._ holes where it was
impossible that any memorial ceremonies could be kept up.[861] Horace's
lines are familiar (_Sat._ 8. 8):

huc prius angustis eiecta cadavera cellis
conservus vili portanda locabat in arca.
hoc miserae plebi stabat commune sepulcrum, etc.

It is dangerous to be too confident about the effect on the religious
imagination of different ways of dealing with the dead; but it is at
least not improbable that any inherited tendency to believe in a
miserable future for the soul would be confirmed and maintained by so
miserable a fate for the body. The mass of the population had little
chance of ridding itself of eschatological superstition.

Thus I am inclined to come to Dr. Masson's conclusion, though on
somewhat different grounds. I think it quite possible that the
uneducated in the age of the poet may have really been inoculated with
these ideas of cruel retribution, and that in many cases this may have
resulted in despair or at least discomfort. Only we must remember that
in a great city like Rome, as in Paris or London to-day, both the
miseries and the enjoyments of life would tend to accustom the minds of
the lower strata to consider the present rather than the future; the
necessities and pleasures of the moment are with them the only material
of thought. Neither comfort nor remonstrance could reach them from
pulpit or from missioner; neither fear nor hope could largely enter into
their lives. In fact I half suspect that most of them were, after all,
so long as they were healthy and active, much what Lucretius would have
them be--free from all religious scruple; but, alas, utterly destitute
of the intellectual support which he claimed from the study of
philosophy. We can well understand how it was among the lower population
of the great cities that early Christianity found its chance. They had
no education or philosophy to stand between them and the gospel of
redemption.

I must say one word about another kind of transcendentalism which was
pushing its way into favour in Roman society at this time--I mean
astrology. One may call it transcendental because it was based, in its
original home in the East, on a mystical notion of sympathy between the
phenomena of the starry heavens and the phenomena of human life;[862]
and that this notion was carefully inculcated by those who taught the
"science" at Rome is shown by the long and wearisome poem on astrology
written by Manilius in the succeedi