healing, but what their names were under the old regime we do not know,
except that possibly they were connected with the gods of water. At the
close of the kingdom they received, as we have seen, Apollo the divine
healer, Apollo Medicus, and this was originally the only side of his
activity which he exercised at Rome. At various seasons of plague during
the early centuries of the republic they called on him for help, and on
one such occasion (B.C. 431) they built him a temple. But in the course
of time men began to think lightly of the old family physician who had
stood by the Romans during more than two centuries; his methods were too
conservative, they were felt not to be thoroughly up to date. A new god
of healing had appeared in Rome, the Greek god Asklepios, whom myth
called Apollo's son, though originally he had had no connection with
Apollo. His great sanctuary was at Epidauros, and from there his cult
spread over all the Greek world. At first he was known at Rome only in
the worship of private individuals, who had brought him up from the
Greek colonies of Southern Italy, probably Tarentum or Metapontum; but
his cult was contagious, and the stories of his miraculous cures were
eagerly heard. It is no wonder then that in the presence of a great
pestilence in B.C. 293, when the Sibylline books were consulted, "it was
found in the books," as Livy says, "that Aesculapius must be brought to
Rome from Epidauros." The war with Pyrrhus however was on, and nothing
could be done that year except the setting apart of a solemn day of
prayer and supplication to Aesculapius. It is interesting to observe how
much the Romans have changed since the time exactly two centuries before
(B.C. 493), when Ceres and her companions, the first gods introduced by
the books, received their temple. That was the acknowledgment of gods
well known at Rome, and even then they were immediately identified with
already existing Roman gods; now they actually send an expedition not
only outside of Rome but of Italy itself to bring in the cult of a god
whom they accept by his Greek name. In the following year (B.C. 292) the
expedition started for Epidauros to bring back the god, that is the
sacred snake which was both his symbol and his visible presence. Such an
importation of a sacred snake from Epidauros is not unique in the case
of Rome, but was the normal method of establishing a branch cult. Snakes
were kept at Epidauros for just this purpose, and many branches were
thus established. It is an extremely interesting question as to the
practical medical value of the methods of healing practised at Epidauros
and its branches. For a long time those best fitted to express a
technical opinion, modern physicians who examined the matter, found
nothing good in them, and their opinion seems to receive confirmation
from some of the inscriptions recently discovered at Epidauros, which
tell the most extraordinary tales of miraculous cures. And yet many of
these tales are not intended as actual facts, but rather as pious
legends, proclaimed for the edification of the devout, in order that
their faith might be quickened. Before we condemn the whole affair, we
must realise two facts; one is that some of the most able minds of
Greece, men who were otherwise by no means remarkable for their
religious faith, believed implicitly in Epidauros and went there to be
cured; and the other is that the miraculous action of the god was always
supplemented by medicines, in which there may well have been some real
value.
We are told too much rather than too little about this embassy to
Epidauros, for the atmosphere of this third century is different from
that of the early republic. Greek literature was beginning to influence
Rome, and those generations were being born who were to be the pioneers
in Roman literature. Thus Roman mythology was commencing along Greek
lines and with Greek models, and one of the points where legend grew
thickest and fastest is in this coming of Aesculapius. The plain facts
are evidently that the committee went to Epidauros, obtained the snake,
brought it back safely to Rome, and established the sanctuary on the
island in the Tiber, where a temple was built and dedicated January 1,
B.C. 291. Probably this was the first use to which the island had ever
been put, and from this time dates the first bridge connecting it with
the city; the other bridge, to the right bank, was much later. The
Romans had always considered the island a disadvantage rather than an
advantage. Even in legend it was cursed, for it sprang from the wheat of
the Tarquins. They had always desired to be cut off from it, and had
always feared lest it might act as a means of approach for the enemy
from the opposite bank. The few real facts of Aesculapius's coming grew
into a romantic account of how, to the great surprise and terror of the
sailors, the snake went of its own accord into the Roman ship; and how
it stayed aboard until they reached Antium, and then suddenly swam
ashore and coiled itself up in a sacred palm tree in the enclosure of
the temple of Apollo there; and how, when they were in despair of ever
getting it back again, it returned peaceably to them at the end of three
days, and all went well on the journey to Ostia and up the Tiber until
they were passing the island, when the snake went ashore to make its
permanent home there.
