Part 36

This epoch is most clearly marked by the building of the great temple on the Capitol of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, an Etruscan Trias, perhaps ultimately of Greek origin, whose statues, as we have seen, were invited in true polytheistic fashion to partake of a feast every year on the Ides of September, the _dies natalis_ of the temple. This temple was dedicated in B.C. 509, directly after the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus. The next of which we hear is that of the old Roman Saturnus (B.C. 497), now strangely represented by a fettered statue, and worshipped henceforward _Graeco ritu_, with the head uncovered. Next comes Mercurius (B.C. 495), a god unknown to the most ancient Fasti; then Ceres, the Greek Demeter under a familiar Italian name (B.C. 493); next Fortuna with a statue (B.C. 486), an imported goddess, to whom Servius Tullius, if tradition can be trusted, had already erected temples. To this same age belongs probably the temple of Diana on the Aventine, with a Greek ξόανον and the introduction of Apollo-worship as a popular cult. If we follow the catalogue of dedications during the two centuries following the abolition of the monarchy[1503], we find that out of fourteen of which the dates are known to us, six are Greek or Graeco-Etruscan, three more admit before long a non-Roman ritual under the influence of the _duoviri sacris faciundis_, and five are known to have contained statues from an early period. Only three, those of Dius Fidius, of Juno Lucina, and of Mater Matuta, can be said to have been genuine Roman foundations. Without doubt a great change is here indicated which has come over the Roman religion, both in cult and theology. New elements of population, new relations with conquerors or conquered, new commercial enterprise, new experiences of war, famine, and pestilence, bring in new deities, suggest recourse to new divine aids. The old Rome is almost a thing of the past; the cults and deities of the Numan period no longer suffice, and are perhaps already beginning to be forgotten; the oldest priesthoods begin to give place in all except empty externals to the semi-political colleges of pontifices and augurs, and to the important new foundation of _duoviri sacris faciundis_; the old Italian ritual of simple apparatus and detailed ceremony is becoming overshadowed by the showy ceremonial of lectisternia and supplicationes.

Was there no reaction, we may well ask, against a tendency so expansive and denationalizing? I answer this question with hesitation, for so far as I am aware it has never yet been fully investigated. But I am strongly disposed to believe that there was such a reaction in the third century B.C., in the period, that is, between the Samnite wars and Hannibal’s invasion of Italy. This, unlike the preceding century, was a period of almost uniform success of the Roman arms, and one in which the State was at no time in serious peril; and the temptation to have recourse to strange divinities, as a patient betakes himself to new physicians, would not present itself to the minds of the senate or the priesthoods. If we pursue the history of the temple-foundations of this period, under Aust’s invaluable guidance, the result is very remarkable. Between 304 and 217 B.C. we know the dates of twenty-five foundations; and of these no less than twenty are in honour of indigenous, or at least what I may perhaps call, home-made deities. No doubt there is a growing tendency to identify Roman gods with Greek; but this does not show itself plainly till the end of the century, and the only genuine Greek foundation is that of Aesculapius, the consequence of a severe pestilence in 293 B.C. Three or four, e. g. those of Fors Fortuna, Minerva Capta, and Feronia, were probably of non-Roman origin; but they were transplanted from the near neighbourhood of Rome and may almost count as indigenous.

In contemplating the Roman foundations of this period we are struck by certain indications of the activity of the _pontifices_, as distinguished from the _duoviri sacris faciundis_; i. e. the activity of that college of priests whose special charge was the Roman religion proper, and who were only indirectly concerned with foreign introductions. For example, we may note with interest a group of four agricultural deities, to whom temples were dedicated in the eight years between 272 and 264 B.C., the years, that is, of the pacification and settlement of Italy after the invasion of Pyrrhus[1504]. These deities were Consus, Tellus, Pales, and Vortumnus. Owing to the loss of Livy’s second decade we cannot be very certain of the immediate object of these foundations; but we may guess that they had a definite meaning in connexion with the events of the time, and that they were chiefly the work of the pontifical college. Less distinct perhaps, but still worth noticing, is a group of foundations in honour of deities connected with water[1505], i.e. to Tempestates, Juturna and Fons, which seem to have had some reference to the naval operations of the First Punic War. The temple of Juturna was vowed by Lutatius Catulus in the battle at the Aegates Insulae in 241 B.C.; that to the Tempestates by Cornelius Scipio, when the fleet was almost destroyed near Corsica in 259 B.C.; and that of Fons in the Corsican war in 231 B.C. It was characteristic of the Roman mind, and of the pontifical methods, thus to connect the spirits of the springs in Rome with those of the sea and its tempests.

