Flamen is nowhere mentioned as connected with the
Capitoline cult. Macrob. i. 15, 16, speaks of the ovis
Idulis as sacrificed on every ides _a flamine_, and
this, it is true, took place on the Capitolium (Aust, in
_Lex._ _s.v._ Jupiter, 655), but (1) Festus, 290,
mentions sacerdotes, Ovid, _Fasti_ i. 588, castus
sacerdos only; and (2) this sacrifice may well, as O.
Gilbert conjectured, have originally taken place in the
Regia (_Gesch. und Topogr. Roms_, i. 236). In any case
the Flamen was not in any special sense priest of Iup.
Opt. Max.
[505] The _locus classicus_ for this is Pliny, _N.H._
xxxv. 157. The artist was said to have been one Volcas
of Veii. Ovid, _Fasti_ i. 201, says that the god had in
his hand a _fictile fulmen_. Varro believed this to be
the oldest statue of a god in Rome; see above, p. 146,
and Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 280, accepts
his statement as probably correct.
[506] Cic. _Catil._ iii. 9. 21.
[507] Jordan, _Topogr._ i. 2. pp. 39 and 62, notes. The
most convincing passages quoted by him are Suet. _Aug._
59, and Serv. _Ecl._ iv. 50 (of boys taking toga virilis
who "ad Capitolium eunt"); but was not this to sacrifice
to Liber or Iuventas? _R.F._ p. 56.
[508] Gellius vi. 1. 6, from C. Oppius et Iulius
Hyginus. In his famous character of Scipio (xxvi. 19)
Livy seems to think that Scipio did this to make people
think him superhuman or of divine descent.
[509] Ovid, _Fasti_, iv. 158. 257; Virg. _Ecl._ iv. 4,
_Aen._ vi. 42; Marquardt, 352, note 7, for evidence that
the books came to Cumae from Erythrae. See also Diels,
_Sibyllinische Blaetter_, p. 80 foll.
LECTURE XI*
CONTACT OF THE OLD AND NEW IN RELIGION
I said at the beginning of my first lecture that Roman religious
experience can be summed up in two stories. The first of these was the
story of the way in which a strong primitive religious instinct, the
desire to put yourself in right relation with the Power manifesting
itself in the universe, _religio_ as the Romans called it, was gradually
soothed and satisfied under the formalising influence of the settled
life of the agricultural family, and still more so under the organising
genius of the early religious rulers of the City-state. This story I
tried to tell in the last few lectures. The second story was to be that
of the gradual discovery of the inadequacy of this early formalised and
organised religion to cope with what we may call new religious
experience; that is, with the difficulties and perils met with by the
Roman people in their extraordinary advance in the world, and with the
new ideas of religion and morals which broke in on them in the course of
their contact with other peoples. This story I wish to tell in the
present course of lectures. It is a long and complicated one, including
the introduction of new rites and ideas of the divine, the anxious
attempts of the religious authorities to put off the evil day by
stretching to the uttermost the capacity of the old forms, and the final
victory of the new ideas as Roman life and thought became gradually
hellenised.
[*] This Lecture was the first of a second and separate
course.
I propose to divide the story thus. In the latter part of this first
lecture I will deal with the first introduction of Greek rites into the
State worship under the directions of the so-called Sibylline books.
Then I will turn to the efforts of the lay priesthoods, pontifices and
augurs, to meet the calls of new experience by formalising the old
religion still more completely in the name of the State, until it became
a mere skeleton of dry bones, without life and power. That will bring us
to the great turning-point in Roman history, the war with Hannibal, to
the religious history of which I shall devote my fourth lecture; and the
fifth will pursue the subject into the century that followed. In the
next lecture I hope to sketch the influence on Roman religious ideas of
the Stoic school of philosophy, and in the seventh to discuss, so far as
I may be able, the tendency towards mysticism prevalent in the last
period of the life of the Republic. My eighth lecture I intend to devote
to the noble attempt of Virgil to combine religion, legend, philosophy,
and consummate art in a splendid appeal to the conscience of the Roman
of that day. Then I turn to the more practical attempt of Augustus to
revive the dying embers of the old religion; and in my last lecture I
shall try to estimate the contribution, such as it was, of the religious
experience we have been discussing, to the early Christian church.
