soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Suns can set and rise again:
but once the brief light has set for us
there is just one everlasting night for us to sleep through.
Catullus, Poem 5
It has surprised me how many students have found these lines difficult to comprehend, a reminder that metaphors are not always obvious to students. One student recently hazarded a guess that Catullus was talking about the idea that he and his lover will be together forever in death. This not really what Catullus is saying at all: the poem focuses on the brevity of life compared with the yawning enormity of death, and uses this as an exhortation to make the most of the short time that he and his lover will have together. Furthermore, my student’s assumption that Catullus is talking about himself and his lover being united forever in the afterlife is an inherently post-Christian sentiment.
My student’s misinterpretation of Catullus’s musings on life and death came not long after I had finished another novel by RF Kuang, an author whom I have blogged about before. Her novel Katabasis is both grim and entertaining, following the travails of two research students who make a trip down to hell in an attempt to retrieve the soul of their academic supervisor. In the same way that Kuang’s previous novel Yellowface was a side-swipe at the publishing industry, Katabasis takes a highly critical look at the competitive world of academia. It also takes a spectacular tour of the ancient underworld, as seen through a variety of cultural lenses.
The way a culture imagines the afterlife reveals much of what it believes about life itself. For the ancient Romans, death was not a doorway into a joyful reunion with loved ones, nor a promise of restored relationships and perfected bonds. Instead, it was a shadowy continuation of our current existence, stripped of vitality, and warmth. The afterlife, even at its best, was a lonely and inadequate shadow of life.. The later Christian vision of the afterlife, especially the idea that death reunites individuals with those they love, rests on a fundamentally different emotional and philosophical foundation. Where Christianity tends to offer hope, restoration and intimacy beyond death, Roman thought leans toward distance, melancholy and an almost unsettling persistence of separation.
To understand this difference, it helps to look at how Romans conceived of the underworld. Deeply influenced by earlier Greek traditions, the Roman afterlife was typically imagined as a vast, dim realm beneath the earth, populated by shades, which were faint, insubstantial echoes of their living predecessors. These shades were not vibrant souls enjoying a new form of life, but diminished versions of their former selves. They retained memory (forgetting comes before reincarnation and a return to the upper world), but not vitality. Existence in this realm was often described as monotonous and emotionally flat, a place where the dead lingered rather than lived.
In this context, the idea of joyful reunion with loved ones has no place. Even when the dead encounter one another, their interactions are rarely depicted as comforting or restorative. Instead, such meetings often emphasise loss and regret, or the impossibility of truly reconnecting. The emotional tone is strikingly different from the Christian expectation that relationships will be healed and perfected after death. For the Romans, death did not mend what was broken in life; if anything, it froze those fractures in place.
Stories set in the underworld illustrate this vividly. When heroes descend into the realm of the dead, they often seek out lost loved ones, but what they find is not solace. Encounters are fleeting, strained and painful. The dead may recognise the living, but there is an unbridgeable gap between them. Attempts at physical contact fail, as the shades cannot be grasped. Words may be exchanged, but they carry a weight of finality rather than hope. The living leave with a deeper sense of loss rather than reassurance.
One of the most telling patterns in these stories is how often reunions are marked by emotional distance. A deceased loved one may turn away and refuse to engage or speak, displaying a kind of weary resignation that underscores the permanence of separation. Even when affection remains, it cannot be acted upon in any meaningful way. The relationship exists only as memory, not as a living bond. This is a far cry from the Christian idea that love transcends death and is fulfilled in eternity.
The Roman view is rooted in a different understanding of the self and its continuity. The soul, in Roman thought, does not necessarily retain the full personality or emotional richness of the living individual. It becomes something quieter, dimmer and more detached. Without the body, the soul’s capacity for connection is limited. Relationships, which in life depend on physical presence, shared experiences and emotional exchange, cannot fully survive in this diminished state. What remains is a kind of echo, not a continuation.
This helps explain why Roman literature often portrays the dead as solitary figures, even when surrounded by countless others. The underworld is crowded yet profoundly lonely. Each shade exists in its own muted sphere of awareness, unable to truly engage with others. Even when groups of the dead are described, they do not form communities in the way the living do. There is no sense of shared joy, no collective celebration, no renewal of bonds. The crowd does not alleviate loneliness; it deepens it.
The Christian concept of the afterlife places relationships at the centre of its promise. A stroll through my local graveyard reveals a multitude of 19th century graves that celebrate a family being reuited: their bodies are laid to rest together and the assumption is that their souls have reunited. Heaven is imagined not just as a place of individual salvation, but as a community of the redeemed, where love is perfected and reunion is assured. The idea that one will see loved ones again, recognise them and be reunited in a meaningful, joyful way is a powerful source of comfort to many (although as a child I often used to ponder how it would work for someone who remarried after their partner’s death: would they all hang out together in the afterlife?) Death, in the Christian framework, is not the end of a relationship but its transformation into something more complete.
Roman culture, for all its emphasis on family, duty and social bonds in life, did not project those values into the afterlife in the same way. Instead, the Romans believed that death severs the active dimension of those bonds. Memory may persist, but the relationship itself does not continue in a fulfilling sense. The finality of death is not softened by promises of reunion.
Even the rare exceptions in Roman thought, such as the idea that particularly virtuous individuals might enjoy a more pleasant afterlife, do not fundamentally alter the overall gloomy picture. These individuals may dwell in more favourable regions of the underworld, but the emphasis is still on individual reward rather than relational restoration. The joy, if it exists, is not primarily about being reunited with loved ones, but about relief from suffering or recognition of virtue. Relationships remain secondary, if they are present at all.
Another important aspect is how the Romans viewed grief. In a culture where the afterlife did not promise reunion, mourning had a different character. The dead were honoured, remembered and ritually maintained through practices that acknowledged their continued existence in some form. Yet these practices did not imply that the dead were waiting to embrace the living again in a future life. Instead, they reflected a desire to maintain a connection across a boundary that was understood to be fundamentally unbridgeable. This creates a poignant tension. On the one hand, Romans cared deeply about their loved ones and sought to preserve their memory. On the other hand, their worldview offered little hope that these relationships would be restored after death. The result is a kind of restrained sorrow, an acceptance that loss is permanent in a very real sense. The dead are not gone entirely, but neither are they truly present.
In stories of the underworld, this tension often reaches its most dramatic expression. A living visitor may be filled with longing, eager to see someone they have lost, only to discover that the person they remember is no longer fully there. The encounter becomes a confrontation with the limits of memory and the reality of change. The loved one is both present and absent, recognisable yet unreachable. The emotional impact is not comfort but a deepened awareness of loss. Death remains a boundary that cannot be undone. The afterlife is not a continuation of life’s relationships but a separate, diminished mode of existence. Encounters between the living and the dead, when they occur, serve to reinforce this boundary rather than dissolve it. They remind us that what has been lost cannot be recovered.
For the Romans, the afterlife was not a place where you would run into the arms of those you missed. It was a place where you might see them again, but only as shadows, only at a distance, and often only to feel more acutely the separation that death had created. Reunion, when it occurred, was not a resolution but a reminder of what once was. It attests to a fundamental difference in mindset and attitudes to death that I find endlessly fascinating.
