"After death,"
said Caesar, "there is nothing," and all the world agreed with
him. The hour, too, in which three thousand gods had not a single
atheist, had gone, never to return. Old faiths had crumbled. None
the less was Rome the abridgment of every superstition. The gods
of the conquered had always been part of her spoils. The Pantheon
had become a lupanar of divinities that presided over birth, and
whose rites were obscene; an abattoir of gods that presided over
death, and whose worship was gore. To please them was easy. Blood
and debauchery was all that was required. That the upper classes
had no faith in them at all goes without the need of telling; the
atmosphere of their atriums dripped with metaphysics. But of the
atheism of the upper classes the people knew nothing; they clung
piously to a faith which held a theological justification of every
sin, and in the temples fervent prayers were murmured, not for
future happiness, for that was unobtainable, nor yet for wisdom or
virtue, for those things the gods neither granted nor possessed;
the prayers were that the gods would favor the suppliant in his
hatreds and in his lusts.
Such was Rome when Verus returned to wed Lucille. Before his car
the phallus swung; behind it was the pest. A little before, the
Tiber overflowed. Presently, in addition to the pest, famine came.
It was patent to everyone that the gods were vexed.
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