Many people visiting the graves of their loved ones have come across tombstones informing that the deceased “slept forever” or “sleeping in the Lord” – few know that these phrases come directly from the world of ancient Romans and Greeks.
From Homer (Hom. Il. XIV 231-2321; XVI 672-3) and Hesiod (Hes. Th. 756-662) sleep and death were linked: twin brothers were supposed to come from the goddess of Night, and every mortal fell under their power. Sleep was gentle, comforting people after a day’s work, and its deadly brother was relentless and fearful. They were united by the similarity of the state to which a person touched by their power fell. Sleep excluded people from life for the duration of the night – in the event of death, this night would never end. The similarity of both brothers resulted in the popularity of the motif3, as well as many accurate formulations, one of the most interesting of which was Aristotle. For he stated that sleep is an intermediate state between life and death, in which, due to the lack of perception, being – although still alive – is similar to the dead (Arist. Gen. An. 778 b4).
The vivid notion of the similarity of sleep to death flourished in the Roman world after the era of Octavian Augustus5, permanently inscribing itself in the landscape of Roman necropolises, providing thousands of tombstone inscriptions on which mourning families contained information about eternal sleep your loved ones. This would not have happened if not for Lucretius, who tried in his work (On Reality, a work on the nature of the world) to familiarize readers with death. He did this by presenting it as a dream-like state (De rerum natura, III 909-910, III 9216). Horace also wrote about sleep as perpetual lethargy (O d. I 24. 5-6 – perpetuis sopor7), or long sleep (O d. III 11. 38-39 – longus somnus). Even Homeric imitator Virgil did not fail to describe death as a deep sleep (Verg. Aen. VI 5228). It was the great poets of the breakthrough period who provided the ordinary inhabitants of the Empire with poems that they could use to get used to the tragedy of the death of a loved one, due to the gentle tone of expressing death in poetry.
The belief in the relationship between sleep and death would not have survived if not for the reinterpretation of this motif in the spirit of the new religion – Christianity. Writers of late antiquity who believed in Christ believed that they would be resurrected at the time of Christ’s return (Parousia); until then, the dead await the Last Judgment. Waiting was identified with the sleeping of the dead, thanks to which the pagan religious idea found identification in the hope-giving message of the new religion.
The motif of a death-like dream is an understandable idea to this day, and its meaning has not changed after more than two thousand years: do not be afraid of death, because you experience it every day.
