THE RELIGION OF ROME
The Romans themselves at a certain period in their history identified
their own gods with those of Greece, and borrowed largely both from
Greek ritual and Greek mythology, so that they came to the conclusion
that the Roman and the Greek religions were essentially the same. To
the early Christian writers the religions of Greece and Rome form one
system; and the world has retained the impression that there was one
old pagan religion which assumed certain local differences in the two
countries, but was substantially the same in both.
Roman Religion was different from Greek.--Now the fact is that while
Greek religion conquered Rome, Italy had an older religion of its
own, which was not annihilated by the more brilliant newcomer, but
remained beside it and never entered into entire fusion with it. The
Romans were not a thinking so much as an organising race; in politics
they were far ahead of the rest of the world, but in thought and
imagination they were children; and so it happened that they borrowed
ideas and usages from neighbours on this side and on that, and
organised the whole into a system they could use, the organism being
their own, but only little of the contents.
We must therefore inquire, in the first place, as to the religion the
Romans had before they came under the influence of Greek ideas. Their
earliest religion is to be traced in the calendar of their sacred
year, in the lists of gods preserved for us in the writings of the
fathers, and in numberless usages and institutions descended from
early times.
The sacred year of early Rome is that of an agricultural community.
The festivals have to do with sowing and reaping and storing corn,
with vintage, with flocks and herds, with wolves, with spirits of the
woods, with boundaries, with fountains, with changes of the sun and
of the moon. There are festivals of domestic life, of the household
fire, and of the spirits of the storeroom, of the spirits of the
departed, and of the household ghosts. There are also festivals
connected with warlike matters, some connected with the river and the
harbour at its mouth, and some having to do with the arts of a simple
population. The calendar, taken by itself, would create the
impression that the community using it began with agriculture and
added to it afterwards various other activities; there is nothing in
it to contradict the supposition that Roman religion had its
beginnings in the fields and in the woods.
The earliest gods of Rome also agree with this. They are, however, a
very peculiar set of gods. Leaving the great gods in the meantime, we
notice two of the agricultural deities; there is a Saturnus, god of
sowing, and a Terminus, god of boundaries. These are what are called
functional deities, such as we met with in Greece, see chapter xvi.;
they take their name from the act or province over which they
preside. Saturnus means one who has to do with sowing; Terminus is a
boundary pure and simple. The god then, in these examples, is not a
great being who has come to have these functions placed under him as
well as others. He and the particular function belong together; he
owes all his deity to it. Now these are only examples; the same is
found to be the case with all or nearly all the distinctively Roman
gods; they are, broadly speaking, all functional beings. Each bears
the name of an object or a process; and on the other hand there is no
object and no act which has not its god. It is astounding to observe
how far the principle of the division of labour is carried among
these beings. Silvanus is the god of the wood, Lympha of the stream,
each wood and each stream having its own Silvanus or Lympha. Seia has
to do with the corn before it sprouts, Segetia with corn when shot
up, Tutilina with corn stored in the granary, Nodotus has for his
care the knots in the straw. There is a god Door, a goddess Hinge, a
god Threshold. Each act in opening infancy has its god or goddess.
The child has Cunina when lying in the cradle, Statina when he
stands, Edula when he eats, Locutius when he begins to speak, Adeona
when he makes for his mother, Abeona when he leaves her; forty-three
such gods of childhood have been counted. Pilumnus, god of the
pestle, and Diverra, goddess of the broom, may close our small sample
of the limitless crowd.
It is usually said about these multitudinous petty deities that the
Roman was very religious, and saw in every act and everything for
which he had a name, something mysterious and supernatural. The
Greek, it is said, sees things on his own level, and adds to them a
god who is human; it is by the human spirit that he interprets them.
The Roman, on the contrary, sees things as mysteries and fills them
with gods who are not human. That is true; but the question to be
asked about these Roman gods is, to what stage of religious
development do they belong: do they prove a primitive or an advanced
stage of religious thought? It has been observed that these names of
gods are all epithets, or adjectives; and it has been supposed that
there was originally a noun belonging to them, that they were all
epithets of one great deity, or, as some are masculine and some
feminine, of a great male and a great female deity. The noun fell out
of use, it is supposed, but was still present to the mind of the
Roman, and thus his regiments of divine names are not really
designations of different persons, but titles of the same person,
supposed to be present alike in all these numberless manifestations.
