Hercules is one of the cases in this last category. Though originally,
as we have seen, a Greek god, his long residence in Tibur (Tivoli) had
made him, as it were, a naturalised citizen of Latium, and hence Rome
felt it no impropriety to take him inside her _pomerium_. At first his
worship seems to have been carried on by two clans, the Potitii and the
Pinarii, but later, during the republic, the state assumed control. But
though it was really the Greek Herakles who had come in as the latinised
Hercules, the god had paid a certain price for his admission, for he
came stripped of all the various attributes which he had had in Greece
and retaining merely his function as patron of trade and travel. It was
this practical side of his nature alone which appealed to the Romans; it
found its expression in the offering of "the tenth" at the great altar
in the Forum Boarium. This altar always remained in a certain sense the
centre of Hercules-worship in Rome. It was reinforced at an early date
by no less than three temples of Hercules in the more or less immediate
neighbourhood, all of which were characterised by the same relative
simplicity of ritual. Centuries later Herakles became known to the
Romans through direct Greek channels, and it was recognised that this
new Herakles was akin to the old Hercules, so that he too was called
Hercules. There was nothing surprising in this to the Romans, because
they considered it a matter of course that there should be found a
parallel among their own gods for each Greek deity. They never
understood the true state of affairs; it is doubtful whether they could
have understood it: namely, that in almost all their other
identifications of Roman and Greek deities, they were really doing
violence to their own native gods by superimposing upon them the
attributes of a deity with whom they had really nothing in common,
whereas, in identifying the new Herakles with their old Hercules, they
were doing a perfectly legitimate thing. For one who knows the true
state of affairs there is something pathetically amusing in the fact
that they really showed more delicacy in making their old (really
originally Greek) Hercules into the new Greek Herakles-Hercules, than
they did in throwing together Neptune and Poseidon, Mars and Ares, Diana
and Artemis. As a matter of fact they always reverenced the old cult of
the great altar, and never allowed the more sensational phases of Greek
worship to be practised there, and put off into another quarter the
temples which were built to Hercules under the various new attributes
which the new Greek cult brought with it. These temples were placed, as
was proper, outside the _pomerium_, in the southern part of the Campus
Martius.
But to return to the simple Hercules and the Servian regime, the Roman
state had now obtained a deity, of which, by the contagion of commerce,
they already felt a need, a god of great power from whom came success in
the practical undertakings of life. Hence he had a strong hold on the
Romans whose practical side was undergoing a rapid development. The idea
of trade was now represented in the religious world, it had received its
divine sanction.
The other god, who came up from Magna Graecia and whose formal
acceptance into the state-cult formed one of the earliest incidents in
the breakdown of the old agricultural religion, was Castor, with his
twin-brother Pollux, although brother Pollux was always an insignificant
partner, so much so that the temple which was subsequently built to them
both was referred to either as the temple of "Castor" alone or as the
temple of "the Castors." At various points in the old Greek world we
meet with a pair of brothers, at first not designated by individual
names but merely named as a pair. Even these pair-names do not agree,
but they represent all of them the same idea. Later when individual
names are substituted for the general pair-name, these individual names
also differ. They are gods of protection, and on the sea-coast--and most
of Greece is sea-coast--they are especially helpful as rescuers from the
dangers of the sea, and they are also very early and almost everywhere
connected with horses. But in spite of their usefulness they are not
very prominent, and it is doubtful whether they would ever have become
famous, except for one of those little accidents which make the fortunes
of gods as well as of men. It so happened that horses began to be used
in warfare more than for the mere drawing of chariots; a primitive sort
of cavalry came into being, produced by mounting heavy-armed
foot-soldiers on horseback. With this cavalry the "Twin-Brothers"
(_Dios-kouroi_ = "Sons of Zeus"), especially Castor, became prominent.
Just as the Greek merchants had taken Herakles with them when they set
out to plant colonies in Southern Italy, so the heavy-mounted horsemen
carried their god Castor with them wherever they went. The Italic tribes
in their turn were quick to seize upon this idea of cavalry, and with
it as an essential part went its divine patron, Castor. Thus the
Castor-cult moved steadily northward, carried, as it were, on horseback.
At last it reached Latium, and there the little town of Tusculum,
afterwards so famous as the residence of Cicero, became in some
unaccountable way an important cult-centre, and did for Castor what
Tibur had done for Hercules, _i.e._ latinised him, so that Rome received
him not as an alien but as one of her kin. There can be little doubt
that the Roman cult actually did come from Tusculum, and that in its
introduction into Rome, as in every other step on its march, it was
connected with the reorganisation of the cavalry. This would seem to
imply that Tusculum was famous for its cavalry and that Rome took the
idea of it from her--statements for which we have unfortunately no other
confirmation, though we have abundant proof of the cult at Tusculum and
of Rome's close association with it.
