RELIGION It is easy to write the word "religion" at the head of this chapter, but by no means easy to find anything in this materialistic period which answers to our use of the word.

In the whole mass, for example, of the Ciceronian correspondence, there is hardly anything to show that Cicero and his friends, and therefore, as we may presume, the average educated man of the day, were affected in their thinking or their conduct by any sense of dependence on, or responsibility to, a Supreme Being.

If, however, it had been possible to substitute for the English word the Latin _religio_ it would have made a far more appropriate title to this chapter, for _religio_ meant primarily awe, nervousness, scruple--much the same in fact as that feeling which in these days we call superstition; and secondarily the means taken, under the authority of the State, to quiet such feelings by the performance of rites meant to propitiate the gods.[530] In both of these senses _religio_ is to be found in the last age of the Republic; but, as we shall see, the tendency to superstitious nervousness was very imperfectly allayed and the worship that should have allayed it was in great measure neglected.
It may be, indeed, that in quiet country districts the joyous rural festivals went on--we have many allusions and a few descriptions of them in the literature of the Augustan period,--and also the worship of the household deities, in which there perhaps survived a feeling of _pietas_ more nearly akin to what we call religious feeling than in any of the cults (_sacra publica_) undertaken by the State for the people.

Even in the city the cult of the dead, or what may perhaps be better called the religious attention paid to their resting-places, and the religious ceremonies attending birth, puberty, and marriage, were kept up as matters of form and custom among the upper and wealthier classes.

But the great mass of the population of Rome, we may be almost sure, knew nothing of these rites; the poor man, for example, could no more afford a tomb for himself than a house, and his body was thrown into some _puticulus_ or common burying-place,[531] where it was impossible that any yearly ceremonies could be performed to his memory, even if any one cared to do so.