As we have said, Roman religion was in the third century what it always had been, purely political. It was the prosperity of the Empire, its peace and immortality, for which sacrifices were made; with the individual, his happiness and prosperity, it concerned itself not at all. The antique virtues were civic, not personal. It was the State which had a soul, not the individual. Man was ephemeral. It was the nation that endured, and to secure that permanence each citizen laboured. As for the citizen, death was near, and so he hastened to live; before the roses could fade, he wreathed himself with them; immortality was, for him, in his descendants, the continuation of his name, the respect for his ashes. Any other form of futurity was a speculation. In anterior epochs, fright had peopled Tartarus, but fright had gone; the Elysian fields were too vague, too wearisome to contemplate. “After death,” said Cicero, “there is nothing”; and philosophy agreed with him. Of such and kindred religious theories the Roman statesmanship—realising the danger of independent religions—had constituted her Emperor supreme governor. As Pontifex Maximus he held much the same position as that which our Tudor Sovereigns created for themselves as heads of the Church in England. The Emperor was supreme over religious dogma and practice, whenever occasion necessitated control. The old faiths were crumbling, but none the less Rome was the abridgment of every superstition. The Gods of the conquered had always formed part of her spoils; to please them was easy—from Jehovah to the unknown Gods beyond the Rhine their worship was gore. That the upper classes had no faith goes without saying, but of the philosophical atheism of the upper classes the people knew nothing; they clung piously to a faith which had a theological justification for every sin; and turned with equal avidity to the Mithraic, Egyptian, and even to the Nazarene religion with which Constantine finally replaced the ancient worship, as long as they were all the same thing under a different name; the religion of the Empire with local or foreign mysteries thrown in; the accustomed traditions, miracles, feasts, and nature worship, unfortunately, as men found after Constantine, grown contentious and continually more expensive to maintain. The Vestals were still the guardians and types of the older theories they professed; they were the link between philosophy and superstition, and as such they played their part admirably: in private much the same as other women, in public exact. Occasionally there was a public scandal, but very rarely. Domitian had recalled the archaic law and had buried one defaulter alive. Claudius, referring to Messalina, had told them that the fate which made him the husband of impure women had destined him to punish such. The lady whom Caracalla buried alive protested, not against the imputation of a broken vow, but because the vow had not been broken satisfactorily enough for her liking.