But though Ceres is the most important of the three deities economically
and politically, we must not forget the other two, both of whom are
interesting, though one of them more for what she is not than for what
she is. Along with Demeter came Dionysos and Demeter's daughter Kore:
the three were associated in the solemn mysteries of Eleusis, but none
of the beauty of these ideas went over into the Roman cult. Demeter was
merely the deified grain-traffic, and Dionysos was little else than the
god of wine, while poor Kore fell out without any particular content for
a curious reason that we shall see in a moment. The only old Roman deity
with whom Dionysos could be identified was the god Liber, who had had a
rather interesting history, and who had done enough along the line of
self-development to deserve a better fate than to be crushed to
insignificance under the prominence of his new namesake. Liber was at
this time a flourishing god of fertility and, since the introduction of
the grape into Italy, especially the patron of the fruit of the vine,
but he had made his own career, and there was a time when he had no
individuality of his own but was merely a cult-adjective of the great
god Juppiter, the giver of all fertility in every phase of life. Thus
out of the original Juppiter-Liber there had grown the independent god
Liber; and now this Liber lost his individuality by identification with
Dionysos. Finally comes Kore, Demeter's daughter. Here the Romans were
hard put to it to find a goddess who represented any similar content,
and after all this was no light task because Kore has little meaning
unless she is taken also as Persephone, Pluto's bride--a process which
required a mythological knowledge and appreciation in which the Romans
of the early republic were totally lacking. But there was an old goddess
Libera, a shadowy potentiality contrasted and paired with the masculine
Liber, and they chose her and gave Kore her name. We have a curious
proof of how little the Romans knew of Kore-Libera, and of how purely
mechanical both the introduction of Kore and her identification with
Libera were, in the fact that about two hundred and fifty years later,
as we shall see, Persephone, the real Kore, was introduced into Rome as
an altogether new deity, and existed there side by side with Libera for
at least a century before people began to realise that Proserpina and
Libera stood for the same Greek goddess.
It was necessary to go into these details in order that we might
understand as much as possible of the process by which the gods of the
Sibylline books were assimilated into the body of Roman religion. We see
how in the main they were superfluous and therefore unnecessary and even
undesirable because by their presence they robbed old Roman deities of
their existence, and how those elements in them which were least in
accord with the old Roman spirit were most apt to develop, and how in
general their adoption was a purely mechanical process, like any act in
witchcraft, where the form is all important because the meaning cannot
be understood, and how totally different therefore the estate of these
gods was in Rome from what it had been in Greece, because in Rome they
were introduced, stripped of all their mythology, worshipped only for
their practical bearings, and compelled therefore to work for their
living.
The importation of grain from Cumae meant more to Rome than the mere
satisfaction of her physical needs; it meant much more than the addition
of three deities to her state-cult, for the grain thus imported was
carried from Cumae to Ostia by sea and so up the Tiber to Rome, and the
whole matter therefore marks one of the important steps in Rome's
interest in commerce generally but especially in ocean commerce. As yet
she did not do the actual carrying herself, but she began to be
interested in it, and the sea began to mean something to this inland
town. This increased interest in trade in general and this inceptive
interest in those who "go down to the sea in ships" have both of them
left their reflexion in the religious life of the time; two new deities
are introduced, both of them almost certainly by means of the Sibylline
oracles, though some accidental blanks in our historical tradition have
deprived us of details.
The chronicle of the year B.C. 495 tells us that there was a dispute in
that year as to who should dedicate the temple of Mercury. This is
Mercury's first appearance in our sources. The circumstances of the
vowing of the temple have been omitted through some oversight, but in
spite of this the connexion of his introduction with the Sibylline books
is beyond all reasonable doubt, for the simple reason that the guardians
of the oracles always looked after his cult in all subsequent time.
Notwithstanding the suddenness of his appearance and the silence of the
chronicle, his story is quite clear and his past history easy to
restore, at least in outline.
The versatile Hermes, who as messenger of the gods plays a part in so
many Greek myths, became in the course of time among other things
associated with travelling, as god of roads, and also with trade,
partly because trading necessitates travelling, and partly because
Hermes was also the protector of the market-place in which the trading
was done. Thus he was called "Hermes Protector of the Merchant"
(_Empolaios_) and in this capacity went into the colonies of Greece,
including those of Southern Italy. Thus Hermes travelled with the grain
merchant from Cumae and became known to the Romans. They however knew
him merely as the god of trade, and their name for him is nothing but
the translation into Latin of his Greek cult-title: _Empolaios_ =
_Mercurius_. For a long time it was thought that there had existed a
Mercurius among the original gods of Rome, but the traces of this old
god are apparent rather than real and suggest one phase of that pastime
of which the later Romans were so fond, that of writing history
backwards and putting an artificial halo of antiquity about the gods
whom they borrowed from Greece. Thus Mercury was received into the
state-cult at about the time when the grain trade began, and was, as it
were, the divine representative of the interest which the Roman state
took in the whole transaction. His temple was outside the _pomerium_ on
the Aventine side of the Circus Maximus. It was in this temple of the
merchant god that the primitive Chamber of Commerce (_collegium
mercatorum_) had its beginning, an association, partly sacral, partly
commercial, whose members, the _mercuriales_, are frequently met with
in literature and also in inscriptions, one of which has been found as
far away as the island of Delos. In the actual cult of the Romans
Mercury never regained the many-sidedness which he had lost in coming to
them merely as a god of trade. In this capacity he appears on the
sextans of the old copper coinage, and under the empire he went into the
provinces as the companion of Mars, since the merchant went side by side
with the soldier. On the contrary when in the third century before
Christ Greek literature came to Rome, this simple idea of Mercury was
reinforced by many new Greek ideas and he entered into Roman poetry with
all the attributes and functions of Hermes; but this had little or no
effect on the cult and there were no great rivals to the old temple near
the Circus Maximus, no cult-centre with advanced Greek ideas, as we have
seen spring up in the case of Hercules, Castor, Minerva, and Diana.
