The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 33

[832] _Tusc. Disp._ i. 12. 27. For the "ius Manium," _de Legibus_, ii. 22 and 54 foll.

[833] _Ad Att._ xii. 18: "Longum illud tempus _c.u.m non ero_ magis me movet quam hoc exiguum," etc. Cp. _Tusc._ i. _ad fin._

[834] _Ad Fam._ iv. 5. 6: "Quod si quis apud inferos sensus est, qui illius in te amor fuit pietasque in omnes suos, hoc certe illa te facere nonvult."

[835] Sall. _Cat._ ch. 51: "Mortem cuncta mortalium dissolvere, ultra neque curae neque gaudio loc.u.m esse."

This is the Epicurean doctrine, which Caesar was said to hold.

[836] Catull. 5. 6; Pliny, _N.H._ vii. 188. The whole pa.s.sage is worth quoting: "Post sepulturam vanae Manium ambages. Omnibus a supremo die eadem quae ante primum, nec magis a morte sensus ullus aut corpori aut animae quam ante natalem. Eadem enim vanitas in futurum etiam se propagat et in mortis quoque tempora sibi vitam ment.i.tur, alias immortalitatem animae, alias transfigurationem, _alias sensum inferis dando et Manes colendo deumque faciendo qui iam etiam h.o.m.o esse desierit_, ceu vero ullo modo spirandi ratio ceteris animalibus praestet, aut non diuturniora in vita multa reperiantur quibus nemo similem divinat immortalitatem,"

etc.

[837] There is an essay on this form of literature in the _etudes morales sur l'antiquite_ of Constant Martha, p. 135 foll.

[838] _Tusc. Disp._ i. 27. 66.

[839] Lact. _Inst._ i. 15. 20.

[840] Lact. iii. 18.

[841] See Schanz, _Gesch. der rom. Literatur_, vol. ii.

p. 376.

[842] Fragments 54 and 55.

[843] P. 158 foll.

[844] Lucr. vi. 764 foll. Cp. iii. 966 foll.; Ma.s.son, _Lucretius_, i. p. 402. Mr. Cyril Bailey also reminds me of Lucr. iii. 31-93, and 1053 to end; and adds a decided opinion that the poet is not here thinking of the common Roman, but of the educated Roman brought up on Greek and Graeco-Roman poetry and philosophy.

[845] Polyb. vi. 56.

[846] _Tusc._ i. 46. 111.

[847] See Roscher's _Myth. Lex._ _s.v._ "Orcus"; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 192.

[848] See above, p. 107.

[849] Muller-Deecke, _Etrusker_, ii. 108 foll.

Ill.u.s.trations can be seen in Dennis, _Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_, ed. 2.

[850] _Captivi_, v. 4. 1.

[851] _La Religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_, vol.

i. p. 310.

[852] Cic. _Tusc._ i. 16. 37. For the eschatology of the sixth _Aeneid_, a curious melange of religion, philosophy, and folklore, see Norden's work on Virgil, _Aeneid_, vi. (index, p. 468). Norden believes, I may note, that the philosophical and religious elements in it are mainly derived from Posidonius. Cp. also Glover, _Studies in Virgil_, ch. x. (Hades). For popular beliefs in Hades, etc., under the Empire, see Friedlander's _Sittengeschichte_, vol. iii. last chapter.

[853] Weil, _etudes sur l'antiquite grecque_, p. 12, quoted by Glover, p. 218.

[854] See above, p. 105.

[855] Since this lecture was written a most interesting discussion of Greek ideas, Achaean and Pelasgic, about the relation of soul and body after death, has appeared in Mr. Lawson's _Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion_, especially in chapters v. and vi., confirming me, to some extent at least, in the conjecture I had here hazarded. The working of the imagination in regard to a future state is in Greece, in his view, peculiar to the older or Pelasgic population; and if the Etruscans were of Pelasgic stock, as is now believed by many, their imaginative grotesqueness, a degraded form perhaps of the original characteristic, acting on the ideas of a still more primitive population of which the Lemuria is a survival, might explain the later prevalence of a gruesome eschatology at Rome. But whoever studies Mr.

