pon the
immorality of the sacred legends they ignored the fact that the gods and
heroes of mythology had no longer any but a purely literary existence.[4]
The writers of that period, like those of the Renaissance, regarded the
fictions of mythology as details necessary to poetical composition. They
were ornaments of style, rhetorical devices, but not the expression of a
sincere faith. Those old myths had fallen to the lowest degree of disrepute
in the theater. The actors of mimes ridiculing Jupiter's gallant adventures
did not believe in their reality any more than the author of Faust believed
in the compact with Mephistopheles.

So we must not be deceived by the oratorical effects {204} of a rhetorician
like Arnobius or by the Ciceronian periods of a Lactantius. In order to
ascertain the real status of the beliefs we must refer to Christian authors
who were men of letters less than they were men of action, who lived the
life of the people and breathed the air of the streets, and who spoke from
experience rather than from the treatises of mythmongers. They were high
functionaries like Prudentius;[5] like the man to whom the name
"Ambrosiaster"[6] has been given since the time of Erasmus; like the
converted pagan Firmicus Maternus,[7] who had written a treatise on
astrology before opposing "The Error of the Profane Religions"; like
certain priests brought into contact with the last adherents of idolatry
through their pastoral duties, as for instance the author of the homilies
ascribed to St. Maximus of Turin;[8] finally like the writers of anonymous
pamphlets, works prepared for the particular occasion and breathing the
ardor of all the passions of the movement.[9] If this inquiry is based on
the obscure indications in regard to their religious convictions left by
members of the Roman aristocracy who remained true to the faith of their
ancestors, like Macrobius or Symmachus; if it is particularly guided by the
exceptionally numerous inscriptions that seem to be the public expression
of the last will of expiring paganism, we shall be able to gain a
sufficiently precise idea of the condition of the Roman religion at the
time of its extinction.

One fact becomes immediately clear from an examination of those documents.
The old national religion of Rome was dead.[10] The great dignitaries still
adorned themselves with the titles of augur and quindecimvir, or of consul
and tribune, but those {205} archaic prelacies were as de