One important and permanent contribution to religion Augustus did make: as early as the year 42 B.C., the masterful youth had forced an unwilling senate to declare Julius Caesar divine; thereby he established the worship of the deified emperors—a cult which was to last nearly four centuries. The significance for us of this worship of the emperor lies in the fact that now for the first time there was introduced into the entire civilized world a common religion. From the remotest East to the farthest West, from Britain on the north to the edge of the Great Desert on the south, temples to the deified emperors had been erected before a century of the Empire had passed, and these did much to accustom men to the idea of one common worship for the whole world. * * * * * Thus far we have been considering almost wholly those forces which were operating in the Roman world first to obscure the original Roman religion and finally to break down faith in that traditional religion which had resulted from the victory of the gods of Greece over those of Rome. Yet the age of Augustus was far from being irreligious. Of the truth of this statement Virgil alone would be sufficient witness if all others were lacking, for the Aeneid owed its immediate popularity and its permanent high place, not only to the unmatched expression which it gave to Roman imperialism, but also to its religious tone, which the poet’s contemporaries and their successors found partly in Virgil’s exact knowledge of Roman ritual and felt still more in the sixth book of the Aeneid, where the current beliefs in a future life with rewards and punishments were set forth in combination with impressive prophecy after the event; all was planned and combined in such a way as to make a strong appeal to the Romans’ national pride and religious sense alike. Moreover under the Empire positive elements tending to elevate religious thought and to purify morals were not lacking. On many of these we have already touched in our last lecture, for they were largely to be found in philosophy, one of the greatest gifts which Greece gave to her conqueror. Even at the risk of repetition, we shall now consider briefly some of these constructive forces.