Seneca, "Do you want to
propitiate the gods? Then be good. The true worshipper of the gods is
he who acts like them." "Better," remarks Plutarch, "not believe in a
God at all than cringe before a god who is worse than the worst of
men." In the actual worship of images none of them believe. One
conspicuous writer of the time says: "To look for a form and shape to
a god, I consider to be a mark of human feebleness of mind."
Concerning the schools of thought and in particular the tenets of
those Stoics and Epicureans whom St. Paul met at Athens, and whom he
could meet in educated circles all over the Roman Empire, we shall
have to speak in a following chapter, when summing up the intellectual
and moral condition of the time. Meanwhile it should be understood
that, though a profound or anything approaching a professional study
of philosophy was discouraged among the true Romans--more than once
the professional philosophers were banished from the capital--there
were few cultivated persons who did not to some extent dabble in it,
and even go so far as to profess an adherence to one school or
another. None of these men believed in the "Roman religion" as
administered by the state, although many of them were administering it
themselves. The same man could one day freely discuss the gods in
conversation or a treatise, and the next he might be clad in priestly
garb and officially seeing that the rites of sacrifice were being
religiously carried out in terms of the books, or that the auspices
were being properly taken.

It does not, however, follow at all that because poet or public man
cared nothing for the pantheon and all its mythology, he was therefore
without his superstitions. He might still tremble at signs and
portents, at comets, at dreams, and at the unpropitious behaviour of
birds and beasts. He might believe in astrology and resort to its
professors, called the "Chaldaeans." On the other hand he might laugh
at such things. It was all a matter of temperament. It certainly was
not every man who dared to act like one of the Roman admirals. When it
was reported that the omens were unpropitious to an imminent battle
because the sacred chickens "would not eat," he ordered them to be
thrown into the sea so that at least they might drink. The
freethinkers were in advance of their times. "Science" in the modern
sense hardly existed, and until phenomena are explained it is hard to
avoid a perplexity or astonishment which is equ