ever have induced Rome to accept such an utterly foreign cult; and when
the nightmare of the war was past, the Senate awoke to the realisation
that a very serious act had been committed. To their credit be it said
that they did what they could to minimise the evil. The goddess had
brought her own priests with her, the cult was in their hands, and there
the law decreed it must stay, and no Roman citizen could become a
priest. That this law was really enforced is shown by several cases
where punishment, even transportation across the sea, was meted out to
transgressors. Then too the worship must be in the main confined to the
precincts of the temple on the Palatine, and only on certain days of the
year were the priests allowed to perform in the streets of the city. It
is significant of the strength of Roman law that these enactments held
good for three and a half centuries, and were not changed until the
reign of Antoninus Pius.
In the introduction of the Great Mother the Sibylline books performed
their last and most notable achievement. Hereafter they introduced no
new deities, and were consulted only occasionally, chiefly for political
purposes, for example in B.C. 87 against the followers of Sulla, and in
B.C. 56 in connexion with a scheme of purely political import. Their
work was done, and we have seen in what it consisted. For three hundred
years they had been encouraging the growth of superstition. From their
vantage ground of the temple of Juppiter Optimus Maximus, the essence of
all that was most patriotically Roman in Rome, they had been giving
forth these infallible oracles which seemed so much superior to the
simple "yes and no" answers with which the old Romans had been content
in their dealings with the gods. In times of peril by pestilence and by
battle they had given advice, and the pestilence had ceased and the
battle had turned to victory. It seemed indeed that the Sibyl deserved
the gratitude of Rome. Time alone could teach them what the books had
really given them. It was only in the coming generations that it became
evident that the abuse of faith, the substitution of incantation for
devotion, was destructive of true religion. It is the effect of this
substitution on the various classes of society under the new and trying
social conditions of the last two centuries of the republic that forms
the theme of our next chapter.
THE DECLINE OF FAITH
It is the fashion of our day to think no evil of Greece. In art we are
experiencing another Renaissance, not like that of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries in a revival of ancient Rome, but in a movement
leading behind Rome to the classic and even the pre-classic models of
Greece. In itself it is a healthful tendency, a needed corrective to the
sensational search for novelty which characterised the closing years of
the nineteenth century. But in our admiration for the Greek spirit we
ought not to forget that after Alexander that spirit lost much of its
beauty, and aged very rapidly. We may indeed regret the fact that Rome,
like certain persons of our acquaintance, seemed at times to possess a
strong faculty for assimilating the worst of her surroundings, while
occasionally curiously unresponsive to the better things; and yet we
ought in justice to strive to realise the fact that not only is the
Greek spirit at its best an unteachable thing, but that at the
historical moment when Rome came under that influence the Greek world
was very old and weary. It was Rome's misfortune and not her fault that
when she was old enough to go to school, Alexandrianism with its
pedantic detail was the order of the day in mythology, and the timorous
post-Socratic schools were the teachers of philosophy. Naturally if Rome
had been another Greece she would have worked back from these later
forms to the truer, purer spirit, but Rome was not Greece, and no
thoughtful man ever pretended that she was. In the third century before
Christ Greece began actively to influence Rome; before that time
Hellenic influence had been confined largely to the effects on religion
produced by the Sibylline books, and to the effects on society caused by
the presence of Greek traders. But now Greek thought as embodied in the
literature began to affect Roman thought, and to bring into being a
literature based on Greek models. Three centuries of Sibylline oracles
had produced for Rome the pathological religious condition of the Second
Punic War, when she did not think twice before breaking down the
religious barrier which had hitherto separated the national from the
adopted elements in her religion, and at the same time unhesitatingly
reached out to Asia Minor for an Oriental cult, masquerading in Greek
colours, and placed on the Palatine the Great Mother of Pessinus. From
this time on two influences were steadily at work which shaped the
history of Roman religion in the two remaining centuries till the close
of the republic: one, mythology, directly affecting the forms of the
cult and the beliefs concerning the individual gods; the other,
philosophy, attacking the whole foundation of religious belief in
general.
Greece gave her gods to Rome when she herself was weary of them, she
gave her the tired gods, exhausted by centuries of handling, long ago
dragged down from Olympus, and weary with serving as lay-figures for
poets and artists, and being for ever rigged out in new mythological
garments, or jaded with the laboratory experiments of philosophers who
tried to interpret them in every conceivable fashion or else to do away
with them entirely. It is no wonder that it did not take the Romans more
than a century to come to the end of these gods, to find that the only
one among them who could satisfy their religious desires was the least
Greek of them all, the Magna Mater, and having found this to go forth to
take to themselves more like unto her, in a word, to crave the
sensational cults of the Orient. And the philosophy which Greece gave
Rome was no better than the mythology. It is not strange that human
thought experienced a reaction after a century which contained both
Plato and Aristotle, but it is a pity that Rome should have learned her
philosophy from a period of doubt and scepticism, an age in which the
lesser masters, who had known the greater ones, had gone, leaving
nothing but pupils' pupils.
