We see from this on what a small resemblance such identifications were
based, in this case merely on the presence of a similar minor injunction
in the laws of each cult. But we have here at least a genuine cult which
had arrived and was asking for admission, and in so far we are better
off than in most instances, where nothing substantial was gained by the
identification. Two forces were now at work assisting in this fusion of
Greek and Roman gods, namely art and literature. The capture of Syracuse
marked an epoch in Rome's artistic career; for several centuries she had
employed Greek architects and had also become acquainted with the
artistic types of certain Greek gods, but now all at once a wealth of
Greek sculpture was disclosed to her, and she could not rest content
until all her gods were represented in the fashion of man. The adoption
of the Greek type, in those cases where an identification had already
been effected, was not difficult and was in the main successful, though
there followed almost inevitably an enrichment of the Greek element in
the Roman god because of the presence of some attribute in the statue,
which brought its own myth with it. But there were certain Roman gods
for whom Greek parallels could not be found, and in these cases a
compromise, usually rather an awkward one, had to be effected, as for
example when the Roman gods of the storeroom, the _Di Penates_, were
represented by statues of the Greek Castor and Pollux. In such cases
confusion was sure to follow, and subsequent antiquarians would be
tempted to write treatises proving the original connexion of Castor or
Pollux with the Penates, as gods of protection in general, etc.
Literature too in its own way was fully as misleading, and Roman
scholars became fascinated with the labyrinths of Alexandrian mythology,
and straightway began to build Roman myths as rapidly as possible,
establishing lists of old Latin kings and all sorts of genealogies, and
weaving as many Greek mythological figures as possible into the legends
of the foundation of Italic towns.
It was the ceremonial of the cult however which most often offered the
best means of identification, as we have seen above in the case of Bona
Dea-Damia, where the exclusion of men from the rites was the main point
of similarity. In a similar way the old Roman god of the harvest,
Consus, was identified with the Greek ocean-god Poseidon because
horse-races were a characteristic feature of the festivals of each; and
the old Roman goddess of women and of childbirth was given as her Greek
parallel the Greek goddess Leukothea, the helper of those in peril at
sea, because in both cases slaves were forbidden to take part in the
cult.
But the effect of the capture of Rome by these Greek gods and Greek
ceremonials was not confined to the mere addition of new ideas, and the
transformation of certain old Roman deities. This would have been
comparatively harmless, but there was inevitably another result: the
consequent neglect of all Roman deities for whom no Greek parallels were
forthcoming, and the forgetting of all the original Roman ideas which
were crowded into the background by the novel and more brilliant Greek
ideas. Even the festivals of the old Roman year were treated in the same
cavalier manner. The interest of the people continued only with those
ceremonies which frightened them or pleased them. There were certain
festivals, for example the _Lupercalia_, the old ceremony of
purification on February 15, for which a reverence was still felt; and
others like the _Parilia_, the birthday of Rome, on April 21, or the
Anna Perenna festival on March 15, which involved open-air celebrations
and picnics. These and others like them were always kept up, while many
others were totally neglected. Naturally for the present the forms were
continued by the state; the festivals were celebrated at least by the
priests; and every temple received sacrifice on its birthday. The wheels
of the state religion were still running, but the power behind them had
stopped, and it was only momentum which kept them in motion.
It is only when we realise these things that we can understand how it
was possible that the most learned scholars at the close of the republic
were so desperately ignorant concerning old Roman religion. In regard to
many of the old Roman gods they know absolutely nothing, and try to
disguise their ignorance behind a show of learning based on etymological
sleight-of-hand; in regard to the rest their information is so tangled
with Greek ideas that it is often almost impossible to unravel the mass
and separate the old from the new. This unravelling has been the tedious
occupation of the last half century in the study of Roman religion; and
so patiently and successfully has it been accomplished that, although we
would give almost anything for a few books of Varro's _Divine
Antiquities_, it is tolerably certain that the possession of these books
would not change in the least the fundamental concepts underlying the
modern reconstruction of ancient Roman religion; though it is equally
certain that these books would emphasise just so much more strongly,
what we already realise, that this modern reconstruction is in distinct
contradiction to many of Varro's favourite theories. It is an
accomplishment of which History may well be modestly proud, that modern
scholars have been able to eliminate, to a large degree, the personal
equation and the myopic effects of his own time from the statements of
the greatest scholar of Roman antiquity, and thus though handicapped by
the possession of merely a small percentage of the facts which Varro
knew, to arrive at a concept of the whole matter infinitely more correct
than that which his books contained.
During this second century before Christ, therefore, the state religion
was apparently unchanged so far as the outward form was concerned. The
terminology and the ceremonies were much the same as before, but the
content was quite different: Greek gods and Greek ideas had displaced
Roman gods and Roman ideas, and the official representatives of
religion, the state priests, were carrying the whole burden of worship
on their own shoulders, because popular interest had been in the main
deflected and was working along other lines. These lines of rival
interest were superstition and scepticism, phenomena which at first
sight appear as distinct opposites, but which are on the contrary very
closely akin, so that they usually occur together not only in the same
age, but frequently even in the same individual. They are purely
relative terms, and the essence of superstition consists in its surplus
element, just as the essence of scepticism lies in its deficiency. No
religion judged from the standpoint of the worshipper can properly be
called a superstition, but if once we can establish the essential things
in a religion, then any large addition to those essential things savours
of superstition. Speaking with historical sympathy we have no right
therefore to designate early Roman religion as a superstition--it may of
course be relatively so in comparison with other religious forms--but
once we have established the essential elements in that early religion,
we may consider the introduction of new and entirely different elements
as superstition. The old religion of Rome consisted in the exact and
scrupulous fulfilment of a large number of minute ceremonials. The
result of this careful fulfilment of ritual was that the powers around
man did him no harm but rather good, and that was the end of the whole
matter. Religion did not command or even permit special inquiries into
these powers; it was not only not man's duty to try to know the gods, it
was his positive duty to try not to. Through the influence of Greece
there had now come into Rome an altogether new idea, nourished largely
by the Sibylline books, and represented most fully in the Magna Mater,
the idea of the perpetual service of a god, a consecration to him, to
the exclusion of all other things, and a life given over to the
orgiastic performance of cult acts, which produced a state of ecstasy
and consequently a communion with the deity. Along with this there went
a belief in the possibility, by means of certain books and certain men,
of obtaining from the gods a knowledge of the future. It is these
surplus beliefs, quite contrary to the spirit of old Roman religion,
which may justly be called superstition.
