cordant to racter; to Roman. nant races which constituted the larger part of the Roman world. The Epicurean, with its subtle metaphysics, ils abstract notion of Epicurethe Deity, its imaginative materialism, its milder and more pleasur- anism ac able morals, and perhaps its propensity to degenerate into indolence Greek chaand sensuality, was kindred and congenial to that of Greece, and the Grecian part of the Roman society. The Stoic, with its more Stoicism practical character, its mental strength and self-confidence, its fatalism, its universally diffused and all-governing Deity, the soul of the universe (of which the political power of the all-ruling re* public might appear an image), bore the same analogy to that of Rome. While the more profound thinkers, who could not disguise from themselves the insufficiency of the grounds on which the philosophical systems rested, either settled into a calm and contented scepticism, or with the Academics, formed an eclectic creed from what appeared the better parts of the rest. Such on all the great questions of religion, the divine nature, providence, the origin and future state of the soul (1), was the floating and uncertain state of the human mind. In the department of morals, Philosophy nobly performed her part; but perhaps her success in this respect more clearly displayed her inefficiency. The height to which moral science was carried in the works of Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Antoninus, while it made the breach still wider between the popular religion and the advanced state of the human mind, more vividly displayed the want of a faith, which would associate itself with the purest and loftiest morality; and remarry, as it were, those thoughts and feelings, which connect man with a future state of being, to the practical duties of life (2). For while these speculations occupied the loftier and more thinking minds, what remained for the vulgar of the higher and of the lower orders? Philosophy had shaken the old edifice to its base; and even if it could have confined its more profound and secret doctrines within the circle of its own elect, if its contempt for the old fables of the popular creed had been more jealously guarded, it is impossible but that the irreligion of the upper order must work downwards upon the lower. When religion has, if not avowedly, yet manifestly, sunk into an engine of state policy, its most imposing and solemn rites will lose all their commanding life and energy. Actors will perform ill who do not feel their parts. "It is marvellous," says the Epicurean in Cicero, that one soothsayer ( Ha (1) Augustin speaking of the great work of Varro concludes thus : In hac totâ serie pulcherrimæ et subtilissimæ disputationis, vitam æternam frustra quæri et sperari, facillime apparet. Civ. Dei, vi. 3. (2) Gibbon and many other writers (Law, Theory of Religion, 127. 130.; Sumner, Evidences, p. 76.) have adduced the well-known passages from Sallust and Ciceró, which indicate the general state of feeling on the great question 66 of the immortality of the soul. There is a striking Acade inies. Philoso phy fatal to popular Religion. Literature. ruspex), can look another in the face without laughing." And when the Epicurean himself stood before the altar, in the remarkable language of Plutarch, "he hypocritically enacted prayer and adoration from fear of the many; he uttered words directly opposite to his philosophy. While he sacrifices, the ministering priest seems to him no more than a cook, and he departs uttering the line of Menander, "I have sacrificed to Gods in whom I have no concern (1)." Unless indeed the literature as well as the philosophy of the age, immediately preceding Christianity, had been confined to the intel-* lectual aristocracy, the reasoning spirit, which rejected with disdain the old imaginative fables, could not but descend at least as low as the rudiments of liberal education. When the gravest writers, like Polybius and Strabo, find it necessary to apologise to their more learned and thinking readers, for the introduction of those mythic legends, which formed the creed of their ancestors, and to plead the necessity of avoiding offence, because such tales are still sacred among the vulgar, this deference shows rather the increasing indifference, than the strength of popular opinion. "Historians," says the former writer, "must be pardoned, if for the sake of maintaining piety among the many, they occasionally introduce miraculous or fabulous tales; but they must not be permitted on these points to run into extravagance." "Religion," he declares in another passage, "would perhaps be unnecessary in a commonwealth of wise men. But since the multitude is ever fickle, full