hey ordained that Roman citizens should not fill leading offices in
it; but it flourished so strongly, among the numerous foreigners in
the capital and among the poor, as to show that it met a great want
there. The worship of Bacchus had to be suppressed by the state; it
was carried on at nocturnal meetings, which even citizens attended,
and it led to all kinds of irregularities. As the subject of this
chapter is not the religions of Rome, but the Roman religion, we do
not here review the numerous foreign worships which were brought to
the capital from every part of the Empire, and made Rome, towards the
close of the Republic, the residence of the gods of every nation. The
Romans as we saw were not led by any convictions of their own to deny
the truth of foreign religions; and their policy as rulers also
inclined them to tolerate all worships which did not offend against
civil order. In the provinces it was the rule not to interfere with
local religion; at Rome the authorities recognised not the imported
religion itself, of which the state did not feel called to judge, but
the association practising it, which received permission to do so.
The worship was then protected by the state--it became a _religio
licita_. Amid the meeting of all the gods and the clashing of all the
creeds which were thus brought about at Rome, the Roman religion
itself maintained its place, not as a doctrine which any one
believed, for the very priests and augurs laughed at the rites and
ceremonies they carried on, but as a ritual which was bound up with
the whole past history of Rome, and believed to be necessary for the
welfare of the state as well as for the satisfaction of the common
people. In the atmosphere of discussion and of far-reaching
scepticism which then prevailed it was not to be expected that faith
could again find any strong support in the historical religion of
Rome. The Emperor Augustus made a serious attempt to reform and
revive religion. He selected the domestic worship of the Lares as the
most living part of the old system, and ordained that the two Lares
should be worshipped along with the genius of the Emperor, and that
Rome should be divided into districts, each with its temple of this
strange trinity; while in the provinces each district was to support
a worship of Rome and of the Emperor in addition to its existing
cults. Temples were rebuilt at Rome, new ones were raised, sacred
offices were filled which had been vacant