The Religion of Ancient Rome
: Cyril Bailey
I wish to express my warm thanks to Mr. W. Warde Fowler for his
kindness in reading my proofs, and for many valuable hints and
suggestions.
C.B.
BALLIOL COLLEGE,
_Jan 25th, 1907_.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION--SOURCES AND SCOPE 1
II. THE 'ANTECEDENTS' OF ROMAN RELIGION 4
III. MAIN FEATURES OF THE RELIGION OF NUMA 12
IV. EARLY HISTORY OF ROME--THE AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITY 31
V. WORSHIP OF THE HOUSEHOLD 36
VI. WORSHIP OF THE FIELDS 58
VII. WORSHIP OF THE STATE 75
VIII. AUGURIES AND AUSPICES 96
IX. RELIGION AND MORALITY--CONCLUSION 103
THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT ROME
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION--SOURCES AND SCOPE
The conditions of our knowledge of the native religion of early Rome
may perhaps be best illustrated by a parallel from Roman archæology.
The visitor to the Roman Forum at the present day, if he wishes to
reconstruct in imagination the Forum of the early Republic, must not
merely 'think away' many strata of later buildings, but, we are told,
must picture to himself a totally different orientation of the whole:
the upper layer of remains, which he sees before him, is for his
purpose in most cases not merely useless, but positively misleading.
In the same way, if we wish to form a picture of the genuine Roman
religion, we cannot find it immediately in classical literature; we
must banish from our minds all that is due to the contact with the
East and Egypt, and even with the other races of Italy, and we must
imagine, so to speak, a totally different mental orientation before
the great influx of Greek literature and Greek thought, which gave
an entirely new turn to Roman ideas in general, and in particular
revolutionised religion by the introduction of anthropomorphic notions
and sensuous representations. But in this difficult search we are not
left without indications to guide us. In the writings of the savants of
the late Republic and of the Empire, and in the Augustan poets, biassed
though they are in their interpretations by Greek tendencies, there is
embodied a great wealth of ancient custom and ritual, which becomes
significant when we have once got the clue to its meaning. More direct
evidence is afforded by a large body of inscriptions and monuments, and
above all by the surviving Calendars of the Roman festival year, which
give us the true outline of the ceremonial observances of the early
religion.
It is not within the scope of this sketch to enter, except by way of
occasional illustration, into the process of interpretation by which
the patient work of scholars has disentangled the form and spirit of
the native religion from the mass of foreign accretions. I intend
rather to assume the process, and deal, as far as it is possible in so
controversial a subject, with results upon which authorities are
generally agreed. Neither will any attempt be made to follow the
development which the early religion underwent in later periods, when
foreign elements were added and foreign ideas altered and remoulded the
old tradition. We must confine ourselves to a single epoch, in which
the native Roman spirit worked out unaided the ideas inherited from
half-civilised ancestors, and formed that body of belief and ritual,
which was always, at least officially, the kernel of Roman religion,
and constituted what the Romans themselves--staunch believers in their
own traditional history--loved to describe as the 'Religion of Numa.'
We must discover, as far as we can, how far its inherited notions ran
parallel with those of other primitive religions, but more especially
we must try to note what is characteristically Roman alike in custom
and ritual and in the motives and spirit which prompted them.
CHAPTER II
THE 'ANTECEDENTS' OF ROMAN RELIGION
In every early religion there will of course be found, apart from
external influence, traces of its own internal development, of stages
by which it must have advanced from a mass of vague and primitive
belief and custom to the organised worship of a civilised community.
The religion of Rome is no exception to this rule; we can detect in its
later practice evidences of primitive notions and habits which it had
in common with other semi-barbarous peoples, and we shall see that the
leading idea in its theology is but a characteristically Roman
development of a marked feature in most early religions.
=1. Magic.=--Anthropology has taught us that in many primitive
societies religion--a sense of man's dependence on a power higher than
himself--is preceded by a stage of magic--a belief in man's own power
to influence by occult means the action of the world around him. That
the ancestors of the Roman community passed through this stage seems
clear, and in surviving religious practice we may discover evidence of
such magic in various forms. There is, for instance, what anthropology
describes as 'sympathetic magic'--the attempt to influence the powers
of nature by an imitation of the process which it is desired that they
should perform. Of this we have a characteristic example in the
ceremony of the _aquaelicium_, designed to produce rain after a long
drought. In classical times the ceremony consisted in a procession
headed by the pontifices, which bore the sacred rain-stone from its
resting-place by the Porta Capena to the Capitol, where offerings were
made to the sky-deity, Iuppiter, but[1] from the analogy of other
primitive cults and the sacred title of the stone (_lapis manalis_), it
is practically certain that the original ritual was the purely
imitative process of pouring water over the stone. A similar rain-charm
may possibly be seen in the curious ritual of the _argeorum sacra_,
when puppets of straw were thrown into the Tiber--a symbolic wetting of
the crops to which many parallels may be found among other primitive
peoples. A sympathetic charm of a rather different character seems to
survive in the ceremony of the _augurium canarium_, at which a red dog
was sacrificed for the prosperity of the crop--a symbolic killing of
the red mildew (_robigo_); and again the slaughter of pregnant cows at
the _Fordicidia_ in the middle of April, before the sprouting of the
corn, has a clearly sympathetic connection with the fertility of the
earth. Another prominent survival--equally characteristic of primitive
peoples--is the sacredness which attaches to the person of the
priest-king, so that his every act or word may have a magic
significance or effect. This is reflected generally in the Roman
priesthood, but especially in the ceremonial surrounding the _flamen
Dialis_, the priest of Iuppiter. He must appear always in festival
garb, fire may never be taken from his hearth but for sacred purposes,
no other person may ever sleep in his bed, the cuttings of his hair and
nails must be preserved and buried beneath an _arbor felix_--no doubt a
magic charm for fertility--he must not eat or even mention a goat or a
bean, or other objects of an unlucky character.
