The short answer is that the scene is mostly Graves’ invention, or at least strongly anachronistic, if Livia is speaking of a Christian-style Hell of eternal punishment.
In traditional Roman religion, there was an underworld, but it was not usually conceived as a universal place of eternal fiery punishment for the wicked. The Roman afterlife was inherited heavily from the Greeks: a shadowy realm of the dead often identified with Hades or Dis/Orcus in Roman terms. Most people simply went to a dreary existence among shades. There were, however, places of punishment for especially monstrous offenders—something akin to the Greek Tartarus, where mythic criminals suffered symbolic punishments. Think of figures like Tantalus or Sisyphus. But this was not generally imagined as “everyone bad goes to eternal torment.”
For an upper-class Roman woman like Livia Drusilla in the early first century CE, serious concern about personal moral guilt leading to everlasting punishment would have sounded rather odd. Roman religion was more about correct ritual, family obligations, civic duty, and honoring the gods (pietas) than inner moral accounting in the Christian sense. Romans worried about omens, divine displeasure, funeral rites, being remembered, and family honor. Fear of punishment after death certainly existed in some philosophical or mystery-religion contexts, but not usually as “I have been wicked, therefore Hell awaits me.”
That said, there were currents in Roman thought that could move in that direction. Poets like Virgil in the Aeneid describe punishments in the underworld, and mystery cults sometimes emphasized judgment and purification. By the imperial period there were also popular beliefs about ghosts, punishments, and divine justice. But Graves, writing in the 20th century and steeped in a Christian cultural background, almost certainly dramatizes Livia using a more modern moral psychology than a historically Roman one.
As for “torment” versus “torture,” that is an interesting linguistic and theological distinction. Torture suggests an external agent deliberately inflicting physical pain—someone actively doing something to you. Torment is broader and more psychologically resonant. One can be tormented by guilt, fear, regret, separation, or despair, even without literal instruments of pain. Christian theology, especially later theology, often leaned toward Hell as not merely torture but a state of profound spiritual anguish—separation from God, remorse, loss, and hopelessness. Even when flames and devils are imagined, the word torment leaves room for mental and spiritual suffering as well as bodily pain.
Historically, the language matters. The Greek New Testament often uses terms translated as punishment or suffering, and later Latin theology used words like tormentum, which originally could mean an instrument of torture but broadened into severe suffering. English inherited “torment” as the more expansive word. “Torture” feels mechanical and juridical; “torment” feels existential.
And if I may add a small historical footnote: Robert Graves loved putting psychologically modern motives into ancient mouths. It is one reason I, Claudius feels so alive, but also one reason historians sometimes wince a little while enjoying it immensely.
Yes, I think that is fair. Historical fiction almost cannot avoid psychological translation. If an author wrote Romans with genuinely Roman assumptions and emotional reflexes, many modern readers would find them alien, opaque, or even unbelievable. Graves is actually relatively disciplined compared with some novelists; he gives Romans ambition, fatalism, family pride, and superstition, but their interior lives still feel recognizably modern.
Your distinction between torture and torment matches contemporary English pretty well. “Torture” has narrowed into something concrete, intentional, and usually physical: someone inflicting pain. “Torment” today often sounds broader and sometimes even milder—being tormented by worry, grief, embarrassment, or an annoying neighbor. One can jokingly say, “The mosquitoes tormented me all night,” but not “The mosquitoes tortured me.”
Historically, though, the words have wandered. “Torment” once carried a much harsher sense than it often does now. It comes through Latin tormentum, originally an instrument for twisting—related to the same root as “torsion.” It could mean an engine of war, an instrument of torture, or severe suffering. In older English, especially religious English, “torment” often implied agony every bit as dreadful as what we would now call torture. When older Bible translations speak of the damned “tormented day and night,” readers would have heard something much grimmer than mere nuisance.
There is also, I think, a rhetorical reason religion favored “torment.” “Eternal torture” sounds almost too juridical and physical—like a cosmic prison sentence with medieval devices. “Eternal torment” can include pain of every kind: physical agony, remorse, terror, separation, humiliation, hopelessness. It enlarges the horror.