of lawless desires, irrational passions and violence, it is right to restrain it by the fear of the invisible world, and such tragic terrors. Whence our ancestors appear to have introduced notions concerning the Gods, and opinions about the infernal regions not rashly or without consideration. Those rather act rashly and inconsiderately who would expel them (2)." "It is impossible," observes the inquiring geographer, "to govern a mob of women, or the whole mixed multitude, by philosophic reasoning, and to exhort them to piety, holiness, and faith; we must also employ superstition with its fables and prodigies. For the thunder, the ægis, the trident, the torches, the serpents, the thyrsi of the Gods are fables, as is all the ancient theology; but the legislature introduced these things as bugbears to those who are children in understanding (3)." In short even when the Roman writers professed the utmost respect for the religious institutions of their country, there was a kind of silent protest against their sincerity. It was an evident, frequently an avowed, condescension to the prejudices of the vulgar. Livy admires the wisdom of Numa, who introduced the fear of the Gods, (1) Quoted also by Neander from Plutarch. (Non poss. suav. viv. sec. Epic.) I have adopted Reiske's reading of the latter clause. (2) Polyb. vi. 56. as a most efficacious means of controlling an ignorant and barbarous populace (1)." Even the serious Dionysius judges of religion according to its usefulness, not according to its truth, as the wise scheme of the legislator, rather than as the revelation of the Deity (2). Pausanias, while he is making a kind of religious survey of Greece, expressing a grave veneration for all the temples and rites of antiquity, frequently relating the miraculous intervention of the several deities (3), is jealous and careful lest he should be considered a believer in the fables which he relates (4). The natural consequence of this double doctrine was not unforeseen. "What," says the Academic in Cicero, "when men maintain all belief in the immortal Gods to have been invented by wise men for the good of the state, that religion might lead to their duty those who would not be led by reason, do they not sweep away the very foundations of all religion (5)?" at Future The mental childhood of the human race was passing away, least it had become wearied of its old toy (6). The education itself, by which, according to these generally judicious writers, the youthful mind was to be impregnated with reverential feelings for the objects of national worship, must have been coldly conducted by teachers conscious that they were practising a pious fraud upon their disciples, and perpetually embarrassed by the necessity of maintaining the gravity befitting such solemn subjects, and of suppressing the involuntary smile, which might betray the secret of their own impiety. One class of fables seems to have been universally exploded even in the earliest youth, those which related to another life. The picture of the unrivalled satirist may be overcharged, but it corresponds strictly with the public language of the orator, and the private sentence of the philosopher : The silent realm of disembodied ghosts, The frogs that croak along the Stygian coasts; Even the religious Pausanias speaks of the immortality of the soul as a foreign doctrine, introduced by the Chaldeans and the Magi, un prêtre, et un athée." He adds atheist, as dis- (7) Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna, Nisi forte ineptiis ac fabulis ducimur, ut exis. Life. Reception of and embraced by some of the Greeks, particularly by Plato (1). Pliny, whose Natural History opens with a declaration that the universe is the sole Deity, devotes a separate chapter to a contemptuous exposure of the idle notion of the immortality of the soul, as a vision of human pride, and equally absurd, whether under the form of existence in another sphere, or under that of transmigration (2). We return then again to the question, what remained for minds Foreign thus enlightened beyond the poetic faith of their ancestors, yet not Religions. ripe for philosophy? how was the craving for religious excitement to be appeased, which turned with dissatisfaction or disgust from its accustomed nutriment? Here is the secret of the remarkable union between the highest reason and the most abject superstition which characterises the age of Imperial Rome. Every foreign religion found proselytes in the capital of the world; not only the pure and rational theism of the Jews, which had made a progress, the extent of which it is among the most difficult questions in history to estimate but the Oriental rites of Phrygia, and the Isiac and Serapic worship