=293.= In the living man the soul, as we have already seen reason to suppose, derives its cohesion (ἕξις) and shape from its association with the body. Separated from the body, it must assume a new shape, and what should that be but the perfect shape of a sphere[137]? Again, the soul being compounded of the elements of air and fire must by its own nature, when freed from the body, pierce through this murky atmosphere, and rise to a brighter region above, let us say to that sphere which is just below the moon[138]. Here then souls dwell like the stars, finding like them their food in exhalations from the earth[139]. Here they take rank as daemons or heroes (of such the air is full), and as such are joined in the fulfilment of the purposes of divine providence[140]. Yet it must be admitted that this bright destiny, if substantiated by the laws of physics, is also subject to physical difficulties. Suppose for instance that a man is crushed by the fall of a heavy rock; his soul will not be able to escape in any direction, but will be at once squeezed out of existence[141]. To fancies of this kind, whether attractive or grotesque, we shall not be inclined to pay serious attention. [Sidenote: Tartarus.] =294.= In this general theory hope is perhaps held out before the eyes of good souls, but there is little to terrify the wicked, even if it be supposed that their souls neither survive so long, nor soar so high, as those of the good[142]. As against it we are told by a Church Father that Zeno accepted the Persian doctrine of future rewards and punishments, and with it the primitive belief in an Inferno in its crudest form[143]. We must agree with the first English editor of the fragments of Zeno that ‘it is hardly credible that Zeno can have attached any philosophical importance to a theory stated in these terms[144]’; they can at the best only have occurred in some narration in the style of the Platonic myths, intended to illustrate a principle but not to convey a literal truth[145]. For just as the whole Hellenistic world, including the Stoics, stood aloof from the Persian doctrine of a spirit of evil, so it firmly rejected the dogma of a hell. Lucretius makes it a principal argument in favour of the philosophy of Epicurus that it drives out of men’s hearts the fear of Tartarus[146]; but writers partly or wholly Stoic are not less emphatic. ‘Ignorance of philosophy,’ says Cicero, ‘has produced the belief in hell and its terrors[147].’ In the mouth of the representative of Stoicism he places the words ‘Where can we find any old woman so silly as to believe the old stories of the horrors of the world below?[148]’ ‘Those tales’ says Seneca ‘which make the world below terrible to us, are poetic fictions. There is no black darkness awaiting the dead, no prison-house, no lake of fire or river of forgetfulness, no judgment-seat, no renewal of the rule of tyrants[149].’ [Sidenote: Purgatory of Virgil.]