hilosophers, while denying immortality, believed in
supernatural powers and beings, and were very superstitious and
childlike in many respects, so that their philosophy of non-survival was
evidently rather the result of temperament and pursuit of material
things than a height of philosophical reasoning or metaphysical thought.

And so, the Romans stand apart from the majority of the ancient
peoples, in so far as the belief in Reincarnation is concerned. While
there were individual mystics and occultists among them, it still
remains a fact that the majority of the people held no such belief, and
in fact the masses had no clearly defined ideas regarding the survival
of the soul. It is a strange exception to the general rule, and one that
has occasioned much comment and attention among thinkers along these
lines. There was a vague form of ancestor worship among the Romans, but
even this was along the lines of collective survival of the ancestors,
and was free from the ordinary metaphysical speculations and religious
dogmas. Roughly stated, the Roman belief may be expressed by an idea of
a less material, or more subtle, part of man which escaped
disintegration after death, and which in some mysterious way passed on
to combine with the ancestral soul which composed the collective
ancestral deity of the family, the peace and pleasure of which were held
as sacred duties on the part of the descendants, sacrifices and
offerings being made toward this end. Nevertheless, here and there,
among the Romans, were eminent thinkers who seemingly held a vague,
tentative belief in some form of Reincarnation, as, for instance, Ovid,
who says: "Nothing perishes, although everything changes here on earth;
the souls come and go unendingly in visible forms; the animals which
have acquired goodness will take upon them human form"; and Virgil says:
"After death, the souls come to the Elysian fields, or to Tartarus, and
there meet with the reward or punishment of their deeds during life.
Later, on drinking of the waters of Lethe, which takes away all memory
of the past, they return to earth." But it must be admitted that Rome
was deficient in spiritual insight and beliefs, on the whole, her
material successes having diverted her attention from the problems which
had so engrossed the mind of her neighbor Greece, and her older sisters
Persia, Chaldea, and Egypt.

Among the Greeks, on the contrary, we find a marked degree of interest
and speculatio