of Egypt, which, in defiance of the edict of the magistrate (3) and the scorn of the philosopher, maintained their ground in the capital, and were so widely propagated among the provinces, that their vestiges may be traced in the remote districts of Gaul (4) and Britain (5); and at a later period the reviving Mithriac Mysteries, which in the same manner made their way into the western provinces of the empire (6). In the capital itself, every thing that was new, or secret, or imposing, found a welcome reception among a people that listened with indifference to philosophers who reasoned, and poets who embodied philosophy in the most attractive diction. For in Rome, poetry had forsworn the alliance of the old imaginative faith. The irreligious system of Euhemerus (7) had found a translator in Ennius; that of Epicurus was commended Poetry by the unrivalled powers of Lucretius. Virgil himself, who, as he collected from all quarters the beauties of ancient poetry, so he religious. inlaid in his splendid tessellation the noblest images of the poetic faith of Greece: yet, though at one moment he transfuses mythology into his stately verse, with all the fire of an ardent votary, at ceases to be (1) Messeniaca, c. xxxii. See antè, p. 7. As late as the time of Julian, the son of a German king had changed his barbarous name of Agenario for that of Serapion, having been instructed in certain Mysteries in Gaul. Amm. Marcell. xvi. c. 12. (5) I have been informed that in some recent excavations at York, vestiges of Isiac worship have been discovered. (6) Religions de l'Antiquité, i. 363.; and note, 9, p. 743. (7) Eulemerus either of Messina in Sicily or of Messene in Peloponnesus (he lived in the time of Cassander king of Macedon), was of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy, and was employed on a voyage to the Red Sea by Cassander. But he was still more celebrated for his theologic innovation he pretended to have discovered during this voyage on an island in the Eastern Ocean, called Panchaia, a register of the births and deaths of the gods inscribed on a golden colump in the temple of the Triphylian Jupiter. Hence he inferred that all the popular deities were mere mortals deified on account of their fame, or their benefactions to the human race. Cic. de Nat. Deor. i. 42. Plut. de Isid. et Osir. p. 42k. Brucker, i. 604. the next he appears as a pantheist, and describes the Deity but as the animating soul of the universe (1). An occasional fit of superstition crosses over the careless and Epicurean apathy of Horace (2). Astrology and witchcraft (3) led captive minds, which boasted themselves emancipated from the idle terrors of the avenging gods. In the Pharsalia of Lucan, which manifestly soars far above the vulgar theology, where the lofty Stoicism elevates the brave man who disdains, above the gods who flatter, the rising fortunes of Cæsar; yet in the description of the witch Erictho evoking the dead (the only purely imaginative passage in the whole rhetorical poem), there is a kind of tremendous truth and earnestness, which show that if the poet himself believed not "the magic wonders which he drew," at least he well knew the terrors that would strike the age in which he wrote. The old established traders in human credulity had almost lost Supersti their occupation, but their place was supplied by new empirics, tions. who swarmed from all quarters. The oracles were silent, while astrology seized the administration of the secrets of futurity. Pompey, and Crassus, and Cæsar, all consulted the Chaldeans (4), whose flattering predictions that they should die in old age, in their homes, in glory, so belied by their miserable fates, still brought not the unblushing science into disrepute. The repeated edicts which expelled the astrologers and "mathematicians" from Rome, was no less an homage to their power over the public mind, than their recall, the tacit permission to return, or the return in defiance of the insulted edict. Banished by Agrippa (5), by Augustus (6), by Tiberius (7), by Claudius (8), they are described in the inimitable language of Tacitus, as a race who, treacherous to those in power, fallacious to those who hope for power, are ever proscribed, yet will ever remain (9). They were at length taken under the avowed patronage of Vespasian and his successors (10). All these circumstances were manifest indications of the decay, and of the approaching dissolution of the old religion. The elegiac poet had read, not without sagacity, the signs of the times. None sought the aid of foreign gods, while bow'd (1) Æn. vi. 724. According to his life by Donatus Virgil was an Epicurean. (2) Insanientis dum sapientiæ And this because he heard thunder at noon-day. |