ero_, p.
334.

[752] _Cistellaria_, ii. 1. 45 foll.

[753] Aust, _op. cit._ p. 66.

[754] See Schanz, _Gesch. der roem. Literatur_, vol. i.
p. 75.

LECTURE XVI

GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND ROMAN RELIGION

I said at the end of the last lecture that ideas about the Divine might
be discussed at Rome by philosophers, as the Romans began to read and in
some degree to think. At the era we have now reached, the latter half of
the second century B.C., this process actually began, and I propose in
this lecture to deal with it briefly. But my subject is the Roman
religious experience, and I can only find room for philosophy so far as
the philosophy introduced at Rome had a really religious side. Another
reason forbidding me to give much space to it is that it was at Rome
entirely exotic, did not spring from an indigenous root in Roman life
and thought, and never seriously affected the minds of the lower and
less educated population. And I must add that the types of Greek
philosophy which concern us at all have been fully and ably dealt with,
the one in vol. ii. of Dr. Caird's lectures on this foundation on _The
Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_, a work from which I
have learnt much, and the other by Dr. Masson in his most instructive
work on the great Epicurean poet Lucretius.

We have seen in the two last lectures that in that second century B.C.
the Roman was fast becoming religiously destitute--a castaway without
consolation, and without the sense that he needed it. He was destitute,
first, in regard to his idea of God and of his relation to God; for if
we take our old definition of religion, which seems to me to be
continually useful, we can hardly say of that age that it showed any
effective desire to be in right relation with the Power manifesting
itself in the universe. The old idea of the manifestation of the Power
in the various _numina_ had no longer any relation to Roman life; the
kind of life in which it germinated and grew, the life of agriculture
and warlike self-defence, had passed away with the growth of the great
city, the decay of the small farmer, and the extension of the empire;
and no new informing and inspiring principle had taken its place.
Secondly, he was destitute in regard to his sense of duty, which had
been largely dependent on religion, both in the family and in the State.
No new force had come in to create and maintain conscience. In public
life, indeed,