THE DOCTRINES OF THE ORPHIC MYSTERIES 153 
with which, or with some abstract of which, Vergil was acquainted, 
may, in spite of Dieterich and Norden, be regarded as still an open 
question. But that these notions in the form in which I have reviewed 
them formed a part of the literary inheritance of Vergil admits of little 
doubt. 
But to explain the Vergilian passage in question we must add an 
element drawn from another source, from Stoic pantheism in its more 
popular form, as it is reflected in Cicero and the Roman writers of his 
time and later—the doctrine that the soul is a spark from the divine 
ethereal fire which pervades and rules the world. This pure emanation 
from the divine essence becomes soiled with earthly taint and fettered 
with an earthly body, whence mortal desires, sorrow and pain.* 
So far this is only a more rational expression of the Orphic conception 
of the soul, but the pure Stoic teaching had nothing of the idea of metem- 
psychosis. The necessity of penance and purification after death is, 
however, recognized. On the death of the body the soul is not yet 
cleansed of the earthly stain, but must wander for a time in the dense, 
heavy atmosphere near the earth, the turbulent region of clouds and 
storms,” where it does penance and is purified, after which it soars into 
the pure region of the sun and finds its home in the ethereal fire whence 
it came. 
This idea of a purgation which the later Stoic thought located in the 
cloudy atmosphere between the earth and heaven’s ‘“‘pure serene” is 
borrowed by Vergil, though it is expressed in Orphic terms, and, seem- 
ingly, made a part of his scheme of purification in Hades.+ Lines 735-44 
can mean only that all who are sent to the broad spaces of Elysium must 
pass through a stage of preliminary punishment and purification, not 
all in equal degree, but each in accordance with his merits. Quisque 
suos patimur manes. 
It is the following lines which present the difficult problem: 
Mittimur Elysium et pauci laeta arva tenemus 
donec longa dies, perfecto temporis orbe, 
t Rohde Psyche II, pp. 320, 321; Cicero Tusc. i. 42-45; Verg. Aen. vi. 724-34. 
2 Cicero Tusc. i. 42. 3 Seneca Consol. ad Marc. 25. 
4 Do we have here simply an instance of Vergil’s eclectic tendency, or was the Stoic teaching in the source 
from which he learned it already contaminated and confused with earlier mystic ideas ? 
