important as a factor in Roman history, is that of the organisation of
the religion of the city-state of Rome. Doubtless there were stages
intermediate between the two, but they are entirely lost to us. We had
to concentrate our attention on the city of the four regions--the first
city we really know--and to examine the one document which has survived
from it, the so-called calendar of Numa. In my fifth lecture I explained
the nature of that calendar, and noted how it reflects the life of a
people at once agricultural and military, and how it must presuppose the
existence of a highly organised legal priesthood, or of some powerful
genius for political as well as religious legislation. The tradition of
a great priest-king is not wholly to be despised, for it expresses the
feeling of the Romans that religious law and order were indispensable
parts of their whole political and social life. During the rest of these
lectures I have been trying to interrogate this religious calendar, with
such help as could be gained from any other sources, on two points: (1)
the conception, or, if we can venture to use the word, the knowledge,
which the Romans of that early city-state had of the Divine; (2) the
chief forms and methods of their worship. We saw that they did not think
of the divine beings as existing in human form with human weaknesses,
but as invisible and intangible functional powers, _numina_. Each had
its special limited sphere of action; and some were now localised within
the _pomoerium_, or just outside it within the _ager Romanus_, and
worshipped under a particular name. I suggested that this very
settlement had probably some influence in preparing them for assuming a
more definite and personal character, should the chance be given them.
In regard to the forms of cult with which they were propitiated, I found
in the ritual of sacrifice and prayer a genuine advance towards a really
religious attitude to the deity, the sacrifices being meant to increase
his power to benefit the community, and the prayers to diminish such
inclination as he might have to damage it; but that there are in these
certain survivals of the age of magic, which are, however, only formal,
and have lost their original significance. I found some curious
examples of such survivals in the rite of _devotio_, and in vows
generally a somewhat lower type of method in dealing with the
supernatural. But, on the other hand, the forms of _lustratio_, at the
bottom of which seems to lie the idea of getting rid of evil spirits and
influences, present very beautiful examples of what we may really call
religious ceremony.
There was, then, in this highly-organised religion of the city-state, in
some ways at least, a great advance. But in spite of this gain, it had
serious drawbacks. Most prominent among these was the fact that it was
the religion of the State as a whole, and not of the individual or the
family. Religion, I think we may safely say, had placed a certain
consecration upon the simple life of the family, which was, in fact, the
life of the individual; for the essence of religion in all stages of
civilisation lies in the feeling of the individual that his own life,
his bodily and mental welfare, is dependent on the Divine as he and his
regard it. But to what extent can it be said that religion so
consecrated the life of the State as to enable each individual in his
family group to feel that consecration more vividly? That would have
constituted a real advance in religious development; that was the
result, if I am not mistaken, of the religion of the Jewish State, which
with all the force of a powerful hierarchical authority addressed its
precepts to the mind and will of the individual. But at Rome, though the
earliest traces and traditions of law show a certain consecration of
morality, inasmuch as the criminal is made over as a kind of
propitiatory sacrifice to the deity whom he has offended, yet in the
ordinary course of life, so far as I can discern, the individual was
left very much where he was, before the State arose, in his relation to
the Divine.
In no other ancient State that we know of did the citizen so entirely
resign the regulation of all his dealings with the State's gods to the
constituted authorities set over him. His obligatory part in the
religious ritual of the State was simply _nil_, and all his religious
duty on days of religious importance was to abstain from civil business,
to make no disturbance. Within the household he used his own simple
ritual, the morning prayer, the libation to the household deities at
meals; and it is exactly here that we see a _pietas_, a sense of duty
consecrated by religion, which seems to have had a real ethical value,
and reminds us of modern piety. But in all his relations with the gods
_qua_ citizen, he resigned himself to the trained and trusted
priesthoods, who knew the secrets of ritual and all that was comprised
in the _ius divinum_; and by passive obedience to these authorities he
gradually began to deaden the sense of _religio_ that was in him. And
this tendency was increased by the mere fact of life in a city, which as
time went on became more and more the rule; for, as I pointed out, the
round of religious festivals no longer exactly expressed the needs and
the work of that agricultural life in which it had its origin.
It would be an interesting inquiry, if the material for an answer were
available, to try and discover how this gradual absorption of religion
(or rather religious duties) by the State and its authorities affected
the morality of the individual Roman. It has often been maintained of
late that religion and morality have nothing in common; and even Dr.
