equences,[748] to point out that his evidence was almost
wholly derived from the play-writers of the very period on which we are
now engaged. I said that he seems to be justified in concluding that
there was a popular idea of such a kind, which the State religion did
not recognise; but that it can very easily be explained as the natural
effect of a degenerate Greek mythology, popularised by Greek dramas
adapted to the Roman stage, upon certain peculiarities of the Roman
theology, and especially the functional combination of male and female
divine names in Italian invocations of the deities. Nothing could be
more natural than that playwrights should take advantage of such
combinations to invent or translate comic passages to please a Roman
audience, "now largely consisting of semi-educated men who had lost
faith in their own religion, and a host of smaller people of mixed
descent and nationality." We do not know enough of the older comedies to
be at all sure how far they had gone in this direction, though we are
certain, to use the words of Zeller,[749] that it was impossible to
transplant Greek poetry to Roman soil without bringing Greek mythology
with it; or, as I should put it, without subordinating the old
reasonable idea of the Power manifesting itself in the universe to the
Greek fancy for clothing that Power in the human form and endowing it
with human faults and frailties.

But of the two great literary figures of the age we have now reached,
Ennius and Plautus, we know beyond all doubt that they taught the
ignorant Roman of their day not only to be indifferent to his deities,
but to laugh at them. Just at the very time when the forged books of
Numa were being burnt in the Comitium, Ennius' famous translation of the
_Sacred History of Euhemerus_ was becoming known at Rome, in which was
taught the doctrine of the human origin of all deities; and though we
have hardly a fragment left of the comedies of Ennius, we may presume
that he would not have hesitated for a moment to make the gods
ridiculous on the stage. It was he who wrote the celebrated lines in his
tragedy of Telamo:[750]

ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus,

which (as I have said elsewhere)[751] strike a direct blow at the
efficacy of sacrifice and prayer by openly declaring that the gods did
not interest themselves in mankind. This is the same Epicurean doctrine
afterwards preached