=2. Worship of Natural Objects.=--A very common feature in the early
development of religious consciousness is the worship of natural
objects--in the first place of the objects themselves and no more, but
later of a spirit indwelling in them. The distinction is no doubt in
individual cases a difficult one to make, and we find that among the
Romans the earlier worship of the object tends to give way to the cult
of the inhabiting spirit, but examples may be found which seem to
belong to the earlier stage. We have, for instance, the sacred stone
(_silex_) which was preserved in the temple of Iuppiter on the Capitol,
and was brought out to play a prominent part in the ceremony of
treaty-making. The fetial, who on that occasion represented the Roman
people, at the solemn moment of the oath-taking, struck the sacrificial
pig with the _silex_, saying as he did so, 'Do thou, Diespiter, strike
the Roman people as I strike this pig here to-day, and strike them the
more, as thou art greater and stronger.' Here no doubt the underlying
notion is not merely symbolical, but in origin the stone is itself the
god, an idea which later religion expressed in the cult-title specially
used in this connection, _Iuppiter Lapis_. So again, in all
probability, the _termini_ or boundary-stones between properties are in
origin the objects--though later only the site--of a yearly ritual at
the festival of the Terminalia on February the 23rd, and they are, as
it were, summed up in 'the god Terminus,' the great sacred
boundary-stone, which had its own shrine within the Capitoline temple,
because, according to the legend, 'the god' refused to budge even to
make room for Iuppiter. The same notion is most likely at the root of
the two great domestic cults of Vesta, 'the hearth,' and Ianus, 'the
door,' though a more spiritual idea was soon associated with them; we
may notice too in this connection the worship of springs, summed up in
the subsequent deity Fons, and of rivers, such as Volturnus, the
cult-name of the Tiber.
=3. Worship of Trees.=--But most conspicuous among the cults of natural
objects, as in so many primitive religions, is the worship of trees.
Here, though doubtless at first the tree was itself the object of
veneration, surviving instances seem rather to belong to the later
period when it was regarded as the abode of the spirit. We may
recognise a case of this sort in the _ficus Ruminalis_, once the
recipient of worship, though later legend, which preferred to find an
historical or mythical explanation of cults, looked upon it as sacred
because it was the scene of the suckling of Romulus and Remus by the
wolf. Another fig-tree with a similar history is the _caprificus_ of
the Campus Martius, subsequently the site of the worship of Iuno
Caprotina. A more significant case is the sacred oak of Iuppiter
Feretrius on the Capitol, on which the _spolia opima_ were hung after
the triumph--probably in early times a dedication of the booty to the
spirit inhabiting the tree. Outside Rome, showing the same ideas at
work among neighbouring peoples, was the 'golden bough' in the grove of
Diana at Aricia. Nor was it only special trees which were thus regarded
as the home of a deity; the tree in general is sacred, and any one may
chance to be inhabited by a spirit. The feeling of the country
population on this point comes out clearly in the prayer which Cato
recommends his farmer to use before making a clearing in a wood: 'Be
thou god or goddess, to whom this grove is sacred, be it granted to us
to make propitiatory sacrifice to thee with a pig for the clearing of
this sacred spot'; here we have a clear instance of the tree regarded
as the dwelling of the sacred power, and it is interesting to compare
the many similar examples which[2] Dr. Frazer has collected from
different parts of the world.
=4. Worship of Animals.=--Of the worship of animals we have
comparatively little evidence in Roman religion, though we may perhaps
detect it in a portion of the mysterious ritual of the Lupercalia,
where the Luperci dressed themselves in the skins of the sacrificed
goats and smeared their faces with the blood, thus symbolically trying
to bring themselves into communion with the sacred animal. We may
recognise it too in the association of particular animals with
divinities, such as the sacred wolf and woodpecker of Mars, but on the
whole we may doubt whether the worship of animals ever played so
prominent a part in Roman religion as the cult of other natural
objects.