The history of religion in Rome during the last two centuries of the
republic is the story of the action and reaction of these two
tendencies--the one toward the novel and sensational in worship, which
we may call superstition, the other the philosophy of doubt, which we
may call scepticism--in the presence of the established religion of the
state. This much the two centuries have in common, but here their
resemblance ends. In the first of these centuries (B.C. 200-100) the
state religion was able to hold her own, at least in outward appearance,
and to wage war against both tendencies. In the other century (B.C. 100
to Augustus) politics gained control of the state religion and so robbed
her of her strength that she was crushed between the opposing forces of
superstition and scepticism. It is to the story of the earlier of these
two centuries, the second before Christ, that we now turn.
With the close of the Second Punic War there began for Rome a period of
very great material prosperity. This prosperity was, to be sure, not
exactly distributed, and it is not without its resemblance to some of
our modern instances of commercial prosperity, in that it was not so
much a general bettering of economic conditions as the very rapid
increase of the wealth of a relatively small number, an increase gained
at the expense of positive detriment to a large element in the
population. Thus it was that a century of which the first seventy years
provide an almost unparalleled spectacle of the increase of national
territory, accompanied, according to the ancient methods of taxation, by
a vast increase in national wealth, should close with the tragedies of
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and the legacy of class hatred which
produced the civil wars. This growth in wealth and territory was not
without its effects on the outward appearance of the state religion. The
territory was gained by a series of minor wars in the course of which
many temples were vowed; and the spoils of the war provided the means
for the fulfilment of the vows. Thus to the outward observer it might
well have seemed that the religion of the state was enjoying a time of
great prosperity. Between the close of the Punic War (B.C. 201) and the
year of Tiberius Gracchus (B.C. 133) we have accurate knowledge of the
dedication of no less than nineteen state temples, and there were
undoubtedly many others of which we have no record. Another apparently
good sign is the fact that the Sibylline books are silent, so far as the
introduction of new deities is concerned. Yet these surface indications
are deceptive. As for the Sibylline books, now that the _pomerium_ line
had been broken down, and the temples of Greek gods might be placed
anywhere in the city, it was a very simple matter for the state to bring
in any Greek god that it pleased, and likening him to a more or less
similar Roman god and calling him by the Roman name, to put up a temple
to him anywhere. It was also true that, as Roman theology was now based
on the principle that every Roman god had his Greek parallel and _vice
versa_, there were no gods left, whose names would have occurred at all
in the Sibylline books, who could not be brought in now without them.
And as for the vowing of new temples, this represented at best merely
the habit formed during more devout days; religion was moving by the
momentum acquired during the Second Punic War, and the gods to whom
these temples were erected were really Greek gods under Roman names. In
a word, not only was the state religion becoming more and more of a form
day by day, but the form was that of Greece and not of Rome. It is
extremely interesting to trace this movement in detail, to look behind
the outward appearance and see the remarkable changes that were really
taking place.
If we look at the temples which were built in the years following the
Second Punic War, we shall have no difficulty in finding examples of the
introduction of Greek gods under Roman names. During the war itself in
the year B.C. 207 a Roman general had vowed a temple to Juventas on the
occasion of a battle near Siena. Juventas was an old Roman goddess, one
of those abstract deities which had been produced by the breaking off
and becoming independent of a cult-title. She was intimately associated
with Juppiter, and had a special shrine in the Capitoline temple.
Juventas was the divine representative of the putting away of childish
things and the assumption of the responsibilities and privileges of
young manhood. This act was symbolised by the Romans in the beautiful
ceremony of putting on the toga of manhood (_toga virilis_), when the
lad was led by his father to the Capitoline temple to make sacrifices to
Juppiter, and at the same time a contribution was made to the treasury
of Juventas. But this was not the goddess in whose honour the temple
vowed at Siena was built at the Circus Maximus and dedicated B.C. 191.
This Juventas was nothing more or less than the Greek Hebe, the female
counterpart of Ganymedes, as cupbearer to the gods. Similarly in B.C.
179 a temple was dedicated to Diana at the Circus Flaminius, but this
was not the old goddess of Aricia, whose cult Rome had adopted for the
sake of increasing her influence in the Latin league. It was the Greek
Artemis, who at her first coming into Rome had been associated with
Apollo in the temple built in B.C. 431, and was now given a temple of
her own. Perhaps the strangest of all is the temple which was erected to
Mars in the Campus Martius in B.C. 138. It might well be supposed that
the Romans would keep holy the reputed father of their race, the god to
whom, under Juppiter, their success was due. On the contrary in B.C.