Castor was thus the patron of the "horsemen" (_equites_) and his great
day was July 15, when the horsemen's parade took place. Possibly this
had been the date of the festival at Tusculum, a day especially
appropriate because it was the Ides of the month, and the Ides were
sacred to Juppiter, whose sons Castor and Pollux (_Dios-kouroi_) were
supposed to be. It is extremely interesting in the light of this
knowledge of the true state of affairs to see how legend later
explained the coming of Castor and Pollux. It was an incident in the
mythical war which was supposed to have taken place after the last
Tarquin had been driven out, and the republic had been started. The
adversaries of Rome, allied with Tarquin, notably Octavius Mamilius of
Tusculum, fought against the Romans in the battle of Lake Regillus on
July 15, B.C. 499. The Romans won, and the first news of victory was
brought to Rome by the miraculous appearance of Castor and Pollux who
were seen watering their horses in the Forum at the spring of Juturna. A
temple on this spot was then vowed and fifteen years later, B.C. 484, it
was completed and dedicated. Tusculum, July 15, and the dedication of
the temple in B.C. 484 are seemingly the only historical facts in this
legend; and long before B.C. 499 Castor was worshipped in Rome,
especially on July 15. The site of his original worship was without
doubt the same locality in the Forum where his temple was subsequently
built, for it is an almost invariable rule that the earliest temples are
built on the actual site of, or close to, the old altar or shrine which
preceded the formal temple. Like Hercules therefore he was received
inside the _pomerium_, and probably for a similar reason, because it was
felt that he was a god of Tusculum, and hence a god of Rome's kinsfolk.
We have an additional confirmation of this feeling in the way in which
the later direct cult of Castor was treated. This cult, connecting
Castor with healing and the interpretation of dreams, and emphasising
his function as a rescuer from the dangers of the sea, would have been
without meaning for the old Romans who worshipped him merely as a patron
of horsemen and horsemanship. The new ideas seem to have had as their
centre a later temple in the Circus Flaminius and thus Hercules and
Castor may again be paralleled, since they have, each of them, an old
cult-centre inside the _pomerium_, Hercules in the Forum Boarium, Castor
in the Forum, and a later cult-centre, for more advanced ideas, in each
case in the Circus Flaminius.
Although it was Greek influence which ultimately caused the destruction
of Roman religion, and although the cults of Hercules and of Castor are
the first definite effects of this influence, it cannot be said that the
destruction had in any sense begun, because in their slow journey
northward, and in their long residence at Tibur and Tusculum
respectively, the two cults had lost all that was pernicious. The Roman
instinct, which felt them to be akin to itself, did not go amiss; they
were indeed akin to the new Rome with its new interest in trade and its
increased interest in warfare, for the trader and the warrior have gone
side by side in all ages of the world's history, whether it be a
primitive instinct to grasp territory for commercial purposes or a more
civilised endeavour to obtain an open port.
The beginnings of Greek influence have thus been exhibited in the case
of Hercules and of Castor, and it remains to inquire what Etruria did.
There is no race about which we know so much and yet so little as about
the Etruscans. They have always been and still are a riddle, and as our
knowledge of them increases we seem further than ever from a solution,
and what we gain in positive knowledge is more than counterbalanced by
the increased sense of our ignorance. Altogether aside from the problem
of the origin of the Etruscans, and the race to which they belonged, is
the other problem of their disappearance. In a certain sense Etruria
steps out of history quite as mysteriously as she entered into it, nay
even more mysteriously, for we are always willing to allow a certain
percentage of mystery as the legitimate accompaniment of prehistoric
history, but when in the light of more or less historic times a nation
steps off the stage of the world's history, and leaves practically no
heritage behind her, we have a right to be amazed. Of all the peoples in
Italy Rome ought in the order of events to have been her successor, and
yet when we contrast the influence of Etruria on Rome with the influence
of the Greek colonies of Southern Italy we see an amazing difference.
The influence of these Greek colonies on Rome prepared the way for the
direct influence of the Greek motherland, so that one passed over into
the other by imperceptible gradations, but the influence of Etruria on
Rome not only led to nothing but was in itself of a most superficial
sort. Etruria must have had some literature, yet we search the history
of Roman literature in vain for any traces of the influence of that
literature on Rome, with the one exception of books on divination and
the interpretation of lightning. We know too little of her manners and
customs to be able to tell exactly how much they may have influenced
Rome, and yet it is worth noting that the things which Roman writers
actually refer to Etruria, are all of them most superficial: a few of
the insignia of political office; a few of the trappings of one or two
ritualistic acts; a branch of divination, by the consultation of the
entrails (_haruspicina_), which was of secondary importance compared to
augury; and the most depraved form of Roman public sport, the
gladiatorial games. The only fundamental institution of Rome which it is
the habit to ascribe to Etruria, the idea of the so-called _templum_ or
division of the sky into regions as an axiom of augury, seems to have
been quite as much a general Italic idea as a specifically Etruscan one.
Even in art her influence was relatively slight, and though her
architects seem to have built the earliest formal temples for Rome, they
were soon succeeded in this work by the Greeks. We seek in vain for a
complete and satisfactory explanation of this limitation of her
influence, but certain thoughts suggest themselves, which, as far as
they go, are probably correct. All that we know of Etruria impresses us
with the fact that hers was an outward civilisation unaccompanied by an
inward culture, that it was a formal rather than a spiritual growth, an
artificial acquisition from without rather than a development from
within outwards. It was strong but with its strength went brutality, it
was interested in art but for its sensual rather than its spiritual
aspects. Now the idealism of youth is present in nations just as in
individuals, though probably a nation is less conscious of it than an
individual. It is with the nation one of the effects of the instinct of
self-preservation, and for a youthful nation to absorb the vices of an
old decadent one would be self-destruction. Thus the youthful Rome
rejected most of the Etruscan poison, and thus nature purified herself,
and Etruria was buried in the pit of her own nastiness.