Lawson's chapters closely will find serious difficulties in the way even of such a hypothesis as this.

[856] Ovid, _Fasti_, v. 430 foll.; _R.F._ p. 109.

Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 192, attributes the ideas of larvae (ghosts) and of Orcus, not to religion, but to popular superst.i.tion. If he here means by religion the State religion and the _Parentalia_ in particular, I can agree with him.

[857] Dr. Carter allows this in Hastings' _Dict. of Religion and Ethics_, vol. i. (Roman section of article "Ancestor Worship.")

[858] See _R.F._ p. 334.

[859] _R.F._ p. 107.

[860] _Origin and Development of Moral Ideas_, ii. 693 foll.

[861] Varro, _L.L._ v. 25; Paulus p. 216; Hulsen-Jordan, _Rom. Topogr._ iii. p. 268 foll. The remains of these puticuli were unluckily very imperfectly reported, and have been lost in the building of the Rome of to-day. On the question of the religious aspect of the two ways of disposing of the dead, burial and cremation, it is as well to remember Dieterich's warning in _Mutter Erde_, p. 66, note: "den Versuch, aus der Verbreitung und dem Wechsel der Sitte des Verbrennens und Begrabens fur meine Untersuchung Schlusse zu gewinnen, habe ich vollig aufgegeben, als ich angesichts der ungeheueren Materialen meines Kollegen von Duhn die Unmoglicheit solcher Schlusse einsehen musste." In Mr. Lawson's book quoted above it seems to me to be proved that the object of both methods is the same, viz. to destroy the body as quickly as possible in order to prevent the soul from re-entering it and annoying the survivors.

[862] This is well explained by c.u.mont in his _Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain_, p. 196 foll., following Bouche-Leclercq's work on astrology in Greece.

c.u.mont thinks that astrology took over the business of the augurs and haruspices, which was now dropped, and this is true in the main as regards the individual, but not as regards the State; see above, p. 308 foll.

[863] For Fortuna in the writings of Caesar, etc., see _Cla.s.sical Review_, vol. xvii. p. 153. The _locus cla.s.sicus_ for Fortuna as a deity under the early empire is Pliny, _N.H._ ii. 22.

[864] Cato, _R.R._ ch. v. 4.

[865] Val. Max. i. 3. 2, who no doubt was following Livy; for in the Epitomes of some lost books of Livy discovered at Oxyrrhyncus by Grenfell and Hunt (_Oxyrrh.

Papyri_, vol. iv. p. 101), the same fact is alluded to.

For the emba.s.sy, Maccab. i. 14. 24; xv. 15-24. Two extracts from the text of Valerius, which is here lost, both state that proselytising Jews were at this time driven from Rome; the Jupiter Sabazius, whose cult they were propagating, can hardly be other than that of Jehovah; see Schurer, _Jewish People in the Time of Christ_, pt. ii. vol. ii. p. 233 of the English translation. The expulsion of Chaldaei may, however, have been a separate measure of the praetor Hispalus.

[866] Plutarch, _Marius_, 42.

[867] Suet. _Aug._ 1. I have seen a learned work about a century old, now entirely forgotten, in which it is maintained that Virgil's fourth Eclogue is simply a genethliacon of Augustus; the arguments, which are ingenious but futile, are drawn from the poem of Manilius.

[868] Tacitus, _Hist._ i. 22.

