was religious, and his gods must go
with him. They filled his literature: for why? He believed himself to be
sprung from their loins. Where would Latin literature be, for example, if
you could cut Venus out of it? Consider Lucretius' grand invocation:

AEneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas,
Alma Venus!

Consider the part Virgil makes her play as moving spirit of his whole
great poem. So follow her down to the days of the later Empire and open
the "Pervigilium Veneris" and discover her, under the name of Dione,
still the eternal Aphrodite sprung from the foam amid the churning hooves
of the sea-horses--_inter et bipedes equos_:--

Time was that a rain-cloud begat her, impregning the heave of the deep,
'Twixt hooves of sea-horses a-scatter, stampeding the dolphins as
sheep.
Lo! arose of that bridal Dione, rainbow'd and besprent of its dew!
_Now learn ye to love who loved never--now ye who have loved, love
anew!_
Her favour it was fill'd the sails of the Trojan for Latium bound,
Her favour that won her AEneas a bride on Laurentian ground,
And anon from the cloister inveigled the Virgin, the Vestal, to Mars;
As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated her Rome for its wars
With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew
From Romulus down to our Caesar--last, best of that blood, of that thew.
_Now learn ye to love who loved never--now ye who have loved, love
anew!_

'Last, best of that blood'--her blood, _fusa Paphies de cruore_, and the
blood of Teucer, _revocato a sanguine Teucri_, 'of that thew'--the thew
of Tros and of Mars. Of these and no less than these our Roman believed
himself the son and inheritor.

If we grasp this, that the old literature was packed with the old
religion, and not only packed with it but permeated by it, we have within
our ten fingers the secret of the 'Dark Ages,' the real reason why the
Christian Fathers fought down literature and almost prevailed to the
point of stamping it out. They hated it, not as literature; or at any
rate, not to begin with; nor, to begin with, because it happened to be
voluptuous and they austere: but they hated it because it held in its
very texture, not to be separated, a religion over which they had hardly
triumphed, a religion actively inimical to that of Christ, inimical to
truth; so that for the sake of truth and in the name of Christ they had
to fight it, accepting no compromise, y