Watching "I Claudius," a scene where Livia talks about Hell, fearing since she was such an evil woman she would go there, the standard place of eternal torment. Is this Graves' invention or did the Romans actually have such a belief? Also, why do we use the word "torment" about Hell rather than "torture?"
Two great questions — let me take them in order.
Did Romans actually believe in a Hell of eternal torment?
Absolutely — this is not Graves' invention. The Romans inherited from the Greeks a fully developed concept of punitive afterlife called Tartarus, and it was a genuine part of their cosmology, not merely literary decoration. The Roman underworld was a tripartite structure, with Tartarus as its deepest realm — the place where oath-breakers, tyrants, traitors, and the most notorious offenders faced eternal punishment. Romanmythology
The geography and moral logic were quite detailed. Most of the dead went to the gloomy Asphodel Meadows, a select few enjoyed the paradise of the Elysian Fields, but the truly wicked were sentenced to tortures in Tartarus — often those who had committed offenses against the gods and their laws. There were even judges of the dead: according to Plato, Rhadamanthus, Aeacus, and Minos were the judges who decided who went to Tartarus. Those who committed crimes seen as uncurable would be eternally damned, and serve as a warning example for the living. MythologySourceWikipedia
The specific punishments were famous and much-discussed — Tantalus tormented with insatiable thirst and hunger, Sisyphus forced to roll a boulder uphill only to have it roll back down, Ixion bound to a perpetually-spinning wheel. And Virgil's Aeneid — one of the most widely read Latin texts — gives an extended tour of Tartarus describing criminals "rolling huge rocks, or hanging spread-eagled on the spokes of wheels," with the Sibyl declaring that even a hundred tongues could not name all their different crimes and punishments. Mythopedia
So Livia's fear is entirely plausible for a Roman of her era and class. She would have grown up with Virgil. The belief was real, culturally widespread, and morally serious — not just mythology in the dismissive modern sense.
Why "torment" rather than "torture" for Hell?
This is a genuinely interesting etymological wrinkle, because the two words are cousins from the same Latin root and were once nearly interchangeable. Both "torment" and "torture" derive from Latin torquere, meaning "to twist," via tormentum, which originally meant a twisted cord, a sling, or an instrument for hurling stones — and then, by extension, an instrument of torture such as a rack. etymonline
They diverged in English usage over time. "Torture" in the sense of "infliction of severe bodily pain as a means of punishment or persuasion" is only firmly attested in English from the 1550s. "Torment," by contrast, entered Middle English earlier, via Old French, and became the standard word for Hell's sufferings in religious and theological writing — you can see it in the 1340s already being used for "the great hideous torments of Hell." Etymonline
The key distinction that settled in is one of agency and duration. Torture implies causing unbearable pain — it's an active, deliberate, episodic infliction. Torment, by contrast, suggests something more ongoing: persecution or the repeated inflicting of suffering. Hell, theologically, is conceived as a state of suffering rather than a series of acts performed by a torturer — it's something you are in, endlessly, rather than something being done to you at particular moments. "Torment" captures that sustained, inescapable quality better. A torturer can stop; Hell cannot. Merriam-Webster
There's also a social register dimension: "torture" came to be associated specifically with judicial practice — the rack, the strappado — while "torment" retained a broader spiritual and emotional range, making it the more natural word when writers wanted to describe suffering of the soul.
My feel for the two words is "torture" is just that, inflicting pain, while "torment" is less dramatic and implies being a nuisance.
That's a fair intuition for modern usage — "torment" has definitely weakened over time. People say their little brother "torments" them, or they're "tormented" by a catchy jingle. The word has slid toward the meaning of persistent annoyance rather than savage suffering.
But this is actually a case of semantic drift going in an interesting direction, because historically "torment" was the stronger word, or at least the grander one — the word you reached for when describing cosmic, eternal suffering. "Torture" was more mundane and procedural, associated with what magistrates did in dungeons. The spiritual and literary tradition consistently used "torment" for the most extreme imaginable suffering: hellfire, damnation, the wrath of God. It was a word with theological weight.
What happened is probably that "torture" held its meaning more firmly because it stayed anchored to a concrete, specific practice — the systematic infliction of physical pain — while "torment" was always slightly more abstract and emotional, which left it vulnerable to inflation and weakening through everyday use. When a word gets applied too broadly, to everything from genuine agony to minor irritation, it loses its punch. "Torment" became the little brother word, and "torture" became the serious one — the reverse of their historical relationship.
So your instinct accurately reflects current usage, but if you were a medieval theologian or a reader of Virgil, you'd have felt it exactly the other way around.
I always wondered how a disembodied mind could experience anything, including pain or bad smells.
This is one of the deepest and most genuinely unresolved problems in the philosophy of Hell — and theologians have wrestled with it seriously for centuries, not just hand-waved it away.
The mainstream Christian solution was actually to insist that the resurrection of the body was necessary precisely for this reason — you need a body to suffer physically. The Last Judgment isn't just a dramatic finale; it has a philosophical function. The damned get their bodies back so they can burn in a fully embodied way. Augustine and Aquinas both took this seriously and argued at length that resurrection flesh could be made indestructible specifically so it could suffer indefinitely without being consumed — like the burning bush, in a way.