It is at this time also that we notice the appearance of abstractions resolved into deities, such as Salus, Spes, Fides, Honos et Virtus, Concordia, and Mens. These, as I have said elsewhere[1506], are not genuine old Roman cults, but pontifical creations in the spirit of the old Roman impersonal and daemonic ideas of divine agency. In connexion with these I may mention the conviction which has grown upon me in the course of these investigations, that it was in this reactionary period, as we may call it, that the pontifices drew up that extraordinary list of deities, classified according to their functions in relation to man and his activity and suffering, which we know as the _Indigitamenta_. This seems to me characteristic of the period, inasmuch as it was probably based on the old Roman ideas of divine agency, now systematized by something like scientific terminology and ordered classification. It is the old national belief in the ubiquity of the world of spirits, now edited and organized by skilled legal theologians. But it would be beyond the province of this work to venture farther into this tangled question.

From the Hannibalic war to the end of the Republic is the period of the decay and downfall of the old Roman religion. This period need not detain us long; it has been no part of my plan to exhibit this religion on its death-bed, for the Fasti do not admit us to that scene. They show us a living and genuine, not a spurious and enfeebled religious life. A few salient facts shall suffice as illustrations of the slow process of this dissolution.

At the very outset of the period we mark the solemn introduction into Rome of Cybele, the Magna Mater Idaea, and the stone which was supposed to represent her; and we are thus warned that even the Greek cults, with all their adjuncts of art and mythology, are no longer sufficient for Roman needs. The State is once more in peril, and the far-reaching struggle with Hannibal has brought her into touch with new peoples and cults. The Greeks do indeed continue to be the chief invaders of the Roman religious territory, but the religion they bring with them is a debased one. The extraordinary rapidity with which the orgiastic rites of Dionysus spread over Italy in 186 B.C. proves at once that the Italian religious forms were wearing out, and that the Greek substitute was no longer a wholesome one[1507]. From this time forward the lower strata of population show a tendency to run after exciting Oriental forms of worship, which neither the attempted restoration of the old religion by Augustus, nor the subsequent rapid growth of Christianity, could entirely and permanently check. Among the educated classes the old beliefs were being eaten away by the acids of a second-hand philosophy. The Greeks had long begun to inquire into the nature of the gods, and they passed on their disintegrating criticism to their conquerors. Euhemerus, the arch-destroyer of ancient faiths, became known to the Romans through a translation by Ennius at the beginning of the second century B.C.; and it took only another century and a half to produce the sceptical and eclectic treatise of Cicero, _De Natura Deorum_.

Again, nothing is more characteristic of this period than the contempt and neglect into which the old priesthoods gradually fell; Rome now swarmed with a mongrel population that knew little of them and cared less. In the year 209 B.C. even the priesthood of Jupiter was filled by the youthful black sheep of an old patrician family, apparently for no other reason than the hope that so objectionable a character might be reformed by the many quaint restrictions imposed upon the office[1508]. Of the flamines in general, of the Fratres Arvales, Salii, Sodales Titii, and others of the ancient priesthoods we henceforward hear little or nothing until the revival of learning and religion in the Augustan age. Old forms continued to be used, but mainly for political purposes, like the _obnuntiatio_ or observation of lightning; and only those religious offices which had considerable political power continued to be sought after by men of light and leading.

Temples continued to be vowed and built, especially in the earlier part of this period; but their cults are, with few exceptions, of Greek origin, or are new and fanciful forms of old worships, such as the Lares Permarini, Venus Verticordia, Fortuna Equestris, Ops Opifera, Fortuna Huiusce Diei. Before the fall of the Republic a great number of the old temples had fallen almost irretrievably into decay; Augustus tells us in his record of his own reign that he restored no less than eighty-two of them. This too is the period when the identification of Roman gods with Greek became a general fashion; a process which had begun long before, but originally with a genuine meaning and object, not as the sport of a sceptical society educated in Greek speculation. Salus takes the attributes of Hygieia, Mater Matuta becomes Leucothea, Faunus Pan, Sancus Hercules, Carmenta Nicostrate, Neptunus Poseidon, the god of Soracte, Apollo Soranus; and even the greater gods like Mars, Diana, and others assume more and more the likeness and mythical adornment of their supposed Greek equivalents.

The civil troubles of the age of revolution completed the work of disintegration. Men became careless, reckless, self-regarding; the δεισιδαιμονία of which Polybius could say only just before the revolution began, that more than anything else it served to knit the Roman state together, was lost to view in the tumult of political passion and personal greed. Not indeed that it was altogether extinct; that could never be, and never has been the case in Italy. Augustus, who came by degrees to know the people he governed better than any statesman in Italian history, was well aware that to inspire the Roman world once more with confidence, he must bring the religious instinct into play again. The task he thus set himself he accomplished with extraordinary skill and tact; the old religion seemed to live again, the old priesthoods were revived, the old minutiae of worship were restored. He did what he could to bring to life again even the spirit and the principles of the old _religio_; and in the _Carmen Saeculare_ of Horace, written to his order at a moment when he wished to make these things obvious to the eyes of all Romans, we probably have the best succinct exposition of them to be found in Roman literature[1509]. But of the Augustan revival, and of the reasons why it could not be permanent, I must forbear here to speak further.

