INTRODUCTION

Bacon is here making ― in a characteristically short space ― three separate points, all of them still much in contention today; his thought will provide the starting points for this paper. First, he is claiming that religious life in antiquity was not the site of specific conflicts. Others were later to turn this into one of the virtues of pagan religious life, its toleration of religious difference, but in this passage (virtually an aside) it is hard to detect a tone of anything but detachment from what the ‘heathens’ did. No doubt, it was a benefit that there should have been no ‘religious’ wars, but he is surely not making a claim for toleration as such. Secondly, he is seeing a contrast between matters of belief, or at least constancy of belief, and the maintenance of ritual traditions; and seeking to explain the freedom from religious conflict as the result of greater concern with ritual than with belief. Conflict, he is assuming, arises from consciously expressed religious views.