But it is not easy to conceive how, if primitive Italy had reached
the conception of the unity of deity, that deity became so remarkably
subdivided, nor how his own proper name and character were lost. It
is much more natural to suppose that the petty gods of Rome were all
the deities the early Latins had, and were worshipped for their own
sake. They represent the stage of thought called Animism (see chapter
iii.) when every part of nature is thought to have its spirit, and
the number of invisible beings is liable to be multiplied
indefinitely. While other Aryan races had passed beyond this stage
when we first know them, and advanced to the belief in great gods
ruling great provinces of nature, the Latins, whose mind was
organising rather than productive, made this advance more slowly, and
instead of making it organised the spiritual world of animism with a
thoroughness nowhere else equalled.[1] They had, therefore, no gods
properly so called, but only a host of spirits. Even the beings they
possessed, who afterwards became great gods, were at first no more
than functional spirits. Janus, afterwards one of the chief deities
of Rome, is originally the "spirit of opening"; an abstraction
capable of great multiplication; a Janus could be invoked for each
act of that kind. Vesta is the spirit of the hearth; each household
had its Vesta, both in early and in later times. Juno is not one but
many: as each man had his genius, a spiritual self accompanying or
guarding him, so each woman had--not her genius, but her Juno. There
were many Vestas, many Junos; and it is only later that the great
goddess arises, who may be looked to from every quarter. Others of
the great gods of later Rome have a similar early history. Mars was
at first the spirit which made the corn grow; Diana was a
tree-spirit, Jovis or Diovis himself, though his name connects him
with the Greek Zeus and the Sanscrit Dyaus, and though he is
afterwards, like these, the god of the sky, was originally in Latin a
spirit of wine, and was worshipped, the Jovis of each village or each
farm, at the wine-feast in April when the first cask was broached.
Thus the gods of the Latins are not beings who have an independent
existence and features of their own; they are limited each to the
particular object or process from which he derives his character, and
have no realm beyond it. And the same is true of the family and
house-gods, whose worship formed perhaps the principal part of the
working religion of the Roman. The Lares represent the departed
ancestors of the family; they dwell near the spot in the house where
they were buried, and still preside over the household as they did in
life. They are worshipped daily with prayers and offerings of food
and drink; the family adore in them not so much the dead individuals,
though their masks hang on the wall, as the abstraction of its own
family continuity. The Penates or spirits of the store-chamber are
worshipped along with the Lares, they represent the continuity of the
family fortune. A more general name for the departed is the Manes,
the kind ones; they are thought of as living below the earth; it is
not individuals who are worshipped at their festivals, but the dead
in the abstract, the former upholders of the family or of the people.
[Footnote 1: See on this Mr. Jevons's preface to Plutarch's _Romane
Questions_ (Nutt, 1892); which deserves to be published in a more
accessible form.]
The character of Roman worship is determined by the nature of its
objects. As each of the gods has his basis in a material object or
action, there can be no need of any images of them; where the object
or the act is, there is the god, his character is expressed in it and
not to be expressed otherwise. Nor could such gods require any
temples. And what need of priests for them, when every one who knew
their names (a great deal depended on that) could place himself in
contact with them as soon as he saw the object or took in hand the
action behind which they stood? Nor can many stories be told about
gods like these,--the Romans have no mythology. The beings they
worship are not persons but abstractions. They have just enough
character to be male or female, but they cannot move about or act
independently of their natural basis; they cannot marry, nor breed
scandal, nor make war. Nor can there be any motive for identifying
with such beings a great man who has died; where there are no true
gods, there cannot be any demi-gods or heroes. Only a very limited
power can possibly be put forth by such beings; all they can do is to
give or to withhold prosperity, each in the narrow section of affairs
he has to do with.
