ROMAN RELIGION--STATE AND INDIVIDUAL
To undertake to set forth with any definiteness the "religious ideas
of a Roman" of A.D. 64 would be an extremely difficult task. Those
ideas would differ with the individual, being determined or varied by
a number of considerations and influences--by locality, education, and
temperament. Silius would not hold the views of Scius and probably not
those of Marcia. We may speak of the "State religion" of Rome, as
distinct from various other religions tolerated and practised in
different parts of the empire, but it is scarcely possible to define
the contents of that "State religion." There were certain special
priests and priestly bodies who saw to it that certain rites and
ceremonies should be perfortied scrupulously in a prescribed manner
and on prescribed dates; but these were officers of the state, whose
knowledge and functions were confined to the ritual observances with
which they had to deal. They were not persons trained in a system of
theology, nor were they preachers of a code of doctrines or morals;
they had no "cure of souls," and belonged to no church; they had no
_credo_ and no Bible or corresponding authority to which to refer.
Though most well-informed persons could have told the names of the
prominent deities in the calendar--such as Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, and
Ceres--perhaps scarcely any one but an encyclopaedist or antiquarian
could have named one-half of the total. It is not merely that the
deities on the list were so numerous. There were other reasons for
ignorance or vagueness. In the first place, the line between the
operations of one deity and those of another was often too fine to
draw, and deities originally more or less distinct came to be confused
or identified. Secondly, it was often hard, if not impossible, to make
up one's mind whether a so-called deity--such as Virtue, Peace, or
Health--was supposed to have a real existence, or whether it was
simply the personification of an abstract quality. Thirdly, many of
the ancient divinities had fallen out of fashion, and to a large
extent out of memory, while many new ones--Isis and Serapis for
example--had come, or were coming, into vogue.
The state possessed its old-established calendar of days sacred to a
number of deities, and its code of ritual to be performed in their
honour. There were ancient prescriptions as to what certain priests
should wear, what they should do or avoid in their priestly character,
what victims--ox, sheep, or pig--they should sacrifice, what
instruments they should use for the purpose, and in what formula of
words they should pray in particular connections. There was a standing
commission, with the Pontifex Maximus--at this date that excellent
religious authority, the emperor Nero--at its head, to safeguard the
state religion, to see that its requirements were carried out, and
that no one ventured to commit an outrage towards it. But the state
could not have told you with any precision that you must believe in
just so many deities and no others; it could not have told you
precisely what notions to entertain concerning those deities whom it
did officially recognise; it dictated no theological doctrines;
neither did it dictate any moral doctrines beyond those which you
would find in the secular law. It reserved the right to prevent the
introduction of foreign or new divinities if it found sufficient
cause; but so long as the temples, the rites and ceremonies, the
cardinal moral axioms of the Roman "religion," and the basic
principles of Roman society were respected, the state practised no
sort of inquisition into your beliefs or non-beliefs, and in no way
interfered with your particular selection of favourite deities.
Polytheism in an advanced community is always tolerant, because it is
necessarily always indefinite. What it does not readily endure is an
organised attack upon the entire system, whether openly avowed or
manifestly implied. Even undisguised unbelief in any deity at all it
is often willing to tolerate, so long as the unbelief is rather a
matter of dialectics than anything else, and makes no attempt at a
crusade. When a state so disposed is found to interfere with a novel
religion, it will generally be easy to perceive that the jealousy is
not on behalf of the deities nor of a creed, but on behalf of the
community in its political, economic, or social aspect. This, however,
is perhaps to anticipate. Let us endeavour to realise as best we can
the religious situation among the Roman or romanized portion of the
population.
Though we are not here directly concerned with the steps by which the
Roman religion had come to be what it was, we can scarcely hope to
understand the position without some comprehension of that
development. The Romans were a conservative people, and many of the
peculiarities of their worship were due to the retention of old forms
which had lost such spirit as they once possessed.
