Reincarnation and the Law of Karma

...cause of things This likely refers to Lucretius's "De Rerum Natura" (On the Nature of Things), a poem explaining the universe through Epicurean philosophy, and was therefore able to reject the baseless fear of an afterlife and all the anxieties arising from such a belief. But even many of the Roman philosophers, while denying that the soul was immortal, still believed in supernatural powers and beings; they were very superstitious and childlike in many respects. Thus, their philosophy of the soul's non-survival was clearly more a result of their temperament and focus on material success than a peak of philosophical reasoning or deep spiritual thought.

Consequently, the Romans stand apart from the majority of ancient peoples regarding the belief in reincarnation. While there were individual mystics and students of the occult among them, it remains a fact that the majority of the population held no such belief. Indeed, the common people had no clearly defined ideas regarding whether the soul survived death. This is a strange exception to the general rule of history, and it has prompted much discussion among scholars of these subjects. There was a vague form of ancestor worship among the Romans, but even this focused on the collective survival of one's ancestors rather than the journey of an individual soul, and it was free from typical spiritual theories or religious doctrines.

Broadly speaking, the Roman belief can be described as an idea that a less material, or more subtle, part of a person escaped physical decay after death. In some mysterious way, this part passed on to merge with the "ancestral soul," which formed the collective guardian deity of the family. Ensuring the peace and pleasure of these ancestors was considered a sacred duty for their descendants, and sacrifices and offerings were made for this purpose.

Nevertheless, here and there among the Romans, there were eminent thinkers who seemingly held a vague, tentative belief in some form of reincarnation. For instance, Ovid Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17 CE), a Roman poet best known for the "Metamorphoses" says:

"Nothing truly dies, although everything on earth changes; souls come and go endlessly in visible forms. Even animals that have acquired goodness will eventually take on a human form."

And Virgil Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BCE), the author of the "Aeneid" says:

"After death, souls travel to the Elysian Fields A paradise in the underworld for the heroic and virtuous, or to Tartarus A deep abyss used as a place of punishment for the wicked, where they receive the reward or punishment for their deeds during life. Later, after drinking from the waters of Lethe A river in the underworld whose water caused forgetfulness—which erases all memory of the past—they return to the earth in new bodies."

But it must be admitted that, on the whole, Rome was lacking in spiritual insight and belief. Her material successes diverted her attention from the profound questions that had so occupied the minds of her neighbor Greece, and her older cultural "sisters" such as Persia, Chaldea An ancient region in Mesopotamia, often associated with early astronomy and occultism, and Egypt.