“The common people of those days,” he said, “still believed in religion just as they do now. And for them it was custom, superstition, elemental magic, the use of ceremonies whose origins were lost in antiquity, just as it is today. But the world of those who originated ideas—those who ruled and advanced the course of history—was a godless and hopelessly sophisticated world like that of Europe in this day and age.” “When I read Cicero and Ovid and Lucretius, it seemed so to me,” I said. He nodded and gave a little shrug. “It has taken eighteen hundred years,” he said, “to come back to the
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