Note 51 — Chapter VI · FREETHOUGHT IN ANCIENT ROME

In a society so managed, all hope of return to self-government having ceased, the level of thought sank accordingly. There was practically no more active freethought. Livy, indeed, speaks so often of the contempt shown in his own day for tales of prodigies, and of what he calls contempt for the Gods,51 that there can be no question of the lack of religion among the upper classes at the beginning of the empire. But even in Livy’s day unbelief had ceased to go beyond a shrugging of the shoulders. Horace, with his credat Judæus Apella, and his frank rejection of the fear of the Deos tristes,52 was no believer, but he was not one to cross the emperor,53 and he was ready to lend himself to the official policy of religion.54 Ovid could satirize55 the dishonest merchant who prayed to the Gods to absolve his frauds; but he hailed Augustus as the sacred founder and restorer of temples,56 prayed for him as such, busied himself with the archæology of the cults, and made it, not quite without irony, a maxim to “spare an accepted belief.”57 Virgil, at heart a pantheist with rationalistic leanings,58 but sadly divided between Lucretius and Augustus, his poetical and his political masters,59 tells all the transition from the would-be scientific to the newly-credulous age in the two wistful lines:—