FREETHOUGHT IN ANCIENT ROME
§ 1
The Romans, so much later than the Greeks in their intellectual
development, were in some respects peculiarly apt--in the case of
their upper class--to accept freethinking ideas when Greek rationalism
at length reached them. After receiving from their Greek neighbours
in Southern Italy, in the pre-historic period, the germs of higher
culture, in particular the alphabet, they rather retrograded than
progressed for centuries, the very alphabet degenerating for lack
of literary activity [762] in the absence of any culture class, and
under the one-idea'd rule of the landowning aristocracy, whose bent
to military aggression was correlative to the smallness of the Roman
facilities for commerce. In the earlier ages nearly everything in
the nature of written lore was a specialty of a few priests, and was
limited to their purposes, which included some keeping of annals. [763]
The use of writing for purposes of family records seems to have been
the first literary development among the patrician laity. [764]
In the early republican period, however, the same conditions of
relative poverty, militarism, and aristocratic emulation prevented
any development even of the priesthood beyond the rudimentary stage
of a primitive civic function; and the whole of these conditions in
combination kept the Roman Pantheon peculiarly shadowy, and the Roman
mythology abnormally undeveloped.
The character of the religion of the Romans has been usually
explained in the old manner, in terms of their particular "genius"
and lack of genius. On this view the Romans primordially tended
to do whatever they did--to be slightly religious in one period,
and highly so in another. Teuffel quite unconsciously reduces
the theorem to absurdity in two phrases: "As long as the peculiar
character of the Roman nation remained unaltered" ... (Hist. of
Roman Lit. ed. Schwabe, Eng. tr. 1900, i, 2): "the peculiar Roman
character had now come to an end, and for ever" (id. p. 123). By
no writer has the subject been more unphilosophically treated than
by Mommsen, whose chapter on Roman religion (vol. i, ch. xii) is
an insoluble series of contradictions. (See the present writer's
Christianity and Mythology, pp. 115-17.) M. Boissier contradicts
himself hardly less strangely, alternately pronouncing the Latin
religion timid and confident, prostrate and dignified (La religion
romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins, 4e édit. i, 7, 8, 26, 28). Both
writers ascribe every characteristic of Roman religion to the
character of "the Romans" in the lump--a method which excludes
any orderly conception. It must be abandoned if there is to be
any true comprehension of the subject.
Other verdicts of this kind by Ihne, Jevons, and others, will no
better bear examination. (See Christianity and Mythology, pt. i,
ch. iii, § 3.) Dr. Warde Fowler, the latest English specialist
to handle the question, confidently supports the strange thesis
(dating from Schwartz) that the multitude of deities and daimons
of the early Latins were never thought of as personal, or as
possessing sex, until Greek mythology and sculpture set the
fashion of such conceptions, whereupon "this later and foreign
notion of divinity so completely took possession of the minds of
the Romans of the cosmopolitan city that Varro is the only writer
who has preserved the tradition of the older way of thinking"
(The Religious Experience of the Roman People, 1911, p. 147). That
is to say, the conception of the Gods in the imageless period was
an "older way of thinking," in which deities called by male and
female names, and often addressed as Pater and Mater, were not
really thought of as anthropomorphic at all! How the early Romans
conceived their non-imaged deities Dr. Fowler naturally does not
attempt to suggest. We get merely the unreasoned and unexplained
negative formula that "we may take it as certain that even the
greater deities of the calendar, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus,
and Vesta, were not thought of as existing in any sense in human
form, nor as personal beings having any human characteristics. The
early Romans were destitute of mythological fancy...."
Either, then, the early Romans were psychologically alien to
every other primitive or barbaric people, as known to modern
anthropology, or, by parity of reasoning, all anthropomorphism
is the spontaneous creation of sculptors, who had no ground
whatever in previous psychosis for making images of Gods. The
Greeks, on this view, had no anthropomorphic notion of their
deities until suddenly sculptors began to make images of them,
whereupon everybody promptly and obediently anthropomorphized!
The way out of this hopeless theorem is indicated for Dr. Fowler
by his own repeated observation that the Roman jus divinum, in
which he finds so little sign of normal "mythological fancy,"
represented the deliberately restrictive action of an official
priesthood for whom all religio was a kind of State magic or
"medicine." He expressly insists (p. 24) on "the wonderful work
done by the early authorities from the State in eliminating from
their rule of worship (jus divinum) almost all that was magical,
barbarous, or, as later Romans would have called it, superstitious"
(Lect. ii, p. 24; cp. Lect. iii.). He even inclines to the view
that the patrician religion "was really the religion of an
invading race, like that of the Achæans in Greece, engrafted
on the religion of a primitive and less civilized population"
(pp. viii, 23). This thesis is not necessary to the rebuttal of
his previous negation; but it obviously resists it, unless we are
to make the word "Roman" apply only to patricians. An invading
tribe might, in the case of Rome as in that of the Homeric Greeks,
abandon ordinary and localized primitive beliefs which it had held
in its previous home, and thereafter be officially reluctant to
recognize the local superstitions of its conquered plebs.
But the Roman case can be understood without assuming any
continuity of racial divergence. Livy shows us that the Latin
peasantry were, if possible, more given to superstitious fears and
panics than any other, constantly reporting portents and prodigia
which called for State ritual, and embarrassing military policy by
their apprehensions. A patrician priesthood, concerned above all
things for public polity, would in such circumstances naturally
seek to minimize the personal side of the popular mythology,
treating all orders of divinity as mere classes of powers to be
appeased. The fact (id. p. 29) that among the early Romans, as
among other primitives, women were rigidly excluded from certain
sacra points to a further ground for keeping out of official
sight the sex life of the Gods. But the very ritual formula of
the Fratres Arvales, Sive deus sive dea (p. 149), proves that the
deities were habitually thought of as personal, and male or female.
