Part 17

The Romans further thought of their religion as a contract between the state and its gods. This view comes out clearly in the vows made at the beginning of the year or of a campaign. At such seasons the king, and later the consuls or other officials, promised that if the divine powers should prosper them against their foes, and should grant them abundant harvests, increase of the crops and herds, then the state, when the gods had done their part, would in its turn pay the price promised in the form of votive gifts and sacrifices. Livy furnishes us many illustrations. For example, in a crisis during the struggle with the Samnites the Roman leader prayed thus to the goddess of war: “Bellona, if thou wilt today grant us victory, then I promise thee a temple.”[264] Another is the vow made near the beginning of the Second Punic War: “If the state of the Roman People, the Quirites, shall be preserved, as I would have it preserved, for the next five years in these wars—the war which the Roman People is carrying on with the Carthaginians and the wars which they have with the Gauls who live this side the Alps,—then the Roman People, the Quirites, will give a gift, etc.”; a long list of the offerings to be made follows.[265]

In this first period the religion of the family also was already fixed in the form which it retained to the end of antiquity. Vesta of the hearthfire, the Penates of the larder, the Lar of the farm, the Genius of the pater familias, were the divine powers which were worshipped in the house. Rites were paid also to the Manes, the shades of the dead. As within the home the head of the family naturally performed the priestly offices, so in the state during the regal period the king was chief priest. Advisers and assistants were given him, who with the organization of the republic acquired an independent position, so that thereafter the Pontifex Maximus and his associates, who formed the College of the Pontifices, were at the head of the state religion. Although it is impossible here to go into the details of the Roman priesthoods, it is important to note that these priestly offices were state magistracies just as much as the offices of consul and praetor, and that with a few exceptions priestly office never debarred its holder from performing any other political function. The Roman state was not burdened with sacerdotalism.

Now this early religion of which I have been giving a brief summary was the religion of a little city-state; it was suited to a small, unimaginative community. As such it remained formal and practical—a religion intended to secure material blessings; but it lacked all spiritual elements, and offered little or nothing to satisfy man’s natural hope for a happy future life. More than this, it contained little to ennoble daily life, save as it taught the lesson of duty and of fidelity towards the gods in the performance of contracts agreed upon. Yet it was not an uncomfortable religion for unreflective men, winning their existence from the soil and gaining their wealth from crops, their power through war. It did not, however, have in it the possibility of satisfying men’s higher desires.

Under the influence of the Greeks and the Etruscans the Hellenic gods were early introduced to Rome. The temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, which the Tarquin kings apparently built to establish a new religious center associated with their own dynasty, housed Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva; but they were only the Greek gods Zeus, Hera, and Athena, who had travelled to Rome by way of Etruria. In this temple the gods were represented in human form, and thereafter the process of anthropomorphizing and individualizing the divinities must have gone on apace. Some gods came by migration and trade, like the Greek Castor and Pollux, who were introduced to Rome from the neighboring town of Tusculum, and Hercules, whom Greek immigrants had established at Tibur. But the greatest influence in introducing Greek gods was the Sibylline Books. Whenever need pressed the state, these books were consulted that they might indicate what new means should be employed to win divine aid. We can name at least ten Greek divinities who were thus brought in before the outbreak of the Second Punic War. Apollo must have come at the time of the acquisition of the Sibylline Books, or soon after, for the Books were believed to contain his directions; we know that he had a temple by 433 B.C. Under the name of the Italian divinity Mercury, the Greek Hermes had received a shrine in 495; two years later the triad Ceres, Liber, and Libera, an Italian disguise for Demeter, Dionysus, and Kore, were domiciled near Mercury; and not long before 399 B.C. the Greek Poseidon, with the name of Neptunus, was established near the city walls. Then there was apparently a pause for about a century. But in 293 B.C. a serious plague ravaged the city, so that the Sibylline Books were consulted. This time they were found to say that relief was certain if the Greek god of healing, Aesculapius, were brought to Rome. The divinity consented, and two years later a temple was dedicated to him on the island in the Tiber where the hospital of San Bartolomeo today continues his kindly work. Again in the crisis of the year 249 B.C., warned by many omens, the Romans obeyed the Books’ injunction to establish on the Campus Martius a festival to the Greek Pluto and Persephone under the names Dispater and Proserpina. This festival was to be renewed every saeculum, and ultimately became the festival which Augustus celebrated with such magnificence in 17 B.C. Finally in 238 B.C. the Greek Aphrodite was adopted under the Italian name Flora. You will observe that most of the Greek gods were identified with Roman or Italian divinities long familiar to the Romans; but in every case sooner or later the Greek god so completely overshadowed his Italian counterpart that the Italian lost his identity in the Greek. Besides these divinities which I have named the popular mind identified many others, and in the end a large part of the Greek pantheon crept into the Roman system. The temple for Jupiter and his associates, Juno and Minerva, had been built on the Capitoline Hill in the Etruscan style and the three gods were represented by Etruscan terra-cotta images; but the homes of the Greek divinities were erected in the Greek style by Greek architects, and the statues of the divinities were copies of statues in Greek cities. These set models for the representation of other gods. We can readily understand how men’s concepts of their gods were profoundly influenced by their artistic representations.

