all punish offences in their own department, at least when it was a case
of _numine laeso_, when the god who protected the hearth was offended by
breach of hospitality, or when the gods invoked to witness an oath were
offended by perjury.

But how did a religiously minded man regard the gods? What hope or what
fears did he entertain with regard to the future life? Had he any sense
of _sin_, as more than a thing that could be expiated by purification
with the blood of slaughtered swine, or by purchasing the prayers and
"masses," so to speak, of the mendicant clergy or charlatans, mentioned
by Plato in the "Republic"? About these great questions of the religious
life--the Future and man's fortunes in the future, the punishment or
reward of justice or iniquity--we really know next to nothing.

That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretius seems so valuable to
me. The _De Rerum Natura_ was written for no other purpose than to
destroy Religion, as Lucretius understood it, to free men's minds from
all dread as to future punishment, all hope of Heaven, all dread or
desire for the interference of the gods in this mortal life of ours on
earth. For no other reason did Lucretius desire to "know the causes of
things," except that the knowledge would bring "emancipation," as people
call it, from the gods, to whom men had hitherto stood in the relation of
the Roman son to the Roman sire, under the _patria potestas_ or _in manu
patris_.

As Lucretius wrought all his arduous work to this end, it follows that
his fellow-countrymen _must_ have gone in a constant terror about
spiritual penalties, which we seldom associate in thought with the
"blithe" and careless existence of the ancient peoples. In every line of
Lucretius you read the joy and the indignation of the slave just escaped