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Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans

Plutarch · c. 100 CE (composed over time) primary

passage 50 of 1497 · (50/1424)

↪ you wandered here via “Quirinus Roman deification legend” — the connecting lines are tinted below

in brief
The work shifts to a philosophical-theological reflection: souls survive death, and good men’s virtues are translated into heroes and gods, followed by competing etymologies for Romulus’s surname Quirinus.

All human bodies yield to Death's decree, The soul survives to all eternity.

For that alone is derived from the gods, thence comes, and thither returns; not with the body, but when most disengaged and separated from it, and when most entirely pure and clean and free from the flesh; for the most perfect soul, says Heraclitus, is a dry light, which flies out of the body as lightning breaks from a cloud; but that which is clogged and surfeited with body is like gross and humid incense, slow to kindle and ascend. We must not, therefore, contrary to nature, send the bodies, too, of good men to heaven; but we must really believe that, according to their divine nature and law, their virtue and their souls are translated out of men into heroes, out of heroes into demi-gods, out of demi-gods, after passing, as in the rite of initiation, through a final cleansing and sanctification, and so freeing themselves from all that pertains to mortality and sense, are thus, not by human decree, but really and according to right reason, elevated into gods, admitted thus to the greatest and most blessed perfection.

Romulus's surname Quirinus, some say, is equivalent to Mars; others, that he was so called because the citizens were called Quirites; others, because the ancients called a dart or spear Quiris; thus, the statue of Juno resting on a spear is called Quiritis, and the dart in the Regia is addressed as Mars, and those that were distinguished in war were usually presented with a dart; that, therefore, Romulus, being a martial god, or a god of darts, was called Quirinus. A temple is certainly built to his honor on the mount called from him Quirinalis.

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topics: fate, destiny, and necessity · immortality of the soul · religious persecution and toleration

Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans · Plutarch · 90–120