ROMAN RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS
Roman religious ideas were in many respects like those of the Greeks,
partly because they were borrowed from the Greeks and partly because
they were common to all the nations of the Mediterranean world. It may
even be that some of these common forms are categories which the human
mind by its constitution imposes upon some classes of phenomena,
_Grundideen_, as ethnologists call them.[34] Among both Romans and
Greeks we shall find deities sharply limited in their spheres, we shall
find the religious act exhausted in the ritual communion, we shall find
evanescent personalities among the gods. But all these things will be
found in a far different degree, and at various periods many other
matters will demand consideration which the Greeks did not know at all
or knew to a slighter extent.
The differences in national development would of themselves require
differences of treatment. Greek religion grew up in countless
independent communities, which advanced in civilization at very
different rates. Roman religion was developed within a single civic
group, and was ultimately swamped by the institutions with which it came
into contact. Again, it is much more necessary among the Romans than
among the Greeks to distinguish clearly between periods. Roman political
history passed through points of obvious crisis, and many institutions
were plainly deflected at these points into quite new paths of
development.
Real comprehension of Roman religion is a matter of recent growth.
During the vogue of comparative mythology, the Roman myths were
principally discussed, and the patent fact that these were mere
translations from the Greek seemed a complete summing up of Roman
religion. It is only when the actual Roman calendar, as recorded on
stone during the reign of Augustus, came to be studied that the real
character of Roman religion began to be apprehended.[35]
The results of this study have made it clear that during the highest
development of the Roman state the official religious ritual was based
upon pastoral and agricultural conditions that could scarcely be reached
even in imagination. Propitiatory and dramatic rites carried out with
painful precision, unintelligible formularies carefully repeated,
ceremonial dances in which every posture was subject to exact
regulation, all these things indicate an anxious solicitude for form
that is ordinarily more characteristic of magic than of religion. Now,
magic and religion have no very definite limits in anthropological
discussions, but most of those who use the terms will probably agree
that magic is coercive, and religion is not. We shall see at various
points in Roman religion that a coercive idea was really present in the
Romans’ relation with the gods, and that it followed in a measure from
the way the gods were conceived.[36]
The personality of the Greek gods was not so sharply individualized as
the myths we happen to know would indicate, but the gods were persons.
That is, during the act of prayer and sacrifice there was conjured up in
the mind of the worshiper a definite anthropomorphic figure, who dealt
with him somewhat as a flesh and blood man would do. But what was
present in a Roman’s mind in very early times—those of the kingdom and
the early republic—was probably not at all like this. The name of his
deity was often an abstraction, and even when this was not verbally the
case, the idea was an abstract one. And this abstraction had so little
plastic form that he was scarcely certain of the being’s sex to which he
addressed words of very real supplication, and wholly uncertain what, if
any, concrete manifestation the god might make of his presence.[37]
But it will be well to understand that this abstraction, which the Roman
knew as Salus, or Fortuna, or Victoria, was not a philosophic
achievement. It was not a Platonic “idea.” No one could doubt the fact
that in times of danger safety was often attained. The means of
attainment seemed frequently due to chance; that is, to the working of
unintelligible forces. It was to evoke these forces and set them in
operation that the Roman ritual was addressed, and whether these forces
acted of their own mere motion, or whether the formularies contained
potent spells, which compelled their activity, was not really of moment.
That was the nature of the “abstraction” which such words as Fides,
Concordia, and the rest signified to Roman minds.
In the early days a great deal of the religious practice was borrowed
from the Etruscan neighbors, conquerors and subjects of Rome. The
Etruscans, as far as anything can be said definitely about them, were
especial adepts in all the arts by which the aid of deities, however
conceived, could be secured. How much of actual religious teaching they
gave the Romans, that is, how far they actually influenced and trained
the emotions which the sense of being surrounded by powerful and
unaccountable forces must excite, is not yet determinable. But they gave
the Romans, or increased among them, the belief in the efficacy of
formulas, whether of the spoken word or of action.
Although most of the Roman deities were abstractions in the sense just
indicated, many others and very important ones bore personal names.
These names could not help suggesting to intelligent men at all times
that the god who bore one of them was himself a person, that his
manifestations would be in human form, and that his mental make-up was
like their own. Genetic relations between themselves and the gods so
conceived were rapidly enough established. It is very likely, too, that
some of these deities, perhaps Jupiter himself, were brought into Italy
by kinsmen of those who brought Zeus into Greece, although the kinship
must have been extremely remote. And when the gods are persons, stories
about them are inevitable, arising partly as folk-lore and partly from
individual poetic imagining. There are accordingly traces of an
indigenous Roman or Italic mythology, but that mythology was literally
overwhelmed, in relatively early times, by the artistically more
developed one of the Greeks, so that its very existence has been
questioned.[38]
The openness of the Romans to foreign religious influences is an outcome
of a conception, common enough, but more pronounced among the Romans
than anywhere else. In most places the gods were believed to be locally
limited in their sphere of action, and in most places this limitation
was not due to unchangeable necessity but to the choice of residence on
the part of the deity. Since it was a choice, it was subject to
revocation. The actual land, once endeared to god or man, had a powerful
hold upon his affections, vastly more powerful than the corresponding
feeling of to-day, but for either god or man changes might and did
occur.