The aim of worship where such a set of beings is concerned, is to get
hold of the spirit or god connected with the act one has in view, and
so to deal with him as to avert his disfavour, which the Roman always
apprehended, and gain his concurrence. The house-gods are beings
possessing a stated cult, but outside the house-cult the worshipper
has to face the question at each emergency which god he ought to
address. He might choose the wrong one, which would make his act of
worship vain. If he names the god correctly he will have a hold on
him; in a case of uncertainty, therefore, he names a number of gods,
in the hope that one of them will be the right one; or he invokes
them all. "Whether thou be god or goddess" he will further say, if he
is in doubt on that point, "or by whatever name thou desirest to be
called." Each god has his proper style and title, and it is vain to
approach him without these; lists of the various gods and of their
correct styles were therefore drawn up in very early times to serve
as guides to the subject. The Latin word "indigito," to point out,
from "digitus," a finger, is the term used of addressing a god; the
lists of deities with their proper appellations were called
"indigitamenta"; and the gods named in them "Dii indigetes." The act
of worship is grave and formal; it has to be done with precision and
in strict accordance with the rules; silence is commanded; the
sacrificer repeats the prayer proper for the occasion after some one
who knows it by rote; the worshippers veil their heads. In this the
Roman ritual is markedly different from the Greek. Mommsen says the
Greek prayed bareheaded, because his prayer was contemplation,
looking at and to the gods; and the Roman with head covered, because
his prayer was an exercise of thought; and in this he sees a
characteristic indication of the difference between the two
religions. A more modern interpretation of the Roman practice is that
it arose from the fear that the worshipper might see the god whom he
has just summoned by name, which would be dangerous. If any mistake
is made in worship, the act is vain and has to be done over again.
The Great Gods.--The foregoing is the logic of the system on which
the Roman religion, as distinguished from the foreign elements
afterwards added to it, was based; the religion, however, does not
come into view historically till it has begun to rise above such a
worship of abstractions or of petty spirits, towards a worship of
gods. It was apparently by the growth of larger social organisms that
the Latin tribes advanced to the worship of greater gods. While the
family religions continued to the end, the tribe had, as in the case
of other early peoples, a larger religion than the family, and a
union of tribes produced a religion on a still greater scale. The
history of early Rome consists of a succession of such fusions of
tribes into a larger political whole. When history opens, "Rome is a
fully-formed and united city"; but Rome is made up of several tribes,
which maintain many separate institutions. The religion of after
times bears witness to these successive unions. "Deus Fidius," the
god of good faith, is the sacred impersonation of an alliance. Mars
and Quirinus are precisely similar to each other, and each has a
flamen, or blower of the sacrificial flame, and a staff of twelve
salii or dancers. Mars is the Roman, Quirinus the Sabine deity; and
we see that the two tribes had, before they were united, very similar
worships, which were both kept up after the union. The feriae
Latinae, or Latin festival, celebrated on Mons Albanus, is common to
the Latin tribes and commemorates their union. Jovis rises into
importance with the growth of city life; he comes to be called father
Jovis, Jupiter; there are many Jupiters, but the Jupiter of the city
of Rome is the greatest and best of all; he bears the title of
Optimus Maximus. He rises above Mars, in earlier times the first
Roman god, after whom the first month of the year was called, before
the month of Janus and the month of Februus, the purifier, were added
to it. Janus, the great state-god of opening, was the only one of
whom there was a representation; Mars was represented symbolically by
a spear, but Janus was figured as a man with two faces. Vesta, the
hearth-goddess of the state, was of course a great deity with a very
important worship.
Here we must mention a side of Roman religion which no doubt has its
roots far back in prehistoric darkness, but which could scarcely be
organised as we find it till the greater gods had risen to some
degree of power. It was believed that the gods were constantly making
signs to men, especially in occurrences which take place in the air,
such as thunder and lightning, and the flight of birds, but also in
many other ways. Some of the signs were simple, so that any one could
tell if they were lucky or the reverse, but some were not to be
interpreted except by men possessing a special knowledge of the
subject. And such men might be asked by an individual or by the state
when about to enter on any undertaking, to seek a sign from heaven
concerning that business. This became with the Romans a great and
important act, and those who had it in their hands exercised great
power.
