The same feeling of angry resentment and defiance may be discerned in inscriptions on the graves of relatives prematurely snatched away by death. An epitaph on the monument of a child of five years was this: "To the unrighteous gods who robbed me of my life." Another on the tombstone of a maiden of twenty, named Procope, read as follows: "I lift my hand against the god who has deprived me of my innocent existence."[147] The soil of familiarity, contempt and sacrilege which we have just described, was most fertile ground for the growth of that rank and killing skepticism which was destroying the vitals of the Roman faith at the time of Christ. This unbelief, it is true, was not universal. At the time of the birth of the Savior, the Roman masses still believed in the gods and goddesses of the Greek and Roman mythologies. Superstition was especially prevalent in the country districts of both Greece and Italy. Pausanias, who lived about the middle of the second century of the Christian era, tells as that in his time the olden legends of god and hero were still firmly believed by the common people. As he traveled through Greece, the cypresses of Alcmæon, the stance of Amphion, and the ashes of the funeral piles of Niobe's children were pointed out to him. In Phocis, he found the belief still existing that larks laid no eggs there because of the sin of Tereus.[148] Plutarch, who lived about the middle of the first century of our era, tells us that the people were still modeling the gods in wax and clay, as well as carving them in marble and were worshiping them in contempt and defiance of philosophers and statesmen.[149] But this credulity was limited to the ignorant and unthinking masses. The intellectual leaders of both the Greek and Roman races had long been in revolt against the absurdity and vulgarity of the myths which formed the foundation of their popular faiths. The purity and majesty of the soul felt keenly the insult and outrage of enforced obedience to the obscene divinities that Homer and Hesiod had handed down to them. Five hundred years before Christ, Pindar, the greatest lyric poet of Greece, had denounced the vulgar tales told of the deities, and had branded as blasphemous the story of the cannibal feast spread for the gods by the father of Pelops. Xenophanes, also, in the sixth century before Christ, had ridiculed the mythical tales of the Homeric poems, and had called attention to the purely human character of popular religions. He had pointed out that the Ethiopians painted the images of their deities black, and gave them flat noses, in the likeness of themselves; that the Thracians, on the other hand, created their gods blue-eyed and red; and that, in general, every race had reflected its own physical peculiarities in the creation of its gods. He declared it to be his opinion that if the beasts of the field should attempt to produce a likeness of the gods, the horses would produce a resemblance