Bacchanalian clubs accorded a warm reception to astrology and made men
listen with eagerness to those who could tell their fortunes or guide
their lives by means of the stars. We do not know when the bearers of
this knowledge first arrived in Rome, but Cato, in his _Farm Almanac_,
our earliest piece of prose literature, in giving rules for the
behaviour of the farm bailiff especially enjoins the intending landowner
that his bailiff should not be given to the consultation of Chaldaean
astrologers. Within half a century the problem of the Chaldaeans grew so
serious that state interference was necessary, and in B.C. 139 the
praetor Cn. Cornelius Hispalus issued an edict ordering the Chaldaeans
to leave Rome and Italy within ten days.
The same age which produced this growth of superstition brought also the
antidote for it in the shape of a sceptical philosophy, but the only
trouble was that this philosophy not only cured superstition but in
doing so killed the genuine religious spirit underlying it. It cast out,
to be sure, the seven devils of superstition, but when men returned to
themselves again, they found their whole spiritual house swept and
garnished. With the death of the direct pupils of Aristotle, the Greek
mind had thought out all the problems of philosophy of which man at that
time was able to conceive. The following generations of philosophers
devoted themselves either to the elaboration of detail or to a renewed
examination of the foundations of belief, with the result that their
smaller minds came to smaller conclusions, and the end of their
investigations was one increased scepticism. The schools of the day
showed many slight variations and bore many different names, but they
all agreed in being more or less pervaded by a sceptical spirit, and by
accenting ethics as against metaphysics, though they defined ethics very
differently according to their starting point.
One of the earliest philosophical influences which reached Rome was
however that of a pre-Socratic school, the school of Pythagoras. This
was natural enough in itself, as the headquarters of the school was in
Southern Italy, but it is curious and significant that the first
pronounced instance of its influence occurred shortly after the Second
Punic War, and in connexion with a clever fraud which was perpetrated
with a view to influencing religion. In the year B.C. 181 a certain man
reported that when he was ploughing his field, which lay on the other
side of the Tiber, at the foot of the Janiculum, the plough had laid
bare two stone sarcophagi, stoutly sealed with lead, and bearing
inscriptions in Greek and Latin according to which they purported to
contain, one of them the body of King Numa, the other, his writings.
When they were opened the one which ought to have contained the body was
empty, in the other lay two rolls, each roll consisting of seven books;
the one set of seven was written in Latin and treated of pontifical law,
the other consisted of philosophical writings. They were examined, found
to be heretical and subversive to true religion, and were accordingly
burned in the Comitium. The connexion of Numa and Pythagoras,
historically impossible but believed in at this time, makes it
practically certain that this was a clever attempt to introduce the
philosophy of Pythagoras into Rome under the holy sanction of the name
of Numa. Fortunately the zeal of the city praetor frustrated the scheme.
But the doctrines of philosophy, which thus failed to enter by the door
of religion, found the door of literature wide open for them. As the
irony of fate would have it, Cato, the stalwart enemy of Greek
influence, had brought back from Sardinia with him the poet Ennius, and
at about the time when the false books of Numa were burning in the
Comitium Ennius was giving to the world a Latin translation of the
_Sacred History_ of the Greek Euhemerus. This Euhemerus, a Sicilian who
had lived about a century before this time, earned his title to fame by
writing a novel of adventure and travel, in which he described a trip
which he had taken in the Red Sea along the coast of Arabia to the
wonderful island of Panchaia, where he found a column with an
inscription on it telling the life history of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus,
who were thus shown to have been historical characters afterwards
elevated into deities. It was this theological element in his book which
made him famous. This theory of the historical origin of the gods is
even to-day called Euhemerism, and has exerted a baleful influence over
writers on mythology from its author's day down to our own. These then
were the doctrines which Ennius presented to the Romans in their own
tongue, and it is pathetic to realise that his _Sacred History_ formed
the first formal treatise on theology which Rome ever possessed. Born
under such an evil star, it is small wonder that her theological
speculations never reached great metaphysical heights.
In these days it seemed to the Senate that the question of philosophy
was beginning to be so serious that it might be considered as a public
danger, and that it was therefore their duty to try to cope with it.
