the fact concealed. There must be nothing in his demeanour or his
speech to lay him open to a charge of becoming dangerous to the
emperor. That emperor is Nero; and even stronger and saner emperors
than Nero watched suspiciously the behaviour of aspiring men.

CHAPTER XIX

ROMAN RELIGION--STATE AND INDIVIDUAL

To undertake to set forth with any definiteness the "religious ideas
of a Roman" of A.D. 64 would be an extremely difficult task. Those
ideas would differ with the individual, being determined or varied by
a number of considerations and influences--by locality, education, and
temperament. Silius would not hold the views of Scius and probably not
those of Marcia. We may speak of the "State religion" of Rome, as
distinct from various other religions tolerated and practised in
different parts of the empire, but it is scarcely possible to define
the contents of that "State religion." There were certain special
priests and priestly bodies who saw to it that certain rites and
ceremonies should be perfortied scrupulously in a prescribed manner
and on prescribed dates; but these were officers of the state, whose
knowledge and functions were confined to the ritual observances with
which they had to deal. They were not persons trained in a system of
theology, nor were they preachers of a code of doctrines or morals;
they had no "cure of souls," and belonged to no church; they had no
_credo_ and no Bible or corresponding authority to which to refer.
Though most well-informed persons could have told the names of the
prominent deities in the calendar--such as Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, and
Ceres--perhaps scarcely any one but an encyclopaedist or antiquarian
could have named one-half of the total. It is not merely that the
deities on the list were so numerous. There were other reasons for
ignorance or vagueness. In the first place, the line between the
operations of one deity and those of another was often too fine to
draw, and deities originally more or less distinct came to be confused
or identified. Secondly, it was often hard, if not impossible, to make
up one's mind whether a so-called deity--such as Virtue, Peace, or
Health--was supposed to have a real existence, or whether it was
simply the personification of an abstract quality. Thirdly, many of
the ancient divinities had fallen out of fashion, and to a large
extent out of memory, while many new ones--Isis and Serapis for
example--had come, or were coming, into v