5 - Greek and Classical Views of Life After Death and Ascent to the Heavens 

The enormous quantity of information that has survived describing ancient Greek conceptions of the afterlife overwhelms the incomplete records left by the various civilizations of the Ancient Near East. The author chooses to focus only on portions of this extensive Greek mythological archive that relates to the residents of Judea. Greeks produced dramas and epics, travel narratives, essays, philosophical and religious writings, as well as a multitude of surviving archeological artifacts.

Foremost in influencing Jewish thought are the writings of Plato, who believed that body and soul were separate entities. Not every Greek thinker agreed with Plato. The separation of body and spirit is a concept that predates Plato. Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Canaanite, and Hebrew writers believed that a “shade” or “shadow” became separated from the body after death. The Greek, principally Platonic contribution to this dichotomy was the introduction of a radical dualism. The immortality of the soul was regarded as beatific, provable, and was exalted as being the natural goal of existence.

Greek history is replete with tales of those who can, in the manner of shamans, depart their living bodies to travel heaven and earth, heal the sick, or peer into the future. Examples include mythical figures Orpheus and Trophonius, and historical visionaries like Aristeas of Proconessus, Hermotemus of Clazomenae, Epimenides of Cnossis (Phaestus), Pythagoras of Samos, Abaris the Hyperborean, Zalmoxis of the Thracian Getae, and Empedocles of Acragas. Greek myths include several cautionary tales about attempting to ascend to the heavenly realm of the gods, the most noted being the legends of Phaethon and Icarus. These stories of “out of body” experiences contributed to Greek belief in the immortality of the soul and to the efficacy of altered states of consciousness to facilitate extracorporeal ventures by entities, human or divine, who possess the capability to do this.

Written Greek history was preceded by oral tradition, most notably the Homeric epics. Ancient heroes are occasionally described as being, upon their deaths, privileged to eternal life in the Isles of the Blessed or the Elysian fields. The Iliad of Homer concludes with a description of funeral games performed in honor of opposing deceased heroes Hector and Patroclus. Achilles has killed Hector in single combat and advises Hector’s father Priam to reconcile himself to the death of his son:

Bear up, and do not unceasingly lament away your heart. For you will not accomplish anything grieving for your son. Nor will you raise him up, and sooner you will suffer another evil.

In another part of the world, at roughly the same time, King David of Israel and Judah similarly laments the death of his son born to Bathsheba. Upon learning that Bathsheba was pregnant with his child, David arranged the murder, in combat, of her lawful husband Uriah the Hittite. As his young son was perishing from illness, David had exhibited much grief and morning. Second Samuel 12:16-17 records this:

David therefore besought God for the child; and David fasted, and went in, and lay all night upon the earth. And the elders of his house arose, and went to him, to raise him up from the earth: but he would not, neither did he eat bread with them.

After the child died, Second Samuel 12:22-24 records David’s response to his servants confusion about his suddenly ceasing to afflict himself on behalf of his ailing son:

And he said, While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. And David comforted Bathsheba his wife, and went in unto her, and lay with her: and she bare a son, and he called his name Solomon: and the Lord loved him.

Solomon would ultimately succeed his father David but would be the last temporal king of the Davidic lineage. Solomon would provide several verses describing his own views about the condition of dead people in the Book of Proverbs.

German philologist Bruno Snell identifies Heraclitus as the earliest Greek writer to systematically distinguish “soul” (which was designated “psyche”) from the body. Heraclitus believed that the soul is endowed with a “logos,” a rational plan common to all humanity that could be modified by education. Both Snell and 19th century German classicist Erwin Rohde (a friend of fellow German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche) hypothesize that Heraclitus was more indebted to Greek lyric poets who more completely described mental processes for deriving this concept than to Homer. Erwin Rohde’s “Psyche” remains a standard reference work for Greek cult practices and beliefs related to the soul. A quote from “Psyche” reveals that objectivity was modified by subjectivity in the work of Heraclitus:

It is quite certain that Herakleitos can never have distinctly asserted the changeless persistence of the individual human soul in the midst of the unbroken stream of becoming in which all fixity is nothing but an illusion of the senses. But it is also incredible that, in despite of his own fundamental principles, he even admitted the possibility of this popular view with an indulgence quite foreign to his nature. What could have tempted him to do so? We are told that it was from the mysteries that he adopted this opinion which was one of their most important doctrines. Herakleitos, however, only casts an occasional glance at the mysteries and what might be called their “doctrine” (just as he glanced at other prominent manifestations of the excited religious life of his time, and he does so in order to harmonize their teaching with his own—a result which he achieves rather by imposing an interpretation than by patiently eliciting one).

The early Greek lyric poets explored the sophisticated concept of a consistent “self” both in its temporal setting and a potential survivor into the afterlife. The lyric poets were interested in how selfhood grew and progressed, emotionally and intellectually, Learning, remembering, and forgetting all bear upon the formation of a “self.”  Memory was an essential component of Plato’s proof of the transcendent immortality of the soul.

Proper funeral rites were important for ancient Greeks, just as they were for other ancient civilizations, and for the same reasons. Dead warriors were burned near the battlefield, but those who died in peacetime were entombed or buried. In the Iliad, Patroklus reminds Achilles that neglect of proper rites for the dead is disgraceful. Unburied dead were not permitted to enter Hades, and the ghosts of these neglected corpses could return to make mischief for the living. Greek ghosts could become transformed into vampires. After a decent burial, regular rites were performed to commemorate, and to placate the dead lest they arise to vindicate themselves upon the living.