They chose, of course, the typical Roman method of dealing with such
matters, and the philosophers were expelled from Rome. At first in B.C.
173 it was only the Epicureans who were sent out, but in B.C. 161 the
edict was broadened to include philosophers in general. However six
years later, in B.C. 155, there came to Rome an embassy of philosophers
whose mission was avowedly political and not philosophical, and who thus
could not be excluded, while at the same time they took occasion to
preach their philosophical doctrines. It was fortunate for Rome that
Stoicism, the best among all these philosophies, appealed to her most
strongly and became thus the national philosophy of Rome. Stoicism was
in many respects quite as sceptical as the others, but it had at least
this great advantage that it laid a strong emphasis on ethics, and was
in so far capable of becoming a guide of life. It might be well enough
for Greeks, whose aggressive work in the world had been done, to settle
down to an idle old age with a theory of life which practically excluded
the possibility of strong decisive action, but Rome was still young, and
most of her work was still before her. She might think herself very old
and pretend to take peculiar delight in many of the more decadent forms
of Greek thought, but in reality her leaders instinctively turned to
Stoicism, as affording a compromise between the mere thoughtless
activity of youth, which acts for the love of acting, and the jaded
philosophy of the vanity of all effort. About the middle of the century
(_circa_ B.C. 150) there existed in Rome a centre of culture and
intellectual influence, a little group of men peculiarly interesting,
because they form practically the first instance of an intellectual
coterie in the history of Rome. Their leader was the younger Scipio, who
had as his associates his friend Laelius, the poet Lucilius, whose
brilliant writings, submerged by the more brilliant satires of Horace,
form one of the most deplorable losses in Roman literature, and the
Stoic philosopher Panaitios of Rhodes. Terence had also belonged to the
circle, but he was now dead. Stoicism was the avowed philosophy of these
men, and their influence, especially that of Panaitios and Lucilius, did
much to popularise their chosen philosophical creed.
While Stoicism claimed superiority to religion and showed the
impossibility of attaching any value to religious knowledge, it
recognised the necessity of religion for the common people on grounds of
expediency, and effected a reconciliation between this denial of
religion on the one hand, and the recognition of it on the other, by
asserting that the religion of the state was justified not only by
expediency but much more by the fact that it was after all only the
presentation of the truths of Stoicism in a form which was intelligible
to the lower classes. Had this group of Scipio and his associates made
an effort to emphasise these particular doctrines of Stoicism in
relation to religion, the downfall of the state religion, which occurred
in the following century, might have been hindered. But for reasons,
which we shall see in a moment, this downfall could not have been
prevented, and it is doubtful whether the influence of any philosophical
system, even when supported by such prominent men, could have
perceptibly postponed the catastrophe. Meantime the only visible
contribution of Stoicism to the problem of religion was the growth under
her influence of the idea of a "double truth," one truth for the
intellectual classes and one for the common people, reaching its climax
in the phrase "It is expedient for the state to be deceived in matters
of religion" (_expedit igitur falli in religione civitatem_). This was
the attitude toward religion of the most intellectual men in the
community at the beginning of what was in many ways the most terrible
period in Rome's history.
The last century before Christ (more exactly B.C. 133-B.C. 27) is the
story of how Rome became an empire because she was no longer able to be
a republic; it is the history of the growth of one-man power because
many-men power had become impossible. This growth was caused not only,
nor at first even chiefly, by the grasping character of Rome's
statesmen, but by the increase of the rabble and the consequent
unmanageable character of her population, except under the firm hand of
a single master. And the reason why it took one hundred years of civil
war to change the republic into the empire was not because the spirit of
the republic was so slow in dying that its death struggles filled a
century, but merely because the republic died too easily and the way to
one-man power was so simple that there were too many candidates for the
position, and hence the civil wars between them. These civil wars were
bound to continue until the bitter lessons of experience had taught men
not only how to gain the supreme control, which was relatively easy, but
how to keep it and exclude rivals, which was much more difficult. The
ambitious leaders of this century did not have to create a throne; that
was ready to their hand. Their task was only to put defences around it.