We have already seen how the rise of the grain trade brought four new
deities to Rome, but there is one more chapter to our story. The grain
itself and the trade itself had now obtained their divine complements,
but the sea had not yet received its due; it too must have its parallel
among the gods of Rome. And so it came to pass that again under the
influence of the fateful books, though exactly when or how we cannot
say, the Greek Poseidon came into Rome. The sea had always meant much
to the Greeks, and the joyful shout of Xenophon's troops "The sea! the
sea!" finds an echo all through the centuries of Greek history before
and after the Anabasis. But the multitude of islands and harbours in
Greece is in marked contrast to the dearth of them in Italy, where even
to-day there is no good port of call on the west coast between Naples
and Civitavecchia--and the latter would be useless, were it not for
Trajan's mole. In Italy accordingly the sea-god Poseidon was worshipped
only in the Greek colonies, where however he had two famous cults, one
at Tarentum, later called Colonia Neptunia, and one at Paestum, whose
old name was Poseidonia. The Romans had worshipped deities of water in
abundance, as became an agricultural people, for water meant life, and
drought, death; but their deities were those of the sweet waters of
springs and rivers, they knew no god of the sea. But when the oracles
brought Poseidon to Rome he was identified with an old Roman water-god
Neptune, whose cult henceforward included the sea. We do not know where
the shrine of the old sweet-water Neptune had been, but his old festival
had occurred on July 23. The new Poseidon-Neptune was given a temple
outside the _pomerium_ in the Campus Martius, but the new was connected
with the old in so far at least that the dedication day of the new
temple was July 23, the day of the old Neptune festival.
With the introduction of Neptune, the sea-god, the state had
accomplished, as it were, a sort of divine marine insurance; the
transport of the grain was now watched over by a Roman god; but it was
not to be expected that the cult of a sea-god would ever mean very much
to the Romans. The maritime commerce of the Eternal City was very slow
in developing, and it grew to its subsequent proportions, not because
the Romans of Italy engaged in it, but because those foreigners who took
to the sea by nature later became Romans. Nor did naval warfare fall to
her lot until the First Punic War, and even then her victories were
gained by the tactics of land fighting transferred to the decks of two
ships, her own and the enemy's, fastened together by landing-bridges,
and the glory of victory was due not to Neptune but to Mars. It was not
until the civil wars at the close of the republic that real naval
battles occurred, and that Neptune received his share of glory for the
victory at Actium in B.C. 31, and later over Sextus Pompeius, in a
temple erected by Agrippa in the Campus Martius, behind the beautiful
columns of which the Roman Stock-Exchange transacts its business to-day.
In the first decade of the republic therefore, as we have seen, a group
of Greek gods was introduced by the Sibylline oracles, no one of whom
can be said to have been really needed, no one of whom except the
sea-element in Neptune represented any new and vital principles not
already present in the religious world, if not of Numa, at least of
Servius. The best that can be said of these gods is that one or two of
them, notably Mercury and Neptune, exerted no positively detrimental
influences on later generations. For the next two centuries our
chronicles are silent, so far as the actual introduction of new deities
by the aid of the books is concerned, and it is not until B.C. 293 that
the narrative of new gods begins again. But in other ways the oracles
were not idle during these two hundred years. We must rid ourselves of
the idea that it was necessary that their consultation should always
result in the importation of some new Greek deity. The oracles might
order the carrying out of some new religious rite regarding the deities
already present, and these religious rites, especially the public
processions so frequently performed, feed the ever-growing superstition
of the populace. It is essential to a charm or incantation that it
should contain something strange or foreign, it is above all things help
from without; and when the gods send prodigies and portents, when their
statues weep and sweat blood, when cattle speak, and meteors fall from
the sky, something strange and unusual must be done to counteract these
things. Among the foreign acts thus ordered the sacred procession occurs
frequently. It started from the temple of Apollo in the Campus Martius
and passed into the city through the Porta Carmentalis, went across the
Forum and then outside the _pomerium_ again to the temple of Ceres, and
then to the temple of Juno Regina on the Aventine. It was therefore a
power from without which came into their city to purify them and to
carry away out of the city again the impurities of which it had rid the
community.
It is also characteristic of such semi-magical things that they lose
their effects after a few applications, and other things must be sought
always more complicated and more strange. Thus from the beginning of the
republic down through the Second Punic War we have a series of
extraordinary measures, growing more and more complicated until in the
religious frenzy of the years after Cannae even human sacrifices are
performed at the command of the books. In this the third century before
Christ deities begin again to be introduced, and it is to this century
that we now turn.
