§ 3
It is significant that the decay of rationalism in Rome begins and proceeds with the Empire. Augustus, whose chosen name was sacerdotal in its character,[42] made it part of his policy to restore as far as possible the ancient cults, many of which had fallen into extreme neglect, between the indifference of the aristocratic class[43] and the devotion of the populace, itself so largely alien, to the more attractive worships introduced from Egypt and the East. That he was himself a habitually superstitious man seems certain;[44] but even had he not been, his policy would have been natural from the Roman point of view. A historian of two centuries later puts in the mouth of Mæcenas an imagined counsel to the young emperor to venerate and enforce the national religion, to exclude and persecute foreign cults, to put down alike atheism and magic, to control divination officially, and to keep an eye on the philosophers.[45] What the empire sought above all things was stability; and a regimen of religion, under imperial control, seemed one of the likeliest ways to keep the people docile. Julius himself had seemed to plan such a policy,[46] though he also planned to establish public libraries,[47] which would hardly have promoted faith among the educated.
Augustus, however, aimed at encouraging public religion of every description, repairing or rebuilding eighty-two temples at Rome alone, giving them rich gifts, restoring old festivals and ceremonies, reinstituting priestly colleges, encouraging special foreign worships, and setting up new civic cults; himself playing high pontiff and joining each new priesthood, to the end of making his power and prestige so far identical with theirs;[48] in brief, anticipating the later ruling principle of the Church of Rome. The natural upshot of the whole process was the imperial apotheosis, or raising of each emperor to Godhead at death. The usage of deifying living rulers was long before common in Egypt and the east,[49] and had been adopted by the conquering Spartan Lysander in Asia Minor as readily as by the conquering Alexander. Julius Cæsar seems to have put it aside as a nauseous flattery;[50] but Augustus wrought it into his policy. It was the consummation at once of the old political conception of religion and of the new autocracy.
In a society so managed, all hope of return to self-government having ceased, the level of thought sank accordingly. There was practically no more active freethought. Livy, indeed, speaks so often of the contempt shown in his own day for tales of prodigies, and of what he calls contempt for the Gods,[51] that there can be no question of the lack of religion among the upper classes at the beginning of the empire. But even in Livy’s day unbelief had ceased to go beyond a shrugging of the shoulders. Horace, with his credat Judæus Apella, and his frank rejection of the fear of the Deos tristes,[52] was no believer, but he was not one to cross the emperor,[53] and he was ready to lend himself to the official policy of religion.[54] Ovid could satirize[55] the dishonest merchant who prayed to the Gods to absolve his frauds; but he hailed Augustus as the sacred founder and restorer of temples,[56] prayed for him as such, busied himself with the archæology of the cults, and made it, not quite without irony, a maxim to “spare an accepted belief.”[57] Virgil, at heart a pantheist with rationalistic leanings,[58] but sadly divided between Lucretius and Augustus, his poetical and his political masters,[59] tells all the transition from the would-be scientific to the newly-credulous age in the two wistful lines:—
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas ...
Fortunatus et ille, Deos qui novit agrestes[60]
—“happy he who has been able to learn the causes of things; fortunate also he who has known the rural Gods.” The Gods, rural and other, entered on their due heritage in a world of decadence; Virgil’s epic is a religious celebration of antiquity; and Livy’s history is written in the credulous spirit, or at least in the tone, of an older time, with a few concessions to recent common sense.[61] In the next generation Seneca’s monotheistic aversion to the popular superstitions is the high-water mark of the period, and represents the elevating power of the higher Greek Stoicism. On this score he belongs to the freethinking age, while his theistic apriorism belongs to the next.[62] All the while his principle of conformity to all legal observances[63] leaves him powerless to modify the environment.
As the empire proceeds, the echoes of the old freethought become fewer and fewer. It is an entire misconception to suppose that Christianity came into the Roman world as a saving counter-force to licentious unbelief. Unbelief had in large part disappeared before Christianity made any headway; and that creed came as one of many popular cults, succeeding in terms of its various adaptations to the special conditions, moral and economic. It was easy for the populace of the empire to deify a ruler: as easy as for those of the East to deify Jesus; or for the early Romans to deify Romulus; at Rome it was the people, now so largely of alien stock, who had most insisted on deifying Cæsar.[64] But the upper class soon kept pace with them in the zest for religion. In the first century, the elder Pliny recalls the spirit of Lucretius by the indignant eloquence with which he protests against the burdensome belief in immortality;[65] and the emphasis with which he scouts alike the polytheism of the multitude, the universal worship of Fortune, and the idea that man can know the infinite divinity which is the universe;[66] but, though Seneca and others reject the fear of future torment, Pliny is the last writer to repudiate with energy the idea of a future state.[67] A number of epitaphs still chime with his view; but already the majority are on the other side;[68] and the fear of hell was normally as active as the hope of heaven; while the belief in an approaching end of the world was proportionally as common as it was later under Christianity.[69] And though Pliny, discussing the bases of magic, of which he recognized the fraudulence, ranks among them the influences of religion, as to which he declared mankind to be still in extreme darkness,[70] we have seen how he in turn, on theistic grounds, frowned upon Hipparchos for daring to number the stars.[71] Thus, whatever may be the truth as to the persecutions of the Christians in the first two centuries of the empire, the motive was in all cases certainly political or moral, as in the earlier case of the Bacchic mysteries, not rationalistic hostility to its doctrines as apart from Christian attacks on the established worships.
