I. SUPERSTITION…

I. SUPERSTITION

Superstition in all ages is a term of unstable meaning. Men even of the same time will apply it or deny its application to the same belief. The devout beliefs of one period may become mere superstitions to the next. And, conversely, what for a time may be regarded as alien superstition, may in course of time become an accepted portion of the native creed. This was the history of those Eastern cults which will be described in coming chapters. At first, they fell under Cicero’s definition of superstition, viz. any religious belief or practice going beyond the prescription of ancestral usage.(2278) But a day came when they were the most popular worships of the Roman world, when great nobles, and even the prince himself, were enthusiastic votaries of them.(2279) The religion of Mithra, when it was confined to an obscure circle of slaves or freedmen at Ostia, was a superstition to the pontifical college. It took its place with the cult of the Roman Trinity when Aurelian built his temple to the Sun and endowed his priesthood.(2280)

Plutarch devoted a treatise to the subject of superstition. And his conception of it is more like our own, less formal and external, than that of Cicero. He develops his view of the degradation of the religious sense by contrasting it with atheism. Atheism is a great calamity, a blindness of the reason to the goodness and love which govern the universe. It is the extinction of a faculty rather than the perversion of one.(2281) But superstition both believes and trembles. It acknowledges the existence of supernatural powers, but they are to it powers of evil who are ready to afflict and injure, to be approached only in terror and with servile prostration. This craven fear of God fills the whole universe with spectres. It leaves no refuge whither the devil-worshipper can escape from the horrors which haunt him night and day. Whither can he flee from that awful presence? Sleep, which should give a respite from the cares of life, to his fevered mind, swarms with ghostly terrors.(2282) And death, the last sleep, which should put a term to the ills of life, only unrolls before the superstitious votary an awful scene of rivers of fire and blackness of darkness, and sounds of punishment and unutterable woe.(2283) To such a soul the festivals of ancestral religion lose all their solemn gladness and cheering comfort. The shrines which should offer a refuge to the troubled heart, even to the hunted criminal, become to him places of torture. And the believer in a God of malignant cruelty betakes himself in despair to dark rites from foreign lands, and spends his substance on impostors who trade upon his fears. Better, says the pious Plutarch, not believe in God at all, than cringe before a God worse than the worst of men. Unbelief, calamity though it be, at least does not dishonour a Deity whose existence it denies. The true impiety is to believe that God can be wantonly faithless and revengeful, fickle and cruel.(2284)

The earnestness, and even bitterness, with which Plutarch assails the degrading fear of the supernal Powers have caused some rather shallow critics to imagine that he had a sympathy with scepticism.(2285) How such an idea could arise in the mind of any one who had read his treatise on the Genius of Socrates or on Isis and Osiris, or on the Delays of Divine Justice, it is difficult to imagine. Plutarch’s hatred of superstition is that of a genuinely pious man, with a lofty conception of the Divine love and pity, who is revolted by the travesty of pure religion, which is repeated from age to age. It is the feeling of a man to whom religion is one of the most elevating joys of life, when he sees it turned into an instrument of torture. But the force of the protest shows how rampant was the evil in that age. Lucretius felt with the intensity of genius all the misery which perverted conceptions of the Divine nature had inflicted on human life.(2286) But the force of Roman superstition had endlessly multiplied since the days of Lucretius. It was no longer the exaggeration of Roman awe at the lightning, the flight of birds, the entrails of a sacrificial victim, or anxious observance of the solemn words of ancestral formulae, every syllable of which had to be guarded from mutilation or omission. All the lands which had fallen to her sword were, in Plutarch’s day, adding to the spiritual burden of Rome. If in some cases they enriched her rather slender spiritual heritage, they also multiplied the sources of supernatural terror. If in the mysteries of Isis and Mithra they exalted the soul in spiritual reverie and gave a promise of a coming life,(2287) they sent the Roman matron to bathe in the freezing Tiber at early dawn and crawl on bleeding knees over the Campus Martius, or purchase the interpretation of a dream from some diviner of Palestine or a horoscope from some trader in astral lore.(2288) The Platonist, nourished on the pure theism of the Phaedo and the Republic, and the priest of that cheerful shrine, which the young Ion had each bright morning swept with myrtle boughs and sprinkled with the water of the Castalian spring,(2289) whose holy ministry gladdened even the years of boyhood—a man with such experience had a natural horror of the dark terrors which threatened to obscure the radiant visions of Delphi and Olympus.

Livy complained of the neglect in his day of signs and omens which formerly were deemed worthy of historical record.(2290) The contempt for augury in the time of Cicero was hardly concealed among the cultivated.(2291) The details of parts of the ancient bird-lore eluded the researches of the elder Pliny. The emperor Claudius, lamenting the neglect of the ancient science, demanded a decree of the Senate to restore it to its former efficiency.(2292) These are some signs of that general decay of old Roman religion in the last century of the Republic, which was partly due to philosophic enlightenment partly to the confusion and demoralisation of civil strife, but perhaps even more to the dangerous seductions of foreign superstitions.(2293) Among the counsels of Maecenas to Augustus none is more earnest and weighty than the warning against these occult arts.(2294) Augustus is advised to observe, and enforce the observance of the time-honoured ancestral forms, but he must banish sorcerers and diviners, who may sow the seeds of conspiracy against the prince. The advice was acted on. While the emperor rebuilt the fallen temples and revived the ancient Latin rites, 2000 books of unlicensed divination were in one day given to the flames.(2295) The old religion, which had absorbed so much from the augural lore of Etruria,(2296) was itself certainly not free from superstition. The wrath of the Lemures,(2297) the darkness of the inner forest, the flash of lightning, the flight of birds, the entrails of a sacrifice, excited many a fear, and might cause a man to suspend a journey, or break up an assembly of the people. But the Romans had, in the early ages, after their orderly legal fashion, reduced the force of these terrors by an elaborate art which provided a convenient resource of statecraft, and a means of soothing the alarms of the crowd.

But foreign and unregulated superstitions, from the second century B.C., were pouring in from the East to put a fresh load on the human spirit or to replace the waning faith in Italian augury. In 139 B.C. Cornelius Scipio Hispalus vainly strove by an edict to stop the inroads of the star readers.(2298) But treatises on this pretended science were in vogue in Varro’s time, and are quoted by the great savant with approval.(2299) These impostors were swarming in Rome at the time of Catiline’s conspiracy,(2300) inflating the hopes of the plotters. Suetonius has surpassed himself in the collection, from many sources, of the signs and wonders which foreshadowed the great destiny, and also the death of Augustus. And it is noteworthy that, among these predictions, are some founded on astrology.(2301) On the day of the emperor’s birth, P. Nigidius, a learned astrologer, found that the position of the stars foretold a coming master of the world. Augustus himself received a similar forecast from Theagenes, a star-reader of Apollonia. He had his horoscope drawn out, and a silver coin was struck with the stamp of Capricorn.

This fatalist superstition infected nearly all the successors of Augustus in the first and second centuries. Astrology is essentially a fatalist creed, and the heir to the great prize of the principate, with the absolute control of the civilised world, was generally designated by that blind impersonal power whose decrees might be read in the positions of the eternal spheres, or by signs and omens upon earth. Suetonius, Tacitus, Dion Cassius, have chronicled, with apparent faith, the predictions of future power which gathered round the popular candidate for the succession, or the dark warnings of coming disaster which excited the prince’s fears and gave courage to enemies and rivals. It is not hard to see why the emperors at once believed in these black arts and profoundly distrusted their professors. They wished to keep a monopoly of that awful lore, lest it might excite dangerous hopes in possible pretenders.(2302) To consult a Chaldaean seer on the fate of the prince, or to possess his horoscope, was always suspicious, and might often be fatal.(2303) The astonishing thing is, that men had such implicit faith in the skill of these Eastern impostors, along with such distrust of their honesty. They were banished again and again in the first century, but persecution only increased their power, and they always returned to exercise greater influence than ever.(2304) Never was there a clearer proof of the impotence of government in the face of a deep-seated popular belief.

Tiberius, who had probably no real religious faith, was, from his youth, the slave of astrology.(2305) An adept had, at his birth, predicted his lofty destiny.(2306) He had in his train one Thrasyllus, a noted professor of the science, who had often to read the stars in the face of death, and he was surrounded in his gloomy retirement at Capreae by a “Chaldaean herd.”(2307) Claudius was pedantic and antiquarian in his religious tastes, and, while he tried to revive old Roman augury, he banished the astrologers.(2308) A great noble who had the temerity to consult them as to the time of the emperor’s death shared the same fate. Nero, who despised all regular religion, except that of the Syrian goddess, was the prey of superstitious terror. The Furies of the murdered Agrippina, as in Aeschylean tragedy, haunted him in dreams, and he used the aid of magic to evoke and propitiate the awful shade.(2309) When, towards the end of his reign, his prospects grew more threatening, the appearance of a comet drove him to consult Balbillus, his astrologer, who advised that the portended danger should be diverted from the emperor by the destruction of the great nobles. Some of the craft had predicted that Nero should one day be deserted and betrayed, while others consoled him with the promise of a great monarchy of the East with its seat at Jerusalem.(2310) The terrible year which followed Nero’s death was crowded with portents, and all the rivals for the succession were equally slaves of the adepts, who exploited their ambitions or their fears. The end of Galba was foreshadowed, from the opening of his reign, by ominous dreams and signs.(2311) The hopes of Otho had long been inflamed by the diviner Seleucus,(2312) and by Ptolemaeus, who was his companion during his command in Spain.(2313) When he had won the dangerous prize, Otho was tortured by nightly visions of the spirit of Galba, which he used every art to lay. Yet this same man set out for the conflict on the Po in defiant disregard of omens warranted by the ancient religion.(2314) His end, which, by a certain calm nobility, seemed to redeem his life, was portended by a sign which Tacitus records as a fact. At the very hour when Otho was falling on his dagger, a bird of strange form settled in a much frequented grove, and sat there undisturbed by the passers-by, or by the flocks of other fowls around.(2315) The horoscope of Otho’s rival Vitellius had been cast by the astrologers, and their reading of his fate gave his parents acute anxiety. He used to follow the monitions of a German sorceress. Yet, like so many of his class in that age, he had but scant respect for accredited beliefs. It was noted with alarm that he entered on his pontificate on the black day of the Allia.(2316) The astrologers he probably found more dangerous than helpful, and he ordered them to be expelled from Italy.(2317) But it is a curious sign of their conscious power and their audacity, that a mocking counter edict to that of Vitellius was immediately published by unknown hands, ordaining the death of the persecutor within a certain day.(2318)

The emperors of the Flavian dynasty, although their power was stable and the world was settling down, were not less devoted to Eastern superstitions than any of their predecessors. Vespasian indeed once more exiled the astrologers, but he still kept the best of them in his train.(2319) He had consulted the oracle on Mount Carmel, and obeyed the vision vouchsafed in the temple of Serapis.(2320) His son Titus, who may have had romantic dreams of an Eastern monarchy, consulted foreign oracles, worshipped in Egyptian temples, and was a firm believer in the science of the stars.(2321) Domitian was perhaps the most superstitious of all his race. The rebuilder of Roman temples and the restorer of Roman orthodoxy had also a firm faith in planetary lore. He lived in perpetual fear of his sudden end, the precise hour and manner of which the Chaldaeans had foretold in his early youth.(2322) Among the many reasons for his savage proscription of the leading nobles, one of the most deadly was the possession of an imperial horoscope. On his side too, the haunted tyrant diligently studied the birth-hour of suspected or possible pretenders to the throne. In the last months of his reign his terror became more and more and more intense; never in the same space of time had the lightning been so busy. The Capitol, the temple of the Flavians, the palace, even Domitian’s own sleeping chamber, were all struck from heaven. In a dream, the haunted emperor beheld Minerva, the goddess whom he specially adored, quitting her chapel, with a warning that she could no longer save him from his doom. On the day before his death, the emperor predicted that, on the next, the moon would appear blood red in the sign of Aquarius. On his last morning, a seer, who had been summoned from Germany to interpret the menacing omens and who had foretold a coming change, was condemned to death.(2323)

Hadrian, that lover of the exotic and the curious, was particularly fascinated by the East. He had probably no settled faith of any kind, but he dabbled in astrology, as he dabbled in all other arts.(2324) It was a study which had been cultivated in his family. His great-uncle, Aelius Hadrianus, was an adept in the science of the stars, and had read the prediction of his nephew’s future greatness.(2325) When the future emperor was a young military tribune in lower Moesia, he found the forecast confirmed by a local astrologer. He consulted the sortes Virgilianae about his prospects, with not less hopeful results. He practised with intense curiosity other dark magical arts, and the mysterious death of Antinous on the Nile was by many believed to have been an immolation for the Emperor’s safety.(2326) Hadrian was glad to think that the spirit of his minion had passed into a new star which had then for the first time appeared. On every 1st of January, Hadrian predicted, with perfect assurance, the events of the year, down to his own last hour.(2327) Even the last great imperial figure in our period is not free from the suspicion of having tampered with the dark arts. Julius Capitolinus reports a rumour that M. Aurelius consulted the Chaldaeans about the infatuated passion of Faustina for a gladiator.(2328) In his account of the famous rainfall that miraculously refreshed the Roman troops in the Marcomannic war, D. Cassius ascribes the miracle to the magic arts of an Egyptian sorcerer whom M. Aurelius kept in his train.(2329) Xiphilinus, however, who attributes the marvel to the prayers of the Thundering Legion, expressly denies that the emperor gave his countenance to these impostors. Another suspicious incident comes to us on the authority of Lucian. When the war on the Danube was at its height, the new oracle of Alexander of Abonoteichos had, by mingled audacity and skill, rapidly gained an extraordinary influence even among the greatest nobles in Italy. Rutilianus, one of the foremost among them, was its special patron and devotee, and actually married the daughter of Alexander by an amour with Selene! Probably through his influence, an oracle, in verse of the old Delphic pattern, was despatched to the headquarters of the emperor, ordering that a pair of lions should be flung into the Danube, with costly sacrifices and all the fragrant odours of the East.(2330) The oracle was obeyed, but the rite was followed by an appalling disaster to the Roman arms. The impostor was equal to the occasion, and defended himself by the example of the ambiguity of the Delphic oracle to Croesus, before the victory of Cyrus. What part M. Aurelius had in this scene we cannot pretend to tell, but the ceremony could hardly have been performed without, at least, his connivance. Nor does his philosophic attitude exclude the possibility of a certain faith in oracular foresight and divination. He believed that everything in our earthly lot was ordained from eternity, and, with the Stoic fatalism, he may have held the almost universal Stoic faith in the power to discover the decrees of fate.(2331)

Nearly all the writers from whom we derive our impressions of that age were more or less tinged with its superstitions. Even the elder Pliny, who rejected almost with scorn the popular religion, was led by a dream to undertake his history of the wars in Germany.(2332) His nephew, although he rejoiced at being raised to the augurate, and restored a temple of Ceres on his lands, seems to have clung to the old religion rather as a matter of sentiment than from any real faith. But he had a genuine belief in dreams and apparitions, and he sends his friend Sura an elaborate account of the romance of a haunted house at Athens.(2333) His friend Suetonius had been disturbed by a dream as to the success of a cause in which he was to appear. Pliny consoled him with the hackneyed interpretation of dreams by contraries.(2334) The biographer of the Caesars may contend with Dion Cassius for the honour of being probably the most superstitious chronicler who ever dealt with great events. Suetonius is shocked by the arrogance of Julius Caesar when he treated with disdain the warning of a diviner from the inspection of a victim’s entrails.(2335) He glorifies the pious Augustus by a long catalogue of signs and celestial omens which foretold the events of his career.(2336) Suetonius must have been as keen in collecting these old wives’ tales as the more sober facts of history,(2337) and, if we may believe him, the palace of the Caesars for a hundred years was as full of supernatural wonders and the terrors of magic and dark prophecy as the Thessalian villages of Apuleius.(2338) The superstitions of the Claudian and Flavian Caesars could nowhere have found a more sympathetic chronicler.

Immensely superior in genius as Tacitus is to Suetonius, even he is not emancipated from the superstition of the age. But he wavers in his superstition, just as he wavers in his conception of the Divine government of the world.(2339) Although he occasionally mentions, and briefly discusses, the tenets of the Epicurean and the Stoic schools, it does not seem probable that Tacitus had much taste for philosophy. Full of the old senatorial ideals, he considered such a study, if carried to any depth, or pursued with absorbing earnestness, to be unbecoming the gravity and dignity of a man of rank and affairs.(2340) Moreover, his views of human destiny and the Divine government were coloured and saddened by the Terror. Having lived himself through the reign of Domitian, and seen all the horrors of its close, having witnessed, in humiliating silence, the excesses of frenzied power and the servility of cringing compliance, Tacitus had little faith either in Divine benevolence or in tempted human virtue.(2341) Even the quiet and security of Trajan’s reign seemed to him but a precarious interval, not to be too eagerly or confidently enjoyed, between the terror of the past and the probable dangers of a coming age.(2342) The corruption of Roman virtue has justly earned the anger of gods, who no longer visit to protect, but only to avenge.(2343) And, in the chaos of human affairs, the Divine justice is confused; the good suffer equally with the guilty.(2344) Amid obscure and guarded utterances, we can divine that, to Tacitus, the ruling force in human fortunes is a destiny which is blind to the deserts of those who are its sport.(2345) He probably held the widespread belief that the fate of each man was fixed for him at his birth, and, although he has a profound scorn for the venality and falsehood of the Chaldaean tribe, he probably had a wavering faith in the efficacy of their lore.(2346) Nor did he reject miracle and supernatural portent on any ground of a scientific conception of the universe.(2347) His language on such subjects is often perhaps studiously ambiguous. Sometimes he appears to report the tale of a portent, as a mere piece of vulgar superstition. But at other times, he records the marvel with no expression of scepticism.(2348) And in his narrative of Otho’s death and the miracles of Vespasian, the threats of heaven which ushered in Galba’s brief reign in darkness broken by lurid lightnings, the neglected signs of the coming doom of Jerusalem, the glare of arms from contending armies in the sky, the ghostly voices, as of gods departing from the Holy of Holies, as in the tale of many another omen, dream, or oracle, the historian gives an awe and grandeur to a superstition which he does not explicitly reject.(2349)

Nor need we be superciliously surprised that the greatest master of historic tragedy, born into such an age, should have had the balance of his faith disturbed. His infancy and boyhood coincided with the last years of Nero.(2350) His youthful imagination must have been disordered and inflamed by the tales, circulating in grave old Senatorial houses, of wild excess or mysterious crime on the Palatine, the daring caprice of imperial harlots, the regal power and fabulous wealth and luxury of the imperial freedmen, the lunacy of the great line which had founded the Empire, and which seemed destined to end it in shame and universal ruin. That the destinies of the world should be at the mercy of a Pallas, a Caligula, or an Agrippina was a cruel trial to any faith. The carnival of lust and carnage in which the dynasty disappeared,(2351) the shock of the fierce struggle on the Po, in which the legions of the East and the West fought with demoniac force for the great prize, deepened the horrors of the tragedy and the gloomy doubts of its future historian. The dawn of a timorous hope, which broke under the calm, strong rule of Vespasian, was overcast, during the early manhood of Tacitus, by the old insanity of power which seemed to revive in the last of the Flavians. Such an experience and such an atmosphere were enough to disorder any imagination. The wild Titanic ambition in the Claudian Caesars, a strange mixture of vicious, hereditary insanity,(2352) with a fevered imagination which, intoxicated with almost superhuman power, dreamt of unheard of conquests over nature, made the Julio-Claudian emperors, in the eyes of men, a race half-fiend, half-god. Men hated and loathed them, yet were ready to deify them. It did not seem unnatural that Caligula should throw a gigantic arch over the Forum, to link the imperial palace with the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol.(2353) Men long refused to believe in the death of Nero, and his reappearance was expected for generations.(2354) In spite of the Augustan revival, the calm, if rather formal, sanity of old Roman religion had lost its power over cultivated minds. The East, with its fatalist superstitions, its apotheosis of lofty earthly sovereignty, its enthronement of an evil power beside the good, was completing the overthrow of the national faith. The air was full of the lawless and the supernatural. Science, in the modern sense, was yet unborn; it was a mere rudimentary mass of random guesses, with as little right to command the reason as the legends which sprang from the same lawless imagination. Philosophic speculation in any high sense had almost disappeared. The most powerful system which still lingered, resolved the gods into mere names for the various potencies of that dim and awful Power which thrills through the universe, which fixes from the beginning the destinies of men and nations, and which deigns to shadow forth its decrees in omen or oracle. Awestruck and helpless in the face of a cruel and omnipresent despotism, with little light from accredited systems of philosophy or religion, what wonder that even the highest and most cultivated minds were darkened and bewildered, and were even ready to lend an ear to the sorcery of the mysterious East? The hesitating acceptance of the popular belief in clairvoyance hardly surprises us in a man like Tacitus, bewildered by the chaos of the Empire, and possessing few reasoned convictions in religion or philosophy. It is more surprising to find so detached a mind as Epictetus recognising in some sort the power of divination. He admits that men are driven to practise it by cowardice or selfish greed.(2355) He agrees that the diviner can only predict the external changes of fortune, and that on their moral bearing, on the question whether they are really good or evil, he can throw no light. Yet even this preacher of a universal Providence, of the doctrine that our true good and happiness are in our own hands, will not altogether deny that the augur can forecast the future. We should, indeed, Epictetus says, come to consult him, without any selfish passion, as a wayfarer asks of a man whom he meets which of two roads leads to his journey’s end.(2356) But the field for such guidance is limited, Where the light of reason or conscience is a sufficient guide, the diviner’s art is either useless or corrupting. Nor should any ominous signs deter a man from sharing a friend’s peril, even though the diviner may give warning of exile or death.