It is probable that the Romans had always worshipped certain powers of
healing, but what their names were under the old regime we do not know,
except that possibly they were connected with the gods of water. At the
close of the kingdom they received, as we have seen, Apollo the divine
healer, Apollo Medicus, and this was originally the only side of his
activity which he exercised at Rome. At various seasons of plague during
the early centuries of the republic they called on him for help, and on
one such occasion (B.C. 431) they built him a temple. But in the course
of time men began to think lightly of the old family physician who had
stood by the Romans during more than two centuries; his methods were too
conservative, they were felt not to be thoroughly up to date. A new god
of healing had appeared in Rome, the Greek god Asklepios, whom myth
called Apollo's son, though originally he had had no connection with
Apollo. His great sanctuary was at Epidauros, and from there his cult
spread over all the Greek world. At first he was known at Rome only in
the worship of private individuals, who had brought him up from the
Greek colonies of Southern Italy, probably Tarentum or Metapontum; but
his cult was contagious, and the stories of his miraculous cures were
eagerly heard. It is no wonder then that in the presence of a great
pestilence in B.C. 293, when the Sibylline books were consulted, "it was
found in the books," as Livy says, "that Aesculapius must be brought to
Rome from Epidauros." The war with Pyrrhus however was on, and nothing
could be done that year except the setting apart of a solemn day of
prayer and supplication to Aesculapius. It is interesting to observe how
much the Romans have changed since the time exactly two centuries before
(B.C. 493), when Ceres and her companions, the first gods introduced by
the books, received their temple. That was the acknowledgment of gods
well known at Rome, and even then they were immediately identified with
already existing Roman gods; now they actually send an expedition not
only outside of Rome but of Italy itself to bring in the cult of a god
whom they accept by his Greek name. In the following year (B.C. 292) the
expedition started for Epidauros to bring back the god, that is the
sacred snake which was both his symbol and his visible presence. Such an
importation of a sacred snake from Epidauros is not unique in the case
of Rome, but was the normal method of establishing a branch cult. Snakes
were kept at Epidauros for just this purpose, and many branches were
thus established. It is an extremely interesting question as to the
practical medical value of the methods of healing practised at Epidauros
and its branches. For a long time those best fitted to express a
technical opinion, modern physicians who examined the matter, found
nothing good in them, and their opinion seems to receive confirmation
from some of the inscriptions recently discovered at Epidauros, which
tell the most extraordinary tales of miraculous cures. And yet many of
these tales are not intended as actual facts, but rather as pious
legends, proclaimed for the edification of the devout, in order that
their faith might be quickened. Before we condemn the whole affair, we
must realise two facts; one is that some of the most able minds of
Greece, men who were otherwise by no means remarkable for their
religious faith, believed implicitly in Epidauros and went there to be
cured; and the other is that the miraculous action of the god was always
supplemented by medicines, in which there may well have been some real
value.
We are told too much rather than too little about this embassy to
Epidauros, for the atmosphere of this third century is different from
that of the early republic. Greek literature was beginning to influence
Rome, and those generations were being born who were to be the pioneers
in Roman literature. Thus Roman mythology was commencing along Greek
lines and with Greek models, and one of the points where legend grew
thickest and fastest is in this coming of Aesculapius. The plain facts
are evidently that the committee went to Epidauros, obtained the snake,
brought it back safely to Rome, and established the sanctuary on the
island in the Tiber, where a temple was built and dedicated January 1,
B.C. 291. Probably this was the first use to which the island had ever
been put, and from this time dates the first bridge connecting it with
the city; the other bridge, to the right bank, was much later. The
Romans had always considered the island a disadvantage rather than an
advantage. Even in legend it was cursed, for it sprang from the wheat of
the Tarquins. They had always desired to be cut off from it, and had
always feared lest it might act as a means of approach for the enemy
from the opposite bank. The few real facts of Aesculapius's coming grew
into a romantic account of how, to the great surprise and terror of the
sailors, the snake went of its own accord into the Roman ship; and how
it stayed aboard until they reached Antium, and then suddenly swam
ashore and coiled itself up in a sacred palm tree in the enclosure of
the temple of Apollo there; and how, when they were in despair of ever
getting it back again, it returned peaceably to them at the end of three
days, and all went well on the journey to Ostia and up the Tiber until
they were passing the island, when the snake went ashore to make its
permanent home there.
It was a pretty fancy which at a later date formed the island into the
likeness of a boat by building a prow and stem of travertine at either
end, the traces of which may still be seen; and it is a curious instance
of the many survivals of ancient Rome in the modern city, that the
Hospital of S. Bartolommeo stands on the site of the old Aesculapius
sanctuary, and so far as we can tell, twenty-two centuries of suffering
humanity have had the burden of their pain lightened there, in
uninterrupted succession since that new year's day, above three hundred
years before Christ, when the hospital of Aesculapius of Epidauros was
formally opened.