It was a pretty fancy which at a later date formed the island into the
likeness of a boat by building a prow and stem of travertine at either
end, the traces of which may still be seen; and it is a curious instance
of the many survivals of ancient Rome in the modern city, that the
Hospital of S. Bartolommeo stands on the site of the old Aesculapius
sanctuary, and so far as we can tell, twenty-two centuries of suffering
humanity have had the burden of their pain lightened there, in
uninterrupted succession since that new year's day, above three hundred
years before Christ, when the hospital of Aesculapius of Epidauros was
formally opened.
The coming of the god of healing in the opening years of the third
century may well be regarded as an omen of the great suffering which
that century was to bring to Rome. It was a century of almost
uninterrupted warfare: first the Samnite war; then the war with Pyrrhus
and Rome's conquest of Southern Italy; then after a breathing spell of
about a decade the first war with Carthage, and Rome's bitter
apprenticeship in fighting at sea; then campaigns in Cisalpine Gaul; and
finally the war with Hannibal roughly filling the last two decades, the
most fearful contest in all Rome's history, with her most terrible enemy
in her own land of Italy. It is little to be wondered at therefore that
this was in the main a century of religious depression, a time when the
fear of the gods filled every man's heart and when every trifling
apparent irregularity in the course of nature was exaggerated into a
portent declaring the wrath of the gods and needing some immediate and
extraordinary propitiation. It is in just such a moment as this in the
middle of the century (B.C. 249) that the next recorded instance of new
gods occurs. The first war with Carthage was in progress, Rome had just
suffered a terrible defeat off the north-western point of Sicily, at
Drepana, a defeat all the more hideous because it was supposed to have
been caused by the impiety of the Consul Clodius, who, hearing that the
sacred chickens would not eat, perpetrated his grim jest by saying "let
them drink then instead," and drowning them all. But to cap it all the
wall of Rome was struck by lightning. Then action was necessary and the
books were consulted. They ordered that sacrifice should be made to Dis
and Proserpina, a black steer to Dis, and a black cow to Proserpina,
three successive nights, out on the Campus Martius, at an altar which
was called the _Tarentum_, and that the ceremony should be repeated at
the end of a hundred years. Here the myth-makers of later times have
been even more busily at work than they were in the case of Aesculapius.
The Aesculapius story was fitted out by them merely with a few
miraculous details, a few legendary ornaments, but the story of Dis and
Proserpina was so covered with their fabrications that it has only
recently been freed from them and seen in its true light, and certain
phases were so absolutely perverted that there are still a number of
very difficult points. To get a clear understanding of the situation we
must begin quite a distance back.
Taken as a whole, religious beliefs are among the most conservative
things in the world; the individual may grow as radical as you please,
but his effect on the general religious consciousness of his time is
extremely slight. Occasionally the number of radical individuals grows
larger and certain classes of society are affected by their views, but
even, in the periods of religious development which we are apt to think
of as most iconoclastic, society taken in the large, and on the average
of all classes, is not much more radical than in apparently normal
times. And while religion as a whole is conservative, there is one
section of it more conservative than all the rest, a section from which
change is almost excluded, that is the beliefs concerning the dead. In
our discussion of the religion of Numa we saw the very primitive
character of Roman beliefs in this field, the firm retention of the old
animistic idea of the dead, the tendency to class the dead together as a
mass and to believe in a collective rather than an individual
immortality, and above all the abhorrence of the dead and the
disinclination to dwell on their condition and to paint imaginary
pictures of life beyond the grave. In view of these feelings it is not
strange that we have great difficulty in finding any old Roman gods of
the dead, aside from the dead who are themselves all gods. These dead as
gods (_Di Manes_) and possibly Mother Earth (_Terra Mater_) are the only
rulers in the Lower World. In Greece on the contrary death was almost as
natural as life, and though the conditions in early times were not
unlike those in Rome, as Rohde in his _Psyche_ has so wonderfully
described them, the Greek soon grew beyond this, and the world of the
dead became almost as well known to him as the world of the living.
There was a kingdom of the dead, and a king and queen ruled over them.