Next to Aristides, there is probably no writer who reveals so strikingly the mingled pietism and superstition of the time as Aelian. Although he preferred to compose his works in Greek, he was a native of the Latian Praeneste, that cool retreat of the wearied Roman, and the seat of the famous shrine of Fortuna Primigenia.(2357) It is a disputed point whether Aelian belongs to the second century or the third. But the more probable conclusion, favoured by the authority of Suidas, is that he lived shortly after the time of Hadrian.(2358) His historical Miscellanies are a good example of that uncritical treatment of history and love of the sensational which were held up to scorn by Lucian.(2359) But it is in the fragments of his work on Providence, that we have the best illustration of his religious attitude. The immediate interference of the Heavenly Powers, to reward the pious believer, or to punish the defiant sceptic, is triumphantly proclaimed. Miracles, oracles, presages, and warning dreams startle the reader on every page. Aelian wages war à outrance with the effeminate and profane crew of the Epicureans, whom he would certainly have handed over pitilessly to the secular arm, if he had had the power.(2360) He records with delight the physical maladies which are said to have afflicted Epicurus and his brothers, and the persecution of their sect at Messene and in Crete.(2361) After the tale of some specially impressive interference of Providence, he launches ferocious anathemas at the most famous sceptics, Xenophanes, Diagoras, and Epicurus.(2362) He pursues Epicurus even to the tomb, and pours all his scorn on the unbelieving voluptuary’s arrangements for biennial banquets to his shade.(2363) He exults in the fate of one who, without initiation, tried to get a sight of the holy spectacle at Eleusis, and perished by falling from his secret point of observation.(2364) It is needless to say that miraculous cures by Asclepius are related with the most exuberant faith. Aristarchus the tragic poet, and Theopompus the comedian, were restored from wasting and hopeless sickness by the god.(2365) Another patient of the shrine had the vision, which was probably often a real fact, of a priest standing beside his bed in the night, bringing counsels of healing.(2366) But the climax of ludicrous credulity is reached in the tale of the pious cock of Tanagra.(2367) This favoured bird, being maimed in one leg, appeared before the shrine of Asclepius, holding out the injured limb, and, taking his place in the choir that sung the morning paean, begged the god for relief and healing. It came before the evening, and the grateful bird, with crest erect, with stately tread, and flapping wings, gave voice to his deliverance in his own peculiar notes of praise! The Divine vengeance is also displayed asserting itself in dreams. A traveller, stopping for the night at Megara, had been murdered for his purse of gold by the keeper of his inn, and his corpse, hidden in a dung-cart, was carried through the gates before dawn. At that very hour his wraith appeared to a citizen of the place, and told him the tale of the tragedy. The treacherous assassin was caught at the very point indicated by the ghost.(2368) The last dream of Philemon is of a more pleasing kind.(2369) The poet, being then in his full vigour, and in possession of all his powers, once had a vision in his home at Peiraeus. He thought he saw nine maidens leaving the house, and heard them bidding him adieu. When he awoke, he told the tale to his boy, and finished the play on which he was at work; then, wrapping himself in his cloak, he lay down to sleep, and when they came to wake him, he was dead. Aelian challenges Epicurus to deny that the maidens of the vision were the nine Muses, quitting an abode which was soon to be polluted by death.

Publius Aelius Aristides is one of the best representatives of the union of high culture with the forces of the religious revival. He saw the beginning and the end of the Antonine age. He was born in 117 A.D. at Adriani, in Mysia, where his family held a high position, his father being priest of Zeus. He received the most complete rhetorical training, and had been a pupil of Herodes Atticus. Travelling through Greece, Italy, and Egypt, and giving exhibitions of his skill in the fashion of the day,(2370) Aristides won a splendid reputation, which swelled his vanity to proportions rare even in a class whose vanity was proverbial. He won the restoration of the ruined Smyrna from M. Aurelius, by an oration which moved the Emperor to tears.(2371) With a naturally feeble constitution and epileptic tendencies, the excitement of the sophist’s life brought on an illness which lasted thirteen years. During that long ordeal, he developed a mystic superstition which, along with an ever-growing self-consciousness, inspired the Sacred Orations, which appeared in 177, long after his health had been restored. He visited many seats of sacred healing—Smyrna, Pergamum, Cyzicus, Epidaurus—and, often in a cataleptic state, between sleep and waking, he had visitations of the Higher Powers in dreams. They gave him prescriptions of the strangest remedies, along with eulogies on his unrivalled talent, which he was solemnly enjoined to devote to the celebration of his deliverance by the Divine favour.(2372)

Aristides zealously obeyed the Divine command. But whether his sole inspiration was simple gratitude and unsophisticated piety, crossed by superstition, as has generally been assumed, may well be doubted.(2373) The truth is, that in Aristides met all the complex influences of his age, both intellectual and spiritual. He was the most elaborate product of the rhetorical school, with its cultivated mastery of phrase, its exuberant pride in the power of words, its indifference to truth, in comparison with rhetorical effect. The whole force of revived Hellenism was concentrated in this declamatory skill.(2374) At the same time, the religious revival was very far from being a return to the old religion, in its clear firm outlines and simple wholeness.(2375) The Zeus and Athene and Poseidon of the age of Aristides were not the divinities of the great age. Many influences had been at work to blur the clean-cut outlines of Hellenic imagination, and to sophisticate the ancestral faith both of Greece and Rome. Men wished to believe in the ancient gods, but they were no longer the gods of Homer or of Aeschylus, the gods worshipped by the men who fought in the Samnite or the Punic wars. Greek philosophy for eight centuries had been teaching a doctrine of one Divine force or essence, transcending the powers and limitations of sense, or immanent in the fleeting world of chance and change. Pagan theology had elaborated a celestial hierarchy, in which the Deity, removed to an infinite distance, was remotely linked to humanity by a graduated scale of inferior spiritual beings, daemons, and heroes.(2376) Then came the religions of the East, with their doctrines of expiation for sin and ascetic preparation for communion, and visions of immortality. And, alongside of all these developments, there was a portentous growth of vulgar superstition, belief in dreams, omens, and oracles, in any avenue to the “Great Mystery.” Sophistic rhetoric, from its very nature and function, was bound to reflect the religious spirit of the age, in all its confusion. The ancient myths, indeed, were revived and decked out with rich poetic colouring. Yet it is not the simple, naïve, old pagan faith which inspires the rhetorical artist. The pantheistic or theosophist doctrines, which were in the air, disturbed the antique character of the piece.(2377) But the sophist, if he occasionally catches the tone of new mysticism, or even of rationalist interpretation, is nothing if not orthodox on the whole, and he anathematises the impiety of free-thinking philosophy, with the same energy as Aelian. Above all, Aristides is in harmony with the infinite faith in miracle and heavenly vision which was rife.

From whatever cause, the worship of Asclepius had attained an extraordinary popularity in the age of the Antonines.(2378) The conditions of health and disease are so obscure, the influences of will and imagination on our bodily states are so marked, that, in all ages, the boundaries between the natural and the unknowable are blurred and may be easily crossed. The science of medicine, even down to the age of Hippocrates, or the age of Galen, had not abandoned all faith in the magical and mysterious.(2379) Incantations long held their ground beside more scientific remedies. Health being the most precious and the most precarious of earthly blessings, it is not strange that, in an age of revived belief in the supernatural, the god of health should attain a rank even on level with the great Olympian gods. His temples rose in every land where Greek or Roman culture prevailed. They were generally built with an eye to beauty of scenery, or the virtues of some clear, cold, ancient spring, or other health-giving powers in the site, which might reinforce the more mysterious influences of religion. And in every temple there was a hierarchy of sacred servants, who guarded a tradition of hieratic ceremonial and of medical science.(2380) There was the chief priest, who may or may not have been a trained physician. There were the daduchi and pyrophori, who attended to the punctual service of the altars. There were the neocori, who were probably physicians, and who waited on the patients, interpreting their visions, and often supplementing them by other visions of their own.(2381) There were also, in a lower rank, nurses, male and female, who, if we may judge from Aristides, performed the sympathetic part of our own hospital-nurses.(2382) The patients came from all parts of the Graeco-Roman world. After certain offerings and rites, the sufferer took his place in the long dormitory, which often contained beds for 200 or 300, with windows open all night long to the winds of the south. The sick man brought his bed-coverings, and made his gift on the altar. The lamps were lighted in the long gallery, a priest recited the vesper prayers. At a later hour, the lights were extinguished, strict silence was enjoined, and a hope for some soothing vision from above was left as a parting gift or salutation by the minister as he retired.(2383)

Divination by dreams was one of the most ancient and universal of superstitions in the pagan world.(2384) It was also one of the most persistent to the last days of paganism in the West. The god of Epidaurus was still visiting his votaries by night, when S. Jerome was composing his commentary on Isaiah.(2385) Nor is the superstition unnatural. Sleep, the most mysterious of physical phenomena, gives birth to mental states which are a constant surprise. Thoughts and powers which are latent in the waking hours, then start into life with a strange vividness and energy. Memory and imagination operate with a force which may well, in an age of faith, be taken for inspiration. The illusion of a double personality, which results from the helplessness of the mind to react on the impressions of sense, also easily passes into the illusion of messages and promptings from powers beyond ourselves. Religious hopes and cravings may thus easily and honestly seem to be fulfilled.

But external causes also reinforced in the ancient world the deceptions of the inner spirit. The dream-oracle was generally on a site where nature might touch the awe and imagination of the votary. Few could have descended into the gloom of the cave of Trophonius without having their fancy prepared for visions.(2386) Exhalations from secret chasms, as at Delphi and Lebadea, aided by the weird spells of the Nymphs who haunted such scenes, often produced a physical excitement akin to madness. Opiates and potions administered by the priests, with the effect of solemn religious rites, prepared the votary for voices from another world.(2387) Soul and body were still further prepared for the touch of a Divine hand by rigorous fasting, which was enjoined as a preparatory discipline in so many mysteries of the renascent paganism.(2388) The heavenly vision could only come to the clear spirit, purged as far as might be from the grossness of the flesh.(2389) Ἐγκοίμησις for the sake of healing became a great, and probably in the main, a beneficent institution in the temples of many deities,(2390) pre-eminently in those of Isis, Serapis, and Asclepius. The temple of Serapis at Canopus in Strabo’s time was thronged by patients of the noblest rank, and was famous for its miraculous cures.(2391) Among the many attributes of Queen Isis, none made a deeper impression than her benignant power of healing even the most desperate cases.(2392) Her temples rose everywhere. Her dream interpreters were famous from the days of Cicero.(2393) In her shrine at Smyrna Aristides had many of his most startling experiences. According to Diodorus, her priests could point to numberless proofs of the power of the great goddess to cure the most inveterate disease. But the great healer was, of course, Asclepius. The remains of his splendid shrine at Epidaurus are a revelation at once of his fame and power, and of the scenes and occupations in which the devout health-seekers passed their days and nights. In his temple on the island in the Tiber, dreams of healing were still sought in the time of Iamblichus. His shrine at Pergamum, which was the scene of so many of the strange visions of Aristides, in his many years of struggle with disease, was one of the most famous, and its inspired dreams were sought long afterwards by the emperor Caracalla.(2394)

It would be idle to speculate on the relative effects of sound medical treatment and of superstition, stimulated by more or less pious arts, upon the constitution of the sufferer. The virtues of herb or mineral drug, of regulated food and abstinence, of bathing in naturally medicated waters, above all of a continual freshness in the air, must have become a tradition in these sacred homes of the god of health. Physical disease is often rooted in moral disorder, and for such troubled, tainted souls, with hereditary poison in vein and nerve, the bright cheerfulness, the orderly calm and confidence of the ritual, which had such a charm for the soul of Plutarch, may have exorcised, for the time, many an evil spirit, and wiped out the memory of old sins. Soothed and relieved in mind and body, the sufferer lay in the dimly lighted corridor, sinking to sleep, with a confidence that the god would somehow make his power felt in visions of the night.(2395) Through a sliding panel, hidden in the wall, a dim figure of gracious aspect might glide to the side of his couch, and whisper strange sweet words of comfort. But in many cases, there is no need to assume the existence of sanctified imposture.(2396) A debilitated frame, nerves shattered by prolonged suffering, an imagination excited by sacred litany, ghostly counsels and tales of miracle, the all-pervading atmosphere of an immemorial faith, may easily have engendered visions which seemed to come from another world.(2397)

But from whatever source the visions came, they had a powerful effect on the imagination, and, through that, on the bodily health. Some of the prescriptions indeed given by these voices of the night may seem to us ludicrous or positively dangerous.(2398) But the tone and surroundings of these shrines, and the sense of being encompassed by Divine as well as human sympathy, probably counteracted any ill effects of quackery. The calm, serene order, which the hieratic spirit cultivates at its best, the cheerful routine of the sacred service, blending indistinguishably with the ministry to suffering, and consecrating and ennobling it, the confidence inspired by the sedate cheerfulness of the priests and attendants, reinforced by the countless cases of miraculous cures recorded on the walls,(2399)—all this must have had a powerful and beneficent influence. And the visitors were not all invalids. The games and festivals drew together many merely for society and amusement. The theatre at Epidaurus must have provided constant entertainment for a far larger concourse than the patients of the temple.(2400) A healthy regimen, which is abundantly attested,(2401) with the charms of art and surrounding beauties of hill and woodland, tended of themselves to restore peace and balance to disordered nerves. And the social life, especially to Greeks, was probably the most potent influence of all. We can see from Aristides that troublesome cases were watched by a circle of curious sympathisers.(2402) In those marble seats, which can still be seen on the site, many a group, through many generations, must have sat listening to music or recitation, or discussing high themes of life and death, or amused with the more trivial gossip of all gatherings of men.

Amid such scenes Aristides spent thirteen years of the prime of his manhood. With all the egotism of the self-pitying invalid, he has recorded the minutest details of his ailments. He seems to have been disordered in every organ, dropsical, asthmatic, dyspeptic, with a tumour of portentous size, and agonising pains which reduced him to the extremity of weakness.(2403) But the extraordinary toughness and vitality of the man is even more striking than his sufferings. Aristides regarded health as the greatest of all blessings, the condition on which the value of all other blessings depends. And he acted on the belief. His hundred days journey to Rome is a miracle of endurance.(2404) Racked with fever and asthma, unable to take any food except milk, he struggled along, alternately through plains turned into lakes, or across the frozen Hebrus, amid storm or rain or freezing cold.

The effects of this journey in aggravated suffering from asthma, dropsy, nervous agony, are described with painful vividness. They were dealt with by the Roman surgeons in a fashion which makes one wonder how the patient survived such laceration.(2405) The invalid hastened home to Asia by sea. The voyage was long and weary, a very Odyssey of storm and wandering. Aristides reached Smyrna in mid-winter, and all the physicians were puzzled to find any alleviation for his troubles.(2406) Henceforth he passed, for thirteen years, from one temple to another, at the bidding of the gods—from Smyrna to Pergamum, or Chios, or Cyzicus, or Epidaurus—enduring often frightful hardships by land or sea. The description of his sufferings sometimes excites the suspicion that a warm imagination and the vanity of the literary artist have heightened the effect. A tumour of monstrous size,(2407) agonies of palpitation and breathlessness, the torture of dyspepsia, vertigo, and neuralgia which doubled up his limbs, and seemed to bend the spine outward like a bow(2408)—these are only a few of the morbid horrors which afflicted him.

The divine prescriptions were often as astounding as the malady was severe. Fresh air, exercise, bathing in the sacred wells, fasting and abstinence, indeed, may often have been sound treatment. But to these were added astonishing prescriptions of food or drugs, purgings and blood-letting which drained the body of its slight remaining strength, and which horrified the attendant physicians.(2409) But these were not the worst. Again and again, Aristides was enjoined, when in a high fever, to bathe two or three times in an ice-cold river running in full flood, and then race a mile at full speed in the face of a northerly gale. He obeyed in spite of all remonstrance, and the doctors and his anxious friends could only follow him to await the result of such extraordinary remedies. Strange to relate, their fears and forebodings proved groundless. Religious excitement, combined with immense vanity and a strange vitality, carried Aristides victoriously through these ordeals,(2410) and his friends received him at their close, with an indescribable genial warmth spreading through his whole body, and a lightness and cheerfulness of spirit which more than rewarded him for these strange hardships of superstition.

The faith of Aristides must have been very robust. His tortures lasted for nearly thirteen years, during which the divine prescriptions only seemed to add to their poignancy. But he was upheld by the belief that he was a special object of the Divine favour, and he persistently followed Divine recipes, which ordinary human skill and prudence would have rejected. No doubts, such as troubled his attendants, ever crossed his mind. How far his illness was prolonged by this obstinate adherence to the illusions of sleep and superstition,(2411) in the face of expert advice, is a matter on which it would be useless to speculate. It is probable that the imagination and exuberant vanity of Aristides made him a more difficult patient than the ordinary people who frequented these shrines of healing. It is also evident that there was a body of more or less skilled medical opinion connected with the cult of Asclepius. Practical physicians came to the temples,(2412) with the benevolence and the curiosity of their craft in all ages, to observe and study, or to advise a cautious interpretation of the revelations of the night. Aristides has preserved the names of some—Theodotus, Asclepiacus, and Satyrus. Long observation of the freaks of individual temperament and constitution must have suggested to thoughtful minds, with some instincts of scientific method, that the supernatural vision should be interpreted in the light of experience. An awful dream of Aristides that all his bones and sinews must be excised, turned, in the hands of a faithful attendant, into a prediction of renewed vitality.(2413) And although some of the nurses, to whom he is so grateful, confirmed his visions by precisely similar revelations of their own,(2414) others, of the more skilled physicians, openly blamed his too confident reliance on his dreams, and his unwillingness to try the effect of more scientific treatment.(2415) Their proposals, however, were sometimes so severe and heroic that we may excuse him for preferring on the whole the more patient and gentle methods of the god. The sufferer was sometimes favoured with epiphanies of Athene, Apollo, Serapis, and other great divinities, exalting him far above the rank of common votaries.(2416) And Asclepius himself, to whom his special devotion was given, not only lightened his physical tortures, although after long years, but endowed him with hitherto unknown powers of rhetorical skill and readiness. The god became the patron of his whole professional life.(2417) And Aristides regarded him as the source of fresh inspiration, in the exercise of that wordcraft of which he was the greatest master in his time. It is not hard to discern the meaning of this self-deception. Before Aristides began to visit the temples of the god, he was already a finished rhetor, possessed of all the skill which the Greek schools could impart.(2418) Prostrated by bodily suffering for years, cut off from that life of brilliant display, which was so lavishly rewarded by applauding crowds, the vain and ambitious declaimer had lost not only his bodily health, but all the joy and excitement of rhetorical triumph. Suddenly he found his balance restored; the tide of energy returned to its old channels. He could once more draw music from the almost forgotten instrument. He had once more the full lecture-hall under his spell. What wonder that he should feel his powers redoubled when they were recovered, and that he should regard the god who had healed his bodily ailments as the author of a fresh literary inspiration?

The debt was repaid in these Sacred Orations.(2419) Some treat them as the expression of a genuine mystical piety, others are inclined to think that the incorrigible rhetorician is quite as evident as the pious votary.(2420) It would be an excess of scepticism to doubt that Aristides believed in his visions, and in the beneficent power of the god, for which he was full of pious gratitude. Yet the rhetorical spirit of that age was an influence of singular intensity. It mastered not only the faculty of utterance, but the whole mind and life of the rhetorician. The passion to produce a startling or seductive effect on the audience had become a second nature. Truth was a secondary matter, not from any moral obliquity, but from the influence of prolonged training. And so, we may retain a belief in the genuine piety or superstition of Aristides, while we may distrust his narrative. The piety or the mystic superstition may not have been less sincere, although it was mingled with egregious vanity, and expressed itself in the carefully moulded and highly coloured phrases of the schools. Nor should we doubt the piety of Aristides because he deemed himself the special object of Divine favour. On such a principle all prayer for personal benefits would become profane egotism. And although Aristides was profoundly conscious that he was the first of Greek orators,(2421) he was also profoundly grateful for the Divine grace which had renewed his powers for the glory of God and the delight and profit of mankind. Whether he would have been content to enjoy his mystic raptures without publishing them to the world, is a question which will be variously answered according to the charity and spiritual experience of the inquirer.

Many another less famous shrine than that of Epidaurus offered this kind of revelation. The gods were liberal in their prophetic gifts in that age, and dreams were as freely sent as they were generally expected. There is no more striking example of the superstition of the age than the treatise of Artemidorus on the interpretation of dreams. Artemidorus lived towards the end of the second century. He was a native of Ephesus, but he called himself Daldianus, in order to share his distinction with an obscure little town in Lydia, which was the birthplace of his mother.(2422) The treatise is in five books, three of which are dedicated to Cassius Maximus, a Roman of rank, who was an adept in this pretended science; the others are inscribed to the son of the author. In spite of absurd credulity, wild and perverted ingenuity and a cold, quasi-scientific tolerance of some of the worst moral enormities of antiquity, Artemidorus seems to have been an earnest and industrious man, who wrote with the mistaken object of doing a service both to his own age and to posterity.(2423) Like other pious men of the time, he was afflicted by the profane attitude of the sceptics,(2424) and determined to refute them by the solid proofs of a sifted experience. He also wished to furnish guidance to the crowd, who believed in their visions, but were bewildered from the want of clear canons of interpretation. There was evidently afloat a voluminous oneirocritic literature. But it was, according to Artemidorus, frequently wanting in depth and system,(2425) and random guesses had too often been the substitute for minute, exhaustive observation and a clear scientific method. Artemidorus was inspired to supply the want by a vision from Apollo, his ancestral patron.(2426) He procured every known treatise on dreams.(2427) He travelled all over Asia, Greece, and Italy, and the larger islands, visiting the great festivals and centres of population, and consulting with all the seers and diviners, even those of the lowest repute. He took the greatest pains to ascertain the facts of the reported fulfilment of dreams, and to compare and sift the facts of his own observation. No austere scientific student of nature in our day ever took himself more seriously than this collector of the wildest and foulest hallucinations of pagan imagination. Artemidorus really believed that he was founding an enduring science for the guidance of all coming generations.