In the infant days of the nation there had been no such things as gods
in human shape, or in recognisable shape at all. There were only
"powers" or "influences" superior to mankind, by whose aid or
concurrence man must work out his existence. The early Romans and such
Italian tribes as they became blended with were, as they still are,
extremely superstitious. In a pre-scientific age they, like other
peoples, were at a loss to understand what produced thunder and
lightning, rain, the fertility or failure of crops, the changes of the
seasons, the flow or cessation of springs and streams, the
intoxication or exhilaration proceeding from wine, and a multitude of
other phenomena. Fire was a perplexing thing; so was wind: the woods
were full of mysterious sounds and movements. They could comprehend
neither birth nor death, nor the fructification of plants. The
consequence was a feeling that these things were due to unseen
agencies; and the attempt was made to bring those powers into some
sort of relation with mankind, either by the compulsion of magical
operations and magical formulae, or by sacrifices and offerings of
propitiation, or by promises. A superhuman power might be placed under
a spell, or placated with food and drink, or persuaded by a vow. Such
"powers" were exceedingly numerous. Greatest of all, and recognised
equally by all, was the power working in the sky with the thunder and
the rain. Its presence was everywhere alike, and its operations most
palpable at every season. Countless others were concerned with
particular localities or with particular functions. Every wood, if not
every tree, and also every fountain, was controlled by some such
higher "power"; every manifestation or operation of nature came from
such an "influence." There was no kind of action or undertaking, no
new stage of life or change of condition, which did not depend for
help or hindrance upon a similar power. At first the "powers" bore no
distinctive names, and were conceived in no definite shapes. They were
not yet gods. The human being who sought to work upon them to favour
him could only do, say, and offer such things as he thought likely to
move them. But in process of time it became inevitable that these
superhuman agencies should be referred to under some sort of title,
and the title literally expressed the conception. Hence a multitude of
names. Not only was there the ever-prominent Jupiter or "sky-father";
there a veritable multitude of powers with provinces great and small.
Among the larger conceptions the power concerned with the sowing of
seed was Saturn that with the growth of crops was Ceres, that with the
blazing of fire was Vesta. Among the smaller the power which taught a
babe to eat was Edulia that which attended the bringing home of a
bride was Domiduca. The ability to speak or to walk was supposed to be
imparted by separate agencies named accordingly. Flowers depended on
Flora and fruits on Pomona.
[Illustration: FIG. 109.--JUPITER.]
But to assign a name is a great step towards creating a "power" into a
"god," and such agencies began to take shape in the mind of those who
named them. This was the second stage. Jupiter, Ceres, Saturn, and
almost all the rest became "gods." The powers in the woodlands--a
Silvanus or Faunus--became embodied, like the more modern gnomes and
kobbolds. Once imagine a shape, and the tendency is to give it visible
form in an image "like unto man," and to honour it with an abode--a
temple or shrine. The earliest Romans known to us erected no images or
temples, but they were not long in creating them. Particularly rapid
was the reducing of a god to human form when they came into close
contact with the Etruscans and the Greeks. For all the important
deities poetry and art combined to evolve an appropriate bodily form,
which gradually became conventional, so that the ordinary notion of a
Jupiter, a Juno, a Mercury, or a Ceres was approximately that which
had been gathered from the statue thus developed. This trouble was not
taken with all the most ancient divinities. Many of the old rural and
local deities, and many of those with quite minor provinces, were left
vague and unrealised. They were represented in no temples and by no
statues. Naturally as the Roman state grew from a set of neighbouring
farms into a great city, and from a small settlement into a vast
empire, the little local gods fell into the background. The deities
which concerned the state, and to which it erected temples, were those
with the more far-reaching operations--such as the gods identified
with the sky and its thunders, with war, with fertility, with the sea,
with the hearth-fire of all Rome. The rest might well be left to
localities or to domestic worship.
From the early days of Rome there existed a calendar for festivals to
certain divinities important to the little growing town, and a code of
ceremonies to be performed in their honour, and of formulae of prayer
to be offered to them. The later Romans, in their characteristic
conservatism, adhered to those festivals, to that ritual, and to those
formulae, even when some of the deities had ceased to be of
appreciable account, and when neither the meaning of the ritual nor
the sense of the old words was any longer understood by the very
priests who used them.
