Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [148]
Cleopatra does not appear by name in Vergil’s Aeneid. On the other hand, Vergil’s benefactor Octavius Augustus Caesar, the most important person who opposed Cleopatra’s designs, can hardly have been more pleased at Vergil’s depiction of Dido’s fiery torture in the Aeneid. It neutralized Cleopatra’s victory by suicide over Octavius. Unlike Antony, after Aeneas enjoys the pleasures of Dido’s North African realm, he returns to his pious duties to help found Rome, leaving Dido to perish out of love: “and for you my honor is gone and that good name that once was mine, my only claim to reach the stars” (4.430-32; see also 620-25).52 The reference would have been clear as day to Vergil’s contemporaries: Dido is a stand-in for Cleopatra; Aeneas provides the good Roman example that Antony should have followed. Shakespeare follows suit, with his own twist, as we shall see.
Aeneas plants the golden bough in the Elysian Fields, having come through the underworld to a land of green pastures and brighter light: “Here an ampler ether clothes the meads with purple light, and they know their own sun and stars” (largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt, 6.637) This is, first of all, an aristocratic place where the great soldiers of the Roman state continue their practice of arms, while the priests, bards, and others who ennobled Roman life are rewarded with eternal leisure. Just as in first-century Rome, it is service to the state more than good birth that brings with it ultimate felicity. Yet, we do not have strictly individual rewards and punishments; Romans, according to Vergil’s representation, spend eternity with their peers and fellow heroes. The social utility of this doctrine in an empire that more and more depended on a new class of common soldiers and bureaucrats does not need any further emphasis. The state can find proper motivation for service by imagining a more perfect heaven with greater access for industrious Romans, who need rewards for earthly service.
Earlier, we see what happens to the villains of Vergil’s world. Rhadamanthys holds sway over a particular part of hell in which the great sinners stay. Ranging from those who have put off atonement until the day of their death (6.565-70), a sin of omission, to perpetrators of much more serious sins of commission, Tartarus yawns twice as far down as Olympus is high (6.579). Entirely gone is the Homeric notion that the hero joins the common lot of shades underground, after a brief turn on earthly life, where everything depends on earthly fame.
Intellectually, Vergil’s justification for adding judgment to Homer’s Hades is Platonic thought. Once there is a self-conscious self who must achieve the beatific vision through its own actions, there can be a place of punishment as well as a place of reward. We have seen this pattern previously in Egyptian culture too. In Vergil’s Hades, no one speaks Homeric Achilles’ lines of envy for the living.
As in Plato’s world, Vergillian souls do return to earth to complete their rehabilitation. Thus, Aeneas is given a vision of the glorious future which will be Rome’s. Caesar is pointed out and then Augustus, his heir, scion of a god (Divigenus, 792). All that remains for us to recognize this as the familiar heaven of childhood’s religion today is for this realm to be transferred to the unchangeable stars from the realms under the earth. But for it to be the Christian heaven, we need to substitute the religious and ethical values of the Judeo-Christian heritage for the values of the Roman republic.
Plutarch’s Discussions of the Judgment of the Dead
THE SAME new-found function of enforcing justice can be seen in Plutarch’s Moralia, in his essay “On Those Who Are Punished by the Deity Late.” In Plutarch’s estimate, the abode of the souls had shifted to the heavens. Plutarch wanted to correct some details of the