Yet the foundation of it all is essentially unscientific. To Artemidorus dreams are not the result of natural causes, of physical states, or of the suggestions of memory and association. They are sent directly by some god, as a promise or warning of the future. Nor should any apparent failure of the prediction tempt us to impeach the truthfulness of the Divine author. Artemidorus affirms as emphatically as Plato, that the gods can never lie.(2428) But although they sometimes express themselves plainly, they also frequently veil their meaning in shadowy, enigmatic form, in order to test men’s faith and patience.(2429) Hence there is need of skilled interpretation, which demands the widest observation, acute criticism combined with reverent faith, and deference to ancient custom and traditional lore. It is curious to see how this apostle of what, to our minds, is a pestilent superstition, pours his scorn on the newer or lower forms of divination.(2430) The Pythagorean dream-readers, the interpreters from hand and face and form, the interpreters of sieve and dish and dice, are all deceivers and charlatans. The old formulated and accredited lore of birds and sacrificial entrails, of dreams and stars and heavenly portents, should alone be accepted by an orthodox faith. It is needless to say that Artemidorus believed in astrology as he believed in oneiromancy. Both beliefs go back to the infancy of the race, and both extended their dominion far into the Middle Ages.(2431)

It would be impossible, in our space, to give any detailed conception of the treatment of dreams by Artemidorus. Nor would the attempt reward the pains; the curious specialist must read the treatise for himself. He will find in it one of the most astonishing efforts of besotted credulity to disguise itself under the forms of scientific inquiry. He will find an apparently genuine piety united with an unprotesting record of the most revolting prurience of the lawless fancy. He will find a subtlety and formalism of system and distinction worthy of a finished schoolman of the fourteenth century, and all employed to give order and meaning to the wildest vagaries of vulgar fancy. The classification of dreams by Artemidorus is a great effort, and is followed out in an exhaustive order. Every possible subject, and many that seem to a modern almost inconceivable, are catalogued, each in its proper place, with the appropriate principles of explanation. The hierarchy of gods and heroes in their various grades, the orbs of the sky, the various parts of the bodily frame, from the hair of the head to the toes and nails, the various occupations and multiform incidents in the life of man from the cradle to the grave,(2432) the whole list of animals, plants, and drugs which serve his uses,—all these things, and many others which might conceivably, or inconceivably, enter into the fabric of a dream, are painfully collected and arranged for the guidance of the future inquirer. And this demands not only an effort of logical classification, but also an immense knowledge of the customs and peculiarities of different races,(2433) the special attributes of each of the gods, and a minute acquaintance with the natural history of the time. For, special circumstances and details cannot be safely neglected in the interpretation of dreams. It may make the greatest difference whether the same dream comes to a rich man or a poor man,(2434) to a man or a woman, to a married woman or a virgin, to old or young, to king or subject. To one it may mean the greatest of blessings, to another calamity or death. For instance, for a priest of Isis to dream of a shaven head is of good omen; to any other person it is ominous of evil.(2435) To dream that you have the head of a lion or elephant is a prediction of a rise above your natural estate; but to dream that you have the horns of an ox portends violent death.(2436) To dream of shoemaking and carpentry foretells happy marriage and friendship, but the vision of a tanner’s yard, from its connection with foul odours and death, may foreshadow disgrace and disaster.(2437) To dream of drinking cold water is a wholesome sign; but a fancied draught of hot fluid, as being unnatural, may forbode disease or failure.(2438) A man dreamt that his mother was bearing him a second time; the issue was that he returned from exile to his motherland, found his mother ill, and inherited her property. Another had a vision of an olive shooting from his head; he developed a vigour and clearness of thought and language worthy of the goddess to whom the olive is sacred.(2439) It would be wearisome, and even disgusting, to give other examples of this futile and almost idiotic superstition, masquerading as a science. A painstaking student might easily classify the modes of interpretation. They are tolerably uniform, and rest on fanciful but obvious conceits, superficial analogies, mere play upon words and impossible etymologies. The interpretations are as dull and monotonous as the dreams are various and fantastic. Many of these visions seem like the wildest hallucinations of prurient lunacy. It is difficult to conceive what was the ordinary state of mind and the habits of a people whose sleep was haunted by visions so lawless. It is perhaps even harder to imagine a father, with the infinite industry of which he is so proud, compiling such a catalogue for the study of his son.(2440)

Lucian, through the mouth of Momus, pours his scorn on the new oracles which were chanting from every rock, vending their lies at two obols apiece, and overshadowing the ancient glories of the more ancient shrines.(2441) In the last century of the Republic, and in the first century of the Empire, the faith in oracles had suffered a portentous decay. The exultation of the Christian Fathers at the desertion of the ancient seats of prophecy seems to find an echo in the record of heathen authors. Cicero speaks as if Delphi were almost silent.(2442) Strabo tells us that Delphi, Dodona, and Ammon had shared in the general contempt which had fallen on oracular divination.(2443) From Plutarch we have seen that in Boeotia, the most famous home of the art, all the oracular shrines were silent and deserted, except that of Trophonius at Lebadea.(2444) And curious inquirers gave various explanations of this waning faith. Strabo thought that, with the spread of Roman power, the Sibylline prophecies and the Etruscan augury eclipsed the Greek and Eastern oracles. The explanation in Plutarch, as we have seen, is involved in an interesting discussion of the various sources of inspiration, and, in particular, of the office of daemons. One theorist of the positive type attributes the failure of the Greek oracles to the growing depopulation of Greece. It is a question of demand and supply. Others find the explanation in physical changes, which have extinguished or diverted the exhalation that used to excite the prophetic powers of the Pythia. Another falls back on the theory of daemonic inspiration, which, mysteriously vouchsafed, may be as mysteriously withdrawn.(2445)

The eclipse of the oracles was really a phase of that pagan unbelief or indifference which tended to disappear towards the end of the first century A.D. And the eclipse perhaps was not so complete as it is represented. Cicero himself consulted the Pythia about his future fame, and received an answer which revealed insight into his character.(2446) Germanicus in the reign of Tiberius visited the shrine of the Clarian Apollo, and that of Apis at Memphis;(2447) Tiberius tried the sacred lottery at Padua,(2448) Caligula that of Fortune at Antium.(2449) Nero, although he is said to have choked the sacred chasm at Delphi with corpses, had previously sought light from the god on his perilous future.(2450) Before the altar of the unseen God on Mount Carmel, Vespasian received an impressive prophecy of his coming greatness.(2451) Titus had his hopes confirmed in the shrine of the Paphian Venus.(2452) When these lords of the world, some of whom were notorious sceptics, thus paid deference to the ancient homes of prophecy, it may be doubted whether their prestige had been seriously shaken.

Although Delphi had not for many ages wielded the enormous political, and even international, power which it enjoyed before the Persian wars, still, even in the days of its greatest obscurity, it was the resort of many who came to consult it in the ordinary cares of life. Apollonius of Tyana, in the reign of Nero, visited the old oracular centres, Delphi, Dodona, Abae, and the shrines of Amphiaraus and Trophonius.(2453) They seem to be still active, although the sage had, in fulfilment of his mission, to correct their ritual. The newer foundations, like that at Abonoteichos, found it politic to defer to the authority of oracles, such as those of Clarus and Didyma, with a great past.(2454) If the conquests of Rome for a time obscured their fame, the ease and rapidity of communication along the Roman roads, and the safety of the seas, must have swelled the number of their votaries from all parts of the world. It is a revelation to find a Tungrian cohort at a remote station in Britain setting up a votive inscription in obedience to the voice of the Clarian Apollo.(2455) If new oracles were springing up in the Antonine age, the old were certainly not quite neglected. In the reign of Trajan the shrine of Delphi recovered from its degradation by the violence of Nero.(2456) And Hadrian, as we have seen, tested the inspiration of the Pythia by a question as to the birthplace of Homer, which was answered by a verse tracing his ancestry to Pylos and Ithaca.(2457) The ancient oracles were in full vigour under the emperors of the third century. Some of the greatest and most venerable—Delphi, Didyma, Mallus, and Dodona—were not reduced to silence till the reign of Constantine.(2458)

But the old oracles could not satisfy the omnivorous superstition of the time. The outburst of new oracles may be compared, perhaps, to the fissiparous tendencies of Protestantism in some countries, at each fresh revival of religious excitement. Any fresh avenue to the “Great Mystery” was at once eagerly crowded. And the most recent claimant to inspiration sometimes threatened to overshadow the tradition of a thousand years, and to assert an oecumenical power.

One such case has been recorded and exposed with the graphic skill and penetrating observation of the greatest genius of the age. Lucian’s description of the foundation of the new oracle of Asclepius at Abonoteichos in Paphlagonia, if it is wanting in the sympathetic handling which modern criticism has attained or can affect, is an unrivalled revelation of the superstition of the time. And a brief narrative of the imposture will probably give a more vivid idea of it than any abstract dissertation.

Alexander, the founder, was a man of mean parentage, but of remarkable natural gifts. Tall and handsome in no ordinary degree, he had eyes with a searching keenness, a look of inspiration, and a voice most clear and sweet.(2459) His mental gifts were equal to his physical charm. In memory, quick perception, shrewdness, and subtlety, he had few equals. But from his early youth, with the affectation of Pythagorean asceticism, he had all the vices which go to make the finished reprobate.(2460) After a youth of abandoned sensuality, in concert with a confederate of no better character, he determined to found an oracle. The times were favourable for such a venture. Never had selfish desire and terror, twin roots of superstition, such a hold on mankind.(2461) The problem was, where to establish the new shrine. It must be founded among a crassly stupid population, ready to accept any tale of the marvellous with the most abandoned credulity.(2462) Paphlagonia seemed to the shrewd observers the readiest prey. Tablets were dug up, which predicted an epiphany of Asclepius at Abonoteichos. A Sibylline oracle, in enigmatic verse, heralded the coming of the god. Alexander, magnificently attired, appeared upon the scene, with all the signs of mysterious insanity, and the Paphlagonians were thrown into hysterical excitement.(2463) Their last new god was fished up from a lake in the form of a young serpent, which had been artfully sealed up in a goose’s egg. When the broken shell revealed the nascent deity, the multitude were in an ecstasy of excitement at the honour vouchsafed to their city. The infant reptile was soon replaced by one full grown, to which a very elementary art had attached a human head. It was displayed to the crowds who trooped through the reception-room of the impostor, and they went away to spread throughout all Asia the tidings of the unheard-of miracle.(2464) Alexander had carefully studied the system of the older oracles, and he proceeded to imitate it. He received inquiries on sealed tablets, and, with all ancient pomp and ceremony of attendance, returned them, apparently untouched, with the proper answer. But Lucian minutely explains the art with which the seal of the missive was dexterously broken and restored.(2465) A hot needle and a delicate hand could easily reveal the secret of the question, and hide the trick. The oracle was primarily medical. Prescriptions were given in more or less ambiguous phrases. The charge for each consultation was, in our money, the small fee of a shilling.(2466) Alexander was evidently a shrewd business man, and his moderate charges attracting a crowd of inquirers, the income of the oracle rose, according to Lucian, to the then enormous sum of nearly £7000 a year.(2467) But the manager was liberal to his numerous staff of secretaries, interpreters, and versifiers.(2468) He had, moreover, missionaries who spread his fame in foreign lands, and who offered the service of the oracle in recovering runaway slaves, discovering buried treasure, healing sickness, and raising the dead.(2469) Even the barbarians on the outskirts of civilisation were attracted by his fame, and, after an interval required to find a translator among the motley crowd who thronged from all lands, an answer would be returned even in the Celtic or Syrian tongue.(2470) The fame of the oracle, of course, soon spread to Italy, where the highest nobles, eager for any novelty in religion, were carried away by the pretensions of Alexander. None among them stood higher than Rutilianus, either in character or official rank. But he was the slave of every kind of extravagant superstition.(2471) He would fall down and grovel along the way before any stone which was shining with oil or decked with garlands. He sent one emissary after another to Abonoteichos to consult the new god. They returned, some full of genuine enthusiasm, some hiding their doubts by interested exaggeration of what they had seen. Soon society and the court circle felt all the delight of a new religious sensation. Great nobles hurried away to Paphlagonia, and fell an easy prey to the gracious charm and the ingenious charlatanry of Alexander.(2472) Some, who had consulted the oracle by questions which might have a sinister meaning, and suggest dangerous ambitions, he knew how to terrify into his service by the hint of possible disclosure.(2473) All came back to swell the fame of the Paphlagonian oracle and to make it fashionable in Italy. But none were so besotted as Rutilianus. This great Roman noble, who had been proved in a long career of office,(2474) at the mature age of sixty, stooped to wed the supposed daughter of the vulgar charlatan by Selene, who had honoured him with the love which she gave of old to Endymion!(2475) And Rutilianus henceforth became the stoutest champion of Alexander against all assaults of scepticism. For, in spite of the credulity of the crowd and of the visitors from Rome, there was evidently a strong body of sturdy dissent. There were, in those days, followers of Epicurus even in Paphlagonia, and, by a strange freak of fortune, the followers of Christ found themselves making common cause against a new outbreak of heathenism with the atheistic philosophy of the Garden.(2476) An honest Epicurean once convicted Alexander of a flagrant deception, and narrowly escaped being stoned to death by the fanatics of Paphlagonia.(2477) One of the books of Epicurus was publicly burnt in the agora by order of Alexander, and the ashes cast into the sea. Lucian himself, with his sly, amused scepticism, tested and exposed the skill of the oracle at the most imminent risk to his life.(2478)

But in spite of all exposure and opposition, the oracle, managed with such art and supported with such blind enthusiasm, conquered for a time the Roman world. It was a period of calamity and gloom. Plague and earthquake added their horrors to the brooding uncertainty of the dim conflict on the Danube.(2479) The emissaries of Alexander went everywhere, exploiting the general terror. Prediction of coming evil was safe at such a time; any shred of comfort or hope was eagerly sought for. A hexameter verse, promising the help of Apollo, was inscribed over every doorway as an amulet against the awful pestilence of 166 A.D. Another ordered two lion’s cubs to be flung into the Danube, to check the advance of the Marcomanni.(2480) Both proved dismal failures, but without shaking the authority of the impostor, who found an easy apology in the darkness of old Delphic utterances. He established mysteries after the model of Eleusis, from which Christians and Epicureans were excluded under a solemn ban. Scenes of old and new mythologies were presented with brilliant effects—the labour of Leto, the birth of Apollo, the birth of Asclepius, the epiphany of Glycon, the new wondrous serpent-deity of Abonoteichos, the loves of Alexander and Selene. The second Endymion lay sleeping, as on Latmus in the ancient story, and the moon goddess, in the person of a great Roman dame, descended from above to woo a too real earthly lover.(2481)

Lucian’s history of the rise of the new oracle in Paphlagonia is not, perhaps, free from some suspicion of personal antipathy to the founder of it. He attributes to Alexander not only the most daring deceit and calculating quackery, but also the foulest vices known to the ancient world. These latter charges may or may not be true. Theological or anti-theological hatred has in all ages too often used the poisoned arrow. And the moral character of Alexander has less interest for us than the spiritual condition of his many admirers and votaries. He can hardly be acquitted of some form of more or less pious imposture. How far it was accompanied by real religious enthusiasm is a problem which will be variously solved, and which is hardly worth the trouble of investigation, even if the materials existed for a certain answer. But the eager readiness of a whole population to hail the appearance of a new god, and the acceptance of his claims by men the most cultivated and highly placed in the Roman Empire, are facts on which Lucian’s testimony, addressed to contemporaries, cannot be rejected. Nor is there anything in our knowledge of the period from other sources which renders the thing doubtful. Creative mythology had revived its activity. Not long before the epiphany of Glycon, in a neighbouring part of Asia Minor the Apostles Paul and Barnabas, after the miraculous cure of the impotent man, had difficulty in escaping divine honours. The Carpocratians, a Gnostic sect, about the same time built a temple in honour of the youthful son of their founder.(2482) The corn-goddess Annona first appears in the first century, and inscriptions, both in Italy and Africa, were set up in honour of the power who presided over the commissariat of the Roman mob.(2483) The youthful favourite of Hadrian, after his mysterious death in the waters of the Nile, was glorified by instant apotheosis. His statues rose in every market-place and temple court; his soul was supposed to have found a home in a new star in the region of the milky way; temples were built in his honour, and the strange cult was maintained for at least a hundred years after any motive could be found for adulation.(2484) The Cynic brothers, and the gaping crowd who stood around the pyre of Peregrinus at Olympia were eager, as we have seen, to hail the flight of a great soul to join the heroes and demigods in Olympus.(2485) The cult of M. Aurelius was maintained by an enthusiasm very different from the conventional apotheosis of the head of the Roman State. We are told that he was adored, by every age and sex and class, long after his death. His sacred image found a place among the penates of every household, and the home where it was not honoured was of more than suspected piety. Down to the time of Diocletian, the saintly and philosophic emperor, who had preached an imperturbable indifference to the chances and changes of life, was believed to visit his anxious votaries with dreams of promise or warning.(2486)

Maximus of Tyre may have been guilty of no exaggeration when he reckoned the heavenly host as thrice ten thousand.(2487) The cynical voluptuary of Nero’s reign, who said that a town of Magna Graecia was inhabited by more gods than men, only used a comic hyperbole to enforce a striking fact.(2488) The anthropomorphic conceptions of Deity, which were prevalent, easily overleapt the interval between the human and Divine. The crowds of the Antonine age were as ready to recognise the god in human form as the Athenians of the days of Pisistratus, who believed that they saw in the gigantic Phye an epiphany of the great goddess of their Acropolis, leading the tyrant home.(2489) In the minds of a philosophic minority, nurtured on the theology of Plato, there might be the dim conception of one awful and remote Power, far removed from the grossness of earth, far above the dreams of mythologic poetry and the materialist imagination of the masses. Yet even philosophy, as we have already seen, had succumbed to the craving for immediate contact, or for some means of communication, with the Infinite Spirit. The daemons of Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre were really a new philosophic mythology, created to give meaning and morality to the old gods. These hosts of baleful or ministering spirits, with which the Platonist surrounded the life of man, divine in the sweep of their power, human in their passions or sympathies, belong really to the same order as the Poseidon who pursued Odysseus with tempest, or the Moon goddess who descended on Latmus to kiss the sleeping Endymion. Anthropomorphic paganism was far from dead; it was destined to live openly for more than three hundred years, and to prolong a secret life of subtle influence under altered forms, the term of which who shall venture to fix?

The daemons of the Platonic philosophers find their counterpart in the popular cult of genii. If there was a visible tendency to syncretism and monotheistic faith in the second century, there was a no less manifest drift to the endless multiplication of spiritual powers. The tendency, indeed, to create divine representatives of physical forces and dim abstract qualities was from early ages congenial to the Roman mind. All the phenomena of nature—every act, pursuit, or vicissitude in human life—found a spiritual patron in the Roman imagination.(2490) But the tendency received an immense impulse in the age with which we are dealing, and the inscriptions of the imperial period reveal an almost inexhaustible fertility of religious fancy. Every locality, every society and occupation of men, has its patron genius, to whom divine honours are paid or recorded,—the canton, the municipality, the curia; the spring or grove; the legion or cohort or troop; the college of the paviors or smiths or actors; the emperors, or even the great gods themselves.(2491)

The old gods of Latium still retained a firm hold on the devotion of the simple masses, as crowds of inscriptions record. But ancient religion, in its cruder forms, divided and localised the Divine power by endless demarcations of place and function. Although the Roman centurion or merchant might believe in the power of his familiar gods to follow him with their protection, and never forgot them, still each region, to which his wanderings carried him, had its peculiar spirits, who wielded a special potency within their own domain, and whom it was necessary to propitiate. On hundreds of provincial inscriptions we can read the catholic superstition of the Roman legionary. The mystery of desert or forest, the dangers of march and bivouack, stimulated his devotion. If he does not know the names of the strange deities, he will invoke them collectively side by side with the gods whom he has been taught to venerate. He will adore the “genius loci,”(2492) or all the gods of Mauritania or of Britain. And so the deities of Alsace and Dacia and Lusitania, of the Sahara and Cumberland, easily took their place in his growing pantheon.(2493) They were constantly identified with the great figures of Greek or Roman mythology. Many an inscription is dedicated to Apollo Grannus of Alsace, whom Caracalla invoked for the recovery of his health, along with Serapis and Aesculapius.(2494) Apollo Belenus, a favourite deity in Southern Gaul, was the special patron of Aquileia.(2495) Batucardus and Cocideus received vows and dedications in Cumberland and Westmorland, Arardus and Agho in the Pyrenees, Abnoba in the Black Forest;(2496) and many another deity with strange, outlandish name, like their provincial votaries, were honoured with sacred Roman citizenship, and took their places, although in a lower grade, with Serapis of Alexandria or Asclepius of Epidaurus. The local heroes were also adored at wayside shrines or altars, which met the traveller in lonely passes. In the heart of the Nubian desert, inscriptions, scratched on obelisk or temple porch, attest the all-embracing faith of the Roman legionary.(2497) At Carlsbourg in Transylvania, a legate of the 5th Legion records his own gratitude to Aesculapius and all the gods and goddesses of the place, and that of his wife and daughter, for the recovery of his sight.(2498) A praetorian prefect, visiting the hot springs of Vif left a graceful inscription to the gods of the eternal fire.(2499) A legate of the 5th Legion returns pious thanks to Hercules and the genius loci, at the baths in Dacia sacred to the hero.(2500) Many a slab pays honour to the nymphs who guarded the secret spring, especially where a source, long since forgotten, had resumed its flow.(2501) A chief magistrate of Lambesi is specially grateful that the town has been refreshed by a new fountain during his year of office.(2502) The heroes of poetic legend were still believed to haunt the scene of their struggles. Apollonius once spent a night in ghostly converse with the shade of Achilles beside his tomb in the Troad, and was charged by the divine warrior to convey his reproaches for the neglect of his worship in the old Thessalian home of the Myrmidons.(2503) The Troad had a hero of much later date, the proconsul Neryllinus, who was believed to deliver oracles and to heal the sick.(2504)

In a time of such vivid belief in the universal presence of divine beings, faith in miracle was a matter of course. Christian and pagan were here at least on common ground. Nay, the Christian apologists did not dispute the possibility of pagan miracles, or even of pagan oracular inspiration. It is curious to see that Origen and Celsus, as regards the probability of recurring miracle, are on very much the same plane of spiritual belief, and that the Christian apologist is fighting with one arm tied. He is disabled from delivering his assaults at the heart of the enemy’s position. The gods of heathenism are still to him living and potent spirits, although they are spirits of evil.(2505) The pagan daemonology, on its worse side, had been accepted by the champion of the Church. Yet it is hard to see how, on such principles, he could deal with the daemon of the Apolline shrine at Delphi, when he denounced the Spartan Glaucus for the mere thought of a breach of faith to his friend,(2506) or the daemon who lurked under the pure stately form of Athene Polissouchos, when she threw a maiden goddess’s protection around the Antigones of Athens. In the field of miracle in the second century the heathen could easily match the Christian. With gods in every grove and fountain, and on every mountain summit; with gods breathing in the winds and flashing in the lightning, or the ray of sun and star, heaving in the earthquake or the November storm in the Aegean, watching over every society of men congregated for any purpose, guarding the solitary hunter or traveller in the Alps or the Sahara, what is called miracle became as natural to the heathen as the rising of the sun. In fact, if the gods had not displayed their power in some startling way, their worshippers would have been shocked and forlorn. But the gods did not fail their votaries. Unquestioning and imperious faith in this kind is always rewarded, or can always explain its disappointments. The Epicurean, the Cynic, or the Aristotelian, might pour their cold scorn on tales of wonder. An illuminé like Lucian, attached to no school, and living merely in the light of clear cultivated sense, might shake his sides with laughter at the tales which were vouched for by a spiritualist philosophy. But the drift of the time was against all such protests. The Divine power was everywhere, and miracle was in the air.

