To the Rev.Geoffrey Martin,Oxford.
Dear Martin,--"How individuals found religious consolation from the creeds of ancient Greece and Rome"is,as you quote C.O.Muller,"a very curious question."It is odd that while we have countless books on the philosophy and the mythology and the ritual of the classic peoples,we hear about their religion in the modern sense scarcely anything from anybody.We know very well what gods they worshipped,and what sacrifices they offered to the Olympians,and what stories they told about their deities,and about the beginnings of things.We know,too,in a general way,that the gods were interested in morality.They would all punish offences in their own department,at least when it was a case of numine laeso,when the god who protected the hearth was offended by breach of hospitality,or when the gods invoked to witness an oath were offended by perjury.
But how did a religiously minded man regard the gods?What hope or what fears did he entertain with regard to the future life?Had he any sense of sin,as more than a thing that could be expiated by purification with the blood of slaughtered swine,or by purchasing the prayers and "masses,"so to speak,of the mendicant clergy or charlatans,mentioned by Plato in the "Republic"?About these great questions of the religious life--the Future and man's fortunes in the future,the punishment or reward of justice or iniquity--we really know next to nothing.
That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretius seems so valuable to me.The De Rerum Natura was written for no other purpose than to destroy Religion,as Lucretius understood it,to free men's minds from all dread as to future punishment,all hope of Heaven,all dread or desire for the interference of the gods in this mortal life of ours on earth.For no other reason did Lucretius desire to "know the causes of things,"except that the knowledge would bring "emancipation,"as people call it,from the gods,to whom men had hitherto stood in the relation of the Roman son to the Roman sire,under the patria potestas or in manu patris.
As Lucretius wrought all his arduous work to this end,it follows that his fellow-countrymen must have gone in a constant terror about spiritual penalties,which we seldom associate in thought with the "blithe"and careless existence of the ancient peoples.In every line of Lucretius you read the joy and the indignation of the slave just escaped from an intolerable thraldom to fear.Nobody could well have believed on any other evidence that the classical people had a gloomy Calvinism of their own time.True,as early as Homer,we hear of the shadowy existence of the souls,and of the torments endured by the notably wicked;by impious ghosts,or tyrannical,like Sisyphus and Tantalus.But when we read the opening books of the "Republic,"we find the educated friends of Socrates treating these terrors as old-wives'fables.They have heard,they say,that such notions circulate among the people,but they seem never for a moment to have themselves believed in a future of rewards and punishments.
The remains of ancient funereal art,in Etruria or Attica,usually show us the semblances of the dead lying at endless feasts,or receiving sacrifices of food and wine (as in Egypt)from their descendants,or,perhaps,welcoming the later dead,their friends who have just rejoined them.But it is only in the deions by Pausanias and others of certain old wall-paintings that we hear of the torments of the wicked,of the demons that torture them and,above all,of the great chief fiend,coloured like a carrion fly.
To judge from Lucretius,although so little remains to us of this creed,yet it had a very strong hold of the minds of people,in the century before Christ.Perhaps the belief was reinforced by the teaching of Socrates,who,in the vision of Er,in the "Republic,"brings back,in a myth,the old popular faith in a Purgatorio,if not in an Inferno.