The Sibylline books had aroused these feelings, a knowledge of the
oracle at Delphi had increased them, the rites of Aesculapius had
carried them farther, but it was not until the Magna Mater came that
they seem to have burst forth in any large degree. But aside from the
rapid growth of the Magna Mater cult itself we have in this second
century two instances of this tendency. The first was connected with the
god Dionysos-Liber, innocent enough at his first reception in B.C. 493,
in the company of Demeter-Ceres and Kore-Libera. To be sure the state
had introduced him merely as the god of wine, but the mystery element in
Dionysos took firm hold on private worship, and the Bacchanalian clubs
or societies began to spread over Italy. In the course of about three
centuries they had become a formidable menace to the morals and even the
physical security of the inhabitants of Rome. Their meetings instead of
occurring three times a year took place five times a month, and finally
in B.C. 186 the famous Bacchanalian trial took place, of which Livy (Bk.
xxxix.) gives such a graphic account, and to which a copy of the
inscription of the decree of the Senate, preserved to our day, gives
such eloquent testimony, providing as it does severe penalties for
subsequent offenders, and recognising on the other hand large liberty of
conscience.
The same love of mystery and longing for knowledge which produced the
Bacchanalian clubs accorded a warm reception to astrology and made men
listen with eagerness to those who could tell their fortunes or guide
their lives by means of the stars. We do not know when the bearers of
this knowledge first arrived in Rome, but Cato, in his _Farm Almanac_,
our earliest piece of prose literature, in giving rules for the
behaviour of the farm bailiff especially enjoins the intending landowner
that his bailiff should not be given to the consultation of Chaldaean
astrologers. Within half a century the problem of the Chaldaeans grew so
serious that state interference was necessary, and in B.C. 139 the
praetor Cn. Cornelius Hispalus issued an edict ordering the Chaldaeans
to leave Rome and Italy within ten days.
The same age which produced this growth of superstition brought also the
antidote for it in the shape of a sceptical philosophy, but the only
trouble was that this philosophy not only cured superstition but in
doing so killed the genuine religious spirit underlying it. It cast out,
to be sure, the seven devils of superstition, but when men returned to
themselves again, they found their whole spiritual house swept and
garnished. With the death of the direct pupils of Aristotle, the Greek
mind had thought out all the problems of philosophy of which man at that
time was able to conceive. The following generations of philosophers
devoted themselves either to the elaboration of detail or to a renewed
examination of the foundations of belief, with the result that their
smaller minds came to smaller conclusions, and the end of their
investigations was one increased scepticism. The schools of the day
showed many slight variations and bore many different names, but they
all agreed in being more or less pervaded by a sceptical spirit, and by
accenting ethics as against metaphysics, though they defined ethics very
differently according to their starting point.
One of the earliest philosophical influences which reached Rome was
however that of a pre-Socratic school, the school of Pythagoras. This
was natural enough in itself, as the headquarters of the school was in
Southern Italy, but it is curious and significant that the first
pronounced instance of its influence occurred shortly after the Second
Punic War, and in connexion with a clever fraud which was perpetrated
with a view to influencing religion. In the year B.C. 181 a certain man
reported that when he was ploughing his field, which lay on the other
side of the Tiber, at the foot of the Janiculum, the plough had laid
bare two stone sarcophagi, stoutly sealed with lead, and bearing
inscriptions in Greek and Latin according to which they purported to
contain, one of them the body of King Numa, the other, his writings.
When they were opened the one which ought to have contained the body was
empty, in the other lay two rolls, each roll consisting of seven books;
the one set of seven was written in Latin and treated of pontifical law,
the other consisted of philosophical writings. They were examined, found
to be heretical and subversive to true religion, and were accordingly
burned in the Comitium. The connexion of Numa and Pythagoras,
historically impossible but believed in at this time, makes it
practically certain that this was a clever attempt to introduce the
philosophy of Pythagoras into Rome under the holy sanction of the name
of Numa. Fortunately the zeal of the city praetor frustrated the scheme.
But the doctrines of philosophy, which thus failed to enter by the door
of religion, found the door of literature wide open for them. As the
irony of fate would have it, Cato, the stalwart enemy of Greek
influence, had brought back from Sardinia with him the poet Ennius, and
at about the time when the false books of Numa were burning in the
Comitium Ennius was giving to the world a Latin translation of the
_Sacred History_ of the Greek Euhemerus. This Euhemerus, a Sicilian who
had lived about a century before this time, earned his title to fame by
writing a novel of adventure and travel, in which he described a trip
which he had taken in the Red Sea along the coast of Arabia to the
wonderful island of Panchaia, where he found a column with an
inscription on it telling the life history of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus,
who were thus shown to have been historical characters afterwards
elevated into deities. It was this theological element in his book which
made him famous. This theory of the historical origin of the gods is
even to-day called Euhemerism, and has exerted a baleful influence over
writers on mythology from its author's day down to our own. These then
were the doctrines which Ennius presented to the Romans in their own
tongue, and it is pathetic to realise that his _Sacred History_ formed
the first formal treatise on theology which Rome ever possessed. Born
under such an evil star, it is small wonder that her theological
speculations never reached great metaphysical heights.