Dr. Fowler alternately and inconsistently argues that the
"vulgar mind was ready to think of God-couples" (p. 152), and
that the conjunctions of masculine and feminine names in the
Roman Pantheon "do not represent popular ideas of the deities,
but ritualistic forms of invocation" (p. 153). The answer is that
the popular mind is the matrix of mythology, and that if a State
ritual given to minimizing mythology recognized a given habit
of myth-making it was presumably abundant outside. In short,
the whole academic process of reducing early Roman religion to
something unparalleled in anthropology is as ill-founded in the
data as it is repugnant to scientific thought.
The differentiation of Greek and Roman religion is to be explained
by the culture-history of the two peoples; and that, in turn,
was determined by their geographical situation and their special
contacts. Roman life was made systematically agricultural and
militarist by its initial circumstances, where Greek life in
civilized Asia Minor became industrial, artistic, and literary. The
special "genius" of Homer, or of various members of an order of
bards developed by early colonial-feudal Grecian conditions, would
indeed count for much by giving permanent artistic definiteness
of form to the Greek Gods, where the early Romans, leaving all
the vocal arts mainly to the conservative care of their women
and children as something beneath adult male notice, missed the
utilization of poetic genius among them till they were long past
the period of romantic simplicity (cp. Mommsen, bk. i, ch. 15;
Eng. tr. 1894, vol. i, pp. 285-300). Hence the comparative
abstractness of their unsung Gods (cp. Schwegler, Römische
Geschichte, i, 225-28, and refs.; Boissier, La religion romaine,
as cited, i, 8), and the absence of such a literary mythology as
was evolved and preserved in Greece by local patriotisms under
the stimulus of the great epopees and tragedies. The doctrine that
"the Italian is deficient in the passion of the heart," and that
therefore "Italian" literature has "never produced a true epos
or a genuine drama" (Mommsen, ch. 15, vol. i, p. 284), is one of
a thousand samples of the fallacy of explaining a phenomenon in
terms of itself. Teuffel with equal futility affirms the contrary:
"Of the various kinds of poetry, dramatic poetry seems after all
to be most in conformity with the character of the Roman people"
(as cited, p. 3; cp. p. 28 as to the epos). On the same verbalist
method, Mommsen decides as to the Etruscan religion that "the
mysticism and barbarism of their worship had their foundation
in the essential character of the Etruscan people" (ch. 12,
p. 232). Schwegler gives a more objective view of the facts, but,
like other German writers whom he cites, errs in speaking of early
deities like Picus as "only aspects of Mars," not realizing that
Mars is merely the surviving or developed deity of that type. He
also commits the conventional error of supposing that the early
Roman religion is fundamentally monotheistic or pantheistic,
because the multitudinous "abstract" deities are "only" aspects
of the general force of Nature. The notion that the Romans did
not anthropomorphize their deities like all other peoples is a
surprising fallacy.
Thus when Rome, advancing in the career of conquest, had developed
a large aristocratic class, living a city life, with leisure for
intellectual interests, and had come in continuous contact with
the conquered Grecian cities of Southern Italy, its educated men
underwent a literary and a rationalistic influence at the same time,
and were the more ready to give up all practical belief in their
own slightly-defined Gods when they found Greeks explaining away
theirs. Here we see once more the primary historic process by which
men are led to realize the ill-founded character of their hereditary
creeds: the perception is indirectly set up by the reflective
recognition of the creeds of others, and all the more readily when the
others give a critical lead. Indeed, Greek rationalism was already old
when the Romans began to develop a written and artistic literature: it
had even taken on the popular form given to it by Evêmeros a century
before the Romans took it up. Doubtless there was skepticism among
the latter before Ennius: such a piece of religious procedure as the
invention of a God of Silver (Argentinus), son of the God of Copper
(Æsculanus), on the introduction of a silver currency, 269 B.C.,
must have been smiled at by the more intelligent. [765]
Mommsen states (ii, 70) that at this epoch the Romans kept
"equally aloof from superstition and unbelief," but this is
inaccurate on both sides. The narrative of Livy exhibits among
the people a boundless and habitual superstition. The records
of absurd prodigies of every sort so throng his pages that he
himself repeatedly ventures to make light of them. Talking oxen,
skies on fire, showers of flesh, crows and mice eating gold, rivers
flowing blood, showers of milk--such were the reports chronically
made to the Roman government by its pious subjects, and followed
by anxious religious ceremonies at Rome (cp. Livy, iii, 5, 10; x,
27; xi, 28-35; xxiv, 44; xxvii, 4, 11, 23, etc., etc. In the index
to Drakenborch's Livy there are over five columns of references
to prodigia). On the other hand, though superstition was certainly
the rule, there are traces of rationalism. On the next page after
that cited, Mommsen himself admits that the faith of the people had
already been shaken by the interference allowed to the priestly
colleges in political matters; and in another chapter (bk. ii,
ch. 13; vol. ii, 112) he recalls that a consul of the Claudian
gens had jested openly at the auspices in the first Punic war,
249 B.C. The story is told by Cicero, De natura Deorum, ii, 3,
and Suetonius, Tiberius, c. 2. The sacred poultry, on being let
out of their coop on board ship, would not feed, so that the
auspices could not be taken; whereupon the consul caused them to
be thrown into the water, etiam per jocum Deos inridens, saying
they might drink if they would not eat. His colleague Junius in
the same war also disregarded the auspices; and in both cases,
according to Balbus the Stoic in Cicero's treatise, the Roman
fleets were duly defeated; whereupon Claudius was condemned by
the people, and Junius committed suicide. Cp. Valerius Maximus,
l. i, c. iv, § 3.
Such stories would fortify the age-long superstition as to auspices
and omens, which was in full force among Greek commanders as late
as Xenophon, when many cultured Greeks were rationalists. But it
was mainly a matter of routine, in a sphere where freethought
is slow to penetrate. There was probably no thought of jesting
when, in the year 193 B.C., after men had grown weary alike of
earthquakes and of the religious services prescribed on account
of them; and after the consuls had been worn out by sacrifices and
expiations, it was decreed that "if on any day a service had been
arranged for a reported earthquake, no one should report another
on that day" (Livy, xxxiv, 55). Cato, who would never have dreamt
of departing from a Roman custom, was the author of the saying
(Cicero, De Div. ii, 24) that haruspices might well laugh in each
other's faces. He had in view the Etruscan practice, being able to
see the folly of that, though not of his own. Cp. Mommsen, iii,
116. As to the Etruscan origin of the haruspices, in distinction
from the augurs, see Schwegler, i, 276, 277; Ihne, Eng. ed. i,
82-83, note; and O. Müller as there cited.
