some
ways even their own ceremonies, to the habits and prejudices of the
pagans, tells the same story. But the question how far Latin
Christianity was indebted to the religion of the Romans must be
postponed to my last lecture; I have said enough to indicate in which
direction we must go for evidence that the work of Augustus was not in
vain, that it gave fresh stimulus to a plant that still had some life in
it.

If, then, the Augustan revival was not a mere sham, but had its measure
of real success, how are we to account for this? I think the explanation
is not really difficult, if we bring to bear upon the problem what we
have learnt from the beginning about the religious experience of the
Romans. Let us note that Augustus troubled himself little about the
later political developments of religion, which we have lately been
examining,--about pontifices, augurs, and Sibylline books; these
institutions, which had been so much used in the republican period for
political and party purposes, it was rather his interest to keep in the
background. But in one way or another he must have grasped the
fundamental idea of the old Roman worship, that the prosperity and the
fertility of man, and of his flocks and herds and crops on the farm, and
the prosperity and fertility of the citizen within the city itself,
equally depended on the dutiful attention (_pietas_) paid to the divine
beings who had taken up their abode in farm or city.[906] The best
expression of this idea in words is _pax deorum_,--the right relation
between man and the various manifestations of the Power,--and the
machinery by which it was secured was the _ius divinum_.[907] We shall
not be far wrong if we say that it was Augustus' aim to re-establish the
_pax_ by means of the _ius_; but if we wished to explain the matter to
some one who has not been trained in these technical terms, it would be
better to say that he appealed to a deeply-rooted idea in the popular
mind,--the idea that unless the divine inhabitants were properly and
continually propitiated, they would not do their part in supporting the
human inhabitants in all their doings and interests. This popular
conviction he deliberately determined to use as his chief political
lever.

This has, I think, been insufficiently emphasised by historians, who
contemplate the work of this shrewd statesman too entirely from the
political point of view. I am sure that he had learnt from his
predecessors in power th