The coming of the god of healing in the opening years of the third
century may well be regarded as an omen of the great suffering which
that century was to bring to Rome. It was a century of almost
uninterrupted warfare: first the Samnite war; then the war with Pyrrhus
and Rome's conquest of Southern Italy; then after a breathing spell of
about a decade the first war with Carthage, and Rome's bitter
apprenticeship in fighting at sea; then campaigns in Cisalpine Gaul; and
finally the war with Hannibal roughly filling the last two decades, the
most fearful contest in all Rome's history, with her most terrible enemy
in her own land of Italy. It is little to be wondered at therefore that
this was in the main a century of religious depression, a time when the
fear of the gods filled every man's heart and when every trifling
apparent irregularity in the course of nature was exaggerated into a
portent declaring the wrath of the gods and needing some immediate and
extraordinary propitiation. It is in just such a moment as this in the
middle of the century (B.C. 249) that the next recorded instance of new
gods occurs. The first war with Carthage was in progress, Rome had just
suffered a terrible defeat off the north-western point of Sicily, at
Drepana, a defeat all the more hideous because it was supposed to have
been caused by the impiety of the Consul Clodius, who, hearing that the
sacred chickens would not eat, perpetrated his grim jest by saying "let
them drink then instead," and drowning them all. But to cap it all the
wall of Rome was struck by lightning. Then action was necessary and the
books were consulted. They ordered that sacrifice should be made to Dis
and Proserpina, a black steer to Dis, and a black cow to Proserpina,
three successive nights, out on the Campus Martius, at an altar which
was called the _Tarentum_, and that the ceremony should be repeated at
the end of a hundred years. Here the myth-makers of later times have
been even more busily at work than they were in the case of Aesculapius.
The Aesculapius story was fitted out by them merely with a few
miraculous details, a few legendary ornaments, but the story of Dis and
Proserpina was so covered with their fabrications that it has only
recently been freed from them and seen in its true light, and certain
phases were so absolutely perverted that there are still a number of
very difficult points. To get a clear understanding of the situation we
must begin quite a distance back.
Taken as a whole, religious beliefs are among the most conservative
things in the world; the individual may grow as radical as you please,
but his effect on the general religious consciousness of his time is
extremely slight. Occasionally the number of radical individuals grows
larger and certain classes of society are affected by their views, but
even, in the periods of religious development which we are apt to think
of as most iconoclastic, society taken in the large, and on the average
of all classes, is not much more radical than in apparently normal
times. And while religion as a whole is conservative, there is one
section of it more conservative than all the rest, a section from which
change is almost excluded, that is the beliefs concerning the dead. In
our discussion of the religion of Numa we saw the very primitive
character of Roman beliefs in this field, the firm retention of the old
animistic idea of the dead, the tendency to class the dead together as a
mass and to believe in a collective rather than an individual
immortality, and above all the abhorrence of the dead and the
disinclination to dwell on their condition and to paint imaginary
pictures of life beyond the grave. In view of these feelings it is not
strange that we have great difficulty in finding any old Roman gods of
the dead, aside from the dead who are themselves all gods. These dead as
gods (_Di Manes_) and possibly Mother Earth (_Terra Mater_) are the only
rulers in the Lower World. In Greece on the contrary death was almost as
natural as life, and though the conditions in early times were not
unlike those in Rome, as Rohde in his _Psyche_ has so wonderfully
described them, the Greek soon grew beyond this, and the world of the
dead became almost as well known to him as the world of the living.
There was a kingdom of the dead, and a king and queen ruled over them.
These rulers were called by different names in different parts of
Greece, but the names which they had in certain parts of the
Peloponnesus, Hades the king of the dead and Persephone his bride, were
destined to survive the rest. The cult of this royal pair travelled far
and wide, but its most notable development occurred in Attica, where
Persephone became Kore the daughter of Demeter, stolen by Hades to
become his bride, while Hades himself under the sunny skies of Athens
lost some of his terrors and became Pluto, the god of riches, especially
the rich blessings of the earth. But all this was very foreign to Rome,
and while the Greeks were thinking these thoughts, the Romans were going
quietly along, content with their simple _Di Manes_. No better proof of
this can be desired than the one accidentally given us in the
introduction of Demeter and her daughter Kore into Rome as Ceres and
Libera in B.C. 493, and the absolute colourlessness and pointlessness of
Libera, in a word the entire lack of connexion in the religious
consciousness of Rome between Libera and Persephone. But in B.C. 249,
almost two and a half centuries later, matters were on a different
basis; Rome had been learning a great deal that was foreign to her old
beliefs, and there was no longer anything impossible to her in the idea
of individual rulers of the dead. Thus at the command of the books Pluto
and Persephone were received into the state-cult, though the strangeness
of the situation was acknowledged, at least in so far that they
translated Pluto into the Latin Dis; Persephone to be sure was left
alone, or more strictly speaking was accommodated to the Latin tongue by
being changed to Proserpina. It is of course impossible that the Romans
of B.C. 249 were entirely ignorant of Pluto and Persephone until the
Sibylline books bade them be brought in. Here again the traders from
Southern Italy had been their teachers; and the name _Tarentum_ of the
altar where the sacrifice was to be made may possibly indicate the town
of Tarentum as the source of the cult. The Romans knew Tarentum only too
well since the eventful war with Pyrrhus, which lay only a generation
back in their history.
And so the Romans adopted the Greek gods of the dead, and thus, at least
theoretically, put their dead ancestors into subjection to the Greeks
just as they themselves, the descendants, were sitting at the feet of
the Greeks in this life. But though the enactment of the Senate gave
these gods Roman citizenship, and the priests of the Sibylline books
were in duty bound to perform the ritual of the cult, be it said to the
credit of the Romans, the gods themselves never took a very deep hold of
the religious life of the people in general. Their names, to be sure,
crept into a few of the old formulae and stood side by side with the
older deities, and Proserpina was made much of by the Roman poets; but
the real tests of devotion, dedicatory inscriptions, are almost entirely
absent. Strangely enough the only thing which seems to have caught
their fancy was the weird ritual of the nightly sacrifice at the
Tarentum, and especially its repetition after one hundred years. This
idea of the hundred years is Roman rather than Greek, and it is at least
open to question whether it may not have been added to the instructions
in the oracle to give the whole matter an added Roman colour. Thus in
B.C. 249 were instituted the Secular Games, which were repeated with
approximate accuracy in B.C. 146, and would doubtless have been again
between B.C. 49 and 46, had not the Civil War completely filled men's
minds and made human sacrifices to the dead, in battle, an almost daily
occurrence. Meantime the Roman annalists were working backwards in their
own peculiar fashion, and building out into the past a series of
fictitious celebrations preceding B.C. 249, one hundred years apart,
back into the time of the kingdom. On the other hand we shall have
occasion later to speak of the restoration of the games and their
reorganisation by Augustus.
