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This chapter identifies some of the earliest Christian texts to describe purgation as part of the Christian afterlife and examines the interpretation placed on them by patristic authors from Origen to Augustine. Bede’s definition of purgatory is presented. The chapter discusses traditional “proof texts” for purgatory including 2 Maccabees, 1 Corinthians 3:11–15, and the fate of Dinocrates in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. It discusses purgatorial fire, universal salvation, and how ideas about original sin intersected with an economy of pain that was thought to cross the barrier of death.

Examines posthumous salvation in a text called The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. The text purports to contain diaries of the North African martyrs, Perpetua and Saturus, while in prison before their deaths in 203 c.e. Saturus had turned himself in, so his martyrdom may be likened to a form of suicide. Just before her execution, Perpetua says she saw her long‐dead little brother Dinocrates in a vision; it is almost certain that Dinocrates had died a pagan. He is in agony, and through her prayer for the dead, she is able to improve his condition in the afterlife. Perpetua's vision will later play a major role in the development of ideas about purgatory, but only after Dinocrates is reinterpreted as a lapsed or sinful Christian. Throughout the chapter, the writings of Tertullian are adduced to illustrate the background of the Perpetua text. Some scholars posit that Perpetua's rescue of Dinocrates has to do with the influence of Montanism in North Africa, but this study argues that such is not the case.

The seventh chapter documents how and why Augustine of Hippo came to reject all the forms of posthumous salvation outlined in the earlier chapters of this study. His influence over theology in the west on this issue cannot be understated. First, some of the antecedents to Augustine's thought are examined, including Cyprian and Ambrose. Next, the chapter traces the gradual development of Augustine's thought up to the year 419. In that year Augustine encountered an opponent named Vincentius Victor, who argued that unbaptized infants could be saved and prayers for the non‐Christian dead could be efficacious. Victor's interpretation of Perpetua's prayer for Dinocrates was crucial to his argument. Augustine insisted on the absolute necessity of infant baptism (as he had earlier in the Pelagianism debate), and he began to outline a notion of what would become purgatory by stating that prayers are only effective for baptized Christians who died with light sins. Central to Augustine's reasoning was a defense of the power and authority of the church on earth as the sole vehicle for salvation.

The Dinocrates-Alexander episode of book 2 supplies the reader with a complex heuristic for differentiating good architects from bad. Vitruvius claims to rely on his knowledge and writing in anticipation of his own success, whereas he attributes Dinocrates’ renown to an attractive bodily appearance. A close intertextual reading of the passage threaded through Livy 1 suggests that Alexander and Dinocrates violate the ideal architect–autocrat relationship. The manner in which one interprets the episode indicates whether one can distinguish altruism from ambitio and the like. Alexander’s appetitious reaction to Dinocrates and his body is further problematized by the latter’s nudity and evocation of Hercules and athletic victors. Discussions in the rhetorical handbooks indicate that arguments concerning a plaintiff’s or defendant’s bodily state can support arguments about his character. The handbooks seem to presume a widespread valorization of what the Greeks would call καλοκἀγαθία‎, but there is an implicit acknowledgment that beauty dissimulates vice. The athletic and/or gladiatorial body is therefore a particular locus of contestation and controversy, as Cicero’s (and Sallust’s) depictions of Catiline show. On the Greek side, writers as early as Tyrtaeus and Xenophanes had suggested that wisdom is better than strength. Isocrates frames the issue politically, and Vitruvius takes it one step further. Following the Roman handbooks that viewed the cultivation of bodily attributes (vs. the fortuitous possession of those attributes) as the primary signifier of character, Vitruvius suggests that athletes are ethically and politically bankrupt, while writers deserve triumphs and apotheosis. Archimedes, Socrates, and even Vitruvius himself provide counterexamples.