Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [135]
The Epicurean perspective on life was popular enough to be copied onto gravestones. The following Epicurean epitaph was so popular that it was often abbreviated: non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (I was not, I was, I am not, I don’t care [or: suffer]; sometimes also non eram, eram, non sum, non curo) or in its Greek form: I was not, and I came into being; I am not, and I do not suffer.38 This attitude only emphasized the Epicureans’ defiance of all conventions, breaking with all civilities. But what they preached was serious: Death was a total end, the cessation of all thinking or feeling, therefore not to be feared.
The Stoics broke only with the Academy-Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle-in rejecting the value of meditation. They often found positions at court and in the homes of the wealthy. Although they believed that humanity was rational, for them reason was purely practical, showing us what the good life is. A vicious person is ruled by his passions, but a wise and virtuous person lives by reason and, hence, is free of slavery of the passions, a doctrine which Plato also emphasized strongly. As for life after death, the Stoics took an intermediary position between the strong denial of afterlife among the Epicureans and the complete acceptance of it among the Platonists. The stoics based their notion of the material cosmos on a divine fire called logos. This material suffused the universe with a reasoning power. Diogenes Laertius says that the Stoics believed:
[the soul] is both corporeal and survives death; but it is perishable, while that of the universe is imperishable, of which the [souls] of living beings are parts…. Cleanthes [believes] that all [souls] exist until the Conflagration, but Crysippus that only the souls of the wise [remain]. (7.156-7)
The Stoics did not decide the question; those who also inclined toward Platonism tended to accept that all souls would eventually be redeemed while the others did not. They did believe that the universe would be consumed in a conflagration, called the ekpyrosis. Panaetius in the second century BCE seems to have denied any survival at all while Posidonius, strongly influenced by Plato, accepted the preexistence of the soul and a postmortem ascent into the aether.39
Plato
PLATO STOOD with the aristocracy, though he never tired of caricaturing their hypocrisies in socratic dialogue. The writings of Plato (430?-347 BCE), which originated during the period that Greece was the arch-enemy of Persia, settled the issue of the immortality of the soul by philosophical demonstration for the Platonists and for an enormous number of admirers afterward. Plato’s is the most influential philosophical system for religion in the West until the modern period. After an inital and telling phase of rejection, Platonism became the cornerstone of the Christian doctrine of immortality of the soul. Those pagans who followed his philosophy accepted the immortality of the soul in one form or another, though not necessarily its personal or individual survival. The most important documents in this context are Plato’s Phaedo and Apology. In the Apology, we have Socrates’ final defense and, in the Phaedo, we witness Socrates’ execution. Plato uses his literary invention of the figure of Socrates, based on his real-life teacher, to speak Platonic philosophy. In the Symposium, Plato gives us a picture of Socrates standing still in a trance for a day and a night (220c). This kind of behavior-as well as his penetrating glance, his quick wit, his constant presence in the marketplace, and his incisive mind-help explain why Socrates had the effect that he did on his contemporaries. What Platonism provided was a theory by which the soul could soar free of the body by contemplation and thus demonstrate that the