in order to save great portions of the old
Roman religion from falling into utter oblivion on account of the
indifference of the Romans themselves. It is obvious that such a state of
affairs would have been impossible in a community where the traditional
religion was a living power, not only formally acknowledged by everybody,
but felt to be a necessary of life, the spiritual daily bread, as it were,
of the nation.

To hold, however, that the main cause of the decay of the established
religion of Rome was the invasion of Greek culture, together with the fact
that the members of the Roman aristocracy, from whom the priests were
recruited and who superintended the cult, had become indifferent to the
traditional religion through this influence, this, I think, is to go
altogether astray. We may take it for granted that the governing classes
in Rome would not have ventured to let the cult decay if there had been
any serious interest in it among the masses of the population; and it is
equally certain that Greek philosophy and religious criticism did not
penetrate to these masses. When they became indifferent to the national
religion, this was due to causes that had nothing to do with free-thought.
The old Roman religion was adapted for a small, narrow and homogeneous
community whose main constituent and real core consisted of the farmers,
large and small, and minor artisans. In the last centuries of the Republic
the social development had occasioned the complete decay of the Roman
peasantry, and the free artisans had fared little better. In the place of
the old Rome had arisen the capital of an empire, inhabited by a
population of a million and of extraordinarily mixed composition. Not only
did this population comprise a number of immigrant foreigners, but, in
consequence of the peculiar Roman rule that every slave on being set free
attained citizenship, a large percentage of the citizens must of necessity
have been of foreign origin. Only certain portions of the Roman religion,
more especially the cult of the great central deities of the State
religion, can have kept pace with these changed conditions; the remainder
had in reality lost all hold on Roman society as it had developed in
process of time, and was only kept alive by force of habit. To this must
be added the peculiar Roman mixture of mobility and conservatism in
religious matters. The Roman superstition and uncertainty in regard to the
gods led on the one hand to a