Even these defences of it were not directly against the people, for the
people had no desire to overthrow the throne, but merely against the
rival candidates. Step by step from Tiberius Gracchus to Gaius Gracchus,
and on to Marius, to Sulla, to Pompey, to Julius Caesar, possession
became more and more permanent; until from being a mere momentary
position, it became nine points of the law, and Octavian made the tenure
perfect by adding an almost religious reverence to his person in the
title _Augustus_.
In the main the foreign wars of the second century before Christ gave
place to the Civil War at home, but there was one exception to this, the
war with Mithradates, king of Pontus, which on various occasions during
the early part of the century took large bodies of Romans to the Orient.
And as though to supplement this knowledge of the East, in the closing
half of the century the field of the civil struggle was enlarged so that
it too included the East and South-East. We have already seen so many
instances of the effects of political events on the course of Roman
religion that it is a matter of no surprise to us to see that both of
these struggles, the Civil War and the Oriental wars, left their marks
on religion. It would be much more surprising if they had not done so.
In the struggle of the rivals at home every possible weapon was
employed, and it was soon discovered that the priests and the
paraphernalia of religion were excellent means of political power and
influence. The religion of the state therefore became enslaved to
politics. On the other hand the campaigns in the East made the soldiers,
and eventually on their return the whole populace, acquainted with
various Oriental deities, which helped to satisfy their craving for the
sensational and the superstitious. Thus while the state religion in its
debauched condition was losing influence, the orgiastic element in
worship was gaining power through these newly acquired Oriental cults.
The story of the religion of the last century of the republic is
accordingly the history of the control of state religion by politics and
its consequent destruction, and the growth of superstition because of
the coming of new Oriental worships; and we may add to these two topics
a third: the pathetic attempts of philosophy to breathe new life into
the dead religion of the state.
When it comes to the question of the human characters whose names are
writ large on this page of religious history, the Dictator Lucius
Cornelius Sulla towers above all others. To his political insight is
largely owing the harnessing of the state religion to the chariot of the
politician, now and hereafter; and it was he who was the foremost leader
of Roman armies to the Orient, and the man who, because of his
peculiarly superstitious character, encouraged the worship of the
strange deities which were found there. In both these directions he was
ably seconded by Pompey, half a generation later. On the other hand the
futile efforts of philosophy to improve the situation were inspired
during the earlier period by the chief priest Scaevola, a contemporary
of Sulla, and during Pompey's and Caesar's time by Varro, the greatest
scholar that Rome ever produced.
Let us follow first the fortunes of the religion of the state at the
hands of the politicians. The upper and influential classes of Roman
society were now thoroughly imbued with Stoic philosophy and accordingly
with the doctrine of the "double truth" in the field of religion--the
real philosophical truth which was their own peculiar property and
which showed them clearly that all the forms of religion were vain, and
its doctrines at best a clumsy statement in roundabout parables of a
truth which they saw face to face; and that lower "truth" intended for
the masses and dictated by the pressure of necessity, the concrete state
religion in all its details, which must be preserved among the lower
classes in the interest of the state and of society. The state religion
was thus a matter of expediency and of usefulness. But once this idea of
its usefulness was put into the foreground, it was natural that the
question should immediately be asked: Was this state religion as useful
after all as it might be? Could it not be put to greater uses? If
religion existed in general for its political effects, why should it not
be used by the individual, like any other political apparatus, for his
own individual advancement? The man to whom this idea seems to have come
first in all its fullness was Sulla, and he proceeded immediately to act
upon it. The control of religion could, of course, be obtained best
through the priesthoods, and those priesthoods were naturally most worth
gaining which possessed the greatest right of interference in affairs of
state. These priesthoods were: first the Augurs, with their traditional
right to break up assemblies and to declare legislative action null and
void; then the Pontiffs, with their general control of all vexed
questions concerning the intersection of divine and human law; and
lastly the XVviri, or the keepers of the Sibylline books, in charge also
of the cults to which the oracles had given birth. Accordingly he
increased the numbers of these three priesthoods, raising each to
fifteen; and inasmuch as the old right of the colleges of the priests to
fill vacancies in their own bodies themselves had been taken away from
them in B.C. 103, and such vacancies were now filled by popular vote, it
was an easy thing for him to fill the new positions with his own men.
