156 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 
of the mysteries, the speculations of philosophers and poets who gave 
the soul a destiny beyond the grave, and popular fancy’ among the Greeks 
as among us, placed the final goal of the spirit in the upper world, gener- 
ally in the “pure serene” of the starry heaven. All this would suggest 
at least the probability that Vergil’s Elysium is not an ultimate paradise, 
but a temporary abode of the good in the lower world. 
The general sense of the mystic conceptions of which I have tried 
to give a summary points to an interpretation of the passage which, 
I think, disposes of its difficulties without tampering with the text or 
rearranging the lines. It is this: Vergil’s Elysium is not the final destiny 
of the soul but, like the “fair meadow” of the Orphic verses, the Elysium 
of Pindar, the intermediate heaven of Plato, it is a place where, after 
the death of the body, the good are sent for purification.2 The longa 
dies perjecto temporis orbe, 745, is the Orphic cycle, or the period of ten 
thousand years of the Phaedrus myth which must elapse before the aver- 
age soul can rise from its fall and be restored to its divine estate. 
Those designated in the words 
has omnes, ubi mille rotam volvere per annos, 
Lethaeum ad fluvium deus evocat agmine magno 
are the majority of those who come to Elysium. These, the average 
good, are subject to the general law of birth and rebirth. After each 
life of the body they come to Elysium, where they remain a thousand 
years before they return to earth. The rota here mentioned is evidently 
the Orphic wheel of life. 
How then about the ‘‘few” who remain in Elysium throughout the 
cycle? We have seen that in the mystic teaching a chosen few are in a 
degree made exempt from the long and wearisome cycle. They are 
released from the necessity of submitting themselves to the full number 
of incarnations. This idea Vergil treats freely, and releases the few 
who have merited it from the necessity of any further life in the body. 
While the others through the long cycle descend to Elysium and ascend 
to earth again and again in each recurring period of a thousand years 
« Cf. a number of epitaphs cited by Rohde II, pp. 384 ff. 
2 The purification through punishment, of ll. 739-44, is a preparation for Elysium. However, penitusque 
necesse est | Multa diu concreta modis inolescere miris, and somewhat of the concreta labes remains to be purged 
away in Elysium. 
