The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 20

[491] _Golden Bough_, i. p. 1 foll.; _Early History of the Kingship_, Lecture I.

[492] Varro, _L.L._ 5. 43; Carter, _op. cit._ p. 55.

[493] See on Fortuna the exhaustive article by R. Peter in the _Mythological Lexicon_; Wissowa, _R.K._ 206 foll.; _R.F._ p. 161 foll., and 223 foll.; Carter, _op.

cit._ p. 50 foll. Dr. Carter seems to me to be too certain of the absence of any idea of luck or chance in the original conception of Fortuna: the word _fors_, so far as we know, never had any other meaning, and the deity Fors must be a personification of an abstraction, like Ops, Fides, and Salus. See Axtell, _Deification of abstract idea in Roman literature_, p. 9, with whom I agree in rejecting the notion of Marquardt and Wissowa that she was a deity of horticulture. He rightly points out that she is not included in the list of agricultural deities in Varro, _R.R._ i. 1. 6.

[494] See Aust in his article "Jupiter" in the _Myth.

Lex._ p. 689, where the evidence for the contemporaneous origin of the temple on the Alban hill and that on the Capitol is fully stated. In this case excavations have confirmed the Roman tradition, which ascribed the former temple to one or other of the Tarquinii. Jordan, _Rom.

Top._ i. pt. 2. p. 9.

[495] See the speech of Claudius the emperor, _C.I.L._ xiii. 1668, printed in Furneaux' _Tacitus' Annals_, vol.

ii. Gardthausen, _Mastarna_, p. 40; Muller-Deecke, _Etrusker_, i. 111. For the Etruscan name Mastarna, see Dennis, _Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_^3, ii. 506 foll.: Gardthausen gives a cut of the painting found in a tomb at Vulci in which he appears with the name attached. Even the ultra-sceptical Pais does not doubt the fact of an Etruscan domination in Rome; but he does not believe the Tarquinii and Mastarna to have been historical personages, and will not date the temples attributed to this age earlier than the fourth century B.C. See his _Ancient Legends of Roman History_, ch.

vii.; _Storia di Roma_, i. 310 foll. But the names of these kings do not concern us, except so far as they connect Etruria with Roman history in the sixth century.

[496] Cic. _Rep._ ii. 24. 44; Livy i. 38. and 55; Dionys. iii. 69; iv. 59. 61. The whole evidence will be found collected in Jordan, _Topogr._ i. pt. ii. p. 9 foll., and in Aust, _Myth. Lex._, _s.v._ Jupiter, p. 706 foll. If the date 509 were seriously impugned Roman chronology would be in confusion, for this is believed to be the earliest date on which we can rely, and on it the subsequent chronology hangs: Mommsen, _Rom.

Chronologie_, ed. 2, p. 198.

[497] Aust, p. 707 foll.; Jordan, _op. cit._, p. 9.

[498] _i.e._ the admission of more than one deity into a single building. The word "trias" is sometimes used of the three old Roman deities, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus (_e.g._ by Wissowa, _Myth. Lex._ _s.v._ Quirinus), but this is in a different sense. On the idea of a trias generally, see Kuhfeldt, _de Capitoliis imperii Romani_, p. 82 foll.; c.u.mont, _Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain_, p. 290, note 51.

[499] The technical name of the temple was aedes Iovis Opt. Max.: for other indications of Jupiter's supremacy see Aust, p. 720.

[500] On Oriental developments of Jupiter Opt. Max. see an interesting paper by c.u.mont in _Archiv_ for 1906, p.

323 foll. (_Iuppiter summus exsuperantissimus_). A relief in the Berlin Museum has a dedication _I.O.M.

summo exsuperantissimo_; but Prof. c.u.mont believes the deity to have been really Oriental, introduced by Greek philosophical theologians in the last century B.C., but probably Chaldaean in origin.

[501] Jordan, _op. cit._ p. 7 and note. It is uncertain whether the whole hill had any earlier name. The Mons Saturnius of Varro, _L.L._ v. 42, with the legend of an oppidum _Saturnia_, and the Mons Tarpeius (_Rhet. ad Herenn._, iv. 32. 43; Pais, _Ancient Legends_, chs. v.

and vi.) need not be taken into account.

[502] Pais, _Ancient Legends of Roman History_, ch. v.

[503] See above, p. 130.

[504] This is an inference from the fact that this Flamen is nowhere mentioned as connected with the Capitoline cult. Macrob. i. 15, 16, speaks of the ovis Idulis as sacrificed on every ides _a flamine_, and this, it is true, took place on the Capitolium (Aust, in _Lex._ _s.v._ Jupiter, 655), but (1) Festus, 290, mentions sacerdotes, Ovid, _Fasti_ i. 588, castus sacerdos only; and (2) this sacrifice may well, as O.

Gilbert conjectured, have originally taken place in the Regia (_Gesch. und Topogr. Roms_, i. 236). In any case the Flamen was not in any special sense priest of Iup.

Opt. Max.

[505] The _locus cla.s.sicus_ for this is Pliny, _N.H._ x.x.xv. 157. The artist was said to have been one Volcas of Veii. Ovid, _Fasti_ i. 201, says that the G.o.d had in his hand a _fictile fulmen_. Varro believed this to be the oldest statue of a G.o.d in Rome; see above, p. 146, and Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 280, accepts his statement as probably correct.

[506] Cic. _Catil._ iii. 9. 21.

[507] Jordan, _Topogr._ i. 2. pp. 39 and 62, notes. The most convincing pa.s.sages quoted by him are Suet. _Aug._ 59, and Serv. _Ecl._ iv. 50 (of boys taking toga virilis who "ad Capitolium eunt"); but was not this to sacrifice to Liber or Iuventas? _R.F._ p. 56.

[508] Gellius vi. 1. 6, from C. Oppius et Iulius Hyginus. In his famous character of Scipio (xxvi. 19) Livy seems to think that Scipio did this to make people think him superhuman or of divine descent.

[509] Ovid, _Fasti_, iv. 158. 257; Virg. _Ecl._ iv. 4, _Aen._ vi. 42; Marquardt, 352, note 7, for evidence that the books came to c.u.mae from Erythrae. See also Diels, _Sibyllinische Blatter_, p. 80 foll.

LECTURE XI*

CONTACT OF THE OLD AND NEW IN RELIGION

I said at the beginning of my first lecture that Roman religious experience can be summed up in two stories. The first of these was the story of the way in which a strong primitive religious instinct, the desire to put yourself in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, _religio_ as the Romans called it, was gradually soothed and satisfied under the formalising influence of the settled life of the agricultural family, and still more so under the organising genius of the early religious rulers of the City-state. This story I tried to tell in the last few lectures. The second story was to be that of the gradual discovery of the inadequacy of this early formalised and organised religion to cope with what we may call new religious experience; that is, with the difficulties and perils met with by the Roman people in their extraordinary advance in the world, and with the new ideas of religion and morals which broke in on them in the course of their contact with other peoples. This story I wish to tell in the present course of lectures. It is a long and complicated one, including the introduction of new rites and ideas of the divine, the anxious attempts of the religious authorities to put off the evil day by stretching to the uttermost the capacity of the old forms, and the final victory of the new ideas as Roman life and thought became gradually h.e.l.lenised.

[*] This Lecture was the first of a second and separate course.

I propose to divide the story thus. In the latter part of this first lecture I will deal with the first introduction of Greek rites into the State worship under the directions of the so-called Sibylline books.

Then I will turn to the efforts of the lay priesthoods, pontifices and augurs, to meet the calls of new experience by formalising the old religion still more completely in the name of the State, until it became a mere skeleton of dry bones, without life and power. That will bring us to the great turning-point in Roman history, the war with Hannibal, to the religious history of which I shall devote my fourth lecture; and the fifth will pursue the subject into the century that followed. In the next lecture I hope to sketch the influence on Roman religious ideas of the Stoic school of philosophy, and in the seventh to discuss, so far as I may be able, the tendency towards mysticism prevalent in the last period of the life of the Republic. My eighth lecture I intend to devote to the n.o.ble attempt of Virgil to combine religion, legend, philosophy, and consummate art in a splendid appeal to the conscience of the Roman of that day. Then I turn to the more practical attempt of Augustus to revive the dying embers of the old religion; and in my last lecture I shall try to estimate the contribution, such as it was, of the religious experience we have been discussing, to the early Christian church.

We shall shortly hear so much of petrifaction and disintegration, that it may be as well, before I actually begin my story, to convince ourselves that the old religion was in its peculiar way a real expression of religious feeling, and not merely a set of meaningless conventions and formulae. It was the positive belief of the later Romans that both they and their ancestors were _religiosissimi mortales_,[510]

full to the brim, that is, of religious instinct, and most scrupulous in fulfilling its claims upon them; for the word _religio_ had come, by the time (and probably long before the time) when it was used by men of letters, to mean the fulfilment of ritualistic obligation quite as much as the anxious feeling which had originally suggested it.[511] Cicero, writing in no rhetorical mood, declared that, as compared with other peoples, the Romans were far superior "in religione, id est cultu."[512]

This is in his work on the nature of the G.o.ds; in an oration he naturally puts it more strongly: "We have overcome all the nations of the world, because we have realised that the world is directed and governed by the will of the G.o.ds."[513] Sall.u.s.t, Livy, and other Roman prose writers have said much the same thing[514]; the _Aeneid_ as a whole might be adduced as evidence, and in a less degree all the poets of the Augustan age. Foreigners, too, were struck with the strange phenomenon, in an age of philosophic doubt. Polybius in the second century B.C. declared his opinion that what was reckoned among other peoples as a thing to be blamed, _deisidaimonia_, both in public and private life, was really what was holding together the Roman state.[515]

Even in the wild century that followed, Posidonius could repeat the a.s.sertion of Polybius, and in the age of Augustus, Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus, then resident at Rome, looking back on the early history of Rome, stated his conviction that one needed to know the _pietas_ of the Romans in order to understand their wonderful career of conquest.[516] Aulus Gellius, in a curious pa.s.sage in which he notes that the Romans had no deity to whose activity they could with certainty ascribe earthquakes, describes them as "in const.i.tuendis religionibus atque in dis immortalibus animadvertendis _castissimi cautissimique_,"--a rhetorical but happy conjunction of epithets. He means that they would order religious rites, though ignorant of the _numen_ to whom they were due.[517]

It might be argued that these later writers knew really little or nothing about the primitive Romans, and that these pa.s.sages only prove that this people had an extraordinary scrupulosity about forms and ceremonies in this as in other departments of action. But the argument will not hold; the survival of all this formalism into an age of disintegration really proves beyond a doubt that there must have been a time when these forms really expressed anxieties, fears, convictions, the earliest germs of _conscience_.

May we not take the constant occurrence in literature of such phrases as _dis faventibus_, _dis iuvantibus_ or _volentibus_, as evidence of an idea deeply rooted at one time in the Roman mind, that nothing should be undertaken until the will of the deities concerned had been ascertained and that early form of conscience satisfied? Let us remember that the whole story of the _Aeneid_ is one of the bending of the will of the hero, as a type of the ideal Roman, to the ascertainable will of the powers in the universe.

And we have abundant evidence that as a matter of fact the good-will of the divine inhabitants of house and city was asked for whenever any kind of work was undertaken,--even the ordinary routine work of the farm or of government. In the household every morning some offering with prayer was made to the Lar familiaris in historical times, and again before the _cena_, the chief meal of the day.[518] On Kalends, Nones, Ides, and on all _dies festi_ a _corona_ was placed on the hearth, and prayer was made to the Lar; we know that this was so in the old Roman home, because in the second century B.C. Cato instructs the _vilicus_ to discharge these duties on behalf of the absent or non-resident owner.[519] Before the flocks were taken out to summer pasture, and doubtless when they returned, some religious service (so we should call it) was held,[520]

just as in the Catholic cantons of Switzerland the blessing of G.o.d is asked when the cows first ascend to the alpine pastures, and again when they leave them for the valleys. Before a journey the later Romans prayed for good fortune;[521] in the old times travelling was of course unusual, and when it did occur the traveller was surrounded by so many spiritual as well as material dangers that _special_ religious measures must have been taken, as by fetials or armies on entering foreign territory. The survival of the same kind of belief and practice is also seen in private life in the religious commendations of some authors at the outset of their literary work; Varro, for example, at the beginning of his work on agriculture, calls on all the agrarian deities (_iis deis ad venerationem advocatis_) before he goes on to mention even the bibliography of his subject.[522] Livy in the last sentence of his preface would fain imitate the poets in calling on the G.o.ds to bless and favour his undertaking. And in all time of their tribulation, even if not in all time of their wealth, the pious Romans sought help from the deities from whom help might be expected; if, at least, the many instances occurring in Roman poetry may point to a practice of the ordinary individual and family.[523] So too, if we may judge by many pa.s.sages in the plays of Plautus and Terence,[524]--if here we have genuine Roman usage, as is probable,--the feeling of dependence on a Power manifesting itself in the affairs of daily life is shown also in the expression of _thankfulness_ which followed success or escape from peril. Grat.i.tude was not a prominent characteristic of the Roman, but I have already remarked on the presence of it in the practice of the _votum_, and there is at least some evidence that it was recognised as due to benignant deities as well as human beings.[525]

In public life, throughout Roman history, the forms of religious rites were maintained on all important occasions. When Varro wrote a little manual of Senatorial procedure for the benefit of the inexperienced Pompeius when consul in 70 B.C., he was careful to mention the preliminary sacrifice and _auspicatio_, performed by the presiding magistrate, who also had to see that the business _de rebus divinis_ came first on the paper of agenda.[526] At one time every speaker invoked the G.o.ds at the beginning of his oration, as well indeed he might in a situation so unusual and trying for a Roman before the days of Greek education; and the earliest speeches preserved in the literary age, _e.g._ those of Cato and the Gracchi, retained the religious exordium.[527] We have a trace of the Gracchan practice in a famous pa.s.sage at the end of the work called _Rhetorica ad Herennium_ of _circ._ 82 B.C., where the death of Ti. Gracchus is graphically described.[528] But there is no need to multiply examples of public religious formalism on occasions of all kinds, on entering on an office, founding a colony, leaving Rome for a provincia, and so on; some of them I have already mentioned, others are familiar to all cla.s.sical students.

So let us not hesitate for a moment to give this people credit for their religiousness. True, their neighbours, Greeks like Polybius, approved of it only with an ironical smile on their lips, as we may smile at the devoted formalism of extreme Catholic or Protestant, while we secretly--if we have some sympathy with strangely varying human nature--admire the confidence and regularity that we cannot ourselves claim. At the moment where I have thus paused before beginning my second story, at the end, that is, of the regal period, I believe that this religious system, though perhaps beginning to harden, still meant a profound belief in the Power thus manifested in many forms, and an ardent and effective desire to be in right relation to it. I believe that it contained the germ of a living and fruitful growth; but that growth was at this very moment arrested by the beginning of a process of which I shall have much to say in the next two or three lectures.

But it is hard to realise this better side of the religion of a hard and practical people, and all the more so since it is the worse side that is almost always presented to us in modern books. It is hard to realise that it was not merely a system of insurance, so to speak, against all kinds of material evils,--and here again all the more so because there is a tendency just now to reduce both religion and law to an origin in magic, leaving the religious instinct, the _feeling of dependence_, the progenitor of conscience, quite out of account. One must indeed be thoroughly familiar with Roman literature and antiquities to overcome these difficulties, to discover the spiritual residuum in the Roman character beneath all its hardness and utilitarianism. Before we pa.s.s on to the task before us, let me make two suggestions for the help of those who would endeavour to find this spiritual residuum. The first is that they should consider the history and true meaning of three great words which Latin language has bequeathed to modern speech,--_religio_, the feeling of awe, taking practical shape in the performance of authorised ceremonies; _sacrum_, that which by authoritative usage is made over without reserve to the divine inhabitants of the city; and last but not least, _pietas_, the sense of duty to G.o.d and man alike, to all divine and human beings having an authorised claim upon you. And this word _pietas_ shall introduce my second suggestion--that there is no better way of getting to understand the spirit of the Roman religion than by continual study of the _Aeneid_, where the hero is the ideal Roman, _pius_ in the best and widest sense. What makes the _Aeneid_ so helpful in this way is the poet's intimate and sympathetic knowledge of the religious ideas of the Italians, in which we may see reflected those of the Roman of the age we are now dealing with: his love too of antiquity and of all ancient rites and legends; and his conviction that the great work of Rome in the world had been achieved not only by _virtus_ but by _pietas_. What has been won by _virtus_ must be preserved by _pietas_, by the sense of duty in family and State,--that is the moral of the _Aeneid_. In no other work of Roman genius is this idea found in anything like the same degree of prominence and consistency; and when a student has steeped his mind well in the details of the Roman worship, and begins to weary of what must seem its soulless Pharisaism, let him take up the _Aeneid_ and read it right through for the story and the characters. I will venture to say that he will think better both of the Romans and their poet than he ever did before. But of the _Aeneid_ I shall have more to say later on; at present let us turn to the less inspiring topics which must occupy us for the next few lectures.

The last fact of Roman religious history which I mentioned last year was the building of the great Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and I then explained why this const.i.tuted a religious revolution. The next temple of which tradition tells us was destined for another trias, Ceres, Liber, and Libera; the traditional date was 493 B.C., the cause a famine, and the site was at the foot of the Aventine, the plebeian quarter outside the pomoerium, close to the river where corn-ships might be moored.[529] Ceres, Liber, and Libera are plainly neither more nor less than the three Greek corn deities, Demeter, Dionysus, and Persephone, in a Latin form,[530] whose worship was prominent in South Italy and Sicily; and unless we throw tradition overboard entirely, as indeed has often been done, the inference is obvious that this trias came from the Greeks of the south with an importation of corn to relieve a famine which pressed especially on the plebs. It is a fact that the temple and its cult remained always closely connected with the plebs; they were under the charge of the plebeian aediles, who also in historical times had the care of the corn-supply necessary for the city population.[531] Thus, though we need not accept in full Livy's statement that the very next year corn was imported from Etruria, c.u.mae, and Sicily, it cannot be denied that there is a strong consensus in the various traditions about the temple, which taken together suggest a Greek, non-patrician, and early origin. That the cult had at all times a Greek character is undisputed fact.

But I am not so much concerned with the temple itself as with the date and the manner of its foundation. It was said to have been founded in the year 496, and dedicated in 493, in obedience to directions found in "the Sibylline books," which books, according to the well-known tradition, had been acquired by the last Tarquin, after some haggling, from an old woman, and placed in the charge of _duoviri sacris faciundis_. The story itself is worthless in detail; but the question for us is whether it can be taken as showing that the Sibylline influence then pervading the Greek world gained a footing at Rome in any form so early as this. Was the temple really founded in 496, or at some time thereabout? And was it founded in obedience to some Sibylline direction? These questions are of real importance, for upon our answer to them depends the date of the beginning of a gradual metamorphosis of the Roman religious practice. The so-called Sibylline books and their keepers were responsible, as we shall see directly, for the introduction at Rome of what was known as the _Graecus ritus_,--for the foundation of temples to deities of Greek origin, and for other rites which initiated an entirely new type of religious feeling. We need to be sure when all this began.

In the first place, so far as I can judge, it is almost impossible to dissociate the origin of the temple from Sibylline influence. As we have seen, the cult was Greek, and all such Greek cults of later times were introduced by the keepers of the Sibylline books; and further, the records of temple foundations were among the most carefully preserved facts in Roman annals.[532] I think it is hardly possible to suppose that a cult which came, not from Latium or southern Etruria, like those of Diana, Minerva, and the Capitoline deities, but from some Greek region to the south, and probably from Sicily, could have been introduced by Roman authorities unaided by Greek influence. If that be so, and if we can show that the temple really belongs to this early age, then we have a strong probability that the Sibylline influence gained a footing at Rome at the very beginning of the republican period.[533]

There is one curious fact in connection with the temple that in my opinion goes far to prove that the traditional date is not far out.

Pliny tells us explicitly that the two Greek artists who decorated the temple, Damophilus and Gorgasus, inscribed their names on the walls, and he added that the work of the former would be found on the right and that of the latter on the left.[534] Nothing more is known about them; but I am a.s.sured that the fact that they signed their names and added these statements suits the character of Greek art in the archaic age 580 to 450 B.C. No signatures of artists are known earlier than about 580; then comes a period when signatures are found, sometimes with statements such as these. And lastly, about 450, we begin to find simple signatures without any other words.[535] Thus the presumption is a strong one that the temple belongs to a time earlier than 450; and if that be so, then I think the inference holds good that the Sibyl first gained a footing at Rome about the same time. There are indeed some reasons why we should not put this event in the period of the kings;[536] but if we accept the traditional date of the temple we may put it any time between 509 and 496.

I have purposely used vague terms, such as Sibylline _influence_, instead of speaking in the old manner of Sibylline _books_ or oracles, because it is almost incredible that at so early a date it could have been possible to divulge any contents of a store of writings such as must have been most carefully treasured and concealed. This has been shown conclusively to be out of the question in Diels' now famous little book "_Sibylline Leaves_." But we may also follow Diels in a.s.suming that about the end of the sixth century some kind of Greek oracle or oracular saying did actually arrive at Rome, purporting to be an utterance of the famous Sibyl of c.u.mae.[537]

But what _was_ this Sibylline influence which thus penetrated to Rome, if I am right, at the beginning of the fifth century? It is no part of my design to discuss the history of Greek mysticism, though we shall hear something more of it in a later lecture. It will be enough to remind you that in the sixth century Greece was not only full of Orphism and Pythagoreanism, but of floating oracular _dicta_ believed to emanate from a mystic female figure, a weird figure of whom it is hard to say how far she was human or divine; and of whose origin we know nothing, except that her original home was, as we might expect, Asia Minor. She was inspired by Apollo,[538] it was said, like the Pythia, and like her too became [Greek: entheos] (_possessed_) when uttering her prophecies; this is the earliest fact we know about her, for a famous fragment of Heracleitus represents her as uttering sayings "with frenzied lips,"[539]--a tradition of which Virgil has made good use in the sixth _Aeneid_:

non vultus, non color unus, non comptae mansere comae; sed pectus anhelum, et rabie fera corda tument.

But more to our purpose is the sober judgment of Plato a century after the first Roman experience of her, who in the _Phaedrus_ cla.s.ses her among those who have wrought _much good_ by their inspired utterances.[540] This pa.s.sage may help us to understand how ready men were at that time to turn for aid in tribulation to what they believed to be divine help, to an inspired wisdom beyond the range of the local deities of their own city-states.