speaking, atheism, and in this
sense atheism was widely spread among the higher classes of the
Graeco-Roman society about the time of the birth of Christ. But from this
to theoretical atheism there is still a good step. Cicero himself affords
an amusing example of how easily people, who have apparently quite
emancipated themselves from the official religion of their community, may
backslide. When his beloved daughter Tullia died in the year 45 B.C., it
became evident that Cicero, in the first violence of his grief, which was
the more overwhelming because he was excluded from political activity
during Caesar's dictatorship, could not console himself with philosophy
alone. He wanted something more tangible to take hold on, and so he hit
upon the idea of having Tullia exalted among the gods. He thought of
building a temple and instituting a cult in her honour. He moved heaven
and earth to arrange the matter, sought to buy ground in a prominent place
in Rome, and was willing to make the greatest pecuniary sacrifices to get
a conspicuous result. Nothing came of it all, however; Cicero's friends,
who were to help him to put the matter through, were perhaps hardly so
eager as he; time assuaged his own grief, and finally he contented himself
with publishing a consolatory epistle written by himself, or, correctly
speaking, translated from a famous Greek work and adapted to the occasion.
So far he ended where he should, _i.e._ in philosophy; but the little
incident is significant, not least because it shows what practical ends
Euhemerism could be brought to serve and how doubtful was its atheistic
character after all. For not only was the contemplated apotheosis of
Tullia in itself a Euhemeristic idea, but Cicero also expressly defended
it with Euhemeristic arguments, though speaking as if the departed who
were worshipped as gods really had become gods.

The attitude of Cicero and his contemporaries towards popular belief was
still the general attitude in the first days of the Empire. It was of no
avail that Augustus re-established the decayed State cult in all its
splendour and variety, or that the poets during his reign, when they
wished to express themselves in harmony with the spirit of the new regime,
directly or indirectly extolled the revived orthodoxy. Wherever we find
personal religious feeling expressed by men of that time, in the Epistles
of Horace, in Virgil's posthumous minor poems or in such passages in his
greater