Westermarck,[464] who, unlike most anthropologists, treats the whole
subject from a psychological point of view, seems inclined to come to
this conclusion. For myself, I am rather disposed to agree with another
eminent anthropologist,[465] that religion and morality are really
elemental instincts of human nature, primarily undistinguishable from
each other; and if that be so, then the over-elaboration of either the
moral or religious law, or of the two combined, will tend to weaken the
binding force of both. If, as at Rome, the citizen is made perfectly
comfortable in his relations with the Power manifesting itself in the
universe, owing to the complete mastery of the _ius divinum_ by the
State and its officials, there will assuredly be a tendency to paralyse
the elemental religious impulse, and with it, if I am not mistaken, the
elemental sense of right and wrong. For in the life of a state with such
a legalised religious system as this, so long at least as it thrives and
escapes serious disaster, there will be few or none of those moments of
peril and anxiety in which "man is brought face to face with the eternal
realities of existence,"[466] and when he becomes awakened to a new
sense of religion and duty. In the life of the family, the critical
moments of birth, puberty, marriage, and death regularly recur, and keep
up the instinct, because man is then brought face to face with these
eternal facts; there is no need of extraordinary perils, such as
tempests or pestilences, to keep the instinct alive. But in the life of
the State as such there were no such continually recurring reminders;
even the old agricultural perils were out of sight of the ordinary
citizen. Thus the farthest we can go in ascribing a moral influence to
the State religion is in giving it credit for helping to maintain that
sense of law and order which served to keep the life of the family sound
and wholesome. That it did to some extent perform this service I have
already pointed out;[467] and it is a remarkable fact that the decay of
the State religion was coincident, in the last two centuries B.C., with
the decay of the family life and virtues. But on the whole, as we shall
see, the _ius divinum_ had rather the effect of hypnotising the
religious and moral instinct than of keeping it awake. It needed new
perils for the State as a whole to re-create that feeling which is the
root of the growth of conscience; and when the craving did at last come
upon the Roman, which in times of doubt and peril has come upon
individuals and communities in all ages, for support and comfort from
the Unseen, it had to be satisfied by giving him new gods to worship in
new ways--aliens with whom he had nothing in common, who had no home in
his patriotic feeling, no place in his religious experience.[468]
I wish to conclude this first part of my subject by giving some account
of the first beginning of this introduction of new deities, _di
novensiles_ as they were called,[469] into the old Roman religious
world. Those, however, of whom I shall speak here were not introduced as
the result of disaster or distress, but were simply the inevitable
consequence of the growing importance of the city on the Tiber--of the
beginnings of her commercial and political relations with her
neighbours, and also of her own development in the arts of civilisation.
The religious system with which I have so far been dealing was the
exclusive property, we must remember, of those _gentes_, with the
families composing them, which formed the original human material of the
State, and were known as _patrician_. If we had no other reason for
being sure of this, the fact that all State priesthoods were originally
limited to patrician families would be sufficient to prove it;[470] even
down to the latest times the _rex sacrorum_, the three _flamines
maiores_, and the _Salii_ were necessarily of patrician birth--a fact
which had much to do with their tendency to disappear in the last age of
the Republic.
But in the course of the period within which the Numan calendar was
drawn up, this community of patrician burghers began to suffer certain
changes. A population of "outsiders," as in so many Greek cities, had
gained admittance to the site of Rome, though not into its political and
religious organism.[471] So solid a city, in such an important position,
was sure to attract such settlers, whether from the Latins dwelling
about it, or from the Etruscans on the north, or the Greek cities along
the coast southwards and in Sicily. The Latins were, of course, of the
same stock as the Romans, and already in some loose political relation
to them; and as each Latin city was open, like Rome, to Greek and
Etruscan influences, we should probably see in Latium an indirect
channel of communication between those peoples and Rome, to be reckoned
in addition to the direct and obvious one. As Dr. J. B. Carter has well
said,[472] "the Latins, becoming rapidly inferior to Rome, were enabled
to do her at least this service, that of absorbing the foreign
influences which came, and in certain cases of Latinising them, and thus
transmitting them to Rome in a more or less assimilated condition." As
Dr. Carter has been the first to explain the arrival of these new
religious influences to English readers, I shall in what follows closely
follow his footsteps. They indicate and also reflect a change from
agricultural economy and habits to a society interested in trade and
travel: I say interested, because we cannot be quite sure how far the
old Romans engaged in such pursuits themselves, as well as admitting
from outside those who did, with their worships. They indicate also the
growth of an industrial population, organised in gilds, as in the Middle
Ages; here beyond doubt the workers were mainly of native birth. Lastly,
they indicate an advance in military efficiency and, as a result of this
military progress, some change in the relation of Rome to her
fellow-communities of Latium.
Perhaps the first of these new deities to arrive was the famous Hercules
Victor or Invictus of the _ara maxima_ in the Forum Boarium, who
continued for centuries to accept the tithes of the booty of generals
and the profits of successful merchants. Virgil in the eighth
_Aeneid_[473] makes Evander show his guest this altar and the
celebration of its festival, and tell him the tale of Cacus and the oxen
and the cave on the Aventine hard by; the poet, like every one else
until the last few years, believed the cult to be primeval and Roman.