Reflect a moment on this situation. First, we have a number of deities
of the first rank, housed in temples, embodied in statues, and
recognised in all the Roman world; next a number of minor divinities
whose operations and worship may be remotely rural or otherwise local,
and whose functions are by no means always distinguishable from those
of the greater gods; then a series of more or less unintelligible
ceremonials carried out by ancient rule in honour of divinities often
practically forgotten; outside these a number of vague powers
presiding over small domestic and other actions; finally, a peculiar
Roman tendency--in keeping with the last--to erect into divinities,
and to symbolise in statue housed in temples, all manner of abstract
qualities and states, such as Hope, Harmony, Peace, Wealth, Health,
Fame, and Youth.
[Illustration: FIG. 110.--A SACRIFICE.]
Reflect again that, when the Romans, as they spread, came into contact
with Greeks, Egyptians, or other foreigners, they met with deities
whose provinces were necessarily often identical with or closely akin
to their own. Then remember that there is no church and no official
document to define the complete list of Roman gods. Does it not
follow, as a matter of course, on the one hand, that the importation
of new gods was an easy matter, and on the other, that no individual
Roman could draw the line as to the number of even the old-established
deities in whom he should or should not believe?
The guardians of the public religion were satisfied if the due rites
were paid by the state to those deities, on those dates, and precisely
in that manner, which happened to be prescribed in the official
religious books. For the rest they left matters to the individual.
So much it has been necessary to say in order to account for existing
attitudes. We must use the plural, since the attitude of the state
officials is but one of several, and, inasmuch as the state officials
themselves were not a theological caste but only secular servants of
the community administering the regulations for external worship as
laid down in the records, it often happened that their official
attitude had nothing to do with their individual beliefs. Often they
did not know or care whether there was a real religious efficacy in
the acts which they performed; sometimes all that they knew was that
they were doing what the state required to be done properly by some
one.
Cicero quotes a dictum of a Pontifex Maximus that there was one
religion of the poet, another of the philosopher, and another of the
statesman. This is true, but it is hardly adequate. We must at least
add that of the common people. A well-known statement of more modern
birth puts the case--rather too strongly--that at our period all
religions were regarded by the people as equally true, by the
philosopher as equally false and by the statesman as equally useful.
We may begin with the ordinary people of whatever station, who were
not poets nor thinkers nor magistrates. It is an error to suppose that
such Romans of the first century were either atheistic or indifferent
to religion. Their fault was rather that they were too superstitious,
ready to believe too much rather than too little, but to believe
without relating their belief to conduct. They did not question the
existence of the traditional gods, nor the characters attributed to
them; they were ready to perform their dues of worship and to make
their due offerings, but all this had no bearing upon their own
morality. They believed with the terror of the superstitious in omens
and portents, and in rites of expiation and purification to avert the
threatened evil. They were alarmed by thunder and lightning,
earthquakes, bad dreams, ravens seen on the wrong side of the road,
and other evil tokens. They commonly accepted the existence of malign
spirits, including ghosts. They were prepared to believe that on
occasion a statue had bled or turned round on its base; that an ox had
spoken in human language; or that there had been a rain of blood.
There were doubtless exceptions, and superstition was less dire and
oppressive than once it was. More than fifty years before our date
Cicero had said that even old women no longer shuddered at the terrors
of an underworld, and fifty years after it the satirist asserts the
same of children. But both writers are speaking somewhat
hyperbolically. Doubtless it had been wondered how two augurs could
look at each other without a smile, but there is nothing to show that
even a minority of augurs were acutely conscious of anything to smile
at.
[Illustration: FIG. 111.--ISIS WORSHIP. (Wall-Painting.)]
In the multiplicity of deities the ordinary people were prepared to
accept as many more as you chose to offer them, especially if the
worship attaching to them contained mystic or orgiastic ceremonies. By
this date the populace had become exceedingly mixed, especially in the
capital, and the cool hard-headed Roman stock had been largely
replaced or leavened by foreign elements, especially from the East.