217, when they were carrying out a Greek ceremony of offering a banquet
to a set of gods, arranged in pairs, they showed no hesitation in
grouping together Mars and Venus to represent the Greek pair Ares and
Aphrodite, thus doing violence to Mars by bringing him into a
relationship with Venus which was entirely foreign to old Roman thought,
and identifying him with Ares, with whom he had nothing to do. Now in
B.C. 138 a temple is built to Ares under the name of Mars, close beside
the venerable old altar of Mars, one of the oldest and most sacred of
Roman shrines.
But this passion for identifying Greek gods with Roman ones did not
confine itself to finding a parallel for the greater gods of Greece; and
less known deities were introduced into Rome in the same way. The old
Roman god, Faunus, in whose honour the ancient festival of the
_Lupercalia_ was yearly celebrated, had as his associate a goddess,
Fauna, who was better known as the "good goddess" (Bona Dea). Eventually
this new title Bona Dea crowded out the old title Fauna, so that it was
almost entirely forgotten. Bona Dea was a goddess of women, and the most
characteristic feature of her worship was the exclusion of men from
taking part in it. Now there was a Greek goddess, called Damia, also a
goddess of women, from whose cult also men were excluded, and her cult
spread from Greece to the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, especially
Tarentum, and so eventually to Rome. But by the time she arrived in Rome
the connexion of Fauna and Bona Dea had been entirely forgotten. Damia
was surely a Bona Dea, yes she was _the_ Bona Dea, for was not the proof
at hand in the fact that men were excluded from both cults? So a temple
was built for her, probably shortly after the Second Punic War, and from
the time no one ever thought of poor Fauna again, except scholars and
poets, who amused themselves, as was their wont, by putting her in
various genealogical relationships to Faunus, as sister, wife, or
daughter, while Damia lived and prospered under the stolen title of the
Bona Dea.
We see from this on what a small resemblance such identifications were
based, in this case merely on the presence of a similar minor injunction
in the laws of each cult. But we have here at least a genuine cult which
had arrived and was asking for admission, and in so far we are better
off than in most instances, where nothing substantial was gained by the
identification. Two forces were now at work assisting in this fusion of
Greek and Roman gods, namely art and literature. The capture of Syracuse
marked an epoch in Rome's artistic career; for several centuries she had
employed Greek architects and had also become acquainted with the
artistic types of certain Greek gods, but now all at once a wealth of
Greek sculpture was disclosed to her, and she could not rest content
until all her gods were represented in the fashion of man. The adoption
of the Greek type, in those cases where an identification had already
been effected, was not difficult and was in the main successful, though
there followed almost inevitably an enrichment of the Greek element in
the Roman god because of the presence of some attribute in the statue,
which brought its own myth with it. But there were certain Roman gods
for whom Greek parallels could not be found, and in these cases a
compromise, usually rather an awkward one, had to be effected, as for
example when the Roman gods of the storeroom, the _Di Penates_, were
represented by statues of the Greek Castor and Pollux. In such cases
confusion was sure to follow, and subsequent antiquarians would be
tempted to write treatises proving the original connexion of Castor or
Pollux with the Penates, as gods of protection in general, etc.
Literature too in its own way was fully as misleading, and Roman
scholars became fascinated with the labyrinths of Alexandrian mythology,
and straightway began to build Roman myths as rapidly as possible,
establishing lists of old Latin kings and all sorts of genealogies, and
weaving as many Greek mythological figures as possible into the legends
of the foundation of Italic towns.
It was the ceremonial of the cult however which most often offered the
best means of identification, as we have seen above in the case of Bona
Dea-Damia, where the exclusion of men from the rites was the main point
of similarity. In a similar way the old Roman god of the harvest,
Consus, was identified with the Greek ocean-god Poseidon because
horse-races were a characteristic feature of the festivals of each; and
the old Roman goddess of women and of childbirth was given as her Greek
parallel the Greek goddess Leukothea, the helper of those in peril at
sea, because in both cases slaves were forbidden to take part in the
cult.
But the effect of the capture of Rome by these Greek gods and Greek
ceremonials was not confined to the mere addition of new ideas, and the
transformation of certain old Roman deities. This would have been
comparatively harmless, but there was inevitably another result: the
consequent neglect of all Roman deities for whom no Greek parallels were
forthcoming, and the forgetting of all the original Roman ideas which
were crowded into the background by the novel and more brilliant Greek
ideas. Even the festivals of the old Roman year were treated in the same
cavalier manner. The interest of the people continued only with those
ceremonies which frightened them or pleased them. There were certain
festivals, for example the _Lupercalia_, the old ceremony of
purification on February 15, for which a reverence was still felt; and
others like the _Parilia_, the birthday of Rome, on April 21, or the
Anna Perenna festival on March 15, which involved open-air celebrations
and picnics. These and others like them were always kept up, while many
others were totally neglected. Naturally for the present the forms were
continued by the state; the festivals were celebrated at least by the
priests; and every temple received sacrifice on its birthday. The wheels
of the state religion were still running, but the power behind them had
stopped, and it was only momentum which kept them in motion.