Enough has been said of the dreams and signs and omens which in the first and second century heralded every accession to the throne and every death of a prince, and which even Tacitus records with more or less vacillating faith. Enough, too, has been said of the miracles of healing which were wrought by the sons of Asclepius in his many shrines from Pergamum to the island in the Tiber. The miracles wrought by Vespasian at Alexandria are the most hackneyed example of belief in miracle, because the tale is told by the greatest master of vivid narrative in a book which every educated man has read. The sensible Vespasian was not confident of his power to give energy to the impotent, even on the strength of a dream sent by Serapis, just as he jested on his deathbed about his approaching apotheosis. But the efficiency of the imperial touch was vouched for by eye-witnesses, to whom Tacitus would not refuse his credence. The chronicler of the age of Diocletian has surrounded the death-bed of Hadrian with similar wonders. A blind man from Pannonia came and touched the fever-wracked emperor, and immediately regained his sight. The legend of the Thundering Legion was long the battle-ground of opposing faiths equally credulous, and equally bent on securing the credit of supernatural powers. The timely rainfall was attributed with equal assurance to the incantations of an Egyptian sorcerer, to the prayers of the believers in Jupiter, or the prayers of the believers in Christ. Apuleius, who was himself prosecuted for practising the black art, has filled his Thessalian romance with the most astounding tales of fantastic sorcery. He may have copied other lawless romances, but he would hardly have given such space to these weird arts if his public had not had an uneasy belief in them. The home of Medea in the days of M. Aurelius was a veritable witch’s cave: the air is tremulous with superstitious fear: everything seems possible in the field of miraculous metamorphosis or monstrous vice. If Apuleius had meant to discredit superstition by wedding it to disgusting sensuality, he could hardly have succeeded better. But he was more probably bent, with perverted skill, on producing a work which might allure imaginations haunted by the ghosts of hereditary sensuality and a spiritual terror revived in redoubled force. An Egyptian priest with tonsure and linen robes raises a dead man to life who has been “floating on the Stygian streams.” Or you are admitted to a witch’s laboratory, open to all the winds and stored with all the wreckage of human life—timbers of ships splintered on cruel rocks, the curdled blood and mangled flesh of murdered men, toothless skulls gnawed by beasts of prey. You see the transformation going on before your eyes under the magic of mysterious unguents, the feathers springing from the flesh, or the human sinking into the ass’s form. Tales like these, which to us are old wives’ tales, may have had a strange charm for an age when human life was regarded as the slave of fate, or the sport of the inscrutable powers of the unseen universe.

II. BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY

A great part of the charm of those oriental religions, on the study of which we are about to enter, lay in the assurance which they seemed to give of an immortal life. It would, therefore, appear a necessary preface to such a review to examine some of the conceptions of the state of the departed which the missionaries of Isis and Mithra found prevalent in the minds of their future votaries. Immortality, in any worthy sense, is inseparable from the idea of God. And the conception of continued life must always be shaped by the character of a people’s beliefs as to the powers of the unseen world. A pantheon of dim phantasms or abstractions will not promise more than a numb spectral future to the human shade. The nectar and ambrosia of Olympian feasts may have their human counterpart in an “eternal debauch.” The Platonist will find his eternal hope in emancipation from the prison of the flesh, and in the immediate vision of that Unity of all beauty, truth, and goodness, which is his highest conception of God. But not only does religion necessarily colour the conception of the eternal state: it may also furnish the warrant for a belief in it. And a religion which can give men a firm ground for that faith will have an immense advantage over others which are less clear and confident as to another world. It is generally admitted that the long array of philosophic arguments for immortality have by themselves little convincing power. They are not stronger, nor perhaps so strong as the argument from the wish for continued life, inveterate in the human spirit, on which Plutarch laid so much stress.(2507) Even amid the triumphant dialectic of the Phaedo, an undertone of doubt in any human proof of immortality is sometimes heard, along with the call for some “divine doctrine” as a bark of safety on perilous seas.(2508) The inextinguishable instinct of humanity craves for a voice of revelation to solve the mystery of life and death.

The Roman spirit, down to the Antonine age, had been the subject of many influences which had inspired widely various ideas of the future state. And the literary and funerary remains from Nero to M. Aurelius are full of contradictions on the subject. Nor, in the absence of authoritative revelation on a field so dark to reason, is this surprising. Even Christian teaching, while it offers a sure promise of a life to come, has not lifted the veil of the great mystery, and the material imagery of the Apocalypse, or the shadowed hints of Jesus or S. Paul, have left the believer of the twentieth century with no clearer vision of the life beyond the tomb than that which was vouchsafed to Plato, Cicero, Virgil, or Plutarch. “We know not what we shall be,” is the answer of every seer of every age. Something will always “seal the lips of the Evangelist,” as the key of the Eumolpidae closed the lips of those who had seen the vision of Eleusis.(2509) The pagans of the early Empire were thus, in the absence of dogma and ecclesiastical teaching, free to express, with perfect frankness, their unbelief or their varying conceptions of immortality, according to the many influences that had moulded them. Nor could these influences be kept apart even in the same mind. Even the poet seer, who was to be the guide of Dante in the shades, has failed to blend the immemorial faith of the Latin race with the dreams of future beatitude or anguish which came to him from Pythagorean or Platonic teaching.(2510) In the sixth book of the Aeneid the eschatologies of old Rome and Greece are combined, but not blended, with the doctrines of transmigration and purgatorial expiation descending from Pythagoras or the Orphic mystics. Virgil, in fact, mirrors the confusion of beliefs which prevailed in his own age, and which pre-eminently characterised the age of the Antonines.

Along with other archaic elements of the Latin faith, the cult of the Manes held its ground, especially in secluded homes of old Italian piety. The most ancient Indo-European conception of the state after death was that of a continuance or faint, shadowy reproduction of the life on earth; it was not that of a vast and mysterious change to a supernatural order. The departed spirit was believed to linger in a dim existence in the vault or grave near the familiar homestead.(2511) The tomb is not a temporary prison, but an everlasting home,(2512) and often provides a chamber where the living members of the family or clan may gather on solemn days around the ashes of the dead.(2513) Provision is made for the sustenance of this spectral life. Vessels for food and drink, the warrior’s arms, the workman’s tools, the cosmetics of the lady, the child’s playthings, are buried with them.(2514) Or they are figured on their tombs cheerfully engaged in their familiar crafts,(2515) not with folded hands, and calm, expectant faces, like the marble forms which lie in our cathedral aisles awaiting the Resurrection.

With such views of the tomb, the perpetual guardianship of it became to the Roman a matter of supreme moment. It is a chapel or an altar, as well as a last home.(2516) It is the meeting-place, in faint ghostly communion, of the society which embraced, by its solemn rites, the members of the household church in the light or in the shades. All the cautious forms of Roman law are invoked to keep the sepulchre, with its garden and enclosure, from passing into alien hands. Its site is exactly described, with the minutest measurements, and the intruder or the alienator is threatened with curses or with fines, to be paid into the public treasury.(2517) Here, among his children and remotest descendants, among his freedmen and freedwomen, the Roman dreamed of resting for ever undisturbed.(2518) And many an appeal comes to us from the original slab not to violate the eternal peace.(2519) What that dim life beneath the marble or the sod, at least in the later times, was conceived to be, how far it involved a more or less vivid consciousness of what was passing in the world above, how far it was a numb repose, almost passing into “the eternal sleep,” seems to be uncertain. The phrases on the tomb in all ages are apt to pass into conventional forms, and personal temperament and imagination must always give varying colour to the picture. Such phrases as “eternal sleep,” however, did not probably at any time imply complete unconsciousness. The old Latin faith that the Manes had a real life and some link of sympathy with the living was still strong and vivid in an age which was eager to receive or answer voices from the world beyond the senses. The wish to maintain, in spite of the severance and shock of death, a bond of communion between the living and the departed was one of the most imperious instincts of the Latin race. It was not a mere imagination, projected on far distant years, which craved for the yearly offering of violets and roses, or the pious ave of the passing traveller.(2520) The dwellers in the vault still remained members of the family, to which they are linked for ever by a dim sympathy expressed in ritual communion. Every year, on the dies parentales in February, there was a general holiday, cheerfully kept in honour of all those whose spirits were at peace.(2521) On the eighth day, the festival of cara cognatio, there was a family love-feast, in which quarrels were forgotten, and the members in the spirit-world joined in the sacred meal. But besides this public and national commemoration, the birthday of each departed member was observed with offerings of wine and oil and milk. The tomb was visited in solemn procession; dead and living shared the sacred fare; flowers were scattered, and with an ave or a prayer for help and good fortune, the shade was left to its renewed repose.(2522) Many a slab makes anxious provision for these communions, and the offering of violets and roses in their season.(2523)

But the Roman in his tomb longed to be near the sound of busy human life, and to feel the tread of pious feet, which might turn aside for a moment to salute even a stranger’s memory. This feeling is expressed in the long rows of vaults which line so many of the great roads, the Via Appia, or the way from Pompeii to Nola.(2524) There were many like that Titus Lollius who had himself laid close to the road into Aquae Sextiae, that the passers might for ever greet his spirit with an ave.(2525) Others leave a prayer for all good things to those who will stop an instant and read the legend; “may the earth lie light upon them when they too depart.”(2526) The horror of the lonely soul, cut off from the kindly fellowship of the living, and lingering on in a forgotten grave, to which no loving hand should ever more bring the libation or the violets in spring, which should one day awake no memory or sympathy in any human heart, was to the old Roman the worst terror in death. This passion for continued memory, especially in great benefactors of their kind, is used by Cicero as an argument for immortality,(2527) and the passion for enduring life blends indistinguishably with the wish to be long remembered. Even Epicurus, the apostle of annihilation, made provision in his last testament for yearly offerings in honour of himself and Metrodorus his disciple—a curious instance of agnostic conformity.(2528) The passion for remembrance was responded to by the dutiful devotion of many generations. The cult of the dead long survived in the cult of martyrs, and the pagan feasting at their tombs disturbed and perplexed S. Augustine and S. Paulinus of Nola.(2529)

The old Roman thought of his departed friends as a company of good and kindly spirits, who watched over the family on earth. But there was another conception of spirits in the other world, whether derived from the gloomy superstition of Etruria, or descending from days anterior to orderly devotion to the dead.(2530) The Lemures were a name of fear. They were dark, malevolent spirits who craved for blood, as they had departed this life by a violent end. Their festival, the Lemuria in May, was quite distinct from the festival of the Manes, and the household ritual for laying the ghosts by the spitting of black beans and a ninefold form of exorcism savours of a far-gone age. These maleficent powers were propitiated by blood—especially by the blood of men in the combats of the arena.

The visitations of these beings, whether as guardian, ministering spirits or as evil powers, were expected and believed in for many ages by all classes of Roman minds. The ancient Latin faith as to the state of the dead was, according to Cicero, confirmed by many tales of spiritual apparition. There are pathetic memorials which end with an appeal in which the lonely wife entreats the lost one sometimes to return in dream or vision.(2531) One vivacious inscription challenges the sceptic to lay his wager and make the experiment of a summons from the unseen world.(2532) The spread of cremation instead of burial gradually led to a new conception of the spirit as having a separate existence from the body, now reduced to a handful of grey ashes.(2533) And spirits no longer clung to the body in the family vault, but were gathered in a dim region near the centre of the earth, where, according to gloomy Etrurian fancy, they were under the cruel care of the conductor of the dead, a brutal figure, with wings and long, matted beard, and armed with a hammer, who for ages appeared in human form to close the last ghastly scene in the gladiatorial combats.(2534) From this limbo of the departed a sort of gateway was provided in every Latin town in the Mundus, a deep trench intended to represent an inverted heaven, which was dug before the pomoerium was traced. Its lower aperture was closed by the stone of the Manes, which on three solemn days, in August, October, and November, was lifted to permit the spirits from the deep to pass for a time into the upper world. Thus a public sanction was given to the belief in the commerce between this life and the next.(2535)

Cicero had said that the faith in immortality was sustained by the fact of spirits returning to the world of sense. In the first and second centuries there was no lack of such aids to faith. Apparitions became the commonest facts of life, and only the hardiest minds remained incredulous about them. Philosophers of all schools, except the Epicurean, were swept into the current. The Philopseudes of Lucian is a brilliant effort to ridicule the superstition of the age, but the attack would have been discredited if it had not had a foundation of fact. There, around the sick-bed of Eucrates, himself saturated with philosophy, are gathered a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean, a Platonist, and a trained physician.(2536) And they regale one another with the most weird and exciting tales of the marvellous. Ion, the Platonic student, has seen the exorcism of a black and smoky daemon.(2537) Eucrates has seen such spirits a thousand times, and, from long habit, has lost all fear of them. At vintage time, he once saw a gigantic Gorgon figure in the woods in broad daylight, and by the turning of a magic ring had revealed to him the gulf of Tartarus, the infernal rivers, and been even able to recognise some of the ghosts below.(2538) On another day, as he lay upon his bed reading the Phaedo, his “sainted wife,” who had recently died, appeared and reproached him because, among all the finery which had been burnt upon her pyre, a single gold-spangled shoe, which slipped under the wardrobe, had been forgotten.(2539) Plutarch reports, apparently with perfect faith, the appearance of such spectral visitors at Chaeronea.(2540) The younger Pliny consulted his friend Sura as to the reality of such apparitions, and reveals his faith in the gruesome tale of a haunted house at Athens, where a restless ghost, who had often disturbed the quiet of night with the clank of chains, was tracked to the mystery of a hidden grave.(2541) Suetonius, of course, welcomes tales of this kind from every quarter. Before Caligula’s half-burnt remains were borne stealthily to a dishonoured burial, the keepers of the Lamian Gardens had been disturbed each night by ghostly terrors.(2542) The pages of Dion Cassius abound in similar wonders. When Nero attempted to cut through the Isthmus of Corinth, the dead arose in numbers from their graves.(2543) In such an age the baleful art of “evocation” acquired a weird attraction and importance. By spells and incantations Hecate was invoked to send up spirits, often for evil ends.(2544) And there were dark rumours of the spell being fortified by the blood of children. Many of the emperors from Tiberius to Caracalla had dabbled in this witchcraft.(2545) When Nero was haunted by the Furies of his murdered mother, he is said to have offered a magic sacrifice to evoke and appease her spirit.(2546) The early Neo-Platonists were, of course, eager to admit the reality of such visits from the unseen world. In anxious quest of any link of sympathy between this world and the next, Maximus tries to fortify his doctrine of daemons by stories of apparitions.(2547) Hector has been often seen darting across the Troad in shining armour. At the mouth of the Borysthenes, Achilles has been espied by mariners, who were sailing past his isle, careering along with his yellow locks and arms of gold, and singing his paean of battle.

In enlarging its rather blank and poor conception of the future state, the Latin race, as in other fields, was content to borrow rather than invent. The Sixth Book of the Aeneid was an effort not only to glorify the legendary heroes of Rome, but to appease a new or revived longing for the hope of immortality, after the desolating nihilism of the Epicurean philosophy had run its course.(2548) Virgil has some touches of old Roman faith about the dead, but the scenery of his Inferno is mainly derived from Greek poetry inspired by Orphism, and the vision is moralised, and also confused, by elements drawn from Pythagoras or Plato.(2549) The scene of Aeneas’s descent to the underworld is laid by the lake of Avernus, where, buried amid gloomy woods, was the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl. Cumae was the oldest Greek colony in the West. Its foundation was placed long before the days of Romulus. Rich, prosperous, and cultivated, at a time when the Romans were a band of rude warriors, it must have early transmitted Greek ideas of religion to the rising power on the Tiber.(2550) The Etrurians also, who affected so profoundly the tone of Roman religion, had come under Greek influences. The spectral ferryman of the dead was a familiar figure in Etruscan art. Thus, both on the south and north, Latium had points of contact with the world of Hellenic legend. And from the early days of the Republic, the worship of Greek gods—Apollo, Asclepius, or the Dioscuri—became naturalised at Rome. Probably of even earlier date was the influence of the oracular lore of Greece through Delphi and the oracle of Cumae.(2551)

On the threshold of the underworld Aeneas and the Sibyl are confronted by the monstrous forms of Hellenic legend—Centaurs and Scyllas, Harpies and Gorgons, the fire-armed Chimaera, and the hissing hydra of Lerna.(2552) They have to pass the ninefold barrier of the Styx in Charon’s steel-grey bark. The grisly ferryman of the infernal stream, foul and unkempt, with fixed eyes of flame, is surrounded by a motley crowd, thick as autumnal leaves, all straining and eager for the further shore. Landed on a waste expanse of mud and sedge,(2553) they pass the kennel of triple-headed Cerberus, and on to the judgment seat, where Minos assigns to each soul its several doom, according to the deeds done in the body. Thence they traverse the “mourning fields,”(2554) where are those sad queens of Grecian tragedy whose wild loves have been their undoing, and among them Phoenician Dido, who, with stony silence and averted gaze, plunges into the darkness of the wood.(2555) As the dawn is breaking, they find themselves before the prison-house of the damned, rising amid the folds of the river of fire, with walls of iron and adamant, its portals watched by a sleepless Fury in blood-red robe.(2556) From within are heard the cries of anguish and the clank of chains, as the great rebels and malefactors of old-world story—Ixion, Salmoneus, and the Titans—are tortured by lash and wheel and vulture.(2557) And with them, sharing the same agony, are those who have violated the great laws on which the Roman character was built.(2558) Through other dusky ways and Cyclopean portals they at last reach the home of the blessed, as it was pictured long before in the apocalypse of Pindar—the meads and happy groves of Elysium, under another sun and other stars than ours, and bathed in the splendour of an ampler air.(2559) Here is the eternal home of the heroic souls of a nobler age, men who have died for fatherland, holy priests and bards and founders of the arts which soften and embellish the life of men. But though their home is radiant with a splendour not of earth, they are, in old Roman and Greek fashion, occupied with the toils or pleasures of their earthly life. Youthful forms are straining their sinews in the wrestling-ground as of old. The ancient warriors of Troy have their shadowy chariots beside them, their lances planted in the sward, their chargers grazing in the meadow. Others are singing old lays or dancing, and the bard of Thrace himself is sweeping the lyre, as in the days when he sped the Argo through the “Clashing Rocks” in the quest of the fleece of gold.(2560)

The vision closes with a scene which criticism has long recognised as irreconcilable with the eschatology of Greek legend hitherto followed by the poet, but which is drawn from a philosophy destined to govern men’s thoughts of immortality for many ages. In a wooded vale, far withdrawn, through which Lethe glided peacefully, countless multitudes are gathered drinking the “water of carelessness and oblivion.” These are they, as Anchises expounds to his son, who, having passed the thousand purgatorial years, to cleanse away the stains of flesh in a former life, and, having effaced the memory of it, now await the call of Destiny to a new life on earth.(2561) This theory of life and death, coming down from Pythagoras, and popularised by Platonism, with some Stoic elements, had gained immense vogue among educated men of the last period of the Republic. Varro had adopted it as a fundamental tenet of his theology, and Cicero had embalmed it in his dream of Scipio, which furnished a text for Neo-Platonist homilies in the last days of the Western Empire.(2562) A fiery spirit animates the material universe, from the farthest star in ether down to the lowest form of animal life. The souls of men are sparks or emanations from this general soul which have descended into the prison of the body, and during the period of their bondage have suffered contamination.(2563) And the prison walls hide from their eyes for a time the heaven from which they come. Nor when death releases them do they shake off the engrained corruption. For a thousand years they must suffer cleansing by punishment till the stains are washed away, the deeply festering taint burnt out as by fire. Then only may the pure residue of ethereal spirit seek to enter on another life on earth.

Virgil, in his Nekuia, mirrored the confusion of beliefs as to the future state prevailing in his time. For his poetic sensibility, the old Roman faith of the Manes, the Greek legends of Tartarus and Elysium, the Pythagorean or Orphic doctrine of successive lives and purgatorial atonement, had each their charm, and a certain truth. On a subject so dim and uncertain as the future life, the keenest minds may have wavering conceptions, and in different moods may clothe them in various guise. This is the field of the protean poetic imagination inspired by religious intuition, not of the rigorous dogmatist. But a great poet like Virgil not only expresses an age to itself: he elevates and glorifies what he expresses. He gives clear-cut form to what is vague, he spreads the warmth and richness of colour over what is dim and blank, and he imparts to the abstract teaching of philosophy a glow and penetrating power which may touch even the unthinking mass of men. The vision of the Sixth Book, moreover, like the Aeneid as a whole, has a high note of patriotism. Beside the water of Lethe are gathered, waiting for their call to earthly life, all the great souls from the Alban Silvius to the great Julius, all the Scipios, Gracchi, Decii, and Fabricii, who were destined through storm and stress to give the world the calm of the Roman peace.(2564) The poet of Roman destiny had a marvellous fame among his countrymen. Men rose up to do him honour when he entered the theatre; the street boys of Pompeii scratched his verses on the walls.(2565) Can we doubt that the grandest part of his great poem, which lifts for a moment the veil of the unseen world, had a profound effect on the religious imagination of the future?

