Death and Immortality in Ancient Philosophy by A. G. Long (review)

At least in the moments we consider them, the ideas we hold about death, what defines our personal identity (what makes us, us), and what happens to that identity post-mortem can affect how we live our lives; to that end, a study of ancient discussions of death and immortality has much to offer us. As Long puts it near the end of this work, “Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy of death is about what to do as well as the removal of fear” (205, my emphasis).

Long’s book is straightforwardly structured: the first part focuses on Greek conceptions of immortality; the second part covers views of death in Greek and Roman philosophy, and includes a discussion of suicide. That order (immortality, then death) is meant to help the reader recognize moments when the language of immortality is used to describe the best human lives.

In the first part of the book, Long discusses a less-recognized ancient debate: what it means to be immortal. This debate becomes especially relevant when, in the more recognized philosophical theories about “immortal” (sic) gods and the cosmos, philosophers also use immortality in discussions of human beings and human ethics (in particular, the ethical side of this debate comes into play in chapter 2, where Long discusses Plato’s writings about immortality and love). His discussion hinges on a particular question: how can the gods be immortal if the cosmos comes to an end? Long’s handling of the problem of comprehending how the early Stoics could understand the gods to be revered as “immortal,” given their cosmology and resulting perishability (81–83), is particularly fruitful.

In the second part of the book, Long pushes against the view of ancient writing as a battleground between dogmatic Epicureans insisting that death is the end of us and equally dogmatic partisans of the soul’s immortality. When discussing the writings of Epicurus and the Epicureans (for whom the soul relies on the body in two ways: for sensation, but also for physical integrity, 116), Long notes that Philodemus not only uses death as an end of the soul’s existence and awareness to mitigate our own fears, but also differentiates between the types of fear and anxiety introduced when we think about death; Philodemus does so in order to distinguish those fears/anxieties that deserve a place in the good life, and those that derive from attitudes that should be avoided throughout life (and not just when we think about death).

Long makes two noteworthy points in the second part of the book: that Stoics and other non-Epicureans make use of the so-called Symmetry argument that compares non-existence before birth and after death; and that, when philosophers use that argument, it does not follow that they are committed to the soul’s destruction at death. For their part, early Stoics do not agree on the length of existence of the soul after death (153). For example, they may suppose that annihilation is one possible outcome, or they may use the Symmetry argument in order to engage in a view of identity, similar to the argument in the [pseudo-Platonic] Axiochus. Also in this discussion is Long’s helpful treatment of Seneca regarding his insistence both on the continuation of personal identity if souls persist after death and his agnosticism about such a post-mortem existence of the soul.

Long’s discussions are, to my mind, models of philosophical interpretation that consider the specific, localized logic as well as the argumentation that frames the target text; at the same time, they take into consideration the larger context, issues of authorship, and the purpose regarding an argument’s placement within a text as a whole. As he writes, “Context matters” (191), and he follows his own precept in this book. Long’s interpretive attention—which delves into portions of arguments for which conclusions are often too easily...