Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

How far the Antonine age is marked by a moral and spiritual revolution—Light which Seneca throws on the moral condition of his class in Nero’s reign—Value of his testimony—His p...

Juvenal and Tacitus compared—Social position and experience of Juvenal—Juvenal and Martial deal with the same features of society—Their motives compared—Character of Martial—The...

The rise of the freedmen a great movement—Roman prejudice against them expressed in the literature of the age—Economic and social causes of the movement—Trade and industry despi...

The contrast between the pictures of society in Juvenal and in Pliny—They belonged to different worlds—They were also of very different temperaments—Moral contrasts side by side...

Little known of country town life from Roman literature—Yet the love of the country was strong—A relief from the strain of the capital, which, however, always maintained its att...

The _plebs_ of the municipal town chiefly known from the Inscriptions—Great development of a free proletariat—The effects of manumission—The artisan class in the Inscriptions—Th...

The great change in the motive and character of philosophy—The schools forsook metaphysical speculation, and devoted themselves to the cultivation of character—Why faith in abst...

Seneca the director of an aristocratic class—The masses needed a gospel—Their moral condition—The Antonine age produced a great movement for their moral elevation—Lucian’s attit...

The pagan revival and the growth of superstition called for a theodicy—Old Roman religion was still powerful—But there was an immense accretion of worships from the conquered co...

Superstition a term of shifting meaning—Plutarch’s treatise on Superstition—Why it is worse than atheism—Immense growth of superstition in the first century, following on a deca...

The conception of immortality determined by the idea of God—Religion supplies the assurance denied by philosophy—Vagueness of the conception natural and universal—“It doth not y...

The decay of old religion in the last age of the Republic—Its causes—Influence of Greek philosophy and rationalism—Distinction drawn between the religion of philosophy and that...

The fascination of the worship of the Great Mother—It was still powerful in the days of S. Augustine—Its arrival from Pessinus in 204 B.C.—The history of its growing influence—T...

Their long reign in Europe—Established at Peiraeus in the fourth century B.C.—And in Asia Minor—How the Egyptian cults had been transformed under Greek influences—Greek settlers...

The causes which in the second century A.D. prepared the triumph of Mithra—Heliolatry the natural goal of heathenism—Early history of Mithra in the Vedas and Avestas—He is a mor...

The period of social history which we are about to study is profoundly interesting in many ways, but not least in the many contrasts between its opening and its close. It opens...

Juvenal and Tacitus, although they moved in different circles and probably never met, have much in common. Both were released from an ignominious silence by the death of Domitia...

The historian, who is occupied with war and politics, and the fate of princes and nobles, is apt to lose sight of great silent movements in the dim masses of society. And, in th...

It is a great relief to turn from the picture of base and vulgar luxury in the novel of Petronius to the sobriety and refinement of a class which has been elaborately painted by...

Nearly all the intimate friends of Pliny were, like himself, bred in the country, and, as we have seen, he has left us a priceless picture of that rural aristocracy in the calm...

The _Populus_ or _Plebs_ of a municipal town of the early Empire is often mentioned in the inscriptions along with the _Ordo_ and the Augustales, generally in demanding some ben...

Philosophy in the time of Seneca was a very different thing from the great cosmic systems of Ionia and Magna Graecia, or even from the system of the older Stoicism. Speculative...

The gospel of philosophy expounded by Seneca was rather an esoteric or aristocratic creed. With all his liberal sentiment, his cosmopolitanism, his clear conception of human equ...

The times were ripe for a theodicy. Religion of every mood and tone, of every age and clime, was in the air, and philosophy had abandoned speculation and turned to the direction...

Superstition in all ages is a term of unstable meaning. Men even of the same time will apply it or deny its application to the same belief. The devout beliefs of one period may...

A great part of the charm of those oriental religions, on the study of which we are about to enter, lay in the assurance which they seemed to give of an immortal life. It would,...

It is well known that, from the second Punic War to the revival of Augustus, old Roman religion was falling into decay. Yet sweeping assertions about the religious condition of...

The earliest invader from the East of the sober decorum of old Roman religion, and almost the last to succumb, was Magna Mater of Pessinus. There is no pagan cult which S. Augus...

The worship of Isis and Serapis, reckoning from the day when it established itself in the port of Athens, had a reign of more than seven centuries over the peoples of Europe. It...

Of all the oriental religions which attracted the devotion of the West in the last three centuries of the Empire, that of Mithra was the most powerful. It is also the system whi...

_ 445 Ib._ xiv. 16; cf. Suet. _Nero_, lii., where Suetonius distinctly says that some of Nero’s verses, which he had seen, bore all the marks of originality. Philostr. _Apoll. T...

1568 The Cornicines of the 3rd Legion at Lambesi paid an entrance fee of 750 denarii (_Scamnari nomine_). The anularium on retirement, and the funeraticium, were each 500 _denar...