But it is with the translation of the Sacred History of Evêmeros
by Ennius, about 200 B.C., that the literary history of Roman
freethought begins. In view of the position of Ennius as a teacher
of Greek and belles lettres (he being of Greek descent, and born
in Calabria), it cannot be supposed that he would openly translate
an anti-religious treatise without the general acquiescence of his
aristocratic patrons. Cicero says of him that he "followed" as well
as translated Evêmeros; [766] and his favourite Greek dramatists
were the freethinking Euripides and Epicharmos, from both of whom
he translated. [767] The popular superstitions, in particular those
of soothsaying and divination, he sharply attacked. [768] If his
patrons all the while stood obstinately to the traditional usages
of official augury and ritual, it was in the spirit of political
conservatism that belonged to their class and their civic ideal,
and on the principle that religion was necessary for the control of
the multitude. In Etruria, where the old culture had run largely
to mysticism and soothsaying on quasi-oriental lines, the Roman
government took care to encourage it, by securing the theological
monopoly of the upper-class families, [769] and thus set up a standing
hot-bed of superstition. In the same spirit they adopted from time
to time popular cults from Greece, that of the Phrygian Mother of the
Gods being introduced in the year 204 B.C. The attempt (186 B.C.) to
suppress the Bacchic mysteries, of which a distorted and extravagant
account [770] is given by Livy, was made on grounds of policy and
not of religion; and even if the majority of the senate had not been
disposed to encourage the popular appetite for emotional foreign
worships, the multitude of their own accord would have introduced
the latter, in resentment of the exclusiveness of the patricians in
keeping the old domestic and national cults in their own hands. [771]
As now eastern conquests multiplied the number of foreign slaves
and residents in Rome, the foreign worships multiplied with them;
and with the worships came such forms of freethought as then existed
in Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt. In resistance to these, as to the
orgiastic worships, political and religious conservatism for a time
combined. In 173 B.C. the Greek Epicurean philosophers Alkaios and
Philiskos were banished from the city, [772] a step which was sure to
increase the interest in Epicureanism. Twelve years later the Catonic
party carried a curt decree in the Senate against the Greek rhetors,
[773] uti Romae ne essent; and in 155 the interest aroused by Carneades
and the other Athenian ambassadors led to their being suddenly
sent home, on Cato's urging. [774] It seems certain that Carneades
made converts to skepticism, among them being the illustrious Scipio
Æmilianus. [775] In the sequel the Greeks multiplied, especially after
the fall of Macedonia, [776] and in the year 92 we find the censors
vetoing the practices of the Latin rhetors as an unpleasing novelty,
[777] thus leaving the Greeks in possession of the field. [778] But,
the general social tendency being downwards, it was only a question of
time when the rationalism should be overgrown by the superstition. In
137 there had been another vain edict against the foreign soothsayers
and the worshippers of Sabazius; [779] but it was such cults that
were to persist, while the old Roman religion passed away, [780]
save insofar as it had a non-literary survival among the peasantry.
§ 2
While self-government lasted, rationalism among the cultured classes
was fairly common. The great poem of Lucretius, On the Nature of
Things, with its enthusiastic exposition of the doctrine of Epicurus,
remains to show to what a height of sincerity and ardour a Roman
freethinker could rise. No Greek utterance that has come down to us
makes so direct and forceful an attack as his on religion as a social
institution. He is practically the first systematic freethinking
propagandist; so full is he of his purpose that after his stately
prologue to alma Venus, who is for him but a personification of the
genetic forces of Nature, he plunges straight into his impeachment of
religion as a foul tyranny from which thinking men were first freed
by Epicurus. The sonorous verse vibrates with an indignation such as
Shelley's in Queen Mab: religion is figured as horribili super aspectu
mortalibus instans; a little further on its deeds are denounced as
scelerosa atque impia, "wicked and impious," the religious term being
thus turned against itself; and a moving picture of the sacrifice of
Iphigeneia justifies the whole. "To so much of evil could religion
persuade." It is with a bitter consciousness of the fatal hold of the
hated thing on most men's ignorant imagination that he goes on to speak
of the fears [781] so assiduously wrought upon by the vates, and to
set up with strenuous speed the vividly-imagined system of Epicurean
science by which he seeks to fortify his friend against them. That
no thing comes from nothing, or lapses into nothing; that matter is
eternal; that all things proceed "without the Gods" by unchanging law,
are his insistent themes; and for nigh two thousand years a religious
world has listened with a reluctant respect. His influence is admitted
to have been higher and nobler than that of the religion he assailed.
"Lucretius was the first not only to reveal a new power, beauty,
and mystery in the world, but also to communicate to poetry a
speculative impulse, opening up, with a more impassioned appeal
than philosophy can do, the great questions underlying human
life--such as the truth of all religious tradition, the position
of man in the universe, and the attitude of mind and course of
conduct demanded by that position." (Sellar, Roman Poets of the
Republic: Virgil, 1877, p. 199.)
"In the eyes of Lucretius all worship seemed prompted by fear
and based on ignorance of natural law.... But it is nevertheless
true that Lucretius was a great religious poet. He was a prophet,
in deadly earnest, calling men to renounce their errors both of
thought and conduct.... We may be certain that he was absolutely
convinced of the truth of all that he wrote." (W. Warde Fowler,
Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, 1909, pp. 327-28.)
