<< No educated Roman believed in those things. They were fairy stories for the proles at worst or allegories at best. >>
A bit simplistic re the ideological role of religion, dontcha think?
Suetonius, e.g., always stopped his witty short biographies of the Caesars dead in their tracks and stuck in pages of superstitious blather about how such-and-such an omen was seen before this-or-that momentous event, to a point far beyond any normal propaganda need. And whatever Augustus's reasons for embracing the god thing, subsequent Caesars seemed to go out of the way to follow suit, again far beyond any vulgar propaganda need; it seemed on some (bizarre) level personally meaningful.
I can imagine that at some point after the collapse of the American empire (being hastened along smartly by the current jaw-droppingly stupid bunch) distant intellectual historians would be able to read through the massive output of the American educated classes and conclude, perfectly understandably, that no educated American really believed that stuff about heaven and hell and the Jesus-God who rose from the dead. And they would of course be wrong on some very important level.
---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 07:38:29 -0700 (PDT)
>
>--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>
>>
________________________________________________________________