There was however one town which acted as an interpreter between Rome
and Etruria, and was the original cult-centre for a very great goddess,
spreading her cult in both directions, into Rome and into Etruria. The
town was Falerii and the goddess was Minerva, who in a certain sense
entered Rome three times, once direct from Falerii to Rome, and once
from Falerii to Rome by way of Etruria, and finally, when Falerii was
captured by the Romans, again direct to Rome. In the earliest period
there are scarcely any traces of the worship of Minerva in Latium or
Southern Italy, and we are absolutely certain that she was not known in
Rome. In the country north of Rome, however, the situation is different
There she is found quite frequently, especially in Etruria under the
name of MENERVA or MENRVA. Yet she cannot have been an Etruscan goddess,
because the name itself is Italic and not Etruscan. She is therefore
neither Roman, nor Etruscan, nor Latin, at least so far as we know Latin
in Latium. If we can find a place however where a Latin people is under
strong Etruscan influence, we shall be near the solution. Such a place
is Falerii, in the country of the Faliscans. To the ancients it appeared
so thoroughly Etruscan that they go out of their way to explain that it
was not. As a matter of fact it was the only Latin town on the right
bank of the Tiber, and because of its locality it was early brought into
vital connection with the Etruscans, so vital that while it never lost
all of its original Latin character, it lost enough of it to exercise a
very considerable direct influence over Etruria, and to be to a very
large extent influenced by her in turn. We cannot of course positively
prove that Minerva was originally worshipped only at Falerii, and that
her cult spread entirely from this one point, but we have at least
strong negative evidence, and so far as the general history of ancient
religion is concerned there is nothing impossible in such a spread.
Religious history shows many parallels to this; for example the classic
case of the god Eros of Thespiae, in Boeotia, who would have lived and
died merely a little insignificant local god, if it had not been for the
Boeotian poet Hesiod who adopted Eros into his poetry and thus gave him
a start in life by which he ultimately succeeded in going all over the
Greek world, and then passing into Rome as Cupid; and so into all later
times.
We are accustomed to think of Minerva as the Latin name for Athena, the
daughter of Zeus, and unconsciously we clothe Minerva with all the glory
of Athena and endow her with Athena's many-sidedness. In reality the
little peasant goddess of Falerii had originally nothing in common with
Athena except the fact that both of them were interested in handicraft
and the handicraftsman, but Athena had a hundred other interests
besides, while this one thing seems to have filled the whole of
Minerva's horizon. When Minerva went on her travels into Etruria, she
came among a people who eventually learned from the representations of
Greek art a very considerable amount of Greek mythology, and who, when
they heard of Athena, saw her resemblance to Minerva and began thus to
associate the two. But even in this association Minerva was still
pre-eminently the goddess of the artisan and the labouring man, she was
the patroness of the works of man's hands rather than of the works of
his mind, and as such she was brought into Rome by Etruscan and
Faliscan workmen. At first she was worshipped merely by these workmen in
their own houses, but by degrees as the number of these workmen
increased and as a knowledge of their handicraft spread to native
Romans, Minerva became so prominent that the state was compelled to
acknowledge her, and to accept her among the gods of the state. But it
was a very different acknowledgment from that of Hercules or Castor;
these gods had been received inside the _pomerium_, but Minerva was
given a temple outside, over on the Aventine. None the less her cult
throve, and her power was soon shown both religiously and socially. Her
great festival was on the 19th of March, a day which had been originally
sacred to Mars, but the presence of Minerva's celebrations on that day
soon caused the associations with Mars to be almost entirely forgotten.
Socially her temple became the meeting-place of all the artisans of
Rome, it was at once their religious centre and their business
headquarters. There they met in their primitive guilds (_collegia_) and
arranged their affairs, and thus it continued to be as long as pagan
Rome lasted. The respect shown to these guilds of Minerva is nowhere
more clearly exhibited than in an incident which happened in the time of
the Second Punic War, several centuries after the introduction of the
cult. Terrified by adverse portents the Roman Senate instructed the old
poet Livius Andronicus to write a hymn in honour of Juno and to train a
chorus of youths and maidens to sing it. The hymn was sung, and was such
a great success that the gratitude of the Senate took the form of
granting permission to the poets of the city to have a guild of their
own, and a meeting-place along with the older guilds in the temple of
Minerva on the Aventine. This was the Roman state's first expression of
literary appreciation; from her standpoint it was flattery indeed, for
were not poets by this decree made equal to butchers, bakers, and
cloth-makers, and was not poetry acknowledged to be of some practical
use and adjudged a legitimate occupation?
The history of the cult of Minerva is much more complicated than that of
Hercules or Castor. Like them she was subjected to strong Greek
influence, and, as we shall see later, not very long after her
introduction she was taken into the company of Juppiter and Juno, thus
forming the famous Capitoline triad. Also temples were built to her
individually under various aspects of the worship of Athena with whom
she gradually became identified, but in the old Aventine temple the
original idea of Minerva, the working man's friend, continued
practically unchanged. Doubtless the society of Servius's day, who
witnessed the coming of Minerva, did not realise what this introduction
meant, and how absolutely necessary it was for Rome's future
development that the artisan class should be among her people, and that
this class should be represented in the world of the gods. They little
knew that in the temple on the Aventine was being brought to expression
the trade-union idea, which was to pass over into the mediaeval guild of
both workmen and masters, still under religious auspices, and to find a
latter-day parody in the modern labour-union, with its spirit of
hostility to employers, and its indifference, at least as an
organisation, to things religious.