The official worship of the state was formal and frigid; it offered
nothing to the emotions or the hopes. Many among the people felt an
instinct for something more sacramental, and especially attractive was
any form of worship which promised a continued existence, and probably
a happier existence, after death. Even the mere mysteriousness of a
form of worship had its allurements. Hence a tendency to Judaism,
still more to the Egyptian worship of Isis and Osiris. The latter made
many proselytes, particularly among the women, and contained ideas
which are by no means ignoble but to our modern minds far more truly
"religious" than anything to be found in the native Roman cults. To
pass through purification, to practise asceticism, to feel that there
was a life beyond the grave apportioned to your deserts, to go through
an impressive form of worship held every day, and to have the emotions
thus worked upon--all this supplied something to the moral nature
which was lacking in the chill sacrifices and prayers to Jupiter and
the other national divinities. In vain had the authorities, in their
doubt as to the moral effects, tried on several occasions to suppress
this foreign worship; it always revived, and it now held its
established place both in the imperial city and in the provinces,
particularly near the sea, for it was especially a sailors' religion.
Rome, like Pompeii, had its temple of Isis and her daily celebrations.
There was, however, no necessary conflict between this worship and the
official religion. It was quite possible to accept Isis while
accepting Jupiter. Nor, though this particular cult has required
mention, must it be taken as belonging to more than a section of the
Roman population. Most Romans would look upon it and other deviations
with acquiescence, some with contempt, and perhaps some with a shake
of the head, while themselves satisfied with an indifferent conformity
to the more established customs of the state.
Setting aside the devotees of the mystic, the more ordinary point of
view was that between Romans and the established gods of Rome there is
an understanding. The gods will support Rome so long as Rome pays to
them their dues of formal recognition. Their ritual must not be
neglected by the authorities; it is not necessary for an individual
member of the community to concern himself further in the matter. The
state, through its appointed ministers, will make the necessary
sacrifices and say the necessary words; the citizen need not put in an
appearance or take any part. He will not do or say anything
disrespectful towards the deities in question, and he will enjoy the
festivals belonging to them. If remarkable portents and disasters
occur, he will agree that there is something wrong in the behaviour of
the state, and that there must be some public purification or other
placation of the gods. If the state orders such a proceeding, he will
perform whatever may be his share in it. So far he is loyal to the
"religion of the state."
[Illustration: FIG. 112.--HOUSEHOLD SHRINE. (Pompeii.)]
In his private capacity he has his own wants, fears, and hopes. He
therefore betakes himself to whatever divinity he considers most
likely to help him; he makes his own prayers and vows an offering if
his request is granted. Reduced to plain commercial language his
ordinary attitude is--no success, no payment. A cardinal difference
between the religion of the Romans and our own is to be seen in the
nature of their prayers. They always ask for some definite
advantage--prosperity, safety, health, or the like. They never pray
for a clean heart or for some moral improvement. Of more importance
than the man's moral condition will be his scrupulous observance of
the right external practices. Unlike the Greek, he will cover his head
when he prays. He will raise his hand to his lips before the statue,
or, if he is appealing to the celestial deities, he will stretch his
palms upwards above his head; if to the infernal powers, he will hold
them downwards. These are the things that matter.
At home, if he belongs to the better type of representative citizen,
our Roman has his household shrine and his household divinities, whom
he never neglects. If he is very pious, he may pray to them every
morning, or at least before every enterprise. In any case he will
remember them with a small offering when he dines. There are the "gods
of the stores"--his "penates"--certain deities whom he has selected as
guardians of his belongings, and who have their little images by the
hearth in the kitchen. There is the household "protector," or more
commonly there are two, who may be painted under the form of
lightly-stepping youths in a little niche or shrine above a small
altar. To these he will offer fruits, flowers, incense, and cakes. And
there is the "Genius" of the master of the house, who is also painted
on the wall, or who may be represented by his own portrait bust or by
the picture of a snake. That "Genius" means the power presiding over
his vitality and health and wellbeing. If he is an artisan and belongs
to a guild, he will pay special worship to the patron god or goddess
of that guild--to Vesta, if he is a baker, to Minerva, if he is a
fuller. Out of doors he will find a street shrine in the wall at a
crossing, pertaining to the tutelary god of what may be called his
"parish," and this he will not neglect. Like all other orthodox Romans
he will not undertake any new enterprise--betrothal, marriage,
journey, or important business--without ascertaining that the auspices
are favourable.