=5. Animism.=--Such are some of the survivals of very early stages of
religious custom which still kept their place in the developed religion
of Rome, but by far the most important element in it, which might
indeed be described as its 'immediate antecedent,' is the state of
religious feeling to which anthropologists have given the name of
'Animism.' As far as we can follow the development of early religions,
this attitude of mind seems to be the direct outcome of the failure of
magic. Primitive man begins to see that neither he nor his magicians
really possess that occult control over the forces of nature which was
the supposed basis of magic: the charm fails, the spell does not
produce the rain and when he looks for the cause, he can only argue
that these things must be in the hands of some power higher than his
own. The world then and its various familiar objects become for him
peopled with spirits, like in character to men, but more powerful, and
his success in life and its various operations depends on the degree in
which he is able to propitiate these spirits and secure their
co-operation. If he desires rain, he must win the favour of the spirit
who controls it, if he would fell a tree and suffer no harm, he must by
suitable offerings entice the indwelling spirit to leave it. His
'theology' in this stage is the knowledge of the various spirits and
their dwellings, his ritual the due performance of sacrifice for
purposes of propitiation and expiation. It was in this state of
religious feeling that the ancestors of Rome must have lived before
they founded their agricultural settlement on the Palatine: we must try
now to see how far it had retained this character and what developments
it had undergone when it had crystallised into the 'Religion of Numa.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Frazer, _Golden Bough_, vol. i. pp. 81 ff.
[2] _Golden Bough_, vol. i. pp. 181-185.
CHAPTER III
MAIN FEATURES OF THE RELIGION OF NUMA
=1. Theology.=--The characteristic appellation of a divine spirit in
the oldest stratum of the Roman religion is not _deus_, a god, but
rather _numen_, a power: he becomes _deus_ when he obtains a name, and
so is on the way to acquiring a definite personality, but in origin he
is simply the 'spirit' of the 'animistic' period, and retains something
of the spirit's characteristics. Thus among the divinities of the
household we shall see later that the Genius and even the Lar
Familiaris, though they attained great dignity of conception, and were
the centre of the family life, and to some extent of the family
morality, never quite rose to the position of full-grown gods; while
among the spirits of the field the wildness and impishness of character
associated with Faunus and his companion Inuus--almost the cobolds or
hobgoblins of the flocks--reflects clearly the old 'animistic' belief
in the natural evilness of the spirits and their hostility to men. The
notion of the _numen_ is always vague and indefinite: even its sex may
be uncertain. 'Be thou god or goddess' is the form of address in the
farmer's prayer already quoted from Cato: 'be it male or female' is the
constant formula in liturgies and even dedicatory inscriptions of a
much later period.
These spirits are, as we have seen, indwellers in the objects of nature
and controllers of the phenomena of nature: but to the Roman they were
more. Not merely did they inhabit places and things, but they presided
over each phase of natural development, each state or action in the
life of man. Varro, for instance, gives us a list of the deities
concerned in the early life of the child, which, though it bears the
marks of priestly elaboration, may yet be taken as typical of the
feeling of the normal Roman family. There is Vaticanus, who opens the
child's mouth to cry, Cunina, who guards his cradle, Edulia and Potina,
who teach him to eat and drink, Statilinus, who helps him to stand up,
Adeona and Abeona, who watch over his first footstep, and many others
each with his special province of protection or assistance. The farmer
similarly is in the hands of a whole host of divinities who assist him
at each stage of ploughing, hoeing, sowing, reaping, and so forth. If
the _numen_ then lacks personal individuality, he has a very distinct
specialisation of function, and if man's appeal to the divinity is to
be successful, he must be very careful to make it in the right quarter:
it was a stock joke in Roman comedy to make a character 'ask for water
from Liber, or wine from the nymphs.' Hence we find in the prayer
formulæ in Cato and elsewhere the most careful precautions to prevent
the accidental omission of the deity concerned: usually the worshipper
will go through the whole list of the gods who may be thought to have
power in the special circumstances; sometimes he will conclude his
prayer with the formula 'whosoever thou art,' or 'and any other name by
which thou mayest desire to be called.' The _numen_ is thus vague in
his conception but specialised in his function, and so later on, when
certain deities have acquired definite names and become prominent above
the rest, the worshipper in appealing to them will add a cult-title, to
indicate the special character in which he wishes the deity to hear:
the woman in childbirth will appeal to Iuno Lucina, the general praying
for victory to Iuppiter Victor, the man who is taking an oath to
Iuppiter as the deus Fidius. As a still later development the
cult-title will, as it were, break off and set up for itself, usually
in the form of an abstract personification: Iuppiter, in the two
special capacities just noted, gives birth to Victoria and Fides.