Trade and handicraft were thus added to the Roman world, of men on
earth, and of the gods above the earth, and it remains for us to
consider the awakening of the political spirit and its corresponding
religious phenomenon; but before we do this, we must clear the way by
casting aside one ancient hypothesis connected with Servius's religious
reforms, which is not correct, at least in the way in which the ancients
meant it.
The writing of the earlier period of Rome's history is sometimes
complicated rather than helped by the statements of the generally
well-meaning but often misguided historians of later times. Their real
knowledge of the facts was in many cases no greater than ours, while
they lacked what modern historians possess: a breadth of view and a
knowledge of the phenomena of history in many periods and among many
nations. The study of the social and religious movements under Servius
presents us with an interesting illustration of this. It was customary
namely to ascribe to Servius Tullius the introduction of the cult of
Fortuna, and Plutarch takes occasion twice in his _Moralia_ to describe
the interest of Servius in this cult and to recount the extraordinary
number of temples which he built to the great goddess of chance under
her various attributes. The Romans of Plutarch's day thought of Fortuna
in very much the way in which their poets, especially Horace, described
her, as a great and powerful goddess of chance, the personification of
the element of apparent caprice which seems to be present in the running
of the universe. It is very much our way of thinking of her, and of
course both our own concept and the later Roman concept go back to
Greece. But Greece had not always had this idea of the goddess of luck.
The older purer age of Greek thought was permeated with the idea of the
absolute immutable character of the divine will, a belief which
precluded the possibility of chance or caprice. The earliest Greek Tyche
(Fortuna) was the daughter of Zeus who fulfilled his will; and that his
will through her was often a beneficent will is shown in the tendency to
think of her as a goddess of plenty. It was only the growth of
scepticism, the failure of faith to bear up under the apparently
contradictory lessons of experience, which brought into being in the
Alexandrian age Tyche, the goddess of chance, the winged capricious
deity poised on the ball. It was this habit of thought which eventually
gave the Romans that idea of Fortuna which has became our idea because
it is the prevalent one in Roman literature and life in the periods with
which we are most familiar. Now if Fortuna be thought of in this latter
way, it is a very easy matter to connect her with Servius Tullius, for
the legendary accounts of Servius's career picture him as a very child
of "fortune," raised from the lowest estate to the highest power, the
little slave boy who became king. What goddess would he delight to
honour, if not the goddess of the happy chance which had made him what
he was?
All this is very pretty, but it is unfortunately quite impossible,
because whatever the time may have been when Fortuna began to be
worshipped in Rome, it is certain that the idea of chance did not enter
into the concept of her until long after Servius's day. Instead the
early Fortuna was a goddess of plenty and fertility, among mankind as a
protectress of women and of childbirth, among the crops and the herds as
a goddess of fertility and fecundity. Her full name was probably Fors
Fortuna, a name which survived in two old temples across the river from
Rome proper, in Trastevere, where she was worshipped in the country by
the farmers in behalf of the crops. Fortuna is thus merely the cult-name
added to the old goddess Fors to intensify her meaning, which finally
broke off from her and became independent, expressing the same idea of
a goddess of plenty. Later under Greek influence the concept of luck,
especially good-luck, slowly displaced the older idea. The possibility
of such a transition from fertility to good-luck is shown us in the
phrase "_arbor felix_," which originally meant a fruitful tree and later
a tree of good omen. As regards Fortuna and Servius therefore there is
no inherent reason why they should have been connected, and whenever it
was that Fortuna began to exist, be it before or after Servius, she came
into the world as a goddess of plenty and did not turn into a goddess of
luck till centuries after her birth.
It must not be supposed that Rome in this sixth century before Christ
could take into herself all these traders and artisans, and become thus
interested also among her own citizens in these new employments, without
receiving a corresponding impulse toward a larger political life. Thus
there began that ever-increasing participation in the affairs of the
Latin league, which was her first step toward acquiring a world
dominion. It is probable that Rome had always belonged to this league,
but at first as a very insignificant member. Those were the days in
which Alba Longa stood out as leader, a leadership which she afterwards
lost, but of which the recollection was retained because the Alban Mount
behind Alba Longa remained the cult-centre, connected with the worship
of the god of the league, the Juppiter of the Latins (Juppiter
Latiaris), not only until B.C. 338 when the league ceased to exist, but
even later when Rome kept up a sentimental celebration of the old
festival. In the course of time, for reasons which we do not know, Alba
Longa's power declined and the mantle of her supremacy fell upon Aricia,
a little town still in existence not far from Albano. The coming of
Aricia to the presidency of the league started a religious movement
which is one of the most extraordinary in the checkered history of Roman
religion. The ultimate result of this movement was the introduction of
the goddess Diana into the state-cult of Rome, where she was
subsequently identified with Apollo's sister Artemis. But this is a long
story, and to understand it we must go back some distance to make our
beginning.
