Abstract
According to Plotinus’ exegesis of Homer’s Odyssey 11.601-2, Heracles’ image or shadow is in Hades, but he himself is among the gods (Ennead I.1[53].12; see also IV.3 [27].32). I shall explore the distinctions between living body, shadow and self as these affect Mediterranean thought about the Afterlife from the seventh century BC to the fifth AD. There was no one universal and coherent account in those years, either of the individual self or of the afterlife: for some, all that survived was memory; others might expect a simple repetition of our lives over infinite time or space; others again, from early until late, supposed that we were spirits, with no essential identity with our living bodies. Schematically, very different Spenglerian cultures develop in those centuries, despite the use of similar terms (like psyche) to describe – in Egyptian terms – both ka and ba.
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Notes
- 1.
For further on the distinct roles of hero or heroine and god or goddess see Lyons (1997).
- 2.
Otherwise called the Conflagration – not all Stoics agreed that there was such a different phase of cosmic history, perhaps because it was always already true that there were no really distinct entities, but ‘God’ was already All.
- 3.
As translated by John Conington (1865): ‘And now ‘tis done: more durable than brass/ My monument shall be, and raise its head/ O’er royal pyramids: it shall not dread/ Corroding rain or angry Boreas, / Nor the long lapse of immemorial time. / I shall not wholly die: large residue/ Shall ‘scape the queen of funerals’. See West (2002: 259–68). West (2002: 262–3) points out that the use of ‘Libitina’ as a metonym for death and burial has a sardonic side – it might evoke a memory of victims torn apart in the Roman arena.
- 4.
Think of all possible worlds as numbered from 1 to Forever (infinite number). Now notice that there are just as many even numbers as there are numbers. Indeed there are just as many multiples of a google as there are numbers. So all the infinitely many actual worlds (thinking of them as having n*google as their number) might only be a subset of all the infinitely many possible worlds.
- 5.
The argument, often repeated in modern humanist literature, is not compelling: if I lose my wits I may not – then – much mind. It does not follow that I am foolish to mind now that someday I may lose them. Absolute annihilation is no less fearful because I shall not be there to see it.
- 6.
A term to be preferred to ‘atoms’ to avoid misleading associations with modern atomic theory.
- 7.
I have sought to place Classical thought and feeling in its full Mediterranean context in Clark (2013).
- 8.
See Paul Veyne (1988 [1983]).
- 9.
For further details of the Plotinian or Neo-Platonic way see Clark (2016).
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Clark, S.R.L. (2017). Classical Mediterranean Conceptions of the Afterlife. In: Nagasawa, Y., Matheson, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48609-7_3
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