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THE
RELIGION OF NUMA
AND OTHER ESSAYS ON
THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT ROME
BY
JESSE BENEDICT CARTER
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1906
_All rights reserved_
TO
K.F.C.
PREFACE
This little book tries to tell the story of the religious life of the
Romans from the time when their history begins for us until the close of
the reign of Augustus. Each of its five essays deals with a distinct
period and is in a sense complete in itself; but the dramatic
development inherent in the whole forbids their separation save as acts
or chapters. In spite of modern interest in the study of religion, Roman
religion has been in general relegated to specialists in ancient history
and classics. This is not surprising for Roman religion is not
prepossessing in appearance, but though it is at first sight
incomparably less attractive than Greek religion, it is, if properly
understood, fully as interesting, nay, even more so. In Mr. W. Warde
Fowler's _Roman Festivals_ however the subject was presented in all its
attractiveness, and if the present book shall serve as a simple
introduction to his larger work, its purpose will have been fulfilled.
No one can write of Roman religion without being almost inestimably
indebted to Georg Wissowa whose _Religion und Cultus der Roemer_ is the
best systematic presentation of the subject. It was the author's
privilege to be Wissowa's pupil, and much that is in this book is
directly owing to him, and even the ideas that are new, if there are any
good ones, are only the bread which he cast upon the waters returning to
him after many days.
The careful student of the history of the Romans cannot doubt the
psychological reality of their religion, no matter what his personal
metaphysics may be. It is the author's hope that these essays may have a
human interest because he has tried to emphasise this reality and to
present the Romans as men of like passions to ourselves, in spite of all
differences of time and race.
Hearty thanks are due to Mr. W. Warde Fowler and to Mr. Albert W. Van
Buren for their great kindness in reading the proofs; and the dedication
of the book is at best a poor return for the help which my wife has
given me.
J.B.C.
ROME, _November, 1905_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE RELIGION OF NUMA 1
THE REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 27
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 62
THE DECLINE OF FAITH 104
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 146
THE RELIGION OF NUMA
Rome forms no exception to the general rule that nations, like
individuals, grow by contact with the outside world. In the middle of
the five centuries of her republic came the Punic wars and the intimate
association with Greece which made the last half of her history as a
republic so different from the first half; and in the kingdom, which
preceded the republic, there was a similar coming of foreign influence,
which made the later kingdom with its semi-historical names of the
Tarquins and Servius Tullius so different from the earlier kingdom with
its altogether legendary Romulus, Numa, Tullus Hostilius and Ancus
Martius. We have thus four distinct phases in the history of Roman
society, and a corresponding phase of religion in each period; and if we
add to this that new social structure which came into being by the
reforms of Augustus at the beginning of the empire, together with the
religious changes which accompanied it, we shall have the five periods
which these five essays try to describe: the period before the
Tarquins, that is the "Religion of Numa"; the later kingdom, that is the
"Reorganisation of Servius"; the first three centuries of the republic,
that is the "Coming of the Sibyl"; the closing centuries of the
republic, that is the "Decline of Faith"; and finally the early empire
and the "Augustan Renaissance." Like all attempts to cut history into
sections these divisions are more or less arbitrary, but their
convenience sufficiently justifies their creation. They must be thought
of however not as representing independent blocks, arbitrarily arranged
in a certain consecutive order, not as five successive religious
consciousnesses, but merely as marking the entrance of certain new ideas
into the continuous religious consciousness of the Roman people. The
history of each of these periods is simply the record of the change
which new social conditions produced in that great barometer of society,
the religious consciousness of the community. It is in the period of the
old kingdom that our story begins.
At first sight it may seem a foolish thing to try to draw a picture of
the religious condition of a time about the political history of which
we know so little, and it is only right therefore that we should inquire
what sources of knowledge we possess.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when under the banner of the
new-born science of "Comparative Philology" there gathered together a
group of men who thought they held the key to prehistoric history, and
that words themselves would tell the story where ancient monuments and
literature were silent. It was a great and beautiful thought, and the
science which encouraged it has taken its place as a useful and
reputable member of the community of sciences, but its pretensions to
the throne of the revealer of mysteries have been withdrawn by those who
are its most ardent followers, and the "Indo-Germanic religion" which is
brought into being is a pleasant thought for an idle hour rather than a
foundation and starting-point for the study of ancient religion in
general. Altogether aside from the fact that although primitive religion
and nationality are in the main identical, language and nationality are
by no means so--we have the great practical difficulty in the case of
Greece and Rome that in the earliest period of which we have knowledge
these two religions bear so little resemblance that we must either
assert for the time of Indo-Germanic unity a religious development much
more primitive than that which comparative philology has sketched, or we
must suppose the presence of a strong decadent influence in Rome's case
after the separation, which is equally difficult. If we realise that in
a primitive religion the name of the god is usually the same as the name
of the thing which he represents, the existence of a Greek god and a
Roman god with names which correspond to the same Indo-Germanic word
proves linguistically that the _thing_ existed and had a name before the
separation, but not at all that the thing was deified or that the name
was the name of a god at that time. We must therefore be content to
begin our study of religion much more humbly and at a much later period.