Under the test of adversity nations are very much like individuals, and
a national weakness, which is often entirely concealed in normal
conditions, comes prominently and disastrously to the surface in the
hour when strength is most needed. The war with Hannibal was just such a
crisis in Rome's history, and under its influence Rome's dependence upon
the Sibylline books was more pronounced than ever. The seeds of
superstition sown during the earlier centuries burst now into full
blossom, destined to produce the fruit, the gathering of which was to be
the bitter task of the closing centuries of the republic. The story of
the Second Punic War, regarded merely from the military standpoint,
reads for Rome almost like a nightmare, with its long succession of
apparently easy victories turning one by one into defeats; but when we
add to this that other chronicle, of which Livy is equally fond, the
long lists of portents and prodigies sent by the angered gods, and when
we realise that to the masses of the people the wrath of the gods was
more terrible and just as real as the hostility of Hannibal, then we
have not the heart to reproach them for their religious frenzy. Seen by
themselves, the jumping of a cow out of a second-story window, or the
images of the gods shedding tears, do not seem very serious matters, but
endow us with three hundred years of hereditary dread of these things,
give us the instinctive interpretation of them as the turning away from
us of the powers upon which we rely for help, nay their positive
opposition to us and our hopes--and our condition in the presence of
these phenomena would be very different.
Thus almost every year between B.C. 218 and 201 had its share of
religious ceremonial, and the Sibylline books, which had hitherto been,
in theory at least, merely an alternative method of religious procedure
permitted to exist alongside of the older and more conservative forms,
became now the order of the day. Like a Homeric picture in which the
quarrels of the gods in Olympus run parallel to the battles of Greeks
and Trojans on the plains of Troy, so every victory which Rome won over
Hannibal on the field of battle was bought at the price of a victory of
Greek gods over Roman gods in the field of religion; and further,
although Rome succeeded in keeping Hannibal outside of her own walls,
her gods did not succeed in defending the _pomerium_ against the Greek
gods, and it is during this Second Punic War that this, the greatest
safeguard of old Roman religion and customs, was broken down, and the
new gods gained entire possession of the city, placing their temples on
the spots hitherto held most sacred. From now on all distinction ceases,
and it is scarcely possible to speak of a Roman in contrast to a
Graeco-Roman cult. It is important however to observe that this
breakdown occurred because of excess of religious zeal rather than
through neglect and indifference, and though we may indeed notice a
gradual deterioration of the deities introduced by the books, all the
way down from the busy working gods like Ceres and Mercury and Neptune
to the more miraculous Aesculapius, and the cult of Dis or Proserpina
with its possibilities of weird fantastic worship, there have been
however as yet only scanty traces of the orgiastic element. But this was
the next step, and it was not long in coming. The rapid campaigns of the
earlier years of the war with Hannibal had passed, Cannae (B.C. 216) had
been somewhat retrieved by Metaurus (B.C. 207), where the reinforcements
for Hannibal, led by Hasdrubal, had been cut to pieces, but the result
was not what had been hoped for, and Hannibal had not left Italy, but
entrenched in the mountains of the south he seemed to be preparing to
pass the rest of his life there. It was in this the year B.C. 205 that
the help of the books was again sought, if peradventure they might show
the way to drive Hannibal out of the country. The reply came that, when
a foreign-born enemy should wage war upon the land, he could be
conquered and driven from Italy, if the Great Mother of the gods should
be brought to Rome from Phrygia. The rest of the story is so quaintly
and withal so truthfully told by Livy (Bk. xxix.) that it will not be
amiss to quote his words:--"The oracle discovered by the Decemviri
affected the Senate the more on this account because the ambassadors who
had brought the gifts [vowed at the battle of Metaurus] to Delphi
reported that when they were sacrificing to the Pythian Apollo the omens
were all favourable, and that the oracle had given response that a
greater victory was at hand for the Roman people than that one from
whose spoils they were then bringing gifts. And as a finishing touch to
this same hope they dwelt upon the prophetic opinion of Publius Scipio
regarding the end of the war, because he had asked for Africa as his
province. And so in order that they might the more quickly obtain that
victory which promised itself to them by the omens and oracles of fate,
they began to consider what means there was of bringing the goddess to
Rome. As yet the Roman people had no states in alliance with them in
Asia Minor; however they remembered that formerly Aesculapius had been
brought from Greece for the sake of the health of the people, though
they had no alliance with Greece. They realised too that a friendship
had been begun with King Attalus [of Pergamon] ... and that Attalus
would do what he could in behalf of the Roman people; and so they
decided to send ambassadors to him, ... and they allotted them five
ships-of-war in order that they might approach in a fitting manner the
countries which they desired to interest in their favour. Now when the
ambassadors were on their way to Asia they disembarked at Delphi, and
approaching the oracle asked what prospect it offered them and the Roman
people of accomplishing the things which they had been sent to do. It is
said that the reply was that through King Attalus they would obtain what
they sought, but that when they brought the goddess to Rome they should
see to it that the best man in Rome should be at hand to receive her.