But one of the many gains for the history of Roman religion which have
recently been secured--even since the publication of my _Roman
Festivals_--is the certainty that the Italian Hercules is really the
Greek Heracles acclimatised in the sister peninsula, and that the cult
of the _ara maxima_, though that altar was inside the sacred boundary of
the _pomoerium_, was not native in Rome.[474] It seems, however, almost
certain that it did not come direct from any part of Hellas, though its
position, close to the Tiber and its landing-place, might naturally lead
us to think so. It is almost impossible to believe that Heracles would
have been allowed inside the _pomoerium_, had he been introduced by
foreigners in the strict sense of the word. No doubt much has yet to be
learnt about Hercules in Italy; but recent painstaking researches have
made it possible for us to acquiesce in the belief that this Hercules of
the _ara_ came from a Latin city,--from that Tibur which by tradition
was of Greek origin--"Tibur Argeo positum colono,"--and which, like its
neighbour Praeneste, was curiously receptive of foreign influence.[475]
It is believed that the Greek traders from Campania and Magna Graecia
made their way northwards through Latium, and thus eventually reached
Rome with the deity whom they seem to have always carried with them. He
was, in the words of Dr. Carter,[476] a deity of whom, by the contagion
of commerce, the Romans already felt a great need, a god of great power
from whom came success in the practical undertakings of life; and it was
quite natural that his shrine should be in the busy cattle-market of the
city, if we remember that the wealth of the early Romans, _pecunia_ as
they called it, mainly consisted in sheep and oxen. As Heracles in
various forms was to be met with all over the Mediterranean coasts, it
would indeed be strange if he were not found in the growing city
commanding the central water-way of Italy; and his appearance there may
be said to have put Rome in touch with the Mediterranean business of
that day. There he was destined to remain, with all the honour of an
oldest cult, though other cults of the same god came in later, and were
established quite close to him; and though never a State deity of much
importance, he exercised a wholesome influence in matters of trade, as
the god who sanctioned your oath, and who accepted the tithe of your
gain which you had vowed at the outset of an enterprise.[477]
In the same period, though the traditional date of their temple is
later, came the Twin Brethren, Castor and Pollux, and found their way,
like Hercules, into the city within the _pomoerium_. The famous temple
of Castor (before whom his brother gradually gave way) was at the end
of the Forum under the Palatine, close to the fountain of Juturna, where
the Twins watered their horses after the battle of Lake Regillus; and
there the beautiful remains of the latest reconstruction of it still
stand.[478] This position alone should make us feel confident that the
cult did not come direct from Greek sources; and it had its origin,
perhaps, in the period when Rome was in close relation with Latin
cities, which themselves had been gradually absorbing the cults and
products of the Greeks of Campania. There is a strong probability that
it came from Tusculum, with which the legend of the Regillus battle is
closely connected, and where the cult had beyond doubt taken strong
root.[479] Like the Hercules of the _ara maxima_, the Twins were no
doubt brought by the course of trade, which was continually pushing up
from the south; for they too were favourites of the merchant adventurer,
and throughout Hellas were the special protectors of the seafarer. Their
connection with horses is well known, and not as yet satisfactorily
explained in its Roman aspect; but Dr. J. B. Carter thinks that they
first became prominent in Greece when the Homeric use of chariots was
abandoned for a primitive kind of cavalry, and that "the Castor-cult
moved steadily northward (from Magna Graecia), carried, as it were, on
horseback," and that when it reached Rome it became connected with the
reorganisation of the cavalry. This seems to be almost pure guess-work,
and, attractive as it is, I fear we cannot put much faith in it.[480]
The position in the Forum, and the well-known connection of both twins
with oaths,[481] seem to me rather to suggest a more natural origin in
trade. I would suggest that the equine character of the cult in Latium
was secondary, and that the connection of the temple and cult with the
Roman cavalry was a natural result, but not a primary feature, of its
introduction. I should be inclined to look on it as coming in with the
building of the temple, which was probably of later origin than the
original introduction of the cult.
Some time after the calendar was drawn up, a deity was established on
the Aventine, _i.e._ not within the _pomoerium_, whose arrival marks a
development in the organisation of handicraft. We cannot indeed _prove_
that the settlement of Minerva on the Aventine took place so early, but
we have strong grounds for the conclusion.[482] This temple was in
historical times the religious centre of trade-gilds; and these gilds
were by universal Roman tradition ascribed to Numa as founder, which
simply means that they were among the oldest institutions of the
City-state. As Minerva does not appear in the calendar, had no _flamen_,
and therefore must have been altogether outside the original patrician
religious system, the natural inference is that the temple was founded,
like the shrines of Hercules and the Twin Brethren, towards the end of
the period we are dealing with, and was from the first the centre of the
gilds. Of those mentioned by Plutarch in his life of Numa (ch. 17), we
know that the following gilds belonged to Minerva: _tibicines_, _fabri_
(carpenters?), _fullones_, _sutores_; and it is a reasonable guess that
the others, _coriarii_, _fabri aerarii_, and _aurifices_, were also
under her protection. These trades, as Waltzing remarks in his great
work on Roman gilds,[483] are all in keeping with the rudimentary
civilisation of primitive Rome; they are those which were first carried
on outside of the family. Workers in iron are not among them; bronze is
still the common metal.