These rulers were called by different names in different parts of
Greece, but the names which they had in certain parts of the
Peloponnesus, Hades the king of the dead and Persephone his bride, were
destined to survive the rest. The cult of this royal pair travelled far
and wide, but its most notable development occurred in Attica, where
Persephone became Kore the daughter of Demeter, stolen by Hades to
become his bride, while Hades himself under the sunny skies of Athens
lost some of his terrors and became Pluto, the god of riches, especially
the rich blessings of the earth. But all this was very foreign to Rome,
and while the Greeks were thinking these thoughts, the Romans were going
quietly along, content with their simple _Di Manes_. No better proof of
this can be desired than the one accidentally given us in the
introduction of Demeter and her daughter Kore into Rome as Ceres and
Libera in B.C. 493, and the absolute colourlessness and pointlessness of
Libera, in a word the entire lack of connexion in the religious
consciousness of Rome between Libera and Persephone. But in B.C. 249,
almost two and a half centuries later, matters were on a different
basis; Rome had been learning a great deal that was foreign to her old
beliefs, and there was no longer anything impossible to her in the idea
of individual rulers of the dead. Thus at the command of the books Pluto
and Persephone were received into the state-cult, though the strangeness
of the situation was acknowledged, at least in so far that they
translated Pluto into the Latin Dis; Persephone to be sure was left
alone, or more strictly speaking was accommodated to the Latin tongue by
being changed to Proserpina. It is of course impossible that the Romans
of B.C. 249 were entirely ignorant of Pluto and Persephone until the
Sibylline books bade them be brought in. Here again the traders from
Southern Italy had been their teachers; and the name _Tarentum_ of the
altar where the sacrifice was to be made may possibly indicate the town
of Tarentum as the source of the cult. The Romans knew Tarentum only too
well since the eventful war with Pyrrhus, which lay only a generation
back in their history.
And so the Romans adopted the Greek gods of the dead, and thus, at least
theoretically, put their dead ancestors into subjection to the Greeks
just as they themselves, the descendants, were sitting at the feet of
the Greeks in this life. But though the enactment of the Senate gave
these gods Roman citizenship, and the priests of the Sibylline books
were in duty bound to perform the ritual of the cult, be it said to the
credit of the Romans, the gods themselves never took a very deep hold of
the religious life of the people in general. Their names, to be sure,
crept into a few of the old formulae and stood side by side with the
older deities, and Proserpina was made much of by the Roman poets; but
the real tests of devotion, dedicatory inscriptions, are almost entirely
absent. Strangely enough the only thing which seems to have caught
their fancy was the weird ritual of the nightly sacrifice at the
Tarentum, and especially its repetition after one hundred years. This
idea of the hundred years is Roman rather than Greek, and it is at least
open to question whether it may not have been added to the instructions
in the oracle to give the whole matter an added Roman colour. Thus in
B.C. 249 were instituted the Secular Games, which were repeated with
approximate accuracy in B.C. 146, and would doubtless have been again
between B.C. 49 and 46, had not the Civil War completely filled men's
minds and made human sacrifices to the dead, in battle, an almost daily
occurrence. Meantime the Roman annalists were working backwards in their
own peculiar fashion, and building out into the past a series of
fictitious celebrations preceding B.C. 249, one hundred years apart,
back into the time of the kingdom. On the other hand we shall have
occasion later to speak of the restoration of the games and their
reorganisation by Augustus.
Under the test of adversity nations are very much like individuals, and
a national weakness, which is often entirely concealed in normal
conditions, comes prominently and disastrously to the surface in the
hour when strength is most needed. The war with Hannibal was just such a
crisis in Rome's history, and under its influence Rome's dependence upon
the Sibylline books was more pronounced than ever. The seeds of
superstition sown during the earlier centuries burst now into full
blossom, destined to produce the fruit, the gathering of which was to be
the bitter task of the closing centuries of the republic. The story of
the Second Punic War, regarded merely from the military standpoint,
reads for Rome almost like a nightmare, with its long succession of
apparently easy victories turning one by one into defeats; but when we
add to this that other chronicle, of which Livy is equally fond, the
long lists of portents and prodigies sent by the angered gods, and when
we realise that to the masses of the people the wrath of the gods was
more terrible and just as real as the hostility of Hannibal, then we
have not the heart to reproach them for their religious frenzy. Seen by
themselves, the jumping of a cow out of a second-story window, or the
images of the gods shedding tears, do not seem very serious matters, but
endow us with three hundred years of hereditary dread of these things,
give us the instinctive interpretation of them as the turning away from
us of the powers upon which we rely for help, nay their positive
opposition to us and our hopes--and our condition in the presence of
these phenomena would be very different.