Sacred Persons.--The priest in the earliest times was, in the
domestic religion, the paterfamilias, in that of the tribe, which was
but an extended household, the head of the leading family, and in the
city, which was constituted after the same model, the king. Religion
was the principal part of the service of the state; the king as such
had to offer sacrifice, to cause the gods to be consulted, to
prosecute and judge and punish those who had violated the laws and
came under the anger of the gods. But as the state grew larger,
various offices were set up to relieve the king of part of these
duties; when new worships were added to the old ones, the care of
them was in some cases committed to a special person or college; and
these priesthoods and sacred guilds of early Rome maintained their
place in the constitution for many centuries, and carried on this
part of the public service long after the words they spoke and the
acts they did had become meaningless. Beginning with the sacred
persons attached to special cults, we have, first, three flamens, one
of Mars, one of Quirinus, and one of Jovis (fl. Martialis,
Quirinalis, Dialis). Mars and Quirinus have their dancers, as we
mentioned above. Other flamens of lower rank were afterwards
instituted for the separate worships of the tribes. Very old are the
"fratres arvales," field-brothers, who served the creative goddess
(Dea Dia) in the country in the month of May, with a view to a good
growing summer, dancing to her and addressing hymns to her which may
be read now but cannot be understood, and were unintelligible to the
Romans themselves. The Luperci (wolf-men) held a shepherd's festival
in the month of February, sacrificing goats and dogs to some rustic
deity, and running naked through the streets afterwards, striking
those they met with thongs cut from the hides of the victims. The six
vestal virgins are well known, who had charge of keeping up the fire
of Vesta, the house-fire of the state. They devoted their whole lives
to this office, and enjoyed great respect. These priesthoods and
corporations, instituted to secure the continuance of special cults,
are not of a nature to bring the whole of life under the influence of
the priests and so to foster a priestly type of religion. Nor were
those other religious offices of a nature to do so, which were not
attached to special cults but served the more general purpose of
assisting and advising the state in matters connected with religion.
First among these comes the office of pontifex, a word which is
variously interpreted, either as "bridge-maker,"--that being a very
important and solemn proceeding,--or as leader in a religious
procession. There were originally five pontifices, and the number was
afterwards raised to fifteen. They exercised a great variety of
functions, and had a general oversight of all religious matters, both
public and domestic. They were experts in ritual and in canon law;
they advised the state as to the proper sacrifices to be offered for
the public, and, when consulted, would also direct the private
individual. Funerals, marriages, and other domestic occurrences into
which religious considerations entered, were under their charge; and
on the occurrence of portents and omens it was their duty to indicate
the steps to be taken in order to find out what the gods wished to
signify. They had charge of the calendar, and had to fix what days
were proper for carrying on the business of the courts (_dies
fasti_), and they were the authorities on the forms of legal process.
The chief pontiff is called the "judge and arbiter of things divine
and human," and the college had manifestly a very strong position.
The same is true of the _augurs_ or experts in signs and omens.
Though they did not consult the gods about public undertakings until
the magistrate or the general asked them to do so, they had power to
stop proceedings of which they disapproved; and this at certain
periods of Roman history they very frequently did. In Cicero's
treatise on Divination a great deal of interesting matter may be
found on this subject. Another sacred college of somewhat later date
is that of the men, at first three in number, afterwards fifteen, who
acted as expounders of the sacred Sibylline books, which King Tarquin
purchased from the old woman or Sibyl, of Cumae.
Roman Religion Legal rather than Priestly.--While some of these
priestly colleges exercised large powers, these powers were always
regarded not as inherent but deputed. The sacred offices were not
hereditary but elective; no course of training was necessary to
qualify for them; men were chosen for them by the state as for any
other public office, and those who became priests did not cease to be
citizens but continued to sit in the Senate, and, as it might happen,
to hold other offices at the same time. The growth of a priestly
caste was thus effectively prevented; religion was precluded from
having any free development of its own, and kept in the position of
an instrument for the furtherance of ends of state. There is no great
religion in which ritual is so much, doctrine and enthusiasm so
little. All these priests and colleges exist for no end but to carry
out with strict exactitude the ritual usage which is deemed necessary
to keep on good terms with the gods. They have no doctrine to teach,
no fervour to communicate, they do not even tell any stories.
