his friend Nigidius Figulus, whose works, now lost, had a great vogue in the later years of Cicero’s life, and much influence on the age that followed.  In the first book of his Tusculan Disputations Cicero discusses the question from the Academic point of view, coming to no definite conclusion, except that whether we are immortal or not we must be grateful to death for releasing us from the bondage of the body.  This book was written in the last year of his life; but ten years earlier, in the beautiful myth, imitated from the myths of Plato, which he appended to his treatise de Republica, he had emphatically asserted the doctrine.  There the spirit of the elder Scipio appears to his great namesake, Cicero’s ideal Roman, and assures him that the road to heaven (caelum) lies open to those who do their duty in this life, and especially their duty to the State.  “Know thyself to be a god; as the god of gods rules the universe, so the god within us rules the body, and as that great god is eternal, so does an eternal soul govern this frail body."[577]

The Somnium Scipionis was an inspiration, written under the influence of Plato at one of those emotional moments of Cicero’s life which make it possible to say of him that there was a religious element in his mind.[578] Some years later the poignancy of his grief at the death of his daughter Tullia had the effect of putting him again in a strong emotional mood.  For many weeks he lived alone at Astura, on the edge of the Pomptine marshes, out of reach of all friends, forbidding even his young wife and her mother to come near him; brooding, as it would seem, on the survival of the godlike element in his daughter.  These sad meditations took a practical form which at first astonishes us, but is not hard to understand when we have to come to know Cicero well, and to follow the tendencies of thought in these years.  He might erect a tomb to her memory,—­but that would not satisfy him; it would not express his feeling that the immortal godlike spark within her survived.  He earnestly entreats Atticus to find and buy him a piece of ground where he can build a fanum, i.e. a shrine, to her spirit.  “I wish to have a shrine built, and that wish cannot be rooted out of my heart.  I am anxious to avoid any likeness to a tomb ... in order to attain as nearly as possible to an apotheosis."[579] A little further on he calls these foolish ideas; but this is doubtless only because he is writing to Atticus, a man of the world, not given to emotion or mysticism.  Cicero is really speaking the language of the Italian mind, for the moment free from philosophical speculation; he believes that his beloved dead lived on, though he could not have proved it in argument.  So firmly does he believe it that he wishes others to know that he believes it, and insists that the shrine shall be erected in a frequented place![580]

Though the great Dictator did not believe in another world, he consented at the end of his life to become Jupiter Julius, and after his death was duly canonised as Divus, and had a temple erected to him.  But the many-sided question of the deification of the Caesars cannot be discussed here; it is only mentioned as showing in another way the trend of thought in this dark age of Roman history.  Whatever some philosophers may have thought, there cannot be a doubt that the ordinary Roman believed in the godhead of Julius.[581]