The conception of the _numen_ being so formless and indefinite, it is
not surprising that in the genuine Roman religion there should have
been no anthropomorphic representations of the divinity at all. 'For
170 years,' Varro tells us, taking his date from the traditional
foundation of the city in 754 B.C., 'the Romans worshipped their gods
without images,' and he adds the characteristic comment, 'those who
introduced representations among the nations, took away fear and
brought in falsehood.' Symbols of a few deities were no doubt
recognised: we have noticed already the _silex_ of Iuppiter and the
boundary-stone of Terminus, which were probably at an earlier period
themselves objects of worship, and to these we may add the sacred
spears of Mars, and the _sigilla_ of the State-Penates. But for the
most part the _numina_ were without even such symbolic representation,
nor till about the end of the regal period was any form of temple built
for them to dwell in. The sacred fire of Vesta near the Forum was, it
is true, from the earliest times enclosed in a building; this, however,
was no temple, but merely an erection with the essentially practical
purpose of preventing the extinction of the fire by rain. The first
temple in the full sense of the word was according to tradition built
by Servius Tullius to Diana on the Aventine: the tradition is
significant, for Diana was not one of the _di indigetes_, the old
deities of the 'Religion of Numa,' but was introduced from the
neighbouring town of Aricia, and the attribution to Servius Tullius
nearly always denotes an Etruscan[3] or at any rate a non-Roman origin.
There were, however, altars in special places to particular deities,
built sometimes of stone, sometimes in a more homely manner of earth or
sods. We hear for instance of the altar of Mars in the Campus Martius,
of Quirinus on the Quirinal, of Saturnus at the foot of the Capitol,
and notably of the curious underground altar of Consus on what was
later the site of the Circus Maximus. But more characteristic than the
erection of altars is the connection of deities with special
localities. Naturally enough in the worship of the household Vesta had
her seat at the hearth, Ianus at the door, and the 'gods of the
storehouse' (_Penates_) at the cupboard by the hearth, but the same
idea appears too in the state-cult. Hilltops, groves, and especially
clearings in groves (_luci_) are the most usual sacred localities. Thus
Quirinus has his own sacred hill, Iuppiter is worshipped on the
Capitol, Vesta and Iuno Lucina have their sacred groves within the
boundaries of the city, and Dea Dia, Robigus, and Furrina similar
groves at the limits of Roman territory. The record of almost every
Roman cult reveals the importance of locality in connection with the
_di indigetes_, and the localities are usually such as would be
naturally chosen by a pastoral and agricultural people.
Such were roughly the main outlines of the genuine Roman 'theology.'
It has no gods of human form with human relations to one another,
interested in the life of men and capable of the deepest passions of
hatred and affection towards them, such as we meet, for instance, in
the mythology of Greece, but only these impersonal individualities, if
we may so call them, capable of no relation to one another, but able to
bring good or ill to men, localised usually in their habitations, but
requiring no artificial dwelling or elaborate adornment of their abode;
becoming gradually more and more specialised in function, yet gaining
thereby no more real protective care for their worshippers--a cold and
heartless hierarchy, ready to exact their due, but incapable of
inspiring devotion or enthusiasm. Let us ask next how the Romans
conceived of their own relations towards them.
=2. The Relation of Gods and Men.=--The character of the Roman was
essentially practical and his natural mental attitude that of the
lawyer. And so in his relation towards the divine beings whom he
worshipped there was little of sentiment or affection: all must be
regulated by clearly understood principles and carried out with formal
exactness. Hence the _ius sacrum_, the body of rights and duties in the
matter of religion, is regarded as a department of the _ius publicum_,
the fundamental constitution of the state, and it is significant, as
Marquardt has observed, that it was Numa, a king and lawgiver, and not
a prophet or a poet, who was looked upon as the founder of the Roman
religion. Starting from the simple general feeling of a dependence on a
higher power (_religio_), which is common to all religions, the Roman
gives it his own characteristic colour when he conceives of that
dependence as analogous to a civil contract between man and god. Both
sides are under obligation to fulfil their part: if a god answers a
man's prayer, he must be repaid by a thank-offering: if the man has
fulfilled 'his bounden duty and service,' the god must make his return:
if he does not, either the cause lies in an unconscious failure on the
human side to carry out the exact letter of the law, or else, if the
god has really broken his contract, he has, as it were, put himself out
of court and the man may seek aid elsewhere. In this notion we have the
secret of Rome's readiness under stress of circumstances, when all
appeals to the old gods have failed, to adopt foreign deities and cults
in the hope of a greater measure of success.
The contract-notion may perhaps appear more clearly if we consider one
or two of the normal religious acts of the Roman individual or state.
Take first of all the performance of the regular sacrifices or acts of
worship ordained by the state-calendar or the celebration of the
household _sacra_. The _pietas_ of man consists in their due
fulfilment, but he may through negligence omit them or make a mistake
in the ritual to be employed. In that case the gods, as it were, have
the upper hand in the contract and are not obliged to fulfil their
share, but the man can set himself right again by the offering of a
_piaculum_, which may take the form either of an additional sacrifice
or a repetition of the original rite. So, for instance, when Cato is
giving his farmer directions for the lustration of his fields, he
supplies him at the end with two significant formulæ: 'if,' he says,
'you have failed in any respect with regard to all your offerings, use
this formula: "Father Mars, if thou hast not found satisfaction in my
former offering of pig, sheep, and ox (the most solemn combination in
rustic sacrifices), then let this offering of pig and sheep and ox
appease thee": but if you have made a mistake in one or two only of
your offerings, then say, "Father Mars, because thou hast not found
satisfaction in that pig (or whatever it may be), let this pig appease
thee."' On the other hand, for intentional neglect, there was no
remedy: the man was _impius_ and it rested with the gods to punish him
as they liked (_deorum iniuriae dis curae_).
