Theology

At the same time its ancient simplicity also departed.  Theology, the spurious offspring of reason and faith, was already occupied in introducing its own tedious prolixity and solemn inanity into the old homely national faith, and thereby expelling the true spirit of that faith.  The catalogue of the duties and privileges of the priest of Jupiter, for instance, might well have a place in the Talmud.  They pushed the natural rule—­that no religious service can be acceptable to the gods unless it is free from flaw—­to such an extent in practice, that a single sacrifice had to be repeated thirty times in succession on account of mistakes again and again committed, and that the games, which also formed a part of divine service, were regarded as undone if the presiding magistrate had committed any slip in word or deed or if the music even had paused at a wrong time, and so had to be begun afresh, frequently for several, even as many as seven, times in succession.

Irreligious Spirit

This exaggeration of conscientiousness was already a symptom of its incipient torpor; and the reaction against it—­indifference and unbelief—­failed not soon to appear.  Even in the first Punic war (505) an instance occurred in which the consul himself made an open jest of consulting the auspices before battle—­a consul, it is true, belonging to the peculiar clan of the Claudii, which alike in good and evil was ahead of its age.  Towards the end of this epoch complaints were loudly made that the lore of the augurs was neglected, and that, to use the language of Cato, a number of ancient auguries and auspices were falling into oblivion through the indolence of the college.  An augur like Lucius Paullus, who saw in the priesthood a science and not a mere title, was already a rare exception, and could not but be so, when the government more and more openly and unhesitatingly employed the auspices for the accomplishment of its political designs, or, in other words, treated the national religion in accordance with the view of Polybius as a superstition useful for imposing on the public at large.  Where the way was thus paved, the Hellenistic irreligious spirit found free course.  In connection with the incipient taste for art the sacred images of the gods began as early as the time of Cato to be employed, like other furniture, in adorning the chambers of the rich.  More dangerous wounds were inflicted on religion by the rising literature.  It could not indeed venture on open attacks, and such direct additions as were made by its means to religious conceptions —­e.g. the Pater Caelus formed by Ennius from the Roman Saturnus in imitation of the Greek Uranos—­were, while Hellenistic, of no great importance.  But the diffusion of the doctrines of Epichar and Euhemerus in Rome was fraught with momentous consequences.  The poetical philosophy, which the later Pythagoreans had extracted from the writings of the old Sicilian comedian Epicharmus