In a society so managed, all hope of return to self-government having ceased, the level of thought sank accordingly. There was practically no more active freethought. Livy, indeed, speaks so often of the contempt shown in his own day for tales of prodigies, and of what he calls contempt for the Gods, [812] that there can be no question of the lack of religion among the upper classes at the beginning of the empire. But even in Livy's day unbelief had ceased to go beyond a shrugging of the shoulders. Horace, with his credat Judæus Apella, and his frank rejection of the fear of the Deos tristes, [813] was no believer, but he was not one to cross the emperor, [814] and he was ready to lend himself to the official policy of religion. [815] Ovid could satirize [816] the dishonest merchant who prayed to the Gods to absolve his frauds; but he hailed Augustus as the sacred founder and restorer of temples, [817] prayed for him as such, busied himself with the archæology of the cults, and made it, not quite without irony, a maxim to "spare an accepted belief." [818] Virgil, at heart a pantheist with rationalistic leanings, [819] but sadly divided between Lucretius and Augustus, his poetical and his political masters, [820] tells all the transition from the would-be scientific to the newly-credulous age in the two wistful lines:-- Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas ... Fortunatus et ille, Deos qui novit agrestes [821] --"happy he who has been able to learn the causes of things; fortunate also he who has known the rural Gods." The Gods, rural and other, entered on their due heritage in a world of decadence; Virgil's epic is a religious celebration of antiquity; and Livy's history is written in the credulous spirit, or at least in the tone, of an older time, with a few concessions to recent common sense. [822] In the next generation Seneca's monotheistic aversion to the popular superstitions is the high-water mark of the period, and represents the elevating power of the higher Greek Stoicism. On this score he belongs to the freethinking age, while his theistic apriorism belongs to the next. [823] All the while his principle of conformity to all legal observances [824] leaves him powerless to modify the environment.