world's history, the beginnings of the Sibylline books are shrouded in
mystery. A later age, for whom history had no secrets, with a cheap
would-be omniscience told of the old woman who visited Tarquin and
offered him nine books for a certain price, and when he refused to pay
it, went away, burned three, and then returning offered him at the
original price the six that were left; on his again refusing she went
away, burned three more and finally offered at the same old price the
three that remained, which he accepted. Except as a sidelight on the
character of the early Greek trader the story is worthless. It is
doubtful even if the presence of the Sibylline books in Rome goes back
beyond the republic. The first dateable use of them was in the year B.C.
496, and there is one little fact connected with them which makes it
probable that they did not come in until the republic had begun. This is
the circumstance that in view of the great secrecy of the books it is
unthinkable that they should ever have been in Rome without especial
guardians, and yet the earliest guardians that we know of were a newly
made priesthood consisting originally of two men, the so-called "two men
in charge of the sacrifices" (_IIviri sacris faciundis_). Now the form
of this title is peculiar; it is not a proper name like the titles of
all the other priesthoods. Instead it is built on the plan of the titles
of the special committees appointed by the Senate for administrative
purposes; it bears every mark therefore of having arisen under the
republic, rather than under the kingdom, at a time when the Senate had
the supreme control. So much may be said regarding the time when they
were introduced into Rome; as for the place from which they came, this
was without doubt the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, probably the
oldest and most important of them, Cumae, so famous for its Sibyl. This
was not the first association that Rome had had with Cumae, for in all
probability the worship of Apollo had spread from there into Rome toward
the close of the kingdom. Apollo and the books were connected at Cumae,
for it was Apollo who inspired the Sibyl, and the oracles were his
commands, but it is almost certain that Apollo came to Rome in advance
of the oracles. He came there as a god of healing and was given a sacred
place outside the _pomerium_ in the Campus Martius, on the spot where
later (B.C. 431) a temple was built for him with his sister
Artemis-Diana and their mother Latona. This was the only state temple
that Apollo ever had, until Augustus built the famous one on the
Palatine. It was in the wake of Apollo that the Sibylline books came. As
for the books themselves, they were kept so secret that we cannot expect
to know much about them, but in rare cases where the seriousness of the
exigency warranted it, the Senate permitted the actual publication of
the oracle upon which its action was based, and of the oracles thus
published one or two have been preserved to us. They were of course
written in Greek and were phrased in the ambiguous style which for
obvious reasons was the most advantageous style for oracles. They
commanded the worship of certain specific deities, naturally all of them
Greek, and the performance of certain more or less complicated ritual
acts. When they were received in Rome, they were placed in the temple of
Juppiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline in the keeping of their
guardians, the new priesthood of the "two men in charge of the
sacrifices." This committee of two was enlarged to ten in B.C. 367 when
the great compromise between the Patricians and the Plebeians was made,
and the Plebeians were admitted into this one priesthood, with five
representatives. Subsequently Sulla made the number fifteen, which
continued as the official number from that time on, so that the
priesthood is ordinarily called the _Quindecemviri_, even when one of
the older periods is referred to. The real control of the books however
lay in the hands of the Senate. When the Senate saw fit, the priests
were ordered to consult the books, but without this special command even
their guardians dared not approach them. The priests reported to the
Senate what they had found, and the Senate then decreed whatever actions
the oracles commanded. The carrying out of these actions was again in
the charge of the Sibylline priests, who performed the ceremonies
demanded and were for all time to come responsible for the maintenance
of any new cults which might be introduced.
When we see how carefully these oracles were guarded and how
circumspectly their use was hedged about by senatorial control, and when
we think how relatively little harm the use of oracles had wrought in
Greece in all the centuries of her history, it may well seem as if the
statements made in the beginning of this chapter about the havoc caused
by these oracles were grossly exaggerated. But the efforts of the Senate
to safeguard these oracles only prove that the older and wiser men in
the community realised how dangerous they were, and the comparison with
Greece leads to a consideration of certain essential differences between
the Greek and the Roman temperament which made that which was meat for
one into poison for the other.