Punctiliousness and anxiety attend all their proceedings. To the
Roman, Ihne says, "religion turns out to be the fear lest the gods
should punish them for neglect; any unusual occurrence may be a sign
that the gods are withdrawing their co-operation from the state, and
this must be looked into, and the due expiations used if judged
necessary." Ritual must always be carried out with the utmost
precision; it is not the goodwill of the worshipper but his
exactitude that counts. He may even cheat the gods of their due if he
is formally correct in his observance. For example, if the auspices
(the signs derived from birds) were unfavourable, they could be
repeated till a better result was obtained.
What we have described is the religion of Rome in its original form,
before it accepted foreign modifications. Its gods are spirits of the
woods and fields, of the market, of the foray, of the treaty, of all
the aspects, in fact, which life had borne to the tribes of Central
Italy, especially to the Latins and the Sabines who combined to form
the state of Rome. These gods form no family and have no history,
they do not, like the gods of Greece, lay hold of the imagination,
nor, like those of Germany, of the affections. They are only dimly
known; but they are powerful, and it is necessary to reckon with
them; and the only relations which can be kept up with such beings
are those of business and of law. It follows that this religion is
one of constraint and not of inspiration. In this it agrees with the
Roman character, which is much more inclined to order than to
freedom, to law than to art. The word religion has here its origin;
its primary meaning is restraint or check, since the chief feeling
with which the Roman regarded his gods was that of anxiety. Not that
the gods were bad; Vediovis, the bad counterpart of Jovis, is a
vanishing figure,--but they were ill-known, and might have cause to
be angry. Worship, therefore, the practical cultivation of the
friendship of the gods, swallows up here the other elements of
religion as a whole. Religion does not free the forces of human
nature to realise themselves in spontaneous activity, but enchains
them to the punctilious service of a nonhuman authority. Everything
exciting is kept at a distance, and men are trained in obedience and
scrupulousness and self-denial. They produce no beautiful works of
art, and have hardly any stories to delight in; but they are reverent
and conscientious; private feeling is sacrificed with an austere
satisfaction to the public interest, and they accordingly build up a
great power. Living in an atmosphere of magic, where unseen dangers
lurk on every side, and there is virtue in words and forms correctly
used to avert these dangers, the Roman develops to perfection one
side of religion. To its inspirations and enthusiasms and hidden
consolation he is a stranger; but he knows it better than others as a
conservative and regulating force, which checks passion, calls for
wary and orderly conduct, and causes the individual to subordinate
himself to the community.
Changes introduced from without.--The Roman religion had, properly
speaking, no development. What it might have become had it been left
to unfold itself without interference from without, we can only
guess; but it was early brought under the influence of more highly
developed religions, and it proved to have so little power of
resisting innovations that it speedily parted with much of its own
native character. The Romans were not unconscious that their religion
was an imperfect one; they never claimed, when they were conquering
the world, that their religion was the only true one, or had any
mission to prevail over others. They were tolerant from the first of
the religions of other peoples. The gods of other peoples they always
believed to be real beings, with whom it was well for them also to be
on good terms. If everything in the world had its spirit, these gods
also were the spirits of their own countries and nations; the very
notion of deity which the Romans entertained prevented them from
having any exclusive belief in their own gods or from denying the
right of the gods of others.[2] When therefore they came in contact
with foreign religions, they were not protected by any profound
conviction of the truth of their own, and were exposed to the full
force of the new ideas. The new religions came to them along with the
culture of peoples much further advanced in art and in thought than
they were themselves; at each such contact, therefore, they felt the
foreigner to be superior to themselves in intellectual matters; and
wherever this happens, the less highly gifted race is likely to
change in its religion as well as in other things. We have to note
the changes which were produced by such external influences.
[Footnote 2: Cf. Celsus in Origen, _Contra Celsum_, vii. 68.]
In the first place, Rome borrowed from Etruria. Etruscan religion was
both more developed and more savage than that of Rome. Human
sacrifice was an acknowledged feature of it; divination was carried
to absurd lengths, one great branch of it consisting in the
prediction of the future from the appearance of the entrails of
slaughtered animals. Etruria had a hell with regular torments for the
departed; in Rome the belief in a future life was much less definite.