In a general way he has a notion that the gods are displeased at
certain forms of crime, and that they approve of justice and the
carrying out of compacts. The gods overlook the state, because the
state engages them so to do, and therefore to break the laws of the
state is to anger the gods of the state. But this is rather subtle for
the common man, and there is generally no understood immediate
relation between these gods and his moral conduct, unless he has sworn
an oath by one or other of them. The purpose of calling a god to
witness is to bring upon a perjurer the anger of the offended deity.
But he entertains no such conception as the modern one of "sin" or of
"remorse for sin." "Sin" is either a breach of the secular law or
breach of a contract with a deity and "remorse" is but fear of or
regret for the consequences.
His morality is determined by the laws of the state, family
discipline, and social custom. For that reason his vices on the
positive side will mostly be those of his appetites, and on the
negative side a want of charity and compassion. He may be guiltless of
lying and stealing, murder and violence; he may be honest and
law-abiding; but there is nothing to make him temperate, continent, or
gentle. His avowed code is "duty," and duty is defined by law and
tradition.
If this is the religious condition of the common-place man or woman--a
blend of superstition, formalism, and tolerance--it is by no means
that of the educated thinker. Such persons were for the most part
freethinkers. Many of them, finding no better guide to conduct,
conform to the "religion" of the state without any real belief in its
gods or attaching any importance to its ceremonies. They do not feel
called upon to propagate any other views, and they probably think the
current notions are at least as good for the ignorant as any others.
If they are poets, like Horace or Lucan, they will dress up the
mythology, mostly from Greek models, and write fluently about Jupiter
and Juno, Venus and Mercury, either attributing to them the recognised
characters and legends, or varying them so as to make them more
picturesque and interesting--perhaps even improving them--but all the
time believing no more in the stories they are telling, or in the
deities themselves, than Tennyson need have believed in King Arthur
and Guinevere. The gods are good poetic material and are sure to
afford popular, or at least inoffensive, reading. The poets doubtless
do something to humanise and beautify the popular conception of a
deity, but they seldom deliberately set out with any such purpose. If
the educated are not poets, but public men of affairs, they may
believe just as little, and yet regard the established cult of the
gods as an excellent discipline for the vulgar and the best known
means of upholding the national principle of "duty." If they are
philosophers they may not, and the Epicureans in reality do not,
believe in the gods at all--certainly not as they are generally
conceived--and will openly discuss in speech and in writing the
question of their existence or non-existence, and of their character
and nature if they do exist. They will endeavour to substitute for the
barren formalism of rites and ceremonies, or the inconsistent or
incomplete traditional morality of duty, another set of principles as
a sounder guide to life and conduct. Some are monotheists, some are
simply in doubt. Says Nero's own tutor, Seneca, "Do you want to
propitiate the gods? Then be good. The true worshipper of the gods is
he who acts like them." "Better," remarks Plutarch, "not believe in a
God at all than cringe before a god who is worse than the worst of
men." In the actual worship of images none of them believe. One
conspicuous writer of the time says: "To look for a form and shape to
a god, I consider to be a mark of human feebleness of mind."
Concerning the schools of thought and in particular the tenets of
those Stoics and Epicureans whom St. Paul met at Athens, and whom he
could meet in educated circles all over the Roman Empire, we shall
have to speak in a following chapter, when summing up the intellectual
and moral condition of the time. Meanwhile it should be understood
that, though a profound or anything approaching a professional study
of philosophy was discouraged among the true Romans--more than once
the professional philosophers were banished from the capital--there
were few cultivated persons who did not to some extent dabble in it,
and even go so far as to profess an adherence to one school or
another. None of these men believed in the "Roman religion" as
administered by the state, although many of them were administering it
themselves. The same man could one day freely discuss the gods in
conversation or a treatise, and the next he might be clad in priestly
garb and officially seeing that the rites of sacrifice were being
religiously carried out in terms of the books, or that the auspices
were being properly taken.