The opinion long prevailed that the period of the early Empire was one of unbelief or scepticism as to the future life. The opinion was founded on literary evidence accepted without much critical care. Cicero and Seneca, Juvenal and Plutarch,(2566) had spoken of the Inferno of Greek legend, its Cerberus and Chimaera, its gloom of Tartarus, as mere old wives’ fables, in which even children had ceased to believe. But such testimony should always be taken with a good deal of reserve. The member of a comparatively small literary and thoughtful circle is apt to imagine that its ideas are more widely diffused than they really are. It may well have been that thoughtful men, steeped in Platonic or Pythagorean faith as to the coming life, rejected as anthropomorphic dreams the infernal scenery of Greek legend, just as a thoughtful Christian of our day will hardly picture his coming beatitude in the gorgeous colouring of the Book of Revelation. Yet the mass of men will always seek for concrete imagery to body forth their dim spiritual cravings. They always live in that uncertain twilight in which the boundaries of pictured symbolism and spiritual reality are blurred and effaced. Lucian was a pessimist as to spiritual progress, and he may have exaggerated the materialistic superstition of his time; he had ample excuse for doing so. Yet, artist as he was, his art would have been futile and discredited in his own time, if it had not had a solid background in widely accepted beliefs. And we cannot refuse to admit his testimony that the visions of the grim ferryman over the waters of Styx, the awful judge, the tortures of Tartarus, the asphodel meads, and the water of Lethe, the pale neutral shades who wandered expectant of the libation on the grave, filled a large space in the imagination of the crowd.(2567) Plutarch, who sometimes agrees with Juvenal and Seneca as to the general incredulity, at others holds that a large class of remorseful sinners have a wholesome fear of the legendary tortures of lost souls, and that they are eager to purge their guilt before the awful ordeal of the Eternal Judgment.(2568) And, however pure and etherealised his own views may have been as to the life to come, no one has left a more lurid picture of the flames, the gloom, the sounds of excruciating anguish from the prison-house of the damned, which oppressed the imagination of the multitude in his time. One part of that vision had a peculiarly tenacious hold.(2569) The belief in the gruff ferryman of the dead, who sternly exacted his fare, and drove from the banks of Styx those who had no right to cross the awful stream, was widely diffused and survived far into the medieval times. For many centuries, long before and long after the coming of Christ, the coin which was to secure the passage of the shade into the world below was placed in the mouth of the corpse.(2570)

The inscriptions might be supposed to give authoritative evidence as to the belief of ordinary men about the future state. The funerary monuments from every part of the Roman world are almost countless for the period of the early Empire. Yet such records, however abundant, are not so clear and satisfactory as they are by some taken to be. The words of a tombstone are sometimes a sincere utterance of real affection and faith. They are also not unfrequently purely conventional, representing a respectable, historic creed, which may not be that of the man who erects the slab. Just as a Frenchman, who has never from infancy entered a church, may have his wife interred with all the solemn forms with which the Catholic Church makes the peace of the passing soul, so the Roman pagan may have often inscribed on his family tomb words which expressed the ancient creed of his race rather than his personal belief. Heredity in religion is a potent influence, and may be misleading to the inquirer of a later age. An epitaph should not be construed as a confession of faith.

The great mass of these inscriptions are couched in the same phrases, with only slight variations. The dedication Dis Manibus, representing the old Roman faith, is the heading of the majority of them. The vault is an “eternal home,” whose peace is guarded by prayers or threats and entreaties. There is a rare dedication to the “ashes” of the dead. There are many to their “eternal repose.”(2571) But it is surely rather absurd to find in expressions which occur almost in the same form in the niches of the Catacombs a tinge of Epicureanism. The poor grammarian of Como, who left all his substance to his town, may be permitted to enjoy “the calm peace” he claims after all the troubles of his life, without a suspicion that he meant the peace of nothingness.(2572) A pious Christian may rejoice at escaping the miseries of old age, and even hail death as the last cure of all mortal ills.(2573) Death and sleep have always seemed near akin, and when the Roman spoke of the sleep of death, he probably did not often mean that it had no awaking. The morning indeed, as we have seen, to old imaginations was not very bright. “The day of eternity” was not irradiated with the golden splendour of Pindar’s Happy Isles; it was grey and sad and calm. But that it was felt to be a real existence is shown by the insistent demand on scores of monuments for the regular service of the living. Every possible precaution is taken by the testator that his family or his club shall maintain this sympathetic observance for ever.(2574) With the idea of prolonged existence, of course, is blended the imaginative hope of having a continued memory among men. And probably the majority of the funerary inscriptions express this feeling chiefly. But the same is true of the monuments of every age, and warrants no conclusion as to the opinions about immortality held by those who raised them. There is abundance of the purest affection expressed on these memorials, and sometimes, although not very often, there is the hope of reunion after death. The wife of a philologus at Narbonne confidently expects to meet him, or a mother prays her son to take her to himself.(2575) Such expressions of a natural feeling, the same from age to age, have really little value as indications of religious belief. But there are not wanting in the inscriptions references to Tartarus and the Elysian fields, to Pluto and Proserpine, to Orcus who has snatched away some one in his bloom. “One little soul has been received among the number of the gods.”(2576) There are others, impregnated with the prevalent philosophy, which speak of the soul returning to its source, or of being dissolved into the infinite ether, or of passing to a distant home in the stars.(2577) This, however, as M. Boissier says,(2578) must have been the dream of a small minority. The funerary inscriptions leave the impression that, down to the final triumph of the Church, the feeling of the Romans about death was still in the main the feeling of their remote ancestors of the Samnite and Punic wars. It was a social feeling, in the prospect of a dim life dependent on the memory of the living, a horror of loneliness and desertion, the longing for a passing prayer even from a stranger. Blessings are heaped on him who will not forget the pious duty to the shade. On him who refuses it is invoked the bitterest curse to Roman imagination—“May he die the last of his race.”

But no dogmatic ecclesiastical system deterred the Roman from expressing frankly his unbelief in any future state. And the rejection of all hope for the future, sometimes coupled with a coarse satisfaction with a sensual past, is the note of not a few epitaphs of this period. Matrinia, the wife of one C. Matrinius Valentius, an Epicurean philosopher, dedicates a tablet to his “eternal sleep,” which in this case is no conventional phrase.(2579) And others, in even more decided language, parade their withering faith that this brief life is only a moment of consciousness between the blank of the past and the blank of the future, and record their indifference at passing again into the nothingness from which they came. The formula is frequent—“Non fueram, non sum, nescio”; or “Non fui, fui; non sum, non curo.” Another adds “non mihi dolet.”(2580) The subjects of some of these epitaphs seem to have obeyed literally the counsel of their master Lucretius, though in a sense different from his, and to have risen up sated with the banquet of life. They express, with cynical grossness, their only faith in the joys of the flesh, and their perfect content at having made the most of them. “Balnea, Vina, Venus,” sums up the tale.(2581) “What I have eaten, what I have drunk, is my own. I have had my life.”(2582) And the departing voluptuary exhorts his friends to follow his example: “My friends, while we live, let us live”; “Eat, drink, disport thyself, and then join us.”(2583) A veteran of the fifth legion records, probably with much truth, that “while he lived he drank with a good will,”(2584) and he exhorts his surviving friends to drink while they live. Under the confessional of St. Peter’s at Rome, in the year 1626, was found a monument of one Agricola of Tibur and his wife. There was a figure holding a wine-cup, and an inscription so frankly sensual that the whole was destroyed by order of the Pope. From the copy which was kept, it appears that Agricola was perfectly satisfied with his life, and recommended his example to others, “since it all ends in the grave or the funeral fire.”(2585) But inscriptions such as these are the exception. The funerary records, as a whole, give a picture of a society very like our own, with warm affections of kindred or friendship, clinging to ancestral pieties, ready to hope, if sometimes not clear and confident in faith.

There was probably a much more settled faith in immortality among the ordinary masses than among the highly educated. The philosophy of Greece came to the cultivated Roman world with many different voices on the greatest problem of human destiny. And the greatest minds, from Cicero to M. Aurelius, reflect the discordance of philosophy. Nay, some of those who, in more exalted moods, have left glowing pictures of the future beatitude, have also at times revealed a mood of melancholy doubt as to any conscious future life. The prevailing philosophy in the last generation of the Republic, demoralised by an internecine strife, was that of Epicurus.(2586) It harmonised with the decay of old Roman religion, and with the more disastrous moral deterioration in the upper cultivated class. The cultivated patrician, enervated by vice and luxury, or intoxicated with the excitement of civil war and the dreams of disordered ambition, flung off all spiritual idealism, and accepted frankly a lawless universe and a life of pleasure or power, to be ended by death. The great poem of Lucretius, the greatest tour de force in Latin, if not in any literature, braving not only the deepest beliefs of the Latin race, but the instinctive longings of humanity, was a herculean attempt to relieve men from the horrors of Graeco-Etruscan superstition. Even the gay frivolity of the comic stage reveals the terror which the path to Acheron inspired in the thoughtless crowd(2587)—the terror from which, with all the fervid zeal of an evangelist, Lucretius sought to relieve his countrymen.(2588) The pictures of Tartarus had burnt themselves into the popular imagination. And no message of Epicurus seems to his Roman interpreter so full of peace and blessing as the gospel of nothingness after death, the “morningless and unawakening sleep” which ends the fretful fever of life. As we felt no trouble when the storm of Punic invasion burst on Italy, we shall be equally unconscious when the partnership of soul and body is dissolved, even in the clash and fusion of all the elements in some great cosmic change.(2589) The older Stoicism permitted the hope of a limited immortality until the next great cataclysm, in which, after many ages, all things will be swallowed up.(2590) But Chrysippus admitted this prolonged existence only for the greater souls. And Panaetius, in the second century B.C., among other aberrations from the old creed of his school, abandoned even this not very satisfactory hope of immortality.(2591) Aristotle, while he held the permanence of the pure thinking principle after death, had given little countenance to the hope of a separate conscious personality. And the later Peripatetics, like Alexander Aphrodisias, had gone farther even than their master in dogmatic denial of immortality.(2592) Whatever support the instinctive craving of humanity for prolonged existence could obtain from philosophy was offered by the Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean schools. And their influence grew with the growing tendency to a revival of faith in the supernatural. For Plato, with his intense belief in the divine affinity of the human spirit, must always be the great leader of those who seek in philosophy an interpreter and a champion of religious intuition. The Phaedo was the last consolation of many a victim of conscription or imperial tyranny. Its fine-spun arguments may not have been altogether convincing, as they hardly seem to be even to the Platonic Socrates. But Plato was not merely a dialectician, he was also a seer and a poet. And, on a subject so dim as immortality, where mere intellectual proof, it is generally recognised, can be no more than tentative and precarious, men with a deep spiritual instinct have always felt the magnetism of the poet who could clothe his intuitions in the forms of imagination, who, from a keener sensibility and a larger vision, could give authority and clearness to the spiritual intuitions of the race.(2593) The philosophy of the Porch gave to the Antonine age some of its loftiest characters. But it was not the philosophy of the future. It was too cold, and too self-centred. It had too little warmth of sympathy with religious instincts which were becoming more and more imperious. Although, as we have seen in Seneca, it was softened by elements borrowed from Platonic sources, in Epictetus and M. Aurelius, in spite of a rare spiritual elevation, it displays the old aloofness from the mass of men, and a cold temperance of reserve on the great question of the future of the soul.

There can be little doubt that in the last age of the Republic a negative philosophy conspired with a decaying religious sense to stifle the hope of immortality among the cultivated class. Lucretius was certainly not a solitary member of his order. His great poem, by its combination of dialectic subtlety, poetic charm, and lofty moral earnestness, may have made many converts to its withering creed. In the debate on the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators, Julius Caesar could assert, without fear of contradiction or disapproval, that death was the final term alike of joy and sorrow in human life.(2594) This philosophy, indeed, was waning in force in the time of Augustus, and its forces were spent before the close of the first century. Yet the elder Pliny, who saw the reign of Vespasian, inveighs almost fiercely against the vanity or madness which dreams of a phantom life beyond the tomb, and robs of its great charm the last kindly boon of nature.(2595) Seneca on this, as on many other questions of high moment, is not steady and consistent. In moments of spiritual exaltation he is filled with apocalyptic rapture at the vision of an eternal world. At other times he speaks with a cold resignation, which seems to have been the fashion with men of his class and time, at the possibility of extinction in death. To the toil-worn spirit, weary of the travail and disappointments of life, death will be a quiet haven of rest.(2596) The old terrors of Charon and Cerberus, of the awful Judge and the tortures of Tartarus, are no longer believed in even by children.(2597) And stripped of its mythic horrors, death, being the loss of consciousness, must be the negation of pain and desire and fear. It is, in fact, a return to the nothingness from which we come, which has left no memory. Non miser potest esse qui nullus est.(2598) The literary men and men of the world in the age of the Flavians, like their successors ever since, probably occupied themselves little with a problem so long debated and so variously solved. Quintilian treats the question of the existence of the disembodied spirit as an open one for dialectical debate.(2599) Tacitus, at once credulous and sceptical, is no clearer on the subject of immortality than he is on the subject of miracles, or omens, or Providence. In his eulogy on Agricola he expresses a faint, pious hope of eternal peace for his hero, if there is a place in some other world for pious shades, and the sages are right in thinking that great souls do not perish with the body.(2600) This is a very guarded and hypothetical hope; and, probably, the only immortality for his friend in which Tacitus had much confidence was the undying fame with which the pen of genius can invest its subject. Tacitus, like so many of his class, had the old Roman distrust of philosophy, and the philosophies of which men of his generation had a tincture had no very confident or comforting message about the soul’s eternal destiny.

Hadrian, the most interesting of the emperors, was probably a sceptic on this as on all kindred subjects. The greatest practical genius in the imperial line had, in the field of religion and speculation, an infinite passion for all that was curious and exotic.(2601) Tramping at the head of his legions through his world-wide domains, he relieved the tedium of practical administration by visiting the scenes of historic fame or the homes of ancient religion both in the East and West. The East particularly attracted him by its infinite fecundity of superstition. He came to see whether there was anything in these revelations of the unseen world; he went away to mock at them. His insatiable curiosity had an endless variety of moods, and offered an open door to all the influences from many creeds. The restorer of ancient shrines, the admirer of Epictetus, the dabbler in astrology, the votary of Eleusis(2602) and all the mysteries of the East, the munificent patron of all professors of philosophy and the arts, the man who delighted also to puzzle and ridicule them,(2603) had probably few settled convictions of his own. His last words to his soul, in their mingled lightness and pathos, seem to express rather regret for the sunlight left behind than any hope in entering on a dim journey into the unknown.

The Antonine age was for the masses an age of growing faith, and yet three or four of its greatest minds, men who had drunk deep of philosophy, or who had a rare spiritual vision, either denied or doubted the last hope of humanity. Epictetus came from Phrygia as the slave of a freedman of Nero.(2604) Even in his days of slavery, he had absorbed the teaching of Musonius.(2605) He received his freedom, but lived in poverty and physical infirmity till, in the persecution of Domitian’s reign he was, with the whole tribe of philosophic preachers, driven from Rome,(2606) and he settled at Nicopolis in Epirus, where Arrian heard his discourses on the higher life. According to Hadrian’s biographer, he lived in the greatest intimacy with that emperor.(2607) He refers more than once to the reign of Trajan,(2608) but it is hardly possible that the tradition is true which carries his life into the reign of M. Aurelius, although the great philosophic emperor owed much to his teaching.(2609)

Epictetus is an example of a profoundly religious mind, to whom personal immortality is not a necessity of his religion. The great law of life is glad submission to the will of God, to the universal order. Death, as an event which is bound to come soon or late, should be regarded without fear. The tremors it excites are like the shuddering of children at a tragic mask of Gorgon or Fury. Turn the mask, and the terror is gone.(2610) For what is death? A separation of soul and body, a dissolution of our frame into the kindred elements.(2611) The door is opened, God calls you to come, and to no terrible future. Hades, Acheron, and Cocytus are mere childish fancies.(2612) You will pass into the wind or earth or fire from which you come. You will not exist, but you will be something else of which the world now has need, just as you came into your present existence when the world had need of you. God sent you here subject to death, to live on earth a little while in the flesh, to do His will and serve His purpose, and join in the spectacle and festival. But the spectacle for you is ended; go hence whither He leads, with adoration and gratitude for all that you have seen and heard. Make room for others who have yet to be born in accordance with His will.(2613) Language like this seems to give slight hope of any personal, conscious life beyond the grave. Epictetus, like the pious Hebrew of many of the Psalms, seems to be satisfied with the present vision of God, whether or not there be any fuller vision beyond the veil. Yet he elsewhere uses almost Platonic language, which seems to imply that the soul has a separate life, that it is a prisoner for a time in the bonds of the flesh, and that it passes at death to the kindred source from which it sprang.(2614) Yet even here the hope of an individual immortality, of any future reproduction on a higher scale of the life on earth, need not be implied; it is indeed probably absent. It is enough for the profoundly religious spirit of Epictetus that God calls us; whither He calls us must be left to His will.

Galen the physician shows a similar detachment from the ordinary hopes of humanity as to a future life, although it springs from a very different environment and training from those of Epictetus. Born in the reign of Hadrian, and dying in the reign of Septimius Severus, Galen represents the religious spirit of the Antonine age in his firm belief in a spiritual Power and Providence.(2615) But in philosophy he was an eclectic of the eclectics. His medical studies began at the age of seventeen. The influence of the Platonist, Albinus of Smyrna, above all his stay at Alexandria, while they gave him a wide range of sympathy, account for the mingled and heterogeneous character of his philosophic creed, which contains elements from every system except that of Epicurus.(2616) The result is a curious hesitation and equipoise between conflicting opinions on the greatest questions. He is particularly uncertain as to the nature of the soul and its relation to the body. The Platonic doctrine that the soul is an immaterial essence, independent of corporeal support, seems to Galen very disputable. How can immaterial essences have any separate individuality? How can they diffuse themselves over a corporeal frame and alter and excite it, as in lunacy or drunkenness? And again, if the Peripatetic doctrine be true, that the soul is the “form” of the body, we are soon landed in the Stoic materialism from which Galen shrank. The soul will become, as in the well-known theory refuted in the Phaedo,(2617) a “temperament” of bodily states, and its superior endurance, its immortality, will become a baseless dream. On these great questions the cautious man of science will not venture to come to any dogmatic conclusion.(2618)

Galen came to Rome in the year 164, at the beginning of the reign of M. Aurelius. He soon rose to great fame in his profession, and when, in 168, he had returned to his native Pergamum, he was recalled by the emperors to meet them at Aquileia. It was an anxious time. It was the second year of the campaign against the Marcomanni, and the legions, returning with Verus from the East, had brought with them the taint of a pestilence which spread a desolation throughout Italy from which it did not recover for ages. The slaves were called to arms as in the Punic invasion, along with the gladiators, and even the brigands of Dalmatia, and the massing of the forces on the Adriatic only concentrated the malignity of the plague.(2619) Galen remained with the army for some time, lending his skill to mitigate the horrors of the disease. He returned to Rome in 170, and was left there in charge of the youthful Commodus. The philosophic Emperor and his philosophic physician must have often met in those dreadful years. And we may be sure, from the detachment of M. Aurelius, that their conversations would take a wider range than the sanitary arrangements of the camp. With death in the air, how could two such men, trained under such masters, fail to question one another as to the sequel of death? At any rate the fact remains that M. Aurelius on this question is as submissive as Epictetus, as hesitating as Galen.

M. Aurelius is commonly spoken of as realising Plato’s dream of the philosopher on the throne. And yet the description is, without some additions and explanations, somewhat misleading. Philosopher, in the large speculative sense, he certainly is not in his Meditations. For the infinite curiosity of intellect, the passion to pierce the veil of the unknown, to build a great cosmic system, he seems to have had but little sympathy.(2620) His is the crowning instance of philosophy leaving the heights and concentrating itself on conduct, which becomes not merely “three-fourths of life,” but the whole, and his philosophy is really a religion. It is a religion because it is founded on the great principle of unquestioning, uncomplaining submission to the will of God, the law of the whole universe. It is a religion because the repellent and rigorous teaching of the older Stoicism is, as it is in Epictetus, suffused with a glow of emotion.(2621) And yet this religion, which makes such immense demands on human nature, cuts itself off from any support in the hope of a future life.

On the subject of immortality, indeed, M. Aurelius sometimes seems to waver. He puts the question hypothetically, or he suggests immortality as an alternative to extinction at death. “If thou goest indeed to another life, there is no want of gods, not even there. But if to a state without sensation, thou wilt cease to be held by pains and pleasures, and to be a slave to the vessel.”(2622) In one doubtful passage he speaks of “the time when the soul shall fall out of this envelop, like the child from the womb.”(2623) He does not dogmatise on a subject so dark. But his favourite conception of death is that of change, of transformation, of dissolution into the original elements. An Infinite Spirit, of which the individual soul is an emanation, pervades the universe, and at death the finite spirit is reabsorbed by the Infinite.(2624) With this is coupled the doctrine of the dark Ephesian philosophy, which through Platonism had a profound influence on later thought. Life is but a moment of consciousness in the unresting flow of infinite mutation;(2625) it is a dream, a mere vapour, the sojourn of a passing stranger. And the last thought of Aurelius probably was that there was no place for a hope of separate conscious existence after the last mortal change. Soul and body alike are swept along the stream of perpetual transformation, and this particular “ego,” with all its dreams and memories, will never re-emerge in a separate personality.

