HISTORY

OF THE

CHRISTIAN

RELIGION.

I. PRELIMINARY ESSAY.

STATE OF ROME UNDER AUGUSTUS.

Ar the period when Christ came into the world, the human race, which was almost comprehended in the Roman Empire, was afflicted, after a series of fierce and pitiless wars, by the loss of liberty and the degeneracy of morals. Augustus, by the victory of Actium, had put an end to the rivalry by which, since the first triumvirate, the world had been given up to slaughter, proscription, and division. The great poet Lucretius had put up his prayer for peace :

Funde potens placidam Romanis inclyte pacem.

Virgil and Horace, the adroit flatterers of Augustus, had endeavoured to instil the belief that, along with the cessation of civil war, there would arise an age not only of civil tranquillity, but of domestic purity. It was the fiction of these two sweet singers, that Augustus was about to open an age of felicity upon earth, founded upon the strength of the Roman arms and the restoration of the ancient Roman manners.

Virgil, with some modesty, confines this era of domestic happiness to the rural population

Interea dulces pendent circum oscula nati:

Casta pudicitiam servat domus.

Horace, with a bolder flight of imagination, adorns in Venetian colours the happiness of the Roman Empire under his generous patron :-

Tutus bos etenim rura perambulat:
Nutrit culta Ceres, almaque Faustitas:
Pacatum volitant per mare navitæ :
Culpari metuit fides.

Nullis polluitur casta domus stupris;
Mos et lex maculosum edomuit nefas:
Laudantur simili prole puerperæ :

Culpam pœna premit comes.

Quis Parthum paveat? Quis gelidum Scythen?
Quis Germania quos horrida parturit

Fatus, incolumi Cæsare? Quis feræ

Bellum curet Iberia ?

In this and twenty other passages, Horace endeavours to infuse the belief that purity of domestic life, with security from foreign foes and civil discord, were to be the happy inheritance of the subjects of Augustus Cæsar. Yet he himself has given us a picture as disgusting as any that Juvenal or Tacitus has drawn of the connubial fidelity of the Roman wives :

Fæcunda culpæ sæcula nuptias

Primum inquinavere, et genus, et domos:
Hoc fonte derivata clades

In patriam populumque fluxit.

Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos
Matura virgo, et fingitur artubus
Jam nunc, et incestos amores

De tenero meditatur ungui.

Mox juniores quærit adulteros
Inter mariti vina: neque eligit
Cui donet impermissa raptim
Gaudia, luminibus remotis;
Sed jussa coram non sine conscio
Surgit marito, seu vocat institor,
Seu navis Hispanæ magister,
Dedecorum pretiosus emptor.

Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?
Ætas parentum pejor avis tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem.1

Ovid is not a whit behind his brother bards in the

task of adulation and false auguries of peace and purity. First commemorating the victories of Octavius

Illius auspiciis obsessæ monia pacem

Victa petent Mutina: Pharsalia sentiet illum
Emathiæque iterum madefacti cæde Philippi
quodcunque habitabile tellus

Sustinet hujus erit, Pontus quoque serviet illi

the poet proceeds to commemorate the blessings of peace :

Pace datâ terris, animum ad civilia vertet

Jura suum, legesque feret justissimus auctor;
Exemploque suo mores regit; inque futuri
Temporis ætatem, venturorumque nepotum
Prospiciens prolem sanctâ de conjuge natam,
Ferre simul nomenque suum curisque jubebit.

I need hardly say how little Horace and Ovid illustrated in their conduct the casta domus' and the 'prolem sanctâ de conjuge natam' which they celebrated in their harmonious numbers. But that is of

little consequence. The important fact for us is, that

Hor. Ode's, lib. iii. 6.

the reformation of manners, so confidently predicted,
did not happen, and that, on the contrary, never was
there so rapid a dissolution of morals, such a violation
of the respect due to virtuous matrons and innocent
daughters, as that which took place during the reign
of Augustus and his immediate successors. Augustus
himself was doomed to see and to condemn, in the
person of his daughter Julia, an example of extreme
vice. Julia, married in the bloom of her beauty
to Marcellus, the son of Octavia, was, after the pre-
mature death of the youth (so poetically celebrated
by Virgil), bound by her father's authority, and against
her own inclinations, to Agrippa in a second, and to
Tiberius in a third marriage. Exulting in her charms,
and vain of her wit, she gave way to the most un-
bounded profligacy, and degraded the forum and the
senate by making them the scenes of her licentious-
ness. The current stories may have been exaggerated,
but it is certain that Augustus adopted the belief that
the guilt of his daughter was shared with several of
the young nobles of Rome. Julius Antonius, son of the
triumvir, one of Julia's lovers, was accused of treason-
able conspiracy, and put to death.1 But is there any
need of proving the utter failure of such projects as
Augustus may have had for the regulation of morals?
Quid leges sine moribus.
Vanæ proficiunt?

is the exclamation of Horace himself.

Further, the very reign in which Christ first taught, the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, was marked by the

1 Seneca, De Benef. vi. 32.

1