Then they came to Pergamon to the king [Attalus], and he received them
graciously and led them to Pessinus in Phrygia, and he gave over to them
the sacred stone which, the natives said, was the Mother of the gods,
and bade them carry it to Rome. And Marcus Valerius Falto was sent ahead
by the ambassadors and he announced that the goddess was coming, and
that the best man in the state must be sought out to receive her with
due ceremony." In the next year (B.C. 204) after recounting new
prodigies Livy continues:--"Then too the matter of the Idaean Mother
must be attended to, for aside from the fact that Marcus Valerius, one
of the ambassadors who had been sent ahead, had announced that she would
soon be in Italy, there was also a fresh message that she was already at
Tarracina. The Senate had to decide a very important matter, namely who
was the best man in the state, for every man in the state preferred a
victory in such a contest as this to any commands or offices which the
vote of the Senate or the people might give him. They decided that of
all the good men in the state the best was Publius Scipio.... He then
with all the matrons was ordered to go to Ostia to meet the goddess and
to receive her from the ship, to carry her to land and to give her over
to the women to carry. After the ship came to the mouth of the Tiber,
Scipio, going out in a small boat, as he had been commanded, received
the goddess from the priests and carried her to land. And the noblest
women of the land ... received her ... and they carried the goddess in
their arms, taking turn about while all Rome poured out to meet her, and
incense-burners were placed before the doors where she was carried by,
and incense was burned in her honour. And thus praying that she might
enter willingly and propitiously into the city, they carried her into
the temple of Victory, which is on the Palatine, on the day before the
Nones of April [April 4]. And this was a festal day and the people in
great numbers gave gifts to the goddess, and a banquet for the gods was
held, and games were performed which were called _Megalesia_." This
extraordinary picture is probably in the main historically correct. The
most striking part of it, the enthusiasm of the Roman populace, is
certainly not overdrawn. Thus was introduced into Rome the last deity
ever summoned by means of the books, the one whose cult was destined to
outlast that of all the others, and to do more harm and produce more
demoralisation than all the other cults together. To understand why this
was so, we must go back for a moment.
The influence of Greece on Rome was progressive, and we are able to
indicate at least three distinct periods and phases of it, so far as
religion is concerned: first, the informal coming of a few Greek gods
who adapted themselves more or less completely to the old Roman
character; such are Hercules and Castor and even Apollo, though Apollo
was indirectly responsible for the second period, because he was the
cause of the coming of the Sibylline books. The influence of these books
produced the second period, with its characteristics of ever-growing
superstition, and greater pomp in cult acts, but though the sobriety of
the old days had changed into a restless activity, the new gods who came
in and the new cult acts introduced were still of such a character that
Romans could take part in the worship without shame. But just as the
staid Apollo had produced the books, so now as their last bequest the
books brought in the Great Mother, and the third period had begun, the
period of orgiastic Oriental worship, which prevailed, at least among
certain classes, until the establishment of Christianity. We may well
ask who this Great Mother was, and why this one Greek cult should be so
different from all the rest.
At different points in Asia Minor and in Crete a goddess was worshipped,
originally without proper name, as the great source of all fertility,
the mother of all things, even of the gods. Mount Dindymos in Phrygia
was one of the chief centres of the cult, and there the Great Mother was
known also as Cybele. From these various centres the cult spread over
all the Greek world, but wherever it went, it always gave evidence of
its birthplace by certain strange Oriental elements both in its myths
and in its rites. Its devotees were a noisy orgiastic band, who filled
the streets with their dances, and the air with their singing and the
clashing of their symbols, to the accompaniment of the rattling of coin
in the money box--for the collection of money from the bystanders was
always a part of the performance.
This then was what the "best man in the state" and the grave Roman
matrons went forth from Rome to receive--a sacred stone representing the
goddess, and a band of noisy emasculated priests; and this was what they
opened their gates to, and took up into their holy of holies, the
Palatine hill, the birthplace of Rome. The Greeks had again come bearing
gifts, and like the Trojans who broke down their walls and took the
wooden horse up into their citadel, Romans, the reputed descendents of
these Trojans, were carrying up to their most sacred hill another gift
of Greece which was to capture their city. They put the image in the
temple of Victoria on the Palatine until such time as its own temple was
ready to receive it, and the goddess of Victory seemed to respond to its
presence, for did not Hannibal leave Italy the very next year? And who
would be so impious as to suggest that to Scipio and not Cybele belonged
the glory, and that a strong Roman army in Africa affected Hannibal
more than a sacred stone on the Palatine?
It may well be doubted whether anything but such a great exigency would
ever have induced Rome to accept such an utterly foreign cult; and when
the nightmare of the war was past, the Senate awoke to the realisation
that a very serious act had been committed. To their credit be it said
that they did what they could to minimise the evil. The goddess had
brought her own priests with her, the cult was in their hands, and there
the law decreed it must stay, and no Roman citizen could become a
priest. That this law was really enforced is shown by several cases
where punishment, even transportation across the sea, was meted out to
transgressors. Then too the worship must be in the main confined to the
precincts of the temple on the Palatine, and only on certain days of the
year were the priests allowed to perform in the streets of the city. It
is significant of the strength of Roman law that these enactments held
good for three and a half centuries, and were not changed until the
reign of Antoninus Pius.
