Expectations of Immortality in Late Antiquity

Résumé du livre

"The question is, to put it simply, 'How much did expectations of an afterlife really matter to people in late antiquity, especially in the period from the second to the fourth centuries A.D. which I know best?' It is not 'Did they in some sense believe in an after-life, and what was the discursively formulable content of their belief?' This might sometimes, though not always, be easier to answer. It is rather 'How far was, not only what they believed, but what they felt and imagined about an after-life, strong enough to influence the way they behaved in this life and faced the always inescapable fact of bodily death?'"--from pages 1-2.