B.C. 92 the Roman soldiery commanded by Sulla penetrated into the valley
of Comana in Cappadocia. There was a whole community, a miniature state,
devoted to the service of a goddess not unlike the Great Mother of
Pessinus, but whose cult was more ecstatic, more orgiastic, than that of
the Magna Mater, at least as Rome knew her. The king was the chief
priest, and the citizens were priests and priestesses. The war with
Mithradates brought the Roman army there again and also to another
Comana in Pontus, where there was a branch of the Cappadocian cult. It
was not the ignorant soldiery alone who were impressed by what they saw;
their leader, Sulla, was fully as much affected, and on his return to
Italy when the great crisis in his career, his march on Rome and his
storming of the Eternal City, lay before him, it was the goddess of
Comana who appeared to him in a dream and gave him courage. Thus her
cult entered Rome, and the capture of the city by Sulla has its parallel
in the capture of the hearts of the people by his companion, the goddess
of Comana. The original name of this goddess seems to have been Ma, but
the Greeks, who also knew her, had likened her to Enyo, their goddess
of strife and warfare; hence in these days of facile identification the
Romans' course was clear, and she became straightway Bellona, called by
the name of their old goddess of war. Of all the chapters of the history
of such identifications none is more curious than this. The old Bellona
had borne to Mars the same relation that Fides, the goddess of good
faith, had borne to Juppiter. She was the result of the separate
deification of one of the qualities of Mars, the breaking off of an
adjective and the turning of it into a noun; but from now on, though the
old goddess still existed and had her own temple and her own worship,
the name was also applied to this strange Oriental goddess who came in
the train of the debauched Roman army on its return from the East. But
though men might call this new-comer by the name of a sacred old
national goddess and worship her in private as they pleased, the
religion of the state, even in its sunken condition, refused to admit
her among its deities, and the priests, the _Fanatici_, with their wild
dances, to the music of cymbals and trumpets, slashing themselves with
their double axes until their arms streamed with blood, were not, at
least as yet, the official representatives of the state, the companions
of the reverend old Salii with their dignified "three-step." Even the
sanctuaries of the private cult must be kept outside the city, and the
violation of this law in B.C. 48 resulted in the raiding and
destruction of one of these private chapels. Her cult does not seem to
have become a state affair until the beginning of the third century
A.D., when Caracalla, who had extended Roman citizenship to all the
inhabitants of the provinces, gave a similar citizenship to all the
foreign deities resident in Rome. It is a curious coincidence that this
action of Caracalla's occurred just about the same year A.D. in which
the breakdown of the _pomerium_ for state cults had occurred B.C. For
the present, however, that is to say in the first century B.C., the
state retained her dignity, though the resultant unorthodox character of
the cult increased its power and influence, and made it more subversive
to morals than the Magna Mater was.
An even more interesting instance, both of the popularity of sensational
foreign cults and of the struggle of the state religion against them, is
found in the case of the Egyptian goddess Isis. The spread of Isis
worship into the Greek, and consequently also into the Roman world,
began relatively early. In the third century Isis and her companion
Serapis were well established on the island of Delos; and in the second
century we find traces of their worship in Campania, especially at
Pompeii and Puteoli. This last-named place, the seaport Puteoli, the
modern Pozzuoli, outside of Naples, was probably the door through which
Isis and her train came into Italy. Puteoli was the chief port for
Oriental ships, including Egypt, and it also had commercial relations
with Delos. At this later date it supplied Rome with gods in somewhat
the same way that Cumae, in the same neighbourhood, had done centuries
before. So far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, an apparently
trustworthy tradition traces the private cult back to the time of Sulla;
and it certainly cannot have been introduced much later than this time,
because in B.C. 58 it had became so prominent and so offensive to the
authorities of the state that they destroyed an altar of Isis on the
Capitoline. Apparently Isis was no exception to the general law of
growth by persecution, because in the course of the next decade the
state found it necessary to interfere no less than three times, _i.e._
in B.C. 53, 50, and 48. Finally the policy of suppression proved so
ineffectual that it was decided to try the opposite extreme, and to see
what could be done by state acknowledgment and state control, and so the
Triumvirs, Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, in B.C. 43 decreed the
building of a state temple for Isis. But although they had decreed the
erection of a temple, they were too much engaged in their own affairs to
build it immediately, and until the temple was built Isis could not
properly be considered among the state gods. As events turned out this
temple was never built, for in the course of the next few years the
trouble with Antony and Cleopatra began, and thus the gods of Egypt
became the gods of Rome's enemies, and so far as the state was concerned
an acknowledgment of these gods was impossible. Instead Augustus forbade
even private chapels inside the _pomerium_. The subsequent history of
Isis does not directly concern us; suffice it to say that after various
vicissitudes she was admitted to the state cult by Caracalla along with
all the other foreign deities.