The introduction of these Greek gods is probably to be connected with the political struggles of the two centuries between 500 and 300 B.C. At the beginning of the Republic the patricians were the only ones who had considerable political rights or who enjoyed the privileges of the state religion, whereas the plebeians were struggling to secure admission to both political and priestly offices; and during these two centuries the humbler class found religious satisfaction in the worship of these new gods, whose rites were public, open to all, and not restricted to the privileged citizens, as were the rites of the older divinities. In 367/6 B.C., the plebeians secured admission to the consulate and to the College of Ten who had charge of the Sibylline Books, and by the year 300 they had obtained a right to all important political offices, including practically all the priesthoods. A social significance also attached to the temples of these new gods: that of Mercury, the god of trade, became the resort of the guild of merchants; the temple of Minerva on the Aventine the center for the various guilds of craftsmen, including that of poets. Along with the Greek gods had come also the Greek ritual. The Hellenization of Roman religion may be said to have been completed by the year 217 B.C. when, as ordered by the Sibylline Books, at the great festival of the lectisternium twelve gods were represented as sharing a sacred meal with the people; these twelve gods were Greek divinities, although all but Apollo were called by Roman names: Jupiter and Juno, Neptune and Minerva, Mars and Venus, Apollo and Diana, Volcanus and Vesta, Mercury and Ceres.[266] While the practical character of Roman religion still remained, the Romans’ concept of the gods themselves, as well as much of the ritual, had been profoundly altered.

In other fields as well Greece began her conquest of Rome before Rome entered on her political subjugation of Greece. An educated young Greek, taken captive at the fall of Tarentum in the year 272 B.C., became the teacher of his master’s children at Rome; when set free, he continued his profession under the name of Livius Andronicus. There was, however, no Roman literature available, so that he had to supply this lack by translating the Odyssey into the rude Saturnian verse current in the mouths of the Latins. In the year 240 B.C. he presented a tragedy and a comedy adapted from Greek originals, and thus through epic and dramatic poetry he became the founder of Latin literature.

We must realize that at this time the only literature existing was the Greek, which in its unexampled history of six centuries and more had originated and perfected almost every major literary form since known. It was inevitable that Andronicus and his successors should turn to the Greek for their models and that the early drama should largely consist of adaptations, chiefly from the cosmopolitan comedy of Greece. That this was possible and natural shows in part how common knowledge of the Greek language and of Greek customs was already in Rome of the third and second centuries before our era. Now these adapted plays, both tragedies and comedies, had a share in breaking down the older religious and social strictness, as we can easily see from the extant comedies of Plautus and of Terence. These prove beyond question that the later Greek drama, when adapted for Roman audiences, must have had a considerable influence upon Roman religion and Roman society. The gods are intentionally held up to ridicule; they are represented as being more immoral and baser than common men; nor is the human society which is presented in these plays an edifying spectacle. Although we should not attribute too great influence in such matters to the stage, there is no possible question that the theatre had its effect then, as it has its influence now.

At the close of the third century before our era native epic poetry began under the influence naturally of the Homeric epics. Naevius, who flourished during the Second Punic War, wrote a narrative poem, the Bellum Punicum, in the native Saturnian measure—a poem which enjoyed great success and continued to be read in Horace’s day. In it he popularized among the Romans a simple form of the legend of Rome’s connection with Troy, which is familiar to us from Virgil and Livy. His successor in this field was Ennius, who died in 169 B.C. He boldly adopted the Greek hexameter for his poetic history of Rome, the Annales, and moulded the Latin language to this measure so successfully that thereafter this remained the metre for the Roman epic. From Naevius and Ennius through Virgil to the end of the fourth Christian century, when Claudian closed the long line of classical Latin poets, every one drew his form, his imagery, and many of his incidents from the Greek epics.