In these days it seemed to the Senate that the question of philosophy
was beginning to be so serious that it might be considered as a public
danger, and that it was therefore their duty to try to cope with it.
They chose, of course, the typical Roman method of dealing with such
matters, and the philosophers were expelled from Rome. At first in B.C.
173 it was only the Epicureans who were sent out, but in B.C. 161 the
edict was broadened to include philosophers in general. However six
years later, in B.C. 155, there came to Rome an embassy of philosophers
whose mission was avowedly political and not philosophical, and who thus
could not be excluded, while at the same time they took occasion to
preach their philosophical doctrines. It was fortunate for Rome that
Stoicism, the best among all these philosophies, appealed to her most
strongly and became thus the national philosophy of Rome. Stoicism was
in many respects quite as sceptical as the others, but it had at least
this great advantage that it laid a strong emphasis on ethics, and was
in so far capable of becoming a guide of life. It might be well enough
for Greeks, whose aggressive work in the world had been done, to settle
down to an idle old age with a theory of life which practically excluded
the possibility of strong decisive action, but Rome was still young, and
most of her work was still before her. She might think herself very old
and pretend to take peculiar delight in many of the more decadent forms
of Greek thought, but in reality her leaders instinctively turned to
Stoicism, as affording a compromise between the mere thoughtless
activity of youth, which acts for the love of acting, and the jaded
philosophy of the vanity of all effort. About the middle of the century
(_circa_ B.C. 150) there existed in Rome a centre of culture and
intellectual influence, a little group of men peculiarly interesting,
because they form practically the first instance of an intellectual
coterie in the history of Rome. Their leader was the younger Scipio, who
had as his associates his friend Laelius, the poet Lucilius, whose
brilliant writings, submerged by the more brilliant satires of Horace,
form one of the most deplorable losses in Roman literature, and the
Stoic philosopher Panaitios of Rhodes. Terence had also belonged to the
circle, but he was now dead. Stoicism was the avowed philosophy of these
men, and their influence, especially that of Panaitios and Lucilius, did
much to popularise their chosen philosophical creed.
While Stoicism claimed superiority to religion and showed the
impossibility of attaching any value to religious knowledge, it
recognised the necessity of religion for the common people on grounds of
expediency, and effected a reconciliation between this denial of
religion on the one hand, and the recognition of it on the other, by
asserting that the religion of the state was justified not only by
expediency but much more by the fact that it was after all only the
presentation of the truths of Stoicism in a form which was intelligible
to the lower classes. Had this group of Scipio and his associates made
an effort to emphasise these particular doctrines of Stoicism in
relation to religion, the downfall of the state religion, which occurred
in the following century, might have been hindered. But for reasons,
which we shall see in a moment, this downfall could not have been
prevented, and it is doubtful whether the influence of any philosophical
system, even when supported by such prominent men, could have
perceptibly postponed the catastrophe. Meantime the only visible
contribution of Stoicism to the problem of religion was the growth under
her influence of the idea of a "double truth," one truth for the
intellectual classes and one for the common people, reaching its climax
in the phrase "It is expedient for the state to be deceived in matters
of religion" (_expedit igitur falli in religione civitatem_). This was
the attitude toward religion of the most intellectual men in the
community at the beginning of what was in many ways the most terrible
period in Rome's history.
The last century before Christ (more exactly B.C. 133-B.C. 27) is the
story of how Rome became an empire because she was no longer able to be
a republic; it is the history of the growth of one-man power because
many-men power had become impossible. This growth was caused not only,
nor at first even chiefly, by the grasping character of Rome's
statesmen, but by the increase of the rabble and the consequent
unmanageable character of her population, except under the firm hand of
a single master. And the reason why it took one hundred years of civil
war to change the republic into the empire was not because the spirit of
the republic was so slow in dying that its death struggles filled a
century, but merely because the republic died too easily and the way to
one-man power was so simple that there were too many candidates for the
position, and hence the civil wars between them. These civil wars were
bound to continue until the bitter lessons of experience had taught men
not only how to gain the supreme control, which was relatively easy, but
how to keep it and exclude rivals, which was much more difficult. The
ambitious leaders of this century did not have to create a throne; that
was ready to their hand. Their task was only to put defences around it.
Even these defences of it were not directly against the people, for the
people had no desire to overthrow the throne, but merely against the
rival candidates. Step by step from Tiberius Gracchus to Gaius Gracchus,
and on to Marius, to Sulla, to Pompey, to Julius Caesar, possession
became more and more permanent; until from being a mere momentary
position, it became nine points of the law, and Octavian made the tenure
perfect by adding an almost religious reverence to his person in the
title _Augustus_.
In the main the foreign wars of the second century before Christ gave
place to the Civil War at home, but there was one exception to this, the
war with Mithradates, king of Pontus, which on various occasions during
the early part of the century took large bodies of Romans to the Orient.