In the introduction of the Great Mother the Sibylline books performed
their last and most notable achievement. Hereafter they introduced no
new deities, and were consulted only occasionally, chiefly for political
purposes, for example in B.C. 87 against the followers of Sulla, and in
B.C. 56 in connexion with a scheme of purely political import. Their
work was done, and we have seen in what it consisted. For three hundred
years they had been encouraging the growth of superstition. From their
vantage ground of the temple of Juppiter Optimus Maximus, the essence of
all that was most patriotically Roman in Rome, they had been giving
forth these infallible oracles which seemed so much superior to the
simple "yes and no" answers with which the old Romans had been content
in their dealings with the gods. In times of peril by pestilence and by
battle they had given advice, and the pestilence had ceased and the
battle had turned to victory. It seemed indeed that the Sibyl deserved
the gratitude of Rome. Time alone could teach them what the books had
really given them. It was only in the coming generations that it became
evident that the abuse of faith, the substitution of incantation for
devotion, was destructive of true religion. It is the effect of this
substitution on the various classes of society under the new and trying
social conditions of the last two centuries of the republic that forms
the theme of our next chapter.
THE DECLINE OF FAITH
It is the fashion of our day to think no evil of Greece. In art we are
experiencing another Renaissance, not like that of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries in a revival of ancient Rome, but in a movement
leading behind Rome to the classic and even the pre-classic models of
Greece. In itself it is a healthful tendency, a needed corrective to the
sensational search for novelty which characterised the closing years of
the nineteenth century. But in our admiration for the Greek spirit we
ought not to forget that after Alexander that spirit lost much of its
beauty, and aged very rapidly. We may indeed regret the fact that Rome,
like certain persons of our acquaintance, seemed at times to possess a
strong faculty for assimilating the worst of her surroundings, while
occasionally curiously unresponsive to the better things; and yet we
ought in justice to strive to realise the fact that not only is the
Greek spirit at its best an unteachable thing, but that at the
historical moment when Rome came under that influence the Greek world
was very old and weary. It was Rome's misfortune and not her fault that
when she was old enough to go to school, Alexandrianism with its
pedantic detail was the order of the day in mythology, and the timorous
post-Socratic schools were the teachers of philosophy. Naturally if Rome
had been another Greece she would have worked back from these later
forms to the truer, purer spirit, but Rome was not Greece, and no
thoughtful man ever pretended that she was. In the third century before
Christ Greece began actively to influence Rome; before that time
Hellenic influence had been confined largely to the effects on religion
produced by the Sibylline books, and to the effects on society caused by
the presence of Greek traders. But now Greek thought as embodied in the
literature began to affect Roman thought, and to bring into being a
literature based on Greek models. Three centuries of Sibylline oracles
had produced for Rome the pathological religious condition of the Second
Punic War, when she did not think twice before breaking down the
religious barrier which had hitherto separated the national from the
adopted elements in her religion, and at the same time unhesitatingly
reached out to Asia Minor for an Oriental cult, masquerading in Greek
colours, and placed on the Palatine the Great Mother of Pessinus. From
this time on two influences were steadily at work which shaped the
history of Roman religion in the two remaining centuries till the close
of the republic: one, mythology, directly affecting the forms of the
cult and the beliefs concerning the individual gods; the other,
philosophy, attacking the whole foundation of religious belief in
general.
Greece gave her gods to Rome when she herself was weary of them, she
gave her the tired gods, exhausted by centuries of handling, long ago
dragged down from Olympus, and weary with serving as lay-figures for
poets and artists, and being for ever rigged out in new mythological
garments, or jaded with the laboratory experiments of philosophers who
tried to interpret them in every conceivable fashion or else to do away
with them entirely. It is no wonder that it did not take the Romans more
than a century to come to the end of these gods, to find that the only
one among them who could satisfy their religious desires was the least
Greek of them all, the Magna Mater, and having found this to go forth to
take to themselves more like unto her, in a word, to crave the
sensational cults of the Orient. And the philosophy which Greece gave
Rome was no better than the mythology. It is not strange that human
thought experienced a reaction after a century which contained both
Plato and Aristotle, but it is a pity that Rome should have learned her
philosophy from a period of doubt and scepticism, an age in which the
lesser masters, who had known the greater ones, had gone, leaving
nothing but pupils' pupils.
The history of religion in Rome during the last two centuries of the
republic is the story of the action and reaction of these two
tendencies--the one toward the novel and sensational in worship, which
we may call superstition, the other the philosophy of doubt, which we
may call scepticism--in the presence of the established religion of the
state. This much the two centuries have in common, but here their
resemblance ends. In the first of these centuries (B.C. 200-100) the
state religion was able to hold her own, at least in outward appearance,
and to wage war against both tendencies. In the other century (B.C. 100
to Augustus) politics gained control of the state religion and so robbed
her of her strength that she was crushed between the opposing forces of
superstition and scepticism. It is to the story of the earlier of these
two centuries, the second before Christ, that we now turn.
