In lectures given at Yale, the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont surveys how the pagans of the Roman Empire imagined death. He moves from the old belief that the dead lived on in the tomb, through the shadowy underworld and the astral doctrine of souls rising to the stars, to the fate of those who died young, the punishments of hell and the joys of the blessed.
Lucid and learned, a standard work for anyone curious about ancient religion and the world Christianity grew up in. Download the free EPUB.