And as though to supplement this knowledge of the East, in the closing
half of the century the field of the civil struggle was enlarged so that
it too included the East and South-East. We have already seen so many
instances of the effects of political events on the course of Roman
religion that it is a matter of no surprise to us to see that both of
these struggles, the Civil War and the Oriental wars, left their marks
on religion. It would be much more surprising if they had not done so.
In the struggle of the rivals at home every possible weapon was
employed, and it was soon discovered that the priests and the
paraphernalia of religion were excellent means of political power and
influence. The religion of the state therefore became enslaved to
politics. On the other hand the campaigns in the East made the soldiers,
and eventually on their return the whole populace, acquainted with
various Oriental deities, which helped to satisfy their craving for the
sensational and the superstitious. Thus while the state religion in its
debauched condition was losing influence, the orgiastic element in
worship was gaining power through these newly acquired Oriental cults.
The story of the religion of the last century of the republic is
accordingly the history of the control of state religion by politics and
its consequent destruction, and the growth of superstition because of
the coming of new Oriental worships; and we may add to these two topics
a third: the pathetic attempts of philosophy to breathe new life into
the dead religion of the state.
When it comes to the question of the human characters whose names are
writ large on this page of religious history, the Dictator Lucius
Cornelius Sulla towers above all others. To his political insight is
largely owing the harnessing of the state religion to the chariot of the
politician, now and hereafter; and it was he who was the foremost leader
of Roman armies to the Orient, and the man who, because of his
peculiarly superstitious character, encouraged the worship of the
strange deities which were found there. In both these directions he was
ably seconded by Pompey, half a generation later. On the other hand the
futile efforts of philosophy to improve the situation were inspired
during the earlier period by the chief priest Scaevola, a contemporary
of Sulla, and during Pompey's and Caesar's time by Varro, the greatest
scholar that Rome ever produced.
Let us follow first the fortunes of the religion of the state at the
hands of the politicians. The upper and influential classes of Roman
society were now thoroughly imbued with Stoic philosophy and accordingly
with the doctrine of the "double truth" in the field of religion--the
real philosophical truth which was their own peculiar property and
which showed them clearly that all the forms of religion were vain, and
its doctrines at best a clumsy statement in roundabout parables of a
truth which they saw face to face; and that lower "truth" intended for
the masses and dictated by the pressure of necessity, the concrete state
religion in all its details, which must be preserved among the lower
classes in the interest of the state and of society. The state religion
was thus a matter of expediency and of usefulness. But once this idea of
its usefulness was put into the foreground, it was natural that the
question should immediately be asked: Was this state religion as useful
after all as it might be? Could it not be put to greater uses? If
religion existed in general for its political effects, why should it not
be used by the individual, like any other political apparatus, for his
own individual advancement? The man to whom this idea seems to have come
first in all its fullness was Sulla, and he proceeded immediately to act
upon it. The control of religion could, of course, be obtained best
through the priesthoods, and those priesthoods were naturally most worth
gaining which possessed the greatest right of interference in affairs of
state. These priesthoods were: first the Augurs, with their traditional
right to break up assemblies and to declare legislative action null and
void; then the Pontiffs, with their general control of all vexed
questions concerning the intersection of divine and human law; and
lastly the XVviri, or the keepers of the Sibylline books, in charge also
of the cults to which the oracles had given birth. Accordingly he
increased the numbers of these three priesthoods, raising each to
fifteen; and inasmuch as the old right of the colleges of the priests to
fill vacancies in their own bodies themselves had been taken away from
them in B.C. 103, and such vacancies were now filled by popular vote, it
was an easy thing for him to fill the new positions with his own men.
The result of accentuating the political importance of these three
colleges was that the whole body of the state religion became actuated
with a political spirit, and the whole structure was remodelled along
the lines of this new valuation. The immediate effect of this was that
the priests themselves became entirely absorbed in politics. To be sure
Sulla was not responsible for all of this, because the tendency had been
in this direction ever since the time of the Punic wars. In the good old
days of Roman religion the office of priest had been in the main its own
reward, and though the priests formed by no means a separate class, and
the individual priest had many secular interests and occasionally some
political ones, he was not supposed to hold political office. In the
time of the Punic wars, however, the tide began to turn. The earliest
recorded instance of a priest holding a high political office is in the
year B.C. 242 when the Flamen Martialis or special priest of Mars was
chosen Consul; but when the gentleman in question started to go to the
war, he was forbidden by the Pontifex Maximus. In B.C. 200 the Flamen
Dialis, or special priest of Juppiter, was allowed to be made aedile,
but his brother had to be especially authorised to take the oath of
office in his stead, since the priest of Juppiter, the god of oaths, was
himself not allowed to take an oath. In the course of the next century
such cases became more common, and where the thing was not allowed, the
priesthood became unpopular, and was sometimes left entirely vacant.
This last thing happened, for instance, in the case of the Flaminium
Diale, a position which was unfilled from B.C. 87 till B.C. 11. But the
evil effects of politics were not confined to the emptying of certain
priesthoods, which after all were of no very great importance, except as
their presence tended to sustain the _morale_ of the old religious
ritual. Its effects were much more disastrous in the very important
priesthoods which had now become essentially political offices. The
exclusively political interests of the incumbents, combined with the
fact that each man was elected by general vote of the people and without
any special fitness for the position, as had been the case in the old
days, tended to break down all the traditions of the college, and thus
to destroy much of the knowledge which was being handed down largely by
oral tradition. There arose therefore an ignorance of the ritual of the
cult which was great just in proportion as the knowledge originally
present had been accurate and intricate. But even this was not all; the
arranging of the yearly calendar, with its complicated intercalation of
days to bring into harmony the solar and the lunar years, was still in
the hands of the priests, and here the results of their growing
ignorance were most appalling. The calendar became terribly disordered;
and this again had its reaction on religion, for the calendar month
occasionally fell so out of gear with the natural seasons that it was
impossible to celebrate some of the old Roman festivals, which had a
distinct bearing on certain seasons of the year.