In fact we cannot go back appreciably before the dawn of political
history, but there are certain considerations which enable us at least
to understand the phenomena of the dawn itself, those survivals in
culture which loom up in the twilight and the understanding of which
gives us a fair start in our historical development. For this knowledge
we are indebted to the so-called "anthropological" method, which is
based on the assumption that mankind is essentially uniform, and that
this essential uniformity justifies us in drawing inferences about very
ancient thought from the very primitive thought of the barbarous and
savage peoples of our own day. At first sight the weakness of this
contention is more apparent than its strength, and it is easy to show
that the prehistoric primitive culture of a people destined to
civilisation is one thing, and the retarded primitive culture of modern
tribes stunted in their growth is quite another thing, so that, as has
so often been said, the two bear a relation to each other not unlike
that of a healthy young child to a full-grown idiot. And yet there is a
decided resemblance between the child and the idiot, and whether
prehistoric or retarded, primitive culture shows everywhere strong
likeness, and the method is productive of good if we confine our
reasoning backwards to those things in savage life which the two kinds
of primitive culture, the prehistoric and the retarded, have in common.
To do this however we must have some knowledge of the prehistoric, and
our modern retarded savage must be used merely to illumine certain
things which we see only in half-light; he must never be employed as a
lay-figure in sketching in those features of prehistoric life of which
we are totally in ignorance. It is peculiarly useful to the student of
Roman religion because he stands on the borderland and looking backwards
sees just enough dark shapes looming up behind him to crave more light.
For in many phases of early Roman religion there are present
characteristics which go back to old manners of thought, and these
manners of thought are not peculiar to the Romans but are found in many
primitive peoples of our own day. The greatest contribution which
anthropology has made to the study of early Roman religion is "animism."
Not much more than a quarter of a century ago the word "animism" began
to be used to describe that particular phase of the psychological
condition of primitive peoples by which they believe that a spirit
(_anima_) resides in everything, material and immaterial. This spirit is
generally closely associated with the thing itself, sometimes actually
identified with it. When it is thought of as distinct from the thing, it
is supposed to have the form of the thing, to be in a word its "double."
These doubles exercise an influence, often for evil, over the thing, and
it is expedient and necessary therefore that they should be propitiated
so that their evil influence may be removed and the thing itself may
prosper. These doubles are not as yet gods, they are merely powers,
potentialities, but in the course of time they develop into gods. The
first step in this direction is the obtaining of a _name_, a name the
knowledge of which gives a certain control over the power to him who
knows it. Finally these powers equipped with a name begin to take on
personal characteristics, to be thought of as individuals, and finally
represented under the form of men.
It cannot be shown that all the gods of Rome originated in this way, but
certainly many of them did, and it is not impossible that they all did;
and this theory of their origin explains better than any other theory
certain habits of thought which the early Romans cherished in regard to
their gods. At the time when our knowledge of Roman religion begins,
Rome is in possession of a great many gods, but very few of them are
much more than names for powers. They are none of them personal enough
to be connected together in myths. And this is the very simple reason
why there was no such thing as a native Roman mythology, a blank in
Rome's early development which many modern writers have refused to
admit, taking upon themselves the unnecessary trouble of positing an
original mythology later lost. The gods of early Rome were neither
married nor given in marriage; they had no children or grandchildren and
there were no divine genealogies. Instead they were thought of
occasionally as more or less individual powers, but usually as masses of
potentialities, grouped together for convenience as the "gods of the
country," the "gods of the storeroom," the "gods of the dead," etc. Even
when they were conceived of as somewhat individual, they were usually
very closely associated with the corresponding object, for example Vesta
was not so much the goddess of the hearth as the goddess "Hearth"
itself, Janus not the god of doors so much as the god "Door."
