CHAPTER VI

FREETHOUGHT IN ANCIENT ROME

§ 1

The Romans, so much later than the Greeks in their intellectual development, were in some respects peculiarly apt--in the case of their upper class--to accept freethinking ideas when Greek rationalism at length reached them. After receiving from their Greek neighbours in Southern Italy, in the pre-historic period, the germs of higher culture, in particular the alphabet, they rather retrograded than progressed for centuries, the very alphabet degenerating for lack of literary activity [762] in the absence of any culture class, and under the one-idea'd rule of the landowning aristocracy, whose bent to military aggression was correlative to the smallness of the Roman facilities for commerce. In the earlier ages nearly everything in the nature of written lore was a specialty of a few priests, and was limited to their purposes, which included some keeping of annals. [763] The use of writing for purposes of family records seems to have been the first literary development among the patrician laity. [764] In the early republican period, however, the same conditions of relative poverty, militarism, and aristocratic emulation prevented any development even of the priesthood beyond the rudimentary stage of a primitive civic function; and the whole of these conditions in combination kept the Roman Pantheon peculiarly shadowy, and the Roman mythology abnormally undeveloped.

The character of the religion of the Romans has been usually explained in the old manner, in terms of their particular "genius" and lack of genius. On this view the Romans primordially tended to do whatever they did--to be slightly religious in one period, and highly so in another. Teuffel quite unconsciously reduces the theorem to absurdity in two phrases: "As long as the peculiar character of the Roman nation remained unaltered" ... (Hist. of Roman Lit. ed. Schwabe, Eng. tr. 1900, i, 2): "the peculiar Roman character had now come to an end, and for ever" (id. p. 123). By no writer has the subject been more unphilosophically treated than by Mommsen, whose chapter on Roman religion (vol. i, ch. xii) is an insoluble series of contradictions. (See the present writer's Christianity and Mythology, pp. 115-17.) M. Boissier contradicts himself hardly less strangely, alternately pronouncing the Latin religion timid and confident, prostrate and dignified (La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins, 4e édit. i, 7, 8, 26, 28). Both writers ascribe every characteristic of Roman religion to the character of "the Romans" in the lump--a method which excludes any orderly conception. It must be abandoned if there is to be any true comprehension of the subject.

Other verdicts of this kind by Ihne, Jevons, and others, will no better bear examination. (See Christianity and Mythology, pt. i, ch. iii, § 3.) Dr. Warde Fowler, the latest English specialist to handle the question, confidently supports the strange thesis (dating from Schwartz) that the multitude of deities and daimons of the early Latins were never thought of as personal, or as possessing sex, until Greek mythology and sculpture set the fashion of such conceptions, whereupon "this later and foreign notion of divinity so completely took possession of the minds of the Romans of the cosmopolitan city that Varro is the only writer