Thus almost every year between B.C. 218 and 201 had its share of
religious ceremonial, and the Sibylline books, which had hitherto been,
in theory at least, merely an alternative method of religious procedure
permitted to exist alongside of the older and more conservative forms,
became now the order of the day. Like a Homeric picture in which the
quarrels of the gods in Olympus run parallel to the battles of Greeks
and Trojans on the plains of Troy, so every victory which Rome won over
Hannibal on the field of battle was bought at the price of a victory of
Greek gods over Roman gods in the field of religion; and further,
although Rome succeeded in keeping Hannibal outside of her own walls,
her gods did not succeed in defending the _pomerium_ against the Greek
gods, and it is during this Second Punic War that this, the greatest
safeguard of old Roman religion and customs, was broken down, and the
new gods gained entire possession of the city, placing their temples on
the spots hitherto held most sacred. From now on all distinction ceases,
and it is scarcely possible to speak of a Roman in contrast to a
Graeco-Roman cult. It is important however to observe that this
breakdown occurred because of excess of religious zeal rather than
through neglect and indifference, and though we may indeed notice a
gradual deterioration of the deities introduced by the books, all the
way down from the busy working gods like Ceres and Mercury and Neptune
to the more miraculous Aesculapius, and the cult of Dis or Proserpina
with its possibilities of weird fantastic worship, there have been
however as yet only scanty traces of the orgiastic element. But this was
the next step, and it was not long in coming. The rapid campaigns of the
earlier years of the war with Hannibal had passed, Cannae (B.C. 216) had
been somewhat retrieved by Metaurus (B.C. 207), where the reinforcements
for Hannibal, led by Hasdrubal, had been cut to pieces, but the result
was not what had been hoped for, and Hannibal had not left Italy, but
entrenched in the mountains of the south he seemed to be preparing to
pass the rest of his life there. It was in this the year B.C. 205 that
the help of the books was again sought, if peradventure they might show
the way to drive Hannibal out of the country. The reply came that, when
a foreign-born enemy should wage war upon the land, he could be
conquered and driven from Italy, if the Great Mother of the gods should
be brought to Rome from Phrygia. The rest of the story is so quaintly
and withal so truthfully told by Livy (Bk. xxix.) that it will not be
amiss to quote his words:--"The oracle discovered by the Decemviri
affected the Senate the more on this account because the ambassadors who
had brought the gifts [vowed at the battle of Metaurus] to Delphi
reported that when they were sacrificing to the Pythian Apollo the omens
were all favourable, and that the oracle had given response that a
greater victory was at hand for the Roman people than that one from
whose spoils they were then bringing gifts. And as a finishing touch to
this same hope they dwelt upon the prophetic opinion of Publius Scipio
regarding the end of the war, because he had asked for Africa as his
province. And so in order that they might the more quickly obtain that
victory which promised itself to them by the omens and oracles of fate,
they began to consider what means there was of bringing the goddess to
Rome. As yet the Roman people had no states in alliance with them in
Asia Minor; however they remembered that formerly Aesculapius had been
brought from Greece for the sake of the health of the people, though
they had no alliance with Greece. They realised too that a friendship
had been begun with King Attalus [of Pergamon] ... and that Attalus
would do what he could in behalf of the Roman people; and so they
decided to send ambassadors to him, ... and they allotted them five
ships-of-war in order that they might approach in a fitting manner the
countries which they desired to interest in their favour. Now when the
ambassadors were on their way to Asia they disembarked at Delphi, and
approaching the oracle asked what prospect it offered them and the Roman
people of accomplishing the things which they had been sent to do. It is
said that the reply was that through King Attalus they would obtain what
they sought, but that when they brought the goddess to Rome they should
see to it that the best man in Rome should be at hand to receive her.