In the older purer age of Greece the gods were never far away from men,
they lived almost side by side with them; there were to be sure many
gods of whom they were afraid and from whom they desired to keep as far
away as possible, but there were a great many other gods of whom they
liked to think. In constructing the records of their history they did
not work backwards from the light of the present into an ever darkening
past, but they began from the beginning in the full light of the gods
from whom all things sprang, and mythology passed into history by
imperceptible gradations. They knew more about the beginning when all
things were completely in the hands of the gods than they did about
their immediate past. Art began very early to make them familiar with
the appearance of the gods, so that there was little that was mysterious
about their religion, so little that the element of mystery had later to
be almost artificially cultivated in the "mysteries." They respected the
gods rather than feared them, and they felt that the gods would do them
no harm unless they themselves first sinned against them or their own
fellow-men, and the oracles of Delphi were no more terrifying to them
than the coming of the word of God was to the prophets of Israel. They
were accustomed to these messages, which were almost every-day affairs.
It was all a part of that marvellous poise of nature which made the
every-day mortal Greek almost as calm as the unperturbed imperturbable
faces of their gods as their great sculptors saw them.
In Rome all was very different. The superstitious element in the Italian
character, which amazes us so much to-day when cultured twentieth
century men and women in good society persecute their fellows because of
the evil eye, is a heritage of many thousand years. Sometimes it seems
as if it were the Italian birthright, the blight of Etruria which came
into their nature in spite of themselves. It required centuries to
educate the Roman into the concept of personal individual gods. He had
begun his theological career by terror of unknown powers all about him,
and by regarding religion as the science of propitiating the right power
on the right occasion. One could not know these powers, one did not
desire to. Their gods were at once their masters and their servants, but
never their companions. The early Roman knew no such thing as an oracle,
the only messages from the gods were the expressions of their wrath, in
the sending of prodigies and portents. They did indeed consult the gods
by watching the flight of birds or studying the entrails of the
sacrifice, but it was merely to obtain a "yes or no" answer to a
categorical question as to whether a certain act was pleasing to the
gods. Otherwise all about them lay mystery, and at the point where sight
failed, since neither imagination nor faith carried them any further,
superstition stepped in, and the more they thought of the gods the more
terrified they became. Now if you present to a people thus constituted a
divine book of infallible oracles, you increase their terror in greater
measure than the book itself can assuage it, and with the use of the
book the simpler forms of their old belief will grow less and less
effective in the face of this new "witchcraft," which can work wonders.
And no matter how you may hedge the use of the book about, it will be
used more and more as the craving for magic is increasingly aroused.
The study of the outward and the inward effects of the Sibylline books
is therefore the real history of religion in the first half of the
republic. The outward effects are seen in the introduction of a series
of Greek gods, who were in themselves in the main eminently respectable,
and whose presence was in itself no offence to good morals, and if we
stop there we fail to understand why the religious interest of the
Second Punic War should change so quickly to the scepticism of the
following century. The inward effects however, which, though they are
hard to see, may yet be discovered between the lines of the chronicle,
will explain all the undermining of foundation, until we wonder not why
the structure collapsed so suddenly but how it managed to last so long.
The history of the activity of the books begins peaceably enough. In the
year B.C. 496 Rome was in a bad way; her crops had failed and the
importation of grain from Latium was rendered very difficult because of
the war with the Latins in which she was engaged. In her distress she
turned to the Sibylline books, and on the occasion of this their first
recorded use, the oracles ordered the introduction into Rome of the cult
of three Greek deities, Demeter, Dionysos, and Kore. It was a most
appropriate and characteristic choice. In the first place the deities in
question were worshipped at Cumae, the home of the books, whence Rome
could, and probably did, borrow the cult; and in the second place
Demeter was the goddess of grain, and it was from Cumae that Rome was
already beginning to obtain her imported grain supply. Thus the coming
of the Cumaean Demeter into the religious world of Rome is but the
sacred parallel to the coming of Cumaean grain into the material world
of Rome. The Greek goddess of grain came with the grain, just as Castor
had come with the Greek cavalry, with this essential distinction however
that Demeter came by the incantation of the books and the enactment of
the Senate, whereas Castor's coming was a slow and normal development.