With the close of the Second Punic War there began for Rome a period of
very great material prosperity. This prosperity was, to be sure, not
exactly distributed, and it is not without its resemblance to some of
our modern instances of commercial prosperity, in that it was not so
much a general bettering of economic conditions as the very rapid
increase of the wealth of a relatively small number, an increase gained
at the expense of positive detriment to a large element in the
population. Thus it was that a century of which the first seventy years
provide an almost unparalleled spectacle of the increase of national
territory, accompanied, according to the ancient methods of taxation, by
a vast increase in national wealth, should close with the tragedies of
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and the legacy of class hatred which
produced the civil wars. This growth in wealth and territory was not
without its effects on the outward appearance of the state religion. The
territory was gained by a series of minor wars in the course of which
many temples were vowed; and the spoils of the war provided the means
for the fulfilment of the vows. Thus to the outward observer it might
well have seemed that the religion of the state was enjoying a time of
great prosperity. Between the close of the Punic War (B.C. 201) and the
year of Tiberius Gracchus (B.C. 133) we have accurate knowledge of the
dedication of no less than nineteen state temples, and there were
undoubtedly many others of which we have no record. Another apparently
good sign is the fact that the Sibylline books are silent, so far as the
introduction of new deities is concerned. Yet these surface indications
are deceptive. As for the Sibylline books, now that the _pomerium_ line
had been broken down, and the temples of Greek gods might be placed
anywhere in the city, it was a very simple matter for the state to bring
in any Greek god that it pleased, and likening him to a more or less
similar Roman god and calling him by the Roman name, to put up a temple
to him anywhere. It was also true that, as Roman theology was now based
on the principle that every Roman god had his Greek parallel and _vice
versa_, there were no gods left, whose names would have occurred at all
in the Sibylline books, who could not be brought in now without them.
And as for the vowing of new temples, this represented at best merely
the habit formed during more devout days; religion was moving by the
momentum acquired during the Second Punic War, and the gods to whom
these temples were erected were really Greek gods under Roman names. In
a word, not only was the state religion becoming more and more of a form
day by day, but the form was that of Greece and not of Rome. It is
extremely interesting to trace this movement in detail, to look behind
the outward appearance and see the remarkable changes that were really
taking place.
If we look at the temples which were built in the years following the
Second Punic War, we shall have no difficulty in finding examples of the
introduction of Greek gods under Roman names. During the war itself in
the year B.C. 207 a Roman general had vowed a temple to Juventas on the
occasion of a battle near Siena. Juventas was an old Roman goddess, one
of those abstract deities which had been produced by the breaking off
and becoming independent of a cult-title. She was intimately associated
with Juppiter, and had a special shrine in the Capitoline temple.
Juventas was the divine representative of the putting away of childish
things and the assumption of the responsibilities and privileges of
young manhood. This act was symbolised by the Romans in the beautiful
ceremony of putting on the toga of manhood (_toga virilis_), when the
lad was led by his father to the Capitoline temple to make sacrifices to
Juppiter, and at the same time a contribution was made to the treasury
of Juventas. But this was not the goddess in whose honour the temple
vowed at Siena was built at the Circus Maximus and dedicated B.C. 191.
This Juventas was nothing more or less than the Greek Hebe, the female
counterpart of Ganymedes, as cupbearer to the gods. Similarly in B.C.
179 a temple was dedicated to Diana at the Circus Flaminius, but this
was not the old goddess of Aricia, whose cult Rome had adopted for the
sake of increasing her influence in the Latin league. It was the Greek
Artemis, who at her first coming into Rome had been associated with
Apollo in the temple built in B.C. 431, and was now given a temple of
her own. Perhaps the strangest of all is the temple which was erected to
Mars in the Campus Martius in B.C. 138. It might well be supposed that
the Romans would keep holy the reputed father of their race, the god to
whom, under Juppiter, their success was due. On the contrary in B.C.
217, when they were carrying out a Greek ceremony of offering a banquet
to a set of gods, arranged in pairs, they showed no hesitation in
grouping together Mars and Venus to represent the Greek pair Ares and
Aphrodite, thus doing violence to Mars by bringing him into a
relationship with Venus which was entirely foreign to old Roman thought,
and identifying him with Ares, with whom he had nothing to do. Now in
B.C. 138 a temple is built to Ares under the name of Mars, close beside
the venerable old altar of Mars, one of the oldest and most sacred of
Roman shrines.
But this passion for identifying Greek gods with Roman ones did not
confine itself to finding a parallel for the greater gods of Greece; and
less known deities were introduced into Rome in the same way. The old
Roman god, Faunus, in whose honour the ancient festival of the
_Lupercalia_ was yearly celebrated, had as his associate a goddess,
Fauna, who was better known as the "good goddess" (Bona Dea). Eventually
this new title Bona Dea crowded out the old title Fauna, so that it was
almost entirely forgotten. Bona Dea was a goddess of women, and the most
characteristic feature of her worship was the exclusion of men from
taking part in it. Now there was a Greek goddess, called Damia, also a
goddess of women, from whose cult also men were excluded, and her cult
spread from Greece to the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, especially
Tarentum, and so eventually to Rome. But by the time she arrived in Rome
the connexion of Fauna and Bona Dea had been entirely forgotten. Damia
was surely a Bona Dea, yes she was _the_ Bona Dea, for was not the proof
at hand in the fact that men were excluded from both cults? So a temple
was built for her, probably shortly after the Second Punic War, and from
the time no one ever thought of poor Fauna again, except scholars and
poets, who amused themselves, as was their wont, by putting her in
various genealogical relationships to Faunus, as sister, wife, or
daughter, while Damia lived and prospered under the stolen title of the Bona Dea. |
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