Some unbelievers there doubtless were after Petronius, whose perdurable maxim that “Fear first made Gods in the world,”[72] adopted in the next generation by Statius,[73] was too pregnant with truth to miss all acceptance among thinking men. The fact that Statius in his verse ranked Domitian with the Gods made its truth none the less pointed. The Alexandrian rationalist Chaeremon, who had been appointed one of the tutors of Nero, had explained the Egyptian religion as a mere allegorizing of the physical order of the universe.[74] It has been remarked too that in the next century the appointment of the freethinking Greek Lucian by Marcus Aurelius to a post of high authority in Egypt showed that his writings gave no great offence at court,[75] where, indeed, save under the two great Antonines, religious seriousness was rare. These, however, were the exceptions: the whole cast of mind developed under the autocracy, whether in the good or in the bad, made for belief and acquiescence or superstition rather than for searching doubt and sustained reasoning.
The statement of Mosheim or of his commentators (Eccles. Hist. 1 Cent. Pt. I, ch. i, § 21, note; Murdock’s trans. Reid’s ed.) that Juvenal (Sat. xiii, 86) “complains of the many atheists at Rome” is a perversion of the passage cited. Juvenal’s allusion to those who put all things down to fortune and deny a moral government of the world begins with the phrase “sunt qui,” “there are (those) who”; he makes far more account of the many superstitious, and never suggests that the atheists are numerous in his day. Neither does he “complain”; on the contrary, his allusion to the atheists as such is non-condemnatory as compared with his attacks on pious rogues, and is thus part of the ground for holding that he was himself something of a freethinker—one of the last among the literary men. In the tenth Satire (346 sqq.) he puts the slightly theistic doctrine, sometimes highly praised (ed. Ruperti, 1817, in loc.), that men should not pray for anything, but leave the decision to the Gods, to whom man is dearer than to himself. There too occurs the famous doctrine (356) that if anything is to be prayed for it should be the mens sana in corpore sano, and the strong soul void of the fear of death. The accompanying phrase about offering “the intestines and the sacred sausages of a whitish pig” is flatly contemptuous of religious ceremonial; and the closing lines, placing the source of virtue and happiness within, are strictly naturalistic. In the two last:—
Nullum numen habes, si sit prudentia; nos [or sed] te
Nos facimus, Fortuna, Deam, cœloque locamus,
the frequent reading abest for habes seems to make the better sense: “No divinity is wanting, if there be prudence; but it is we, O fortune, who make thee a Goddess, and throne thee in heaven.” In any case, the insistence is on man’s lordship of himself. (The phrase occurs again in Sat. xiv, 315.) But the worship of Fortune—which Pliny declares to be the prevailing faith of his day (Hist. Nat. II, v (vii), 7)—was itself a cult like another, with temples and ritual; and the astrology which, he adds, is beginning to supersede Fortune-worship among the learned and the ignorant alike, was but a reversion to an older Eastern religion. His own preference is for sun-worship, if any; but he falls back on the conviction that the power of God is limited, and that God is thus seen to be simply Nature (id. 8).
The erroneous notion that the Roman aristocracy ran mainly to atheism was widely propagated by Voltaire, who made it part of his argument against the atheism of his own day (Jenni; art. Athéisme, in the Dict. Philos., etc.). It will not bear examination. As regards the general tone of Roman literature from the first century onwards, the summing-up of Renan is substantially just: “The freethinkers ... diminish little by little, and disappear.... Juvenal alone continues in Roman society, down to the time of Hadrian, the expression of a frank incredulity.... Science dies out from day to day. From the death of Seneca, it may be said that there is no longer a thoroughly rationalistic scholar. Pliny the Elder is inquisitive, but uncritical. Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, avoid commenting on the inanity of the most ridiculous inventions. Pliny the Younger (Ep. vii, 27) believes in puerile stories of ghosts; Epictetus (xxxi, 5) would have all practise the established worship. Even a writer so frivolous as Apuleius feels himself bound to take the tone of a rigid conservative about the Gods (Florida, i, 1; De Magia, 41, 55, 56, 63). A single man, about the middle of this century, seems entirely exempt from supernatural beliefs; that is Lucian. The scientific spirit, which is the negation of the supernatural, exists only in a few; superstition invades all, enfeebling all reason” (Les Évangiles, ed. 1877, pp. 406–407).
