Some Greek and Roman Ideas of a Future Life (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Some Greek and Roman Ideas of a Future Life I remember being greatly struck a few years ago by the remark of the vicar of a large suburban parish on the outskirts of a big Midland town. "I have no doubt, " he said, "that the real religion of these people centres not in the Church but in the churchyard." But when I asked him what they believed about the continued existence of their dead kin, he replied that it was impossible to say: "Their beliefs are very various and very vague, but the reality of the existence of their friends is most vivid to them here in the churchyard." There was no doubt some exaggeration in his verdict - and certainly a note of pessimism - but I could not help feeling myself transported across the centuries to the old world of Greece and Rome, and thinking for the moment how little the mind of man has changed. There, too, we have as what might be called the "established" religion a noble conception of personal powers or deities controlling the destinies of the world and tending towards an idealized monotheism not so far distant in some respects from our own conception of God - and under it all in the mind of the common people, as recent investigators have shown, perhaps again with some exaggeration, a persistent clinging to chthonic notions and chthonic rites, associated closely with a belief in the continued existence of the dead. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.