Religion as a factor in the history of Empires

Abstract

The part played by religious sentiment and worship in the public life of the ancient world was generally underestimated by historians of the older school. Persons of imagination and taste appreciated the poetical aspects of the ancient mythologies, while the grosser and more cruel superstitions were dwelt upon by those who compared the worships and faiths of Greece, Rome, Syria and Egypt with Christianity and Islam. But comparatively few writers saw, as we see now, how important a factor religious sentiment was, and indeed could not but be, in the political sphere. There are two respects in which it was then and always has been a force of immense though uncertain potency.