ave been thrown, for he certainly used every other sort of
social material in the Satires. Among the few allusions to anything of
the kind in his works are his ridicule of the over-dressed praetor of the
town of Fundi, who had been a government clerk in Rome, and in the same
story, his jest at one of Maecenas' parasites, a freedman, and nominally
a Treasury clerk, as Horace had been. In another Satire, the clerks in
a body wish him to be present at one of their meetings.

Perhaps what strikes one most in the study of Horace, which means the
study of the Augustan age, is the vivid contrast between the man who
composed the Carmen Saeculare, the sacred hymn sung on the Tenth
anniversary of Augustus' accession to the imperial power, besides many
odes that breathe a pristine reverence for the gods, and, on the other
hand, the writer of satirical, playfully sceptical verses, who comments
on the story of the incense melting without fire at the temple of
Egnatia, with the famous and often-quoted 'Credat Judaeus'! The original
Romans had been a believing people, most careful in all ceremonies and
observances, visiting anything like sacrilege with a cool ferocity
worthy of the Christian religious wars in later days. Horace, at one
time or another, laughs at almost every god and goddess in the heathen
calendar, and publishes his jests, in editions of a thousand copies,
with perfect indifference and complete immunity from censorship, while
apparently bestowing a certain amount of care on household sacrifices
and the like.

The fact is that the Romans were a religious people, whereas the
Italians were not. It is a singular fact that Rome, when left long to
herself, has always shown a tendency to become systematically devout,
whereas most of the other Italian states have exhibited an equally
strong inclination to a scepticism not unfrequently mixed with the
grossest superstition. It must be left to more profound students of
humanity to decide whether certain places have a permanent influence in
one determined direction upon the successive races that inhabit them;
but it is quite undeniably true that the Romans of all ages have tended
to religion of some sort in the most marked manner. In Roman history
there is a succession of religious epochs not to be found in the annals
of any other city. First, the early faith of the Kings, interrupted by
the irruption of Greek influences which began approximately with Scipio
Africanus; next, the