On the other hand, Etruria had deities who were something more than
abstractions; there was a circle of twelve gods, who held meetings on
high, and regulated the affairs of the world. Above them was a power,
little defined, to which the gods were subject, a kind of fate. Greek
influence, so notably apparent in Etruscan art, is present, too, we
see, in Etruscan religion; it is through this somewhat dark passage
that Greek religious ideas first came to Rome. Under this influence
various innovations took place at Rome. Before the end of the
monarchy the Romans had begun to build houses for their gods, after
being for 170 years, we are told, without any such arrangement. The
Roman "templum" was not originally a building, but a space marked
off, according to the rules of augury, for the observation of signs.
A part of the sky was also marked off for such "observation" and
"contemplation." On such a holy site, on the Capitoline hill, there
was founded by the earlier Tarquin the temple of Jupiter which always
continued to be the principal site of Roman religion. Its
architecture was Tuscan; and it contained not only a cella or holy
place for the image of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, but also a cella for
Juno and one for Minerva. The latter was both an Etruscan and a Roman
deity, the goddess of memory. Art was thus enlisted in the service of
the gods; the divine figures acquired a reality and distinctness
quite wanting to the earlier divine abstractions; and a new notion of
deity was presented to the Roman mind. Other temples followed, to
Jupiter under other names than that which he had in the Capitol, and
to other deities. That of Faith was a very early one. It was a rule
in temple-building that the image in the cella faced the west, so
that the worshipper, praying towards it, faced the east. Here also
the Roman custom is a departure from the Greek; for in Greek temples
it is the rule that the image faces the east, and the worshipper the
west. The Roman orientation of sacred buildings has passed into the
practice of the Christian Church. From Etruria the Romans also
derived a great addition to the rules of divination; but the more
childish parts of Etruscan divination were regarded at Rome as
superstitious, though private persons might frequently resort to
them.
Greek Gods in Rome.--While Greek ideas thus came indirectly from the
north, the south of the peninsula was becoming more and more Greek,
and the gods and temples of Hellas, established first at the
sea-ports and colonies, gradually came to Rome. This movement is
connected with the Sibylline books which were acquired by the last of
the kings. These books were brought to Rome from the Greek town of
Cumae; they were written in Greek, and contained oracles which were
ascribed to an old Greek prophetess. They were consulted in grave
emergencies of state through the officials who had charge of them,
and what they generally prescribed was that a god should be sent for
from Greece, and his worship set up in Rome. Many foreign worships
were thus imported. First came Apollo, disguised under the Latin name
of Aperta, "opener," for the books contained many of his oracles; he
was received and worshipped as a god of purification, since the state
was in need of that process at the time, as well as of prophecy. In
the year 496 B.C. came in the same way Demeter, Persephone, and
Dionysus, identified with the old Latin Ceres, Libera, and Liber;
and, a century later, Heracles, identified with the Latin Hercules.
In the year 291, on the occurrence of a plague, Asclepios, in Latin
Aesculapius, was brought from Epidauros; and when the crisis of the
contest with Hannibal was at hand (204 B.C.) Cybele, the great mother
of the gods, was fetched from Pessinus in Phrygia. The people of that
town generously handed over to the Roman ambassadors the field-stone
which was their image of the goddess, and her journey to Rome had the
desired effect, in the expulsion of Hannibal from Italy. The Venus of
Mount Eryx in Sicily arrived in Rome about the same time; a goddess
combining the characters of Aphrodite and Astarte, and quite
different from the simple old Roman Venus, who was a goddess of
Spring, and presided over gardens.
