any obligation to believe in any particular dogma. Merely in the case of
an open denial of the existence of the gods, or any other reviling of
them, a penalty was imposed, and that on account of the insult offered
to the state, which served those gods; beyond this it was free to
everyone to think of them what he pleased. If anyone wanted to gain the
favor of those gods privately, by prayer or sacrifice, it was open to
him to do so at his own expense and at his own risk; if he didn't do it,
no one made any objection, least of all the state. In the case of the
Romans, everyone had his own Lares and Penates at home; they were,
however, in reality, only the venerated busts of ancestors. Of the
immortality of the soul and a life beyond the grave, the ancients had no
firm, clear or, least of all, dogmatically fixed idea, but very loose,
fluctuating, indefinite and problematical notions, everyone in his own
way: and the ideas about the gods were just as varying, individual and
vague. There was, therefore, really no _religion_, in our sense of the
word, amongst the ancients. But did anarchy and lawlessness prevail
amongst them on that account? Is not law and civil order, rather, so
much their work, that it still forms the foundation of our own? Was
there not complete protection for property, even though it consisted for
the most part of slaves? And did not this state of things last for more
than a thousand years? So that I can't recognize, I must even protest
against the practical aims and the necessity of religion in the sense
indicated by you, and so popular now-a-days, that is, as an
indispensable foundation of all legislative arrangements. For, if you
take that point of view, the pure and sacred endeavor after truth would,
to say the least, appear quixotic, and even criminal, if it ventured, in
its feeling of justice, to denounce the authoritative creed as a usurper
who had taken possession of the throne of truth and maintained his
position by keeping up the deception.