Thus the greatest enemies of the religion of the state were those of its
own household, the priests, who turned the reverent formalism of the old
days into a mockery, and made their priesthood merely a means of
political influence.
Now that the old Roman gods had been changed into new-fangled Greek
gods, and the old Roman priesthoods into modern political clubs, it is
little wonder that the religion of the fathers ceased to satisfy their
descendants. But while history shows that specific religious creeds have
often proved mortal and subject to change and decay, the same history
makes clear that the religious instinct is a constant factor in
humanity; and we must not suppose for a moment that the religious need
of the Roman community had ceased to exist, simply because the religion
of the state had ceased to satisfy it. From the day when the Sibyl gave
her first oracles to Rome on down to the time of Sulla, the desire for
the sensational and the extraordinary in religion had been steadily
growing. It had its birth in the idea that there was such a thing as a
direct communion with the deity, and that the oracles were an immediate
command from him. It was nourished by the sense of foreignness in the
Greek ceremonies gradually introduced into the cult. It fed on the more
sensational aspects of certain of the gods brought in: on the
enthusiastic rites of Bacchus, on the miracle-working of Aesculapius, on
the Stygian mystery of Dis and Proserpina. But its fulfilment was to
come from the East, that inexhaustible fountain of religious energy. In
the Magna Mater it recognised its own. This was the first undiluted
Orientalism which came to Rome. But the state itself had received it,
and had managed in some unaccountable way to put upon this outlandish
Eastern cult the stamp of Rome's nationality, that stamp which no nation
ever successfully and permanently resisted; and thus the reception of
the cult on the part of the state was not only a disgraceful thing,
tending to degrade true religion and spread the contagion of
Orientalism, but it also made those whose appetite had been aroused
eager for other deities, whose cult would have the great additional
charm of being unlicensed by the state, and hence savouring of
unlawfulness.
Such a cult, long half-consciously desired, was at length found, when in
B.C. 92 the Roman soldiery commanded by Sulla penetrated into the valley
of Comana in Cappadocia. There was a whole community, a miniature state,
devoted to the service of a goddess not unlike the Great Mother of
Pessinus, but whose cult was more ecstatic, more orgiastic, than that of
the Magna Mater, at least as Rome knew her. The king was the chief
priest, and the citizens were priests and priestesses. The war with
Mithradates brought the Roman army there again and also to another
Comana in Pontus, where there was a branch of the Cappadocian cult. It
was not the ignorant soldiery alone who were impressed by what they saw;
their leader, Sulla, was fully as much affected, and on his return to
Italy when the great crisis in his career, his march on Rome and his
storming of the Eternal City, lay before him, it was the goddess of
Comana who appeared to him in a dream and gave him courage. Thus her
cult entered Rome, and the capture of the city by Sulla has its parallel
in the capture of the hearts of the people by his companion, the goddess
of Comana. The original name of this goddess seems to have been Mâ, but
the Greeks, who also knew her, had likened her to Enyo, their goddess
of strife and warfare; hence in these days of facile identification the
Romans' course was clear, and she became straightway Bellona, called by
the name of their old goddess of war. Of all the chapters of the history
of such identifications none is more curious than this. The old Bellona
had borne to Mars the same relation that Fides, the goddess of good
faith, had borne to Juppiter. She was the result of the separate
deification of one of the qualities of Mars, the breaking off of an
adjective and the turning of it into a noun; but from now on, though the
old goddess still existed and had her own temple and her own worship,
the name was also applied to this strange Oriental goddess who came in
the train of the debauched Roman army on its return from the East. But
though men might call this new-comer by the name of a sacred old
national goddess and worship her in private as they pleased, the
religion of the state, even in its sunken condition, refused to admit
her among its deities, and the priests, the _Fanatici_, with their wild
dances, to the music of cymbals and trumpets, slashing themselves with
their double axes until their arms streamed with blood, were not, at
least as yet, the official representatives of the state, the companions
of the reverend old Salii with their dignified "three-step." Even the
sanctuaries of the private cult must be kept outside the city, and the
violation of this law in B.C. 48 resulted in the raiding and
destruction of one of these private chapels. Her cult does not seem to
have become a state affair until the beginning of the third century
A.D., when Caracalla, who had extended Roman citizenship to all the
inhabitants of the provinces, gave a similar citizenship to all the
foreign deities resident in Rome. It is a curious coincidence that this
action of Caracalla's occurred just about the same year A.D. in which
the breakdown of the _pomerium_ for state cults had occurred B.C. For
the present, however, that is to say in the first century B.C., the
state retained her dignity, though the resultant unorthodox character of
the cult increased its power and influence, and made it more subversive
to morals than the Magna Mater was.
