as they are generally conceived—­and will openly discuss in speech and in writing the question of their existence or non-existence, and of their character and nature if they do exist.  They will endeavour to substitute for the barren formalism of rites and ceremonies, or the inconsistent or incomplete traditional morality of duty, another set of principles as a sounder guide to life and conduct.  Some are monotheists, some are simply in doubt.  Says Nero’s own tutor, 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 equivalent to superstition.

Consider now these various states of mind—­that of the people, ready to add almost any deity to the large and vague number already recognised; that of the poet, who finds the deities such useful literary material; that of the magistrate or public man, who, without enthusiasm or necessary belief, regards religion as a thing useful to society; and that of the philosopher, who thinks all the current religious conceptions unsound, if not absurd, and morally almost useless.