A writer on The Imaginative Conservative actually attempts to assay, A Short History of the Human Soul, and does an impressive job of it. “After the Battle of Actium—the turning point in 31 BC between Rome, the Republic and Rome, the Empire—Hellenism went through an agonized death and a ‘failure of nerve,’ as Franz Cumont, the eloquent historian of the soul, describes in his classic After-Life in Pagan Rome,” Marcia Christoff-Kurapovna writes. “And by the time of the late Roman republic—beginning around 30 BC—and at the time of the genesis of Christianity, an unrelenting pessimism toward the idea of the afterlife came to overwhelm the religiosity of men.”
“At the same time, it was a wealthy, united world and citizenship was the highest honor the city dweller could obtain. Nonetheless, there was a very dark underside to life that would become the ancient world’s complete moral undoing. The social morality of the Roman State was by then dissipating irretrievably as the culture of excessive slavery and violence had reached a banality-of-evil level of the grotesque by the first century AD.”
