The first great unofficial importation seems to have been the orgiastic worship of Dionysos, who specially bore for the Romans his epithet of Bacchus, and was identified with their probably aboriginal Liber. This worship, carried on in secret assemblies, was held by the conservatives to be a hotbed of vice and crime, and was, according to Livy, bloodily punished (B.C. 186). So essentially absurd, however, is Livy's childish narrative that it is impossible to take anything in it for certain save the bare fact that the worship was put under restrictions, as tending to promote secret conspiracies.[418] But from this time forward, roughly speaking, Rome may be said to have entered into the mythological heritage of Greece, even as she did into her positive treasure of art work and of oriental gold. Every cult of the conquered Mediterranean world found a footing in the capital, the mere craving for new sensations among the upper class being sufficient to overcome their political bias to the old system. It is clear that when Augustus found scores of Roman temples in disrepair after the long storms of the civil wars, it was not that "religion" was out of vogue, but that it was superseded by what the Romans called "superstition"—something extraneous, something over and above the public system of rites and ceremonies. In point of fact, the people of Rome were in the mass no longer of Roman stock, but a collection of many alien races, indifferent to the indigenous cults. The emperor's restorations could but give a subsidised continuity to the official services: what vitally flourished were the cults which ministered to the new psychological needs of a population more and more divorced from great public interests, and increasingly alien in its heredity—the stimulant and hysterical worships of Adonis, of Attis, of the Lover Goddess coupled with the first, or the Mourning Mother Goddess with the second, of Isis and Osiris and their child—rituals of alternate lamentation and rejoicing, of initiations, austerities, confessions, penances, self-abasement, and the promise of immortality. On the general soil of devotion thus formed, there finally grew up side by side Mithraism and Christianity, the rival religions of the decadence, of which the second triumphed in virtue of having by far the larger number of adaptations to its environment.
But while Rome was thus at length fully possessed by the spirit of religious imagination which had so fruitfully stirred the art of Greece, there ensued no new birth of faculty. It was with the arts as with literature: the stimulus from Greece was received by a society rapidly on the way to that social state which in Greece had choked the springs of progress. In the last generations of the Republic the literary development was markedly rapid. In the century which saw Rome, after a terrific struggle, victorious over Carthage and prepared for the grapple with Macedon, the first practitioners of literature were playwrights, or slaves, or clients of great men, or teachers like Ennius, who could find in the now leisured and in part intelligent or at least inquisitive upper class a sufficient encouragement to a literary career. That class did not want recitals of the crude folklore of their fathers, so completely eclipsed by that of Greece, which was further associated with the literary form of drama, virtually new to the Romans.[419] Drama, always the form of literature which can best support itself, is the form most cultivated down till the period of popular abasement and civil convulsion, though of a dozen dramatists we have only Plautus and Terence left in anything like completeness; and while the tragedy of Pacuvius and Attius was unquestionably an imitation of the Greek, it may have had in its kind as much merit as the comedies that have been preserved. Even more rapid than the development, however, is the social gangrene that kills the popular taste; for when we reach the time of Augustus there is no longer a literary drama, save perhaps for the small audiences of the wooden theatres, and the private performances of amateurs;[420] parades and pantomimes alone can attract the mindless multitude; and the era of autocrats begins on well-laid foundations of ignorance and artificial incivilisation.
As with the literature of the people, so with that of the lettered class. In the last generation of freedom, we have in Lucretius and Catullus two of the great poets of all antiquity, compared with whose forceful inspiration Virgil and Horace already begin to seem sicklied o'er with the pale cast of decline. Thenceforth the glory begins to die away; and though the red blade of Juvenal is brandished with a hand of power, and Lucan clangs forth a stern memorial note, and Petronius sparkles with a sinister brilliancy, there is no mistaking the downward course of things under Cæsarism. It is true we find Juvenal complaining that only the emperor does anything for literature:—
Et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum.
Solus enim tristes hac tempestate Camoenas
Respexit.[421]
It is the one word of praise he ever gives to the autocrat, be it Domitian or another; and the commentators decide that only at the beginning of Domitian's reign would it apply. In effect, the satire is a description of the Roman upper class as grown indifferent to poetry, or to any but their own. But it is not on the economic side that the autocracy and the aristocracy of the Empire are to be specially indicted. The economic difficulty was very much the same under the Republic, when only by play-writing could literary men as such make a living. As Juvenal goes on to say, Horace when he cried Evohe was well fed, and if Virgil had lacked slave and lodging the serpents would have been lacking to the fury's hair, and the tongueless trumpet have sounded nothing great. Lucretius, Catullus, and Virgil were all inheritors of a patrimony; and Horace needed first an official post and later a patron's munificence to enable him to live as a poet. The mere sale of their books could not possibly have supported any one of them, so low were prices kept by the small demand.[422] What was true of the poets was still truer of the historians. Thus in the Republic as in the Empire, the men of letters, apart from the playwrights, tended to be drawn solely from the small class with inherited incomes. The curse of the Empire was that even when the sanest emperors, as the Antonines, sought to endow studies,[423] they could not buy moral or intellectual energy. The senate of poltroons who crouched before the Neros and Caligulas were the upper-class version of the population which lived by bread and the circus; and in that air neither great art nor great thought could breathe. Roman sculpture is but enslaved Greek sculpture taken into pay; Latin literature ceases to be Roman with Tacitus. The noble apparition of Marcus Aurelius shines out of the darkening ages like some unearthly incarnation, collecting in one life and in one book all the light and healing left in the waning civilisations; beside the babble of Fronto his speech is as that of one of the wise Gods of the ancient fantasy. Henceforth we have but ancillary history, and, in imaginative literature, be it of Apuleius or of Claudian, the portents of another age. Roma fuit.