A proper Greek funeral featured three phases: (1) the laying out of the body, or prothesis, (2) the conveyance of the body to its place of internment or cremation, or ekphora, and (3) the proper disposition of the inhumated or cremated remains. Prayers were offered to the chthonic deities to ensure a kindly reception of the dead. In later Greco-Roman culture were buried in tombs in a sarcophagus, which can be literally translated as “flesh-eater” until the flesh was decayed. Afterward, bones were collected into an ossuary, a secondary burial that was also practiced in Israel. As is the case in present-day England, this permitted gravesites to be reused. 

Hints of pending pleasures for the dead are often evident in sarcophagus decorations. Mycenaean tombs feature depictions of a judgement scene with scales, a psychostasia or “weighing of souls.” Butterflies are also depicted, symbolic of goddess Psyche for whom the Greek name for soul is derived. Offerings for the dead were deposited at tombs and graves. As was the case in Mesopotamia and Canaan, graves were often fitted with plumbing pipes to facilitate the offering of libations for the dead. Similar systems delivered drink offerings to buried urns, the final resting place for remains.

During the Homeric era the dominant explanation for the location of the dead was the underground kingdom of a god variously termed Hades, Pluto, and Rhadamanthus. Later elaborations included messenger god Hermes as guide to journeys to the underworld, initial encounters with Cerberus the three-headed watchdog and the payment of coins as a toll for Charon, ferryman who conveyed souls across the river Styx. Small coins called obols were placed in the mouths of the dead to finance this passage, The simpler Homeric narrative does not include judgement scenes, despite exceptions described in the cases of Tantalus, Sisyphus, Tityus, and a few others. Everyone, both the virtuous and the sinner, shared identical existences in the afterlife, The dead are weak, and inhabit a dark and distant locale. The only information that the dead can obtain about the living is gleaned from newly arrived dead souls.

The Odysseus portrayed in the 5th book of the Odyssey is dissimilar to the Odysseus of the Iliad. He is weeping on the beach of the magical island Ogygia, a guest of the beautiful goddess Calypso who has just granted him immortality, imperishable attire, and frequent access to her sexual charms. Despite these benefits, Odysseus’s thoughts lay elsewhere. Earlier chapters of the Odyssey revealed that his kingdom of Ithica was imperiled. Suitors of his presumed widow Penelope were conspiring to kill his son and heir Telemachus. One of these suitors intended to marry Penelope.  An Achaian hero was constrained to place family honor and fame above a potential eternity of sensual pleasures. The Iliad highlighted the moral qualities of heroism in battle. The Odyssey enjoined victors to renounce their enjoyment of the spoils of war and to return home, their principal field of responsibility, as soon as possible. Before Odysseus accomplishes his own return home he descends to Hades, a journey described in the 11th book of the Odyssey. There he encounters deceased members of his crew and other departed souls, including his mother. Most notably, he encounters the shade of Achilles, the greatest of Greek heroes.

The souls that Odysseus met in the underworld were recognizable, but intangible, and dispersed like mist when Odysseus tried to embrace them. This argues against any Greek notion of a bodily resurrection, a belief that arises in later Hebrew conceptions of the afterlife. Neither does this Homeric description accord with Platonic descriptions of souls becoming entirely disembodied and ethereal. The dead that Odysseus met are analogous to modern beliefs about ghosts. Lines 489-491 of the 11th book of the Odyssey reveal Odysseus’s final assessment of life in Hades:

I would rather serve as slave to another man, a man with no land and livelihood, than be a king over all the rotted corpses.

In Ecclesiastes 9:4 Solomon expresses a similar evaluation of life, contrasted to death

For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.

Odysseus returns home to rescue his son, destroy his wife’s scheming suitors, restore his kingdom to prosperity, and to transitorily enjoy the fame of his having defeated the Trojans. Unlike the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey is not focused on the afterlife. Immortality is secondary to the subjects of immortality and fame. Gilgamesh did not become a good king until after he became humanized by obtaining knowledge about his own mortality. Whereas Gilgamesh pursued immortality, Odysseus flatly refused it. Both stories describe heroic struggles against political disorder, and both stories idealize the heroic, warlike values of males.

The author now discusses the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, an account of the rape of Persephone by Pluto, the god of the underworld. It fills the same role in Greek culture that The Descent of Inanna did in Sumerian culture. Persephone is abducted by Pluto while she is gathering spring flowers. Her mother Demeter neglects her regular duties as patroness of grains and wheat while she searches for her missing daughter. Upon discovering Persephone’s location, Demeter petitions her Olympian siblings to arrange for her release. None can enter the underworld of the dead except for messenger god Hermes. Pluto is persuaded to release Persephone, but since she has eaten six pomegranate seeds in Hades, she is required to return to the underworld for six months of every year. Again, eating is associated with human mortality. Conversely, immortality can be obtained by the ascetic denial of the pleasures of food and sex, an idea that was later adopted by Christian monastics.

For the six months per year that Persephone dwells beneath the earth, her mourning mother Demeter causes the fields to remain infertile. When Persephone returns, an overjoyed Demeter causes grain to grow again. Like the Mesopotamian Descent of Inanna, this myth explains not only the change of seasons and the yearly agricultural cycle, but also demonstrates the ritual importance of grief, libations, and sacrifices offered to the dead. The dead continue to eat and drink in the underworld, so offerings of food and beverages pacify potentially troublesome spirits. Greek marriage customs required that a daughter be joined to the family of her husband, so a wife and her mother would only occasionally be able to visit each other. This doleful human condition mirrors that of the two goddesses Persephone and Demeter. Grief attends not only the partial loss of a daughter due to marriage, but the more complete loss of a family member who has died.

