After Life in Roman Paganism

A series of lectures examines Roman pagan conceptions of the soul and its fate after death, tracing beliefs from grave rituals and tomb cults through nether-world cosmologies and folk ghosts to philosophical debates among Epicureans, Stoics, Academics, and Peripatetics. It surveys rites—funeral offerings, meals, sacred gardens—and everyday practices that sustained ancestral presence, then follows speculative developments including Pythagorean rebirth, Stoic immortality, and Neoplatonic synthesis. The work also considers the diffusion of mystery religions, Hermetic and Chaldean texts, and later Roman reflections, combining archaeological, literary, and philosophical evidence to map changing attitudes toward death and the afterlife.