But by just as much as the human element was absent from the concept of
the deity, by just so much the element of formalism in the cult was
greater. This formalism must not be interpreted according to our modern
ideas; it was not a formalism which was the result and the successor of
a decadent spirituality; it was not a secondary product in an age of the
decline of faith; but it was itself the essence of religion in the
period of the greatest religious purity. In the careful and
conscientious fulfilment of the form consisted the whole duty of man
toward his gods. Such a state of affairs would have been intolerable in
any nation whose instincts were less purely legal. So identical were the
laws concerning the gods and the laws concerning men that though in the
earliest period of Roman jurisprudence the _ius divinum_ and the _ius
humanum_ are already separated, they are separated merely formally as
two separate fields or provinces in which the spirit of the law and
often even the letter of its enactment are the same. Such a formalism
implies a very firm belief in the existence of the gods. The dealings of
a man with the gods are quite as really reciprocal as his dealings with
his fellow citizens. But on the other hand though the existence of the
gods is never doubted for a moment, the gods themselves are an unknown
quantity; hence out of the formal relationship an intimacy never
developed, and while it is scarcely just to characterise the early cult
as exclusively a religion of fear, certainly real affection is not
present until a much later day. The potentiality of the gods always
overshadowed their personality. But this was not all loss, for the
absence of personality prevented the growth of those gross myths which
are usually found among primitive peoples, for the purer more inspiring
myths of gods are not the primitive product but result from the process
of refining which accompanies a people's growth in culture. Thus the
theory of animism illumines the religious condition of that borderland
of history in which Romulus and Numa Pompilius have their
dwelling-place.
According to that pleasant fiction of which the ancient world was so
extremely fond--the belief that all institutions could be traced back to
their establishment by some individual--the religion of Rome was
supposed to have been founded by her second king Numa, and it was the
custom to refer to all that was most antique in the cult as forming a
part of the venerable "religion of Numa." For us this can be merely a
name, and even as a name misleading, for a part of the beliefs with
which we are dealing go back for centuries before Romulus and the
traditional B.C. 753 as the foundation of Rome. But it is a convenient
term if we mean by it merely the old kingdom before foreign influences
began to work. The Romans of a later time coined an excellent name not
so much for the period as for the kind of religion which existed then,
contrasting the original deities of Rome with the new foreign gods,
calling the former the "old indigenous gods" (_Di Indigetes_) and the
latter the "newly settled gods" (_Di Novensides_). For our knowledge of
the religion of this period we are not dependent upon a mere theory, no
matter how good it may be in itself, but we have the best sort of
contemporary evidence in addition, and it is to the discovery of this
evidence that the modern study of Roman religion virtually owes its
existence. The records of early political history were largely
destroyed in B.C. 390 when the Gauls sacked Rome, but the religious
status, with the conservativeness characteristic of religion generally,
suffered very few changes during all these years, and left a record of
itself in the annually recurring festivals of the Roman year, festivals
which grew into an instinctive function of the life of the common
people. Many centuries later when the calendar was engraved on stone,
these revered old festivals were inscribed on these stone calendars in
peculiarly large letters as distinguished from all the other items. Thus
from the fragments of these stone calendars, which have been found, and
which are themselves nineteen centuries old, we can read back another
eight or ten centuries further. By the aid of this "calendar of Numa" we
are able to assert the presence of certain deities in the Rome of this
time, and the equally important absence of others. And from the
character of the deities present and of the festivals themselves a
correct and more or less detailed picture of the religious condition of
the time may be drawn. This calendar and the list of _Indigetes_
extracted from it form the foundation for all our study of the history
of Roman religion.
The religious forms of a community are always so bound up with its
social organisation that a satisfactory knowledge of the one is
practically impossible without some knowledge of the other.
Unfortunately there is no field in Roman history where theories are so
abundant and facts so rare as in regard to the question of the early
social organisation. But without coming into conflict with any of the
rival theories we may make at least the following statements. In the
main the community was fairly uniform and homogeneous, there were no
great social extremes and no conspicuous foreign element, so that each
individual, had he stopped to analyse his social position, would have
found himself in four distinct relationships: a relationship to himself
as an individual; to his family; to the group of families which formed
his clan (_gens_); and finally to the state. We may go a step further on
safe ground and assert that the least important of these relations was
that to himself, and the most important that to his family. The unit of
early Roman social life was not the individual but the family, and in
the most primitive ideas of life after death it is the family which has
immortality, not the individual. The state is not a union of individuals
but of families. The very psychological idea of the individual seems to
have taken centuries to develop, and to have reached its real
significance only under the empire. Of the four elements therefore we
have established the pre-eminence of the family and the importance of
the state as based on the family idea; the individual may be disregarded
in this early period, and there is left only the clan, which however
offers a difficult problem. The family and the state were destined to
hold their own, merely exchanging places in the course of time, so that
the state came first and the family second; the individual was to grow
into ever increasing importance, but the clan is already dying when
history begins. It is a pleasant theory and one that has a high degree
of probability that there may have been a time when the clan was to the
family what the state is when history begins, and that when the state
arose out of a union of various clans, the immediate allegiance of each
family was gradually alienated from its clan and transferred to the
state, so that the clan gave up its life in order that the state, the
child of its own creation, might live. If this be so, we can see why the
social importance of the clan ceases so early in Roman history.