It does not, however, follow at all that because poet or public man
cared nothing for the pantheon and all its mythology, he was therefore
without his superstitions. He might still tremble at signs and
portents, at comets, at dreams, and at the unpropitious behaviour of
birds and beasts. He might believe in astrology and resort to its
professors, called the "Chaldaeans." On the other hand he might laugh
at such things. It was all a matter of temperament. It certainly was
not every man who dared to act like one of the Roman admirals. When it
was reported that the omens were unpropitious to an imminent battle
because the sacred chickens "would not eat," he ordered them to be
thrown into the sea so that at least they might drink. The
freethinkers were in advance of their times. "Science" in the modern
sense hardly existed, and until phenomena are explained it is hard to
avoid a perplexity or astonishment which is equivalent to
superstition.
Consider now these various states of mind--that of the people, ready
to add almost any deity to the large and vague number already
recognised; that of the poet, who finds the deities such useful
literary material; that of the magistrate or public man, who, without
enthusiasm or necessary belief, regards religion as a thing useful to
society; and that of the philosopher, who thinks all the current
religious conceptions unsound, if not absurd, and morally almost
useless.
Manifestly a society so composed will be one of unusual tolerance. The
Romans had no disposition to force their religion on the subject
provinces of the empire. Their religion was the Roman religion; the
religion of the Greeks might be left Greek, the Jewish religion
Jewish, and the Egyptian religion Egyptian. Any nation had a right to
the religion of its fathers. Nay, the Jews had such peculiar notions
about a Sabbath day and other matters that a Jew was exempted from the
military service which would have compelled him to break his national
laws. All religions were permitted, so long as they were national
religions. Also all religious views were permitted to the individual,
so long as they were not considered dangerous to the empire or
imperial rule, or so long as they threatened no appreciable harm to
the social order. If a Jew came to Rome and practised Judaism well and
good. It was, in the eyes of the Romans, a narrow-minded and
uncharitable religion, marked by many strange and absurd practices and
superstitions, but if a misguided oriental people liked to indulge in
it, well and good. Even if a Roman became a proselyte to Judaism, well
and good, so long as he did not flout the official religion of his own
country. If the Egyptians chose to worship cats, ibises, and
crocodiles, that was their affair, so long as they let other people
alone. In Gaul, it is true, the emperor Claudius, predecessor of Nero,
had put down the Druids. Earlier still the Druids had already been
interfered with; but that was because the Druids--those weird old
white-sheeted men with their long beards and strange magic--were
performing human sacrifices--burning men alive in wicker frames--and
such conduct was not only contrary to the secular law of Rome, but
even to natural law. And when Claudius finally suppressed them, or
drove the remnant out of Gaul into Britain, it was not simply because
they worshipped non-Roman gods and performed non-Roman rites, but
because they were, as they had always notoriously been, a dangerous
political influence interfering with the proper carrying out of the
Roman government.
And when we come to Christianity it must be remarked that, so long as
that nascent religion was regarded as merely a variety of Judaism, it
was actually protected by the Roman power, and owes no little of its
original progress to the fact. In the Acts of the Apostles it is
always from the Roman governor that St. Paul receives, not only the
fairest, but the most courteous treatment. It is the Jews who
persecute him and work up difficulties against him, because to them he
is a renegade and is weaning away their people. To the philosophers at
Athens he appears as the preacher of a new philosophy, and they think
him a "smatterer" in such subjects. To the Roman he is a man charged
by a certain community with being dangerous to social order, to wit,
causing factious disturbances and profaning the temple; and since he
refuses to let the local authorities judge his case, and has exercised
his citizen privilege by appealing to Caesar, to Caesar he is sent.
And, when a prisoner in somewhat free custody at Rome, note that he is
permitted to speak "with all freedom," and that in the first instance
he is acquitted.
