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rty of her theology and ritual by taking what she needed from the Greeks. But here this resource failed her because the poetic, artistic and even intellectual religion of the Greeks was hardly moral. And the fables of a mythology jeered at by the philosophers, parodied on the stage and put to verse by libertine poets were anything but edifying. Moreover--this was its second weakness--whatever morality it demanded of a pious man went unrewarded. People no longer believed that the gods continually intervened in the affairs of men to reveal hidden crimes and to punish triumphant vice, or that Jupiter would hurl his thunderbolt to crush the perjurer. At the time of the proscriptions and the civil wars under Nero or Commodus it was more than plain that power and possessions were for the strongest, the ablest or even the luckiest, and not for the wisest or the most pious. The idea of reward or punishment beyond the grave found little credit. The notions of future life were hazy, uncertain, doubtful and contradictory. Everybody knows Juvenal's famous lines: "That there are manes, a subterranean kingdom, a ferryman with a long pole, and black frogs in the whirlpools of the Styx; that so many thousand men could cross the waves in a single boat, to-day even children refuse to believe."[20] After the fall of the republic indifference spread, the temples were abandoned and threatened to tumble into ruins, the clergy found it difficult to recruit members, the festivities, once so popular, fell into desuetude, and {38} Varro, at the beginning of his _Antiquities_, expressed his fear lest "the gods might perish, not from the blows of foreign enemies, but from very neglect on the part of the citizens."[21] It is well known that Augustus, prompted by political rather than by religious reasons, attempted to revive the dying religion. His religious reforms stood in close relation to his moral legislation and the establishment of the imperial dignity. Their tendency was to bring the people back to the pious practice of ancient virtues but also to chain them to the new political order. The alliance of throne and altar in Europe dates from that time. This attempted reform failed entirely. Making religion an auxiliary to moral policing is not a means of establishing its empire over souls. Formal reverence for the official gods is not incompatible with absolute and practical skepticism. The restoration attempted by Augustus is nevertheless
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