Religion, similarly, "often and often has given birth to sinful and unholy deeds." The illustration, which he uses, is the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and it seems a little remote. Yet Pliny says that in 97 B.C. in the consulship of Lentulus and Crassus, a decree of the Senate forbade human sacrifice--_ne homo immolaretur_. "It cannot be estimated," he goes on, "what a debt is owed to the Romans who have done away (in Gaul and Britain) with monstrous rites, in which it was counted the height of religion to kill a man, and a most healthful thing to eat him."[92] Elsewhere he hints darkly at his own age having seen something of the kind, and there is an obscure allusion in Plutarch's life of Marcellus to "unspeakable rites, that none may see, which are performed (?) upon Greeks and Gauls."[93] "At the temple of Aricia," says Strabo, "there is a barbarian and Scythian practice. For there is there established a priest, a runaway slave, who has killed with his own hand his predecessor. There he is, then, ever sword in hand, peering round about, lest he should be attacked, ready to defend himself." Strabo's description of the temple on the lake and the precipice overhanging it adds to the impressiveness of the scene he thus pictures.[94] If human sacrifice was rare in practice, none the less it was in the minds of men. _Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum_ concludes Lucretius, and yet it was not perhaps his last thought. M. Patin has a fine study of the poet in which he deals with "the anti-Lucretius in Lucretius." Even in the matter of religion, his keen observation of Nature frequently suggests difficulties which are more powerfully expressed and more convincing than the arguments with which he himself tries to refute them. "When we look up to the heavenly regions of the great universe, the aether set on high above the glittering stars, and the {27} thought comes into our mind of the sun and moon and their courses; then indeed in hearts laden with other woes that doubt too begins to wake and raise its head--can it be perchance, after all, that we have to do with some vast Divine power that wheels those bright stars each in his orbit? Again who is there whose mind does not shrink into itself with fear of the gods, whose limbs do not creep with terror, when the parched earth rocks under horrible blow of the thunderbolt, and the roar sweeps over the vast sky? ... When too the utmost fury of the wild wind scours the sea and sweeps over its waters the admiral with his stout legions and his elephants, does he not in prayer seek peace with the gods? ... but all in vain, since, full oft, caught in the whirlwind, he is driven, for all his prayers, on, on to the shoals of death. Thus does some hidden power trample on mankind.... Again, when the whole earth rocks under their feet, and towns fall at the shock or hang ready to collapse, what wonder if men despise themselves, and make over to the gods high prerogative and