Dante’s Paradise, with its choirs of angels and its classes of the blessed, distributed among the superimposed spheres of the heavens, is a magnificent testimony to the strength of the tradition which antiquity bequeathed to the Middle Ages. Before this tradition could be destroyed, Galileo and Copernicus had to ruin Ptolemy’s system and open up to the imagination the infinite spaces of a limitless universe. IV THE WINNING OF IMMORTALITY A fundamental difference distinguishes the conception of immortality as it appears in the religion of the Roman Empire from our modern ideas. Immortality, as we conceive of it, follows on the very nature which we ascribe to the human soul. It is affirmed by some, denied by others, in accordance with the character which each one attributes to the principle of conscious thought, but whenever credence is given to it, it is generally supposed to be absolute, eternal, universal. For the ancients, on the other hand, immortality was no more than conditional: it might not be perpetual and it might not belong to all men. According to the Platonists the soul, an incorruptible essence, a principle of life and movement, survived necessarily;[260] according to the Epicureans, being composed of atoms, it was dissolved at the moment of death.[261] But between these extreme opinions of the philosophers, the religion of the people remained faithful to the old belief that the shade must be nourished with offerings and sacrifices, that if it lacked sustenance it was condemned to waste away miserably. This conception, like not a few others which were fading away in the West, was revived when the Orientals imposed on the Roman world their more primitive and sometimes very crude beliefs. The normal destiny of the soul was therefore to survive the body for a certain time, then in its turn to disappear. A second death (δεύτερος θάνατος) completed the work of the first which gave the corpse over to corruption. The spiritual essence which had abandoned the body was annihilated after it. Such was the inevitable necessity imposed on mankind. Immortality was a privilege of divinity. The man who was exempted from the common lot of his kind was therefore the equal of the gods; he had risen above his perishable condition to acquire the everlasting youth of the Olympians, the unlimited duration of the stars which travel the heavens, the eternity of the Supreme Being.