Among the more savage tribes and in the wilder mountain regions of both
Greece and Italy there was worshipped a goddess who had a different name
in each country, Artemis in Greece, Diana in Italy, but who was in
nature very much the same. This does not imply that it was the same
goddess originally or that the early Artemis of Greece had any influence
on the Diana of Italy. Their similarity was probably caused merely by
the similarity of the conditions from which they sprang, the similar
needs of the two peoples. She was a goddess of the woods, and of nature,
and especially of wild animals, a patroness of the hunt and the
huntsman, but also a goddess of all small animals, of all helpless
little ones, and a helper too of those that bore them, hence a goddess
of birth, and in the sphere of mankind a goddess of women and of
childbirth. Later in Greece Artemis was absorbed into the sea-cult of
Apollo on the island of Delos, where she became Apollo's sister, like
him the child of Latona; but naturally Diana experienced no similar
change until in Rome, centuries later, she was artificially identified
with Artemis. In the earliest times there were two places in Italy where
the cult of Diana was especially prominent, both, as we should expect,
in wooded mountainous regions: one on Mount Tifata (near Capua), the
modern St. Angelo in Formis; the other in Latium, in a grove near
Aricia. It is with this latter cult-centre that we have here to do. The
grove near Aricia became so famous that the goddess worshipped there was
known as "Diana of the Grove" (Diana Nemorensis), and the place where
she was worshipped was called the "Grove" (_nemus_), a name which is
still retained in the modern "Nemi." She was a goddess of the woods, of
the animal kingdom, of birth, and so of women; and almost all the
dedicatory inscriptions which have been found near her shrine were put
up by women. She was worshipped above all by the people of Aricia, and
she seems to have been the patron deity of the town. When it fell to
Aricia's lot to become the head of the league, her goddess Diana
promptly assumed an important position in the league, not because she
had by nature any political bearing whatsoever, but merely because she
was wedded to Aricia, and experienced all the vicissitudes of her
career. Thus there came into the league, alongside of the old Juppiter
Latiaris of the Alban Mount, the new Diana Nemorensis of Aricia, and
sacrifices to her formed a part of the solemn ritual of the united towns
of Latium. It does not take actually a great many years for a religious
custom to acquire sanctity, and before many generations had passed,
Diana was felt to be quite as original and essential a part of the
worship of the league as Juppiter himself. During these same centuries
Rome was growing in importance and influence in the league, until,
instead of being one of its insignificant towns, she was in a fair way
to become its president. Here her diplomacy stepped in to help her. The
league was of course essentially a political institution, but in a
primitive society political institutions are still in tutelage to
religious ones, and the direct road to strong political influence lies
through religious zeal. The way to leadership in the Latin league lay
through excessive devotion to Juppiter and Diana. It is therefore no
accidental coincidence that we find Rome in the period of Servius
building a temple to Juppiter Latiaris on the top of the Alban Mount,
and introducing the worship of Diana into Rome, building her a temple on
the Aventine, hence outside the _pomerium_. Yet it was not the
introduction of her worship as an ordinary state-cult, for then she
would have been taken inside the _pomerium_ with far greater right than
Hercules and Castor were. It was, on the contrary, the building of a
sanctuary of the league outside the _pomerium_, yet inside the civil
wall; not the adoption of Diana as a Roman goddess, but the close
association of the Diana of the Latin league with Rome. It was the
attempt to put Rome religiously as well as politically into the position
which Aricia held; and it was successful. Diana was still the
league-goddess; tradition has it that the league helped to build the
temple; and the dedication day of the temple, August 13, was the same as
that of the temple at Nemi. The Roman temple was outside the _pomerium_
therefore, not because she was a foreign goddess like Minerva, but
because as a league-goddess she must be outside, not inside, the sacred
wall of Rome.
Diana had been introduced for a specific purpose as part of a diplomatic
game, not because Rome felt any real religious need of her; it is hardly
to be expected therefore that her subsequent career in Rome would be of
any great importance. Naturally when once the state had taken the
responsibility of the cult upon itself, that cult was assured as long as
pagan Rome lasted, for the state was always faithful, at least in the
mechanical performance of a ritual act; but popular interest could not
be counted on, especially as many of the things which Diana stood for,
for example her relation to women, were ably represented by Juno. It is
not likely that Diana would ever have been of importance in the religion
of subsequent time, had it not been for another accident which served to
keep alive the interest in Diana, just as the accident of Diana's
connection with the Latin league had aroused that interest in the
beginning. This was the coming of Apollo and his sister Artemis. Apollo
came first, probably during the time of Servius, but Artemis seems to
have come much later, not before B.C. 431. Her identification with Diana
was inevitable, and from that time onward Diana begins a new life with
all the attributes and myths of Artemis, but this new Artemis-Diana was
quite as different a goddess from the old Aventine Diana as the new
Athena-Minerva was from the old Aventine Minerva.
The political interest of the Romans had been aroused, they had found
their life-work, their career was opening before them, and it must not
be supposed that the reflex action of this new political spirit on the
religious world was confined to the building of two league temples, one
to Juppiter Latiaris on the Alban Mount, miles away from Rome, and one
to Diana outside the _pomerium_ over in the woods of the Aventine. This
political interest was no artificial acquisition, but the inevitable
expression of an instinct. It must therefore find its representation
inside the city, in connexion with a deity who was already deep in the
hearts of the people. This deity could be none other than the sky-father
Juppiter, who had stood by them in the old days of their exclusively
farming life, sending them sunshine and rain in due season. Up on the
Capitoline he was worshipped as _Feretrius_, "the striker," in his most
fearful attribute as the god of the lightning. To him the richest spoils
of war (_spolia opima_) were due, and to him the conqueror gave thanks
on his return from battle. It was this Juppiter of the Capitoline who
was chosen to be the divine representative of Rome's political ambition;
and her confidence in the future, and the omen of her inevitable success
lay in the cult-names, the _cognomina_, with which this Juppiter was
henceforth and forever adorned, Juppiter Optimus Maximus. These
adjectives are no mere idle ornament, no purely pleasant phraseology;
they express not merely the excellence of Rome's Juppiter but his
absolute superiority to all other Juppiters, including Juppiter
Latiaris. And so while Rome with one hand was building a temple for the
league on the Alban Mount, merely as a member of the league, with the
other hand she was building a temple in the heart of her city to a god
who was to bring into subjection to himself all other gods who dared to
challenge his supremacy, just as the city which paid him honour was to
overcome all other cities which refused to acknowledge her. From
henceforth Juppiter Optimus Maximus represents all that is most truly
Roman in Rome. It was under his banner that her battles were fought, it
was to him in all time to come that returning generals gave thanks.