M. Aurelius, from the frequency with which he returns to the subject, seems fully conscious of the instinctive passion for continued life. But he refuses to recognise it as original and legitimate, and therefore demanding some account to be given of it.(2626) Still less would he ever dream of erecting it, as Cicero and Plutarch did, into a powerful argument for some corresponding satisfaction in another world. It is simply one of the irrational appetites, a form of rebellion against the universal order, which must be crushed and brought into submission to inexorable law. Neither do we find in M. Aurelius any feeling of the need for a rectification of the injustices of time, for any sphere for the completion of ineffectual lives, where the crooked may be made straight and the perverted be restored. He has, apparently, no sympathy with the sadness so often felt by the noblest minds, at having to go hence with so little done, so little known. The philosopher seems to have no wish to explore in some coming life the secrets of the universe, to prolong under happier conditions the endless quest of the ideal in art and knowledge and thought, which seems so cruelly baffled by the shortness of the life here below. The affectionate father and husband and friend seems to have no dream of any reunion with kindred souls. Above all, this intensely religious and devout spirit seems to have no conception, such as sometimes flashes on the mind of Seneca and of Plutarch, of a future beatitude in the full vision of God. This austere renunciation, if it was deliberate, of feelings and hopes so dear to humanity, excites a certain admiration, as the result of a stern self-discipline. It is the resignation of what are thought to be mere fond, self-flattering fancies in the cold light of truth, and, as such, it must ever command a reverent respect. Yet how completely the renunciation cuts off M. Aurelius from the spiritual movement of his time, from the great onward sweep of humanity to a spiritual reconstruction!

The attitude of M. Aurelius to the instinctive longing for immortality is partly dictated by logical loyalty to the fundamental principles of his theory of life, partly by personal temperament and sad experience. The cosmic theory of Heraclitus, the infinite flux of cyclic change, left little ground for faith in the permanence of consciousness. The Stoic principle of submission to the law of the whole made it a duty to acquiesce calmly, or even cheerfully, in what has been ordained for us. The whole duty, the sole blessedness of man, lie in bringing his will into conformity with the Eternal Reason, and in moulding this brief mundane life into a slight counterpart of the order of the mighty world. From one point of view the single human life is infinitely small, a mere point in infinite age,(2627) agitated by hopes and fears which are mere flitting dreams of a momentary consciousness. Nay, the grandest features of its earthly home shrink to mean proportions before the eye of reason. Asia is a mere corner, the sea a drop, Athos a tiny clod in the universe.(2628) Life is so little a thing that death is no evil.(2629) Yet, looked at on another side, the daemon, the divine spark within each of us, may, by its irresistible power, create a moral whole in each human spirit which, during its short space of separate being, may have the rounded harmony and perfectness of the whole vast order—it may become a perfect miniature of the universe of God.(2630) This consummate result, attainable, though so rarely attained, is the ideal which alone gives dignity to human life. The ideal of humanity lies not in any future life or coming age; it may be, were the will properly aroused to its divine strength, realised here and now in our short span of forty years of maturity.(2631) Get rid of gross fears and hopes, aim only at the moral ends which the will, aided by the daemon within, can surely reach, dismiss the fear of censure from the ephemeral crowd around us, the craving for fame among ephemeral generations whom we shall not see,(2632) let the divine impulse within us gravitate to its proper orbit, and this poor human life is swept into the eternal movement of the great whole, and, from a moment of troubled consciousness, becomes a true life in God. Such a life, having fulfilled the true law of its being, is in itself rounded and complete: it needs no dreams of future beatitude to rectify its failures or reward its eager effort. Death to such a soul becomes an unimportant incident, fixed, like all other changes, in the general order. And the length or shortness of life is not worth reckoning. The longest life is hardly a moment in eternity: the shortest is long enough if it be lived well. This life, as fixed by eternal law, is a whole, a thing by itself, a thing with innumerable counterparts in the infinite past, destined to be endlessly reproduced in the years of the limitless future.(2633) To repine at its shortness is no more rational than to mourn the swift passing of a springtime, whose glorious promise, yet ever-withering charm, have come and gone in the self-same way through myriads of forgotten years.

This is the ideal view of an austere creed, with a grandeur of its own which all generations of the West have agreed to venerate. But the temperament and the history of M. Aurelius had also their share in shaping his views of life and death. With infinite charity, indulgence, and even love for his fellows, he was a pessimist about human life.(2634) He had good excuse for being so. In the words of one who knew that age as only genius combined with learning can, le monde s’attristait; and with good cause. The horizon was darkened with ominous thunder-clouds. The internal forces of the Empire were becoming paralysed by a mysterious weakness. The dim hordes beyond the Danube had descended with a force only to be repelled in many weary campaigns. Famine and pestilence were inflicting worse horrors than the Marcomanni. It was the beginning of the end, although the end was long deferred. The world was growing sad; but there was no sadder man than the saintly Stoic on the throne, who had not only to face the Germans on the Danube, and bear the anxieties of solitary power, but who had to endure the keener anguish of a soul which saw the spiritual possibilities of human nature, but also all its littleness and baseness. The Emperor needed all the lessons of self-discipline and close-lipped resignation which he had painfully learnt for himself, and which he has taught to so many generations. There have been few nobler souls, yet few more hopeless. Like the arch mocker of the time, although from a very different point of view, he sees this ephemeral life, with its transient pleasures and triumphs, ending in dust and oblivion.(2635) And its fragility is only matched by its weary sameness from age to age. The wintry torrent of endless mutation sweeps all round in an eternal vortex.(2636) This restless change is a movement of cyclic monotony.(2637) Go back to Vespasian or Trajan: you will find the same recurring spectacle, men plotting and fighting, marrying and dying.(2638) The daughter who watches by her mother’s death-bed soon passes away under other eyes. The soul can in vision travel far, and survey the infinity of ages.(2639) It can stretch forward into the endless ages to come, as it can go back in historic imagination through the limitless past. Yet it finds nothing strange in the experience of the past, as there will be nothing new in the experience of our remotest posterity. The man whose course has run for forty years, if he has any powers of perception, has concentrated in his brief span the image of all that has been, all that ever will be in human thought or fate. The future is not gilded by any dream of progress: it is not to be imaged in any magic light of a Platonic Utopia, or City of God descending from heaven like a bride.(2640) From this “terrene filth,” from these poor frivolous souls, what celestial commonwealth could ever emerge?(2641) The moral is, both on the ground of high philosophy and sad experience—“be content, thou hast made thy voyage, thou hast come to shore, quit the ship.”

But even in heathendom, long before M. Aurelius was born, the drift of thought towards the goal of a personal immortality was strong and intense. And this was only one consequence of a movement which had profoundly affected human thought, and had compelled Stoicism to recast itself, as in the teaching of Seneca. Pure reason could not explain the relation of man to the universe, it could not satisfy the deepest human instincts. The maxim, “live according to Nature,” was interpreted by the Stoic to mean a life in accordance with our own higher nature, the Divine element within us. Yet this interpretation only brought out the irreconcilable discordance between the two conceptions of Nature in the physical universe and in the human spirit. There are depths and mysteries in the one which have no answering correspondence in the other. Something more than reason is needed to solve the problems of human destiny, the mysterious range of human aspiration. Nature, as a system of cold impersonal processes, has no sympathy with man, she may be icily indifferent or actively hostile. To conform one’s life to the supposed dictates of an abstract Reason, asserting itself in physical laws, which seem often to make a mockery of the noblest effort and aspiration of man, demanded a servility of submission in human nature, and called upon it to disown a large part of its native powers and instincts. Man, a mere ghost of himself, attenuated to a bloodless shade, finds himself in presence of a power cold, relentless, unmoral, according to human standards, a power which makes holocausts of individual lives to serve some abstract and visionary ideal of the whole. The older Stoicism provided no object of worship. For worship cannot be paid to an impersonal law without moral attributes. You may in abject quietism submit to it, but you cannot revere or adore it. It is little wonder that the Stoic sage, who could triumph over all material obstructions by moral enthusiasm, was sometimes exalted above the Zeus who represented mere passionless physical law. Such an idea—for it cannot be called a Being—has no moral import, it supplies no example, succour, or inspiration. The sage may for a moment have a superhuman triumph, in his defiance of the temptations or calamities with which Nature has surrounded him, but it is a lonely triumph of inhuman pride.(2642) It may be the divine element within him which has given him the victory, but this is conceived as the mere effluence of that subtle material force which moves under all the phenomena of physical Nature. In surrendering yourself to the impulse of such a power you are merely putting yourself in line with the other irrational subjects of impersonal law. There is here, it need not be said, no stimulus to moral life, there is the absolute negation of it. The affinity of the human soul with the soul of the world is a mere physical doctrine, however refined and subtle be the “fiery breath” which is the common element of both. But prolonged ethical study and analysis combined with the infiltration of Platonism by degrees to modify profoundly the Stoic conception of the nature of God, and of the relation of man to Him. God tended to become more and more a person, a moral power, a father. And the indwelling God became the voice of conscience, consoling, prompting, supporting, inspiring an ideal of fuller communion in another sphere. Was the longing for continued life, in communion with kindred souls, with a Divine Spirit, which has made us what we are, to be relegated to the limbo of anthropomorphic dreams?

Seneca, as we have seen in a former chapter, still retains some of the hard orthodoxy of the older Stoicism. In his letters to Lucilius he occasionally uses the language of the old Stoic materialism.(2643) But there can be little doubt that Seneca had assimilated other conceptions antagonistic to it. God becomes more a Person, distinct from the world, which He has created, which He governs, which He directs to moral ends.(2644) He is not merely the highest reason, He is also the perfect wisdom, holiness, and love. He is no longer a mere blind force or fate; He is the loving, watchful Father, and good men are His sons. The apparent calamities which they have to suffer are only a necessary discipline, for, “whom He loves He tries and hardens by chastisement.”(2645) God can never really injure, for His nature is love, and we are continually loaded with His benefits.(2646) In his view of the constitution of man, Seneca has deviated even further from the creed of his school. He appears indeed to assert sometimes that the soul is material, but it is matter so fine and subtle as to be indistinguishable from what we call spirit. And the ethical studies of Seneca compelled him to abandon the Stoic doctrine of the simple unity of the soul for the Platonic dualism, with the opposition of reason and animal impulse. The latter has its seat in the body, or the flesh, as he often calls it. And of the flesh he speaks with all the contempt of the Phaedo. It is a mere shell, a fetter, a prison; or a humble hostelry which the soul occupies only for a brief space.(2647) With the flesh the spirit must wage perpetual war, as the alien power which cramps its native energies, darkens its vision, and perverts its judgment of the truth. The true life of the spirit will, as in the theology of Plato, only begin when the unequal partnership is dissolved.(2648)

The orthodox Stoic doctrine allowed a limited immortality, till the next great cosmic conflagration. But it was doubtful whether even this continued existence was real personal life, and with some Stoic doctors it was a privilege confined to the greater souls.(2649) Like nearly all philosophers of this age, Seneca occasionally seems to admit the possibility of a return to antenatal nothingness at death. “Non potest miser esse qui nullus est” is a consolation often administered even by those who have the hope of something better than the peace of annihilation.(2650) It was a consolation which might be a very real one to men living in the reign of Nero. Taken at the worst, death can only be dissolution, for the rivers of fire and the tortures of Tartarus are mere figments of poetic fancy. The mind trained in submission to universal law will not shrink from a fate which awaits the universe by fire or cataclysmal change. Its future fate can only be either to dwell calmly for ever among kindred souls, or to be reabsorbed into the general whole.(2651) But in moments of spiritual exaltation, such an alternative does not satisfy Seneca. He has got far beyond the grim submission, or graceful contempt, of aristocratic suicide, or even the faith in a bounded immortality. He has a hope at times apparently more clear than any felt by the Platonic Socrates on the last evening in prison. Death is no longer a sleep, a blank peace following the futile agitations of life: it is the gateway to eternal peace. The brief sojourn in the body is the prelude to a longer and nobler life.(2652) The hour, at which you shudder as the last, is really the birthday of eternity, when the mind, bursting from its fetters, will expatiate in all the joy of its freedom in the light, and have unrolled before it all the secrets and splendour of starry worlds, without a haunting shadow.(2653) Nay, the vision is moralised almost in Christian fashion. The thought of eternity compels us to think of God as witness of every act, to remember that “decisive hour” when, with all veils and disguises removed, the verdict on our life will be pronounced. It also gives the hope of purging away for ever the taint of the flesh and entering on communion with the spirits of the blessed.(2654) Thus as though with the Eternal eyes upon him, a man should shrink from all the baser and meaner side of his corporeal life, and so prepare himself for the great ordeal, and the beatitude of the life to come.

In the apocalypse of Seneca a new note is struck in pagan meditation on the immortality. We have left far behind the thought of the Manes haunting the ancestral tomb, and soothed in returning years by the jet of wine or the bunch of violets. We are no longer watching, with Pindar or Virgil, the spirits basking in Elysian meads and fanned by ocean breezes. We are far on the way to the City of God, cujus fundamenta in montibus sanctis. And indeed Seneca has probably travelled as far towards it as any one born in heathendom ever did. It is not wonderful that, in the fierce religious struggle of the fourth century, his moral enthusiasm, his view of this life as a probation for the next, his glowing vision of an almost Christian heaven, should have suggested an imaginary intercourse with St Paul.(2655)

What were the influences which really moulded his highest conception of the future state, how much was due to a pure and vigorous spiritual intuition, how much to Platonic and Pythagorean sources, we cannot pretend to say. In Seneca’s most enraptured previsions of immortality, the very exuberance of the rhetoric seems to be the expression of intense personal feeling. But Seneca’s was a very open and sensitive mind. One of his teachers was Sotion, who, like his master Sextius, was called a Pythagorean, and who, on true Pythagorean principles, taught Seneca to abstain from animal food.(2656) We may be sure that no Pythagorean teacher of that age would fail to discuss with his pupil the problem of the future life. It is true that Seneca only once or twice alludes to the doctrine of a previous life, and he only mentions the Pythagorean school to record the fact that in his day it was without a head.(2657) But that does not preclude the supposition that he may have felt its influence in the formative years of youth. And the Pythagoreans of the early empire were a highly eclectic school. They still reproduced the spirit of their founder in mathematical symbolism, in the ideal of asceticism, in a pronounced religious tendency.(2658) But they had absorbed much from Platonism, as well as from the Lyceum and the Porch. These mingled influences also account for the profound alterations which Stoicism had undergone in the mind of Seneca. And his contempt for the body or the flesh, and many of the phrases in which its cramping, lowering influences are described, savour of the Pythagorean and Platonist schools.

But Seneca is an inconsistent, though eloquent and powerful, expounder of that faith in personal immortality, with its moral consequences, which goes back through many ages to Plato, to Pythagoras, to the obscure apostles of the Orphic revelation, perhaps to Egypt.(2659) The mythical Orpheus represents, in the field of religion and in the theory of life and death, an immense revolution in Greek thought and an enduring spirit which produced a profound effect down to the last years of paganism in the West.(2660) With the names of Orpheus and Pythagoras are connected the assured faith in immortality, the conception of this life as only preparatory and secondary to the next, the need for purgation and expiation for deeds done in the body, the doctrine of transmigration and successive lives, possibly in animal forms. Orpheus was also the mythical founder of mysteries in whose secret lore the initiated were always supposed to receive some comforting assurance of a life to come.(2661) A spokesman in one of Cicero’s dialogues recalls with intense gratitude the light of hope and cheerfulness which the holy rites had shed for him both on life and death.(2662) And Plutarch, on the death of their daughter, reminded his wife of the soothing words which they had together heard from the hierophant in the Dionysiac mysteries.(2663) Long before their day Plato had often, on these high themes, sought a kind of high ecclesiastical sanction or suggestion for the tentative conclusions of dialectic.(2664) The great name of Orpheus, and the mystic lore of this esoteric faith, had indeed in Plato’s day been sadly cheapened and degraded by a crowd of mercenary impostors.(2665) And even the venerable rites of Eleusis may have contained an element of coarseness, descending from times when the processes of nature were regarded unveiled.(2666) But philosophy and reason, which purged and elevated religion as a whole, did the same service for the mysteries, and Orphic and Pythagorean became almost convertible.(2667) The systems represent a converging effort to solve those great questions which lie on the borderland of religion and philosophy, questions on which the speculative intellect is so often foiled, and has to fall back on the support of faith and religious intuition.(2668) In an age which had forsaken curious speculation, whose whole interest was concentrated on the moral life, an age which longed for spiritual vision and supernatural support, an essentially religious philosophy like the new Pythagoreanism was sure to be a great power. Gathering up impartially whatever suited its main end from the ancient schools, maintaining a scrupulous reverence for all the devotion of the past, it shed over all a higher light, issuing, as its votaries believed, from the lands of the dawn.(2669) Keeping a consecrated place for all the gods of popular tradition, linking men to the Infinite by a graduated hierarchy of spirits with their home in the stars, it rose to the conception of the One, pure, passionless Being to whom no bloody sacrifice is to be offered, who is to be worshipped best by silent adoration and a life of purity. And in cultivating this purity, the grossness of the body must be attenuated by a strict rule of life.(2670) And though the Highest be so remote and so ethereal, He has not left us without messengers and interpreters to bridge the vast interval between us and the Infinite, by means of dream and vision and oracle. A world of strange daemonic life surrounds us, a world of spirits and heroic souls akin to ours.(2671) For though we are immersed in the alien element of the flesh, yet our complex soul has a divine part, which may even here below have converse with the Divine. During its period of duress and probation, it may indeed become irremediably tainted by contact with matter. It may also, hearkening to the voice of philosophy, hold itself clear and pure from such defilement. When the mortal severance of the two natures comes, the divine part does not perish with its mouldering prison, but it may have a very different destiny in the ages to come, according to the manner of its earthly life. This life and the eternal state are linked in an inevitable moral sequence; as we sow, so shall we reap in successive lives. There is a Great Judgment in the unseen world, with momentous, age-long effects. The spirit which has refused to yield to the seductions of the flesh may, in the coming life, rise to empyrean heights beyond human imagination to picture. The soul which has been imbruted by its environment may have to pass a long ordeal of three thousand years, and then return to another sojourn in human form, or it may sink hopelessly to ever lower depths of degradation.

The biography of Apollonius of Tyana is, of course, in one sense a romance.(2672) Yet its tales of miracle should hardly be allowed to obscure its value as a picture of the beliefs of that age. We cannot doubt that the Pythagorean apostle of the time of the Flavians went all over the Roman world, preaching his gospel of moral and ritual purity, kindling or satisfying the faith in the world of spirit, striving in a strange fashion to reconcile a mystic monotheism and devotion to a pure life of the soul with a scrupulous reverence for all the mythologies. It may, at first sight, appear strange that a mystic like Apollonius, of the Pythagorean school, should so seldom allude to the subject of immortality. The truth is that Apollonius was not a dogmatic preacher; he dealt little in theories. His chief business, as he conceived it, was with practical morality, and the reform or restoration of ritual where it had fallen into desuetude and decay.(2673) Penetrated as he was with the faith in a spiritual world, he seems to assume as a postulate the eternity of the soul, and its incarnation for a brief space on earth. During its sojourn in the flesh, it is visited by visions from on high, and such revelations are vouchsafed in proportion to its ascetic purity.(2674) What conception of the life to come Apollonius entertained we cannot say; but its reality to him was a self-evident truth. We are surrounded by the spirits of the departed, although we know it not. Sailing among the islands of the Aegean, he once gratified his disciples by the tale of his having met the shade of Achilles at his tomb in the Troad.(2675) Men said that the hero was really dead, and in the old home of the Myrmidons, his worship was forgotten. But Apollonius, in a prayer which he had learnt from the sages on the Ganges, called upon the heroic shade to dispel all doubts by appearing at his call. At once an earthquake shook the tomb, and a fair youthful form was by his side of wondrous beauty and superhuman stature, clothed in a Thessalian mantle. His stature grew more majestic, and his beauty more glorious as Apollonius gazed. But the sage had no weak fears in the presence even of so august a spirit, and pressed him with questions which savour far more of antiquarian than spiritual interest. Was Helen really in Troy? Why does not Homer mention Palamedes? The hero resolved his doubts, sent a warning message to the Thessalians to restore his forgotten honours, and in a soft splendour vanished at the first cock-crow.(2676)

The biography of Apollonius closes with a tale which throws a strong light on the spiritual cravings of that age. The sage firmly believed in transmigration and immortality, although he discouraged debate on these high themes.(2677) After his death, the youth of Tyana were much occupied with solemn thoughts. But there was a sceptic among them who had vainly besought the departed philosopher to return from spiritland and dispel his doubts as to the future life. At last one day he fell asleep among his companions, and then suddenly started up as one demented, with the cry—“I believe thee.” Then he told his friends that he had seen the spirit of the sage, that he had been actually among them, though they knew it not, chanting a marvellous song of life and death. It told of the escape of the soul from the mouldering frame and of its swift flight to ethereal worlds. “Thou shalt know all when thou art no more; but while thou art yet among the living, why seek to pierce the mystery?”(2678)

The new Platonist school, with Plutarch and Maximus at their head, were, in this age, the great apostles of the hope of immortality. Platonists in their theory of mind and God, Neo-Pythagorean in their faith in the openness of the human spirit at its best to supernatural influences, they felt the doctrine of the coming life to be axiomatic. It is true that the author of the Consolation to Apollonius, seems at times to waver, as Seneca did, between the idea of extinction at death and the hope of eternal beatitude.(2679) This piece is full of pessimist thoughts of life, and embalms many a sad saying of the Greek poets on its shortness and its misery.(2680) Bringing far more sorrow than joy, life may well be regarded as a mysterious punishment. That Thracian tribe which mourned at each birth as others do at death, had a true philosophy of man’s estate. The great consolation is that, in the phrase of Heraclitus, death and life are one, we are dying every moment from our birth. Death is the great healer, in the words of Aeschylus, the deliverer from the curse of existence, whether it be an eternal sleep or a far journey into an unknown land. The prospect of blank nothingness offers no terrors; for the soul only returns to its original unconsciousness. But this was hardly a congenial mood to the author, and before the close, he falls back on the solace of mystic tradition or poetic vision, that, for the nobler sort, there is a place prepared in the ages to come, after the Great Judgment, when all souls, naked and stripped of all trappings and disguises, shall have to answer for the deeds done in the body.(2681) The same faith is professed by Plutarch to his wife in the Consolation on the death of their little daughter, which took place while Plutarch was from home. The loss of a pure bright young soul, full of love and kindness to all, even to her lifeless toys, was evidently a heavy blow.(2682) But Plutarch praises his wife’s simple restraint and abstinence from the effusive parade of conventional mourning. All such displays seemed to him a rather vulgar intemperance and self-indulgence.(2683) And why grieve for one who is spared all grief? She had her little joys, and, knowing no other, she suffers no pain of loss. Yet Plutarch would not have his wife accept the cold consolation that death brings unconsciousness. He reminds her of the brighter, more cheering vision which they have enjoyed together as communicants in the Dionysiac mysteries. If the soul is undying, if it is of divine parentage and has a divine destiny, then the shortness of its imprisonment and exile is a blessing. The captive bird may come by use and wont actually to love its cage. And the worst misery of old age is not grey hairs and weakness, but a dull absorption in the carnal and forgetfulness of divine things. “Whom the gods love die young.” By calling them back early, they save them from long wanderings.(2684)

