aided, or benefited their country, there is a fixed and definite place in heaven, where they shall be happy in the enjoyment of everlasting life." But "the souls of those who have given themselves up to the pleasures of sense, and made themselves, as it were, the servants of these, who at the bidding of the lusts which wait upon pleasure have violated the laws of gods and men,—they, when they escape from the body, flit still around the earth, and never attain to these abodes but after many ages of wandering." We may gather that his creed admitted a Valhalla for the hero and the patriot, and a long process of expiation for the wicked.
There is a curious passage preserved by St Augustin from that one of Cicero's works which he most admired—the lost treatise on 'Glory'[1]—which seems to show that so far from being a materialist, he held the body to be a sort of purgatory for the soul.
"The mistakes and the sufferings of human life make me think sometimes that those ancient seers, or interpreters of the secrets of heaven and the counsels of the Divine mind, had some glimpse of the truth, when they said that men are born in order to suffer the penalty for some sins committed in a former life; and that the idea is true which we find in Aristotle, that we are suffering some such punishment as theirs of old, who fell into the hands of those Etruscan bandits, and were put to death with a studied cruelty; their living bodies being tied to dead bodies, face to face, in closest possible conjunction: that so our souls are
- ↑ See p.29.