The myth of Persephone and Demeter was the basis of a significant, secret religious rite performed at Eleusis known as the Eleusinian mysteries. The elite of nearby Athens eagerly sought admission to these rites, which featured themes and imagery focused on rebirth and immortality. A subplot of the Persephone/Demeter story involved an attempt by Demeter to make a human boy (called Triptolemus in some accounts) immortal by immersing him in a purifying fire. The boy’s human mother, fearful that her child is being murdered, interrupts this procedure. The author identifies parallels to the Near Eastern cult practice of passing children through fire, presumably cases of human sacrifice, and reminds the reader of how abhorrent this custom was to the Hebrews. Hints of human sacrifice, however, are not evident in the Homeric epic, but the possibility of human immortality is. Demeter’s interrupted effort to immortalize Triptolemus by fire was featured in the mystery rites conducted at Eleusis. Details about the pilgrimage from Athens to Eleusis are well known. In Eleusis, the secret rites were enacted within the telesterion, a large rectangular, windowless building close to a cave that was believed to be the entrance to the underworld. Initiates were sworn to secrecy, do the Eleusinian mysteries remain mysterious to this day.

The telesterion, site of the rites, was unlike any other Greek temple. It was devoid of ornamentation and possessed a single door. It is believed that as part of the evening service initiates drank a barley brew called the kykeon which may have been infused with enough ergot to cause a psychedelic experience. Aristotle wrote that participants learned nothing at all, but experienced a change in their state of mind which improved their condition in the afterlife. How the annual production of the wheat crop and immortality were related is unknown. Lines 480-482 of the Hymn to Demeter asserts that participants enjoyed an advantage over nonparticipants:

Olbios [fortunate] among earth-bound mortals is he who has seen these things. But whoever is uninitiated in the rites, whoever takes no part in them, will never get a share [aisa] of those sorts of things [that the initiated get], once they die, down below in the dank realms of mist.

Plutarch provides a more detailed description of the death of an initiate:

(Upon dying) the soul suffers an experience similar to those who celebrate the great initiations...Wanderings astray in the beginning, tiresome walking in circles, some frightening paths in darkness that lead nowhere; then immediately before the end all the terrible things, panic and shivering and sweat, and amazement. And then some wonderful light comes to meet you, pure regions and meadows are there to greet you, with sounds and dances and solemn, sacred words and holy views; and there the initiate, perfect by now, set free and loose from all bondage, walks about, crowned with a wreath, celebrating the festival together with the other sacred and pure people, and he looks down on the uninitiated, unpurified crowd in this world in mud and fog beneath his feet.

The pattern provided by the story of Persephone and Demeter (like that of the Descent of Inanna) is evident in other world cultures. The death and rebirth of divinities and mythical heroes is often serves as an explanation for the agricultural cycle. While the Eleusinian mysteries are the best-known example of Greek cults, other such as the Orphic and Bacchic mysteries coexisted with it. During the Hellenistic era, non-Greek cults were repackaged for adoption by Greco-Roman adherents including those of Isis, Mithras, great mother Cybele, Adonis, and many others. Although Christianity emerged in a Jewish setting, by the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE it had absorbed the features and language of the Hellenistic mystery religions.

After the Homeric era, the Greeks possessed a variety of often conflicting myths and epics describing the afterlife. Heroes Hercules, Perseus, and Castor and Pollux all mounted to heaven after they died, humans who became immortal due to their legendary exploits and memorialized by their various cults. These great heroes could be transformed into constellations, but a multitude of lesser heroes were also regarded as deities who could be offered sacrifices at their shrines or altars, petitioned for benefits and intervention, and worshipped as patron deities of specific locales. The hero cults led to the later Roman and Western development of the oriental concept of the “divine right of kings.” In both the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, rulers increasingly began to identify themselves with divinity. The tombs of these rulers increasingly came to resemble temples embellished by evidence of their heroic exploits. The tomb of King Maussollus, although not particularly temple-like, was so enormous it became regarded as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Greek myths also describe individuals who were raised from the dead. The story of Alcestis concerns the imminent death of King Admetus, who is advised that he will be allowed to live if he can find someone willing to die in his place. Alcestis, his wife, gives up her life before she recognizes that the fact and manner of her dying will tarnish her husband’s reputation. Admetus’s old friend Heracles appears just in time to rescue Alcestis from the clutches of Death and restore her to her relieved husband. Similarly, the first Greek casualty of the Trojan War, Protesilaus, was revived to provide a good example for other soldiers and to offer hope for the wives of these soldiers. Neither of these returns to life led to immortality for the revived 

In De animus, Aristotle writes that the Orphics believed that after death, the soul departs the body and inhabits the upper atmosphere. The Orphic cult was based on the story of Thracian lyre player Orpheus’s descent to Hades to retrieve his deceased wife Eurydice. Just before the pair are about to exit the underworld, Orpheus looks back at Eurydice. This backward glance causes Eurydice to vanish forever. The original meaning of this tale was humanity’s inability to defeat death, but it emphasized the value of commemorating the dead. Cultists later modified this to incorporate various techniques for ultimately defeating death through a series of reincarnations. Punishments followed after each death, and prior to each reincarnation. The Orphic Hymns are a collection of eighty-seven hymns addressed to various deities and are among the few extant works of Orphic literature. It is largely accepted in modern scholarship that the Orphic Hymns were liturgical in function and were used in religious rites. Many contain instructions to be remembered by the soulof t he dead man or woman as it navigates its way through Hades and towards reincarnation. Page 96 of Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets by Fritz Graf and others states that, “…it is impossible to reconstruct a single, complete, and coherent eschatological system out of the statements on the tablets [hymns], even if we supplement them with related information from other sources.” Bacchic Gold Tablet 1, a travel guide to Hades, is quoted:

