The Emperor Julian

The birth of Christ sounded the knell of Paganism. Though from distant and despised Judaea the wailing of the banshee was inaudible to Roman Paganism, at almost the same time the ancient religion of Rome underwent a final revolution. Old faiths had long been refluent. At the close of the Republic they were abandoned and replaced by new. 


The inauguration of the Empire of Rome synchronizes in some sort, and by no means accidentally, with an abdication of Empire by the old gods. Amid the varying types of Paganism, representing sometimes Greek estheticism, sometimes Scythian savagery, sometimes Oriental sensuousness, sometimes Egyptian repose, it had been the pride of Roman Paganism to be above all else patriotic. 


Lacking the exuberant richness of Hellenic art and poetry, spurning alike the mystic piety and the voluptuous self-abandonment of the hot East, it strove with characteristic earnestness and consistency to be intensely national. Even before the Republic fell the power and the genius of the primitive religion died utterly out. Rome haughty, self-reliant, mistress of the world, needed no longer the aid of gods to win her victories; the soul of Roman religion had evaporated, and the young Empire proclaimed its disappearance. Before imperialism and cosmopolitanism the very conception of patriotism had withered: it could not breathe or live in that atmosphere. 


Next after being patriotic Roman religion had been moral: it had personified (such was its one effort of imagination) the moral virtues, and set these personified abstractions to superintend every sphere and occupation of life. But in an age of much superficial culture and still more of vast material civilization, bringing with it luxury and enervation and their habitual concomitants widespread social and personal immorality, the homeliness and simplicity of the old faith had been abandoned...