Note 116 — Chapter VII · ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY AND ITS OPPONENTS

The spirit of reason, however, is well marked at the beginning of the fifth century in a pagan writer who belongs more truly to the history of freethought than either Julian or Porphyry. Macrobius, a Roman patrician of the days of Honorius, works out in his Saturnalia, with an amount of knowledge and intelligence which for the time is remarkable, the principle that all the Gods are but personifications of aspects or functions of the Sun. But such doctrine must have been confined, among pagans, to the cultured few; and the monotheism of the same writer’s treatise On the Dream of Scipio was probably not general even among the remaining pagans of the upper class.116