This is the work of Memory when you are about to die down to the well-built house of Hades, There is a spring at the right side, and standing by it a white cypress. Descending to it, the souls of the dead refresh themselves. Do not even go near this spring! Ahead you will find from the Lake of Memory, cold water pouring forth. There are guards before it. They will ask you, with astute wisdom, what you are seeking in the darkness of murky Hades. Say, “I am a son of the Earth and starry Sky, I am parched with thirst and I am dying; but quickly grant me cold water to drink from the Lake of Memory to drink.” And they will announce you to the Chthonian King, and they will grant you to drink from the Lake of Memory. And you, too, having drunk, will go along on the sacred road on which other glorious initiates and bacchoi travel.

Whereas the Eleusinian mysteries focused on victory in Hades, the Orphic hymns promise the deification of initiates who ascend to heaven to become like the gods.

The Pythagoreans also provided guidance for overcoming death. Although founded by Samos native and mathematician Pythagoras, Pythagoreans were mystics, rather than mathematicians. This cult was an amalgam of musical and mathematical theories and strict dietary and ascetic practices. Like the Orphic cult, they also believed in the reincarnation and transmigration of souls and may have served as the source of Platonic doctrines, Orphism and Pythagoreanism melded during Late Antiquity, and the result is often referred to as Neo-Pythagoreanism.

Many Greek philosophers, particularly the Epicureans, embraced beliefs about the afterlife promulgated by the Orphics and Pythagoreans. The philosophy of Epicurus was based on the atomic theory of Democritus. Matter was described as comprised of basic, unbreakable units Democritus called atoms. The universe was described as solely consisting of matter and void, or vacuum (the absence of matter). Epicurus, in contrast to Plato, believed that souls must exist in matter, since nothing can exist in a void. The consequence of this theory is that both body and soul are destroyed by death. Epicurus therefore dismissed any possibility of an afterlife. Roman Epicurean Lucretius could assure his followers that “death is nothing to us.” The concept of divine judgement and posthumous retribution was rare in Greek thought, but just prevalent enough to inspire Lucretius to endeavor to refute it. His professed disregard for the corpses of deceased persons was contrary to prevalent beliefs that the absence of proper funeral rites was an insult to both the deceased and to the family of the dead person. Romans Cicero and Seneca similarly upset conventional sensibilities regarding the proper disposition of corpses.

The Stoics adopted a position between the Epicureans for whom death was an absolute and the Platonists who championed the immortality of the disembodied soul. Stoics believed in an all-pervading divine fire they called logos. Wise and virtuous people pass lives in strict accordance with reason, a concept also advocated by Plato. Passion is dangerous and must be repressed. The fiery logos of the Stoics pervaded the universe with the power of reason. The Lives of the Philosophers written in the 2nd century CE by Diogenes Laertius describes the contrasting beliefs of the Stoics in Section 8.4:

Another of their doctrines is that nature is an artificial fire tending by a regular road to production, which is a fiery kind of breath proceeding according to art. Also, that the soul is sensible, and that it is a spirit which is born with us; consequently, it is a body and continues to exist after death; that nevertheless it is perishable. But that the soul of the universe is imperishable, and that the souls which exist in animals are only parts of that of the universe.  But Zenon the Citiaean, and Antipater in his treatise concerning the Soul, and Poseidonius also, all say that the soul is a spirit; for that by it we have our breath, and by it we are moved. Cleanthes, accordingly, asserts that all souls continue to exist till they are burnt up; but Chrysippus says that it is only the souls of the wise that endure.

Stoics believed that the universe would ultimately be consumed in a conflagration called the ekpyrosis. Second century Stoic Panaetius wrote that nothing could survive this event, but Poseidonius, under the influence of Plato, accepted the preexistence of the soul and its postmortem ascent into the ether.

Focusing on Plato himself, student of Socrates, and tutor to Aristotle the purported tutor of Alexander the Great, a plethora of primary source material exists written during the period when Greece was directly confronting its archrival, Persia. Platonic conceptions about the immortality of the soul became the cornerstone of Christian doctrine, despite the absence of biblical sources that would support this belief. Pagan religions based on Plato’s theories embraced the concept of the immortality of the soul, but not necessarily the survival of the personal souls of every individual. Plato’s Symposium furnishes an example of Socrates soaring free from his body through a sustained act of contemplation, demonstrative of the soul’s independence from the body. In the final section of Plato’s Apology, Socrates dismisses the eternal consequences of death just before he drinks the cup of poisoned hemlock that will facilitate his own death sentence:

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things:  either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again.

The author describes the final words of Socrates as being an evasion, rather than a serious discussion of death and its potential repercussions. Offered several opportunities to escape his death sentence and live in exile, Socrates instead chooses to become a philosophical martyr. Plato, through the words of Socrates, champions the cultivation of the soul over the preservation of the invariably transient body. The soul is the principle of life, whereas the body is merely a reflection of it. In Plato’s Phaedo, another account of the final hours of Socrates, the condemned man undertakes to prove that the soul is immortal. His proof became extremely influential on subsequent Western conceptions of the afterlife. Socrates bases his proof on the premise that opposites are related to each other. For example, bonds are painful, but the removal of bonds is pleasurable. Most people fear death because it is an unknown, but philosophers do not fear death because it offers an opportunity to live as a soul freed from the body. Below is an excerpt from Phaedo:

Now, said Socrates, I will analyze one of the two pairs of opposites which I have mentioned to you, and also its intermediate processes, and you shall analyze the other to me. One of them I term sleep, the other waking. The state of sleep is opposed to the state of waking, and out of sleeping waking is generated, and out of waking, sleeping; and the process of generation is in the one case falling asleep, and in the other waking up. Do you agree?

