And it was not only Augustus and his loved poet Vergil who had felt the power of the ancient Roman religion, so sadly ignored if not despised in their day and time, and who had seen that a return to the old Roman way of living and to the primitive simple beliefs and the old austere life alone would help to purify the corrupt and dissolute manners which were weakening, perhaps destroying, the old Roman spirit. Tacitus, the greatest historian Rome had ever given birth to, had also expressed the same beautiful thought. Juvenal the poet-satirist, too, who had lashed with an unsparing pen the luxury, the vices, and the follies of his age, painted as his ideal Roman a Curius, thrice consul, who, despising all state and pomp and luxury, hungry and tired after a day in the fields, preferred “a meal of herbs and bacon served on homely earthenware.”
Juvenal had a true Roman reverence for the old heroes of the Republic, for the Curii, the Fabii, and the Scipios, and their unostentatious way of living. Even Martial felt a strange charm in the antique simplicity of the old republican statesmen and soldiers.
The younger Pliny, courtier, statesman, and polished writer, weary and sated with the brilliant luxurious life of a great noble in the earlier years of the second century, in his wonderful picture of social life in the times of Trajan, shows us how intensely sensible he and his circle were of the purer pleasures and rest to be found in “the stillness of the pine woods, and the cold breeze from the Apennines which blew over his quiet rural home in Tuscany.”
But while Augustus and his famous poets had striven to lead the citizens of the great empire to love and lead the more austere and purer life of the primitive Roman people, it was an open secret that the imperial teacher himself failed to lead the life he professed to love, for Augustus stained his own works and days with grave moral irregularities. The two Antonines, on the other hand, different from Augustus, set themselves as the noblest examples of a pure austere life; no moral stain or flaw was ever suffered to disfigure the life-work of these two patriotic pagan sovereigns.
There was one master-thought deep buried in the heart of Antoninus Pius and of his adopted son and successor Marcus Antoninus. Their whole career was influenced by an intense love of Rome. They would preserve the mighty Empire from the decay which they perceived was fast gaining ground; they would set, by their own example, the vogue of the purer, simpler religious life on which the foundation stories of the Empire had been so securely laid; hence the bitter persecution of the Christian sect which was so striking and painful a feature in the Antonine administration of the Empire,—a persecution evidently active and bitter in the reign of Pius, but which greatly increased in intensity and virulence under the rule of his successor Marcus.
The Antonines were intensely persuaded that all that was great and glorious in the Roman Empire came from the simple and even austere life led by their fathers under the protection of the mighty Immortals—of Jupiter of the Capitol, of Mars the Avenger, of Vesta with her sacred fire, of the great Twin Brethren—of the gods whose temples with their golden roofs were the stately ornaments of the Forum on which the Emperors looked down from their proud home on the Palatine Hill. These were the deities which the great pagan Emperor believed “had cradled the Roman State and still watched over her career.” It was this belief which induced Pius to grave on his coins the sacred memories of the earliest days of this divine protection on which we have been dwelling.