The centre therefore of early religious life is the family, and the
state as a macrocosm of the family; and the father of each family is its
chief priest, and the king as the father of the state is the chief
priest of the state. As for the individual the only god which he has for
worship is his "double," called in the case of a man his _Genius_ and in
that of a woman her _Juno_, her individualisation of the goddess Juno,
quite a distinct deity, peculiar to herself. But even here the family
instinct shows itself, and though later the Genius and the Juno
represent all that is intellectual in the individual, they seem
originally to have symbolised the procreative power of the individual in
relation to the continuance of the family. The family and the state,
however, side by side worshipped a number of deities.
In the primitive hut, the model of which has come down to us in so many
little burial urns of early time (for example those that have recently
been dug up in the wonderful cemetery under the Roman Forum), with its
one door and no window, there were several elements which needed
propitiation; the door itself as the keeper away of evil, the hearth,
and the niche for the storage of food. The door-god was the god-door
Janus, the _ianua_ itself; the hearth was in the care of the womenfolk,
the wife and daughters, so it was a goddess, Vesta, whom they served;
and the storage-niche, the _penus_, was in the keeping of the
"store-closet gods" (_Di Penates_). The state itself was modelled after
the house. It had its Janus, its sacred door, down in the Forum, and the
king himself, the father of the state, was his special priest; it had
its hearth, where the sacred fire burned, and its own Vesta, tended by
the vestal virgins, the daughters of the state; and it had its
store-niche with its Penates. At a later date but still very early there
was added to the household worship the idea of the general protector of
the house, the Lar, which gave rise to the familiar expression "Lares
and Penates." The origin of this _Lar Familiaris_, as he is called, is
interesting, because it shows the intimate connection between the
farming life of the community and its religion. The Lares were
originally the group of gods who looked after the various farms; they
were in the plural because they were worshipped where the boundary lines
of several farms met, but though several of them were worshipped
together, each farm had its one individual Lar. But the care of the farm
included also the protection of the house on the farm, so that the Lar
of the farm became also the Lar of the house, first of course of houses
on farms, and then of every house everywhere even when no farm was
connected with it.
Aside from Vesta, the Genius, the Lar, and the Penates, possibly the
most important element in family worship was the cult of the dead
ancestors. This cult is, of course, common to almost all religions, and
its presence in Roman religion is in so far not surprising, but the form
in which it occurs there is curious and relatively rare. Just as the
living man has a "double," the Genius, so the dead man also must have a
double, but this double is originally not the Genius, who seems to have
been thought of at first as ceasing with the individual. On the contrary
as death is the great leveller and the remover of individuality, so the
double of the dead was not thought of at first as an individual double
but merely as forming a part of an indefinite mass of spirits, the "good
gods" (_Di Manes_) as they were called because they were feared as being
anything but good. These _Di Manes_ had therefore no specific relation
to the individual, and the individual really ceased at death; the only
human relation which the _Di Manes_ seem to have preserved was a
connection with the living members of the family to which they had
originally belonged. It is therefore very misleading to assert that the
Romans had from the beginning a belief in immortality, when we
instinctively think of the immortality of the individual. The thing that
was immortal was not the individual but the family. It is thoroughly in
keeping with the practical character of the Roman mind that they did not
concern themselves with the place in which these spirits of the dead
were supposed to reside, but merely with the door through which they
could and did return to earth. We have no accounts of the Lower World
until Greece lent her mythology to Rome, and imagination never built
anything like the Greek palace of Pluto. But while they did not waste
energy in furnishing the Lower World with the fittings of fancy, they
did keep a careful guard over the door of egress. This door they called
the _mundus_, and represented it crudely by a trench or shallow pit, at
the bottom of which there lay a stone. On certain days of the year this
stone was removed, and then the spirits came back to earth again, where
they were received and entertained by the living members of their
family. There were a number of these days in the year, three of them
scattered through the year: August 24, October 5, November 8; and two
sets of days: February 13-21 and May 9, 11, 13. The February
celebration, the so-called _Parentalia_, was calm and dignified and
represented all that was least superstitious and fearful in the
generally terrifying worship of the dead. The _Lemuria_ in May had
exactly the opposite character and belongs to the category of the
"expulsion of evil spirits," of which Mr. Frazer in his _Golden Bough_
has given so many instances.