But apart from the regularly constituted ceremonies of religion, there
might be special occasions on which new relations would be entered into
between god and man. Sometimes the initiative would come from man:
desiring to obtain from the gods some blessings on which he had set
his heart, he would enter into a _votum_, a special contract by which
he undertook to perform certain acts or make certain sacrifices, in
case of the fulfilment of his desire. The whole proceeding is strictly
legal: from the moment when he makes his vow the man is _voti reus_, in
the same position, that is, as the defendant in a case whose decision
is still pending; as soon as the gods have accomplished their side of
the contract he is _voti damnatus_, condemned, as it were, to damages,
having lost his suit; nor does he recover his independence until he has
paid what he undertook: _votum reddidi lubens merito_ ('I have paid my
vow gladly as it was due') is the characteristic wording of votive
inscriptions. If the gods did not accomplish the wish, the man was of
course free, and sometimes the contract would be carried so far that a
time-limit for their action would be fixed by the maker of the vow:
legal exactness can hardly go further.
Or again, the initiative might come from the gods. Some marked
misfortune, an earthquake, lightning, a great famine, a portentous
birth, or some such occurrence would be recognised as a _prodigium_, or
sign of the god's displeasure. Somehow or other the contract must have
been broken on the human side and it was the duty of the state to see
to the restoration of the _pax deum_, the equilibrium of the normal
relation of god and man. The right proceeding in such a case was a
_lustratio_, a solemn cleansing of the people--or the portion of the
people involved in the god's displeasure--with the double object of
removing the original reason of misfortune and averting future causes
of the divine anger. The commercial notion is not perhaps quite so
distinct here, but the underlying legal relationship is sufficiently
marked.
If then the question be asked whether the relation between the Roman
and his gods was friendly or unfriendly, the correct answer would
probably be that it was neither. It was rather what Aristotle in
speaking of human relations describes as 'a friendship for profit': it
is entered into because both sides hope for some advantage--it is
maintained as long as both sides fulfil their obligations.
=3. Ceremonial.=--It has been said sometimes that the old Roman
religion was one of cult and ritual without dogma or belief. As we have
seen this is not in origin strictly true, and it would be fairer to say
that belief was latent rather than non-existent: this we may see, for
instance, from Cicero's dialogues on the subject of religion, where in
discussion the fundamental sense of the dependence of man on the help
of the gods comes clearly into view: in the domestic worship of the
family too cult was always to some extent 'tinged with emotion,' and
sanctified by a belief which made it a more living and in the end a
more permanent reality than the religion of the state. But it is no
doubt true that as the community advanced, belief tended to sink into
the background: development took place in cult and not in theology, so
that by the end of the Republic, to take an example, though the
festival of the Furrinalia was duly observed every year on the 25th of
July, the nature or function of the goddess Furrina was, as we learn
from Cicero, a pure matter of conjecture, and Varro tells us that her
name was known only to a few persons. Nor was it mere lapse of time
which tended to obscure theology and exalt ceremonial: their relative
position was the immediate and natural outcome of the underlying idea
of the relation of god and man. Devotion, piety--in our sense of the
term--and a feeling of the divine presence could not be enjoined or
even encouraged by the strictly legal conception on which religion was
based: the 'contract-notion' required not a 'right spirit' but right
performance. And so it comes about that in all the records we have left
of the old religion the salient feature which catches and retains our
attention is exactness of ritual. All must be performed not merely
'decently and in order,' but with the most scrupulous care alike for
every detail of the ceremonial itself, and for the surrounding
circumstances. The omission or misplacement of a single word in the
formulæ, the slightest sign of resistance on the part of the victim,
any disorder among the bystanders, even the accidental squeak of a
mouse, are sufficient to vitiate the whole ritual and necessitate its
repetition from the very beginning. One of the main functions of the
Roman priesthood was to preserve intact the tradition of formulæ and
ritual, and, when the magistrate offered sacrifice for the state, the
_pontifex_ stood at his side and dictated (_praeire_) the formulæ which
he must use. Almost the oldest specimen of Latin which we now possess
is the song of the Salii, the priests of Mars, handed on from
generation to generation and repeated with scrupulous care, even though
the priests themselves, as Quintilian assures us, had not the least
notion what it meant. Nor was it merely the words of ceremonial which
were of vital importance: other details must be attended to with equal
exactness. Place, as we have seen, was an essential feature even in the
conception of deity, and it must have required all the personal
influence of Augustus and his entourage to reconcile the people of
Rome, with the ancient home of the goddess still before their eyes, to
the second shrine of Vesta within the limits of his palace on the
Palatine. The choice of the appropriate offering again was a matter of
the greatest moment and was dictated by a large number of
considerations. The sex of the victim must correspond to the sex of the
deity to whom it is offered, white beasts must be given to the gods of
the upper world, black victims to the deities below. Mars at his
October festival must have his horse, Iuno Caprotina her goat, and
Robigus his dog, while in the more rustic festivals such as the
Parilia, the offering would be the simpler gift of millet-cakes and
bowls of milk: in the case of the Bona Dea we have the curious
provision that if wine were used in the ceremonial, it must, as she was
in origin a pastoral deity, always be spoken of as 'milk.' The persons
who might be present in the various festivals were also rigidly
determined: men were excluded from the Matronalia on March 1, from the
Vestalia on the 9th of June, and from the night festival of the Bona
Dea: the notorious escapade of Clodius in 62 B.C. shows the scandal
raised by a breach of this rule even at the period when religious
enthusiasm was at its lowest ebb. Slaves were specifically admitted to
a share in certain festivals such as the Saturnalia and the Compitalia
(the festival of the Lares), whereas at the Matralia (the festival of
the matrons) a female slave was brought in with the express purpose of
being significantly driven away.
