Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/101

DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 65 in this world, but how the human soul might return to God — a goal which the Neo-Platonists often sought to attain by asceticism or mortifying the flesh, by ceremonies of purifi- cation, and sometimes by magic and incantations. Their one supreme being, they believed, transcended all attempts at description and was outside and far above the world of nature, — a transcendent God. The great Christian writer, Augustine, in the fifth century, admits that he was led to a more spiritual and monotheistic idea of God by reading Plotinus. The followers of Plotinus, however, feeling the need of mediators between man and so lofty and distant a God, or else desiring to retain some of their old religious be- liefs, stated the existence of a host of intermediate spiritual beings between the supreme deity and the human soul, and of a multitude of daemonic forces in the stars, the air, and nature generally. These mediators and demons could be propitiated by sacrifice and ceremony or coerced by magic and incantations. Religion in ancient and medieval times was the chief inspiration of art and literature, and we have seen that classical art and literature centered in the city. De clineof /^ Hence, when the city-state and civic religion art and declined, art and literature deteriorated too. Moreover, the efforts of men who were neither Greeks nor Latins by birth to write in those tongues resulted in a nat- ural falling-off in purity of style and diction, while they failed to introduce much new subject-matter. Public taste, too, had degenerated, and where Athens had supplied large audiences for the tragedies of ^Eschylus and Euripides, the people of the Roman Empire preferred pantomime, as the people of to-day prefer moving pictures. Seneca's tragedies in the first century of our era were probably written to be read rather than acted, and after him no dramas are extant from the time of the Roman Empire. Here we have a good illustration of how the decline of religion affected literature. Many had attended the performance of a drama by ^schy- lus, just as many listen to a sermon to-day, not because they especially enjoyed or even thoroughly comprehended it, but I