In this connection it is interesting to notice two facts which stand
almost as corollaries to these beliefs. One fact is the religious
necessity for the continuance of the family, in order that there might
always be a living representative of the family to perform the
sacrifices to the ancestors. It was the duty of the head of the family
not only to perform these sacrifices himself as long as he lived but
also to provide a successor. The usual method was by marriage and the
rearing of a family, but, in case there was no male child in the family,
adoption was recurred to. Here it is peculiarly significant that the
sanction of the chief priest was necessary, and he never gave his
consent in case the man to be adopted was the only representative of his
family, so that his removal from that family into another would leave
his original family without a male representative. In cases of
inheritance the first lien on the income was for the maintenance of the
traditional sacrifices unless some special arrangement had been made.
These exceptional inheritances, without the deduction for sacrifices,
were naturally desired above all others and the phrase "an inheritance
without sacrifices" (_hereditas sine sacris_) became by degrees the
popular expression for a godsend. The other fact of interest in this
connection is that, inasmuch as ancestors were worshipped only _en
masse_ and not as individuals, that process could not take place in
Roman religion which is so familiar in many other religions, namely that
the great gods of the state should some of them have been originally
ancestors whose greatness during life had produced a corresponding
emphasis in their worship after death, so that ultimately they were
promoted from the ranks of the deified dead into the select Olympus of
individual gods. This has been a favourite theory of the making of a god
from the time of Euhemerus down to Herbert Spencer. There are religions
in which it is true for certain of the major gods, but there are no
traces of the process in Roman religion, and the reason is obvious in
view of the peculiar character of ancestor worship in Rome.
We have now seen the principal elements which went to make up the family
religion and that part of the state religion which was an enlargement
and an imitation of the family religion. But even in the most primitive
times a Roman's life was not bounded by his own hut and the phenomenon
of death. There was work to be done in life, a living to be gained, and
here, as everywhere, there were hosts of unseen powers who must be
propitiated. His religion was not only coincident with every phase of
private life, it was also closely related to the specific occupations
and interests of the people, and just as the interests of the community,
its means of livelihood, were agriculture and stock-raising, so the gods
were those of the crops and the herds. Some years ago the late Professor
Mommsen succeeded in extracting from the existing stone calendars a list
of the religious festivals of the old Roman year, and also in proving
that this list of festivals was complete in its present condition at a
time before the city of Rome was surrounded by the wall which Servius
Tullius built, and that it therefore goes back to the old kingdom, the
time of what has been called the "Religion of Numa." We cannot go
through all the festivals in detail, but it is extremely interesting to
notice that almost every one of them is connected with the life of the
farmer and represents the action of propitiation towards some god or
group of gods at every time in the Roman year which was at all critical
for agricultural interests.
It must not be forgotten also that this list is not absolutely complete,
because it represents merely the official state festivals, and not even
all of them but only those which fell upon the same day or days every
year, so that they could be engraved in the stone to form a perpetual
calendar. All state festivals, of which there were several, which were
appointed in each particular year according to the backward or forward
estate of the harvest, were omitted from the list, though they were
celebrated at some time in every year; and naturally the public
calendars contained no reference to the many private and semi-private
ceremonies of the year, with which the state had nothing official to do,
festivals of the family and the clan, and even local festivals of
various districts of the city.
In this list of peaceful deities of the farm there is one god whose
character has been very much misunderstood because of the company which
he keeps; this is the god Mars. It has become the fashion of late to
consider him as a god of vegetation, and a great many ingenious
arguments have been brought forward to show his agricultural character.
But the more primitive a community is, the more intense is its struggle
for existence, and the more rife its rivalries with its neighbours.
Alongside of the ploughshare there must always have been the sword or
its equivalent, and along with Flora and Ceres there must always have
been a god of strife and battle. That Mars was this god in early as well
as later times is shown above all things by the fact that he was always
worshipped outside the city, as a god who must be kept at a distance.
Naturally his cult was associated with the dominant interest of life,
the crops, and he was worshipped in the beautiful ceremony of the
purification of the fields, which Mr. Walter Pater has so exquisitely
described at the opening of _Marius the Epicurean_. But he was regarded
as the protector of the fields and the warder off of evil influences
rather than as a positive factor in the development of the crops. Then
too in the early days of the Roman militia, before the regular army had
come into existence, the war season was only during the summer after the
planting and before the harvest, so that the two festivals which marked
the beginning and the end of that season were also readily associated
with the state of the crops at that time.