The general notion of the exactness of ritual will perhaps become
clearer when we come to examine some of the festivals in detail, but it
is of extreme importance for the understanding of the Roman religious
attitude, to think of it from the first as an essential part in the
expression of the relation of man to god.
=4. Directness of Relation--Functions of Priests.=--In contrast to all
this precision of ritual, which tends almost to alienate humanity from
deity, we may turn to another hardly less prominent feature of the
Roman religion--the immediateness of relation between the god and his
worshippers. Not only may the individual at any time approach the altar
of the god with his prayer or thank-offering, but in every community of
persons its religious representative is its natural head. In the
family the head of the household (_pater familias_) is also the priest
and he is responsible for conducting the religious worship of the whole
house, free and slave alike: to his wife and daughters he leaves the
ceremonial connected with the hearth (_Vesta_) and the deities of the
store-cupboard (_Penates_), and to his bailiff the sacrifice to the
powers who protect his fields (_Lares_), but the other acts of worship
at home and in the fields he conducts himself, and his sons act as his
acolytes. Once a year he meets with his neighbours at the boundaries of
their properties and celebrates the common worship over the
boundary-stones. So in[4] the larger outgrowth of the family, the
_gens_, which consisted of all persons with the same surname (_nomen_,
not _cognomen_), the gentile _sacra_ are in the hands of the more
wealthy members who are regarded as its heads; we have the curious
instance of Clodius even after his adoption into another family,
providing for the worship of the _gens Clodia_ in his own house, and we
may remember Virgil's picture of the founders of the _gentes_ of the
Potitii and the Pinarii performing the sacrifice to Hercules at the
_ara maxima_, which was the traditional privilege of their houses.
When societies (_sodalitates_) are formed for religious purposes they
elect their own _magistri_ to be their religious representatives, as we
see in the case of the Salii and the Luperci. Finally, in the great
community of the state the king is priest, and with that exactness of
parallelism of which the Roman was so fond, he--like the _pater
familias_--leaves the worship of Vesta in the hands of his 'daughters,'
the Vestal virgins. And so, when the Republic is instituted, a special
official, the _rex sacrorum_, inherits the king's ritual duties, while
the superintendence of the Vestals passes to his representative in the
matter of religious law, the _pontifex maximus_, whose official
residence is always the _regia_, Numa's palace. The state is but the
enlarged household and the head of the state is its religious
representative.
If then the approach to the gods is so direct, where, it may be asked,
in the organisation of Roman religion is there room for the priest? Two
points about the Roman priesthood are of paramount importance. In the
first place, they are not a caste apart: though there were restrictions
as to the holding of secular magistracies in combination with the
priesthood--always observed strictly in the case of the _rex sacrorum_
and with few exceptions in the case of the greater _flamines_--yet the
_pontifices_ might always take their part in public life, and no kind
of barrier existed between them and the rest of the community: Iulius
Cæsar himself was _pontifex maximus_. In the second place they are not
regarded as representatives of the gods or as mediators between god and
man, but simply as administrative officials appointed for the
performance of the acts of state-worship, just as the magistrates were
for its civil and military government. In origin they were chosen to
assist the king in the multifarious duties of the state-cult--the
_flamines_ were to act as special priests of particular deities, the
most prominent among them being the three great priests of Iuppiter
(_flamen Dialis_), Mars, and Quirinus; the _pontifices_ were sometimes
delegates of the king on special occasions, but more particularly
formed his religious _consilium_, a consulting body, to give him advice
as to ritual and act as the repositories of tradition. In later times
the _flamines_ still retain their original character, the _pontifices_
and especially the _pontifex maximus_ are responsible for the whole
organisation of the state-religion and are the guardians and
interpreters of religious lore. In the state-cult then the priests play
a very important part, but their relation to the worship of the
individual was very small indeed. They had a general superintendence
over private worship and their leave would be required for the
introduction of any new domestic cult; in cases too where the private
person was in doubt as to ritual or the legitimacy of any religious
practice, he could appeal to the _pontifices_ for decision. Otherwise
the priest could never intervene in the worship of the family, except
in the case of the most solemn form of marriage (_confarreatio_),
which, as it conferred on the children the right to hold certain of the
priesthoods, was regarded itself as a ceremony of the state-religion.