The splendid results of the Second Punic War, made the more glorious by the long years of doubt and disaster, stirred the Romans to a desire to record their national history in prose form. But the only prose which had been developed for this purpose was Greek; therefore the Roman historians wrote in that language for half a century until Cato the Censor set the fashion of writing in Latin prose. So we might go on and point out how in oratory, lyric poetry, elegy, and in almost every other form of literature the Greeks were the direct models for the Romans, as in a way they have been for the literatures of all peoples since. Furthermore in poetry, history, and indeed in all classes of literature, Greek myths and legends were adopted or worked over to fit new conditions, tales and genealogies invented on Greek models, and everywhere the Greek gods were given Latin names and adapted to their new environment. The disastrous result for the indigenous religion is self-evident.

During the third and second centuries education came to mean first of all the study of the Greek language and literature. I have just spoken of some of the evidence we possess which shows that Greek was early widely known among all classes at Rome. By the Second Punic War it became customary in well-to-do and noble families to employ a private teacher (grammaticus) within the house to give instruction in the Greek language and literature; in the middle of the second century B.C., with the growth of a wider interest in the formal study of Greek literature, schools arose in which the grammatici taught a considerable number of pupils together. The Greek authors studied were first of all Homer, and then the great tragedians; among the writers of comedy Menander was the favorite; the fables of Aesop and lyric poetry also found their place. Modelled on this Greek curriculum was the study of Latin literature—Livius Andronicus, Ennius, with selections from the Roman writers of tragedy and comedy. In due season Virgil and Horace occupied the first rank. Furthermore not far from the beginning of the last century before our era Greek rhetoricians began formal instruction at Rome, and they continued to hold the field against Latin rhetoricians throughout antiquity. We see therefore that all education of every grade from the time of the Second Punic War was either Greek or modelled directly on the Greek. By it the Latin tongue was refined and perfected; but more significant for us at the present moment is the fact that thereby Latin society was made familiar with Greek social, philosophic, and religious ideas so far as they were represented in Greek literature.

I have earlier said that the temples of the Greek gods at Rome were built in Greek style by Greek architects, and that the images of the gods within were copies of famous Greek works of art. By these the Romans’ ideas as to the personality of their divinities were fixed in the Greek concepts. As Rome extended her conquests over Greek lands, first in southern Italy and Sicily, and then in Greece proper, she acquired as part of the spoils of war great treasures of Greek sculpture and painting; the number of statues and other works of art which were brought home by Memmius alone after the destruction of Corinth in 146 B.C. can hardly be estimated. A large number of them represented the gods, and intensified the process of Hellenization with which we are now concerned, for the statues and other representations of Cronos, Zeus, Hera, Ares, and Athena readily represented Saturn, Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Minerva. In cases where the similarity was not so close, the nearest Greek analogy was selected; if none was satisfactory, still the best was made of the case, as when the Greek representations of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, came to do service for the Lares Praestites. Among the spoils of war were many Greek paintings, for which mythological scenes were favorite subjects, and such frequently represented the baser, sensual side of traditional religion. The effect on the ignorant was to give them a lower concept of divinity; the intellectual classes were disgusted with the gods of such a sort and rejected them.

But the most potent influence that came from Greece to Rome was naturally philosophy. We cannot fix any date for the introduction of Greek philosophic thought at Rome, yet it certainly became influential soon after the close of the Second Punic War. We have already seen that long before this time the Greek philosophic systems were highly developed and had done much to drive the traditional gods from their high places. It was inevitable that these philosophies should have a swift effect when they once became known to the newly Hellenized Roman society of the second century B.C. The poet Ennius, who belonged to the first half of that century, was a man of strong religious bent and moral convictions, and he heartily scorned the superstitious notions of his day. He had been already influenced by Epicurean scepticism with regard to the existence of the gods, and the following words, spoken by Teucer in one of his tragedies, may well have represented his own view: “I have always said, and I shall always say, that the gods of heaven exist, but I believe that they have no care for what the race of man does. For if they had such care, it would be well with the good and ill with the wicked; which is not the case now.”[267] It is the ancient difficulty of justifying the ways of God to men. Ennius adopted the easy solution by denial, which he had already learned from Epicureanism.