That the mental paralysis connects causally with the political conditions will perhaps not now be denied. A censorship of the written word belongs congenitally to autocracy; and only the personal magnanimity of Cæsar and the prudence of Augustus delayed its development in Rome. Soon it became an irresistible terrorism. Even Cæsar, indeed, so far forgot one of the great rules of his life as to impeach before the Senate the tribunes who had quite justifiably prosecuted some of the people who had hailed him as king;[76] and the fact that the Senate was already slavish enough to eject them gives the forecast of the future. Augustus long showed a notable forbearance to all manner of verbal opposition, and even disparagement; but at length he also began to prosecute for private aspersions,[77] and even to suppress histories of a too critical stamp. Tiberius began his reign with the high-pitched sentiment that “in a free State tongue and mind should be free”;[78] and for a time he bore himself with an exemplary restraint; but he too, in turn, took the colour of his place, and became murderously resentful of any semblance of aspersion on himself.[79] The famous sentiment ascribed to him in the Annals of Tacitus, Deorum injuriae diis curae[80]—“the Gods’ wrongs are the Gods’ business”—is not noted by Suetonius, and has an un-Roman sound. What Suetonius tells is[81] that he was “very negligent concerning the Gods and religions,” yet addicted to the astrologers, and a believer in fate. The fact remains that while, as aforesaid, there must have been still a number of unbelievers, there is no sign after Lucretius of any Roman propaganda against religion; and the presumption is that the Augustan policy of promoting the old cults was extended to the maintenance of the ordinary Roman view that disrespect to the Gods was a danger to the State. In the reign of Nero we find trace of a treatise De religionis erroribus by Fabricius Vejento,[82] wherein was ridiculed the zeal of the priests to proclaim mysteries which they did not understand; but, whether or not its author was exiled and the book burnt on their protest, such literature was not further produced.[83]
There was, in fact, no spirit left for a Lucretian polemic against false beliefs. Everything in the nature of a searching criticism of life was menaced by the autocracy; Nero decreeing that no man should philosophize at Rome,[84] after slaying or banishing a series of philosophers;[85] Domitian crucifying the very scribes who copied the work of Hermogenes of Tarsus, in which he was obliquely criticized.[86] When men in the mass crouched before such tyranny, helplessly beholding emperor after emperor overtaken by the madness that accrues to absolute power, they were disabled for any disinterested warfare on behalf of truth. All serious impeachment of religion proceeds upon an ethical motive; and in imperial Rome there was no room for any nobility of ethic save such as upbore the Stoics in their austere pursuit of self-control, in a world too full of evil to be delighted in.
Thus it came about that the Cæsars, who would doubtless have protected their co-operating priesthoods from any serious attack on the official religion,[87] had practically no occasion to do so. Lucian’s jests were cast at the Gods of Greece, not at those of the Roman official cults; hence his immunity. What the Cæsars were concerned to do was rather to menace any alien religion that seemed to undermine the solidarity of the State; and of such religions, first the Jewish, and later the Christian, were obvious examples. Thus we have it that Tiberius “put down foreign religions” (externas ceremonias), in particular the Egyptian and Judaic rites; pulling down the temple of Isis, crucifying her priests, expelling from Rome all Jews and proselytes, and forcing the Jewish youth to undergo military service in unhealthy climates.[88] Even the astrologers, in whose lore he believed, he expelled until they promised to renounce their art—a precedent partly set up by Augustus,[89] and followed with varying severity by all the emperors, pagan and Christian alike.
And still the old Italian religion waned, as it must. On the one hand, the Italic population was almost wholly replaced or diluted by alien stocks, slave or free, with alien cults and customs; on the other, the utter insincerity of the official cults, punctiliously conserved by well-paid, unbelieving priests, invited indifference. In the nature of things, an unchanging creed is moribund; life means adaptation to change; and it was only the alien cults that in Rome adapted themselves to the psychic mutation. Among the educated, who had read their Lucretius, the spectacle of the innumerable cults of the empire conduced either to entire but tacit unbelief, or to a species of vaguely rationalistic[90] yet sentimental monotheism, in which Reason sometimes figured as universal Deity.[91] Among the uneducated the progression was constant towards one or other of the emotional and ritualistic oriental faiths, so much better adapted to their down-trodden life.