LECTURE XVIII

RELIGIOUS FEELING IN THE POEMS OF VIRGIL

My justification for devoting a whole lecture to Virgil must be that this great poet, more warmly and sympathetically than any other Latin author, gives expression to the best religious feeling of the Roman mind. And this is so not only in regard to the tendencies of religion in his own day; he stands apart from all his literary contemporaries in that he sums up the past of Roman religious experience, reflects that of his own time, and also looks forward into the future. No other poet, no historian, not even Livy, who sprang from the same region and in his tone and spirit in some ways resembles Virgil, has the same broad outlook, the same tender interest in religious antiquity, the same all-embracing sympathy for the Roman world he knew, and the same confident and cheerful hope for its future. Each of the Augustan poets--Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus--has his own peculiar gift and charm; but those who know Virgil through and through will at once acknowledge the difference between these and the man possessed of spiritual insight. They are helpful in various ways to the student of Roman religion, and Tibullus especially has a simple reverence for the old religion which has inspired a few exquisite descriptions of this aspect of Italian life. But, if I may use the word, they had no mission; they were true poets, yet not poets of the prophetic order; they had not thought deeply and reached conviction, like Lucretius and Virgil. A few words from the conclusion of an Edinburgh professor's admirable work on Virgil will sufficiently express what I mean. "His religious belief," says Sellar, "like his other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it embraced what was purest and most vital in the religions of antiquity, and in its deepest intuitions it seems to look forward to the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later."[869] In fact, Virgil gathers up what was valuable in the past of Rome and adds to it a new element, a new source of life and hope. It was this that made it possible for a great French critic to a.s.sert that for those who have read Virgil there is nothing astonishing in Christianity.[870] Let us try and realise what these writers mean.

The Scotsman is sober and earnest, the Frenchman epigrammatically exaggerating; but the feeling that underlies both utterances is a true one.

We have traced the gradual paralysis of the secularised State religion.

We have glanced at the two types of philosophical thought which took the place of that religion in the minds of the cultivated section of Roman society, neither of which could adequately supply the Roman and Italian mind with an expression of its own natural feeling, never wholly extinct, of its relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. Stoicism came near to doing what was needed, by rehabilitating itself on Italian soil and indulging Roman preconceptions of the divine; but it could not greatly affect the ma.s.s of men, and its appeal was not to feeling, but to reason. Epicurism, though perhaps more popular, was in reality more in conflict with what was best in the Italian nature, and the pa.s.sionate appeal of Lucretius to look for comfort to a scientific knowledge of the _rerum natura_ had no enduring power to cheer. Lastly, we have examined the tendency of the same age towards mysticism and Cicero's doubting and embarra.s.sed expression of it, and we found that this tendency rather ill.u.s.trates a sense of something wanting than hopefully satisfies it. We may well feel ourselves, now we have arrived at the close of the Republican era, just as the best men of that day felt, that there _is_ something wanting. In their minds this feeling almost amounted to despair; in ours, as we read the story of the troublous time after the death of Caesar, it is pity and wonder. There was, in fact, more than a sense of weariness and discomfort, moral and material, in the Roman mind of that generation--there was also what we may almost call a sense of sin, such a feeling, though doubtless less real and intense, as that which their prophets, from time to time, awoke in the Jewish people, and one not unknown in the history of h.e.l.las. It was essentially a feeling of neglected duty--of neglected duty to the Power and of goodwill wanting towards men. Lucretius had been unconsciously a powerful witness to this feeling, but had not found the remedy. In the early Augustan age it is again expressed by Horace, by Sall.u.s.t, and more deeply and truly in the beautiful preface to Livy's History.[871] Livy there says that he devoted himself to the early annals of Rome that he might shut his eyes to the evils of his own time--"tempora quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus."

This something wanting was then a feeling, a _religio_, if we can venture to use the old word once more in the sense which I have so often attributed to it. Not an unreasonable or ungovernable feeling, not a _superst.i.tio_, but a feeling of happy dependence on a higher Power, and a desire to conform to His will in all the relations of human life. This is the kind of feeling that had always lain at the root of the Roman _pietas_, the sense of duty to family and State, and to the deities who protected them. In the jarring of factions, the cruelty and bloodshed of tyrants, and the luxurious self-indulgence of the last two generations, the voice of _pietas_ had been silenced, the better instincts of humanity had gone down. We have to see what was done by our poet to awake that voice again and to put fresh life into those instincts. Only let us remember that more permanent good is done in this world by a beautiful nature giving itself its natural expression, than by precept or denunciation; and beware of attributing to Virgil more direct consciousness of his mission than he really felt. It is the nature of the man that is of value to us in our studies, as it was to the Romans in their despair, a nature ruled by sweet, calm feeling, full of sympathy and full of hope.