Note 5 — Chapter VI · FREETHOUGHT IN ANCIENT ROME

But it is with the translation of the Sacred History of Evêmeros by Ennius, about 200 B.C., that the literary history of Roman freethought begins. In view of the position of Ennius as a teacher of Greek and belles lettres (he being of Greek descent, and born in Calabria), it cannot be supposed that he would openly translate an anti-religious treatise without the general acquiescence of his aristocratic patrons. Cicero says of him that he “followed” as well as translated Evêmeros;5 and his favourite Greek dramatists were the freethinking Euripides and Epicharmos, from both of whom he translated.6 The popular superstitions, in particular those of soothsaying and divination, he sharply attacked.7 If his patrons all the while stood obstinately to the traditional usages of official augury and ritual, it was in the spirit of political conservatism that belonged to their class and their civic ideal, and on the principle that religion was necessary for the control of the multitude. In Etruria, where the old culture had run largely to mysticism and soothsaying on quasi-oriental lines, the Roman government took care to encourage it, by securing the theological monopoly of the upper-class families,8 and thus set up a standing hot-bed of superstition. In the same spirit they adopted from time to time popular cults from Greece, that of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods being introduced in the year 204 B.C. The attempt (186 B.C.) to suppress the Bacchic mysteries, of which a distorted and extravagant account9 is given by Livy, was made on grounds of policy and not of religion; and even if the majority of the senate had not been disposed to encourage the popular appetite for emotional foreign worships, the multitude of their own accord would have introduced the latter, in resentment of the exclusiveness of the patricians in keeping the old domestic and national cults in their own hands.10 As now eastern conquests multiplied the number of foreign slaves and residents in Rome, the foreign worships multiplied with them; and with the worships came such forms of freethought as then existed in Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt. In resistance to these, as to the orgiastic worships, political and religious conservatism for a time combined. In 173 B.C. the Greek Epicurean philosophers Alkaios and Philiskos were banished from the city,11 a step which was sure to increase the interest in Epicureanism. Twelve years later the Catonic party carried a curt decree in the Senate against the Greek rhetors,12 uti Romae ne essent; and in 155 the interest aroused by Carneades and the other Athenian ambassadors led to their being suddenly sent home, on Cato’s urging.13 It seems certain that Carneades made converts to skepticism, among them being the illustrious Scipio Æmilianus.14 In the sequel the Greeks multiplied, especially after the fall of Macedonia,15 and in the year 92 we find the censors vetoing the practices of the Latin rhetors as an unpleasing novelty,16 thus leaving the Greeks in possession of the field.17 But, the general social tendency being downwards, it was only a question of time when the rationalism should be overgrown by the superstition. In 137 there had been another vain edict against the foreign soothsayers and the worshippers of Sabazius;18 but it was such cults that were to persist, while the old Roman religion passed away,19 save insofar as it had a non-literary survival among the peasantry.