Then they came to Pergamon to the king [Attalus], and he received them
graciously and led them to Pessinus in Phrygia, and he gave over to them
the sacred stone which, the natives said, was the Mother of the gods,
and bade them carry it to Rome. And Marcus Valerius Falto was sent ahead
by the ambassadors and he announced that the goddess was coming, and
that the best man in the state must be sought out to receive her with
due ceremony." In the next year (B.C. 204) after recounting new
prodigies Livy continues:--"Then too the matter of the Idaean Mother
must be attended to, for aside from the fact that Marcus Valerius, one
of the ambassadors who had been sent ahead, had announced that she would
soon be in Italy, there was also a fresh message that she was already at
Tarracina. The Senate had to decide a very important matter, namely who
was the best man in the state, for every man in the state preferred a
victory in such a contest as this to any commands or offices which the
vote of the Senate or the people might give him. They decided that of
all the good men in the state the best was Publius Scipio.... He then
with all the matrons was ordered to go to Ostia to meet the goddess and
to receive her from the ship, to carry her to land and to give her over
to the women to carry. After the ship came to the mouth of the Tiber,
Scipio, going out in a small boat, as he had been commanded, received
the goddess from the priests and carried her to land. And the noblest
women of the land ... received her ... and they carried the goddess in
their arms, taking turn about while all Rome poured out to meet her, and
incense-burners were placed before the doors where she was carried by,
and incense was burned in her honour. And thus praying that she might
enter willingly and propitiously into the city, they carried her into
the temple of Victory, which is on the Palatine, on the day before the
Nones of April [April 4]. And this was a festal day and the people in
great numbers gave gifts to the goddess, and a banquet for the gods was
held, and games were performed which were called _Megalesia_." This
extraordinary picture is probably in the main historically correct. The
most striking part of it, the enthusiasm of the Roman populace, is
certainly not overdrawn. Thus was introduced into Rome the last deity
ever summoned by means of the books, the one whose cult was destined to
outlast that of all the others, and to do more harm and produce more
demoralisation than all the other cults together. To understand why this
was so, we must go back for a moment.
The influence of Greece on Rome was progressive, and we are able to
indicate at least three distinct periods and phases of it, so far as
religion is concerned: first, the informal coming of a few Greek gods
who adapted themselves more or less completely to the old Roman
character; such are Hercules and Castor and even Apollo, though Apollo
was indirectly responsible for the second period, because he was the
cause of the coming of the Sibylline books. The influence of these books
produced the second period, with its characteristics of ever-growing
superstition, and greater pomp in cult acts, but though the sobriety of
the old days had changed into a restless activity, the new gods who came
in and the new cult acts introduced were still of such a character that
Romans could take part in the worship without shame. But just as the
staid Apollo had produced the books, so now as their last bequest the
books brought in the Great Mother, and the third period had begun, the
period of orgiastic Oriental worship, which prevailed, at least among
certain classes, until the establishment of Christianity. We may well
ask who this Great Mother was, and why this one Greek cult should be so
different from all the rest.
At different points in Asia Minor and in Crete a goddess was worshipped,
originally without proper name, as the great source of all fertility,
the mother of all things, even of the gods. Mount Dindymos in Phrygia
was one of the chief centres of the cult, and there the Great Mother was
known also as Cybele. From these various centres the cult spread over
all the Greek world, but wherever it went, it always gave evidence of
its birthplace by certain strange Oriental elements both in its myths
and in its rites. Its devotees were a noisy orgiastic band, who filled
the streets with their dances, and the air with their singing and the
clashing of their symbols, to the accompaniment of the rattling of coin
in the money box--for the collection of money from the bystanders was
always a part of the performance.
This then was what the "best man in the state" and the grave Roman
matrons went forth from Rome to receive--a sacred stone representing the
goddess, and a band of noisy emasculated priests; and this was what they
opened their gates to, and took up into their holy of holies, the
Palatine hill, the birthplace of Rome. The Greeks had again come bearing
gifts, and like the Trojans who broke down their walls and took the
wooden horse up into their citadel, Romans, the reputed descendents of
these Trojans, were carrying up to their most sacred hill another gift
of Greece which was to capture their city. They put the image in the
temple of Victoria on the Palatine until such time as its own temple was
ready to receive it, and the goddess of Victory seemed to respond to its
presence, for did not Hannibal leave Italy the very next year? And who
would be so impious as to suggest that to Scipio and not Cybele belonged
the glory, and that a strong Roman army in Africa affected Hannibal
more than a sacred stone on the Palatine?