In his private worship then the individual had immediate access to the
deity, and it was no doubt this absence of priestly mediation and the
consequent sense of personal responsibility, no less than its emotional
significance, which caused the greater reality and permanence of the
domestic worship as compared with the organised and official cults of
the state.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Etruscan builders were according to tradition employed on the
earliest Roman temples.
[4] This is all open to doubt, but see De Marchi, _Il Culto Privato_,
vol. ii.
CHAPTER IV
EARLY HISTORY OF ROME--THE AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITY
After this sketch of the main features which we must expect to find in
Roman religion, we may attempt to look a little more in detail at its
various departments, but before doing so it is necessary to form some
notion of the situation and character of the Roman community: religion
is not a little determined by men's natural surroundings and
occupations. The subject is naturally one of considerable controversy,
but certain facts of great significance for our purpose may fairly be
taken as established. The earliest settlement which can be called
'Rome' was the community of the Palatine hill, which rises out of the
valleys more abruptly than any of the other hills and was the natural
place to be selected for fortification: the outline of the walls and
sacred enclosure running outside them (_pomoerium_) may still be
traced, marking the limits of 'square Rome' (_Roma quadrata_), as the
historians called it. The Palatine community no doubt pursued their
agricultural labours over the neighbouring valleys and hills, and
gradually began to extend their settlement till it included the
Esquiline and Caelian and other lesser heights which made up the
Septimontium--the next stage of Rome's development. Meanwhile a kindred
settlement had been established on the opposite hills of the Quirinal
and Viminal, and ultimately the two communities united, enclosing
within their boundaries the Capitol and their meeting-place in the
valley which separated them--the Forum. In this way was formed the Rome
of the Four Regions, which represents the utmost extent of its
development during the period which gave rise to the genuine Roman
religion. All these stages have left their mark on the customs of
religion. _Roma quadrata_ comes to the fore in the Lupercalia: not
merely is the site of the ceremony a grotto on the Palatine
(_Lupercal_), but when the _Luperci_ run their purificatory course
around the boundaries, it is the circuit of the Palatine hill which
marks its limits. Annually on the 11th of December the festival of the
Septimontium was celebrated, not by the whole people, but by the
_montani_, presumably the inhabitants of those parts of Rome which
were included in the second settlement. Finally, the addition of the
Quirinal settlement is marked by the inclusion among the great
state-gods of Quirinus, who must have been previously the local deity
of the Quirinal community.
But more important for us than the history of the early settlement is
its character. We have spoken of early Rome as an agricultural
community: it would be more exact and more helpful to describe it as a
community of agricultural households. The institutions of Rome, legal
as well as religious, all point to the household (_familia_) as the
original unit of organisation: the individual, as such, counted for
nothing, the community was but the aggregate of families. Domestic
worship then was not merely independent of the religion of the
community: it was prior to it, and is both its historical and logical
origin. Yet the life of the early Roman agriculturalist could not be
confined to the household: in the tilling of the fields and the care of
his cattle he meets his neighbour, and common interests suggest common
prayer and thanksgiving. Thus there sprung up the great series of
agricultural festivals which form the basis of the state-calendar, but
were in origin--as some of them still continued to be--the independent
acts of worship of groups of agricultural households. Gradually, as the
community grew on the lines we have just seen, there grew with it a
sense of an organised state, as something more than the casual
aggregation of households or clans (_gentes_). As the feeling of union
became stronger, so did the necessity for common worship of the gods,
and the state-cult came into being primarily as the repetition on
behalf of the community as a whole of the worship which its members
performed separately in their households or as joint-worshippers in the
fields. But the conception of a state must carry with it at least two
ideas over and beyond the common needs of its members: there must be
internal organisation to secure domestic tranquillity, and--since there
will be collision with other states--external organisation for purposes
of offence and defence. Religion follows the new ideas, and in two of
the older deities of the fields develops the notions of justice and
war. Organisation ensues, and the general conceptions of state-deities
and state-ritual are made more definite and precise.
It will be at once natural and convenient that we should consider these
three departments of religion in the order that has just been
suggested--the worship of the household, the worship of the fields, the
worship of the state. But it must not be forgotten that both the
departments themselves and the evidence for them frequently overlap.
The domestic worship is not wholly distinguishable from that of the
fields, the state-cult is, as we have seen, very largely a replica of
the other two. The evidence for the domestic and agricultural cults is
in itself very scanty, and we shall frequently have to draw inferences
from their counterparts in the state. Above all, it is not to be
supposed that any hard and fast line between the three existed in the
Roman's mind; but for the purposes of analysis the distinction is
valuable and represents a historical reality.