Cebes: I entirely agree.

Socrates: Then, suppose that you analyze life and death to me in the same manner. Is not death opposed to life?

Cebes: Yes.

Socrates: And they are generated one from the other?

Cebes: Yes.

Socrates: What is generated from the living?

Cebes: The dead.

Socrates: And what from the dead?

Cebes: I can only say in answer — the living.

Socrates: Then the living, whether things or persons, Cebes, are generated from the dead?

Cebes: That is clear.

Socrates: Then the inference is that our souls exist in the world below?

Cebes: That is true.

Socrates: And one of the two processes or generations is visible—for surely the act of dying is visible?

Cebes: Surely.

Socrates: What then is to be the result? Shall we exclude the opposite process? And shall we suppose nature to walk on one leg only? Must we not rather assign to death some corresponding process of generation?

Cebes: Certainly.

Socrates: And what is that process?

Cebes: Return to life.

Socrates: And return to life, if there be such a thing, is the birth of the dead into the world of the living?

Cebes: Quite true.

Greek poet Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, wrote “observe due measure; moderation is best in all things.” Platonists similarly advised the avoidance of extremes. Asceticism was believed to brace the mind with a philosophical framework and to lead to a noble death. Arguments about the preexistence of the soul highlight the importance of recollection. The process of recollecting something one learned, and then forgotten, Plato closely identifies with the process of learning itself. Basic mental categorizations such as “more than,” “less than,” or “equal to” are indicative of knowledge humans possess before they are born, and provisional proof that the soul preexists the body. This is not an airtight argument. Plato’s pupil Aristotle believed that human intelligence at birth is a “tabula rasa” (a blank slate) devoid of preconceptions. Concepts like “more than,” “less than,” or “equal to” are learned, rather than recollected or hardwired into our brains. Despite these later objections, however, Plato stressed that immortality of the soul was linked to the act of thinking as performed by individual, internal psychological “selves.”  A multitude of cerebral processes were lumped into the single category of “recollection,” which can be alternately defined as “memory.”

Previous descriptions of immortality in this work being extensively summarized have always been connected to actions, heroic, cultic, or ritual, rather than to thoughts. Immortality was linked to the body by both Persians and apocalyptic Jews. Plato was first to associate immortality exclusively with the mind, rather than with the body. Greek myth connected death with the act of forgetting as it crossed the River Lethe. Plato refused to accept that death erased the memory because this opposed his theory of the mind and soul preexisting the body. Thinking, the primary function of the soul, principally survives the death of the body. Plato was not describing modern definitions od “consciousness,” but rather altered states of consciousness that arise in the wake of intense concentration, meditation, and the higher planes of rational thought processes.

Plato believed that souls should be educated to achieve their highest and most refined potential. Of all possible ideas, ideas of self-conception stood uppermost. Self-conception, or self-mentation was prioritized by both Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle advocated a mind devoted to contemplation of the Good, an exalted object of contemplation first defined by his mentor Plato.

These definitions represent a definitive break from traditional Greek beliefs. Odysseus sought fame as a military hero and ruler. Fighting, lying, cheating, and womanizing were all acceptable means of achieving this fame. The immortality described by Plato, however, could be sought and achieved by anyone who properly developed their powers of thought, not just heroic men of arms like Odysseus. Moderation, proper deportment, and a developed ethical sense were the keys to immortality, a marked contrast to the unrefined and primitive techniques of the Homeric heroes. Plato’s approach was elitist rather than egalitarian, since it prioritized intellectual pursuits over the mundane activities most humans are obligated perform to make a living. Leisure time, and a lengthy education were prerequisites. But the list of qualified candidates for immortality by Plato’s standard was greatly expanded beyond the short list of warrior-kings mentioned by Homer. Plato enshrined the intellectual elite as being transcendently important, a self-informed minority accomplished in the art of self-definition that carried the torch of Western philosophy forward for the next few thousand years.

Apart from the questionable proofs of immortality provided by Plato’s dialogues featuring Socrates, his conception of entities or ideas associated with every material body on earth. These forms of the “Good” or the “Beautiful” were considered as existing apart from whatever objects they may pertain to, and their abstract existence confirms equally abstract conceptions of the immortal soul. Socrates is again enlisted in Plato’s Phaedo to defend the idea that the soul does not dissolve upon the death of the body that formerly encapsulated it. It is a type of analogy, rather than a logical proof:

Socrates: And are we to suppose that the soul, which is invisible, in passing to the true Hades, which like her is invisible, and pure, and noble, and on her way to the good and wise God, whither, if God will, my soul is also soon to go-that the soul, I repeat, if this be her nature and origin, is blown away and perishes immediately on quitting the body as the many say? That can never be, dear Simmias and Cebes. The truth rather is that the soul which is pure at departing draws after her no bodily taint, having never voluntarily had connection with the body, which she is ever avoiding, herself gathered into herself (for such abstraction has been the study of her life). And what does this mean but that she has been a true disciple of philosophy and has practiced how to die easily? And is not philosophy the practice of death?

Cebes: Certainly.

Socrates: That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world to the divine and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives in bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions and all other human ills, and forever dwells, as they say of the initiated, in company with the gods. Is this not true, Cebes?

Cebes: Yes, beyond a doubt.