An even more interesting instance, both of the popularity of sensational
foreign cults and of the struggle of the state religion against them, is
found in the case of the Egyptian goddess Isis. The spread of Isis
worship into the Greek, and consequently also into the Roman world,
began relatively early. In the third century Isis and her companion
Serapis were well established on the island of Delos; and in the second
century we find traces of their worship in Campania, especially at
Pompeii and Puteoli. This last-named place, the seaport Puteoli, the
modern Pozzuoli, outside of Naples, was probably the door through which
Isis and her train came into Italy. Puteoli was the chief port for
Oriental ships, including Egypt, and it also had commercial relations
with Delos. At this later date it supplied Rome with gods in somewhat
the same way that Cumae, in the same neighbourhood, had done centuries
before. So far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, an apparently
trustworthy tradition traces the private cult back to the time of Sulla;
and it certainly cannot have been introduced much later than this time,
because in B.C. 58 it had became so prominent and so offensive to the
authorities of the state that they destroyed an altar of Isis on the
Capitoline. Apparently Isis was no exception to the general law of
growth by persecution, because in the course of the next decade the
state found it necessary to interfere no less than three times, _i.e._
in B.C. 53, 50, and 48. Finally the policy of suppression proved so
ineffectual that it was decided to try the opposite extreme, and to see
what could be done by state acknowledgment and state control, and so the
Triumvirs, Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, in B.C. 43 decreed the
building of a state temple for Isis. But although they had decreed the
erection of a temple, they were too much engaged in their own affairs to
build it immediately, and until the temple was built Isis could not
properly be considered among the state gods. As events turned out this
temple was never built, for in the course of the next few years the
trouble with Antony and Cleopatra began, and thus the gods of Egypt
became the gods of Rome's enemies, and so far as the state was concerned
an acknowledgment of these gods was impossible. Instead Augustus forbade
even private chapels inside the _pomerium_. The subsequent history of
Isis does not directly concern us; suffice it to say that after various
vicissitudes she was admitted to the state cult by Caracalla along with
all the other foreign deities.
But it was not only Asia Minor and Egypt which gave their cults to Rome;
the deities of Syria came too. Prominent among them was Atargatis, whose
cult seems to have touched the Italian mainland first at Puteoli. In
B.C. 54 the army of Crassus on its Eastern expedition, which was
destined to come to such a tragic end in the terrible defeat at Carrhae,
visited and plundered the sanctuary of the goddess in Syria. Thus she
became known at Rome, where she was called simply the "Syrian goddess"
(_dea Syria_) and was worshipped in a way very similar to the Magna
Mater and Bellona.
Lastly when Pompey swept the Mediterranean clean of Cilician pirates,
the sailors became acquainted with a Persian deity, Mithras, whose cult
in Rome began during our period and subsequently crowded all the other
orgiastic cults into insignificance.
We have now seen how the politicians were turning the state religion
into a tool for the accomplishment of their own selfish ends, and how
the masses of the people were seeking satisfaction for their religious
needs in sensational foreign worships, introduced from Asia Minor,
Egypt, Syria, and Persia. We must now see whether any efforts were being
made by any members of the community in behalf of the old religion, and
whether there were still in existence any traces of the pure old Roman
worship.
The latter-day philosophies of Greece had dealt a severe blow at Roman
religion by convincing the intellectual classes in the community that in
the nature of things there could be no such knowledge as that upon which
religion was based, and hence that religion was an idle thing unworthy
of a true man's interest. Yet all the philosophy in the world could not
take away from a Roman his sense of duty to the state. Now the state in
its experience had found religion so necessary that she had built up a
formal system of it and made it a part of herself. As it was the duty of
the citizen to support the state in every part of her activity, it was
clearly his duty to support the state religion. Hence there arose that
crass contradiction, which existed in Rome to a large degree as long as
these particular systems of philosophy prevailed, between the duty which
a man, as a thinking man, owed to himself, and the duty which he, as a
good citizen, owed to the state. We have seen how during the second
century before Christ no attempt was made to reconcile these two views
and how they existed side by side in such a man, for example, as Ennius,
who wrote certain treatises embodying the most extraordinary sceptical
doctrines, and certain patriotic poems in which the whole apparatus of
the Roman gods is prominently exhibited and most reverently treated. We
have also seen how this "double truth" could not but have disastrous
results on the state religion in spite of all efforts to the contrary.
The first effort which was made to improve the situation was not so much
an attempt at reconciliation as a frank statement of the difficulties of
the case. The problem had advanced considerably toward solution when
once it had been clearly stated. The man who had the courage to make the
statement was Quintus Mucius Scaevola, a famous lawyer as well as the
head of the college of Pontiffs (Pontifex Maximus). He was a
contemporary of Sulla, and was admirably fitted for his task because he
not only represented religion in his position as Pontifex Maximus, but
could speak also in behalf of the state both theoretically as a lawyer,
and practically because he had filled almost all the important political
offices (consul, B.C. 95). The treatise in which he made his statements
has been lost to us, but we may obtain a fair idea of what he said from
a quotation by the Christian writer Augustine in his wonderful book _The
City of God_ (iv. 27). For Scaevola the double truth of Ennius has grown
into a triple truth, and there are no less than three distinct
religions: the religion of poets, of philosophers, and of statesmen. The
religion of the poets, by which he means the mythological treatment of
the gods, he condemns as worthless because it tells a great many things
about the gods which are not true and which are entirely unworthy of
them. The religion of philosophers he does not consider suitable to the
state, because it contains many things which are superfluous, and some
which are injurious. The superfluous things may be allowed to pass, but
the injurious things, by which he evidently means the doctrines of
Euhemeros, are a very serious matter, not because they are untrue but
because the knowledge of them is inexpedient for the masses. The
religion of the statesman can have no part in these things, even if they
are true; and a man as a citizen of the state must believe in many
things, or profess belief in them, which the same man, as an individual
and a philosopher, knows are false. Scaevola's honest well-intentioned
effort to support the religion of the state was naturally a failure. The
very "masses" in whose behalf Scaevola was calling on his
fellow-citizens to undergo these casuistical gymnastics soon cared more
for Bellona and Isis than for all the gods of Numa together. But we
cannot help admiring Scaevola for his patriotism, though we may not envy
him his ethics. The state religion could never be supported on the
arguments of expediency; every one granted its expediency, and still it
fell; its worst enemies, the politicians, granted it most of all, and
they were the only ones who put the doctrine to any practical use. It
was precisely this discovery of its expediency and its great practical
value which caused its downfall. From the practical standpoint the
problem was settled once and for all, but as a matter of theory it
remained for the next generation, in the person of Varro, to provide a
more satisfactory solution, and to effect something of a compromise
between the truth of philosophy and the truth of religion.
