There must always be something arbitrary in the choice and isolation of a period of social history for special study. No period can, from one point of view, be broken off and isolated from the immemorial influences which have moulded it, from the succession of coming ages which it will help to fashion. And this is specially true of the history of a race at once so aggressive, yet so tenacious of the past, as the Roman. The national fibre was so tough, and its tone and sentiment so conservative u

Yet neither the language of Tacitus nor the testimony from other sources justify the belief in any sudden moral revolution. The Antonine age was undoubtedly an age of conscientious and humane government in the interest of the subject; it was even more an age of religious revival. But whether these were accompanied by a corresponding elevation of conduct and moral tone among the masses may well be doubted. On the other hand the pessimism of satirist and historian who had lived through the darknes

The life of Juvenal is wrapt in obscurity, although nine lives of him are extant. 345 Scholars are still at variance as to the date of his birth, the date of many of his satires, and especially as to the time and circumstances of his banishment, about which there is so uniform a tradition. But, for our purpose, some facts are clear enough. Juvenal was the son of a well-to-do freedman of Aquinum, and rose to the highest magisterial office in his native town at some time of his career. 346 He care

It shows the immense force of old Roman conservatism and of social prejudice which is the same from age to age, when men so cultivated, yet of such widely different temperament and associations as Pliny and Tacitus, Juvenal and Martial 615 and Petronius, denounce or ridicule an irresistible social movement. We can now see that the rise of the emancipated slave was not only inevitable, but that it was, on the whole, salutary and rich in promise for the future. The slave class of antiquity really

The truth is that society in every age presents the most startling moral contrasts, and no single comprehensive description of its moral condition can ever be true. This has been too often forgotten by those who have passed judgment on the moral state of Roman society, both in the first age of the Empire and in the last. That there was stupendous corruption and abnormal depravity under princes like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian, we hardly need the testimony of the satirists to induce us to believ

This silence of the literary class is not due to any want of love in the Roman for the calm and freshness and haunting charm of country scenes, still less to callousness towards old associations. Certainly Virgil cannot be charged with any such lack of sensibility. In the Eclogues and the Georgics, the memory of the old farm at Andes breaks through the more conventional sentiment of Alexandrian tradition. In the scenery of these poems, there are “mossy fountains and grass softer than sleep,” the

The immense development of the free proletariat, in the time of the early Empire, is one of the most striking social phenomena which the study of the inscriptions has brought to light. It has sometimes been the custom to speak of that society as depending for the supply of its wants entirely on slave labour. And undoubtedly at one time slave labour occupied the largest part of the field of industry. A household in the time of the Republic, of even moderate wealth, might have 400 slaves, while a

The ancient schools, if they maintained a formal individuality even to the days of Justinian, 1572 had worked themselves out. A host of scholarchs, from all the cities of the Greek East, failed to break fresh ground, and were content to guard the most precious or the least vulnerable parts of an ancient tradition. Moreover, the scrutiny of the long course of speculation, issuing in such various conclusions, with no criterion to decide between their claims, gave birth to a scepticism which shelte

But what of the great masses lying outside the circle of cultivated and exhausted self-indulgence, that plebeian world of which we have seen the picture in their municipalities and colleges? It is clear from the records of their daily life, their ambitions, their tasks and amusements, that, although perhaps not generally tainted with such deep corruption as the nobles of the Neronian age, their moral tone and aspirations hardly correspond to the material splendour of the Empire. Even apart from

The old religion had not lost all hold on men’s minds, as it is sometimes said to have done, in rather too sweeping language. The punctilious ritual with which, in the stately narrative of Tacitus, the Capitol was restored by Vespasian, the pious care with which the young Aurelius recited the Salian litany in words no longer understood, the countless victims which he offered to the guardian gods of Rome in evil days of pestilence and doubtful war, these things reveal the strength of the religion

Plutarch devoted a treatise to the subject of superstition. And his conception of it is more like our own, less formal and external, than that of Cicero. He develops his view of the degradation of the religious sense by contrasting it with atheism. Atheism is a great calamity, a blindness of the reason to the goodness and love which govern the universe. It is the extinction of a faculty rather than the perversion of one. 2281 But superstition both believes and trembles. It acknowledges the exist

The Roman spirit, down to the Antonine age, had been the subject of many influences which had inspired widely various ideas of the future state. And the literary and funerary remains from Nero to M. Aurelius are full of contradictions on the subject. Nor, in the absence of authoritative revelation on a field so dark to reason, is this surprising. Even Christian teaching, while it offers a sure promise of a life to come, has not lifted the veil of the great mystery, and the material imagery of th

Quintus Scaevola and Varro applied all the forces of subtle antiquarianism and reverence to sustain the ancestral faith. But they also drew the line sharply between the religion of philosophy and the religion of the State. And Varro went so far as to say that the popular religion was the creation of early statesmen, 2713 and that if the work had to be done again, it might be done better in the light of philosophy. The Stoic in Cicero, as Seneca did after him, treated the tales of the gods as mer

But S. Augustine knew well the power of the superstition. For more than 600 years the Great Mother had been enthroned on the Palatine; for more than 300 years she had captivated the remotest provinces of the West. 2816 In the terror of the Second Punic War, 204 B.C. , she had been summoned by solemn embassy from her original home at Pessinus in Galatia. In obedience to a sibylline command, the Roman youth with purest hands, together with the Roman matrons, had welcomed her at Ostia. 2817 The shi

The Isiac worship had conquered the Greek world before it became a power in Italy. In the fourth century B.C. traders from the Nile had their temple of Isis at the Peiraeus; 2876 in the third century the worship had been admitted within the walls of Athens. 2877 About the same time the goddess had found a home at Ceos, and Delos, at Smyrna and Halicarnassus, and on the coasts of Thrace. 2878 She was a familiar deity at Orchomenus and Chaeronea for generations before Plutarch found in her legends

Mithra was one of the most ancient and venerable objects of pagan devotion, as he was one of the last to be dethroned. In faint outline he can be traced to the cradle of the Aryan race. 3007 In the Vedas he is a god of light, and, as the god of truth, who hates all falsehood, he has the germ of that moral character which grew into a great force in the last age of his worship in the West. In the Avestas, the sacred books of the religion of Iran, which, however late their redaction, still enshrine