ymen in the form in which they were
cast in the national religion. However many allowances they made, their
attitude towards the popular faith was critical, and on important points
they denied it. It is against the background thus resulting from ancient
philosophy's treatment of ancient religion that we must view such
phenomena as Polybius, Cicero, and Pliny the Elder, if we wish to
understand their full significance.

On the other hand, it is certain that this was not the view that conquered
in the end among the educated classes in antiquity. The lower we come down
in the Empire the more evident does the positive relation of the upper
class to the gods of the popular faith become. Some few examples have
already been mentioned in the preceding pages. In philosophy the whole
movement finds its typical expression in demonology, which during the
later Empire reigned undisputed in the one or two schools that still
retained any vitality. It is significant that its source was the earlier
Platonism, with its very conservative attitude towards popular belief, and
that it was taken over by the later Stoic school, which inaugurated the
general religious reaction in philosophy. And it is no less significant
that demonology was swallowed whole by the monotheistic religion which
superseded ancient paganism, and for more than a thousand years was the
recognised explanation of the nature thereof.

In accordance with the line of development here sketched, the inquiry has
of necessity been focused on two main points: Sophistic and the
Hellenistic Age. Now it is of peculiar interest to note what small traces
of pure atheism can after all be found here, in spite of all criticism of
the popular faith. We have surmised its presence among a few prominent
personalities in fifth-century Athens; we have found evidence of its
extension in the same place in the period immediately following; and in
the time of transition between the fourth and third centuries we have
thought it likely that it existed among a very few philosophers, of whom
none are in the first rank. Everywhere else we find adjustments, in part
very serious and real concessions, to popular belief. Not to mention the
attitude towards worship, which was only hostile in one sect of slight
importance: the assumption of the divinity of the heavenly bodies which
was common to the Academics, Peripatetics, and Stoics is really in
principle an acknowledgement of the popular faith, whose con