It is important to notice closely exactly what happened when these
deities were introduced, partly because they form the first recorded
instance, and hence may well have acted as a model for subsequent
repetitions of the act, but also because we have a more definite
knowledge of the phenomena in this case than in many others. In the
first place it is clear that the deities were felt to be foreign: not
only was their temple built out the Aventine way, in the valley of the
Circus Maximus, outside the _pomerium_, but--a much more significant
fact--their Greek names were dropped, and they were given Roman names
instead, to make them seem less out of place. Then too these Roman names
were not new names, translations of their Greek titles, but were the
names of already existing Roman deities with whom they were easily
identified, so that we see at once that their coming was no real
enrichment of the Roman Olympus; what they stood for was already
represented there, and their coming was simply a reduplication, with the
consequent result that as these parvenus increased in prominence and
influence, they robbed of all their vitality the sober old Roman deities
to whom they had attached themselves. What were these original deities
who were thus doomed to death in B.C. 496? Demeter took the name of the
old Roman goddess Ceres, a goddess of fertility, about whom we know just
enough to assert that she belonged to the old religion of Numa and that
she was at heart quite a different person from Demeter. All the rest is
lost, submerged under the new Demeter-Ceres with her temple built by
Greek architects and her April games. It is this new Ceres who soon
develops an extraordinary political importance because her temple is to
the Plebeians as a class what the temple of Minerva is to the unions of
organised labour. It is there that they have their meeting-place, and
the temple itself is always their treasury as contrasted with the Saturn
temple, the treasury of the state as a whole. The very officers of the
Plebeians, the famous Plebeian aediles, get their name from association
with this temple (_aedes_). This political side of her activity is the
only real advantage, except the grain itself, connected with her
importation; the two form at best a poor economic compensation for the
ever increasing immoral effects of the public games of Ceres.
But though Ceres is the most important of the three deities economically
and politically, we must not forget the other two, both of whom are
interesting, though one of them more for what she is not than for what
she is. Along with Demeter came Dionysos and Demeter's daughter Kore:
the three were associated in the solemn mysteries of Eleusis, but none
of the beauty of these ideas went over into the Roman cult. Demeter was
merely the deified grain-traffic, and Dionysos was little else than the
god of wine, while poor Kore fell out without any particular content for
a curious reason that we shall see in a moment. The only old Roman deity
with whom Dionysos could be identified was the god Liber, who had had a
rather interesting history, and who had done enough along the line of
self-development to deserve a better fate than to be crushed to
insignificance under the prominence of his new namesake. Liber was at
this time a flourishing god of fertility and, since the introduction of
the grape into Italy, especially the patron of the fruit of the vine,
but he had made his own career, and there was a time when he had no
individuality of his own but was merely a cult-adjective of the great
god Juppiter, the giver of all fertility in every phase of life. Thus
out of the original Juppiter-Liber there had grown the independent god
Liber; and now this Liber lost his individuality by identification with
Dionysos. Finally comes Kore, Demeter's daughter. Here the Romans were
hard put to it to find a goddess who represented any similar content,
and after all this was no light task because Kore has little meaning
unless she is taken also as Persephone, Pluto's bride--a process which
required a mythological knowledge and appreciation in which the Romans
of the early republic were totally lacking. But there was an old goddess
Libera, a shadowy potentiality contrasted and paired with the masculine
Liber, and they chose her and gave Kore her name. We have a curious
proof of how little the Romans knew of Kore-Libera, and of how purely
mechanical both the introduction of Kore and her identification with
Libera were, in the fact that about two hundred and fifty years later,
as we shall see, Persephone, the real Kore, was introduced into Rome as
an altogether new deity, and existed there side by side with Libera for
at least a century before people began to realise that Proserpina and
Libera stood for the same Greek goddess.
It was necessary to go into these details in order that we might
understand as much as possible of the process by which the gods of the
Sibylline books were assimilated into the body of Roman religion. We see
how in the main they were superfluous and therefore unnecessary and even
undesirable because by their presence they robbed old Roman deities of
their existence, and how those elements in them which were least in
accord with the old Roman spirit were most apt to develop, and how in
general their adoption was a purely mechanical process, like any act in
witchcraft, where the form is all important because the meaning cannot
be understood, and how totally different therefore the estate of these
gods was in Rome from what it had been in Greece, because in Rome they
were introduced, stripped of all their mythology, worshipped only for
their practical bearings, and compelled therefore to work for their
living.