The same poet also translated and made known to the Romans the Sacred History of Euhemerus. This was a romantic tale written in the third century before our era in which the author told of an imaginary voyage which he had made from Arabia to the island Panchaea in the Indian Ocean; there he found inscribed on a column the history of the supposed gods Uranus, Cronos, and Zeus, and learned that they and the other gods and heroes had been originally historical persons who were raised to their high position because of the services they had rendered mankind. This Sacred History was an interesting example of the rationalizing tendency of the age that produced it; its effect upon the Roman, whose belief in the traditional religion was already shaken, we can readily understand. Unquestionably Ennius’ work and the plays of the comedians hastened the work of unbelief, although they were only two of many factors that contributed to the ultimate result.

The first half of this same second century was also a time of religious unrest. Whatever may have been the reason, whether the common longing for mystic assurance of safety and salvation had come naturally to the front in the Roman and Italian mind, or whether the large number of Greeks, slaves, traders, and other members of the lower and immigrant classes had moved the natives by mystic practices which they had brought with them, certain it is that a considerable part of the Romans found no satisfaction for their deeper longings in the traditional religion, and turned to a form of the Greek mysteries.[268] The mysteries of Bacchus which had gradually made their way up the peninsula from the Greek cities of the south led to such excesses in 186 B.C. that the Roman senate felt obliged to adopt stern measures; yet it is significant that it did not dare to forbid the celebration of these mysteries, but attempted only to control them. The Bacchic mysteries offered essentially the same religious satisfaction that the great mysteries at Eleusis did. Their influence at this time in Italy shows how conscious men had become of larger religious desires and how little the current forms of religion satisfied them. The conservatives in the state abhorred the Bacchic rites and would have no more part in them than in philosophy, towards which they showed an amusing timidity. Five years after the regulation of the mysteries an attempt was made to introduce at Rome some philosophic books which were generally regarded as subversive in their tendencies. The method of their introduction was the same one which has been used many times for similar purposes. Some farmers plowing in their fields at the foot of the Janiculum found two stone chests or coffins with inscriptions upon them in both Latin and Greek, saying that in one King Numa Pompilius had been buried, and that in the other were the books of the sacred law established by him. On opening the sarcophagi it was discovered that the body of the king had disappeared, but in the second chest were found two rolls of seven books each; one set was in Latin and treated of the pontifical law, the other, in Greek, dealt with Greek philosophy—tradition said it was the philosophy of Pythagoras. After solemn deliberation by the officials it was found that these books tended to destroy religion, and a timid senate ordered them to be publicly burned.[269] Again about 173 B.C., the senate required the Epicurean philosophers, Aldus and Philiscus, to leave the state;[270] and once more in 161 it passed a vote banishing the Greek philosophers and rhetoricians.[271] In 156/5 an embassy from Athens included the Peripatetic philosopher Critolaus, the Academic Carneades, and the Stoic Diogenes, who during their stay at Rome exhibited their skill in disputation and their eloquence in speeches before the people. The populace was charmed, but old fashioned people were horrified at such exhibitions. Cato the Censor was so shocked that he moved in the senate that the Roman youth should not be allowed to listen to such teachings.[272] But it was too late; philosophers might be driven from the state, but philosophy had found a foothold at Rome.

The two schools that made the strongest appeal to the Romans at the end of the Republic were Epicureanism and Stoicism. The former had wide influence until the first century of our era, chiefly because its agnosticism, or rather its denial of the existence of any future life, offered a refuge from the uncertainty which prevailed now that the old beliefs were broken up and men, harrassed by political disorders, had not yet found an abiding place in any positive philosophy. The Epicureans did not deny the existence of gods, it is true, but they declared that the gods, if they existed, must dwell in some remote place in the upper ether in eternal sunshine, undisturbed by any care for mortals. They explained the universe by a resort to the atomistic materialism of Democritus, a philosopher of the late fifth century. Their religious aim, if we may so define it, was to free men from the terror which their superstitious beliefs in the gods and in future punishment brought upon them. No writer sets this forth with greater genius or with greater passion than Lucretius, the contemporary of Cicero. His six books are devoted to an explanation of the universe and its phenomena, of the nature of man, and of the impossibility of immortality. This splendid poem furnishes us the best proof that in that day the mass of men still believed in immortality and longed for an assurance that their belief was not in vain.