CHAPTER V
WORSHIP OF THE HOUSEHOLD
=1. The Deities.=--The worship of the household seems to have
originated, as has been suggested, in the sense of the sacredness of
certain objects closely bound up with the family life--the door, the
protection against the external world, by which the household went out
to work in the morning and returned at evening, the hearth, the giver
of warmth and nourishment, and the store-cupboard, where was preserved
the food for future use. At first, in all probability, the worship was
actually of the objects themselves, but by the time that Rome can be
said to have existed at all, 'animism' had undoubtedly transformed it
into a veneration of the indwelling spirits, Ianus, Vesta, and the
Penates.
Of the domestic worship of Ianus no information has come down to us,
but we may well suppose that as the defence of the door and its main
use lay with the men of the household, so they, under the control of
the _pater familias_, were responsible for the cult of its spirit.
Vesta was, of course, worshipped at the hearth by the women, who most
often used it in the preparation of the domestic meals. In the original
round hut, such as the primitive Roman dwelt in--witness the models
which he buried with his dead and which recent excavations in the Forum
have brought to light--the 'blazing hearth' (such seems to be the
meaning of Vesta) would be the most conspicuously sacred thing; it is
therefore not surprising to find that her simple cult was the most
persistent of all throughout the history of Rome, and did not vary from
its original notion. Even Ovid can tell the inquirer 'think not Vesta
to be ought else than living flame,' and again, 'Vesta and fire require
no effigy'--notions in which he has come curiously near to the
conceptions of the earliest religion. The Penates in the same way were
at first 'the spirits'--whoever they might be--who preserved and
increased the store in the cupboard. Then as the conception of
individual deities became clearer, they were identified with some one
or other of the gods of the country or the state, among whom the
individual householder would select those who should be the particular
Penates of his family: Ceres, Iuno, Iuppiter, Pales would be some of
those chosen in the earlier period. Nor are we to suppose that
selection was merely arbitrary: the tradition of family and clan, even
possibly of locality, would determine the choice, much as the
patron-saints of a church are now determined in a Roman Catholic
country.
Two other deities are very prominent in the worship of the early
household, and each is a characteristic product of Roman religious
feeling, the Lar Familiaris and the Genius. The Lares[5] seem to have
been in origin the spirits of the family fields: they were worshipped,
as Cicero tells us, 'on the farm in sight of the house,' and they had
their annual festival in the Compitalia, celebrated at the
_compita_--places where two or more properties marched. But one of
these spirits, the _Lar Familiaris_, had special charge of the house
and household, and as such was worshipped with the other domestic gods
at the hearth. As his protection extended over all the household,
including the slaves, his cult is placed specially in the charge of the
bailiff's wife (_vilica_). He is regularly worshipped at the great
divisions of the month on Calends, Nones, and Ides, but he has also an
intimate and beautiful connection with the domestic history of the
family. An offering is made to the Lar on the occasion of a birth, a
wedding, a departure, or a return, and even--a characteristically Roman
addition--on the occasion of the first utterance of a word by a son of
the house: finally, a particularly solemn sacrifice is made to him
after a death in the family.
The Genius is perhaps the most difficult conception in the Roman
religion for the modern mind to grasp. It has been spoken of as the
'patron-saint' or 'guardian-angel,' both of them conceptions akin to
that of the Genius, but both far too definite and anthropomorphic: we
shall understand it best by keeping the '_numen_' notion clearly in
mind and looking to the root-meaning of the word (_genius_ connected
with the root of _gignere_, to beget). It was after all only a natural
development of the notions of 'animism' to imagine that man too, like
other objects, had his indwelling spirit--not his 'soul' either in our
sense of moral and intellectual powers, or in the ancient sense of the
vital principle--but rather as the derivation suggests, in origin
simply the spirit which gave him the power of generation. Hence in the
house, the sphere of the Genius is no longer the hearth but the
marriage-bed (_lectus genialis_). This notion growing somewhat wider,
the Genius comes to denote all the full powers, almost the personality,
of developed manhood, and especially those powers which make for
pleasure and happiness: this is the origin of such common phrases as
_genium curare_, _genio indulgere_, meaning practically to 'look after
oneself,' 'to indulge oneself.' Every man, then, has this 'spirit of
his manhood' in his Genius, and correspondingly every woman her Iuno,
or spirit of womanhood, which are worshipped on the birthdays of their
owners. No doubt later the Genius was accredited with powers over the
fortune and misfortune of his possessor, but he never really developed
anything like the independence of a god, and remained always rather a
_numen_. The individual revered his own Genius, but the household cult
was concerned, as one would expect, with the Genius of the master of
the house, the pre-eminent Genius of the family. Its special locality
was, for the reason just noticed, the marriage-bed and its symbol, the
house-snake, kept as a revered inmate and cherished in the feeling that
evil happening to it meant misfortune to the master. The festival of
the Genius was naturally the master's birthday, and on that day slaves
and freedmen kept holiday with the family and brought offerings to the
_Genius domus_. It is a significant fact, and may serve to bring out
the underlying notion, that in later paintings, when anthropomorphism
and sensuous representation held sway over all Roman religion, though
the other gods of the household were depicted after the manner of Greek
deities, the Genius is either represented by his symbolic snake or
appears with the human features and characteristics of the head of the house, his owner. |
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