were, they were beginning to feel a sense of the brotherhood of man. Seneca was calling the slaves “humble friends.” “Man is a holy thing to man,” he says; and such teaching was reflected even in the legislation of the day. Juvenal pleads passionately for kindness to slaves and for moral purity in the home. Seneca not only feels that men are brothers, but that God is the Father of us all. We have seen how public charity was finding expression in the _alimenta_ and the free schools. “Love them that hate you” would not strike the Romans of the second century as anything more than a strong expression of the truth they had already begun to recognise. Thus the practical side of Christian ethics found its harmonies in the conduct as well as the theory of the more enlightened pagans. Peace and humanitarianism were in the air of the Antonine Age. As for religious dogma the whole tendency of thought was towards monotheism. “God is a Spirit” would find an instant acquiescence among educated Romans, even though they frequented the temples of a hundred different gods. Philosophy among Greeks and Romans alike had always been monotheistic. On the subject of immortality the philosophers were divided. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca are on the whole not hopeful. Probably the beliefs of the common folk--as testified in the epitaphs of their cemeteries--were equally divided. The laconic epitaph: “I was not, I was: I am not, I care not,” is common. But other epitaphs equally common express the hope of reunions in the other world or even of being “received among the number of the gods.” But on the whole the commonest view of Death was as a happy release and an unending sleep. It was the immediate hope of eternal bliss, which was the greatest thing that Christianity had to offer to the pagan world. Rome, then, was in many ways prepared for the reception of Christianity, whose doctrines found an echo in the aspirations of the day. She did much to give to Christian theology its Western form, and of course the ritual and practice of the Roman Church was in many ways merely a continuation of old pagan rites and ceremonies. Ancient deities became Christian saints without change of rite or cult; images were often adapted and even names scarcely altered. But, in fact, the whole conception of that mighty Church which conquered the world, including the barbarian invaders, was the offspring of the Roman political system. It was her genius for statecraft which made Rome the Eternal City. In one form or another she has governed the world for twenty centuries. EPILOGUE Musæ quid facimus? τὶ κεναῖσιν ἐν ἐλπίσιν αὔτως ludimus ἀϕραδίῃσιν ἐν ἤματι γηράσκοντες; Σαντονικοῖς camp οισν, ὄπῃ κρύος ἄσπετον ἐστίν, erramus gelido-τρομεροὶ rigidique poetæ. AUSONIUS