The importation of grain from Cumae meant more to Rome than the mere
satisfaction of her physical needs; it meant much more than the addition
of three deities to her state-cult, for the grain thus imported was
carried from Cumae to Ostia by sea and so up the Tiber to Rome, and the
whole matter therefore marks one of the important steps in Rome's
interest in commerce generally but especially in ocean commerce. As yet
she did not do the actual carrying herself, but she began to be
interested in it, and the sea began to mean something to this inland
town. This increased interest in trade in general and this inceptive
interest in those who "go down to the sea in ships" have both of them
left their reflexion in the religious life of the time; two new deities
are introduced, both of them almost certainly by means of the Sibylline
oracles, though some accidental blanks in our historical tradition have
deprived us of details.
The chronicle of the year B.C. 495 tells us that there was a dispute in
that year as to who should dedicate the temple of Mercury. This is
Mercury's first appearance in our sources. The circumstances of the
vowing of the temple have been omitted through some oversight, but in
spite of this the connexion of his introduction with the Sibylline books
is beyond all reasonable doubt, for the simple reason that the guardians
of the oracles always looked after his cult in all subsequent time.
Notwithstanding the suddenness of his appearance and the silence of the
chronicle, his story is quite clear and his past history easy to
restore, at least in outline.
The versatile Hermes, who as messenger of the gods plays a part in so
many Greek myths, became in the course of time among other things
associated with travelling, as god of roads, and also with trade,
partly because trading necessitates travelling, and partly because
Hermes was also the protector of the market-place in which the trading
was done. Thus he was called "Hermes Protector of the Merchant"
(_Empolaios_) and in this capacity went into the colonies of Greece,
including those of Southern Italy. Thus Hermes travelled with the grain
merchant from Cumae and became known to the Romans. They however knew
him merely as the god of trade, and their name for him is nothing but
the translation into Latin of his Greek cult-title: _Empolaios_ =
_Mercurius_. For a long time it was thought that there had existed a
Mercurius among the original gods of Rome, but the traces of this old
god are apparent rather than real and suggest one phase of that pastime
of which the later Romans were so fond, that of writing history
backwards and putting an artificial halo of antiquity about the gods
whom they borrowed from Greece. Thus Mercury was received into the
state-cult at about the time when the grain trade began, and was, as it
were, the divine representative of the interest which the Roman state
took in the whole transaction. His temple was outside the _pomerium_ on
the Aventine side of the Circus Maximus. It was in this temple of the
merchant god that the primitive Chamber of Commerce (_collegium
mercatorum_) had its beginning, an association, partly sacral, partly
commercial, whose members, the _mercuriales_, are frequently met with
in literature and also in inscriptions, one of which has been found as
far away as the island of Delos. In the actual cult of the Romans
Mercury never regained the many-sidedness which he had lost in coming to
them merely as a god of trade. In this capacity he appears on the
sextans of the old copper coinage, and under the empire he went into the
provinces as the companion of Mars, since the merchant went side by side
with the soldier. On the contrary when in the third century before
Christ Greek literature came to Rome, this simple idea of Mercury was
reinforced by many new Greek ideas and he entered into Roman poetry with
all the attributes and functions of Hermes; but this had little or no
effect on the cult and there were no great rivals to the old temple near
the Circus Maximus, no cult-centre with advanced Greek ideas, as we have
seen spring up in the case of Hercules, Castor, Minerva, and Diana.
