mourned, so “catasterism” was in the end accorded to deceased persons of very moderate deserts. “Nearly the whole heaven,” says Cicero, “is filled with mankind.”[250] In an inscription of Amorgos[251] a young man, carried off by the Fates at the age of twenty, thus addresses his mother: “Weep not; for of what use is weeping? Rather venerate me, for I am now a divine star which shows itself at sunset.” And at Miletus[252] a child of eight years old, whom Hermes has led to Olympus, contemplates the ether and shines in the midst of the stars, “rising every evening to the horn of the Goat. By the favour of the gods he protects the young boys who were his playfellows in the rude palaestrae.” Epitaphs so precise in expression are exceptional. On the other hand, numerous epigraphic and literary texts declare that the soul of some dead person has risen to the stars to live there with the Immortals, but leave the position of this soul undetermined. It is stated to have flown towards the vast sky, to have been received by the ether, to be living at the summit of the world and following the revolutions of the celestial armies. But the place where the blessed thus come together, that one of the upper spheres in which their meeting takes place, is left uncertain. Their dwelling was known to be somewhere very high above us, but men did not willingly venture to fix its exact situation. The heathen theologians wished however to bring order and precision into this astral eschatology. As they had combined the doctrines of lunar and solar immortality, so they attempted to bring both into agreement with stellar immortality. When Lucian in the beginning of his “Icaromenippus” shows us his hero passing over three thousand stadia from the earth to the moon, where he makes a first halt, rising thence five hundred parasangs to the sun, and then ascending from the sun to heaven, Jupiter’s citadel, through the space travelled in a full day by an eagle in rapid flight, he is giving us a humorous parody of the journey which some men ascribed to souls. This idea that the soul thus rises to Paradise by three stages was widely entertained in the East, and it was notably held by Mazdeism. A trace of this belief seems to linger in the passage of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians in which Saint Paul tells that he has been lifted “to the third heaven.”[253]