The process of which these are the outward landmarks went on during
the whole period of the Republic, and resulted in the substitution of
what may be called with Mommsen the Graeco-Roman, for the old Roman
religion. The change was a very profound one. Not only were some new
gods added to the old ones, not only did Greek art come to be
employed in Roman temples, not only were new rites introduced, such
as the _lectisternium_, in which couches were arranged, each with the
image of a god and that of a goddess, and tables spread to regale the
recumbent deities. The very notion of deity was changed; the Greek
god, represented by an image in human form and moving freely in the
upper world, was substituted for the Latin god who was the unseen
side of an act or process or quality, from which he had his name,
and apart from which he was not. The following is a list of the
principal Roman gods and of the Greek ones with whom they were
identified:--Jupiter (Zeus), Juno (Hera), Neptunus (Poseidon),
Minerva (Athene), Mars (Ares), Venus (Aphrodite), Diana (Artemis),
Vulcanus (Hephaestus), Vesta (Hestia), Mercurius (Hermes), Ceres
(Demeter). The identifications are by no means accurate; Jupiter and
Vesta, as we have seen, are the only two Roman gods who are really
identical with Greek gods, the other equations are founded on
accidental resemblances, and are more arbitrary than real. The result
of them was, however, that the Romans forgot to a large extent their
own gods, and got Greek ones instead. With the divine figures they
took over the mythology of Greece, and thus the gods came to be well
known with all their weaknesses, instead of as before surrounded with
mystery and awe. The worship founded on the earlier conception of the
deity, and kept up with unwavering regularity, was inapplicable to
these new gods, and inevitably lost all its reality. This is not the
only cause, but it is one of the chief causes which prepared for the
fearful spectacle presented by Roman religion at the end of the
Republic, when men of learning and distinction officiated as the
heads of a religion in which they had no belief, and which they
scoffed at in their writings.
Among the worships which came to Rome from the East there were
several which are not of Greek, but of Oriental origin. The worship
of Cybele belongs to Asia Minor, though it had spread over Greece;
that of Dionysus also came to Greece from Asia. The practice of both
these cults was accompanied by excitement and self-abandonment on the
part of the worshippers; and they formed a great contrast to the
staid and formal worship of the Romans, the only admissible passion
in which was a calm passion for correctness. The worship of Cybele
was carried on by eunuchs, it had noisy processions, and depended on
begging for its support. When the Romans brought it to their city,
they ordained that Roman citizens should not fill leading offices in
it; but it flourished so strongly, among the numerous foreigners in
the capital and among the poor, as to show that it met a great want
there. The worship of Bacchus had to be suppressed by the state; it
was carried on at nocturnal meetings, which even citizens attended,
and it led to all kinds of irregularities. As the subject of this
chapter is not the religions of Rome, but the Roman religion, we do
not here review the numerous foreign worships which were brought to
the capital from every part of the Empire, and made Rome, towards the
close of the Republic, the residence of the gods of every nation. The
Romans as we saw were not led by any convictions of their own to deny
the truth of foreign religions; and their policy as rulers also
inclined them to tolerate all worships which did not offend against
civil order. In the provinces it was the rule not to interfere with
local religion; at Rome the authorities recognised not the imported
religion itself, of which the state did not feel called to judge, but
the association practising it, which received permission to do so.
The worship was then protected by the state--it became a _religio
licita_. Amid the meeting of all the gods and the clashing of all the
creeds which were thus brought about at Rome, the Roman religion
itself maintained its place, not as a doctrine which any one
believed, for the very priests and augurs laughed at the rites and
ceremonies they carried on, but as a ritual which was bound up with
the whole past history of Rome, and believed to be necessary for the
welfare of the state as well as for the satisfaction of the common
people. In the atmosphere of discussion and of far-reaching
scepticism which then prevailed it was not to be expected that faith
could again find any strong support in the historical religion of
Rome. The Emperor Augustus made a serious attempt to reform and
revive religion. He selected the domestic worship of the Lares as the
most living part of the old system, and ordained that the two Lares
should be worshipped along with the genius of the Emperor, and that
Rome should be divided into districts, each with its temple of this
strange trinity; while in the provinces each district was to support
a worship of Rome and of the Emperor in addition to its existing
cults. Temples were rebuilt at Rome, new ones were raised, sacred
offices were filled which had been vacant, religious games were
instituted to carry the Roman mind back to the sacred past. Livy and
Virgil treated the past from a religious point of view, showing the
sacred mission of the Roman race, and exhibiting the valour and piety
of the founders of the state. If the Roman religion could be revived
these were the proper means to do it. But the religion of the future
was not to be prepared in this way.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
The sections on religion in Mommsen's _History of Rome_.
Ramsay's _Roman Antiquities_.
Wissowa, _Religion und Cultur der Roemer_.
Holwerda, in De la Saussaye.
For the period of the Empire, Boissier's _La Religion Romaine_.
See also the work of Cumont, cited at the end of chapter x.