* * * * *

I have yet to say a few words in answer to the interesting question whether the religious system we have been examining had any appreciable influence on the character of the Roman people: whether it contributed to build up that _virtus_ of the State and the individual which enabled them to subdue and govern the world, as the _pietas_ of Aeneas in the poem armed him for the subjugation and civilization of the wild Italian tribes. The question may at first sight seem a superfluous one, since the religion of a people is rather the expression of its own genius for dealing with the perplexities of human life, than a _vera causa_ in determining its character; yet it is worth asking, for it is unquestionable that the peculiar turn taken by a nation’s religious beliefs and practices does in course of time come to react upon its character and morals.

It has often been said of the Roman religion that it had nothing to do with righteousness, and was without ethical value. The admirable criticism of it given by Mommsen in the first volume of his History may originally have suggested this view; but if so, the copyists have exaggerated the opinion of the master in one particular point, failing to give due weight to the general tenor of his exposition. However this may be, we certainly are now always invited to conclude that this great people, which in its dealings with human beings discovered an extraordinary genius for expansion and adaptation, in its attitude to the supernatural remained cooped up within curiously narrow mental limits, drawing no real sustenance either from its primitive beliefs or its quaint and detailed practice. The current views of this kind have just lately been so well summed up in an admirable English work on the latest age of Roman society and thought, that I cannot do better than borrow a few sentences from it[1510]:—

‘The old Roman theology was a hard, narrow, unexpansive system of abstraction and personification, which strove to represent in its Pantheon the phenomena of nature, the relations of man in the State or in the clan, every act and feeling and incident in the life of the individual. Unlike the mythologies of Hellas and the East, it had no native principle of growth, or adaptation to altered needs of society and the individual imagination. It was also singularly wanting in awe and mystery. The religious spirit which it cultivated was formal, timid, and scrupulous.... The old Roman worship was businesslike and utilitarian. The gods were partners in a contract with their worshippers, and the ritual was characterized by the hard and literal formalism of the legal system of Rome. The worshipper performed his part to the letter with the scrupulous exactness required in pleadings before the praetor. To allow devotional feeling to transgress the bounds prescribed by immemorial custom was “superstitio.”’

It is impossible to deny that there is much truth in all this; yet I may venture to express a doubt whether it contains the whole truth. The fact is that the subject needs a more historical treatment, and perhaps also something of the historical imagination, to do it full justice.

In the earliest periods of Roman civilization, those of the family and the beginnings of the State, the Roman attitude towards the supernatural was, if I am not mistaken, a real contributing cause towards the formation of _virtus_. It was not merely an attitude of business and bargaining. So far as we know it, the common form of address to the gods was not ‘send me what I want—sun, rain, victory, &c., and you shall then have these gifts’; but ‘I give you these sacrifices and expect you to do your part; in taking all this trouble to act correctly by you, I establish a right as against you.’ It is true that in one particular form of dealing with the gods, the vow, or solemn undertaking (_votum_), the transaction wears more the character of a definite bargain; if the god will do certain things, he shall then have his reward. So Cloanthus in Virgil addresses the gods of the sea[1511]—

Di, quibus imperium est pelagi, quorum aequora curro, Vobis laetus ego hoc candentem in litore taurum Constituam ante aras, _voti reus_, extaque salsos Proiciam in fluctus et vina liquentia fundam.

But the _votum_ was the exception, not the rule; it was a promise made by an individual at some critical moment, not the ordered and recurring ritual of the family or the State. It takes its peculiar form simply because the maker of the vow is not at the particular moment in a position to fulfil it. The normal attitude of the Roman in prayer and sacrifice was not this; it is much more exactly expressed in the formula of the farmer’s prayer already quoted in these pages: ‘Father Mars, I pray and beseech thee be willing and propitious to me, my household, and my slaves; for the which object I have caused this threefold sacrifice to be driven round my farm and land.’ This is the usual and natural attitude of all peoples in sacrificing to their gods, and is far from being peculiar to Rome; but it was the nature of the Roman to express it in a more formal and definite way than others, and this led to an outward religion of formulae which has done much to obscure for us, as indeed for the Romans themselves, the real thought underlying them.