But it was not only Asia Minor and Egypt which gave their cults to Rome;
the deities of Syria came too. Prominent among them was Atargatis, whose
cult seems to have touched the Italian mainland first at Puteoli. In
B.C. 54 the army of Crassus on its Eastern expedition, which was
destined to come to such a tragic end in the terrible defeat at Carrhae,
visited and plundered the sanctuary of the goddess in Syria. Thus she
became known at Rome, where she was called simply the "Syrian goddess"
(_dea Syria_) and was worshipped in a way very similar to the Magna
Mater and Bellona.
Lastly when Pompey swept the Mediterranean clean of Cilician pirates,
the sailors became acquainted with a Persian deity, Mithras, whose cult
in Rome began during our period and subsequently crowded all the other
orgiastic cults into insignificance.
We have now seen how the politicians were turning the state religion
into a tool for the accomplishment of their own selfish ends, and how
the masses of the people were seeking satisfaction for their religious
needs in sensational foreign worships, introduced from Asia Minor,
Egypt, Syria, and Persia. We must now see whether any efforts were being
made by any members of the community in behalf of the old religion, and
whether there were still in existence any traces of the pure old Roman
worship.
The latter-day philosophies of Greece had dealt a severe blow at Roman
religion by convincing the intellectual classes in the community that in
the nature of things there could be no such knowledge as that upon which
religion was based, and hence that religion was an idle thing unworthy
of a true man's interest. Yet all the philosophy in the world could not
take away from a Roman his sense of duty to the state. Now the state in
its experience had found religion so necessary that she had built up a
formal system of it and made it a part of herself. As it was the duty of
the citizen to support the state in every part of her activity, it was
clearly his duty to support the state religion. Hence there arose that
crass contradiction, which existed in Rome to a large degree as long as
these particular systems of philosophy prevailed, between the duty which
a man, as a thinking man, owed to himself, and the duty which he, as a
good citizen, owed to the state. We have seen how during the second
century before Christ no attempt was made to reconcile these two views
and how they existed side by side in such a man, for example, as Ennius,
who wrote certain treatises embodying the most extraordinary sceptical
doctrines, and certain patriotic poems in which the whole apparatus of
the Roman gods is prominently exhibited and most reverently treated. We
have also seen how this "double truth" could not but have disastrous
results on the state religion in spite of all efforts to the contrary.
The first effort which was made to improve the situation was not so much
an attempt at reconciliation as a frank statement of the difficulties of
the case. The problem had advanced considerably toward solution when
once it had been clearly stated. The man who had the courage to make the
statement was Quintus Mucius Scaevola, a famous lawyer as well as the
head of the college of Pontiffs (Pontifex Maximus). He was a
contemporary of Sulla, and was admirably fitted for his task because he
not only represented religion in his position as Pontifex Maximus, but
could speak also in behalf of the state both theoretically as a lawyer,
and practically because he had filled almost all the important political
offices (consul, B.C. 95). The treatise in which he made his statements
has been lost to us, but we may obtain a fair idea of what he said from
a quotation by the Christian writer Augustine in his wonderful book _The
City of God_ (iv. 27). For Scaevola the double truth of Ennius has grown
into a triple truth, and there are no less than three distinct
religions: the religion of poets, of philosophers, and of statesmen. The
religion of the poets, by which he means the mythological treatment of
the gods, he condemns as worthless because it tells a great many things
about the gods which are not true and which are entirely unworthy of
them. The religion of philosophers he does not consider suitable to the
state, because it contains many things which are superfluous, and some
which are injurious. The superfluous things may be allowed to pass, but
the injurious things, by which he evidently means the doctrines of
Euhemeros, are a very serious matter, not because they are untrue but
because the knowledge of them is inexpedient for the masses. The
religion of the statesman can have no part in these things, even if they
are true; and a man as a citizen of the state must believe in many
things, or profess belief in them, which the same man, as an individual
and a philosopher, knows are false. Scaevola's honest well-intentioned
effort to support the religion of the state was naturally a failure. The
very "masses" in whose behalf Scaevola was calling on his
fellow-citizens to undergo these casuistical gymnastics soon cared more
for Bellona and Isis than for all the gods of Numa together. But we
cannot help admiring Scaevola for his patriotism, though we may not envy
him his ethics. The state religion could never be supported on the
arguments of expediency; every one granted its expediency, and still it
fell; its worst enemies, the politicians, granted it most of all, and
they were the only ones who put the doctrine to any practical use. It
was precisely this discovery of its expediency and its great practical
value which caused its downfall. From the practical standpoint the
problem was settled once and for all, but as a matter of theory it
remained for the next generation, in the person of Varro, to provide a
more satisfactory solution, and to effect something of a compromise
between the truth of philosophy and the truth of religion.
