'Why,' he asks
elsewhere, 'should not I as a Catholic share a hope which was
demonstrably cherished by the heathen?' Soon afterwards Coluccio
Salutati wrote his 'Labors of Hercules' (still existing in manuscript),
in which it is proved at the end that the valorous man, who has well
endured the great labors of earthly life, is justly entitled to a
dwelling among the stars. If Dante still firmly maintained that the
great pagans, whom he would have gladly welcomed in Paradise,
nevertheless must not come beyond the Limbo at the entrance to Hell,
the poetry of a later time accepted joyfully the new liberal ideas of a
future life. Cosimo the Elder, according to Bernardo Pulci's poem on
his death, was received in heaven by Cicero, who had also been called
the 'father of his country,' by the Fabii, by Curius, Fabricius and
many others; with them he would adorn the choir where only blameless
spirits sing.
But in the old writers there was another and less pleasing picture of
the world to come--the shadowy realms of Homer and of those poets who
had not sweetened and humanized the conception. This made an impression
on certain temperaments. Gioviano Pontano somewhere attributes to
Sannazaro the story of a vision which he beheld one morning early while
half awake. He seemed to see a departed friend, Ferrandus Januarius,
with whom he had often discoursed on the immortality of the soul, and
whom he now asked whether it was true that the pains of Hell were
really dreadful and eternal.
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