Now of course we must not go so far as to assume that none of these
trades existed before the cult of Minerva came to Rome; but from her
close association with them all through Roman history, and from the fact
that the Romans were originally an agricultural folk, as the calendar
shows, with a simple economy and simple needs, it is legitimate to
connect the arrival of the goddess with the growth of town life and the
demand for articles once made in rude fashion chiefly on the farms, and
with a period of improvement in manufacture, and the use of better
materials and better methods. Whence, then, did these improvements come?
This is only another way of asking the question, Whence did Minerva
come?
By the common consent of investigators she came from the semi-Latin town
of Falerii in southern Etruria, where these arts were practised by
Etruscans, or those who had learnt of Etruscans.[484] Her name is
Italian, not Etruscan;[485] she was an old Italian deity taken over by
the invading Etruscans from the peoples whose land they occupied. But
while in the hands of Etruscans she had adopted Greek characteristics,
especially those of Athene, the patroness of arts and crafts. She soon,
indeed, appeared with some of the character of Athene Polias, as we
shall see at the end of this lecture; but her real importance, far down
into the period of the Empire, was in the temple on the Aventine, and in
connection with the crafts. The dedication day of the temple was March
19, which was known, as we learn on the best authority, also as
_artificum dies_.[486]
There was another famous temple on the Aventine which by universal
consent is attributed to the same period as that of Minerva. Diana does
not appear in the calendar, and had no _flamen_; Roman tradition
ascribed her arrival to Servius Tullius, and we shall not be far wrong
if we place it at or towards the end of the age of the kingship. The
temple was celebrated as containing an ancient statue of Diana, the
oldest or almost the oldest representation of a deity in human form
known at Rome, which was a copy of a rude image of Artemis at Massilia,
of the type of the famous [Greek: xoanon] of the Ephesian Artemis.[487]
It also contained a _lex templi_ in Greek characters, and a treaty or
charter of a federation of Latin cities with Rome as their head, which
was seen by Dionysius of Halicarnassus when in Rome in the time of
Augustus.[488]
The explanation of the arrival of Diana is simple. The _dies natalis_ of
the temple is the same as that of the famous shrine of the same goddess
at Aricia--the Ides of August.[489] Aricia was at this time the centre
of a league of cities including Tusculum and Tibur, with both of which,
as we have just seen, Rome was closely connected at this time; a league
which is generally supposed to have superseded that of Alba, marking
some revolution in Latium consequent on the fall of Alba.[490] Diana
was a wood-spirit, a tree-spirit, as Dr. Frazer has taught us, with some
relation to the moon and to the life of women; of late she has become
familiar to every one, not as she was known later, in the disguise of
Artemis, but as the deity of that shrine--"pinguis et placabilis ara
Dianae"--of which the priest was the Rex Nemorensis: he who "slew the
slayer and shall himself be slain."[491] But in those days it was only
the fact that she was the chief local deity of Aricia, the leading city
of the new league, which brought her suddenly into notice. When the
strategic position of Rome gave her in turn the lead in Latium, Diana
passed on from Aricia to the Tiber, entered on a new life, and
eventually took over the attributes of Artemis, with whom she had much
in common. The Diana whom we know in Roman literature is really Artemis;
but Diana of the Aventine, when she first arrived there, was the
wood-spirit of Aricia, and her temple was an outward sign of Rome's new
position in Latium: it was built by the chiefs of the Latin cities in
conjunction with Rome, and is described by Varro as "commune Latinorum
Dianae templum."[492] It was appropriately placed on the only Roman hill
which was then still covered with wood, and was outside the _pomoerium_.
There was one other goddess, a Latin one, who was traditionally
associated with this period, and especially with king Servius
Tullius--Fortuna, or Fors Fortuna; she does not appear in the calendar,
had no _flamen_, and must have been introduced from outside. But it was
long before Fortuna became of any real importance in Rome, and I shall
leave her out of account here. She had two homes of renown in Latium, at
Antium and Praeneste, and was in each connected with a kind of oracle,
which seems to have been specially resorted to by women before and after
childbirth. She was also very probably a deity of other kinds of
fertility; and in course of time she took on the characteristics of the
Greek Tyche, and became a favourite deity of good luck.[493]