Socrates: But the soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her departure, and is the companion and servant of the body always, and is in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth only exists in a bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste and use for the purposes of his lusts-the soul, I mean, accustomed to hate and fear and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy-do you suppose that such a soul as this will depart pure and unalloyed?

Cebes: That is impossible.

The survival of the soul after death is an indisputable facet of Platonism, but this was not initially regarded as being the survival of our personal soul, or “self” until the succeeding eras of Plotinus and (especially) Augustine. Every subsequent mainline Christian reference to the immortality of the human soul, however, was primarily, for better or worse, based on the philosophy of Plato. Some aspects of Plato’s argument, however, have ben repressed by Christians who aspire to promote the nonbiblical concept of the immortality of the soul. Greeks, like Buddhists and Hindus, incorporated reincarnation into their theological systems. Every successive iteration of life on earth ideally better fits a soul for its ultimate release into eternity. The Indian conception of karma includes provisions for backward progress. A life badly led could result in a rebirth as a lower form of human or animal. Socrates states, in the words of Plato, that gluttons, drunkards, and violent people might be reborn as donkeys. Metamorphosis, written by Platonic philosopher Apulieus, was partially inspired by this idea. The protagonist Lucias, aspiring to become transformed into a bird, is unwittingly transformed into a Donkey. His mistress Photis informs him that he again become human by consuming roses. Egyptian goddess Isis (“mother of the universe”) ultimately instructs Lucias how to obtain a rose to eat. Once eaten, this repast restores Lucian to his former condition as a man. In gratitude, Lucias afterward dedicates his life to the service of the cult of Isis.

Most fathers of the early Christian Church Fathers (Origen and Gregory of Nyssah excepted) rejected the concept of reincarnation since it tended to diminish personal responsibility for specific actions performed by individuals which could be mitigated by improved acts performed in a future life. For the Greeks, proper thoughts and deeds were the means of ending the continual cycle of births and rebirths, a way to exit the merry-go-round of temporal existence. Life is punishment enough, so transformation into a noncorporeal, disembodied soul was pleasant by comparison. Plato was ambiguous concerning the idea of divine retribution for sins committed while a person was living, but in the Republic, he presents a variation on the Orphic doctrine of retribution through the words of Adeimantus:

Still I hear a voice saying that the gods cannot be deceived, neither can they be compelled. But what if there are no gods? or, suppose they have no care of human things - why in either case should we mind about concealment? And even if there are gods, and they do care about us, yet we know of them only from tradition and the genealogies of the poets; and these are the very persons who say that they may be influenced and turned by sacrifices and soothing entreaties and by offerings. Let us be consistent then and believe both or neither. If the poets speak truly, why then we had better be unjust, and offer of the fruits of injustice; for if we are just, although we may escape the vengeance of heaven, we shall lose the gains of injustice; but, if we are unjust, we shall keep the gains, and by our sinning and praying, and praying and sinning, the gods will be propitiated, and we shall not be punished. `But there is a world below in which either we or our posterity will suffer for our unjust deeds. Yes, my friend, will be the reflection, but there are mysteries and atoning deities, and these have great power. That is what mighty cities declare; and the children of the gods, who were their poets and prophets, bear a like testimony.

Despite the satiric nature of these passages, a refutation of the teachings of Orphic sages Musaeus and Emolpus, Plato did not completely deny the existence of rewards and punishments in the afterlife. He asserts that justice will ultimately prevail, but nor with the degree of certainty that he asserts that the soul is immortal. Plato felt that the human soul would be better off in the realm of forms and ideas than to continue to be confined to this imperfect world.

Plato’s writings about the immortality of the soul influenced every subsequent Greek and Roman view, and nearly every Western conception of the body, the soul, and of the afterlife. Acceptance of tthis viewpoint includes accepting that an immortal soul, after the death of the body, must return to an immortal realm. Plato describes the judgement of the dead in section 248 of the Phaedrus:

And this is a law of Destiny, that the soul which follows after God and obtains a view of any of the truths is free from harm until the next period, and if it can always attain this, is always unharmed; but when, through inability to follow, it fails to see, and through some mischance is filled with forgetfulness and evil and grows heavy, and when it has grown heavy, loses its wings and falls to the earth, then it is the law that this soul shall never pass into any beast at its first birth, but the soul that has seen the most shall enter into the birth of a man who is to be a philosopher or a lover of beauty, or one of a musical or loving nature, and the second soul into that of a lawful king or a warlike ruler, and the third into that of a politician or a man of business or a financier, the fourth into that of a hardworking gymnast or one who will be concerned with the cure of the body, and the fifth will lead the life of a prophet or someone who conducts mystic rites; to the sixth, a poet or some other imitative artist will be united, to the seventh, a craftsman or a husbandman, to the eighth, a sophist or a demagogue, to the ninth, a tyrant. Now in all these states, whoever lives justly obtains a better lot, and whoever lives unjustly, a worse.

Plato was undoubtedly inspired by Ophism. Theodicy is defined as the vindication of divine goodness and providence despite the undeniable existence of evil. The Persians had enlisted dualism to portray the universe as a cosmic ethical struggle. Plato’s dualism described mundane matter and the transcendent Forms as antithetical opposites. Persians believed that the body was central to personhood, thereby validating sex and other bodily pleasures as being important both for life and the afterlife. Platonists excluded sex from the afterlife, and promoted the denial, insofar as possible, of sexual activity during bodily life as a means of perfecting the mind for its higher calling. Plato inhabited a sex-drenched society. Later Platonists believed that sex was disruptive to the meditative life and that a life of abstanence and self-denial enhanced the probabilities of a satisfactory afterlife.