Marcus Terentius Varro came to the work equipped with all the learning
of his time and possessed of a greater knowledge of facts than any other
Roman of his or any other day. So far as the problem of religion was
concerned, he embodied this learning in the sixteen books of _Divine
Antiquities_, which he very appropriately dedicated to Julius Caesar in
his capacity as Pontifex Maximus. If Ennius's _Sacra Historia_ be left
out of account, his book was the first treatise on systematic theology
which Rome ever had. In this work he desired to accomplish three things:
first, by a review of the history of Rome to show how essential the
state religion was; second, by an examination of Greek mythology to
purify the state religion from its immoral influences; third, to show
that the state religion so purified was fully in accord with Stoic
philosophy. In regard to the "three religions," therefore, he agreed
with Scaevola in casting out entirely the religion of the poets, and in
accepting both the others, but he differed from Scaevola in that he
denied the contradiction between them and asserted that they were not
two truths but two forms of the same truth. We are not able to go into
the details of his attempt, because unfortunately the books in which he
wrote it have been lost to us, and we have again merely the quotation in
Augustine's _City of God_. But we know that in general he tried to show
that the formal doctrines of the state religion were merely a popular
presentation of the truths of the Stoic philosophy, and that the whole
system of Roman gods could be reduced in theory to the great
philosophical contrast between the sky and the earth, the procreative
and the conceptive elements. A man might therefore hold fast to both
religions as to a simpler creed and a more abstruse one. Hence a man's
belief as a good citizen and his belief as an intelligent individual
were not in contrast so far as the truth was concerned, but merely in
the matter of form, in the manner of presentation. Varro's heroic
effort, supported as it was by all the learning of his day and all the
influence that his fame lent to his words, was nevertheless a failure.
The religion of the state was dead; politics had killed it. It was a
political power alone which could restore life to it, but that was the
work of an emperor, Augustus, and not of a scholar, Varro.
While Varro, with the weapon of philosophy, was attempting to defend the
religion of the state against its enemies, the poets and the
philosophers, a poet, also armed with philosophy, was trying to defend
the Roman people against its worst enemy, superstition. It may not seem
as though Lucretius belonged among the friends of old Roman religion,
and as though the _De Rerum Natura_ were exactly a religious poem, and
yet his work was in so far helpful to old Roman religion in that it
attacked the excesses of a latter-day superstition which had alienated
the hearts of the people from their old beliefs. Superstition is a
parasite which lives on scepticism, and with the killing of the parasite
scepticism sometimes dies as well; and it is open to question whether
Lucretius's book was not of considerable service in the cause of
religion. For religion still lived at Rome, though it is the fashion of
the writers on the ethics of the close of the republic to emphasise
almost entirely the scepticism of the day, dwelling on the attitude of a
Cicero or a Caesar, and forgetting the infinite number of "little
people," especially outside of Rome in the country, who still believed
in the old religion of the fathers, and who still performed the old
festivals of Numa, people who knew no more about Isis than they did
about Stoic philosophy. Their presence is disclosed to us in a few
republican inscriptions, but better yet in the continuance of the rites
of family worship down into the latest days of Rome, rites which did not
form a part of the restoration of Augustus, and which therefore, had
they died now, would never have come to life again. It is by just so
much more our duty to remember these people, as they have been forgotten
by history, if we ever expect to obtain a picture of Roman religion in
its true proportions. They were besides the people upon whom Augustus
built in the restoration, to which we now turn.
