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.
§ 4
One element of betterment there was in the life of declining Rome, until the Roman ideals were superseded by oriental. Even the Augustan poets, Horace and Ovid, had protested like the Hebrew prophets, and like Plato and like Cicero, against the idea that rich sacrifices availed with the Gods above a pure heart; and such doctrine, while paganism lasted, prevailed more and more.[92] At the same time, Horace rejects the Judæo-Stoic doctrine, adopted in the gospels, that all sins are equal, and lays down the rational moral test of utility—Utilitas justi propè mater et aequi.[93] The better and more thoughtful men who grew up under the autocracy, though inevitably feebler and more credulous in their thinking than those of the later commonwealth, developed at length a concern for conduct, public and private, which lends dignity to the later philosophic literature, and lustre to the imperial rule of the Antonines. This concern it was that, linking Greek theory to Roman practice, produced a code of rational law which could serve Europe for a thousand years. This concern too it was, joined with the relatively high moral quality of their theism, that ennobled the writing of Seneca[94] and Epictetus and Maximus of Tyre; and irradiates the words as well as the rule of Marcus Aurelius. In them was anticipated all that was good[95] in the later Christian ethic, even as the popular faiths anticipated the Christian dogmas; and they cherished a temper of serenity that the Fathers fell far short of. To compare their pages with those of the subsequent Christian Fathers—Seneca with Lactantius, “the Christian Cicero”; Maximus with Arnobius; Epictetus with Tertullian; the admirable Marcus, and his ideal of the “dear city of Zeus,” with the shrill polemic of Augustine’s City of God and the hysteria of the Confessions—is to prove a rapid descent in magnanimity, sanity, self-command, sweetness of spirit, and tolerance. What figures as religious intolerance in the Cæsars was, as we have seen, always a political, never a religious, animosity. Any prosecution of Christians under the Antonines was certainly on the score of breach of law, turbulence, or real or supposed malpractices, not on that of heresy—a crime created only by the Christians themselves, in their own conflicts.