But an antiquarian interest in ritual is not inconsistent with indifference to religion. Varro, as we have seen, was criticized as an actual enemy of religion in spite of the services he claimed to have rendered to the gods--and the very claim justifies the criticism. So far as the literature of the last century B.C. and the stories current about the leading men in Rome allow us to judge, it is hard to suppose there has ever been an age less interested in religion. Cicero, for example, wrote--or, perhaps, compiled--three books "On the Nature of the Gods." He casts his matter into the form of a dialogue, in which in turn an Epicurean and a Stoic give their grounds for rejecting and for accepting the gods, and an Academic points out the inadequacy of the reasoning in both cases. He has also written on the immortality of the soul. But Cicero's correspondence is a more reliable index to his own beliefs and those of the society in which he moved. No society could be more indifferent to what we call the religious life. In theory and practice, in character and instinct, they were thoroughly secular. One sentence will exhibit Cicero's own feeling. He wrote to his wife from Brundusium on 30th April 58 B.C., when he was on his way to foreign exile: "If these miseries are to be permanent, I only wish, my dearest (_mea vita_), to see you as soon as possible and to die in your arms, since neither gods, whom _you_ have worshipped with such pure devotion, nor men, whom _I_ have always served, have made us any return."[26] Even when his daughter Tullia died, no sign of any hope of re-union escaped him in his letters, nor did Servius Sulpicius, who wrote him a beautiful letter of consolation, do more than merely hint at such a thing. "If the dead have consciousness, would she wish you to be so overcome of sorrow?" Horace, whose odes, as we have seen, are now and then consecrated to the restoration of religion, was every whit as secular-minded. He laughed at superstition and ridiculed the idea of a divine interest in men, when he expressed his own feeling. No one was ever more thoroughly Epicurean in the truest sense of the word; no one ever urged more pleasantly the Epicurean theory _Carpe diem_; no one ever had more deeply ingrained in him the belief _Mors ultima linea rerum est_. His candour, his humour, his friendliness, combine to give him a very human charm, but in all that is associated with the {11} religious side of man's thought and experience, he is sterile and insufficient. And Horace, like Cicero, represents a group. Fuscus Aristius, it is true, declined to rescue the poet from the bore on the ground that "it was the thirtieth Sabbath--and Horace could not wish to offend the Jews?" but we realize that this scruple was dramatic. Fuscus is said to have been a writer of comedies.[27] [Sidenote: The childhood of a pagan]