extremely fashionable among the gilded youth of Rome. Religion was almost purely formal or political. Augurships and priesthoods still existed as the perquisite of aristocratic families. People still uttered the formulæ of oaths and vows. There was still some belief in omens and prodigies, the altars still smoked with sacrifice when triumphant generals went up to the capitol, but few prayers ascended to Jupiter in sincerity. Instead the importation of strange deities continued. Again and again in this first century before Christ the senate tried to expel the worship of Isis from the precincts of Rome, but it always returned, and eventually the triumvirs built a temple to Isis and Serapis as a measure to court popular favour. The Magna Mater of the Phrygian corybants had long been firmly established at Rome. I think it was general materialism and immorality which killed the old State religion at Rome. Greek philosophy had generally been able to exist amicably by the side of religion. It now came in to fill up the gap left by the absence of real religious feeling. But at Rome, though Stoicism afterwards became a powerful force of inspiration to the noblest minds, philosophy was in the main a form of literary activity for dilettantists. Cato of Utica was a Stoic by temperament before he became one by doctrine. Cicero amused his leisure by recasting and combining the doctrines of the leading Greek schools in a Roman form of dialogue, in imitation of Plato; but with him it was more of a literary exercise than anything else, and Cicero has added little or nothing to the world’s stock of philosophical ideas. Only in the poet Lucretius does the fire of philosophy burn with genuine ardour. Lucretius had before him the task of proselytising at Rome for the doctrines of Epicurus and Democritus. People accustomed to the modern associations of the word “epicure” may wonder what there was to arouse the enthusiasm of a poet in the philosophy of Epicurus. That creed offered a rational explanation of the universe. With its theory of spontaneous atomic creation, and its surprising foreknowledge of some at least of the ideas of natural selection and evolution, it claimed to satisfy the intellect of mankind and to drive out all the grovelling superstition and empty rites which had usurped at Rome, as they tend to do always and everywhere, the throne of religion. All the enthusiasm with which the nineteenth century approached the new discoveries of science glowed in the heart of this rugged poet of the first century before Christ. “Voluptas” was his only goddess, but it was no vulgar pleasure of the body upon earth. It was the spirit soaring to freedom and knowledge. This atheist Epicurean is, in the true sense of the word, the most religious of all poets. He explains the nature of lightning in order that his fellow-creatures may not live in fear of thunderbolts. He explains with the same confident logic the nature of death in order