And yet throughout the whole powerful poem we have testimony to the
pupillary character of Roman thought in relation to Grecian. However
much the earnest student may outgo his masters in emphasis and zeal of
utterance, he never transcends the original irrationality of asserting
that "the Gods" exist; albeit it is their glory to do nothing. It is
in picturing their ineffable peace that he reaches some of his finest
strains of song, [782] though in the next breath he repudiates every
idea of their control of things cosmic or human. He swears by their
sacred breasts, proh sancta deum pectora, and their life of tranquil
joy, when he would express most vehemently his scorn of the thought
that it can be they who hurl the lightnings which haply destroy their
own temples and strike down alike the just and the unjust. It is a
survival of a quite primitive conception of deity, [783] alongside
of an advanced anti-religious criticism.
The explanation of the anomaly seems to be twofold. In the first
place, Roman thought had not lived long enough--it never did live
long enough--to stand confidently on its own feet and criticize
its Greek teachers. In Cicero's treatise On the Nature of the Gods,
the Epicurean and the Stoic in turn retail their doctrine as they
had it from their school, the Epicurean affirming the existence
and the inaction of the Gods with equal confidence, and repeating
without a misgiving the formula about the Gods having not bodies
but quasi-bodies, with not blood but quasi-blood; the Stoic, who
stands by most of the old superstitions, professing to have his
philosophical reasons for them. Each sectarian derides the beliefs
of the other; neither can criticize his own creed. It would seem
as if in the habitually militarist society, even when it turns to
philosophy, there must prevail a militarist ethic and psychosis in the
intellectual life, each man choosing a flag or a leader and fighting
through thick and thin on that side henceforth. On the other hand,
the argumentation of the high-priest Cotta in the dialogue turns to
similar purpose the kindred principle of civic tradition. He argues
in turn against the Epicurean's science and the Stoic's superstition,
contesting alike the claim that the Gods are indifferent and the
claim that they govern; and in the end he brazenly affirms that,
while he sees no sound philosophic argument for religious beliefs and
practices, he thinks it is justifiable to maintain them on the score
of prescription or ancestral example. Here we have the senatorial
or conservative principle, [784] availing itself of the skeptical
dialectic of Carneades. In terms of that ideal, which prevailed alike
with believers and indifferentists, [785] and mediated between such
rival schools as the Epicurean and Stoic, we may partly explain the
Epicurean theorem itself. For the rest, it is to be understood as an
outcome partly of surviving sentiment and partly of forced compromise
in the case of its Greek framers, and of the habit of partizan loyalty
in the case of its Roman adherents.
In the arguments of Cotta, the unbelieving high-priest, we presumably
have the doctrine of Cicero himself, [786] who in the Academica avows
his admiration of Carneades's reasoning, and in the De Divinatione
follows it, but was anchored by officialism to State usage. With
his vacillating character, his forensic habit, and his genius for
mere speech, he could not but betray his own lack of intellectual
conviction; and such weakness as his found its natural support in
the principle of use and wont, the practice and tradition of the
commonwealth. On that footing he had it in him to boast like any
pedigreed patrician of the historic religiousness of Rome, he himself
the while being devoid of all confident religious belief. His rhetoric
on the subject can hardly be otherwise estimated than as sheer hustings
hypocrisy. Doubtless he gave philosophic colour to his practice by
noting the hopeless conflict of the creeds of the positive sects,
very much as in our own day conservative dialectic finds a ground for
religious conformity in the miscarriages of the men of science. [787]
But Cicero does not seem even to have had a religious sentiment to
cover the nakedness of his political opportunism. Not only does he in
the Tusculan Disputations put aside in the Platonic fashion all the
Homeric tales which anthropomorphize and discredit the Gods; [788]
but in his treatise On Divination he shows an absolute disbelief in
all the recognized practices, including the augury which he himself
officially practised; and his sole excuse is that they are to be
retained "on account of popular opinion and of their great public
utility." [789] As to prodigies, he puts in germ the argument later
made famous by Hume: either the thing could happen (in the course of
nature) or it could not; if it could not, the story is false; if it
could, non esse mirandum--there is no miracle. [790] In his countless
private letters, again, he shows not a trace of religious feeling,
[791] or even of interest in the questions which in his treatises
he declares to be of the first importance. [792] Even the doctrine
of immortality, to which he repeatedly returns, seems to have been
for him, as for so many Christians since, only a forensic theme,
never a source of the private consolation he ascribed to it. [793]
In Cicero's case, in fine, we reach the conclusion that either the
noted inconstancy of his character pervaded all his thinking, or
that his gift for mere utterance, and his demoralizing career as an
advocate, overbore in him all sincere reflection. But, indeed, the
practical subversion of all rational ethic in the public life of late
republican Rome, wherein men claimed to be free and self-governing,
yet lived by oppressing the rest of the world, was on all hands fatal
to the moral rectitude which inspires a critical philosophy.
Modern scholarship still clings to the long-established view that
Cicero was practically right, and that Lucretius was practically
wrong. Augustus, says Dr. Warde Fowler, was fortunate in finding
in Virgil "one who was in some sense a prophet as well as a poet,
who could urge the Roman by an imaginative example to return
to a living pietas--not merely to the old religious forms,
but to the intelligent sense of duty to God and man which
had built up his character and his empire. In Cicero's day
there was also a great poet, he too in some sense a prophet;
but Lucretius could only appeal to the Roman to shake off the
slough of his old religion, and such an appeal was at the time
both futile and dangerous. Looking at the matter historically,
and not theologically, we ought to sympathize with the attitude
of Cicero and Scaevola towards the religion of the State. It was
based on a statesmanlike instinct; and had it been possible for
that instinct to express itself practically in a positive policy
like that of Augustus, it is quite possible that much mischief
might have been averted" (Social Life at Rome, pp. 325-26).
It is necessary to point out (1) that the early Roman's "sense of
duty to God and man" was never of a kind that could fitly be termed
"intelligent"; and (2) that it was his character that made his
creed, and not his creed his character, though creed once formed
reacts on conduct. Further, it may be permitted to suggest that
we might consider historical problems morally, and to deprecate
the academic view that "statesmanship" is something necessarily
divorced from veracity. The imperfect appeal of Lucretius to the
spirit of truth in an ignorant and piratical community, living
an increasingly parasitic life, was certainly "futile"; but it is
a strange sociology that sees in it something "dangerous," while
regarding the life of perpetual conquest and plunder as a matter
of course, and the practice of systematic deceit as wholesome.