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE
Politics had caused the downfall of the state religion. Weakened by the
attacks of a sceptical philosophy, driven from the hearts of the common
people by the rival cults of the Orient, the state religion had finally
lost all its influence by the abuse of it as a political tool. Its
priesthoods were deserted, its temples were falling into ruins with the
grass carpeting their mosaic pavements and the spiders weaving new altar
cloths. To us with our modern ideas it would have seemed impossible that
this state religion could ever rise again; and probably no other state
religion that the world has ever seen could have been brought to life
again, because no other state religion has ever been so absolutely a
part of the state, unless the state itself were a theocracy; and
possibly no lesser genius than Augustus could have accomplished the task
even under the slightly more favourable conditions which the state
religion of Rome offered. Whether Julius Caesar would have attempted the
restoration is one of the many questions which his death left
unanswered. Certainly thoughtful men of his day hoped that he would, and
it was in this hope that Varro dedicated his _Divine Antiquities_ to
him; and another contemporary, Granius Flaccus, his book _On the
Invocation of the Gods_. But except for one law which he caused to be
enacted "concerning the priesthoods," we have no knowledge either of his
accomplishment or of his intentions, and the great task was left
practically untouched for the master-hand of Augustus.
In order that we may understand what Augustus did and how he managed to
succeed in relation to the state religion we must obtain some idea of
the whole scheme of Augustus in relation to the state at large, of which
his religious reorganisation was merely a part. One of the cleverest
characterisations of the Emperor Augustus which has ever been written
was that by the late Professor Mommsen, but its relatively secluded
position in the Latin preface to an edition of Augustus's great
autobiography, the _Res Gestae_, has prevented it from being generally
known. Mommsen describes Augustus as "a man who wore most skilfully the
mask of a great man, though himself not great." This epigrammatic
statement is undoubtedly clever but it is not just, although it is the
opinion concerning Augustus which we would expect a man to hold who,
like Mommsen, had an almost unbounded admiration for Julius Caesar.
There have been scattered through the pages of history even down to our
own day men of whom we say that they were not great men, though they did
a great work. In certain cases doubtless we can separate the man from
his work and justify the assertion, but in other cases we are deceived
by the man himself just as his contemporaries were and as he wished them
to be. For it occasionally happens that a man who is called to rule over
men and to reorganise a disordered government is able best to accomplish
his end by a gentle diplomacy, a conciliatory manner, which is often
misunderstood by those who surround him and who interpret gentleness of
spirit as smallness of spirit and self-restraint as weakness. It would
be truer to describe Augustus as a man who wore most skilfully the mask
of an ordinary man though himself an extraordinary man. The more we
study the chaotic condition of Rome under the Second Triumvirate and the
more fully we realise not only the total disorganisation of the forms of
government but also the absolute demoralisation of the individual
citizen, the more we appreciate the almost impossible task which was set
for Augustus and which he successfully accomplished. For one hundred
years (B.C. 133-31), from Tiberius Gracchus to Actium, hardly a decade
had passed which had not brought forth some terrible revolution for
Rome. Even the great Caesar had failed, had not divined aright the only
treatment to which the disease of the age would yield, for although the
blows which actually killed Caesar may have been merely an accident in
history, the deed of irresponsible men, his fall was no accident but was
the inevitable logical outcome of his imperial policy. But Augustus
succeeded in establishing a form of government which enabled himself and
his connexion to occupy the throne for almost a hundred years, and even
then though revolutions came, his constitution was the main bulwark of
government in succeeding centuries. It would take us too far from our
present subject to answer in any completeness the question of how he
succeeded, but a word or two may be said in general, and the rest will
become clearer when we examine his reorganisation of religion.
