The Italian festa, ancient and modern; meaning of the word feriae;
change in its meaning; holidays of plebs; festival of Anna Perenua;
The Saturnalia; the ludi and their origin; ludi Romani and plebeii;
other ludi; supported by State; by private individuals; admission
free; Circus maximus and chariot-racing; gladiators at funeral games;
stage-plays at ludi; political feeling expressed at the theatre;
decadence of tragedy in Cicero's time; the first permanent theatre, 55
B.C.; opening of Pompey's theatre; Cicero's account of it; the great
actors of Cicero's day: Aesopus; Roscius; the farces; Publilius Syrus
and the mime.


CHAPTER XI

RELIGION

Absence of real religious feeling; neglect of worship, except in the
family; foreign cults, e.g. of Isis; religious attitude of Cicero and
other public men: free thought, combined with maintenance of the ius
divinum; Lucretius condemns all religion as degrading: his failure to
produce a substitute for it; Stoic attitude towards religion: Stoicism
finds room for the gods of the State; Varro's treatment of theology on
Stoic lines; his monotheistic conception of Jupiter Capitolinus;
the Stoic Jupiter a legal rather than a moral deity; Jupiter in the
Aeneid; superstition of the age; belief in portents, visions, etc.;
ideas of immortality; sense of sin, or despair of the future.


EPILOGUE