Marcus Terentius Varro came to the work equipped with all the learning
of his time and possessed of a greater knowledge of facts than any other
Roman of his or any other day. So far as the problem of religion was
concerned, he embodied this learning in the sixteen books of _Divine
Antiquities_, which he very appropriately dedicated to Julius Caesar in
his capacity as Pontifex Maximus. If Ennius's _Sacra Historia_ be left
out of account, his book was the first treatise on systematic theology
which Rome ever had. In this work he desired to accomplish three things:
first, by a review of the history of Rome to show how essential the
state religion was; second, by an examination of Greek mythology to
purify the state religion from its immoral influences; third, to show
that the state religion so purified was fully in accord with Stoic
philosophy. In regard to the "three religions," therefore, he agreed
with Scaevola in casting out entirely the religion of the poets, and in
accepting both the others, but he differed from Scaevola in that he
denied the contradiction between them and asserted that they were not
two truths but two forms of the same truth. We are not able to go into
the details of his attempt, because unfortunately the books in which he
wrote it have been lost to us, and we have again merely the quotation in
Augustine's _City of God_. But we know that in general he tried to show
that the formal doctrines of the state religion were merely a popular
presentation of the truths of the Stoic philosophy, and that the whole
system of Roman gods could be reduced in theory to the great
philosophical contrast between the sky and the earth, the procreative
and the conceptive elements. A man might therefore hold fast to both
religions as to a simpler creed and a more abstruse one. Hence a man's
belief as a good citizen and his belief as an intelligent individual
were not in contrast so far as the truth was concerned, but merely in
the matter of form, in the manner of presentation. Varro's heroic
effort, supported as it was by all the learning of his day and all the
influence that his fame lent to his words, was nevertheless a failure.
The religion of the state was dead; politics had killed it. It was a
political power alone which could restore life to it, but that was the
work of an emperor, Augustus, and not of a scholar, Varro.
While Varro, with the weapon of philosophy, was attempting to defend the
religion of the state against its enemies, the poets and the
philosophers, a poet, also armed with philosophy, was trying to defend
the Roman people against its worst enemy, superstition. It may not seem
as though Lucretius belonged among the friends of old Roman religion,
and as though the _De Rerum Natura_ were exactly a religious poem, and
yet his work was in so far helpful to old Roman religion in that it
attacked the excesses of a latter-day superstition which had alienated
the hearts of the people from their old beliefs. Superstition is a
parasite which lives on scepticism, and with the killing of the parasite
scepticism sometimes dies as well; and it is open to question whether
Lucretius's book was not of considerable service in the cause of
religion. For religion still lived at Rome, though it is the fashion of
the writers on the ethics of the close of the republic to emphasise
almost entirely the scepticism of the day, dwelling on the attitude of a
Cicero or a Caesar, and forgetting the infinite number of "little
people," especially outside of Rome in the country, who still believed
in the old religion of the fathers, and who still performed the old
festivals of Numa, people who knew no more about Isis than they did
about Stoic philosophy. Their presence is disclosed to us in a few
republican inscriptions, but better yet in the continuance of the rites
of family worship down into the latest days of Rome, rites which did not
form a part of the restoration of Augustus, and which therefore, had
they died now, would never have come to life again. It is by just so
much more our duty to remember these people, as they have been forgotten
by history, if we ever expect to obtain a picture of Roman religion in
its true proportions. They were besides the people upon whom Augustus
built in the restoration, to which we now turn.
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE
Politics had caused the downfall of the state religion. Weakened by the
attacks of a sceptical philosophy, driven from the hearts of the common
people by the rival cults of the Orient, the state religion had finally
lost all its influence by the abuse of it as a political tool. Its
priesthoods were deserted, its temples were falling into ruins with the
grass carpeting their mosaic pavements and the spiders weaving new altar
cloths. To us with our modern ideas it would have seemed impossible that
this state religion could ever rise again; and probably no other state
religion that the world has ever seen could have been brought to life
again, because no other state religion has ever been so absolutely a
part of the state, unless the state itself were a theocracy; and
possibly no lesser genius than Augustus could have accomplished the task
even under the slightly more favourable conditions which the state
religion of Rome offered. Whether Julius Caesar would have attempted the
restoration is one of the many questions which his death left
unanswered. Certainly thoughtful men of his day hoped that he would, and
it was in this hope that Varro dedicated his _Divine Antiquities_ to
him; and another contemporary, Granius Flaccus, his book _On the
Invocation of the Gods_. But except for one law which he caused to be
enacted "concerning the priesthoods," we have no knowledge either of his
accomplishment or of his intentions, and the great task was left
practically untouched for the master-hand of Augustus.
