When Is an Afterlife Really an Afterlife?

When studying classical afterlives, I kept returning to a question: how can we tell whether a resemblance to the ancient world is intentional or coincidental? John Adams offers a relatively clear example. In his writings on balanced government, he discussed Polybius's account of the Roman Republic. We know Adams was familiar with Polybius because he referred to him directly. Other apparent connections between ancient and modern institutions are much harder to establish, especially when similar ideas could have developed independently.

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An ancient text can also acquire meanings its author never intended. Tacitus wrote his Germania in the first century CE, describing peoples who lived beyond Rome's northern frontier. Centuries later, German nationalists drew on the work to construct ideas about an ancient German identity. Under the Nazis, passages were appropriated to support claims of German racial superiority, despite the enormous distance between Tacitus's Roman perspective and modern racial ideology.

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These examples raise different problems for historians. With Adams, the question is how an identifiable ancient influence contributed to later political thinking. With Germania, it is how later readers selected and reinterpreted an ancient text for their own purposes. Both require returning to the original sources and examining the circumstances in which they were written and subsequently read.