The secret of Augustus's success was the infinite tact and diplomacy by
which he managed to strengthen the throne and his own position on it
while apparently restoring the form of the republic and the manners of
the old days. It is open to question whether he was actuated by a
consideration of the good of the state, or by a regard for his own
selfish ends, but it is beyond question that he gave to Rome the only
form of government which could eradicate the habit of revolution, and
thus saved the state. He succeeded because he did not underestimate the
difficulty of the task, and accordingly brought to bear on it every
possible influence, emphasising especially the psychological element
and being willing to go a long way around in order to arrive at his
goal. He was not content with a mere temporary makeshift, which might
carry him to the end of his own life; he was laying foundations for the
future. Nowhere is this more clearly stated than in one of his edicts,
where he says:--"May it fall to my lot to establish the state firm and
strong and to obtain the wished-for fruit of my labours, that I may be
called the author of it and that when I die I may carry with me the hope
that the foundations which I have laid may abide." These abiding
foundations must be laid deep in the national psychology, and it was his
grasp of the psychological problem which explains his reorganisation of
religion. A century of civil war had totally destroyed the spirit of
unity and created an infinite number of petty hatreds between man and
man. Men had looked so long at their individual interests that they had
almost forgotten the existence of the state. But if the spirit of
patriotism could be quickened into a new life, then men would think of
the state and forget themselves, and united in their love of this one
universal object of devotion they would learn a lesson of union which
might gradually be extended to their whole life. But the state must be
presented not as it was in all its wretchedness, lacerated by civil
struggle; the sight of the present would serve only to start the quarrel
over again; instead it must be the ideal state, a state so far away, so
distant from all the citizens, that they all seemed equally near. If
this state were to be something more than a mere abstraction, it could
be clothed only in the reverential garments of the past, it must be the
Rome of the good old days. Yet if they were not for ever to mourn a
"Golden Age" in the past and a paradise that was lost, there must also
be a hope for the future, a paradise to be regained. In a word the
belief in the eternity of Rome must be instilled into men's hearts. Thus
was the idea of the "eternal city" born, and it is no mere coincidence
that the first instance of this phrase in literature occurs in Tibullus,
a poet of the Augustan age. Once convinced of the eternity of Rome men
could look at the past for inspiration in full confidence that the
beauties which had been could be obtained again. But Augustus was more
than a sentimental enthusiast, and he saw that it was not enough for men
to drop their swords at the epiphany of "Roma Aeterna," that their eyes
would grow weary and looking to earth would behold the swords again.
These swords must be beaten into ploughshares and pruning hooks; the
deserted farms of Italy must be filled again, and the stability of the
state must be increased by an enlargement of the agricultural community.
But for the accomplishment of these reforms something was needed which
was at once gentler and stronger than legal enactments. The poet must
make smooth the way of the law. It was the poet who could best interest
men in the past; and thus Augustan poetry was encouraged and directed by
the emperor, that by pointing out the glories of old Rome it might
inspire men to make a new Rome more glorious than the old. Practically
every poet of the age was directly or indirectly under the influence of
the ruler. It was the emperor's counsellor, Maecenas, who encouraged
Virgil to write his _Georgics_, and these glowing pictures of farm life
did quite as much to carry out the emperor's plans as the _Aeneid_
later. And Virgil was not alone in writing of country life; Tibullus,
even more gentle than the gentle bard of Mantua, was telling the same
story in another form.
By this time the myths which Greece had given to Rome or which Rome had
made for herself on Greek models were absolutely a part of the national
past. These too entered into Augustus's scheme. Thus another protege of
Maecenas, the poet Propertius, was gradually weaned from love poetry and
filled instead with a hunger for the myths of Roman temples and of old
Roman customs, so that Cynthia slowly gives way to Tarpeia and
Vertumnus, and the Rome of Augustus to the Rome of Romulus. Even the
irrepressible Ovid tried in his exuberant fashion to assist in this work
and started in his _Fasti_ to write a history of the religious
festivals of the Roman year. But above all these, and infinitely more
important in its influence, towers the _Aeneid_ of Virgil. All through
the varied incidents of the twelve books there runs the scarlet thread
of a great purpose, the glorification of Rome and of Augustus. From the
sack of Troy, through the long wanderings and the fierce wars in Latium,
down to the final conquest of the enemy, we see Aeneas led by the hand
of the gods whose will it was that Rome should be. The lesson is very
evident. The providence which guided us in the past still protects us;
we have no right to be discouraged, and our future is assured us under
the same gods who brought our fathers out of the land of the Trojans,
through the midst of the Greeks. But there is concealed in the _Aeneid_
another lesson, much more directly useful to Augustus. Its hero, the
immaculate pious Aeneas, is the direct ancestor of the Julian house to
which Augustus belongs, and the founding of Rome shows not only the good
will of the gods toward the city, but in no less degree their special
appointment and protection of the leader. The descendants of the house
of Aeneas are therefore the divinely appointed rulers of Rome.