But they were so empty. They sounded well enough in the books of Zeno and Epicurus and Epictetus and Plutarch, which were to be found in every cornerstore library.
But in the long run, this diet of pure reason was found to lack the necessary nourishing qualities. The Romans began to clamor for a certain amount of “emotion” with their spiritual meals.
Hence the purely philosophical “religions” (for such they really were, if we associate the idea of religion with a desire to lead useful and noble lives) could only appeal to a very small number of people, and almost all of those belonged to the upper classes who had enjoyed the advantages of private instruction at the hands of competent Greek teachers.
To the mass of the people, these finely-spun philosophies meant less than nothing at all. They too had reached a point of development at which a good deal of the ancient mythology seemed the childish invention of rude and credulous ancestors. But they could not possibly go as far as their so-called intellectual superiors and deny the existence of any and all personal Gods.
Wherefore they did what all half-educated people do under such circumstances. They paid a formal and outward tribute of respect to the official Gods of the Republic and then betook themselves for real comfort and happiness to one of the many mystery religions which during the last two centuries had found a most cordial welcome in the ancient city on the banks of the Tiber.
The word “mystery” which I have used before was of Greek origin. It originally meant a gathering of “initiated people”—of men and women whose “mouth had been shut” against the betrayal of those most holy secrets which only the true members of the mystery were supposed to know and which bound them together like the hocus pocus of a college fraternity or the cabalistic incantations of the Independent Order of Sea-Mice.
During the first century of our era, however, a mystery was nothing more nor less than a special form of worship, a denomination, a church. If a Greek or a Roman (if you will pardon a little juggling with time) had left the Presbyterian church for the Christian Science church, he would have told his neighbors that he had gone to “another mystery.” For the word “church,” the “kirk,” the “house of the Lord,” is of comparatively recent origin and was not known in those days.
If you happen to be especially interested in the subject and wish to understand what was happening in Rome, buy a New York paper next Saturday. Almost any paper will do. Therein you will find four or five columns of announcements about new creeds, about new mysteries, imported from India and Persia and Sweden and China and a dozen other countries and all of them offering special promises of health and riches and salvation everlasting.
Rome, which so closely resembled our own metropolis, was just as full of imported and domestic religions. The international nature of the city had made this unavoidable. From the vine-covered mountain slopes of northern Asia Minor had come the cult of Cybele, whom the Phrygians revered as the mother of the Gods and whose worship was connected with such unseemly outbreaks of emotional hilarity that the Roman police had repeatedly been forced to close the Cybelian temples and had at last passed very drastic laws against the further propaganda of a faith which encouraged public drunkenness and many other things that were even worse.
Egypt, the old land of paradox and secrecy, had contributed half a dozen strange divinities and the names of Osiris, Serapis and Isis had become as familiar to Roman ears as those of Apollo, Demeter and Hermes.