But the most interesting and curious thing about this old religion is
not so much what it does contain as what it does not. It is not so much
what we find as what we miss, for more than half the gods whom we
instinctively associate with Rome were not there under this old regime.
Here is a partial list of those whose names we do not find: Minerva,
Diana, Venus, Fortuna, Hercules, Castor, Pollux, Apollo, Mercury, Dis,
Proserpina, Aesculapius, the Magna Mater. And yet their absence is not
surprising when we realise that almost all of the gods in this list
represent phases of life with which Rome in this early period was
absolutely unacquainted. She had no appreciable trade or commerce, no
manufactures or particular handicrafts, and no political interests
except the simple patriarchal government which sufficed for her present
needs. Her gods of water were the gods of rivers and springs; Neptune
was there, but he was not the ocean-god like the Greek Poseidon. Vulcan,
the god of fire, who was afterwards associated with the Greek Hephaistos
and became the patron of metal-working, was at this time merely the god
of destructive and not of constructive fire. Even the great god Juppiter
who was destined to become almost identical with the name and fame of
Rome was not yet a god of the state and politics, but merely the
sky-god, especially the lightning god, Juppiter Feretrius, the
"striker," who had a little shrine on the Capitoline where later the
great Capitoline temple of Juppiter Optimus Maximus was to stand.
Another curious characteristic of this early age, which, I think, has
never been commented on, is the extraordinarily limited number of
goddesses. Vesta is the only one who seems to stand by herself without a
male parallel. Each of the others is merely the contrasted potentiality
in a pair of which the male is much more famous, and the only ones in
these pairs who ever obtained a pronounced individuality did so because
their cult was afterwards reinforced by being associated with some
extra-Roman cult. The best illustration of this last is Juno. We may go
further and say that it-seems highly probable that the worship of female
deities was in the main confined to the women of the community, while
the men worshipped the gods. This distinction extended even to the
priesthoods where the wife of the priest of a god was the priestess of
the corresponding goddess. Such a state of affairs is doubly interesting
in view of the pre-eminence of female deities in the early Greek world,
which has been so strikingly shown by Miss Jane Harrison in her recent
book, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_.
The most vital question which can be put to almost any religion is that
in regard to its expansive power and its adaptability to new conditions.
Society is bound to undergo changes, and a young social organism, if
normal, is continually growing new cells. New conditions are arising and
new interests are coming to the front. In addition, if the growth is to
be continuous, new material is being constantly absorbed, and the simple
homogeneous character of the old society is being entirely changed by
the influx of foreign elements. This is what occurred in ancient Rome,
and it is because ancient Roman religion was not capable of organic
development from within, that the curious things happened to it which
our history has to record. It is these strange external accretions which
lend the chief interest to the story, while at the same time they
conceal the original form so fully as to render the writing of a history
of Roman religion extremely difficult.
Yet it must not be supposed because Roman religion was unable to adapt
itself to the new constitution of society with its contrasted classes,
and to the new commercial and political interests which attracted the
attention of the upper classes, that it was absolutely devoid within
itself, within its own limitations, of a certain capability of
development. For several centuries after outside influences began to
affect Rome, her original religion kept on developing alongside of the
new forms. The manner in which it developed is thoroughly significant of
the original national character of the Romans.
We have seen that from the very beginning the nature of the gods as
powers rather than personalities tended to emphasise the value and
importance of the name, which usually indicated the particular function
or speciality of each deity and was very often the only thing known
about him. In the course of time as the original name of the deity began
to be thought of entirely as a proper name without any meaning, rather
than as a common noun explaining the nature of the god to which it was
attached, it became necessary to add to the original name some adjective
which would adequately describe the god and do the work which the name
by itself had originally done. And as the nature of the various deities
grew more complicated along with the increasing complications of daily
life, new adjectives were added, each one expressing some particular
phase of the god's activity. Such an adjective was called a _cognomen_,
and was often of very great importance because it began to be felt that
a god with one adjective, _i.e._ invoked for one purpose, was almost a
different god from the same god with a different adjective, _i.e._
invoked for another purpose. Thus a knowledge of these adjectives was
almost as necessary as a knowledge of the name of the god. The next step
in the development was one which followed very easily. These important
adjectives began to be thought of as having a value and an existence in
themselves, apart from the god to which they were attached. The
grammatical change which accompanied this psychological movement was the
transfer of the adjective into an abstract noun. Both adjectives and
abstract nouns express quality, but the adjective is in a condition of
dependence on a noun, while the abstract noun is independent and
self-supporting. And thus, just as in certain of the lower organisms a
group of cells breaks off and sets up an individual organism of its own,
so in old Roman religion some phase of a god's activity, expressed in an
adjective, broke off with the adjective from its original stock and set
up for itself, turning its name from the dependent adjective form into
the independent abstract noun. Thus Juppiter, worshipped as a god of
good faith in the dealings of men with one another, the god by whom
oaths were sworn under the open sky, was designated as "Juppiter,
guarding-good-faith," Juppiter Fidius. There were however many other
phases of Juppiter's work, and hence the adjective _fidius_ became very
important as the means of distinguishing this activity from all the
others. Eventually it broke off from Juppiter and formed the abstract
noun _Fides_, the goddess of good faith, where the sex of the deity as a
goddess was entirely determined by the grammatical gender of abstract
nouns as feminine.
