iberty nor for power.

[Footnote 14: Few of the many sad pictures in the _Satires_ of Juvenal
are more pitiable than that of the wretched "Quirites" struggling at
their patrons' doors for the pittance which formed their daily dole.
(Sat i. 101.)]

[Footnote 15: See Juv. _Sat_. iii. 62. Scipio, on being interrupted by
the mob in the Forum, exclaimed,--"Silence, ye stepsons of Italy! What!
shall I fear these fellows now they are free, whom I myself have brought
in chains to Rome?" (See Cic. _De Orat_. ii. 61.)]

II. It was an age at once of atheism and superstition. Strange to say,
the two things usually go together. Just as Philippe Egalite, Duke of
Orleans, disbelieved in God, and yet tried to conjecture his fate from
the inspection of coffee-grounds at the bottom of a cup,--just as Louis
XI. shrank from no perjury and no crime, and yet retained a profound
reverence for a little leaden image which he carried in his cap,--so the
Romans under the Empire sneered at all the whole crowd of gods and
goddesses whom their fathers had worshipped, but gave an implicit
credence to sorcerers, astrologers, spirit-rappers, exorcists, and every
species of imposter and quack. The ceremonies of religion were performed
with ritualistic splendour, but all belief in religion was dead and
gone. "That there are such things as ghosts and subterranean realms not
even boys believe," says Juvenal, "except those who are still too young
to pay a farthing for a bath." [16] Nothing can exceed the cool
impertinence with which the poet Martial prefers the favour of Domitian
to that of the great Jupiter of the Capitol. Seneca, in his lost book
"Against Superstitions,"[17] openly sneered at the old mythological
legends of gods married and gods unmarried, and at the gods Panic and
Paleness, and at Cloacina, the goddess of sewers, and at other deities
whose cruelty and license would have been infamous even in mankind. And
yet the priests, and Salii, and Flamens, and Augurs continued to fulfil
their solemn functions, and the highest title of the Emperor himself was
that of _Pontifex Maximus_, or Chief Priest, which he claimed as the
recognized head of the national religion. "The common worship was
regarded," says Gibbon, "by the people as equally true, by the
philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally
useful." And this famous remark is little more than a translation from
Seneca, who, after exposing the futility of the popular belief