Life after Death
The chapter begins by setting out the terms of traditional aristocratic immortality in Rome, which consisted in the acquisition of praise (laus) and glory (gloria) during life and the survival in the memory of the family and the larger civic community after death; in contrast to philosophical belief in the immortality of the soul and the hubristic desire for deification, it was thus grounded in practices of commemoration. The chapter shows how Cicero nevertheless flirted with the radical possibility of continued existence after death through deification or the immortality of the soul, conceiving of the hereafter as a realm of reward and/ or punishment. The discussion thus illustrates how he strategically endorsed the popular, but also Platonic idea of the afterlife as a site of reckoning where mechanisms of distributive and retributive justice balance open accounts.
Keywords: afterlife, deification, gloria, glory, immortality, justice, laus, Platonic, soul
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .