The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 32

But when a man like Cicero was deeply touched by grief, his emotional nature abandoned its neutral att.i.tude, and turned for consolation to mysticism. As I have said, he was persuading himself that Tullia was still living,--a glorified spirit. We can gain just a momentary glimpse of what was in his mind by turning to the fragments of the _Consolatio_ which he was now writing at Astura.

This was a _Consolatio_ of the kind which was a recognised literary form of this and later times,[837] though in this case it was addressed by the writer to himself; to write was for Cicero second nature, and he was sure to take up his pen when he had feelings that needed expression. It is unfortunately lost, all but one fragment, which he quotes himself in the first book of his _Tusculans_, and one or two more preserved by the Christian writer Lactantius, a great admirer of Cicero, who came near to catching the beauty of his style. The pa.s.sage quoted by himself is precious.[838] It insists on the spiritual nature of the soul, which can have nothing in common with earth or matter of any kind, seeing that it thinks, remembers, foresees: "ita quicquid est illud, quod sent.i.t, quod sapit, quod vivit, quod viget, caeleste et divinum, ob eamque rem aeternum sit necesse est." And in the concluding words he hints strongly at the _divinity_ of the soul, which is of the same make as G.o.d himself,--of the same immaterial nature as the only Deity of whom we mortals can conceive. His daughter, therefore, is not only still living in a spiritual life, but she is in some vague sense divine; that word _apotheosis_, which he twice uses in the letters, has a real meaning for him at this moment; and in a fragment of the _Consolatio_ quoted by Lactantius he makes this quite plain; "Te omnium optimam doctissimamque, approbantibus dis immortalibus ipsis, in eorum coetu locatam, ad opinionem omnium mortalium consecrabo."[839]

Undoubtedly Cicero is here under the influence of the Pythagoreans as well as of his own emotion. In another chapter Lactantius seems to make this certain;[840] he begins by combining Stoics and Pythagoreans as both believing the immortality of the soul, goes on to deal with the Pythagorean doctrine (or one form of it) that in this life we are expiating the sins of another, and ends by quoting Cicero's _Consolatio_ to that effect: "Quid Ciceroni faciemus? qui c.u.m in principio Consolationis suae dixit, luendorum scelerum causa nasci homines, iteravit id ipsum postea, quasi obiurgans eum qui vitam poenam non esse putet." Another lost book, the _Hortensius_, which was written immediately after the _Consolatio_, March to May 45,[841] shows in one or two surviving fragments exactly the same tendency of thought and reading.[842] Our conclusion then must be that Cicero, always impressionable, and in his way also religious, had in this year 45 a real religious experience. He was brought face to face with one of the mysterious facts of life, and with one of the great mysteries of the universe, and the religious instinct awoke within him. How many others, even in that sordid and materialistic age, may have had the like experience, with or without a mystical philosophy to guide their thoughts? In the last words of the famous Laudatio Turiae, of which I have written at length in my _Social Life in the Age of Cicero_,[843] we may perhaps catch an echo of a similar religious feeling: "Te di Manes tui ut quietam patiantur atque ita tueantur opto" (I pray that thy divine Manes may keep thee in peace and watch over thee). These words, expressing the hope of a practical man, not of a philosopher, are very difficult to explain, except as the unauthorised utterances of an individual. They hardly find a parallel either in literature or inscriptions. We must not press them, yet they help us to divine that there was in this last half-century B.C. some mystical yearning to realise the condition of the loved ones gone before, and the relation of their life to that of the living. This religious instinct, let us note once for all, is not identical with the old one which we expressed by the formula about the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The religious instinct of the primitive Roman was concerned only with this life and its perils and mysteries; the religious instinct of Cicero's time was not that of simple men struggling with agricultural perils, but that of educated men whose minds could pa.s.s in emotional moments far beyond the troubles of this present world, to speculate on the great questions, why we are here, what we are, and what becomes of us after death.

But what of the ordinary Roman of this age--what of the man who was not trained to think, and had no leisure or desire to read? What did he believe about a future life, or did he believe anything? This brings us to a curious question about which I must say a very few words--did this ordinary Roman, as Lucretius seems to insist, believe in Hades and its torments? Not in one pa.s.sage only does Lucretius insist on this. "That fear of h.e.l.l" (so Dr. Ma.s.son translates him) "must be driven out headlong, which troubles the life of man from its inmost depth, and overspreads everything with the blackness of death, and permits no pleasure to be pure and unalloyed."[844] I need not multiply quotations; evidently the poet believed what he said, though he may be using the exaggeration of poetical diction. And to a certain extent he is borne out by the literature of his time. In fact Polybius, writing nearly a century earlier of the Romans and their religion, implies that such notions were common, and that they were invented by "the ancients" to frighten the people into submission.[845] Cicero, though he of course thinks of them as merely the fables of poets, seems to suggest that the ordinary man did believe in them; thinking of his own recent loss, he says that our misery would be unbearable when we lose those we love, if we really thought of them as "_in iis malis quibus vulgo opinantur_."[846] Of course all these fables were Greek, not Roman.

There is no reason to believe that the old Romans imagined their own dead experiencing any miseries in Orcus--the old name, as it would seem, for the dimly imagined abode of the Manes, afterwards personified after the manner of Plutus.[847] No doubt they believed that the dead were ghosts, desiring to get back to their old homes, who, in the well-ordered religion of the City-state, were limited in this strong desire to certain days in the civic year.[848] But their first acquaintance with Hades and its tortures may probably be dated early, _i.e._ when they first became acquainted with Etruscan works of art, themselves the result of a knowledge of Greek art and myth.[849] Early in the second century B.C. Plautus in the _Captivi_ alluded to these paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for ill.u.s.tration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his work on the Roman religion of the early empire.[851] In the theatre, with women and children present, Cicero says in the first book of his _Tusculans_, the crowded auditorium is moved as it listens to such a "grande carmen" as that sung by a ghost describing his terrible journey from the realms of Acheron; and in another pa.s.sage of the same book he mentions both painters and poets as responsible for a delusion which philosophers have to refute.[852] I need not say that the Roman poets too continually use the imagery of Tartarus; but they use it as literary tradition, and in the sixth _Aeneid_ it is used also to enforce the idea of duty to the State which is the real theme of the poem.

As Dr. Ma.s.son truly observes, we have the literature but we have not the folklore of the age of Cicero and Virgil; and it must be confessed that without the folklore such scanty literary evidence as I have just mentioned does not come to much. Dr. Ma.s.son indeed concludes on this evidence that the fear of future torments played a considerable part in the religious notions both of the common people and possibly of some of the educated. I think it may have been so, but on other grounds, which I must briefly explain.

From all that I have said in these lectures about the religious ideas represented in the earliest calendar, _i.e._ those of the governing Romans of the earliest City-state, it will be plain that a gruesome eschatology was an impossibility for them. Just the same may be said of the Greek ideas represented in the Homeric poems; for with the exception of the Nekuia of the _Odyssey_, which almost all scholars agree in attributing to a later age than the bulk of the two Homeric epics, in this poetry _il se fait grand jour_.[853] This is not the first time that I have compared the religion of the Roman patricians to that of Homer;[854] and there is a growing conviction among experts that we have in each case the ideas of a comparatively civilised immigrant population, whose religion, though it has developed in very different ways, has the common characteristic of cleanness and brightness. In Italy it is practical, in Homer imaginative; but in both it is free from the brutal and the grotesque. Even the eschatology of the eleventh _Odyssey_ is not cruel, it is comparatively colourless; and, as I said just now, this also may be said of the Roman ideas of Orcus and the Manes.

In each case it is life, not death, that is of interest to the living; death is rather a negation than anything distinctly realised. The state of the dead in Homer is shadowy and _triste_, a state not to be desired, as Achilles so painfully expresses it in a famous pa.s.sage; but the _life_ of the Achaean in the poems is vivid--nay, such a vivid realisation of life can alone account for the production of such poems.

So, too, the immigrant population at Rome, to whom is due the regulation of the religion as we know it, and the inspiring force that made for ordered government and warlike enterprise, was too full of practical if not of imaginative vitality to be apt to dwell upon the possibilities of existence after death, to conceive of such existence as either happy or miserable, the reward or the punishment for things done in this world.

But in each peninsula this immigrant race was living in the midst of a far more primitive population; and it is perhaps to this population that we must look for the origin of the more detailed and imaginative notions of the life of the dead. Of the Greeks in this matter I have not s.p.a.ce here to speak, nor am I competent to do so. But the conviction is steadily gaining ground that in early Rome we have to recognise the existence of two races; whether the older of these was Ligurian, as Prof. Ridgeway thinks, or primitive Latin, _i.e._ old Italic, as Binder believes, does not matter for our present purpose;[855] nor are the arguments drawn from religion which these writers have used at all convincing to my intelligence. But they have not noticed what is to me a really valid argument, viz. the double festival of the dead in the calendar of Numa. In February we find the cheerful and orderly festival of the Parentalia, the yearly renewal of the seemly rite of burial; in May, on the other hand, the student of the calendar is astonished to find three several days called Lemuria, the rites belonging to which are never mentioned, except where Ovid treats us to a grotesque account of the driving out of ancestral spirits from the house.[856] No one doubts, I think, that the Lemuria represents an older stratum of thought about the dead than the other festival,[857] but no one, so far as I know, has ventured to claim the Lemures and their three days as belonging to the religion of the more primitive race. If I make this suggestion now, it must be taken as a hypothesis only, but as a hypothesis it can at least do no harm. If I am asked why Lemuria should have been admitted into the patrician calendar, I answer that I have long held that a few of the non-patrician religious customs were absorbed into the religion of the city of the four regions, the Lupercalia, for example;[858] and nothing could be more likely than that the old barbarous ideas about the dead should win this amount of respect, seeing that by the limitation to three days in the year order and decency might be brought into their service. I may repeat, with a slight addition, what I wrote ten years ago about these two Roman festivals of the dead: "If we compare Ovid's account of the grotesque domestic rites of the Lemuria with those of February, which were of a systematic, cheerful, and even beautiful character, we may feel fairly sure that the latter represent the organised life of a City-state, the former the ideas of an age when life was wilder and less secure, and the fear of the dead, of ghosts and demons, was a powerful factor in the minds of the people. If we may argue from Ovid's account, it is not impossible that the Lemuria may have been one of those periodical expulsions of demons of which we hear so much in the _Golden Bough_, and which are performed on behalf of the community as well as in the domestic circle among savage peoples. It is noticeable that the offering of food to the demons is a feature common to these practices, and that it also appears in those described by Ovid."[859] To this I should now add the suggestion above made, that the Lemuria represents the ideas of the older race that occupied the site of Rome, while the Parentalia is originally the festival of the patrician immigrants.

But what has all this to do with the eschatology which Lucretius attributes to the common people at Rome in his own day? Simply this, that the ideas at the root of the Lemuria may well have provided the raw material for such an eschatology, while those at the root of the Parentalia could not have done this. Dr. Westermarck has recently shown that primitive religions do spontaneously generate the idea of moral retribution after death, _e.g._ the notion that the souls of bad people may reappear as evil spirits or obnoxious animals.[860] We have no proof whatever of the existence of such notions at Rome; but I contend that the permanence of this type of belief about the dead which is represented by the Lemuria--a permanence which is attested by Ovid's description--raises a presumption that the lower stratum of the Roman population, if the chance were given it, would the more readily understand the pictures of Etruscan artists and the allusions of Greek playwrights, and the more easily become the prey of the eschatological horrors which Lucretius describes as terrifying them. The material was there from the earliest times, and all that was needed was for Greeks and Etruscans to work upon it.

Before leaving this point it may be worth while to remember that though the well-to-do and educated cla.s.ses cremated their dead, the poor of the crowded city population of the period I am now dealing with enjoyed no such orderly and cleanly funeral rites. The literary evidence is explicit on this point, and has been confirmed by modern excavation on the Esquiline, where we know from Varro and Horace that the poor and the slaves were thrown _en ma.s.se_ into _puticuli_, _i.e._ holes where it was impossible that any memorial ceremonies could be kept up.[861] Horace's lines are familiar (_Sat._ 8. 8):

huc prius angustis eiecta cadavera cellis conservus vili portanda locabat in arca.

hoc miserae plebi stabat commune sepulcrum, etc.

It is dangerous to be too confident about the effect on the religious imagination of different ways of dealing with the dead; but it is at least not improbable that any inherited tendency to believe in a miserable future for the soul would be confirmed and maintained by so miserable a fate for the body. The ma.s.s of the population had little chance of ridding itself of eschatological superst.i.tion.

Thus I am inclined to come to Dr. Ma.s.son's conclusion, though on somewhat different grounds. I think it quite possible that the uneducated in the age of the poet may have really been inoculated with these ideas of cruel retribution, and that in many cases this may have resulted in despair or at least discomfort. Only we must remember that in a great city like Rome, as in Paris or London to-day, both the miseries and the enjoyments of life would tend to accustom the minds of the lower strata to consider the present rather than the future; the necessities and pleasures of the moment are with them the only material of thought. Neither comfort nor remonstrance could reach them from pulpit or from missioner; neither fear nor hope could largely enter into their lives. In fact I half suspect that most of them were, after all, so long as they were healthy and active, much what Lucretius would have them be--free from all religious scruple; but, alas, utterly dest.i.tute of the intellectual support which he claimed from the study of philosophy. We can well understand how it was among the lower population of the great cities that early Christianity found its chance. They had no education or philosophy to stand between them and the gospel of redemption.

I must say one word about another kind of transcendentalism which was pushing its way into favour in Roman society at this time--I mean astrology. One may call it transcendental because it was based, in its original home in the East, on a mystical notion of sympathy between the phenomena of the starry heavens and the phenomena of human life;[862]

and that this notion was carefully inculcated by those who taught the "science" at Rome is shown by the long and wearisome poem on astrology written by Manilius in the succeeding age. But it is not likely that this form of mysticism had become really popular before the period of the Empire, and in any case it can hardly be called a part of Roman religious experience. I only mention it here as helping to ill.u.s.trate the way in which men's minds were now beginning to turn with interest to speculations altogether beyond the range of that practical ethical philosophy which was natural and congenial to the Roman, altogether beyond the horizon of man's daily prospect in this world. The growing interest in Fortuna, both as natural force and deity, which became intense under the Empire, is another indication of the same tendency.[863]

As soon as Rome had come into close contact with Greece, which had long before been overrun by the eastern astrology--by the Chaldaeans or _mathematici_, as they are so often called--these experts began to appear also in Italy. We first hear of them from old Cato, who advises that the steward of an estate should be strictly forbidden to consult _Chaldaei_, _harioli_, _haruspices_, and such gentry.[864] In 139 B.C.--a year in which there happened to be in Rome an emba.s.sy from Simon Maccabaeus--Chaldaeans were ordered to leave Rome and Italy within ten days; but I think there is some evidence that these were really Jews who were trying to propagate their own religion.[865] For some time we hear nothing more of these intruders; but they probably gained ground again in the course of the Mithridatic wars, which were responsible for the introduction of much Oriental religion into Italy. They are mentioned in 87, together with [Greek: thytai] and Sibyllistae, as persuading the ill-fated Octavius to remain in Rome to meet his death, as it turned out, at the hands of the Marians.[866] But no Roman seems to have taken up astrology as a quasi-scientific study till that Nigidius, of whom I have already said a word, was persuaded thus to waste his time and brains. He is said to have foretold the greatness of Augustus at his birth in 63 B.C.;[867] and from this time forward the taking of horoscopes or _genethliaca_ became a favourite pursuit at Rome--unfortunately for the people of Europe, who caught the infection and kept it endemic for at least fifteen centuries.

Astrology is in no sense religion, and I must leave it with these few remarks. It represents the individual and his personal interests, not even the advantage of the community, and it was for this reason that the Chaldaei were disliked by the Roman government. The individual is not satisfied with legitimate Roman means of divination; he is employing illegitimate ways when he entrusts himself to these Orientals, who, most of them doubtless, well deserved the scathing contempt which Tacitus has contrived to put into six words: "Genus hominum potentibus infidum, sperantibus fallax," adding, with no less contempt for the Roman authorities who had to deal with them, that they will always be forbidden, and always will be found at Rome.[868]

NOTES TO LECTURE XVII

[804] For the Pythagoreanism of the Neo-platonic movement in the third century A.D. consult Bussell, _Marcus Aurelius and the Later Stoics_ (Edin. 1910), p.

30 foll., who explains the reaction from Stoicism to Neo-Platonism. See also Caird, _Gifford Lectures_, ii.

162 foll.

[805] Schmekel, _Die mittlere Stoa_, p. 403, says that it had ceased to exist for centuries as a philosophy, but cautiously adds in a note that the knowledge of it was not extinct. The famous Orphic tablets from South Italy are taken as dating from the third and fourth centuries B.C., and if not actually Pythagorean, they are next door to being so. See Miss Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, p. 660.