We have already seen how the rise of the grain trade brought four new
deities to Rome, but there is one more chapter to our story. The grain
itself and the trade itself had now obtained their divine complements,
but the sea had not yet received its due; it too must have its parallel
among the gods of Rome. And so it came to pass that again under the
influence of the fateful books, though exactly when or how we cannot
say, the Greek Poseidon came into Rome. The sea had always meant much
to the Greeks, and the joyful shout of Xenophon's troops "The sea! the
sea!" finds an echo all through the centuries of Greek history before
and after the Anabasis. But the multitude of islands and harbours in
Greece is in marked contrast to the dearth of them in Italy, where even
to-day there is no good port of call on the west coast between Naples
and Civitavecchia--and the latter would be useless, were it not for
Trajan's mole. In Italy accordingly the sea-god Poseidon was worshipped
only in the Greek colonies, where however he had two famous cults, one
at Tarentum, later called Colonia Neptunia, and one at Paestum, whose
old name was Poseidonia. The Romans had worshipped deities of water in
abundance, as became an agricultural people, for water meant life, and
drought, death; but their deities were those of the sweet waters of
springs and rivers, they knew no god of the sea. But when the oracles
brought Poseidon to Rome he was identified with an old Roman water-god
Neptune, whose cult henceforward included the sea. We do not know where
the shrine of the old sweet-water Neptune had been, but his old festival
had occurred on July 23. The new Poseidon-Neptune was given a temple
outside the _pomerium_ in the Campus Martius, but the new was connected
with the old in so far at least that the dedication day of the new
temple was July 23, the day of the old Neptune festival.
With the introduction of Neptune, the sea-god, the state had
accomplished, as it were, a sort of divine marine insurance; the
transport of the grain was now watched over by a Roman god; but it was
not to be expected that the cult of a sea-god would ever mean very much
to the Romans. The maritime commerce of the Eternal City was very slow
in developing, and it grew to its subsequent proportions, not because
the Romans of Italy engaged in it, but because those foreigners who took
to the sea by nature later became Romans. Nor did naval warfare fall to
her lot until the First Punic War, and even then her victories were
gained by the tactics of land fighting transferred to the decks of two
ships, her own and the enemy's, fastened together by landing-bridges,
and the glory of victory was due not to Neptune but to Mars. It was not
until the civil wars at the close of the republic that real naval
battles occurred, and that Neptune received his share of glory for the
victory at Actium in B.C. 31, and later over Sextus Pompeius, in a
temple erected by Agrippa in the Campus Martius, behind the beautiful
columns of which the Roman Stock-Exchange transacts its business to-day.
In the first decade of the republic therefore, as we have seen, a group
of Greek gods was introduced by the Sibylline oracles, no one of whom
can be said to have been really needed, no one of whom except the
sea-element in Neptune represented any new and vital principles not
already present in the religious world, if not of Numa, at least of
Servius. The best that can be said of these gods is that one or two of
them, notably Mercury and Neptune, exerted no positively detrimental
influences on later generations. For the next two centuries our
chronicles are silent, so far as the actual introduction of new deities
by the aid of the books is concerned, and it is not until B.C. 293 that
the narrative of new gods begins again. But in other ways the oracles
were not idle during these two hundred years. We must rid ourselves of
the idea that it was necessary that their consultation should always
result in the importation of some new Greek deity. The oracles might
order the carrying out of some new religious rite regarding the deities
already present, and these religious rites, especially the public
processions so frequently performed, feed the ever-growing superstition
of the populace. It is essential to a charm or incantation that it
should contain something strange or foreign, it is above all things help
from without; and when the gods send prodigies and portents, when their
statues weep and sweat blood, when cattle speak, and meteors fall from
the sky, something strange and unusual must be done to counteract these
things. Among the foreign acts thus ordered the sacred procession occurs
frequently. It started from the temple of Apollo in the Campus Martius
and passed into the city through the Porta Carmentalis, went across the
Forum and then outside the _pomerium_ again to the temple of Ceres, and
then to the temple of Juno Regina on the Aventine. It was therefore a
power from without which came into their city to purify them and to
carry away out of the city again the impurities of which it had rid the
community.
It is also characteristic of such semi-magical things that they lose
their effects after a few applications, and other things must be sought
always more complicated and more strange. Thus from the beginning of the
republic down through the Second Punic War we have a series of
extraordinary measures, growing more and more complicated until in the
religious frenzy of the years after Cannae even human sacrifices are
performed at the command of the books. In this the third century before
Christ deities begin again to be introduced, and it is to this century
that we now turn.