terial. Both could have claimed the sanction
of religion. In those days a sin was a prayer. Religion was then, as it
always had been, purely political. With the individual, with his
happiness or aspirations, it concerned itself not at all. It was the
prosperity of the empire, its peace and immortality, for which
sacrifices were made, and libations offered. The god of Rome was Rome,
and religion was patriotism. The antique virtues, courage in war,
moderation in peace, and honor at all times, were civic, not personal.
It was the state that had a soul, not the individual. Man was
ephemeral; it was the nation that endured. It was the permanence of its
grandeur that was important, nothing else.

To ensure that permanence each citizen labored. As for the citizen,
death was near, and he hastened to live; before the roses could fade he
wreathed himself with them. Immortality to him was in his descendants,
the continuation of his name, respect to his ashes. Any other form of
future life was a speculation, infrequent at that. In anterior epochs
Fright had peopled Tartarus, but Fright had gone. The Elysian Fields
were vague, wearisome to contemplate; even metempsychosis had no
adherents. "After death," said Caesar, "there is nothing," and all the
world agreed with him. The hour, too, in which three thousand gods had
not a single atheist, had gone, never to return. Old faiths had
crumbled. None the less was Rome the abridgment of every superstition.
The gods of the conquered had always been part of her spoils. The
Pantheon had become a lupanar of divinities that presided over birth,
and whose rites were obscene; an abattoir of gods that presided over
death, and whose worship was gore. To please them was easy. Blood and
debauchery was all that was required. That the upper classes had no
faith in them at all goes without the need of telling; the atmosphere
of their atriums dripped with metaphysics. But of the atheism of the
upper classes the people knew nothing; they clung piously to a faith
which held a theological justification of every sin, and in the temples
fervent prayers were murmured, not for future happiness, for that was
unobtainable, nor yet for wisdom or virtue, for those things the gods
neither granted nor possessed; the prayers were that the gods would
favor the suppliant in his hatreds and in his lusts.

Such was Rome when Verus returned to wed Lucille. Before his car the
phallus swung; behind it was the pest. A littl