The great intellectual revolution which has been named the Renaissance was at first a return to Greek and Roman antiquity. Literary men and scholars, filled with adoration for a glorious past, abandoned their mother tongue for that of the great dead, imitated Virgil, Cicero, Demosthenes, swore by Jupiter and Mercury, insisted, like Montaigne, on being given the title of Roman citizens, or like Erasmus, Ramus, or Melanchthon, took neo-classical names. They restored ancient methods of thought and action; they wove conspiracies in imitation of Brutus; they dated their letters by the Calends and the Ides; they became pagans once more in appearance and sometimes in reality; in opposition to Christianity--the religion of sadness, resignation, poverty, and of the struggle against the flesh and passion--they re-established love, pleasure, beauty, and the joy of life. They wakened from their long slumber the old systems of philosophy, and as disciples not only of Aristotle, but of Plato, Epicurus, and Diogenes, they became accustomed to coquetting with every kind of doctrine and often acquired an elegant dilettantism. These new conceptions, which demanded a knowledge of languages requiring long study at college, could only be held by an _élite_. To have the right of initiation into the ancient authors it was necessary to belong to the leisured classes; it took time to read and re-read them in order to extract the "marrow within." In a word, the Renaissance was fundamentally aristocratic. Most of its classical scholars and poets profess disdain and hatred of the ignorant masses. Rien ne me plaist que ce qui peut desplaire Au jugement du rude populaire cries one of the brilliant satellites of our Pléiade.[113]