The summary of the situation is that Cicero's policy of religious
make-believe could no more have "saved" Rome than Plato's could
have saved Athens, or than that of Augustus did save the empire. It
went downhill about as steadily after as before him; and it
continued to do so under Christianity as under paganism. The
decline was absolutely involved in the policy of universal
conquest; and neither creeds nor criticism of creeds could have
"averted" the result while the cause subsisted. But there is
something gratuitously anti-rational in the thesis that such
a decay might have been prevented by a politic manipulation
of beliefs known to be false, and that some regeneration
was really worked in Rome by the tale of pious Æneas. In his
Religious Experience of the Roman People (1911) Dr. Fowler is
more circumspect.
In the upper-class Rome of Cicero's day his type seems to have been
predominant, [794] the women alone being in the mass orthodox, [795]
and in their case the tendency was to add new superstitions to the
old. Among public men there subsisted a clear understanding that public
religion should continue for reasons of State. When we find an eminent
politician like the elder M. Æmilius Scaurus prosecuted in the year 103
B.C. on a charge of neglecting certain religious ceremonies connected
with his offices, we know that there had been neither conscientious
abstention on his part nor sincere religious resentment on the other
side, but merely a resort by political enemies, after Greek precedent,
to a popular means of blackening an antagonist; for the same Scaurus,
who was a member of the college of augurs, had actually rebuilt or
restored the temple of Fides, said to have been founded by Numa, and
that of Mens (Prudence), which had been set up after the great defeat
of the Romans at the Trasimene lake; [796] the early and the late
procedure alike illustrating the political and pragmatic character
of the State religion. [797] In the supreme figure of Julius Cæsar
we see the Roman brain at its strongest; and neither his avowed
unbelief in the already popular doctrine of immortality, [798] nor
his repeatedly expressed contempt for the auspices, [799] withheld
him from holding and fulfilling the function of high pontiff. The
process of skepticism had been rapid among the men of action. The
illiterate Marius carried about with him a Syrian prophetess; of
Sulla, who unhesitatingly plundered the temple of Delphi, it was
said that he carried a small figure of Apollo as an amulet; [800]
of Cæsar, unless insofar as it may be true that in his last years,
like Napoleon, he grew to believe in omens as his powers failed,
under the stress of perpetual conflict, [801] it cannot be pretended
that he was aught but a convinced freethinker. [802] The greatest and
most intellectual man of action in the ancient world had no part in
the faith which was supposed to have determined the success of the
most powerful of all the ancient nations.
Dean Merivale, noting that Cæsar "professed without reserve
the principles of the unbelievers," observes that, "freethinker
as he was, he could not escape from the universal thraldom of
superstition in which his contemporaries were held" (Hist. of
the Romans under the Empire, ed. 1865, ii, 424). The reproach,
from a priest, is piquant, but misleading. All the stories
on which it is founded apply to the last two or three years
of Cæsar's life; and supposing them to be all true, which is
very doubtful, they would but prove what has been suggested
above--that the overstrained soldier, rising to the dizzy height
of a tremendous career, partly lost his mental balance, like so
many another. (Cp. Mackail, Latin Literature, 1895, p. 80.) Such
is the bearing of the doubtful story (Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxviii,
2) that after the breaking down of a chariot (presumably the
casualty which took place in his fourfold triumph; see Dio
Cassius, xlviii, 21) he never mounted another without muttering
a charm. M. Boissier (i, 70) makes the statement of Pliny apply
to Cæsar's whole life; but although Pliny gives no particulars,
even Dean Merivale (p. 372) connects it with the accident in the
triumph. To the same time belongs the less challengeable record
(Dio Cassius, lx, 23) of his climbing on his knees up the steps of
the Capitol to propitiate Nemesis. The very questionable legend,
applied so often to other captains, of his saying, I have thee,
Africa, when he stumbled on landing (Sueton. Jul. 59), is a
proof not of superstition but of presence of mind in checking
the superstitious fears of the troops, and was so understood by
Suetonius; as was the rather flimsy story of his taking with him
in Africa a man nicknamed Salutio (Sueton. ibid.) to neutralize the
luck of the opposing Cornelii. The whole turn given to the details
by the clerical historian is arbitrary and unjudicial. Nor is he
accurate in saying that Cæsar "denied the Gods" in the Senate. He
actually swore by them, per Deos immortales, in the next sentence
to that in which he denied a future state. The assertion of
the historian (p. 423), that in denying the immortality of the
soul Cæsar denied "the recognized foundation of all religion,"
is a no less surprising error. The doctrine never had been so
recognized in ancient Rome. A Christian ecclesiastic might have
been expected to remember that the Jewish religion, believed by
him to be divine, was devoid of the "recognized foundation" in
question, and that the canonical book of Ecclesiastes expressly
discards it. Of course Cæsar offered sacrifices to Gods in whom
he did not believe. That was the habitual procedure of his age.
§ 3
It is significant that the decay of rationalism in Rome begins and
proceeds with the Empire. Augustus, whose chosen name was sacerdotal
in its character, [803] made it part of his policy to restore as far
as possible the ancient cults, many of which had fallen into extreme
neglect, between the indifference of the aristocratic class [804]
and the devotion of the populace, itself so largely alien, to the
more attractive worships introduced from Egypt and the East. That
he was himself a habitually superstitious man seems certain; [805]
but even had he not been, his policy would have been natural from the
Roman point of view. A historian of two centuries later puts in the
mouth of Mæcenas an imagined counsel to the young emperor to venerate
and enforce the national religion, to exclude and persecute foreign
cults, to put down alike atheism and magic, to control divination
officially, and to keep an eye on the philosophers. [806] What
the empire sought above all things was stability; and a regimen of
religion, under imperial control, seemed one of the likeliest ways
to keep the people docile. Julius himself had seemed to plan such a
policy, [807] though he also planned to establish public libraries,
[808] which would hardly have promoted faith among the educated.