It is only when we realise these things that we can understand how it
was possible that the most learned scholars at the close of the republic
were so desperately ignorant concerning old Roman religion. In regard to
many of the old Roman gods they know absolutely nothing, and try to
disguise their ignorance behind a show of learning based on etymological
sleight-of-hand; in regard to the rest their information is so tangled
with Greek ideas that it is often almost impossible to unravel the mass
and separate the old from the new. This unravelling has been the tedious
occupation of the last half century in the study of Roman religion; and
so patiently and successfully has it been accomplished that, although we
would give almost anything for a few books of Varro's _Divine
Antiquities_, it is tolerably certain that the possession of these books
would not change in the least the fundamental concepts underlying the
modern reconstruction of ancient Roman religion; though it is equally
certain that these books would emphasise just so much more strongly,
what we already realise, that this modern reconstruction is in distinct
contradiction to many of Varro's favourite theories. It is an
accomplishment of which History may well be modestly proud, that modern
scholars have been able to eliminate, to a large degree, the personal
equation and the myopic effects of his own time from the statements of
the greatest scholar of Roman antiquity, and thus though handicapped by
the possession of merely a small percentage of the facts which Varro
knew, to arrive at a concept of the whole matter infinitely more correct
than that which his books contained.
During this second century before Christ, therefore, the state religion
was apparently unchanged so far as the outward form was concerned. The
terminology and the ceremonies were much the same as before, but the
content was quite different: Greek gods and Greek ideas had displaced
Roman gods and Roman ideas, and the official representatives of
religion, the state priests, were carrying the whole burden of worship
on their own shoulders, because popular interest had been in the main
deflected and was working along other lines. These lines of rival
interest were superstition and scepticism, phenomena which at first
sight appear as distinct opposites, but which are on the contrary very
closely akin, so that they usually occur together not only in the same
age, but frequently even in the same individual. They are purely
relative terms, and the essence of superstition consists in its surplus
element, just as the essence of scepticism lies in its deficiency. No
religion judged from the standpoint of the worshipper can properly be
called a superstition, but if once we can establish the essential things
in a religion, then any large addition to those essential things savours
of superstition. Speaking with historical sympathy we have no right
therefore to designate early Roman religion as a superstition--it may of
course be relatively so in comparison with other religious forms--but
once we have established the essential elements in that early religion,
we may consider the introduction of new and entirely different elements
as superstition. The old religion of Rome consisted in the exact and
scrupulous fulfilment of a large number of minute ceremonials. The
result of this careful fulfilment of ritual was that the powers around
man did him no harm but rather good, and that was the end of the whole
matter. Religion did not command or even permit special inquiries into
these powers; it was not only not man's duty to try to know the gods, it
was his positive duty to try not to. Through the influence of Greece
there had now come into Rome an altogether new idea, nourished largely
by the Sibylline books, and represented most fully in the Magna Mater,
the idea of the perpetual service of a god, a consecration to him, to
the exclusion of all other things, and a life given over to the
orgiastic performance of cult acts, which produced a state of ecstasy
and consequently a communion with the deity. Along with this there went
a belief in the possibility, by means of certain books and certain men,
of obtaining from the gods a knowledge of the future. It is these
surplus beliefs, quite contrary to the spirit of old Roman religion,
which may justly be called superstition.
The Sibylline books had aroused these feelings, a knowledge of the
oracle at Delphi had increased them, the rites of Aesculapius had
carried them farther, but it was not until the Magna Mater came that
they seem to have burst forth in any large degree. But aside from the
rapid growth of the Magna Mater cult itself we have in this second
century two instances of this tendency. The first was connected with the
god Dionysos-Liber, innocent enough at his first reception in B.C. 493,
in the company of Demeter-Ceres and Kore-Libera. To be sure the state
had introduced him merely as the god of wine, but the mystery element in
Dionysos took firm hold on private worship, and the Bacchanalian clubs
or societies began to spread over Italy. In the course of about three
centuries they had become a formidable menace to the morals and even the
physical security of the inhabitants of Rome. Their meetings instead of
occurring three times a year took place five times a month, and finally
in B.C. 186 the famous Bacchanalian trial took place, of which Livy (Bk.
xxxix.) gives such a graphic account, and to which a copy of the
inscription of the decree of the Senate, preserved to our day, gives
such eloquent testimony, providing as it does severe penalties for
subsequent offenders, and recognising on the other hand large liberty of
conscience.