Tradition sets the completion of the Capitoline temple in the first year
of the republic, but the idea and the actual beginning of the work
belong to the later kingdom and hence to our present period, and the
contemplation of it forms a fitting close to the development which we
have tried to sketch. And now that this part of our work is over it may
be well to ask ourselves what we have seen, for there have been so many
bypaths which we have of necessity explored, that the main road we have
travelled may not be entirely distinct in our mind. In the period which
corresponds to the later kingdom, and roughly to the sixth century
before Christ, and which we have called "Servian" for convenience, we
have watched a primitive pastoral community, isolated from the world's
life, turning into a small city-state with political interests, the
beginnings of trade and handicraft, and various rival social classes;
and we have seen how along with the coming of these outside interests
there came various new cults connected with them, most of them implying
entirely new deities, and only one or two of them new sides of old
deities. The body of old Roman religion had received its first blows;
what Tacitus (_Hist._ i. 4) says of the downfall of the empire--"Then
was that secret of the empire disclosed, that it was possible for a
ruler to be appointed elsewhere than at Rome"--is true of Roman religion
in this period when it was discovered that the state might take into
itself deities from outside Rome. And yet while the principle itself was
fatal, the practice of it, so far, had been without much harm. Rome's
growth was inevitable, it was quite as inevitable that these new
interests should be represented in the world of the gods; her old gods
did not suffice, hence new ones were introduced. But the actual gods
brought in thus far were harmless; Hercules, Castor, Minerva, Diana
never did Rome any injury in themselves, never injured her national
_morale_, never lowered the tone of earnest sobriety which had been
characteristic of the old regime.
So far it was good, and well had it been for Rome if she could have shut
the gate of her Olympus now. What the old religion had not provided was
now present. Politics, trade, and art were now represented. With these
she was abundantly supplied for all her future career. But that was not
to be, the gate was still open, and the destructive influence of Greece
was soon to send in a host of new deities, who were destined not only to
overwhelm the old Roman gods--which in itself we might forgive--but to
sap away the old Roman virtues, to the maintenance of which the
atmosphere of these old gods was essential. The forerunner of this
influence was in himself innocent enough, it was Apollo, and it is to
his coming and the subsequent developments which set him in distinct
opposition to Juppiter Optimus Maximus that we now turn.
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL
The Rome of the first consuls was a very different Rome from that of the
earlier kings. Not only was the population larger but it was divided
socially into different classes. The simple patriarchal one-class
community had been transformed into the complex structure of a society
which had in it virtually all those elements and interests, except the
more strictly intellectual ones, which go to make up what we call
society in the modern sense. The world of the gods also had increased in
population, and there too there was present a slight social distinction
between the old gods (_Indigetes_) and the new-comers (_Novensides_),
though it is open to question how strongly this distinction was felt.
The new gods thus far were not incommensurable with the old ones. They
formed a tolerably harmonious circle, and there was not felt to be any
need of new priesthoods; the old priests were sufficient to look after
them all. There were a few new names, and a few new temples or altars,
but everything was in the old spirit, and there was no rivalry between
the old and the new. None of the old gods was crowded into the
background by the new-comers. This was on the face of it impossible as
yet, because the new gods all represented new ideas which had not been
provided for under the old scheme. Even Diana, who afterwards usurped
somewhat the functions of Juno, stood at present pre-eminently for the
political idea pure and simple, so far as Rome was concerned. This
period of equipoise did not continue very long, but while it lasted it
was beyond doubt the best and strongest period in the whole history of
Roman religion. There was no violent religious enthusiasm, but then
there was no corresponding depression offsetting it. It was the cold but
conscientious formalism which was best adapted to the Roman character,
because so long as it held sway the excesses of superstition were
avoided.
But this element of superstition was already on the way, it came in
within a few years of the opening of the republic, and it exercised its
insidious influence ever more and more powerfully until it celebrated
its wildest orgies in the time of the Second Punic War. It is in this
period of the first three centuries of the republic, roughly from B.C.
500 to B.C. 200, that this change was produced. Outwardly it resembled a
steady growth in religious feeling and enthusiasm, and it might well
have seemed so to contemporaries. It was a period of many new gods and
many new temples, but this in itself was no harm. It was the principle
behind it which did the damage. It was the essential contradiction to
what true Roman religion and Roman character demanded; and the last half
of the republic paid the price for what the first half had done, in a
decline of faith which has scarcely been exceeded in the world's
history.