Augustus, however, aimed at encouraging public religion of every
description, repairing or rebuilding eighty-two temples at Rome
alone, giving them rich gifts, restoring old festivals and ceremonies,
reinstituting priestly colleges, encouraging special foreign worships,
and setting up new civic cults; himself playing high pontiff and
joining each new priesthood, to the end of making his power and
prestige so far identical with theirs; [809] in brief, anticipating
the later ruling principle of the Church of Rome. The natural upshot
of the whole process was the imperial apotheosis, or raising of each
emperor to Godhead at death. The usage of deifying living rulers was
long before common in Egypt and the east, [810] and had been adopted
by the conquering Spartan Lysander in Asia Minor as readily as by the
conquering Alexander. Julius Cæsar seems to have put it aside as a
nauseous flattery; [811] but Augustus wrought it into his policy. It
was the consummation at once of the old political conception of
religion and of the new autocracy.
In a society so managed, all hope of return to self-government having
ceased, the level of thought sank accordingly. There was practically
no more active freethought. Livy, indeed, speaks so often of the
contempt shown in his own day for tales of prodigies, and of what
he calls contempt for the Gods, [812] that there can be no question
of the lack of religion among the upper classes at the beginning
of the empire. But even in Livy's day unbelief had ceased to go
beyond a shrugging of the shoulders. Horace, with his credat Judæus
Apella, and his frank rejection of the fear of the Deos tristes,
[813] was no believer, but he was not one to cross the emperor,
[814] and he was ready to lend himself to the official policy of
religion. [815] Ovid could satirize [816] the dishonest merchant who
prayed to the Gods to absolve his frauds; but he hailed Augustus as
the sacred founder and restorer of temples, [817] prayed for him as
such, busied himself with the archæology of the cults, and made it,
not quite without irony, a maxim to "spare an accepted belief." [818]
Virgil, at heart a pantheist with rationalistic leanings, [819] but
sadly divided between Lucretius and Augustus, his poetical and his
political masters, [820] tells all the transition from the would-be
scientific to the newly-credulous age in the two wistful lines:--
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas ...
Fortunatus et ille, Deos qui novit agrestes [821]
--"happy he who has been able to learn the causes of things;
fortunate also he who has known the rural Gods." The Gods, rural
and other, entered on their due heritage in a world of decadence;
Virgil's epic is a religious celebration of antiquity; and Livy's
history is written in the credulous spirit, or at least in the tone,
of an older time, with a few concessions to recent common sense. [822]
In the next generation Seneca's monotheistic aversion to the popular
superstitions is the high-water mark of the period, and represents
the elevating power of the higher Greek Stoicism. On this score he
belongs to the freethinking age, while his theistic apriorism belongs
to the next. [823] All the while his principle of conformity to all
legal observances [824] leaves him powerless to modify the environment.
As the empire proceeds, the echoes of the old freethought become
fewer and fewer. It is an entire misconception to suppose that
Christianity came into the Roman world as a saving counter-force to
licentious unbelief. Unbelief had in large part disappeared before
Christianity made any headway; and that creed came as one of many
popular cults, succeeding in terms of its various adaptations to
the special conditions, moral and economic. It was easy for the
populace of the empire to deify a ruler: as easy as for those of
the East to deify Jesus; or for the early Romans to deify Romulus;
at Rome it was the people, now so largely of alien stock, who had
most insisted on deifying Cæsar. [825] But the upper class soon kept
pace with them in the zest for religion. In the first century, the
elder Pliny recalls the spirit of Lucretius by the indignant eloquence
with which he protests against the burdensome belief in immortality;
[826] and the emphasis with which he scouts alike the polytheism of
the multitude, the universal worship of Fortune, and the idea that
man can know the infinite divinity which is the universe; [827]
but, though Seneca and others reject the fear of future torment,
Pliny is the last writer to repudiate with energy the idea of a
future state. [828] A number of epitaphs still chime with his view;
but already the majority are on the other side; [829] and the fear of
hell was normally as active as the hope of heaven; while the belief
in an approaching end of the world was proportionally as common as it
was later under Christianity. [830] And though Pliny, discussing the
bases of magic, of which he recognized the fraudulence, ranks among
them the influences of religion, as to which he declared mankind
to be still in extreme darkness, [831] we have seen how he in turn,
on theistic grounds, frowned upon Hipparchos for daring to number the
stars. [832] Thus, whatever may be the truth as to the persecutions of
the Christians in the first two centuries of the empire, the motive
was in all cases certainly political or moral, as in the earlier
case of the Bacchic mysteries, not rationalistic hostility to its
doctrines as apart from Christian attacks on the established worships.
Some unbelievers there doubtless were after Petronius, whose perdurable
maxim that "Fear first made Gods in the world," [833] adopted in
the next generation by Statius, [834] was too pregnant with truth
to miss all acceptance among thinking men. The fact that Statius in
his verse ranked Domitian with the Gods made its truth none the less
pointed. The Alexandrian rationalist Chaeremon, who had been appointed
one of the tutors of Nero, had explained the Egyptian religion as
a mere allegorizing of the physical order of the universe. [835]
It has been remarked too that in the next century the appointment of
the freethinking Greek Lucian by Marcus Aurelius to a post of high
authority in Egypt showed that his writings gave no great offence
at court, [836] where, indeed, save under the two great Antonines,
religious seriousness was rare. These, however, were the exceptions:
the whole cast of mind developed under the autocracy, whether in the
good or in the bad, made for belief and acquiescence or superstition
rather than for searching doubt and sustained reasoning.
