To a Greek, in short, his gods mattered enormously; and to a Roman. To a Roman they continued to matter enormously, down to the end. Do you remember that tessellated pavement with its emblems and images of the younger gods? and how I told you that a Roman general on foreign service would carry the little cubes in panniers on mule-back, to be laid down for his feet at the next camping place? Will you suggest that he did this because they were pretty? You know that practical men—conquering generals—don't behave in that way. He did it because they were sacred; because, like most practical men, he was religious, and his gods must go with him. They filled his literature: for why? He believed himself to be sprung from their loins. Where would Latin literature be, for example, if you could cut Venus out of it? Consider Lucretius' grand invocation:
Æneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas,
Alma Venus!
Consider the part Virgil makes her play as moving spirit of his whole great poem. So follow her down to the days of the later Empire and open the "Pervigilium Veneris" and discover her, under the name of Dione, still the eternal Aphrodite sprung from the foam amid the churning hooves of the sea-horses—inter et bipedes equos:—
Time was that a rain-cloud begat her, impregning the heave of the deep,
'Twixt hooves of sea-horses a-scatter, stampeding the dolphins as
sheep.
Lo! arose of that bridal Dione, rainbow'd and besprent of its dew!
Now learn ye to love who loved never—now ye who have loved, love
anew!
Her favour it was fill'd the sails of the Trojan for Latium bound,
Her favour that won her Æneas a bride on Laurentian ground,
And anon from the cloister inveigled the Virgin, the Vestal, to Mars;
As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated her Rome for its wars
With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew
From Romulus down to our Cæsar—last, best of that blood, of that thew.
Now learn ye to love who loved never—now ye who have loved, love
anew!
'Last, best of that blood'—her blood, fusa Paphies de cruore, and the blood of Teucer, revocato a sanguine Teucri, 'of that thew'—the thew of Tros and of Mars. Of these and no less than these our Roman believed himself the son and inheritor.
If we grasp this, that the old literature was packed with the old religion, and not only packed with it but permeated by it, we have within our ten fingers the secret of the 'Dark Ages,' the real reason why the Christian Fathers fought down literature and almost prevailed to the point of stamping it out. They hated it, not as literature; or at any rate, not to begin with; nor, to begin with, because it happened to be voluptuous and they austere: but they hated it because it held in its very texture, not to be separated, a religion over which they had hardly triumphed, a religion actively inimical to that of Christ, inimical to truth; so that for the sake of truth and in the name of Christ they had to fight it, accepting no compromise, yielding no quarter, foreseeing no issue save that one of the twain—Jupiter or Christ, Deus Optimus Maximus or the carpenter's son of Nazareth—must go under.
It all ended in compromise, to be sure; as all struggles must between adversaries so tremendous. To-day, in Dr Smith's "Classical Dictionary," Origen rubs shoulders with Orpheus and Orcus; Tertullian reposes cheek by jowl with Terpsichore. But we are not concerned, here, with what happened in the end. We are concerned with what these forthright Christian fighters had in their minds—to trample out the old literature because of the false religion. Milton understood this, and was thinking of it when he wrote of the effect of Christ's Nativity—
The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No mighty trance, or breathèd spell
Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell.
The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
as Swinburne understands and expresses it in his "Hymn to Proserpine," supposed to be chanted by a Roman of the 'old profession' on the morrow of Constantine's proclaiming the Christian faith—