Note 64 — Chapter VI · FREETHOUGHT IN ANCIENT ROME

As the empire proceeds, the echoes of the old freethought become fewer and fewer. It is an entire misconception to suppose that Christianity came into the Roman world as a saving counter-force to licentious unbelief. Unbelief had in large part disappeared before Christianity made any headway; and that creed came as one of many popular cults, succeeding in terms of its various adaptations to the special conditions, moral and economic. It was easy for the populace of the empire to deify a ruler: as easy as for those of the East to deify Jesus; or for the early Romans to deify Romulus; at Rome it was the people, now so largely of alien stock, who had most insisted on deifying Cæsar.64 But the upper class soon kept pace with them in the zest for religion. In the first century, the elder Pliny recalls the spirit of Lucretius by the indignant eloquence with which he protests against the burdensome belief in immortality;65 and the emphasis with which he scouts alike the polytheism of the multitude, the universal worship of Fortune, and the idea that man can know the infinite divinity which is the universe;66 but, though Seneca and others reject the fear of future torment, Pliny is the last writer to repudiate with energy the idea of a future state.67 A number of epitaphs still chime with his view; but already the majority are on the other side;68 and the fear of hell was normally as active as the hope of heaven; while the belief in an approaching end of the world was proportionally as common as it was later under Christianity.69 And though Pliny, discussing the bases of magic, of which he recognized the fraudulence, ranks among them the influences of religion, as to which he declared mankind to be still in extreme darkness,70 we have seen how he in turn, on theistic grounds, frowned upon Hipparchos for daring to number the stars.71 Thus, whatever may be the truth as to the persecutions of the Christians in the first two centuries of the empire, the motive was in all cases certainly political or moral, as in the earlier case of the Bacchic mysteries, not rationalistic hostility to its doctrines as apart from Christian attacks on the established worships.