In order that we may understand what Augustus did and how he managed to
succeed in relation to the state religion we must obtain some idea of
the whole scheme of Augustus in relation to the state at large, of which
his religious reorganisation was merely a part. One of the cleverest
characterisations of the Emperor Augustus which has ever been written
was that by the late Professor Mommsen, but its relatively secluded
position in the Latin preface to an edition of Augustus's great
autobiography, the _Res Gestae_, has prevented it from being generally
known. Mommsen describes Augustus as "a man who wore most skilfully the
mask of a great man, though himself not great." This epigrammatic
statement is undoubtedly clever but it is not just, although it is the
opinion concerning Augustus which we would expect a man to hold who,
like Mommsen, had an almost unbounded admiration for Julius Caesar.
There have been scattered through the pages of history even down to our
own day men of whom we say that they were not great men, though they did
a great work. In certain cases doubtless we can separate the man from
his work and justify the assertion, but in other cases we are deceived
by the man himself just as his contemporaries were and as he wished them
to be. For it occasionally happens that a man who is called to rule over
men and to reorganise a disordered government is able best to accomplish
his end by a gentle diplomacy, a conciliatory manner, which is often
misunderstood by those who surround him and who interpret gentleness of
spirit as smallness of spirit and self-restraint as weakness. It would
be truer to describe Augustus as a man who wore most skilfully the mask
of an ordinary man though himself an extraordinary man. The more we
study the chaotic condition of Rome under the Second Triumvirate and the
more fully we realise not only the total disorganisation of the forms of
government but also the absolute demoralisation of the individual
citizen, the more we appreciate the almost impossible task which was set
for Augustus and which he successfully accomplished. For one hundred
years (B.C. 133-31), from Tiberius Gracchus to Actium, hardly a decade
had passed which had not brought forth some terrible revolution for
Rome. Even the great Caesar had failed, had not divined aright the only
treatment to which the disease of the age would yield, for although the
blows which actually killed Caesar may have been merely an accident in
history, the deed of irresponsible men, his fall was no accident but was
the inevitable logical outcome of his imperial policy. But Augustus
succeeded in establishing a form of government which enabled himself and
his connexion to occupy the throne for almost a hundred years, and even
then though revolutions came, his constitution was the main bulwark of
government in succeeding centuries. It would take us too far from our
present subject to answer in any completeness the question of how he
succeeded, but a word or two may be said in general, and the rest will
become clearer when we examine his reorganisation of religion.
The secret of Augustus's success was the infinite tact and diplomacy by
which he managed to strengthen the throne and his own position on it
while apparently restoring the form of the republic and the manners of
the old days. It is open to question whether he was actuated by a
consideration of the good of the state, or by a regard for his own
selfish ends, but it is beyond question that he gave to Rome the only
form of government which could eradicate the habit of revolution, and
thus saved the state. He succeeded because he did not underestimate the
difficulty of the task, and accordingly brought to bear on it every
possible influence, emphasising especially the psychological element
and being willing to go a long way around in order to arrive at his
goal. He was not content with a mere temporary makeshift, which might
carry him to the end of his own life; he was laying foundations for the
future. Nowhere is this more clearly stated than in one of his edicts,
where he says:--"May it fall to my lot to establish the state firm and
strong and to obtain the wished-for fruit of my labours, that I may be
called the author of it and that when I die I may carry with me the hope
that the foundations which I have laid may abide." These abiding
foundations must be laid deep in the national psychology, and it was his
grasp of the psychological problem which explains his reorganisation of
religion. A century of civil war had totally destroyed the spirit of
unity and created an infinite number of petty hatreds between man and
man. Men had looked so long at their individual interests that they had
almost forgotten the existence of the state. But if the spirit of
patriotism could be quickened into a new life, then men would think of
the state and forget themselves, and united in their love of this one
universal object of devotion they would learn a lesson of union which
might gradually be extended to their whole life. But the state must be
presented not as it was in all its wretchedness, lacerated by civil
struggle; the sight of the present would serve only to start the quarrel
over again; instead it must be the ideal state, a state so far away, so
distant from all the citizens, that they all seemed equally near. If
this state were to be something more than a mere abstraction, it could
be clothed only in the reverential garments of the past, it must be the
Rome of the good old days. Yet if they were not for ever to mourn a
"Golden Age" in the past and a paradise that was lost, there must also
be a hope for the future, a paradise to be regained. In a word the
belief in the eternity of Rome must be instilled into men's hearts. Thus
was the idea of the "eternal city" born, and it is no mere coincidence
that the first instance of this phrase in literature occurs in Tibullus,
a poet of the Augustan age. Once convinced of the eternity of Rome men
could look at the past for inspiration in full confidence that the
beauties which had been could be obtained again. But Augustus was more
than a sentimental enthusiast, and he saw that it was not enough for men
to drop their swords at the epiphany of "Roma Aeterna," that their eyes
would grow weary and looking to earth would behold the swords again.
These swords must be beaten into ploughshares and pruning hooks; the
deserted farms of Italy must be filled again, and the stability of the
state must be increased by an enlargement of the agricultural community.
But for the accomplishment of these reforms something was needed which
was at once gentler and stronger than legal enactments. The poet must
make smooth the way of the law. It was the poet who could best interest
men in the past; and thus Augustan poetry was encouraged and directed by
the emperor, that by pointing out the glories of old Rome it might
inspire men to make a new Rome more glorious than the old. Practically
every poet of the age was directly or indirectly under the influence of
the ruler. It was the emperor's counsellor, Maecenas, who encouraged
Virgil to write his _Georgics_, and these glowing pictures of farm life
did quite as much to carry out the emperor's plans as the _Aeneid_
later. And Virgil was not alone in writing of country life; Tibullus,
even more gentle than the gentle bard of Mantua, was telling the same story in another form. |
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