to pass that those who have lived
have not lived, or that he who has held honourable offices did not hold
them); and that he has no other power over the past than that of oblivion;
and that (in order that we may also give a jesting proof of our
partnership with God) he cannot bring it about that twice ten is not
twenty, and more of the same sort--by all which the power of Nature is
clearly revealed, and that it is this we call God."

An opinion like that expressed here must without doubt be designated as
atheism, even though it is nothing but the Stoic pantheism logically
carried out. As we have said before, we rarely meet it so directly
expressed, but there can hardly be any doubt that even in the time of
Pliny it was quite common in Rome. At this point, then, had the educated
classes of the ancient world arrived under the influence of Hellenistic
philosophy.

CHAPTER VII

Though the foundation of the Empire in many ways inaugurated a new era for
the antique world, it is, of course, impossible, in an inquiry which is
not confined to political history in the narrowest sense of the word, to
operate with anything but the loosest chronological divisions. Accordingly
in the last chapter we had to include phenomena from the early days of the
Empire in order not to separate things which naturally belonged together.
From the point of view of religious history the dividing line cannot
possibly be drawn at the Emperor Augustus, in spite of his restoration of
worship and the orthodox reaction in the official Augustan poetry, but
rather at about the beginning of the second century. The enthusiasm of the
Augustan Age for the good old times was never much more than affectation.
It quickly evaporated when the promised millennium was not forthcoming,
and was replaced by a reserve which developed into cynicism--but, be it
understood, in the upper circles of the capital only. In the empire at
large the development took its natural tranquil course, unaffected by the
manner in which the old Roman nobility was effacing itself; and this
development did not tend towards atheism.

The reaction towards positive religious feeling, which becomes clearly
manifest in the second century after Christ, though the preparation for it
is undoubtedly of earlier date, is perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon
in the religious history of antiquity. This is not the place to inquire
into its causes, which still remain largely unexplained; there