This is all strange enough but there is one more step in the development
even more curious yet. This abstract goddess _Fides_ did not stay long
in the purely abstract sphere; she began very soon to be made concrete
again, as the Fides of this particular person or of that particular
group and as this Fides or that, until she became almost as concrete as
Juppiter himself had been, and hence we have a great many different
_Fides_ in seeming contradiction to the old grammatical rule that
abstract nouns had no plural. Now all this development in the field of
religion throws light upon the character of the Roman mind and its
instinctive methods of thought, and we see why it is that the Romans
were very great lawyers and very mediocre philosophers. Both law and
philosophy require the ability for abstract thought; in both cases the
essential qualities of a thing must be separated from the thing itself.
But in the case of philosophic thought this abstraction, these
qualities, do not immediately seek reincarnation. They continue as
abstractions and do not immediately descend to earth again, whereas for
law such a descent is absolutely necessary because jurisprudence is
interested not so much in the abstraction by itself, but rather in the
abstract as presented in concrete cases. Hence a type of mind which
found it equally easy to make the concrete into the abstract and then to
turn the abstract so made into a kind of concrete again, is _par
excellence_ the legal mind, and no better proof of the instinctive
tendency to law-making on the part of the Romans can be found than in
the fact that the same habits of mind which make laws also governed the
development of their religion.
Unfortunately however it was not these abstract deities who could save
old Roman religion. They were merely the logical outcome of the deities
already existing, merely new offspring of the old breed. They did not
represent any new interests, but were merely the individualisation of
certain phases of the old deities, phases which had always been present
and were now at most merely emphasised by being worshipped separately.
THE REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS
Like a lofty peak rising above the mists which cover the tops of the
lower-lying mountains, the figure of Servius Tullius towers above the
semi-legendary Tarquins on either side of him. We feel that we have to
do with a veritable character in history, and we find ourselves
wondering what sort of a man he was personally--a feeling that never
occurs to us with Romulus and the older kings, and comes to us only
faintly with the elder Tarquin, while the younger Tarquin has all the
marks of a wooden man, who was put up only to be thrown down, whose
whole _raison d'etre_ is to explain the transition from the kingdom to
the republic on the theory of a revolution. Eliminate the revolution,
suppose the change to have been a gradual and a constitutional one, and
you may discard the proud Tarquin without losing anything but a
lay-figure with its more or less gaudy trappings of later myths. But it
is not so with Servius; his wall and his constitution are very real and
defy all attempts to turn their maker into a legend. Yet on the other
hand we must be on our guard, for much of the definiteness which seems
to attach to him is rather the definiteness of a certain stage in Rome's
development, a certain well-bounded chronological and sociological
tract. It is dangerous to try to limit too strictly Servius's personal
part in this development; and far safer, though perhaps less
fascinating, to use his name as a general term for the changes which
Rome underwent from the time when foreign influences began to tell upon
her until the beginning of the republic. He forms a convenient title
therefore for certain phases of Rome's growth. And yet even this is not
strictly correct, for Servius stands not so much for the coming into
existence of certain facts, as for the recognition of the existence of
these facts. The facts themselves were of slow growth, covering probably
centuries, but the actions resulting from them, and the outward changes
in society, came thick and fast and may well have taken place, all of
them, within the limits of one man's life. The foundation fact upon
which all these changes were based is the influence of the outside world
on the Roman community. Until this time there had been little to
differentiate Rome from any other of the hill-communities of Italy, of
which there were scores in her immediate neighbourhood; nor was she the
only one to come into contact with the outside world. It was the effect
which that influence had upon her as contrasted with her neighbours
which made the difference. When we ask why this influence affected her
differently we find no satisfactory answer, and are in the presence of a
mystery--the world-old insoluble mystery of the superiority of one tribe
or one individual over others apparently of the same class. Political
history is wont to tell this chapter of Rome's story under the title of
the "Rise of the Plebeians," but the presence of the Plebeians was only
the outward symbol of an inward change. This change was the breaking up
of the monotonous one-class society of the primitive community with its
one--agricultural--interest, and the formation of a variegated
many-class society with manifold interests, such as trade, handicraft,
and politics. It was the awakening of Rome into a world-life out of her
century-long undisturbed bucolic slumber.
