ary to say in order to account for existing
attitudes. We must use the plural, since the attitude of the state
officials is but one of several, and, inasmuch as the state officials
themselves were not a theological caste but only secular servants of
the community administering the regulations for external worship as
laid down in the records, it often happened that their official
attitude had nothing to do with their individual beliefs. Often they
did not know or care whether there was a real religious efficacy in
the acts which they performed; sometimes all that they knew was that
they were doing what the state required to be done properly by some
one.

Cicero quotes a dictum of a Pontifex Maximus that there was one
religion of the poet, another of the philosopher, and another of the
statesman. This is true, but it is hardly adequate. We must at least
add that of the common people. A well-known statement of more modern
birth puts the case--rather too strongly--that at our period all
religions were regarded by the people as equally true, by the
philosopher as equally false and by the statesman as equally useful.
We may begin with the ordinary people of whatever station, who were
not poets nor thinkers nor magistrates. It is an error to suppose that
such Romans of the first century were either atheistic or indifferent
to religion. Their fault was rather that they were too superstitious,
ready to believe too much rather than too little, but to believe
without relating their belief to conduct. They did not question the
existence of the traditional gods, nor the characters attributed to
them; they were ready to perform their dues of worship and to make
their due offerings, but all this had no bearing upon their own
morality. They believed with the terror of the superstitious in omens
and portents, and in rites of expiation and purification to avert the
threatened evil. They were alarmed by thunder and lightning,
earthquakes, bad dreams, ravens seen on the wrong side of the road,
and other evil tokens. They commonly accepted the existence of malign
spirits, including ghosts. They were prepared to believe that on
occasion a statue had bled or turned round on its base; that an ox had
spoken in human language; or that there had been a rain of blood.
There were doubtless exceptions, and superstition was less dire and
oppressive than once it was. More than fifty years before our date
Cicero had said that even old women no longer