The statement of Mosheim or of his commentators (Eccles. Hist. 1
Cent. Pt. I, ch. i, § 21, note; Murdock's trans. Reid's ed.) that
Juvenal (Sat. xiii, 86) "complains of the many atheists at Rome" is
a perversion of the passage cited. Juvenal's allusion to those who
put all things down to fortune and deny a moral government of the
world begins with the phrase "sunt qui," "there are (those) who";
he makes far more account of the many superstitious, and never
suggests that the atheists are numerous in his day. Neither does he
"complain"; on the contrary, his allusion to the atheists as such
is non-condemnatory as compared with his attacks on pious rogues,
and is thus part of the ground for holding that he was himself
something of a freethinker--one of the last among the literary
men. In the tenth Satire (346 sqq.) he puts the slightly theistic
doctrine, sometimes highly praised (ed. Ruperti, 1817, in loc.),
that men should not pray for anything, but leave the decision to
the Gods, to whom man is dearer than to himself. There too occurs
the famous doctrine (356) that if anything is to be prayed for it
should be the mens sana in corpore sano, and the strong soul void
of the fear of death. The accompanying phrase about offering "the
intestines and the sacred sausages of a whitish pig" is flatly
contemptuous of religious ceremonial; and the closing lines,
placing the source of virtue and happiness within, are strictly
naturalistic. In the two last:--
Nullum numen habes, si sit prudentia; nos [or sed] te
Nos facimus, Fortuna, Deam, coeloque locamus,
the frequent reading abest for habes seems to make the better
sense: "No divinity is wanting, if there be prudence; but it
is we, O fortune, who make thee a Goddess, and throne thee in
heaven." In any case, the insistence is on man's lordship of
himself. (The phrase occurs again in Sat. xiv, 315.) But the
worship of Fortune--which Pliny declares to be the prevailing
faith of his day (Hist. Nat. II, v (vii), 7)--was itself a cult
like another, with temples and ritual; and the astrology which, he
adds, is beginning to supersede Fortune-worship among the learned
and the ignorant alike, was but a reversion to an older Eastern
religion. His own preference is for sun-worship, if any; but he
falls back on the conviction that the power of God is limited,
and that God is thus seen to be simply Nature (id. 8).
The erroneous notion that the Roman aristocracy ran mainly to
atheism was widely propagated by Voltaire, who made it part
of his argument against the atheism of his own day (Jenni;
art. Athéisme, in the Dict. Philos., etc.). It will not bear
examination. As regards the general tone of Roman literature
from the first century onwards, the summing-up of Renan is
substantially just: "The freethinkers ... diminish little by
little, and disappear.... Juvenal alone continues in Roman
society, down to the time of Hadrian, the expression of a frank
incredulity.... Science dies out from day to day. From the death
of Seneca, it may be said that there is no longer a thoroughly
rationalistic scholar. Pliny the Elder is inquisitive, but
uncritical. Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, avoid commenting
on the inanity of the most ridiculous inventions. Pliny the Younger
(Ep. vii, 27) believes in puerile stories of ghosts; Epictetus
(xxxi, 5) would have all practise the established worship. Even
a writer so frivolous as Apuleius feels himself bound to take
the tone of a rigid conservative about the Gods (Florida, i,
1; De Magia, 41, 55, 56, 63). A single man, about the middle of
this century, seems entirely exempt from supernatural beliefs;
that is Lucian. The scientific spirit, which is the negation of
the supernatural, exists only in a few; superstition invades all,
enfeebling all reason" (Les Évangiles, ed. 1877, pp. 406-407).
That the mental paralysis connects causally with the political
conditions will perhaps not now be denied. A censorship of
the written word belongs congenitally to autocracy; and only the
personal magnanimity of Cæsar and the prudence of Augustus delayed its
development in Rome. Soon it became an irresistible terrorism. Even
Cæsar, indeed, so far forgot one of the great rules of his life as
to impeach before the Senate the tribunes who had quite justifiably
prosecuted some of the people who had hailed him as king; [837]
and the fact that the Senate was already slavish enough to eject
them gives the forecast of the future. Augustus long showed a notable
forbearance to all manner of verbal opposition, and even disparagement;
but at length he also began to prosecute for private aspersions,
[838] and even to suppress histories of a too critical stamp. Tiberius
began his reign with the high-pitched sentiment that "in a free State
tongue and mind should be free"; [839] and for a time he bore himself
with an exemplary restraint; but he too, in turn, took the colour
of his place, and became murderously resentful of any semblance of
aspersion on himself. [840] The famous sentiment ascribed to him in
the Annals of Tacitus, Deorum injuriae diis curae [841]--"the Gods'
wrongs are the Gods' business"--is not noted by Suetonius, and has
an un-Roman sound. What Suetonius tells is [842] that he was "very
negligent concerning the Gods and religions," yet addicted to the
astrologers, and a believer in fate. The fact remains that while,
as aforesaid, there must have been still a number of unbelievers,
there is no sign after Lucretius of any Roman propaganda against
religion; and the presumption is that the Augustan policy of promoting
the old cults was extended to the maintenance of the ordinary Roman
view that disrespect to the Gods was a danger to the State. In the
reign of Nero we find trace of a treatise De religionis erroribus
by Fabricius Vejento, [843] wherein was ridiculed the zeal of the
priests to proclaim mysteries which they did not understand; but,
whether or not its author was exiled and the book burnt on their
protest, such literature was not further produced. [844]
There was, in fact, no spirit left for a Lucretian polemic against
false beliefs. Everything in the nature of a searching criticism
of life was menaced by the autocracy; Nero decreeing that no man
should philosophize at Rome, [845] after slaying or banishing
a series of philosophers; [846] Domitian crucifying the very
scribes who copied the work of Hermogenes of Tarsus, in which he was
obliquely criticized. [847] When men in the mass crouched before such
tyranny, helplessly beholding emperor after emperor overtaken by the
madness that accrues to absolute power, they were disabled for any
disinterested warfare on behalf of truth. All serious impeachment of
religion proceeds upon an ethical motive; and in imperial Rome there
was no room for any nobility of ethic save such as upbore the Stoics
in their austere pursuit of self-control, in a world too full of evil
to be delighted in.
