They were
convinced that the soul is not a substance, but a faculty which is born
and which perishes with the body; consequently they had no yoke other
than morality and honour. The Roman senators and knights were veritable
atheists, for the gods did not exist for men who neither feared nor
hoped anything from them. The Roman senate in the time of Caesar and
Cicero, was therefore really an assembly of atheists.
That great orator, in his harangue for Cluentius, says to the whole
senate in assembly: "What ill does death do him? we reject all the inept
fables of the nether regions: of what then has death deprived him? of
nothing but the consciousness of suffering."
Does not Caesar, the friend of Cataline, wishing to save his friend's
life against this same Cicero, object to him that to make a criminal die
is not to punish him at all, that death _is nothing_, that it is merely
the end of our ills, that it is a moment more happy than calamitous? And
do not Cicero and the whole senate surrender to these reasons? The
conquerors and the legislators of the known universe formed visibly
therefore a society of men who feared nothing from the gods, who were
real atheists.
Further on Bayle examines whether idolatry is more dangerous than
atheism, if it is a greater crime not to believe in the Deity than to
have unworthy opinions thereof: in that he is of Plutarch's opinion; he
believes it is better to have no opinion than to have a bad opinion; but
with all deference to Plutarch, it was clearly infinitely better for the
Greeks to fear Ceres, Neptune and Jupiter, than to fear nothing at all.
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