I. CHAP. ing 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, and embraced by some of the Greeks, particularly by Plato.† 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 Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna, Atque una transire vadum tot millia cymba. vantur. Pro Sat. ii. 149. Nisi forte ineptiis ac fabulis ducimur, ut existimemus apud inferos impiorum supplicia perferre * * * quæ si falsa sunt, id quod omnes intelligunt.-Cic. Pro Cluent. c.61. Nemo tam puer est ut Cerberum timeat, et tenebras et larvarum habitum nudis ossibus cohærentem. Mors nos aut consumit aut emittit. Sen. Ep. 24. + Messeniaca, c. xxxii. I. of human pride, and equally absurd, whether under CHAP. the form of existence in another sphere, or under that of transmigration.* of Foreign Religions. We return then again to the question, what re- Reception mained for minds thus enlightened beyond the poetic faith of their ancestors, yet not 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† 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 ‡ and Britain §; and at a later period the reviving Mithriac Mysteries, which in the same manner made their way into the western provinces of the empire. In the capital itself, I have been informed that in some recent excavations at York, vestiges of Isiac worship have been discovered. Réligions de l'Antiquité, i. 363.; and note, p. 743. CHAP. 1. Poetry ceases to be re ligious. 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 had found a translator in Ennius; that of Epicurus was commended by the unrivalled powers of Lucretius. Virgil himself, who, as he collected from all quarters the beauties of ancient poetry, so he 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 the next he appears as a pantheist, and describes the Deity but as the animating soul of the universe. † An occasional fit of superstition crosses over the careless and Epicurean apathy of Horace. ‡ Astrology and witchcraft § led captive minds, which boasted them *Euhemerus 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 column in the temple of the Triphylian Jupiter. Hence he inferred that all the popular deities were mere mortals deified on ac count of their fame, or their benefactions to the human race. Cic. de Nat. Deor. i. 42. Plut. de Isid. et Osir. p.421. Brucker, i. 604. + Æn. vi. 724. According to his life by Donatus Virgil was an Epicurean. Insanientis dum sapientiæ See the Canidia of Horace. According to Gibbon's just criticism, a " vulgar witch," the Erictho of Lucan, is "tedious, disgusting, but sometimes sublime." Note, ch. xxv. vol. iv. p. 239. It is the difference between the weird sisters in Macbeth and Middleton's "Witch," excepting of course the prolixity of Lucan. selves 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. CHAP. tions. I. The old established traders in human cre- Superstidulity had almost lost their occupation, but their place was supplied by new empirics, 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", 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 Agrippat, by Augustus ‡, by Tiberius§, by Claudius, they are described in the inimitable • Chaldeis sed major erit fiducia, quicquid Juv. vi. 553. Dio. xlix. c. 43. Dio. lvi. c. 25. Tac. Ann. xii. 52. .I. CHAP. 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.* They were at length taken under the avowed patronage of Vespasian and his successors. 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. Revolution effected by Christianity. None sought the aid of foreign gods, while bow'd And thus, in this struggle between the old house- Such is the state in which the ancient world leaves the mind of man. On a sudden a new era commences; a rapid yet gradual revolution takes place in the opinions, sentiments, and principles of mankind; the void is filled; the connection be * Genus hominum, potentibus Tac. Hist. ii. 78. Suet. in Vesp. Nulli cura fuit externos quærere Divos, PROP. iv. 1-17. Propertius may be considered in one sense the most religious poet of this period: his verses teem with mythological allusion, but it is poetical ornament rather than the natural language of piety; it has much of the artificial school of the Alexandrian Callimachus, his avowed model, nothing of the simplicity of faith which breathed in Pindar and Sophocles. |