Plutarch’s belief in immortality is a religious faith, a practical postulate. He nowhere discusses the bases of the belief in an exhaustive way. It is rather inseparable from his conception of God and His justice, and the relation of the human soul to God.(2685) He admits that the prospect of reward or punishment in another world has but little influence on men’s conduct.(2686) Few believe in the tales of tortures of the damned. And those who do can soothe their fears, and purchase a gross immortality, by initiations and indulgences.(2687) Yet it is impossible to doubt that to Plutarch the hope of the eternal life was a precious possession. He assails with force, and even asperity, the Epicurean school for their attempt to rob humanity of it, on the pretext of relieving men of a load of superstitious fears. They are like men on board a ship who, letting the passengers know that they have no pilot, console them with the further information that it does not matter, as they are bound to drive upon the rocks.(2688) The great promise of Epicurus was to free men from the spectral terrors with which poetic fancy had filled the scenery of the under world. But in doing so, he invested death with a new horror infinitely worse than the fabled tortures of the damned. It was a subtle fallacy which taught that, as annihilation involves the extinction of consciousness, the lamented loss of the joys and vivid energy of life was a mere imagination projected on a blank future where no regret could ever disturb the tranquillity of nothingness(2689). Plutarch took his stand on psychology. The passion for continued existence is, as a matter of fact, the most imperious in our nature. With the belief in immortality, Epicurus sweeps away the strongest and dearest hopes of the mass of men. This life is indeed full of pain and sorrow; yet men cling to it passionately, merely as life, in the darkest hours. And they are ready to brave the worst horrors of Cerberus and Chimaera for the chance of continued existence.(2690) The privation of a dream of happiness in another world is a real loss, even though, when the grey day of nothingness dawns, the consciousness of loss be gone. Is it a light thing to tell the nobler spirits, the moral athletes, who have battled with evil all life long, that they have been contending for a visionary crown?(2691) Is it nothing to the idealist who, amid all the obstructions of the life in the flesh, has been fostering his nobler powers, in the hope of eternal freedom and the full vision of truth, that that real life to which he fancied death was only the gateway is, after all, a mere illusion? Nor does Plutarch disdain to take account of that vivacity of love which in all ages has sought to soften the bitterness of parting by the hope of reunion and recognition in other worlds.(2692)

The Consolation to Apollonius only refers briefly to the punishment of lawless wealth and power, as the complement to the reward of virtue.(2693) But this aspect of immortality is dwelt on at length in the remarkable treatise on the Delays of the Divine Vengeance. The problem of hereditary guilt, and the punishment of the children for the sins of the fathers in this world, in view of the justice and benevolence of God, leads on to the thought of another tribunal which may terribly correct the injustices of time.(2694) The doctrine of Divine providence and the doctrine of immortality stand or fall together.(2695) God could not take so much care for ephemeral souls, blooming for a brief space and then withering away, as in the women’s soon-fading gardens of Adonis.(2696) Above all, Apollo would be the greatest deceiver, the god who has so often solemnly from the tripod ordered rites of expiation and posthumous honours to be paid to lofty souls departed.(2697) Yet, like his great master Plato, Plutarch felt that the full assurance of the long dream of humanity lies beyond the veil—that we know not what we shall be. And, like the master, he invoked the apocalyptic power of the religious and poetic imagination to fortify the hesitating conclusions of the reason.

The visionary power and charm of the great master, whose reign was to be prolonged for ages after Plutarch’s time, is seen, perhaps in a faint reflection, in Plutarch’s mythical forecast of the future of the soul. Plato’s psychology, his sharp opposition of the reason to the lower nature rooted in the flesh, his vision of the Eternal Goodness, his intensely moral conception of the responsibility of life on earth, its boundless possibilities of future unimpeded intuition, its possible eternal degradation through ages of cyclic change, all this, together with kindred elements, perhaps from the Semitic east, had left a profound effect on religious minds. The greatness of S. Augustine is nowhere more apparent than in his frank recognition of the spiritual grandeur of Plato. And that great spirit, so agile in dialectic subtlety, so sublime in its power of rising above the cramping limitations of our mortal life, is also, from its vivid poetic sympathy, most ready to aid weak ordinary souls to climb “the altar stairs.” Never was pure detached intelligence wedded so harmoniously to glowing imagination, never was ethereal truth so clothed in the warm colouring and splendour of the world of sense. Where reason has strained its utmost strength to solve the eternal riddle, ecstatic vision and religious myth, transcending the limits of space and time, must be called in to lend their aid.

Plato and the Platonic Socrates are fully conscious that the conclusions of philosophic reason on a future state can be only tentative. And they often fall back on a divine doctrine, or tradition, or a mythopoeic power by which poetic imagination peoples the dim regions of a world beyond the senses. The visions of Timarchus and Thespesius in Plutarch are, like the Nekuia of the Phaedo and of the Republic, an effort of the religious imagination to penetrate the darkness from which reason recoils. Nor is the effort strange in one who, along with the purest conception of an immaterial spirit, still believed in the efficacy of legend and material symbol to reveal the truth which they veiled.(2698)

Thespesius of Soli, a man of evil life, once fell from a height, was taken up for dead, but revived again on the third day, on the eve of his funeral. He came back to the living an altered man, after a marvellous experience. His soul, on escaping from the body, was swept along a sea of light among the stars.(2699) He saw other souls emerging in the form of fiery bubbles, which burst and gave forth a subtle form in the likeness of man.(2700) Three or four he recognised, and would have spoken to them, but they seemed delirious or senseless, and shrank away from him, forming in the end little companies of their own, who swept along in wild disordered movements, uttering strange cries of wailing or terror. The soul of an old acquaintance then hailed him and became his guide, pointing out that the souls of the really dead cast no shadow, being perfectly pellucid, surrounded by light. Yet some of them are marked with scales and weals and blotches. Adrasteia is the inevitable judge of all, and, through three ministers, three great classes of criminals receive their proper doom. Some are punished swiftly on earth, another class meet with heavier judgment in the shades. The utterly incurable are ruthlessly pursued by the Erinnys, and finally plunged in a dark abyss, of which the horrors might not be told. The second class undergo a fierce purgatorial cleansing, in which some spirits have all their stains wiped out and become clear and lustrous. But where evil is more obstinate, and passion again and again asserts its power, the soul long retains a colour appropriate to its peculiar vice. The mean avaricious soul is dark and squalid; the cruel is blood-red; the envious violet and livid. Short of the worst eternal torture, souls with insatiable craving for fleshly delights, gravitate to a birth into low animal forms.(2701)

Thespesius and his guide are then swept on wings of light to other and less gloomy scenes. Over the chasm of Forgetfulness, clothed in its recesses with flowers and herbs which exhale a fragrant odour, the opening through which Dionysus had passed to his place among the gods, floated a cloud of spirits like birds, drinking in the fragrance with mirth and gladness. On again they passed, till they came to a crater which received the flow of many-coloured streams, snow-white or rainbow-hued,(2702) and hard by was the oracle of Night and Selene, from which issue dreams and phantoms to wander among men. Then Thespesius was dazzled with the radiance which shot from the Delphic tripod upwards to the peaks of Parnassus; and, blinded by the radiance, he could only hear the shrill voice of a woman chanting a song which seemed to tell of the hour of his own death. The woman, his guide explained, was the Sibyl who dwells on the face of the moon. The sweep of the moon’s onward course prevented him catching the Sibyl’s words to the full, but he heard a prophecy of the desolation of Campania by the fires of Vesuvius, and the death of the emperor.

Other scenes of punishment follow, among which Thespesius saw his own father rising from the abyss, covered with weals and marks of torture which had been inflicted for a long-buried crime. Finally, the friendly guide vanished, and Thespesius was forced onwards by dread spectral forms to witness fresh scenes of torment. The hypocrite who had hidden his vices under a veil of decorum was forced, with infinite pain of contortion, to turn out his inmost soul. The avaricious were plunged by daemons by turns in three lakes, one of boiling gold, one of freezing lead, and one of hardest iron. But the worst fate of all was reserved for those whose sins had been visited on their innocent descendants upon earth, who pursued them with curses, or clung around them in clouds like bees or bats, keeping ever poignant the memory of transmitted guilt and suffering.(2703)

The vision of Timarchus, in the piece on the Genius of Socrates, has a rather different motive from that which inspired the vision of Thespesius. Thespesius came back with a message as to the endless consequences of sin in worlds beyond the senses, and the far-reaching responsibilities of the life on earth. The experiences of Timarchus in the cave of Trophonius were intended to teach the doctrine of the existence, apart from the lower powers akin to fleshly nature, of the pure intelligence or daemon, which, coming from the Divine world, can catch its voices and transmit them to the mortal life here below. Timarchus made the descent into the cave of Trophonius and spent in its weird darkness two nights and a day, during which he saw a wondrous revelation of the spirit-world.(2704) His higher part, escaping from the sutures of the head, emerged in pellucid ether. There was no trace of earthly scenery, but countless islands swept around him, gleaming with the shifting colours of lambent fire, amid tones coming from ethereal distances.(2705) From a yawning abyss of surging darkness arose endless wailings and moans. An unseen guide explained to him the fourfold division of the universe and the boundaries of its provinces. High above all is the sphere of the One and the Invisible. Next in order is the region of pure mind, of which the Sun is lord. The third is the debatable land between pure intelligence and the sensible and mortal—the region of soul, whose mistress is the moon. Styx is the boundary between this lunar kingdom and the low world of matter, sin, and death. The three realms beneath the highest correspond to the three elements of our composite nature,—mind, soul, and body.(2706) This mortal life is a temporary and unequal partnership of the Divine reason with the lower appetites, which have their roots in the flesh. It is an exile, an imprisonment; it is also a probation of the higher part of human nature, and its escape comes to it by a twofold death. The first, imperfect and incomplete, is the severance of soul from body in what men call death, the falling away of the gross wrappings of matter. This death is under the sway of Demeter. The second, under the care of Persephone, is a slower process, in which the ethereal reason, the true eternal personality of man, is finally released from association with the passionate and sensitive nature, which is akin to the bodily organism. After the first corporeal death, all souls wander for a time in the space between the moon and earth. In the vision of Timarchus, he saw over the chasm of darkness a host of stars with a curious variety of motion. Some shot up from the gulf with a straight decided impetus. Others wavered in deflexions to right or left, or, after an upward movement, plunged again into the abyss. These motions, as the invisible guide expounded, represent the various tendencies of souls, corresponding to the strength or weakness of the spiritual force within them. All souls have an element of the Divine reason, but it is variously blended with the baser elements in different natures. In some it becomes completely sunk and absorbed in the life of the senses. In others, the rational part holds itself above the lower bodily life, and maintains an almost separate existence. And yet there are natures in which the rational and irrational elements wage a long and indecisive conflict until, slowly, at last, the passions recognise their rightful master, and become obedient to the heavenly voice within. The debased and hopeless souls, rising for a moment after death, are repelled with fierce angry flashes by the moon, and fall back again to the world of sense and corruption, to undergo a second birth. The purer souls are received by her for a loftier destiny. In some, the pure spiritual part is finally released by the love of the Sun from the lower powers of the soul, which wither and fade away as the body does on earth. Others, still retaining the composite nature, though no longer tainted by the flesh, dwell in the moon as daemons, but often revisit the earth on various missions, to furnish inspiration to oracles and mysteries, to save men from crime or to punish, to help the struggling by land or sea. But even the daemons may fall from their high estate. If, in their duties of providence and succour, they show anger or favour or envy, they may be thrust down once more into the purgatory of material form.(2707)

It may well be that the unsympathetic critic will regard such an imaginative invasion of the unseen as a freak of lawless fancy, hardly worth chronicling. And like all similar attempts, the apocalypse of Plutarch may easily be treated with an airy ridicule. To a more serious criticism, it seems vitiated by a radical inconsistency. Starting with the principle of the absolutely immaterial nature of the immortal part of man, it yet depicts its future existence in the warmest colours of the world of sense. Its struggles, its tortures, its beatitude are described in terms which might seem fitting only to a corporeal nature. All this is true; and yet the answer which Plutarch would probably have made to any such cavils is very simple. How can you speak of pure disembodied spirit at all, how can you imagine it, save in the symbolism of ordinary speech? Refine and subtilise your language to the very uttermost, and it will still retain associations and reminiscences, however faint and distant, of the material world. Myth and symbol are necessary to any expression of human thought alike about God and the future of the soul. The Infinite Spirit and the future destiny of the finite, which is His child, are equally beyond the range of human sense and speech. When the human spirit has exhausted all its efforts of imagination to pierce the darkness of the world beyond the grave, it takes refuge in some religious system which claims to have a divine message and speaks in the tones of another world. The voice from eternity came to troubled heathendom from Egypt and the East.

III. THE OLD ROMAN RELIGION

It is well known that, from the second Punic War to the revival of Augustus, old Roman religion was falling into decay. Yet sweeping assertions about the religious condition of any age must he taken with some reserve. They are often unsafe about a contemporary society; they must be still more so with regard to a society which is known to us almost entirely through the literary remains of a comparatively small cultivated class. Even among that limited circle, we can know only the opinions of a few, and hardly anything of its silent members, still less of the feelings of its women and dependents. A deep shadow rests on those remote granges and quiet country towns in Samnium or Lombardy where character remained untainted in the days of Nero or Domitian, and where the religion of Numa long defied the penal edicts of Theodosius and Honorius. Lucretius, whose mission it was to liberate men from the terrors of old Latin and Etrurian superstition, was not contending against an imaginary foe. The sombre enthusiasm which he throws into the conflict reveals the strength of the enemy. The grandmother of Atticus and Terentia, the wife of Cicero, were timorous devotees. Among the aristocratic augurs of Cicero’s day there were firm believers in the sacred birds; and Lentulus, a confederate of Catiline, trusted implicitly in the oracles of the Sibyl.(2708)

Still there can be no doubt that in the governing and thinking class of the last century of the Republic, scepticism and even open contempt for the old religion were rampant. Many causes were at work to produce this decadence of old Roman faith. It was hardly possible for the cultivated Roman of the days of Scipio Aemilianus, or of Cicero and Caesar, who had fought and travelled in many lands, and studied their mythologies and philosophies, to acquiesce in the faith of the simple farmers of Latium, who founded the Ambarvalia and Lupercalia, who offered the entrails of a dog to Robigus(2709) and milk to Pales and Silvanus, who worshipped Jupiter Feretrius under the mountain oak.(2710) Since those far-off days, Latium had come under many influences, and added many new deities to her pantheon. The gods of Hellas had come to be identified with the gods of Rome, or to share their honours. Syncretism had been at work in Italy centuries before the days of Plutarch and Aristides. And the old Italian deities, who had only a shadowy personality, with no poetry of legend to invest them with human interest, melted into one another or into forms of alien mythology. Greek literature became familiar to the educated from the Hannibalic war, and a writer like Euripides, who had a great popularity, must have influenced many by the audacious skill with which he lowered the dignity and dimmed the radiance of the great figures of Greek legend. The comic stage improved upon the lesson. Early in the second century Ennius translated the Sacred Histories of Euhemerus, and familiarised his countrymen with a theory which reduced Jupiter and Saturn, Faunus and Hercules, to the stature of earthly kings and warriors. But Greek philosophy was the great solvent of faith. The systems of the New Academy and Epicurus were openly or insidiously hostile to religious belief. But they had not so long and powerful a reign over the Roman mind as Stoicism, and, although the earlier Stoicism extended a philosophic patronage to popular religion, it may be doubted whether it stimulated faith. There was indeed a certain affinity between Stoical doctrine and old Roman religion, as there was between Stoic morals and old Roman character. In resolving the gods by allegory and pseudo-scientific theory into various potencies of the great World-Soul, the follower of Zeno did not seem to do much violence to the vaguely personified abstractions of the old Latin creed. Above all, with the exception of Panaetius, the Stoic doctors did not throw doubt on the powers of divination and augury, so essential an element in the religion of Rome. The power to read the future was a natural corollary to the providence and benevolence of the gods.(2711) Yet, although the Stoic might strive to discover the germ of truth, he did not conceal his contempt for the husk of mythology in which it was hidden, and for many of the practices of worship.(2712)

Quintus Scaevola and Varro applied all the forces of subtle antiquarianism and reverence to sustain the ancestral faith. But they also drew the line sharply between the religion of philosophy and the religion of the State. And Varro went so far as to say that the popular religion was the creation of early statesmen,(2713) and that if the work had to be done again, it might be done better in the light of philosophy. The Stoic in Cicero, as Seneca did after him, treated the tales of the gods as mere anile superstition.(2714) It is probable that such was the tone, in their retired debates, of the remarkable circle which surrounded Scipio and Laelius. Panaetius, their philosophic guide, had less sympathy than any great Stoic with popular theology.(2715) Polybius gave small place to Providence in human affairs, and regarded Roman religion as the device of statesmen to control the masses by mystery and terror.(2716) Yet these men were enthusiastic champions of a system which they regarded as irrational, but which was consecrated by immemorial antiquity. Laelius defended the institutions of Numa in a speech of golden eloquence which moved the admiration of Cicero, just as Symmachus defended them five centuries later before the council of Valentinian.(2717) The divorce between esoteric belief and official profession must have insidiously lowered the moral tone of those who were at once thinkers and statesmen. Such a false position struck some of the speakers in Cicero’s theological dialogues, and it makes his own opinions an enigma.(2718) The external and utilitarian attitude to the State religion hardly secured even punctual or reverent conformity in the last age of the Republic. Divination and augury had become mere engines of political intrigue, and the aristocratic magistrate could hardly take the omens without a smile. Varro could not repress the fear that the old religion, on which he expended such a wealth of learning, might perish from mere negligence.(2719) The knowledge of liturgical usage began to fade, and Varro had to recall the very names of forgotten gods. An ancient priesthood of the highest rank remained unfilled for seventy years.(2720) Scores of the most venerable temples were allowed to fall into ruin,(2721) and ancient brotherhoods like the Titii and Fratres Arvales are hardly heard of for generations before the reforms of the Augustan age.

It is not within the scope of this work to enter minutely into the subject of that great effort of reform or reaction. It is commonly said that the cool imperial statesman had chiefly political ends in view, and especially the aggrandisement and security of the principate. And certainly Ovid, who strove to interest his countrymen in the revival of their religion, does not display much seriousness in religion or morals. He treats as lightly the amours of Olympus as the intrigues of the Campus Martius and the Circus. Yet it may well have been that after the terrible orgies of civil strife through which the Roman world had passed, Augustus was the convinced representative of a repentant wish to return to the old paths. The Roman character, through all wild aberrations of a trying destiny, was an enduring type. And Augustus, if he may have indulged in impious revels in his youth, which recall the wanton freaks of Alcibiades,(2722) had two great characteristics of the old Roman mind, formalism and superstition. He had an infinite faith in dreams and omens. He would begin no serious business on the Nones.(2723) When he had to pronounce a funeral oration over his sister, Octavia, he had a curtain drawn before the corpse, lest the eyes of the pontiff might be polluted by the sight of death.(2724) We may think that his religious revival was not inspired by real religious sentiment. Yet it is well to remind ourselves that old Roman religion, while it consecrated and solemnised the scenes and acts of human life, was essentially a formal religion; the opus operatum was the important thing. Its business was to avert the anger or win the favour of dim unearthly powers; it was not primarily to purify or elevate the soul. Above all, it was interwoven from the beginning with the whole fabric of society and the State. Four centuries after Augustus was in his grave, it was only by a violent wrench, which inflicted infinite torture even on pagan mystics of the Neoplatonist school, that Rome was severed from the gods who had been the guardians and partners of her career for twelve hundred years. The altar of Victory which Augustus had placed in the Senate-house, and before which twelve generations of senators after him offered their prayers for the chief of the State, the most sacred symbol of the pagan Empire, was only removed after a fierce, obstinate struggle.

