming to life in the underworld, thereby assuring the adherent of a good afterlife. In other cases, there may or may not be an afterlife benefit expectation, but in each case the mystery cult, via participatory ritual, encounters the divine and partakes of the divine vitality, whether temporarily or even beyond the grave. Such encounters with divine vitality were thought to be vouchsafed by the drama of the enacted ritual/reenacted story, the partaking of the sacred objects and substances, and the verbal affirmation of the cultic script. (This applies to the Eleusinian mysteries, the Bacchinalian/Dionysiac mysteries, the Attis/Cybele mysteries, and the Mithraic mysteries)
Among the Greek philosophies, it was Pythagoreanism and Platonism that first developed notions of afterlife. Herodotus said that the Egyptians were the first to teach the immortality of the soul, while Philostratus claimed that it came from the Egyptians and the Indians. Under their influence, especially as mediated by Orphism, Pythagoras had conceived of the body as a tomb for the soul until death released the soul, and Plato took over this idea for his own metaphysical conception. Both philosophers also believed that souls either went on to experience a good afterlife in the upper realms to which souls properly belong or underwent metempsychosis because these souls could not sufficiently detach themselves from the material realm and so remained hovering over it awaiting their reincarnation.
Plato was more elaborate, not least because of his more thoroughly articulated metaphysic. Interestingly, he co-opts the traditional mythological cosmology in assigning good souls in general to the Isles of the Blessed and the evil souls to Tartarus, assuming they are not currently caught in the middle of the metempsychosis cycle. Furthermore, since he saw the soul as belonging to the “real” world of Forms, he thought, in distinction from Pythagoras, that the soul was truly immortal and eternal, without beginning or end.
Pythagoras also thought the best destination for the human soul was to be made immortal and dwell among the stars. Indeed, this astral immortality became more prevalent among the philosophical and political elites. Cicero, who represented both groups, famously articulated in Book 6 of his Republic a heavenly destiny of all those who preserve, aid, or enlarge the fatherland (patria; 6.13). The reason for this destiny is because the rulers and preservers come from the heavens and will return to the heavens when they die (6.13–15). This duty is fundamentally to enact the rule of Jupiter through his natural law. The individual must do this over his own life to demonstrate that the spirit is the true self and god over the body (6.24–26). Likewise, rulers must ensure the harmony of the State so that it is in harmony with the cosmos (2.43; 3.33; 6.18).
However, not all philosophers expressed such particular interest in the afterlife. Democritus, and later Epicurus, taught that all that a human was (defined entirely in material terms, as all things were) disintegrated at death. There was no post-mortem consciousness or sensation. Death is the full and final end of all, the mere inevitable conclusion of mortality. Hence, it only makes sense to enjoy life while it lasts, for however short a time that is. While the maxim “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” was not unique to the philosophy of Epicureanism, nor did it originate with it (as a form of it appears in Isa 22:13), it summarizes well this philosophy’s approach to life. However, one should not understand this as mere self-indulgence, as the Epicureans ultimately sought pleasure as freedom from pain or disturbance (ataraxia) and they achieved such a goal by avoiding behaviors and situations that could lead to such states.
Likewise, the Stoics did not devote much thought to post-mortem fate. They lived differently than the Epicureans, since they thought that pleasure was not good. But they were not so motivated by their perspective on post-mortem fate. They thought humans should simply accept death as inevitable and part of the cyclical life of the cosmos as dictated by the Logos. Marcus Aurelius summarized this approach well in Meditations 8.58: “He who fears death fears either unconsciousness or another sort of consciousness. Now if you will no longer be conscious you will not be conscious either of anything bad. If you are to take on a different consciousness, you will be a different being and life will not cease.” This did not mean that they had no notion of what happened to a person after death—they believed the soul ascended after death to takes its place among the lighter substance of the stars whence it came—but eschatological rewards and punishments played no role for them, nor did any notion of consciousness.
Even Aristotle, as important an ethicist as he was, put little investment into a picture of an afterlife. He agreed with Plato that the Active Intellect, the mind (nous), survived death, but not memory (since memory is inherent to the body). In other words, that which is common to all of humanity survives death because it is immortal, but that which is personal to each individual does not. There is no continuing distinct consciousness.
Beyond these beliefs, there were peculiar one-off stories, such as that of Orpheus attempting to bring Eurydice out of Hades. These are certainly interesting, but they need not be explored for our purposes here, as they are not necessarily indicative of beliefs about the dead in general (or about any particular group of the dead). For that same reason, we will not be looking at the cases of resurrection stories of various children of the gods (or of some gods themselves, as in some ancient Near Eastern myths). As they were exceptional, I will review them another time.
Peter G. Bolt, “Life, Death, and the Afterlife in the Greco-Roman World,” in Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1998), 52.
Dag Øistein Endsjø, Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 25; Paul J. Brown, Bodily Resurrection and Ethics in 1 Cor 15, WUNT 2/360 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 85–89; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, vol. 3 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 39–46.
Dag Øistein Endsjø, “Immortal Bodies, before Christ: Bodily Continuity in Ancient Greece and 1 Corinthians,” JSNT 30 (2008): 429.
Idem, Greek Resurrection Beliefs, 31–35.
This paragraph came from K. R. Harriman, “A Synthetic Proposal About the Corinthian Resurrection Deniers,” NovT 62 (2020): 192–93. For more, see John Granger Cook, Empty Tomb, Resurrection, Apotheosis, WUNT 410 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 144–51.
I think much of this is very misleading. I refer you to my book “The Ancient Roman Afterlife: Di Manes, Belief, and the Cult of the Dead” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020). The problem with talking about “Greco-Roman” religion is that it creates a distortion in which Roman religious culture gets ignored in favor of treating pre-Roman Greek authors like Homer and Plato as normative for Roman thought. If you look at Roman religious practices, however, you will see that the main Roman ritual responses to death are not about that Greek material and are instead about the manes, who have no exact equivalent in Greek religion and thus are not going to be found in Greek texts. The Romans deified their dead as gods called manes and, contrary to what you can sometimes find in older scholarship, they worshipped individual people as manes and did so very inclusively of the whole population. So, the Roman Pagan alternative to the Christian afterlife was to become a god. The scholarship you are citing just ignores the manes, like Peter Bolt, to make it easier to claim that Christian ideas were attractive, but that again is a misrepresentation of the alternative.