of the life of the family and the State.
This is a tendency that had long been at work in Greece, and is
especially marked in the teaching of the two great ethical schools of
the post-Alexandrian period, the Epicureans and Stoics. The influence of
Greece on the Romans was already strong enough to have sown the seeds of
individualism in Italy; but the tendency was at the same time a natural
result of enlarged experience and expanding intelligence among the upper
classes. The second century B.C. shows us many prominent men of strong
individual character, who assert themselves in ways to which we have not
been accustomed in Roman history, _e.g._ Scipio the elder, Flamininus,
Cato, Aemilius Paulus and his son, Scipio Aemilianus; and among lesser
and less honourable men we see the tendency in the passionate desire for
personal distinction in the way of military commands, triumphs, and the
giving of expensive games. This is the age in which we first hear of
statues and portrait busts of eminent men; and magistrates begin to put
their names or types connected with their families on the coins which
they issue.[716]

In religion this tendency is seen mainly in the attempts of the
individual, often successful, to shake himself free of the restrictions
of the old _ius divinum_. I pointed out long ago that it was a weak
point in the old Roman religion that it did little or nothing to
encourage and develop the individual religious instinct; it was
formalised as a religion of family and State, and made no appeal, as did
that of the Jews, to the individual's sense of right and wrong.[717] The
sense of sin was only present to the Roman individual mind in the form
of scruple about omissions or mistakes in the performance of religious
duties. Thus religion lost her chance at Rome as an agent in the
development of the better side of human nature. As an illustration of
what I mean I may recall what I said in an early lecture, that the
spirit of a dead Roman was not thought of as definitely individualised;
it joined the whole mass of the Manes in some dimly conceived abode
beneath the earth; there is no singular of the word Manes. It is only in
the third century B.C. that we first meet with memorial tombstones to
individuals, like those of the Scipios, and not till the end of the
Republican period that we find the words Di Manes representing in any
sense the spirit of the individual departed.[718]

In practical life the quarrel of the indi