Thus it came about that the Cæsars, who would doubtless have protected
their co-operating priesthoods from any serious attack on the official
religion, [848] had practically no occasion to do so. Lucian's jests
were cast at the Gods of Greece, not at those of the Roman official
cults; hence his immunity. What the Cæsars were concerned to do was
rather to menace any alien religion that seemed to undermine the
solidarity of the State; and of such religions, first the Jewish,
and later the Christian, were obvious examples. Thus we have it
that Tiberius "put down foreign religions" (externas ceremonias),
in particular the Egyptian and Judaic rites; pulling down the temple
of Isis, crucifying her priests, expelling from Rome all Jews and
proselytes, and forcing the Jewish youth to undergo military service
in unhealthy climates. [849] Even the astrologers, in whose lore he
believed, he expelled until they promised to renounce their art--a
precedent partly set up by Augustus, [850] and followed with varying
severity by all the emperors, pagan and Christian alike.
And still the old Italian religion waned, as it must. On the one
hand, the Italic population was almost wholly replaced or diluted by
alien stocks, slave or free, with alien cults and customs; on the
other, the utter insincerity of the official cults, punctiliously
conserved by well-paid, unbelieving priests, invited indifference. In
the nature of things, an unchanging creed is moribund; life means
adaptation to change; and it was only the alien cults that in Rome
adapted themselves to the psychic mutation. Among the educated,
who had read their Lucretius, the spectacle of the innumerable cults
of the empire conduced either to entire but tacit unbelief, or to a
species of vaguely rationalistic [851] yet sentimental monotheism,
in which Reason sometimes figured as universal Deity. [852] Among the
uneducated the progression was constant towards one or other of the
emotional and ritualistic oriental faiths, so much better adapted to
their down-trodden life.
§ 4
One element of betterment there was in the life of declining Rome,
until the Roman ideals were superseded by oriental. Even the Augustan
poets, Horace and Ovid, had protested like the Hebrew prophets, and
like Plato and like Cicero, against the idea that rich sacrifices
availed with the Gods above a pure heart; and such doctrine, while
paganism lasted, prevailed more and more. [853] At the same time,
Horace rejects the Judæo-Stoic doctrine, adopted in the gospels,
that all sins are equal, and lays down the rational moral test of
utility--Utilitas justi propè mater et aequi. [854] The better and
more thoughtful men who grew up under the autocracy, though inevitably
feebler and more credulous in their thinking than those of the later
commonwealth, developed at length a concern for conduct, public and
private, which lends dignity to the later philosophic literature,
and lustre to the imperial rule of the Antonines. This concern it
was that, linking Greek theory to Roman practice, produced a code
of rational law which could serve Europe for a thousand years. This
concern too it was, joined with the relatively high moral quality of
their theism, that ennobled the writing of Seneca [855] and Epictetus
and Maximus of Tyre; and irradiates the words as well as the rule
of Marcus Aurelius. In them was anticipated all that was good [856]
in the later Christian ethic, even as the popular faiths anticipated
the Christian dogmas; and they cherished a temper of serenity that
the Fathers fell far short of. To compare their pages with those
of the subsequent Christian Fathers--Seneca with Lactantius, "the
Christian Cicero"; Maximus with Arnobius; Epictetus with Tertullian;
the admirable Marcus, and his ideal of the "dear city of Zeus,"
with the shrill polemic of Augustine's City of God and the hysteria
of the Confessions--is to prove a rapid descent in magnanimity,
sanity, self-command, sweetness of spirit, and tolerance. What
figures as religious intolerance in the Cæsars was, as we have seen,
always a political, never a religious, animosity. Any prosecution of
Christians under the Antonines was certainly on the score of breach
of law, turbulence, or real or supposed malpractices, not on that of
heresy--a crime created only by the Christians themselves, in their
own conflicts.
The scientific account of the repellent characteristics of the Fathers,
of course, is not that their faith made them what they were, but that
the ever-worsening social and intellectual conditions assorted such
types into their ecclesiastical places, and secured for them their
influence over the types now prevailing among the people. They too
stand for the intellectual dissolution wrought by imperialism. When
all the higher forms of intellectual efficiency were at an end, it
was impossible that on any religious impulse whatever there should
be generated either a higher code of life or a saner body of thought
than those of the higher paganism of the past. Their very arguments
against paganism are largely drawn from old "pagan" sources. Those
who still speak of the rise of Christianity in the ancient world as
a process of "regeneration" are merely turning historical science
out of doors. The Christian Fathers had all the opportunity that
a life of quasi-intellectual specialism could supply; and their
liberty of criticism as regarded the moribund pagan creeds was a
further gymnastic; but nothing could countervail the insanity of
their intellectual presuppositions, which they could not transcend.
Inheriting the Judaic hypnotism of the Sacred Book, they could reason
only as do railers; and the moral readjustment which put them in revolt
against the erotic element in pagan mythology was a mere substitution
of an ascetic neurosis for the old disease of imagination. Strictly
speaking, their asceticism, being never rationalized, never rose
to the level of ethic as distinguished from mere taboo or sacrosanct
custom. As we shall see, they could not wholly escape the insurgence of
the spirit of reason; but they collectively scouted it with a success
attained by no other ostensibly educated priesthood of antiquity. They
intellectually represent, in fact, the consummation of the general
Mediterranean decadence.
For the rest, the "triumph" of the new faith was simply the
survival of the forms of thought, and, above all, of the form of
religious community, best fitted to the political and intellectual
environment. The new Church organization was above all things a
great economic endowment for a class of preachers, polemists, and
propagandists; and between the closing of the old spheres of public
life and the opening of the new, [857] the new faith was established
as much by political and economic conditions as by its intellectual
adaptation to an age of mental twilight.
Of the religion of the educated pagans in its last forms, then,
it is finally to be said that it was markedly rationalistic as
compared with the Christianity which followed, and has been on that
ground stigmatized by Christian orthodoxy down till our own day. The
religion of Marcus Aurelius is self-reverence, self-study, self-rule,
plus faith in Deity; and it is not to be gainsaid that, next to his
adoptive father Antoninus Pius, he remains the noblest monarch in
ancient history; the nearest parallel being the more superstitious but
still noble Julian, the last of the great pagan rulers. In such rulers
the antique philosophy was in a measure justified of its children;
and if it never taught them to grapple with the vast sociological
problem set up by the Empire, and so failed to preserve the antique
civilization, it at least did as much for them in that regard as the
new faith did for its followers.