The civilizations of Greece and Rome influenced mediaeval culture
in a multitude of ways, in religion and philosophy, in law, govern-
ment, and social usage, in art and technology, in science and educa-
tion, in language and literature, and in music. It is on the side of
religion and philosophy that the connections between antiquity and
the Middle Ages are deepest and the debt of mediaeval thinkers to
their Greek and Roman ancestors is most profound. Interest here cen-
ters in the long story of the growth of asceticism, mysticism, and
monotheism in the religious and philosophical experience of antiquity.
So, like mediaeval men, who used from the riches of classical culture
those parts that seemed germane, the author has, at this point, selected
from the whole Graeco-Roman heritage only that part that influenced
mediaeval religion and philosophy. Later on, he will have frequent
occasions to discuss many other Greek and Roman influences in
mediaeval Civilization. The men of the mediaeval centuries were the
inheritors of a long evolution of Greek and Roman culture, a culture
that in spite of many common elements changed greatly in the eleven
centuries between Homer and St. Augustine. In the fields of religion
and philosophy, as in nearly every other branch of culture, the history
of Roman civilization after about 300 B.C. began to merge with that of
Greek culture; hence there is much justification for treating the story
of Graeco-Roman civilization as a single development.

GREEK and Roman religion started independently with simple inter-
pretations of the forces of nature which included methods of trying to
make these forces work for man's good. The thought of primitive men
everywhere lacks a sense of natural causation. There are no laws of
nature, there are only unpredictable forces. These forces are in trees
and springs and stones and animals; they are everywhere, and these
forces are like men. If a primitive man hits his head against a tree
in the dark, he says: "that tree meant to do me harm. It must be pro-
pitiated." So by prayers and ritual forms, the performance of certain
acts, like a libation of milk or wine or burning a cake or an animal,
and by taboos (the avoidance of other acts) the spirits that dwell in all

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