Plato, like Socrates, was no admirer of democracy, but his philosophy led to the democratization of the afterlife. The short, flamboyant lives of heroes like Odysseus, followed by an eternity in the underworld, was supplanted by the concept that anyone who engaged in the process of proper intellectual development could become immortal. Multiple lifetimes might be required to inch forward to this coveted goal, but possessing a philosophical mindset could abbreviate this iterative process.

The conundrum of theodicy (how can a just God permit evil to exist?)  is central to the story of Er the Pamphylian which concludes Plato’s Republic. Er returns to life after being dead for twelve days to share his experiences with the living. After Er's soul left his body, it traveled with other souls to a location where there are two chasms in the earth and two above them in the sky. Between the chasms and between heaven and earth sit judges who pass judgment on souls. Just souls were directed to the right-hand chasm leading into heaven. Unjust souls were directed to the left-hand chasm back down to the earth. Er witnessed souls coming from the exit-chasms from heaven and earth. Those coming from earth were weary, filthy, and careworn. Those from heaven were clean and rested, having been rewarded for their just lives during their sojourn in heaven. The unjust were condemned to wander a thousand years in the underworld. The unjust informed Er about the destinies of exceptionally evil people, murderers and tyrants who were condemned to eternal suffering beneath the earth.

These souls in transit tarried with Er near the chasms for seven days, then they and Er journeyed to where the Fates dwell. The Fates granted souls new lives as mortals, and each soul was permitted to pick whatever new life they would lead. Some chose wisely, and some chose foolishly. Orpheus chose to be a swan, Ajax, a lion, and Agamemnon, an eagle. Odysseus, who remembered his earlier sufferings pursuing a life of glory and deeds, chose to become an average citizen. After choosing their new lives, the souls were obliged to drink from the waters of Lethe, the river of Forgetfulness. Er was forbidden to drink because he needed to remember his experience and share it with the living.

The author writes, “The story confirms that justice exists in the universe by claiming that the voyage is parallel to the one that the soul will take at death. Its purpose is to warn men of the implications of their actions upon the earth and exhort them to righteousness.”

Plato believed that the mission of every individual soul was to purify itself in the course of its habitation in a series of rebirths, or reincarnations. Although solace could be sought in the company of like-minded persons, salvation was not a communal and sectarian endeavor as was the case with the Iranians and Jews. 

Aristotle took exception to his mentor Plato’s strict division of form from matter, believing rather that the apprehension of forms was intrinsic to the process of thinking, a material process modern science attributes to the white and grey matter of the brain. Describing the nascent souls of humanity as a blank slate, no recollections from preceding lives sullied an individual’s tabula rasa. This philosophy does not align with Plato’s attempted proof of the immortality of the soul. In De Anima, Aristotle nevertheless assents to Plato’s dualistic notions, but asserts that body and soul are inseparable. The body is primary, and thoughts and forms are secondary, apprehended solely through the bodily senses. The nous, the intelligence, is a process that turns a mind’s potentiality into actuality, a concept first advanced by Aristotle. Just because humans engage in the divine act of thinking, indicative of a higher intelligence in the4 world, this does not necessarily mean that humans are immortal.  Aristotle’s philosophy supports the existence of God, while Plato’s philosophy supports the immortality of the soul. Later theologians would combine both philosophies to support both the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.

In De Anima, Aristotle distinguishes between the active and passive intellects, equating the active intellect with the "unmoved mover" and God. He explains that when people have real knowledge, their thinking is, for a time receiving, or partaking of, this energeia of the nous, or active intellect. The nature of the active intellect was a major theme of late classical and medieval philosophy. Various thinkers sought to reconcile their commitment to Aristotle's account of the body and soul to their own theological commitments. At stake in particular was in what way Aristotle's account of an incorporeal soul might contribute to understanding of deity and creation. Aristotle believed that although a person’s acquired intellect survives death, memories inherent to the body do not so the soul retains no personal knowledge of its corporeal existence. Immortality is the provenance of the active intellect, a transcendent quality infused into the living and that survive the transition from life to death.

Since Aristotelian philosophy negated any possibility of personal immortality it was not very popular during the Hellenistic Age. Platonism, however, survived as the philosophical basis for Western religions until the Enlightenment. In the 9th century CE, medieval philosophers ventured to integrate Aristotelian philosophy into mainstream religion. Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi was an early Islamic philosopher and music theorist. He has been designated as "Father of Islamic Neoplatonism" and the "Founder of Islamic Political Philosophy." Moses ben Maimon, commonly known as Maimonides, was a Sephardic rabbi and philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages. His Treatise on Logic illustrates the essentials of Aristotelian logic to be found in the teachings of the great Islamic philosophers such as al-Farabi, the Second Master, the First Master Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas was a proponent of natural theology and the father of a philosophical and theological school of thought known as Thomism. He argued that God is the source of the light of natural reason and the light of faith. He embraced several ideas put forward by Aristotle and attempted to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity.

