The Religion of Ancient Rome Part 3

Even in the fear, from which all ultimately sprang, there was a training in self-repression and self-subordination, which in a more civilised age must result in a valuable respect and obedience. The descendants of those who had made religion out of an attempt to appease the hostile _numina_, feeling themselves not indeed on more familiar terms with their 'unknown G.o.ds,' but only perhaps a little more confident of their own strength, were not likely to be wanting in a disciplined sense of dependence and an appreciation of the value of respect for authority, which alone can give stability to a const.i.tution. If fear with the Romans was not the beginning of theological wisdom, it was yet an important contribution to the character of a disciplined state.

But, as I have hinted in the course of this sketch more than once, the answer to this problem, as well as the key to the general understanding of the Roman religion, is to be found in the worship of the household.

If we knew more of it, we should see more clearly where religion and morality joined hands, but we know enough to give us a clue. There not only are the princ.i.p.al events of life, birth, adolescence, marriage, attended by their religious sanction, but in the ordinary course of the daily round the divine presence and the dependence of man are continually emphasised. The G.o.ds are given their portion of the family meal, the sanctified dead are recalled to take their share of the family blessings. The result was not merely an approach--collectively, not individually--to that sense of the nearness of the unseen, which has so great an effect on the actions of the living, but a very strong bond of family union which lay at the root of the life of the state.

It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the notion than in the fact that the same word _pietas_, which expresses the due fulfilment of man's duty to G.o.d, is also the ideal of the relations of the members of a household: filial piety was, in fact, but another aspect of that rightness of relation, which reveals itself in the worship of the G.o.ds. No doubt that, in the city-life of later periods, this ideal broke down on both sides: household worship was neglected and family life became less dutiful. But it was still, especially in the country, the true backbone of Roman society, and no one can read the opening odes of Horace's third book without feeling the strength of Augustus' appeal to it.

And if we translate this, as we have learned to do, into terms of the state, we can get some idea of what the Romans meant by their debt to their religion. As the household was bound together by the tie of common worship, as in the intermediate stage the clan, severed politically and socially, yet felt itself reunited in the gentile rites, so too the state was welded into a whole by the regularly recurring annual festivals and the a.s.surance of the divine sanction on its undertakings. It might be that in the course of time these rites lost their meaning and the community no longer by personal presence expressed its service to the G.o.ds, but the cult stood there still, as the type of Rome's union to the higher powers and a guarantee of their a.s.sistance against all foes: the religion of Rome was, as it has been said, the sanctification of patriotism--the Roman citizen's highest moral ideal. It has been remarked, perhaps with partial truth, that the religion of the _aeneid_--in many ways a summary of Roman thought and feeling--is the belief in the _fata Romae_ and their fulfilment. The very impersonality of this conception makes it a good picture of what religion was in the Roman state. It was not, as with the Jews, a strong conviction of the rightness of their own belief and a certainty that their divine protectors must triumph over those of other nations, but a feeling of the constant presence of some spirits, who, 'if haply they might find them,' would, on the payment of their due, bear their part in the great progress of right and justice and empire on which Rome must march to her victory. It was the duty of the citizen, with this conception of his city before his eyes, to see to it that the state's part in the contract was fulfilled. From his ancestors had been inherited the tradition, which told him the when, where, and how, and in the preservation of that tradition and its due performance consisted at once Rome's duty and her glory. 'If we wish,' says Cicero, 'to compare ourselves with other nations, we may be found in other respects equal or even inferior; in religion, that is in the worship of the G.o.ds, we are far superior.' The religion of Rome may not have advanced the theology or the ethics of the world, but it made and held together a nation.

WORKS BEARING ON THE EARLY RELIGION OF ROME

_The Golden Bough_, (2nd Ed.). J.G. FRAZER.

_History of Rome_, BOOK I. CHAP XII. TH. MOMMSEN.

_Die Religion der Romer._ E. AUST.

_Religion und Kultus der Romer._ G. WISSOWA.

_Il Culto Privato di Roma Antica_, PART I. A. DE-MARCHI.

_The Roman Festivals._ W. WARDE FOWLER.

_The Religion of Numa._ J.B. CARTER.