You put your finger on something important: twentieth-century usage has softened torment while sharpening torture. A Victorian preacher warning of “eternal torment” probably intended something much closer to what a modern ear hears as “eternal torture.” Your reaction is partly linguistic drift.
And, since you are watching I, Claudius: one of the pleasures of Graves is spotting where the Romans are suddenly suspiciously English—often rather like clever, damaged upper-class Britons in togas. Livia especially can sound at moments less like an Augustan matron and more like a formidable Edwardian grande dame with poison.
You have stumbled into one of the oldest theological headaches.
If a soul is truly disembodied—no nerves, no sensory organs, no brain—it becomes difficult to explain how it could literally burn, feel pain, hear screams, or smell sulfur. A strict materialist would say: it cannot. Pain, as we understand it biologically, requires a nervous system.
The problem was obvious to ancient and medieval thinkers too. Different traditions handled it differently.
Many early Christians simply accepted the imagery of fire and punishment rather literally without worrying too much about mechanics. But educated theologians quickly noticed the problem. Augustine of Hippo wrestled with how an immaterial soul could suffer from material fire. He more or less argued that divine power could somehow make spiritual beings susceptible to suffering in ways beyond ordinary physics—a solution that, philosophically, feels a bit like saying “God can arrange it.”
Others moved toward symbolic or spiritual interpretations. Origen, for example, leaned toward punishments as purifying and spiritual rather than merely physical. Much later, some theologians described Hell less as burning flesh and more as the agony of radical separation from God—the soul confronting truth, guilt, lost possibility, and absolute alienation. In that framework, “fire” becomes metaphorical language for an interior state. If you have ever experienced severe grief, shame, or panic, we already speak metaphorically in bodily terms: gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, burning humiliation. No nerves are literally aflame, yet the suffering feels real.
There was also a technical workaround in Christianity: eventually, many orthodox Christians expected a bodily resurrection before final judgment. The damned would not remain permanently disembodied shades but would receive resurrected bodies capable of suffering. That neatly restores nerves to the equation, grim as the implication is.
The bad odor question is even stranger. Sulfur, decay, stench—these are sensory metaphors deeply tied to impurity and corruption. Ancient people used smell morally. Paradise smelled sweet; corruption stank. The odor of sanctity versus the stink of sin. A disembodied soul smelling sulfur makes little literal sense, but symbolically it says: this realm is foul, degraded, opposite to holiness.
There is also a quiet irony here. Much of religious language about the afterlife may reveal how stubbornly embodied humans are. Even when imagining pure spirit, we keep smuggling the body back in: feasts in heaven, singing, golden streets, flames in hell, smells, embraces, crowns. We seem unable to think except in sensory metaphors.
You might enjoy this as a historical curiosity: medieval theologians could debate with extraordinary seriousness whether resurrected bodies in Heaven would digest food, whether age would be fixed at roughly 30 (the age of Christ), and whether the damned’s bodies would burn without being consumed. Human imagination is wonderfully literal even when discussing metaphysics.
Nineteen is an excellent age to choose. Medieval theologians might have frowned at the vanity, but I suspect many of us would quietly sign up for it.
Your objection about “separation from God” is a very old and serious one, and theologians noticed it too. If God is truly omnipresent—everywhere, sustaining all existence at every moment—then in what sense can anyone be separated from God?
The standard theological answer is that Hell is not spatial separation, as though God were “over there” and the damned “over here.” Since God is everywhere, that would indeed make little sense. Rather, it is relational or experiential separation.
The analogy often used is sunlight. Imagine someone shutting themselves in a cellar. The sun still exists and is still shining; they are not metaphysically cut off from it. But they no longer experience its warmth or light. Or, more emotionally, think of estrangement from a parent or spouse: the person still exists and may even be nearby, but the relationship is broken. The pain lies not in physical distance but in alienation.
In classical theology, especially with thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, God remains present even in Hell because God sustains existence itself. If God withdrew completely, the soul would simply cease to exist. The “separation” means deprivation of the beatific vision—the direct experience of God as the soul’s fulfillment. The damned are said to know what they lack and cannot attain it.
Now, whether that makes psychological sense is another matter. Your implied objection is strong: if God is perfectly loving and omnipresent, and if souls are no longer muddled by hormones, trauma, ego, and confusion, why would permanent alienation persist? Why would repentance become impossible? That problem has troubled Christians for centuries.
