he mask of
Cupid, a maliciousness that was simian. Aphrodite, whose eyes had been
lifted to the north and south, and who in Attica was draped with light,
obtained as Venus the leer of the Lampsacene. Long since from Syria
Astarte had arrived, as already, torn by Cilician pirates from Persia,
Mithra had come, while, from Egypt, had strayed Apis from whose mouth two
phalluses issued horizontally.

These were Rome's gods, the divinities about whom men and maidens
assembled, and to whom pledges were made. There were others, so many, in
such hordes had they come, that Petronius said they outnumbered the
population. The lettered believed in them no more than we do. But, like
the Athenians, they lived among a people that did. Moreover, the lettered
were few. Rome, brutal at heart, sanguinary and voluptuous, fought, she
did not read. She could applaud, but not create. Her literature, like her
gods, her art, her corruption, had come from afar. Her own breasts were
sterile. When she gave birth, it was to a litter of monsters, by accident
to a genius, again to a poet, to Caesar and to Lucretius, the only men of
letters ever born within her walls.

Meanwhile, though the Pantheon was obviously but a lupanar, the people
clung piously to creeds that justified every disorder, tenaciously to gods
that sanctified every vice, and fervently to Caesars that incarnated them
all.

The Caesars were religion in a concrete form. Long before, Ennius, the
Homer of Latium, had announced that the gods were but great men. The
Caesars accepted that view with amplifications. They became greater than
any that had been. Save Death, who, in days that precede the fall of
empires, is the one divinity whom all fear and in whom all believe, they
alone were august. In the absence of the aromas of tradition, they had
something superior. The Olympians inspired awe, the Caesars fright. Death
was their servant. They ordered. Death obeyed. In the obedience was
apotheosis. In the apotheosis was the delirium that madmen know. At their
feet, Rome, mad as they, built them temples, raised them shrines, created
for them hierophants and flamens, all the phantasmagoria of the
megalomaniac Alexander, and, with it, a worship which they accepted as
their due perhaps, but in which their reason fled. That of Caesar withstood
it. Insanity began with Antony, who called himself Osiris. The brain of
Tiberius, very steady at first, was insufficiently strong to withstand the
necta