These exact formulae of invocation and sacrifice were really the outward expression of a fear of the unknown, and its power to hinder and injure man; for the old Roman did not know his gods intimately, inasmuch as they took no human shape, and did not dwell in buildings made by hands. We have illustrated this ignorance of his again and again, and the vagueness and fluidity of the religious conceptions of the Roman mind. The remedy for this weakness was found, as with the Jews, in a remarkable formularity of ritual, both as regards time, place, and method of worship: in a series of elaborate prescriptions drawn up by experts, going even so far as to anticipate the consequence of an unintentional omission or error by piacular acts. This in time, and under State organization, became a science, and finds its parallel in the science of legal formulae. But there was a difference between the two sciences, even for the Roman. In religious acts, the human mind is dealing with the unseen and unknown, not with human beings who can be calculated with or outwitted. His fear of the unknown was thus for the primitive Roman a wholesome discipline; and his attitude towards it he aptly and characteristically called _religio_, because it _bound_ him to the performance of certain regulated duties, calculated to keep his footsteps straight as he walked daily in this unseen world: duties which even in the family and clan must have been to some extent systematized, and which when the city-state was reached took the definite form of a calendar of public prayers, sacrifices, and festivities.

Now surely in this motive of fear, thus remedied by exact ritual, we may trace a true civilizing element—the idea of Duty, Pietas, which as Cicero defined it, was ‘iustitia erga deos’: righteous dealing towards the gods, in expectation of righteous treatment on their part. And he would be a bold man who should assert that ‘iustitia erga deos’ had no effect in inducing the habit of ‘iustitia erga homines’: in other words that it could not react upon conduct. In the _pietas_ of the one typical Roman in literature both these elements are equally present. The _pietas_ of Aeneas is a sense of duty towards god and man alike; to his father, his son, and his people, as well as to the will of the gods, and to that solemn mission which is at once the religion of his life and the key to the great Roman poem[1512]. This is indeed that same sense of duty and responsibility which governed every Roman in authority in the best days of the State, whether paterfamilias, patronus, priest, or magistrate, and which was the motive power in the working of a constitution which lasted for centuries though only resting on a basis of trust. In this _pietas_, it is true, we find no sense of contrition for sin, no humbling of the individual self before an almighty Governor of the world; but we do find a very sensitive conscientiousness, arising from the dread of neglect or trespass in the discharge of religious observance, in the trust committed by family or State to its constituted representative. And this trust included also the discharge of duties to other men, the neglect of which might bring down the anger of the Unknown, and even compel the surrender of a criminal as _sacer_ to an offended deity. We find abundant evidence of this aspect of the _religio_ in the language of solemn oaths and treaties, and especially in connexion with the cult of the great Jupiter.

I maintain then that in this Roman religion, in spite of its dryness and formality, there was a distinct ethical and civilizing element. And in conclusion I may perhaps raise the question whether it was really, as has been so often asserted, such a conception of the unseen as could never admit of elevation and expansion. A religion, which in its best and simplest forms, could bind men together in the orderly dutiful life of family, gens, state, and federation, could hardly, if left to itself, have speedily become an inanity, even though based on the motive of fear rather than that of brotherly love. But this religion, as the State became more fully matured, came under the influence of two retarding causes. First, its ritual, always obnoxious to formularism, was gradually deprived of its meaning by great priesthoods which from causes which need not be here discussed became powerful political agencies. Secondly, the contact with a mature system of polytheism, adorned and in some sort materialized by art and literature, drew away the mind of the simple and wondering Roman from the task of developing his religious ideas in his own way. When a new world of thought broke on the conquering Roman of the Republic, his own religious motives were already drying up under the influence of a powerful State-organization. His _pietas_ lived on after a fashion for centuries, but more and more it lost that hold on the conscience, that appeal to trust and responsibility, which had once promised it a vigorous life and growth. While foreign gods and cults attracted his attention and admiration, or appealed to his sense that there was no quarter from which supernatural aid might not be called in for the advancement of his State, they failed to bind his conscience with the wholesome motives which lay at the root of his old native _religio_. And neither in the reaction of the fourth century B.C., nor in the protests of an austere Cato in the second, nor in the elaborate revival of Augustus, much less in any later effort of philosopher or autocrat to return to the old ways, was any permanent resuscitation of discipline or conduct possible. The problem of giving a real religion to the world-state into which the Roman dominion had then grown, was not to be solved either by Roman _pietas_ or Hellenic polytheism.

Footnote 1502:

Tertullian, _de Praescriptionibus Haereticorum_, 40.

Footnote 1503:

Collected by Aust in his work _de Aedibus sacris_, pp. 4 foll.

Footnote 1504:

Aust, op. cit., p. 14, note 1.

Footnote 1505:

Above, p. 190.

Footnote 1506:

Aust, op. cit., p. 15, note 1.