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