Note 96 — Chapter XIV · PART II POPULAR BELIEF

How far indeed this really happened is of course not to be answered decisively. The Celsus against whom Origen wrote his polemical treatise looks at the matter from the popular point of view on the whole. (He is no Epicurean as Orig. supposes; but neither in fact is he a professional philosopher of any kind, but rather an ἰδιώτης with inclinations to philosophy of all sorts and esp. to the semi-Platonism current at the time.) He distinctly says μήτε τούτοις (the Christians) εἴη μήτ’ ἐμοὶ μήτ’ ἄλλῳ τινὶ ἀνθρώπων ἀποθέσθαι τὸ περὶ τοῦ κολασθήσεσθαι τοὺς ἀδίκους καὶ γερῶν ἀξιωθήσεσθαι τοὺς δικαίους δόγμα (ap. Orig., Cels. 3, 16, p. 270 Lomm.).—On the other hand, it is significant of the temper of the very “secular” Graeco-Roman society which was at the head of affairs at the end of the last century B.C., that Cicero at the end of his work, de Nat. Deor. (iii, 81 ff.), in discussing the various means of obtaining a balance between desert and punishment, virtue and reward, in the circumstances of human life, never even mentions the belief in a final balance and recompense after death. (He only mentions among other things the visiting of the sins of the father upon his descendants on earth—90 ff.—that old Greek belief [see above, chap. xii, n. 65] which really excludes the idea of an after life.) Between the days of Cic. and those of Celsus ideas had changed. We know this from innumerable indications; even the next world was looked at in quite a different light in the second century A.D. from what it had been two centuries earlier.