It has sometimes been maintained that the old polytheism of Greece and Rome was already moribund by the reign of Augustus; that, although its forms still persisted, they persisted only as conventions of literature and art, or as political conveniences; that genuine religious emotion had either ebbed away or found other channels,—the Eastern religions, Judaism, Christianity, or the moral philosophies. This thesis, however, ceases to appeal, when we realize how vigorous the old idiom still was. It is not simply that things once expressed in it continued to be repeated. It was still used to express what was actually being thought and felt in the present. What is true is that it was now used to express something different from its earlier contents. It is this ‘something different’ that I wish to explore in this paper.