It has been customary for writers on the history of Roman morals to
attribute these changes to the coming of Greek influence; and of course
in the main this is correct, but these writers have in general neglected
to analyse this Greek influence more closely, and to distinguish the
various aspects of it in different periods, and to ask and answer the
question why this influence should be so particularly harmful to the
Romans. It is generally spoken of as the influence of Greek literature
and philosophy, but for our present period this is entirely incorrect,
for we all know that Greek literature did not begin to influence Rome
until the time of the Punic wars, and yet the Greek influence of which
we speak here began to exert its effects two hundred and fifty years
before the Punic wars. The real cause of the unnatural stimulation of
religion during these three centuries is nothing more nor less than the
books of the Sibylline oracles. It is therefore a very definite and
interesting problem which we have before us. It is to examine the
workings of these oracles and to explain why they had such an
extraordinary effect on religion and society, that in three centuries
they could entirely change both the form and the content of Roman
religion, and under the guise of increasing its zeal, so sap its
vitality that it required almost two hundred years of human experience
and suffering before true religion was in some sense at least restored
to its own place.
Like the origin of almost all the great religious movements in the
world's history, the beginnings of the Sibylline books are shrouded in
mystery. A later age, for whom history had no secrets, with a cheap
would-be omniscience told of the old woman who visited Tarquin and
offered him nine books for a certain price, and when he refused to pay
it, went away, burned three, and then returning offered him at the
original price the six that were left; on his again refusing she went
away, burned three more and finally offered at the same old price the
three that remained, which he accepted. Except as a sidelight on the
character of the early Greek trader the story is worthless. It is
doubtful even if the presence of the Sibylline books in Rome goes back
beyond the republic. The first dateable use of them was in the year B.C.
496, and there is one little fact connected with them which makes it
probable that they did not come in until the republic had begun. This is
the circumstance that in view of the great secrecy of the books it is
unthinkable that they should ever have been in Rome without especial
guardians, and yet the earliest guardians that we know of were a newly
made priesthood consisting originally of two men, the so-called "two men
in charge of the sacrifices" (_IIviri sacris faciundis_). Now the form
of this title is peculiar; it is not a proper name like the titles of
all the other priesthoods. Instead it is built on the plan of the titles
of the special committees appointed by the Senate for administrative
purposes; it bears every mark therefore of having arisen under the
republic, rather than under the kingdom, at a time when the Senate had
the supreme control. So much may be said regarding the time when they
were introduced into Rome; as for the place from which they came, this
was without doubt the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, probably the
oldest and most important of them, Cumae, so famous for its Sibyl. This
was not the first association that Rome had had with Cumae, for in all
probability the worship of Apollo had spread from there into Rome toward
the close of the kingdom. Apollo and the books were connected at Cumae,
for it was Apollo who inspired the Sibyl, and the oracles were his
commands, but it is almost certain that Apollo came to Rome in advance
of the oracles. He came there as a god of healing and was given a sacred
place outside the _pomerium_ in the Campus Martius, on the spot where
later (B.C. 431) a temple was built for him with his sister
Artemis-Diana and their mother Latona. This was the only state temple
that Apollo ever had, until Augustus built the famous one on the
Palatine. It was in the wake of Apollo that the Sibylline books came. As
for the books themselves, they were kept so secret that we cannot expect
to know much about them, but in rare cases where the seriousness of the
exigency warranted it, the Senate permitted the actual publication of
the oracle upon which its action was based, and of the oracles thus
published one or two have been preserved to us. They were of course
written in Greek and were phrased in the ambiguous style which for
obvious reasons was the most advantageous style for oracles. They
commanded the worship of certain specific deities, naturally all of them
Greek, and the performance of certain more or less complicated ritual
acts. When they were received in Rome, they were placed in the temple of
Juppiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline in the keeping of their
guardians, the new priesthood of the "two men in charge of the
sacrifices." This committee of two was enlarged to ten in B.C. 367 when
the great compromise between the Patricians and the Plebeians was made,
and the Plebeians were admitted into this one priesthood, with five
representatives. Subsequently Sulla made the number fifteen, which
continued as the official number from that time on, so that the
priesthood is ordinarily called the _Quindecemviri_, even when one of
the older periods is referred to. The real control of the books however
lay in the hands of the Senate. When the Senate saw fit, the priests
were ordered to consult the books, but without this special command even
their guardians dared not approach them. The priests reported to the
Senate what they had found, and the Senate then decreed whatever actions
the oracles commanded. The carrying out of these actions was again in
the charge of the Sibylline priests, who performed the ceremonies
demanded and were for all time to come responsible for the maintenance
of any new cults which might be introduced.
When we see how carefully these oracles were guarded and how
circumspectly their use was hedged about by senatorial control, and when
we think how relatively little harm the use of oracles had wrought in
Greece in all the centuries of her history, it may well seem as if the
statements made in the beginning of this chapter about the havoc caused
by these oracles were grossly exaggerated. But the efforts of the Senate
to safeguard these oracles only prove that the older and wiser men in
the community realised how dangerous they were, and the comparison with
Greece leads to a consideration of certain essential differences between
the Greek and the Roman temperament which made that which was meat for
one into poison for the other.
In the older purer age of Greece the gods were never far away from men,
they lived almost side by side with them; there were to be sure many
gods of whom they were afraid and from whom they desired to keep as far
away as possible, but there were a great many other gods of whom they
liked to think. In constructing the records of their history they did
not work backwards from the light of the present into an ever darkening
past, but they began from the beginning in the full light of the gods
from whom all things sprang, and mythology passed into history by
imperceptible gradations. They knew more about the beginning when all
things were completely in the hands of the gods than they did about
their immediate past. Art began very early to make them familiar with
the appearance of the gods, so that there was little that was mysterious
about their religion, so little that the element of mystery had later to
be almost artificially cultivated in the "mysteries." They respected the
gods rather than feared them, and they felt that the gods would do them
no harm unless they themselves first sinned against them or their own
fellow-men, and the oracles of Delphi were no more terrifying to them
than the coming of the word of God was to the prophets of Israel. They
were accustomed to these messages, which were almost every-day affairs.