True, but the fact remains that Nero burnt Christians in his gardens
after the great fire of Rome, and that certain later emperors are
found punishing Christians merely for avowing themselves such. Why was
Christianity thus singled out? It was not through what can be
reasonably called "religious intolerance," for, as has been said, the
Romans did not seek to force Roman religion on other peoples nor did
they make any inquisition into the beliefs of Romans themselves. The
reasons for singling out Christianity for special treatment are
obvious enough. The question is not whether the reasons were sound,
whether the Romans properly understood or tried to understand, whether
they could be as wise before the event as we are after it, but whether
the motive was what we should call a "religious" one. To allow
Epicureans to deny the existence of gods at all, and to make scornful
concessions to the peculiar tenets of Jews, could not be the action of
a people which was bigoted. If there was bigotry and intolerance, it
was political or social bigotry and intolerance, not religious. To
prevent any possible misconception let the present writer say here
that he considers the principles of Christianity, as laid down by its
Founder and as spread by St. Paul, to have been the most humanizing
and civilising influence ever brought to bear upon society. But that
is not the point. The early Christians were treated as they were, not
because they held non-Roman views, but because they held anti-Roman
views; not because they did not believe in Jupiter and Venus, but
because they refused to let any one else believe in them; not because
they threatened to weaken Roman faith, but because they threatened to
weaken and even to wreck the whole fabric of Roman society; not
because they were known to be heretics, but because they were supposed
to be disloyal; not because they converted men, but because they
appeared to convert them into dangerous characters. As it has been
put, the Christians were regarded as the "Nihilists" of the period. We
are apt to judge the Romans from the standpoint of Christianity
dominant and understood; it is fairer to judge them from the
standpoint of a dominant pagan empire looking on at a strange new
phenomenon altogether misunderstood and often deliberately
misrepresented. Moreover--and the point is worth more attention than
it commonly receives--we have only to read the Epistles to the
Corinthians, to perceive that the early Christian gatherings were by
no means always such meek, pure, and model assemblages as they are
almost always assumed to have been. Some of the members, for instance,
quarrelled and "were drunken." There were evidently many unworthy
members of the new communion, and of course there were also many
manifestations of insulting bigotry on their part. The class of
society to which the Christians belonged was closely associated in the
Roman mind with the rabble and the slave, if not with criminals. What
the pagan observer saw in the new religion was "a pestilent
superstition," "hatred of the human race," "a malevolent
superstition." He thought its practices to be connected with magic.
The _intransigeant_ Christian refused to take the customary oath in
the law courts, and therefore appeared to menace a trustworthy
administration of the law. He took no interest in the affairs of the
empire, but talked of another king and his coming kingdom, and he
appeared to be an enemy to the Roman power. He held what appeared to
be secret meetings, although the empire rigidly suppressed all secret
societies. He weakened the martial spirit of the soldier. He divided
families--the basis of Roman society--against themselves. He was a
socialist leveller. He threatened with ruin all the trades connected
with either the established worship--as amongst the silversmiths at
Ephesus--or with the luxuries and amusements of life. Those amusements
in circus or amphitheatre he hated, and therefore appeared
misanthropic. He not only stood aloof from the religious observances
of the state and the household, but treated them with contempt or
abhorrence.
Moreover, at this date, he refused to acknowledge the one great symbol
of the imperial authority. This was the statue of the emperor. When
that statue was set up in every town it was not understood by any
intelligent man that the emperor was actually a god, or that, when
incense was burnt before the statue, it was being burned to the
emperor himself as deity. But just as every householder had his
attendant "Genius"--the power determining his vital functions and
well-being--which was often represented as a bust with the man's own
features, so the statue of the Augustus, "His Highness," represented
the Genius of that Head of the State, and the offering of incense was
meant as an appeal to the Genius to keep the emperor and the imperial
power "in health and wealth long to live." The man who refused to make
such an offering was necessarily considered to be ill-disposed to the
majesty and welfare of the Head of the State, and therefore of the
state itself. The Roman attitude towards the early Christians was
partly that of a modern government towards Nihilists, and partly that
of a generation or two ago to a blend of extreme Radical with extreme
atheist.
We are not here concerned with the whole story of the persecution of
the Christians, but only with the situation at and immediately after
the date we have chosen. It is at least quite certain that when Nero
burned the Christians in the year 64 he was treating them, not as the
adherents of a religion, but as social criminals or nuisances. How far
his notions of Christianity may have been influenced by Poppaea we do
not know. At least he believed he was pleasing the populace.