So much it has been necessary to say in order to account for existing attitudes.  We must use the plural, since the attitude of the state officials is but one of several, and, inasmuch as the state officials themselves were not a theological caste but only secular servants of the community administering the regulations for external worship as laid down in the records, it often happened that their official attitude had nothing to do with their individual beliefs.  Often they did not know or care whether there was a real religious efficacy in the acts which they performed; sometimes all that they knew was that they were doing what the state required to be done properly by some one.

Cicero quotes a dictum of a Pontifex Maximus that there was one religion of the poet, another of the philosopher, and another of the statesman.  This is true, but it is hardly adequate.  We must at least add that of the common people.  A well-known statement of more modern birth puts the case—­rather too strongly—­that at our period all religions were regarded by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the statesman as equally useful.  We may begin with the ordinary people of whatever station, who were not poets nor thinkers nor magistrates.  It is an error to suppose that such Romans of the first century were either atheistic or indifferent to religion.  Their fault was rather that they were too superstitious, ready to believe too much rather than too little, but to believe without relating their belief to conduct.  They did not question the existence of the traditional gods, nor the characters attributed to them; they were ready to perform their dues of worship and to make their due offerings, but all this had no bearing upon their own morality.  They believed with the terror of the superstitious in omens and portents, and in rites of expiation and purification to avert the threatened evil.  They were alarmed by thunder and lightning, earthquakes, bad dreams, ravens seen on the wrong side of the road, and other evil tokens.  They commonly accepted the existence of malign spirits, including ghosts.  They were prepared to believe that on occasion a statue had bled or turned round on its base; that an ox had spoken in human language; or that there had been a rain of blood.  There were doubtless exceptions, and superstition was less dire and oppressive than once it was.  More than fifty years before our date Cicero had said that even old women no longer shuddered at the terrors of an underworld, and fifty years after it the satirist asserts the same of children.  But both writers are speaking somewhat hyperbolically.  Doubtless it had been wondered how two augurs could look at each other without a smile, but there is nothing to show that even a minority of augurs were acutely conscious of anything to smile at.

[Illustration:  FIG. 111.—­ISIS WORSHIP. (Wall-Painting.)]