But that just pushes the problem back, because you still have the intermediate state — the period between death and resurrection when the soul exists without a body. Aquinas argued that even a disembodied soul could experience a kind of "virtual" suffering through its relationship to fire, without physically burning — which even he admitted was difficult to explain clearly.
The more philosophically interesting response came from thinkers who said the real torment of Hell is purely mental and spiritual — the agony of being permanently separated from God, if you're the kind of being oriented toward God, or the torment of your own conscience, memories, and self-knowledge with no distraction or relief possible. No body required. C.S. Lewis took roughly this line — Hell as a state of self-imprisonment and profound spiritual dysfunction rather than a furnace.
Which inadvertently raises your bad smells problem in an acute form — because sulphur and brimstone are very much a physical, sensory tradition. You could argue those details were always metaphorical. But it does suggest that the vivid, lurid, physical imagery of Hell was always in tension with the actual metaphysics, and most people throughout history simply didn't worry about reconciling the two.
Yes, being "separated from God" is the way some priests would describe it to me when it became clear I wasn't buying the more literal idea.
That's a very recognizable progression — the literal fire and brimstone version tends not to survive much scrutiny, and thoughtful clergy know it, so they retreat to the more defensible philosophical position.
But it's worth noticing that "separation from God" only works as a description of torment if you actually want to be with God. For a convinced atheist it's not a punishment at all — it's just Tuesday. Theologians are aware of this problem too, and the usual response is something like: even if you don't consciously desire God, you were made with an inherent orientation toward the divine, and separation from that will be experienced as a profound wrongness or incompleteness whether you recognize its source or not. A kind of existential homesickness for something you never knew you needed.
That's a more sophisticated argument, but it starts to feel like it's being constructed specifically to make Hell inescapable as a concept regardless of what the person actually believes or wants — which raises its own moral questions. A Hell you can't even understand as punishment starts to look less like justice and more like metaphysical bad luck.
Then there's the further problem that eternal punishment for finite sins strikes many people — including plenty of believing Christians — as wildly disproportionate. Which is why some traditions have moved toward annihilationism (the soul simply ceases rather than suffering forever) or universal reconciliation (everyone eventually gets there). These aren't fringe positions — serious theologians hold them.
The whole architecture starts showing stress fractures once you pull on any one thread, which is probably why the smarter clergy pivot to poetry and mystery fairly quickly.
I just said that would be impossible if God is everywhere.
Ha — yes, that's a knockdown objection and it's surprising more people don't reach for it immediately. If God is genuinely omnipresent, the concept of a place or state from which God is absent is simply incoherent. You can't have a corner of existence that the omnipresent being doesn't occupy.
The theological escape route is usually to distinguish between God's presence and God's favor or love. God is everywhere in the sense of sustaining existence, but the damned are deprived of his benevolent attention, his grace, his warmth — rather like being in a room with someone who is pointedly ignoring you. You're in their presence but excluded from their regard.
But that distinction does a lot of work and starts to feel rather strained. It also raises the uncomfortable image of God actively maintaining Hell, keeping it running, sustaining the existence of the damned specifically so they can continue suffering — which sits awkwardly with the idea of a loving deity. You'd be kept alive against your interests by the very being whose absence is supposedly your torment.
Some theologians, notably C.S. Lewis again, tried to finesse this by saying the damned choose Hell, continually, and God respects that choice — the doors are locked from the inside. Which is a memorable image but again doesn't really solve the omnipresence problem, it just reframes the question of consent.
At a certain point you notice that each answer generates a fresh problem requiring another answer, and the whole thing begins to resemble a philosophical game of whack-a-mole. Which is more or less where honest theology has to admit it's dealing with genuine mystery rather than solved doctrine.
The surface of the planet Venus.
A perfect illustration — yes. Venus is about as close to the traditional image of Hell as the solar system gets: crushing pressure, sulphuric acid clouds, and a surface temperature of around 465°C (870°F), hot enough to melt lead. Brimstone made literal.
And your point lands perfectly. God, being omnipresent, is presumably fully present on the surface of Venus — sustaining every atom of that hellish environment in existence moment to moment, as classical theology requires. So the most physically hellish place we actually know of is not bereft of God at all. He's right there in the sulphuric acid.
It's a wonderfully concrete reductio ad absurdum of the "separation from God" formulation. If omnipresence means anything, it means there is no location — however unpleasant — from which God is absent. The word omni doesn't leave room for exceptions. A God who is present everywhere except Hell is by definition not omnipresent, which means one of the Church's central attributes of God has to be quietly dropped to make the Hell formulation work.
What's funny is that the Church has always been very attached to all the omnis — omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent — and they create problems not just for Hell but for each other. The problem of evil, free will, foreknowledge — they all arise largely because the omnis are very difficult to hold simultaneously without contradiction.
Medieval theologians were not stupid people, and they tied themselves in extraordinarily elaborate knots trying to keep all the plates spinning at once.
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