The religious revival of Augustus may not have aroused any deep religious sentiment; that, as we shall see, was to come from a different source. But it gave a fresh life to the formal religion of the State, which maintained itself till within a few years before the invasion of Alaric. The title Augustus which the new emperor assumed was one which, to the Roman mind, associated him with the majesty of Jupiter and the sanctity of all holy places and solemn rites.(2725) It was the beginning of that theocratic theory of monarchy which was to culminate, under the influence of Sun-worship, in the third century, and to propagate itself into ages far removed from the worship of Jupiter or the Sun. Although the counsels of Maecenas, recorded by Dion Cassius, may be apocryphal, Augustus acted in their spirit.(2726) As triumvir he had raised a shrine to Isis,(2727) as emperor he frowned on alien worships.(2728) His mission was to restore the ancient religion of Latium. He burnt two thousand books of spurious augury, retaining only the Sibylline oracles.(2729) He restored the ancient temples, some of them, like those of Jupiter Feretrius and Juno Sospita, coeval with the Roman State, and encouraged his friends to do the same for other venerable monuments of devotion. The most lavish gifts of gold and jewels were dedicated in the Capitoline temples. The precision of ancient augury was restored. Ancient priesthoods which had been long vacant were filled up, and the sacred colleges were raised in dignity and wealth.(2730) Special care was taken to recall the vestals to the chaste dignity from which they had fallen for a hundred years. Before taking his seat, each senator was required to make a prayer, with an offering of incense and wine before the altar. Three worships, specially connected with the fortunes of Augustus or his race,—those of Venus Genetrix, Mars Ultor, and the Palatine Apollo,—were revived with added splendour.(2731) The emperor paid special attention to the ancient sacred colleges, such as the Salii and Arvales, which went back to days far earlier than the Republic. Amid all the cares of State, he attended their meetings punctually. The dangerous right of co-optation was quietly withdrawn, till the members in the end owed their appointment to the sacerdotal chief of the State.(2732) The colleges became the most courtly and deferential supports of the prince’s power. Prayers for his safety soon found a place in their antique litanies. It has been said with some truth that the Salii and Arvales seem to be thinking more of the emperors than of the gods. The colleges had a courtly memory for all anniversaries in the imperial family. The Arval brothers achieved the infamy of complimenting Nero on his return after the murder of Agrippina,(2733) and made vows of equal fervour for all the emperors of the year 69.(2734)

But it was through the chief pontificate that the emperors did most at once to fortify and dignify their secular power, and to prolong the reign of the old Latin religion. It was the highest religious dignity of ancient Rome. The college of which the emperor, as Pontifex Maximus, was head exercised a supreme and comprehensive control over the whole field of religion.(2735) It was charged with the duty of maintaining the ancestral purity and exactness of the national worship, and of repressing tendencies to innovation and the adoption of alien rites. It selected the virgins who guarded the eternal fire, and sat in judgment on erring vestals and their betrayers. It had special jurisdiction in questions of adoption, burial, and sacred sites.(2736) From Augustus every emperor was also chief pontiff;(2737) even the Christian princes from Constantine to Valentinian and Valens bear the honoured title in the inscriptions, and accepted the pontifical robes.(2738) Thus the emperors strove in their religious attributes to connect themselves with the sacred tradition of Numa and the Roman kings. And, as time went on, the imperial house claimed a growing share in the pontifical honours. Nero, indeed, had been a member of all the sacred colleges as well as chief pontiff.(2739) But down to the reign of Vespasian only one of the “Caesares” could belong to the sacred college. But his sons Titus and Domitian were co-opted to the pontificate and all the priestly colleges before his death.(2740) From Hadrian the pontificate and all the highest sacerdotal honours were held by all designated successors of the emperor.(2741) Antoninus Pius has the insignia of four priestly colleges on his coins.(2742) M. Aurelius was one of the Salian brotherhood in his eighth year,(2743) and was received into all the colleges at nineteen.(2744) Commodus had reached the same sacred honours before he assumed the toga,(2745) and in five years more was Pontifex Maximus. Thus deeply had the policy of Augustus sunk into the minds of his successors. It is little wonder that never in the great days of the Republic were the forms of ancient religion more scrupulously observed than in the reign of M. Aurelius.(2746)

Private opinion after the Augustan revival greatly varied as to matters of faith. Men like the elder Pliny and Seneca scoffed at anthropomorphic religion. Men like Juvenal and Tacitus maintained a wavering attitude, with probably a receding faith. Others like Suetonius were rapacious collectors of every scrap of the miraculous. The emperors who succeeded Augustus were, with the exception of Nero, loyal supporters and protectors of the religion of the State. Tiberius, although personally careless of religion, displayed a scrupulous respect for ancient usage in filling up the ancient priesthoods, and in guarding the Sibylline verses from interpolations.(2747) He also frowned on the imported rites of Egypt.(2748) Claudius, at once pedantic and superstitious, revived venerable rites of the days of Tullus Hostilius, and, when an ill-omened bird alighted on the temple of Jupiter, as supreme pontiff, the emperor pronounced the solemn form of expiation before the assembled people.(2749) Nero, and the Neronian competitors for the Empire, in the fierce conflict which followed his death, were, indeed, often, though not always, careless of ancient rite, but they were all the slaves of superstition.(2750) The Flavians and Antonines were religious conservatives of the spirit of Augustus. There is a monument to Vespasian of the year 78 A.D. as “the restorer of temples and public ceremonies.”(2751) The restoration of the Capitol, which had been burned down in the civil war, was one of the first tasks of his reign. And the ceremony made such an impression on the imagination of the youthful Tacitus, that he has recorded with studied care the stately and accurate ritual of olden time which was observed by the emperor.(2752) Domitian carried on the restoration on even a more splendid scale; he was a devotee of Minerva, and a rigorous vindicator of old ascetic religious law.(2753) The emperor Hadrian, whose character is an enigma of contrasts, to judge by his last famous jeu d’esprit on his death-bed, probably died a sceptic. Yet his biographer tells us that he was a careful guardian of the ancient ritual.(2754) The archaistic fashion in literary taste, which had begun in the first century, and which culminated in Hadrian’s reign, favoured and harmonised with a scrupulous observance of ancient forms in religion.(2755) The genius of one too early taken away has done more than a legion of historic critics to picture for us the sad, dutiful piety of a spirit of the Antonine age, steeped in philosophies which made the passing moment of vivid artistic perception the great end of life, yet still instinct with the old Roman love of immemorial forms at the harvest gathering or the yearly offering to the dead members of the household.(2756) The cheerless negation of Epicurus, and the equally withering theology of the Stoics, could not weaken in Roman hearts the spell of ancestral pieties which clustered round the vault near the grey old country house of the race, looking down on the Tyrrhene sea, or the awe of ancient grove or spring sacred to Silvanus and the Nymphs, or the calm, chastened joy in a ritual in which every act was dictated by a love of ceremonial cleanness and exactness, and redolent of an immemorial past. In such a household, and in such an atmosphere, the two great Antonines were reared. The first, who was before all else an honest country gentleman, fond of hunting, fishing, and the gladness of the vintage at Lorium, never failed to perform all due sacrifices unless he was ill. His coins bear the pictured legends of the infancy of Rome.(2757) M. Aurelius was famous as a boy for his knowledge of Roman ritual. Enrolled in the college of the Salii in his eighth year, he performed all its sacred offices with perfect composure, reciting from memory, with no one to dictate the form, every word of the ancient liturgy which had in his generation become almost unintelligible.(2758) In the terror of the Marcomannic invasion he delayed his departure for the seat of war to summon around him all the priests; he had the city purified in solemn, decorous fashion, not excluding even the rites of alien lands; and for seven days the images of the gods were feasted on their couches along all the streets.(2759)

The emperors from Augustus found religion a potent ally of sovereignty, and the example of the master of the world was a great force. Yet it may well be doubted whether, in the matter of religious conservatism, the emperors were not rather following than leading public opinion. Gods were in those times being created by the score; apotheosis was in the air from the days of Nero to the days of the Severi. Petronius, with an exaggeration which has a certain foundation in fact, affirms that in Croton you could more readily light upon a god than on a man.(2760) The elder Pliny uses almost the same strength of language. The grumbler in Lucian indignantly complains of the fashion in which the ancient gods of Olympus are being overshadowed by the divine parvenus of every clime. And, as we shall presently see, the inscriptions reveal an immense propaganda of worships in tone and spirit apparently hostile to the old religion of the Latin race. Yet the inscriptions also show that the old gods had really little to fear from the new. A survey of the index to almost any volume of the Corpus will convince the student that the Trinity of the Capitol,—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva,—that Hercules and Silvanus, the Nymphs, Semo Sancus and Dea Dia, Mars and Fortuna, so far from being neglected, were apparently more popular than ever.(2761) In an age of growing monotheism the King of the gods was, of course, still supreme in his old ascendency. Jupiter is worshipped under many titles; he is often coupled or identified with some provincial deity of ancient fame.(2762) But Jupiter is everywhere. The Lord of the thunder and the tempest has shrines on the high passes of the Apennines or the Alps,(2763) and soldiers or travellers leave the memorials of their gratitude for his protection on perilous journeys.(2764) The women of Campanian towns go in procession to implore him to send rain.(2765) Antoninus Pius built a temple to Juno Sospita of Lanuvium, where the goddess had a sacred grove, and a worship of great antiquity.(2766) The Quinquatria of Minerva were not only celebrated with special honour by Domitian, but by large and powerful classes who owned her divine patronage, physicians and artists, orators and poets.(2767) Some of the old Latin deities seem to have even grown in popularity under the early Empire. Hercules, the god of plenty, strong truth, and good faith, whose legend is intertwined with the most venerable names in Roman story, has his altars and monuments everywhere.(2768) Combining with his own native Latin character the poetic prestige of his brother of Greek legend, he became the symbol of world-wide conquest, and was associated in the end with the triumph of the “unconquered” Mithra. His image is stamped upon the coins of some of the emperors. Septimius Severus, Caracalla, and Diocletian took him for their great divine patron and ensample.(2769) Silvanus, too, the god of the primeval forest, and, when the forest had receded, the god of the shepherd and the farmer, the guardian of boundaries, acquired a strange vogue in what was eminently an age of cities. One is apt, however, to forget sometimes that it was an age which had also a charming country life. A Roman cavalry officer in Britain has left a memorial of his gratitude to Silvanus for the capture of a wild boar of surpassing size and strength,(2770) which had long defied the hunter. In one of the forest cantons of the Alps a procurator of the imperial estates inscribed his gratitude in a pretty set of verses to the god of the wilds, whose image was enshrined in the fork of a sacred ash.(2771) It is the record of many a day passed in lonely forest tracks, coupled with a prayer to be restored safely to Italian fields and the gardens of Rome. The nymphs and river gods had all their old honours. Chapels and hostelries, in the days of Pliny, rose on the banks of the Clitumnus, where the votaries easily combined pleasure with religious duty. The nymphs receive votive thanks for the discovery of hidden springs, or for the reappearance of some fountain long dried up.(2772) Aesculapius, who had been naturalised in Italy since the beginning of the third century B.C., sprang to a foremost place in the age of the Antonines. Whether it was “an age of valetudinarians,” as has been said, may be doubtful; but it was an age eagerly in quest of the health which so often comes from the quiet mind. Whatever we may think of the powers of the old Olympians, there can be no doubt about the beneficent influence of the god of Epidaurus. He was summoned to Rome 300 years before Christ, and obtained a home in the island in the Tiber, where for ages he gave his succour in dreams. His worship spread far and wide, and was one of the last to succumb to the advance of the Church.(2773)

The unassailable permanence of the old religion may perhaps be still more vividly realised in the long unbroken life of sacred colleges, such as the Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The Arval brotherhood was probably the oldest sacred corporation of Latium, as its liturgy, preserved in the Acta from the reign of Augustus to that of Gordian, is the oldest specimen of the Latin language.(2774) According to the legend, the first members were the twelve sons of Acca Larentia, the foster-mother of Romulus, and Romulus himself first held the dignity of master of the brotherhood.(2775) Its patron goddess, Dea Dia,(2776) was, as her very name suggests, one of those dim shadowy conceptions dear to old Roman awe, who was worshipped in the still solitude of ancient groves, on whose trunks no axe of iron might ever ring,(2777) a power as elusive and multiform to picturing fancy as the secret forces which shot up the corn ear from the furrow. The whole tone of the antique ritual savours of a time when the Latin race was a tribe of farmers, believing with a simple faith that the yearly increase of their fields depended on the favour of secret unearthly powers. The meetings of the college took place on three days in May, the precise dates being fixed and solemnly announced by their master on the 3rd of January.(2778) The festival began and ended in the master’s house at Rome, the intermediate day being spent in a sacred grove on the right bank of the Tiber, about four miles from the city. There was much feasting, at which the brethren were attended by the Camilli, four sons of high-born senators. Corn of the new and the preceding year was touched and blessed; libations and incense were offered to the goddess, and all the rites were performed with many changes of costume, which were rigidly observed.(2779) In the ceremonies which took place in the grove, an expiatory sacrifice of two porkers and a white cow was always offered, to atone for the use of any iron implement, or other infringement of the ancient rubric.(2780) Fat lambs were offered in sacrifice to Dea Dia, and ancient earthen vessels of rude make, resembling those of the age of Numa, were adored upon the altar.(2781) Ears of corn, plucked in some neighbouring field, were blessed and passed from the hand of one member to another, and back again in reverse order, and, at last, in the closed temple, along with solemn dancing, the famous chant was intoned from ancient scrolls, the words of which had long become strange even to the antiquary. After another meal in the hall of the brotherhood, the members passed on to the circus and gave the signal for the races to begin.(2782)

This ritual, so little heard of before the time of Augustus, is chiefly known to us from the Acta which have been recovered from the site of the ancient grove. The monuments of it extend from the reign of Augustus to the year 241 A.D.(2783) Members of the highest aristocracy and princes of the imperial house appear on its lists. Its membership was a high distinction, and was sometimes conferred by the potent recommendation of the emperor.(2784) The college evidently became a great support of the imperial power.

The emperors were elected magistri of the College, and we can read that Caligula, Nero, Vespasian, and Titus were present at its meetings. In the opening days of January the most solemn vows are made in old Roman fashion for the emperor’s safety, to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, to Salus and Dea Dia, and they are duly paid by offerings of oxen with gilded horns.(2785) So servile or so devoted to the throne was the brotherhood, that their prayers were offered with equal fervour for three emperors in the awful year 69 A.D.(2786) The vows made for Galba in the first week of January were alertly transferred to the cause of Otho the day after Galba’s murder.(2787) The college met to sacrifice in honour of Otho’s pontificate on the day (March 14) on which he set out to meet his doom in the battle on the Po. Thirteen days after his death, while the spring air was still tainted with the rotting heaps on the plain of Bedriacum, vows as fervent or as politic were registered for Vitellius. In the summer of the following year, the arrival of Vespasian in the capital was celebrated by the Arval brothers with sacrifices to Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Fortuna Redux.(2788)

The college, as a matter of course, paid due honour to the emperor’s birthday and all important anniversaries in his family. It is interesting to see how for years the Neronian circle, the Othos and Vitellii, along with Valerii and Cornelii, appear in all the records of the college.(2789) It was apparently devoted to Nero. The brothers celebrate his birthday and all the civic and sacerdotal honours heaped upon him.(2790) They make vows for his wife Octavia, and soon after, for the safety of Poppaea in childbirth. The matricide dreaded to return from Campania after his unnatural crime, but his admirers knew well the abasement of the Roman aristocracy, and promised him an enthusiastic reception. The Arval brotherhood, which then included a Regulus and a Memmius, redeemed the promise, and voted costly sacrifices for his safe restoration to the capital.(2791) They execrate the secret plots against his sacred person, and offer thanksgiving for the detection of the Pisonian conspiracy.(2792)

The extant prayers and congratulations for the safety of Vespasian are much more quiet and restrained than those for his cruel son Domitian.(2793) The public joy at Domitian’s safe return from ambiguous victories in Germany or Dacia is faithfully re-echoed, and effusive supplications are recorded for his safety from all peril and for the eternity of the Empire whose bounds he has enlarged. There is a sincerer tone in the prayers, in the spring of 101, for the safe return of Trajan, when he was setting out for his first campaign on the Danube, and on his home-coming four years later.(2794) The Arval records of Hadrian’s reign are chiefly noteworthy for his letters to the college, recommending his friends for election.(2795) In the reign of Antoninus Pius the Acta register those perfervid acclamations which meet us in the later Augustan histories:(2796)—“O nos felices qui te Imperatorem videmus; Di te servent in perpetuo; juvenis triumphis, senex Imperator!” The young M. Aurelius is first mentioned in 155 A.D. Probably the sincerest utterance in the Arval liturgies is the petition for his safety, and that of L. Verus, from peril in the years when the Quadi and Marcomanni swept down through Rhaetia and the Julian Alps to the shores of the Adriatic.(2797)

It was thus that the antique ritual of a rustic brotherhood was converted into a potent support of the imperial power. No part of the Augustan revival was perhaps so successful. Probably few of the emperors, or of the aristocratic brothers who intoned the litany for the safety of the imperial house, had much faith in its efficacy. But the ceremony linked the principate with the most venerable traditions of Latium, and with Romulus the first master of the college. When we read the minute and formal record of these coarse sacrifices and rude, fantastic rites, with the chanting of prayers no longer understood, we are amazed at the prolongation for so many ages of religious ideas which the Roman mind might appear to have outgrown. Yet in such inquiries there is often a danger of treating society as a uniform mass, moving together along the same lines, and permeated through all its strata by the same influences. In another chapter we have shown that the masses were probably never so superstitious as in the second century. And the singular thing is that the influx of foreign religions, due to the wide conquests of Rome, never to the end seems to have shaken the supreme attachment of the people to their ancient gods. It is true that the drift towards monotheism was felt even among the crowd. But while the educated might find expression for that tendency in the adoration of Isis or the Sun, the dim monotheism of the people turned to the glorification of Jupiter. Dedications to him are the most numerous in all lands. He is often linked with other gods or all the gods,(2798) but he is always supreme. And, while he is the lord of tempest and thunder,(2799) he is also addressed by epithets which show that he is becoming a moral and spiritual power. On many a stone he appears as the governor and preserver of all things, monitor, guardian, and heavenly patron, highest and best of the heavenly hierarchy.(2800) Yet it is equally clear that other gods are worshipped in the same spirit as of old. Roman religion was essentially practical. Prayer and vow were the means to win temporal blessings. The gods were expected, in return for worship, to be of use to the devotee. It is evident from the inscriptions that this conception of religion was as prevalent in the age of the Antonines, or of the oriental princes, as it was under the Republic. The sailor still offers thanks for his preservation to Neptune and the gods of the sea.(2801) The successful merchant still honours Mercury.(2802) Minerva Memor receives thanks for succour in sickness. A lady of Placentia even pays her vows for the recovery of her hair.(2803) The reappearance of a hidden spring is still attributed to the grace of the Nymphs.(2804) And in many a temple the healing power of Aesculapius is acknowledged by grateful devotees.(2805)

A more difficult problem is presented by the attitude of the cultivated class to the old mythologies. Since the days of Xenophanes and of Plato, philosophy had revolted against the degradation of the Divine character by ancient legend. It had taught for ages the unity of the mysterious Power or Goodness which lies behind the shifting scene of sense. Moreover, philosophy for generations had deserted the heights of speculative inquiry, and addressed itself to the task of applying the spiritual truth which the schools had won to the problems of practical religion and human life. Alike in Cicero, in Seneca, in Plutarch, and M. Aurelius, there are conceptions of God and the worship due to Him, of prayer, of the relation of conduct to religion, which seem irreconcilable with conformity to the old religion of Rome. How could a man, nourished on such spiritual ideas and refined by a thousand years of growing culture, take part in a gross materialistic worship, and even gallantly defend it against all assailants?

The conformity of highly instructed minds to ancient systems which their reason has outgrown is not always to be explained by the easy imputation of dishonesty. And that explanation is even less admissible in ancient than in modern times. Roman religion did not demand any profession of faith in any theory of the unseen; all it required was ceremonial purity and exactness. And the Roman world was never scandalised by the spectacle of a notorious sceptic or libertine holding the office of chief pontiff. If a man were more scrupulous himself, philosophy, whether of the Porch or the Academy, came to his aid. It would tell him that frail humanity, unable to comprehend the Infinite God, had parcelled out and detached his various powers and virtues, which it adored under material forms according to its varying needs.(2806) Or it found a place for all the gods of heathendom, as ministering or mediating spirits in the vast abyss which separates us from the unapproachable and Infinite Spirit.(2807) If the legends which had gathered around the popular gods offended a tender moral sense, men were taught that the apparent grossness was an allegorical husk, or a freak of poetic fancy which concealed a wholesome truth. Thus a pantheist or monotheist, who would never have created such a religious system for himself, was trained to cultivate a double self in matters of religion, to worship reverently with the crowd, and to believe with Zeno or with Plato.

The heathen champion in the dialogue of Minucius Felix maintains that, in the dimness and uncertainty of things, the safest course is to hold fast to the gods of our fathers.(2808) The inclination of the sceptic was fortified by the conservative instinct of the Latin race and its love of precedent and precision of form. Moreover the religion of Numa was probably more than any other involved and intertwined with the whole life of the people. It penetrated the whole fabric of society; it consecrated and dignified every public function, and every act or incident of private life. To desert the ancient gods was to cut oneself off from Roman society, as the Christians were sternly made to feel. No established Church in modern Christendom has probably ever so succeeded in identifying itself with the national life in all its aspects. Alike under the Republic and under the Empire, religion was inseparable from patriotism. The imperial pontiff was bound to watch over the purity and continuity of the Latin rites. He might be a scoffer like Nero, or a spiritually-minded Stoic like M. Aurelius, an Isiac devotee like Commodus, or devoted to the Syrian worships like the Oriental princes of the third century. But he took his duties seriously. He would dance with the Salii, or accept with gratitude the mastership of the Arval brotherhood, or order a lectisternium to ward off a pestilence or a menacing invasion. The imperial colleges still held their meetings on the eve of the revolution of Theodosius. Antiquarian nobles still discussed nice questions of ritual in the reign of Honorius. At the end of the fifth century the Lupercalia were still celebrated with coarse, half-savage rites which went back to the prehistoric times.(2809) The imperial policy, founded by Augustus, no doubt inspired much of this conformity. But old Roman sentiment, the passion expressed with such moving eloquence by Symmachus, to feel himself in touch with a distant past(2810) through a chain of unbroken continuity, was the great support of the State religion in the fourth century as in the first. Yet, among the great nobles who were its last champions—Flavianus, Praetextatus, or Volusianus—there was a spiritual craving for which the religion provided little satisfaction. They sought it in the rites and mysteries of Eastern lands which had little in common with the old Roman religious sentiment. In these alien rites they found a new religious atmosphere. The priest, set apart from the world, with his life-long obligations and the daily offices in the shrine, becomes in some way a minister to the spiritual life of his flock. Instead of cold ceremonial observance, ecstatic emotion is aroused, often to a degree which was perilous to character. Through a series of sacraments, with ascetic preparation for them, the votary rose under priestly guidance to some vision of the eternal world, with a new conception of sin; this life and the next were linked in a moral sequence, with tremendous issues of endless beatitude or endless degradation. In a temple of Magna Mater, Isis, or Mithra in the reign of Julian, we are far away from the worship of the Lares and the offering of a heifer to Dea Dia in the grove on the Tiber. We are travelling towards the spiritual mystery and sacramental consolations of the mediaeval Church.