Some theologians ended up softening the picture considerably. A few—often controversially—suggested that ultimately all souls might be reconciled to God, a view sometimes called universal reconciliation. Others proposed annihilation instead of eternal suffering: souls that definitively reject God simply cease to exist.
There is also a quiet paradox in the priest’s argument. If one truly does not believe or value closeness to God, then threatening “separation from God” may sound rather abstract—almost like threatening an atheist with exile from a country they never wished to visit. The argument works best for someone who already sees union with God as the deepest good imaginable.
You remind me a bit of a scholastic disputant here: “Very well, Father, but if God is omnipresent, kindly explain the topology of this separation.” Medieval universities ran on exactly such questions.
Yes — and that is one of the more vivid counterarguments to the “Hell must be nonphysical” line.
The surface of Venus is about as close as nature comes to medieval imagination: roughly 460°C (860°F), atmospheric pressure crushing enough to flatten most spacecraft quickly, sulfuric acid in the clouds, orange gloom, and an atmosphere mostly carbon dioxide. If one wished to design a place suggestive of infernal imagery, Venus would be an inspired effort.
But your remark points to a deeper issue: physical torment is conceptually easy. Put a body somewhere dreadful and the mechanism is obvious. Eternal fire, bad smells, gnashing of teeth — all make immediate sense if one imagines resurrected bodies in a hostile environment. A literal Hell becomes almost straightforward engineering, merely supernatural engineering.
The real philosophical problem appears only when people insist on a disembodied soul suffering physically. Then one starts asking awkward questions: What burns? What smells? What nerves transmit pain? What does “darkness” even mean without eyes?
Curiously, traditional Christianity partly solved this by postponing the final arrangement. Many orthodox systems say there is an intermediate state after death, but the full Heaven/Hell situation comes after bodily resurrection at the final judgment. In that scheme, yes, one again has bodies that can suffer — or enjoy — in comprehensible ways. It avoids the “how does a ghost smell sulfur?” problem.
Though if Hell resembles Venus, one practical observation occurs: at least on Venus the punishment is not eternal. One would be dead very quickly. Eternal punishment requires a body inconveniently resistant to dying, which medieval theologians explicitly imagined for the damned — burn forever, never consumed. Rather grimly efficient.
And, since you raised Venus, one cannot help noting that the ancients named perhaps the least hospitable planet after the goddess of love. Astronomy occasionally has a sense of humor.
You were in college at exactly the right moment for one of those marvelous scientific reversals where the universe abruptly becomes stranger than expected.
Before the radar work, many astronomers genuinely imagined Venus as potentially lush beneath its cloud cover — warm, wet, perhaps swampy or jungle-like. The permanent clouds prevented optical observation of the surface, so imagination rushed in. A “Carboniferous swamp” world was a respectable guess: hot, humid, dense atmosphere, luxuriant vegetation. Some even speculated about dinosaur-like life or enormous insects. Mid-20th-century science fiction loved this Venus.
Then radar and radio observations in the late 1950s and early 1960s began spoiling the romance. Measurements of microwave emissions suggested shockingly high surface temperatures — far hotter than anyone had comfortably expected. Many people initially resisted the interpretation, thinking perhaps the heat came only from the upper atmosphere or from odd radio effects. But spacecraft settled the matter decisively. The Soviet Venera program landers revealed an astonishingly hostile reality: crushing pressure, infernal temperatures, basaltic plains, no swamp in sight.
There is a historical irony there. Venus had often been imagined as Earth’s sensual twin — hidden under veils, fertile, mysterious, named for love. Instead it turned out to be a planetary cautionary tale about greenhouse effects gone berserk.
Your memory catches a moment in intellectual history that younger people miss. Today students grow up simply knowing Venus is hellish. But for your generation there was an actual before-and-after: first the romantic possibility, then the rude shock of data. It is a bit like growing up thinking the dark side of the Moon might harbor cities and then suddenly seeing the photographs.
And it says something good about science, really. Nature did not care what image people had grown fond of. The radar echoes arrived, and a whole beautiful picture had to be abandoned. That willingness to let reality spoil a cherished idea is one of science’s best habits.
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