Both Greeks and Romans held views somewhat of this kind, but the
difference in political development compelled the Roman to face problems
in the relations of the gods that were not presented to the Greeks.
Greek wars were not wars of conquest. They resulted rather in the
acknowledgment on the part of the vanquished of a general superiority.
With barbarians, again, the struggles were connected with colonizing
activity, and, when they were successful, they resulted in the
establishment of a new community, which generally continued the ancient
shrines in all but their names. Roman wars, however, soon became of a
different sort. The newly conquered territory was often annexed—attached
to the city, and ruled from it. To secure the lands so obtained it was
frequently found necessary to destroy the city of which they were once a
part, and that involved the cessation of rites, which the gods would not
be likely to view with composure. The Romans drew the strictly logical
inference that the only solution lay in bringing the gods of the
conquered city to Rome. The Roman legend knew of the solemn words with
which the dictator Camillus began the sack of Veii: “Thou, Queen Juno,
who now dwellest in Veii, I beseech thee, follow our victorious troops
into the city that is now ours, and will soon be thine, where a temple
worthy of thy majesty will receive thee.”[39] But besides this legendary
incident, we have an actual formula quoted by Macrobius from the book of
a certain Furius,[40] probably the contemporary of the younger
Africanus. The formula, indubitably ancient and general, is given as
Africanus himself may have recited it before the destruction of Carthage
in 146 B.C.E., and it is so significant that we shall give it in full:
Whoever thou art, whether god or goddess, in whose ward the people
and city of Carthage are, and thou above all, who hast accepted the
wardship of this city and this people, I beseech, I implore, I beg,
that ye will desert the people and city of Carthage, that ye will
abandon the site, the consecrated places and the city, that ye will
depart from them, overwhelm that people and city with fear, dread,
and consternation, and graciously come to Rome, to me and my people:
that our site, our consecrated places, and our city be more
acceptable and more pleasing in your sight, and that ye may become
the lords of myself, the Roman people, and my soldiers. Deign to
make known your will to us. If ye do so, I solemnly promise to erect
temples in your honor and establish festal games.[41]
What might happen as an incident of warfare could be otherwise effected
as well. We have very old evidence of the entry of Greek deities into
the city of Rome. The Dioscuri came betimes; also Heracles and Apollo,
both perhaps by way of Etruria. And in historical times we have the
well-known official importation of the Great Mother and of
Asclepius.[42]
These importations of Greek gods were at the time conscious receptions
of foreign elements. The foreign god and his ritual were taken over
intact. Greek modes of divine communion, notably the _lectisternium_, or
sacrificial banquet,[43] and the games, were adopted and eagerly
performed by Romans. When Rome reached a position of real primacy in the
Mediterranean, the process of saturation with foreign elements was
accelerated, but with it an opposition movement became apparent, which
saw in them (what they really were) a source of danger for the ancient
Roman institutions. The end of the second Punic war, approximately 200
B.C.E., shortly after a most striking instance of official importation
of cults, that of the Phrygian Cybele, particularly marks a period in
this respect as in so many others. From that time on, the entry of
foreign religions went on apace, but it was somewhat surreptitious, and
was carried on in the train of economic, social, and political movements
of far-reaching effect.
When the Jews came in contact with the Romans, this point had been long
reached. As far, therefore, as the Jews were concerned, their religion
shared whatever feeling of repulsion and distrust foreign religions
excited among certain classes, and equally shared the very catholic
veneration and dread that other classes brought to any system of
worship.
The former classes correspond roughly to those of educated men
generally. Their intellectual outlook was wholly Greek, and all their
thinking took on a Greek dress. But they received Greek ideas, not only
through Homer and Sophocles, but also through Plato and Aristotle. Not
popular Greek religion, but sophisticated religious philosophy, was
brought to the intellectual leaders of Rome. One of the very first works
of Greek thought to be brought to Roman attention was the theory of
Euhemerus, a destructive analysis of the existing myths, not merely in
the details usually circulated, but in respect to the fundamental basis
of myth-making.[44] In these circumstances educated men adopted the
various forms of theism, pantheism, or agnosticism developed by the
Greek philosophical schools, and their interest in the ceremonial of
their ancestral cult became a form of patriotism, in which, however, it
was not always possible to conceal the consciousness of the chasm
between theory and practice.
The other part of the Roman population, which knew Greek myths chiefly
from the stage, could not draw such distinctions. What was left of the
old Italian peasantry perhaps continued the sympathetic and propitiatory
rites that were the substance of the ancient Roman cult. But there
cannot have been a great number of these. The mass of the later plebs, a
mixed multitude in origin, could get little religious excitement out of
the state ritual. What they desired was to be found in the Oriental
cults, which from this time on invaded the city they were destined to
conquer.
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