Cicero’s The Dream of Scipio reflects on the value of Plato’s Republic. Scipio the Elder, also known as Scipio Africanus, ventures in a dream to heavenly realms and afterward informs his namesake Scipio the Younger about the structure of the cosmos (spheres nested within other spheres) and the advantages of Plato’s ideal state which Romans believed they had realized. The republic had, by Cicero’s era, transformed itself into an empire. Justification for the deification of Emperors commenced with a revision of the story of Romulus, founder of Rome, and was extended to Julius Caesar, the second founder of Rome. In Chapter 16 of Book 1 of his history of Rome, Titus Livius describes the apotheoses of Romulus in a manner that connects it to the assassination of Julius Caesar:

After these immortal achievements, Romulus held a review of his army at the ‘Caprae Palus’ in the Campus Martius. A violent thunderstorm suddenly arose and enveloped the king in so dense a cloud that he was quite invisible to the assembly. From that hour Romulus was no longer seen on earth. When the fears of the Roman youth were allayed by the return of bright, calm sun-shine after such fearful weather, they saw that the royal seat was vacant. Whilst they fully believed the assertion of the Senators, who had been standing close to him, that he had been snatched away to heaven by a whirlwind, still, like men suddenly bereaved, fear and grief kept them for some time speechless. At length, after a few had taken the initiative, the whole of those present hailed Romulus as ‘a god, the son of a god, the King and Father of the City of Rome.’ They put up supplications for his grace and favor and prayed that he would be propitious to his children and save and protect them. I believe, however, that even then there were some who secretly hinted that he had been torn limb from limb by the senators-a tradition to this effect, though certainly a very dim one, has filtered down to us.

Publius Vergilius Maro, better known as Vergil, composed his Aeneid in the style of Homer’s Odyssey, but its content is based on an Aristotelian universe. In Book 6, Aeneas visits the dead, just as Odysseus had done in Book 11 of the Odyssey.  Vergil improved on his Homeric model by describing rewards and punishments characteristic of the Platonic worldview. Deceased infants are not admitted into the gates of Vergil’s underworld but are not tormented because of this exclusion. 

Within the gates, Minos presides over a court of the silent (silentum concilliumque vocat) who presumptively dispense justice. The realms of Hades are divided into ethical categories, which later served as a model for Dante’s Inferno. Plato’s concept of transcendent love is not portrayed as the highest good in this vision of heaven. The highest good is fulfilling one’s duties to the Roman state. Dido (founder and first queen of Carthage) symbolizes Rome’s ancient nemesis as well as its relatively contemporary nemesis Egypt, the scene of Anthony’s ill-fated alliance with Ptolemaic ruler Cleopatra. Octavius, later known as Caesar Agustus, defeated Anthony and Cleopatra in 31 BCE. Agustus was the patron of the Roman poet Vergil. 

Aeneas, unlike Anthony, returns to his duties after his dalliance with exotic Dido. Aeneas plants the golden bough in the Elysian Fields after emerging from the underworld to a land of green pastures. Here, those who have served the state well are amply rewarded regardless of the circumstances of their birth. Good soldiers continue to drill for warfare. Priests and bards rest from their labors. This vision embraced the aspirations of classes the vast Roman Empire grew to be increasingly dependent on, soldiers and bureaucrats who contributed to the stability of the realm. The Elysian Fields rewarded these nonaristocratic contributors.

Punishment of the vilest of sins, both sins of omission and sins of commission, was doled out in the underworld of Vergil by Rhadamanthys, overseer of the darkest depths of Hades. The commonality of the fates of the dead described by Homer is replaced by Platonic ideas about judgement and potential rebirths that might better one’s chances of ultimately being worthy of admission to the Elysian Fields. Aeneas is granted a vision of the glories of Rome in the age of Julius and Agustus Caesar, both of which are described as being the sons or scions of a god. All that is required to transform this pagan vision of heaven and Hell into a Christian vision is the substitution of Judeo-Christian ethics for the values of the Roman republic 

Plutarch, who wrote about practically every subject imaginable, provides information about the judgement of the dead in his book Moralia with an essay titled “On Tose Who Are Punished by the Deity Late.” Plutarch shifted the destination of souls from Hades to heaven, and pointed out the cruelest of punishments is seeing our loved ones and offspring suffering because of our own misdeeds. Plutarch recounts the story of Aridaeus, a reprobate until he had a complete change of heart. The impetus for this ethical adjustment was a journey Aridaeus made to heaven. His transformation was so complete that after this experience he received a new name, Thespesius. In heaven several mysteries are revealed to Thespesius, including the well-deserved punishment of Nero.

The Imperial cult believed in the literal ascension, either in a chariot or on the back of an eagle, of a deceased ruler. The death of an Emperor was believed to be signaled by a shooting star. A caged eagle was released from the top of an Emperor’s funeral pyre. Symbols of this apotheosis included a quadriga (a chariot drawn by four horses) driven by a youth who is probably Helios, two soaring eagles, representative of the deified Emperor and Empress, and above these the signs of the zodiac along with a grouping of deceased and divinized ancestors of the emperor. The horse-drawn chariot, representative of the sun, had previously been featured in depictions of the Zodiac. A pyre excavated in Rome bears the inscription, “Sol me rapuit,” Latin for “the Sun has seized me.”  The soul, rather than the body of an Emperor, ascended to heaven. Bodily ascension was reserved for great, heroes, and demigods like Romulus. Whereas Plato believed that souls existed among the stars, Romans believed that stars and souls were identical, a discovery that Plainy attributed to Hipparchus.

It has been noted that the Romans adapted preexisting myths describing the afterlife to better strengthen the Roman state, but during and after the Hellenistic era beliefs began to shift to a more personal viewpoint that included rewards for the righteous above and punishments for evildoers below. Astronomy, astrology, and cosmology were all enlisted to add credibility to this view. Oriental and Hebrew conceptions of the universe were a major. These placed the earth at the center of a series of heavenly spheres, usually seven in number. Cosmology under the influence of Platonism regarded the ultimate home for humanity as the realm of stars and ideas. Earth retained importance as the realm where civic duty could be discharged, but the immutable heavenly realms, ultimate destiny for immortal souls, increasingly became the focus of intellectual activity.