[806] _Tusc. Disp._ i. 38.

[807] See, _e.g._, Prof. Taylor's little book on Plato (Constable), p. 11.

[808] See above, p. 349.

[809] s.e.xtus Empiricus, _adv. Physicos_, ii. 281 foll.

[810] For the devotion of the believers to the founder and his _ipse dixit_, see Cicero, _Nat. Deor._ i. 5. 10.

[811] The relation of Posidonius to Roman literature has been much discussed of late. See, _e.g._, Norden, Virgil, _Aen._ vi., index, _s.v._ "Stoa"; Schmekel, _Die mittlere Stoa_, 85 foll., 238 foll.

[812] For Panaetius' enthusiasm for Plato and his teaching, see Cic. _Tusc. Disp._ i. 32. 79; the whole pa.s.sage indicates, though it does not exactly prove, an approach to the Platonic psychology.

[813] Caird, _Gifford Lectures_, vol. ii. p. 85.

[814] See above, p. 75. The idea that the practice of cremation influenced the ideas of the Roman about the soul was first, I think, suggested by Boissier, _Religion romaine_, i. 310. Cicero himself hints at this conclusion in _Tusc. Disp._ i. 16. 36: "In terram enim cadentibus corporibus, hisque humo tectis, e quo dictum est humari, sub terra censebant reliquam vitam agi mortuorum. Quam eorum opinionem magni errores consecuti sunt; quos auxerunt poetae."

[815] This point is well put by Dill, p. 493 of _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_. See also Dieterich, _Eine Mithras-Liturgie_, p. 200 fol.; Stewart, _Myths of Plato_, 352-53.

[816] Schmekel, _Die mittlere Stoa_, p. 400 foll.

[817] _De Rep._ vi. 26.

[818] _Ib._ The word _providet_ reminds us that this transcendental philosophy supplied the later Stoics with an explanation of divination. See Bouche-Leclercq, _Hist. de divination_, i. 68; Dill, _op. cit._ p. 439; Seneca, _Nat. Quaest._ ii. 52, fully accepted divination. Cp. Cic. _Tusc. Disp._ i. 37. 66, where he quotes his own _Consolatio_; see above, p. 388.

Panaetius, however, had courageously denied divination: Cic. _Div._ i. 3. 6; Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 352.

[819] _De Rep._ vi. 15, 26, and 29.

[820] _Tusc. Disp._ i. 16. 36 foll. On the whole subject of the rise of the soul after death see Dieterich, _Eine Mithras-Liturgie_, p. 179 foll.

[821] Schmekel, _op. cit._ p. 438; Stewart, _Myths of Plato_, p. 300.

[822] For Nigidius, see Schanz, _Gesch. der rom.

Literatur_ (ed. 2), vol. ii. p. 419 foll.

[823] "Nigidius Figulus Pythagoreus et magus in exilio moritur" is the notice of him in St. Jerome's Chronicle for the year 45 B.C.

[824] These letters are in the 12th book of those to Atticus, Nos. 12-40.

[825] _Ad Att._ xii. 36. The translation is Shuckburgh's.

[826] A good example is Virg. _Aen._ viii. 349, but it is needless to multiply instances of the _religio loci_.

Serv. _ad Aen._ i. 314 defines _lucus_ as "arborum mult.i.tudo c.u.m religione."

[827] _Ad Att._ xii. 36; cp. 35. He uses the Greek word [Greek: apotheosis] in 35. 1, which seems to have come into use in his own time; see Liddell & Scott, _s.v._

[828] See above, p. 58.

[829] _Aen._ vi. 743. The meaning of these words seems to be quite plain, though commentators have worried themselves over them from Servius downwards. The mistake has been in not sufficiently considering the force of _quisque_, and puzzling too much over the vague word _Manes_. Henry discerned the true meaning in our own time. See his _Aeneidea_, vol. iii. p. 397. Cp. the words quoted above from _Somn. Scip._: "mens cuiusque is est quisque." M. S. Reinach (_Cultes_, etc. ii. 135 foll.) is not far out: "Nous souffrons chacun suivant le degre de souillure de nos ames."

[830] _C.I.L._ i. 639, with Mommsen's note.

[831] See _R.F._ p. 308.