It was all a part of that marvellous poise of nature which made the
every-day mortal Greek almost as calm as the unperturbed imperturbable
faces of their gods as their great sculptors saw them.
In Rome all was very different. The superstitious element in the Italian
character, which amazes us so much to-day when cultured twentieth
century men and women in good society persecute their fellows because of
the evil eye, is a heritage of many thousand years. Sometimes it seems
as if it were the Italian birthright, the blight of Etruria which came
into their nature in spite of themselves. It required centuries to
educate the Roman into the concept of personal individual gods. He had
begun his theological career by terror of unknown powers all about him,
and by regarding religion as the science of propitiating the right power
on the right occasion. One could not know these powers, one did not
desire to. Their gods were at once their masters and their servants, but
never their companions. The early Roman knew no such thing as an oracle,
the only messages from the gods were the expressions of their wrath, in
the sending of prodigies and portents. They did indeed consult the gods
by watching the flight of birds or studying the entrails of the
sacrifice, but it was merely to obtain a "yes or no" answer to a
categorical question as to whether a certain act was pleasing to the
gods. Otherwise all about them lay mystery, and at the point where sight
failed, since neither imagination nor faith carried them any further,
superstition stepped in, and the more they thought of the gods the more
terrified they became. Now if you present to a people thus constituted a
divine book of infallible oracles, you increase their terror in greater
measure than the book itself can assuage it, and with the use of the
book the simpler forms of their old belief will grow less and less
effective in the face of this new "witchcraft," which can work wonders.
And no matter how you may hedge the use of the book about, it will be
used more and more as the craving for magic is increasingly aroused.
The study of the outward and the inward effects of the Sibylline books
is therefore the real history of religion in the first half of the
republic. The outward effects are seen in the introduction of a series
of Greek gods, who were in themselves in the main eminently respectable,
and whose presence was in itself no offence to good morals, and if we
stop there we fail to understand why the religious interest of the
Second Punic War should change so quickly to the scepticism of the
following century. The inward effects however, which, though they are
hard to see, may yet be discovered between the lines of the chronicle,
will explain all the undermining of foundation, until we wonder not why
the structure collapsed so suddenly but how it managed to last so long.
The history of the activity of the books begins peaceably enough. In the
year B.C. 496 Rome was in a bad way; her crops had failed and the
importation of grain from Latium was rendered very difficult because of
the war with the Latins in which she was engaged. In her distress she
turned to the Sibylline books, and on the occasion of this their first
recorded use, the oracles ordered the introduction into Rome of the cult
of three Greek deities, Demeter, Dionysos, and Kore. It was a most
appropriate and characteristic choice. In the first place the deities in
question were worshipped at Cumae, the home of the books, whence Rome
could, and probably did, borrow the cult; and in the second place
Demeter was the goddess of grain, and it was from Cumae that Rome was
already beginning to obtain her imported grain supply. Thus the coming
of the Cumaean Demeter into the religious world of Rome is but the
sacred parallel to the coming of Cumaean grain into the material world
of Rome. The Greek goddess of grain came with the grain, just as Castor
had come with the Greek cavalry, with this essential distinction however
that Demeter came by the incantation of the books and the enactment of
the Senate, whereas Castor's coming was a slow and normal development.
It is important to notice closely exactly what happened when these
deities were introduced, partly because they form the first recorded
instance, and hence may well have acted as a model for subsequent
repetitions of the act, but also because we have a more definite
knowledge of the phenomena in this case than in many others. In the
first place it is clear that the deities were felt to be foreign: not
only was their temple built out the Aventine way, in the valley of the
Circus Maximus, outside the _pomerium_, but--a much more significant
fact--their Greek names were dropped, and they were given Roman names
instead, to make them seem less out of place. Then too these Roman names
were not new names, translations of their Greek titles, but were the
names of already existing Roman deities with whom they were easily
identified, so that we see at once that their coming was no real
enrichment of the Roman Olympus; what they stood for was already
represented there, and their coming was simply a reduplication, with the
consequent result that as these parvenus increased in prominence and
influence, they robbed of all their vitality the sober old Roman deities
to whom they had attached themselves. What were these original deities
who were thus doomed to death in B.C. 496? Demeter took the name of the
old Roman goddess Ceres, a goddess of fertility, about whom we know just
enough to assert that she belonged to the old religion of Numa and that
she was at heart quite a different person from Demeter. All the rest is
lost, submerged under the new Demeter-Ceres with her temple built by
Greek architects and her April games. It is this new Ceres who soon
develops an extraordinary political importance because her temple is to
the Plebeians as a class what the temple of Minerva is to the unions of
organised labour. It is there that they have their meeting-place, and
the temple itself is always their treasury as contrasted with the Saturn
temple, the treasury of the state as a whole. The very officers of the
Plebeians, the famous Plebeian aediles, get their name from association
with this temple (_aedes_). This political side of her activity is the
only real advantage, except the grain itself, connected with her
importation; the two form at best a poor economic compensation for the
ever increasing immoral effects of the public games of Ceres. |
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