The last stages of the transition from the pagan to the Middle Ages can best be traced in the history of the northern province of Gaul. Subjected to regular imperial administration within a generation of its conquest by Cæsar, Gaul for some centuries actually gained in civilisation, the imperial regimen being relatively more favourable to nearly every species of material progress than that of the old chiefs.[424] The emperors even in the fourth century are found maintaining there the professorships of rhetoric, language, law, philosophy and medicine first founded by Marcus Antoninus;[425] and until finance began to fail and the barbarians to invade, the material conditions were not retrograde. But the general intellectual life was merely imitative and retrospective; and the middle and upper classes, for which the higher schools existed, were already decaying in Gaul as elsewhere. The old trouble, besides, the official veto on all vital political discussion—if indeed any appetite for such discussion survived—drove literature either into mere erudition or into triviality. On the other hand, the growing Church offered a field of ostensibly free intellectual activity, and so was for a time highly productive, in point of sheer quantity of writing; a circumstance naturally placed by later inquirers to the credit of its creed. The phenomenon was of course simply one of the passage of energy by the line of least resistance. Within the Church, to which they turned as did thoughtful Greeks to philosophy after the rise of Alexander's Empire, men of mental tastes and moderate culture found both shelter and support; and the first Gaulish monasteries, unlike those of Egypt and the East, were, as M. Guizot has noted, places for conference rather than for solitary life.[426] There, for men who believed the creed, which was as credible as the older doctrines, there was a constant exercise for the mind on interests that were relatively real, albeit profoundly divided from the interests of the community. Thus, at a time when the community needed all its mental energy to meet its political need, that mental energy was spent in the discussion of insoluble and insane problems, of predestination and freewill, of faith and works, of fasts, celibacy, the Trinity, immortality, and the worship of saints. Men such as Ambrose and Jerome in Italy, Paulinus, Cassian, Hilary, and Salvian in Gaul, Chrysostom in the East, and Augustine in the South, represent as it were the last vibrations of the civilised intelligence; their energy, vainly spent on what they felt to be great issues, hints of the amount of force that was still running to waste throughout the Empire.
Soon, however, and even before the barbarian tide had overflowed the intellectual world, the fatal principle at the core of the new creed began to paralyse even the life that centred around that. In a world of political tyranny, an established church claiming to stand for the whole of supernatural truth must needs resort to tyranny as soon as it could wield the weapons. The civil strifes which broke out alike in the Eastern and the Western Empire in the third and fourth centuries, and the multitude of sects which rapidly honeycombed the Church, wore so many more forces of social disintegration; and churchmen, reasoning that difference of dogma was the ground of civil warfare as well as of war in the Church, must needs take the course that had before been taken in politics.
After the original Arian battle had raged itself out in Egypt, Gregory of Nazianzun at Constantinople, Ambrose at Milan, and Martin at Tours,[427] fought it over again. One point secured, others were settled in turn; and as soon as the influence of Augustine set up a prevailing system of thought, theology was as much a matter of rule and precedent as government. As we read Augustine's City of God, with its strenuous demonstration that the calamities which men ascribe to the new religion are the fruit of their own misdeeds, we realise to the full the dissolution of antiquity. All that is valid in his polemic is the exposure of the absurdity of the old faiths, long before detected by the reason of the few, but maintained by believers and unbelievers alike for reasons of State. The due Nemesis came in the rise of a faith which first flourished on and promoted an utter disregard of State concerns, then helped directly to rob the State of the mental energy it most needed, and finally wrought for the paralysis of what mental energy itself had attracted. Of constructive truth, of the thought whereby a State could live, the polemist had much less than was once possessed by the men who framed or credited the fables he derided. He could destroy, but could not build up. And so it was with the Church, as regarded the commonweal. "Of all the various systems of government that have been attempted on this earth, theocracy, or more properly hierocracy, is undoubtedly one of the very worst."[428]
But one thing the Church could construct and conserve—the fabric of her own wealth and power. Hence it came about that the Church, in itself a State within the State, was one of the three or four concrete survivals of antiquity round which modern civilisation nucleated. Of the four, the Church, often treated as the most valuable, was really the least so, inasmuch as it wrought always more for the hindrance of progress and the sundering of communities than for advance and unification. The truly civilising forces were the other three: the first being the body of Roman law, the product of Roman experience and Greek thought in combination; and the second, the literature of antiquity, in large part lost till the time we call the New Birth, when its recovery impregnated and inspired, though it perhaps also overburdened and lamed, the unformed intelligence of modern Europe. The third was the heritage of the arts of life and of beauty, preserved in part by the populations of the western towns which survived and propagated their species through the ages of dominant barbarism; in part by the cohering society of Byzantium. From these ancient germs placed in new soil is modern civilisation derived.