THE EMPIRE AND THE PAGAN CREED
Paganism is essentially tolerant, and the Romans always extended a full measure of this toleration to the religions of the nations they conquered. The early custom of transferring to Rome the tutelary divinity of any conquered city in the vicinity is a practical expression of the view that any addition to the Roman pantheon (which had begun to grow into a Græco-Roman pantheon by the admittance of Apollo and the Sibyls and had actually been such since the war with Hannibal) must be regarded simply as an addition to the divine patrons of Rome. In the main this view was adhered to under the empire, although Augustus formulated more definitely the idea of a Roman state religion and closed the circle of gods to whom worship was due on the part of the state. But we have evidence of the spirit of tolerance and the capacity for assimilation characteristic of the age in the wide dissemination of the Egyptian cults of Isis and Serapis, especially in the upper ranks of society, and still more in the worship—deep rooted among the masses and spread abroad over the greatest part of the earth—of the Persian Mithras, whom Diocletian and his co-regents praised in the great Danubian camp of Caruntum as the patron of their dominion. Even the Phœnician gods of Africa and the Celtic gods of Gaul and the Danube provinces were allowed to survive by identification with Roman divinities of a somewhat similar character, and in the outlandish surnames bestowed upon the latter; although the names of the great Celtic divinities disappear from the monuments—a matter in which the government undoubtedly had a hand. So many barbarians, says Lucian the scoffer, have made their way into Olympus that they have ousted the old gods from their places, and ambrosia and nectar have become scanty by reason of the crowd of topers; and he makes Zeus resolve upon a thorough clearance, in order unrelentingly to thrust forth from Olympus all who could not prove their title to that divine abode, even though they had a great temple on earth and there enjoyed divine honours.
In view of the lengths to which the Romans carried the principle of giving free course to every religion within the empire so long as its professors did not come into conflict with the government officials or tend to form hotbeds of political intrigue, such as were the schools of the Druids, how did it come to pass that the Christian religion, and to a less extent the Jewish religion also, were assailed as hostile and dangerous to the state?
It is the collision between monotheism and polytheism, between the worship of God and—from the Jewish and Christian point of view—the worship of idols. The great crime which Tacitus lays to the charge of the Jews, that which brought upon the Christian the imputation of atheism, was contempt for the gods, i.e., the gods of the Roman state. And this denial was not only aimed at the gods of the Roman pantheon; it applied in equal measure to the emperor-god, to whom all subjects of the empire, whatever other religion they professed, were bound to erect altars and temples in the capitals of the provinces, and everywhere do sacrifice; who, conjointly with and above all other gods, in both East and West, demanded that supreme veneration which constituted the touch-stone of loyalty. To refuse this was necessarily regarded as high treason, as crimen læsæ majestatis, and prosecuted as such. It is true that the monotheistic Jews, after the destruction of their national independence, were allowed by law to exercise their own religion on condition of paying the temple dues in future to the Capitoline Jupiter, and penalties were attached only to conversion to the Jewish religion, especially in the case of Roman citizens. But it is evident that they very skilfully contrived to avoid an open rupture with the worship of the emperor no less than with the national religion of Rome; for history has no record of Jewish martyrs who suffered death for their faith under the empire.
Roman Trophies