There were at this time two peoples in Italy, who by reason of their
older culture were able to be Rome's teachers. One lay to the north of
her, the mysterious Etruscans, whose culture fortunately for Rome had
only a very moderate influence, because the Etruscan culture had already
lost much of its virility, possibly also because it was distinctly felt
to be foreign, and hence could effect no insidious entry, and probably
because Rome was at this time too strong and young and clean to take
anything but the best from Etruria. The other lay to the south, the
Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, separated from Rome for the present by
many miles of forest and by hostile tribes. Around her in Latium were
her own next of kin, the Latins, becoming rapidly inferior to her, but
enabled to do her at least this service, that of absorbing the foreign
influences which came, and in certain cases latinising them, and thus
transmitting them to Rome in a more or less assimilated condition.
The three great facts in the life of Rome during this period are the
coming of Greek merchants and Greek trade from the south, the coming of
Etruscan artisans and handicraft from the north, and the beginnings of
her political rivalry and gradual prominence in the league of Latin
cities around her. Each one of these movements is reflected in the
religious changes of the period. In regard to the first two this is not
surprising, for the ancient traveller, like his mythical prototype
Aeneas, carried his gods with him. Thus there were worshipped in private
in Rome the gods of all the peoples who settled within her walls, and
the presence of these gods was destined to make its influence felt. Your
primitive polytheist is very catholic in his religious tastes; for, when
one is already in possession of many gods, the addition of a few more is
a minor matter, especially when, as was now the case in Rome, these
deities are the patrons of occupations and interests hitherto entirely
unknown to the Roman, and hence not provided for in his scheme of gods.
It was therefore in no spirit of disloyalty to the already existing
gods, and with no desire to introduce rival deities, that the new cults
began to spread until they became so important as to call for state
recognition.
Possibly the most interesting cases are those of the two gods who came
from the south, Hercules and Castor, interesting because they were the
forerunners of that great multitude of Greek gods who later came in
proudly by special invitation, and even more interesting yet because,
though they were Greek as Greek could be, they came into Rome, as it
were, incognito, and were so far from being known as Greek, that, when
the same gods came in afterwards more directly, these new-comers were
felt to be quite a different thing, and their worship was carried on in
another part of the city away from the old-established cults.
In the Greek world Herakles and Hermes were the especial patrons of
travellers, and as travelling was never done for pleasure but always for
business, they became the patrons of the travelling merchant. It was
also natural that they should go with the settlers away from the
mother-city into the new colony. Thus it was that they came from the
mother-land into the colonies of Magna Graecia in Southern Italy, and
once being established there made their way slowly but inevitably
northwards. The story of Hermes, under the name of Mercury, belongs to a
later chapter, but that of Herakles = Hercules must be recounted here.
It is only within the last few years that the scholarly world has been
persuaded that there was no such thing as an original Italic Hercules;
at first sight it was very difficult to believe, because there seemed to
be so many apparently very old Italic legends centering in Hercules. But
it has been shown, either that these legends never existed and rest
solely upon false interpretation of monuments, or that, though they did
exist at an early date, they were introduced under Greek influence. It
was the trading merchant therefore who brought Herakles northward. And
as the god went, his name was softened into Hercules, and with the
assimilation of the name to the tongue of the Italic people, there went
hand in hand an adaptation of his nature to their needs, so that by
degrees he became thoroughly italicised both in form and content. It is
probable that the cult came into Rome as well as into the other cities
of Latium, but in Rome it was confined to a few individuals, and at
first obtained no public recognition. On the contrary, for reasons that
we are at a loss to find, this Greek cult seems to have reached very
large proportions in the little town of Tibur (Tivoli), fourteen miles
north-east of Rome. There it dominated all other worship and lost so
much of its foreign atmosphere that it became thoroughly latinised. In
the course of time the Roman state acknowledged this Tivoli cult of
Hercules and accepted a branch of it as its own. But the extraordinary
thing about this acknowledgment is that the Romans felt it to be a Latin
and not a foreign cult. They showed this intimate and friendly feeling
by permitting an altar to Hercules to be erected within the city proper,
in the Forum Boarium. But in order to understand the significance of
this act a word of digression is necessary.