The result of accentuating the political importance of these three
colleges was that the whole body of the state religion became actuated
with a political spirit, and the whole structure was remodelled along
the lines of this new valuation. The immediate effect of this was that
the priests themselves became entirely absorbed in politics. To be sure
Sulla was not responsible for all of this, because the tendency had been
in this direction ever since the time of the Punic wars. In the good old
days of Roman religion the office of priest had been in the main its own
reward, and though the priests formed by no means a separate class, and
the individual priest had many secular interests and occasionally some
political ones, he was not supposed to hold political office. In the
time of the Punic wars, however, the tide began to turn. The earliest
recorded instance of a priest holding a high political office is in the
year B.C. 242 when the Flamen Martialis or special priest of Mars was
chosen Consul; but when the gentleman in question started to go to the
war, he was forbidden by the Pontifex Maximus. In B.C. 200 the Flamen
Dialis, or special priest of Juppiter, was allowed to be made aedile,
but his brother had to be especially authorised to take the oath of
office in his stead, since the priest of Juppiter, the god of oaths, was
himself not allowed to take an oath. In the course of the next century
such cases became more common, and where the thing was not allowed, the
priesthood became unpopular, and was sometimes left entirely vacant.
This last thing happened, for instance, in the case of the Flaminium
Diale, a position which was unfilled from B.C. 87 till B.C. 11. But the
evil effects of politics were not confined to the emptying of certain
priesthoods, which after all were of no very great importance, except as
their presence tended to sustain the _morale_ of the old religious
ritual. Its effects were much more disastrous in the very important
priesthoods which had now become essentially political offices. The
exclusively political interests of the incumbents, combined with the
fact that each man was elected by general vote of the people and without
any special fitness for the position, as had been the case in the old
days, tended to break down all the traditions of the college, and thus
to destroy much of the knowledge which was being handed down largely by
oral tradition. There arose therefore an ignorance of the ritual of the
cult which was great just in proportion as the knowledge originally
present had been accurate and intricate. But even this was not all; the
arranging of the yearly calendar, with its complicated intercalation of
days to bring into harmony the solar and the lunar years, was still in
the hands of the priests, and here the results of their growing
ignorance were most appalling. The calendar became terribly disordered;
and this again had its reaction on religion, for the calendar month
occasionally fell so out of gear with the natural seasons that it was
impossible to celebrate some of the old Roman festivals, which had a
distinct bearing on certain seasons of the year.
Thus the greatest enemies of the religion of the state were those of its
own household, the priests, who turned the reverent formalism of the old
days into a mockery, and made their priesthood merely a means of
political influence.
Now that the old Roman gods had been changed into new-fangled Greek
gods, and the old Roman priesthoods into modern political clubs, it is
little wonder that the religion of the fathers ceased to satisfy their
descendants. But while history shows that specific religious creeds have
often proved mortal and subject to change and decay, the same history
makes clear that the religious instinct is a constant factor in
humanity; and we must not suppose for a moment that the religious need
of the Roman community had ceased to exist, simply because the religion
of the state had ceased to satisfy it. From the day when the Sibyl gave
her first oracles to Rome on down to the time of Sulla, the desire for
the sensational and the extraordinary in religion had been steadily
growing. It had its birth in the idea that there was such a thing as a
direct communion with the deity, and that the oracles were an immediate
command from him. It was nourished by the sense of foreignness in the
Greek ceremonies gradually introduced into the cult. It fed on the more
sensational aspects of certain of the gods brought in: on the
enthusiastic rites of Bacchus, on the miracle-working of Aesculapius, on
the Stygian mystery of Dis and Proserpina. But its fulfilment was to
come from the East, that inexhaustible fountain of religious energy. In
the Magna Mater it recognised its own. This was the first undiluted
Orientalism which came to Rome. But the state itself had received it,
and had managed in some unaccountable way to put upon this outlandish
Eastern cult the stamp of Rome's nationality, that stamp which no nation
ever successfully and permanently resisted; and thus the reception of
the cult on the part of the state was not only a disgraceful thing,
tending to degrade true religion and spread the contagion of
Orientalism, but it also made those whose appetite had been aroused
eager for other deities, whose cult would have the great additional
charm of being unlicensed by the state, and hence savouring of
unlawfulness.