We shall shortly hear so much of petrifaction and disintegration, that
it may be as well, before I actually begin my story, to convince
ourselves that the old religion was in its peculiar way a real
expression of religious feeling, and not merely a set of meaningless
conventions and formulae. It was the positive belief of the later Romans
that both they and their ancestors were _religiosissimi mortales_,[510]
full to the brim, that is, of religious instinct, and most scrupulous in
fulfilling its claims upon them; for the word _religio_ had come, by the
time (and probably long before the time) when it was used by men of
letters, to mean the fulfilment of ritualistic obligation quite as much
as the anxious feeling which had originally suggested it.[511] Cicero,
writing in no rhetorical mood, declared that, as compared with other
peoples, the Romans were far superior "in religione, id est cultu."[512]
This is in his work on the nature of the gods; in an oration he
naturally puts it more strongly: "We have overcome all the nations of
the world, because we have realised that the world is directed and
governed by the will of the gods."[513] Sallust, Livy, and other Roman
prose writers have said much the same thing[514]; the _Aeneid_ as a
whole might be adduced as evidence, and in a less degree all the poets
of the Augustan age. Foreigners, too, were struck with the strange
phenomenon, in an age of philosophic doubt. Polybius in the second
century B.C. declared his opinion that what was reckoned among other
peoples as a thing to be blamed, _deisidaimonia_, both in public and
private life, was really what was holding together the Roman state.[515]
Even in the wild century that followed, Posidonius could repeat the
assertion of Polybius, and in the age of Augustus, Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, then resident at Rome, looking back on the early history
of Rome, stated his conviction that one needed to know the _pietas_ of
the Romans in order to understand their wonderful career of
conquest.[516] Aulus Gellius, in a curious passage in which he notes
that the Romans had no deity to whose activity they could with
certainty ascribe earthquakes, describes them as "in constituendis
religionibus atque in dis immortalibus animadvertendis _castissimi
cautissimique_,"--a rhetorical but happy conjunction of epithets. He
means that they would order religious rites, though ignorant of the
_numen_ to whom they were due.[517]
It might be argued that these later writers knew really little or
nothing about the primitive Romans, and that these passages only prove
that this people had an extraordinary scrupulosity about forms and
ceremonies in this as in other departments of action. But the argument
will not hold; the survival of all this formalism into an age of
disintegration really proves beyond a doubt that there must have been a
time when these forms really expressed anxieties, fears, convictions,
the earliest germs of _conscience_.
May we not take the constant occurrence in literature of such phrases as
_dis faventibus_, _dis iuvantibus_ or _volentibus_, as evidence of an
idea deeply rooted at one time in the Roman mind, that nothing should be
undertaken until the will of the deities concerned had been ascertained
and that early form of conscience satisfied? Let us remember that the
whole story of the _Aeneid_ is one of the bending of the will of the
hero, as a type of the ideal Roman, to the ascertainable will of the
powers in the universe.
And we have abundant evidence that as a matter of fact the good-will of
the divine inhabitants of house and city was asked for whenever any kind
of work was undertaken,--even the ordinary routine work of the farm or
of government. In the household every morning some offering with prayer
was made to the Lar familiaris in historical times, and again before the
_cena_, the chief meal of the day.[518] On Kalends, Nones, Ides, and on
all _dies festi_ a _corona_ was placed on the hearth, and prayer was
made to the Lar; we know that this was so in the old Roman home, because
in the second century B.C. Cato instructs the _vilicus_ to discharge
these duties on behalf of the absent or non-resident owner.[519] Before
the flocks were taken out to summer pasture, and doubtless when they
returned, some religious service (so we should call it) was held,[520]
just as in the Catholic cantons of Switzerland the blessing of God is
asked when the cows first ascend to the alpine pastures, and again when
they leave them for the valleys. Before a journey the later Romans
prayed for good fortune;[521] in the old times travelling was of course
unusual, and when it did occur the traveller was surrounded by so many
spiritual as well as material dangers that _special_ religious measures
must have been taken, as by fetials or armies on entering foreign
territory. The survival of the same kind of belief and practice is also
seen in private life in the religious commendations of some authors at
the outset of their literary work; Varro, for example, at the beginning
of his work on agriculture, calls on all the agrarian deities (_iis deis
ad venerationem advocatis_) before he goes on to mention even the
bibliography of his subject.[522] Livy in the last sentence of his
preface would fain imitate the poets in calling on the gods to bless and
favour his undertaking. And in all time of their tribulation, even if
not in all time of their wealth, the pious Romans sought help from the
deities from whom help might be expected; if, at least, the many
instances occurring in Roman poetry may point to a practice of the
ordinary individual and family.[523] So too, if we may judge by many
passages in the plays of Plautus and Terence,[524]--if here we have
genuine Roman usage, as is probable,--the feeling of dependence on a
Power manifesting itself in the affairs of daily life is shown also in
the expression of _thankfulness_ which followed success or escape from
peril. Gratitude was not a prominent characteristic of the Roman, but I
have already remarked on the presence of it in the practice of the
_votum_, and there is at least some evidence that it was recognised as
due to benignant deities as well as human beings.[525]
In public life, throughout Roman history, the forms of religious rites
were maintained on all important occasions. When Varro wrote a little
manual of Senatorial procedure for the benefit of the inexperienced
Pompeius when consul in 70 B.C., he was careful to mention the
preliminary sacrifice and _auspicatio_, performed by the presiding
magistrate, who also had to see that the business _de rebus divinis_
came first on the paper of agenda.[526] At one time every speaker
invoked the gods at the beginning of his oration, as well indeed he
might in a situation so unusual and trying for a Roman before the days
of Greek education; and the earliest speeches preserved in the literary
age, _e.g._ those of Cato and the Gracchi, retained the religious
exordium.[527] We have a trace of the Gracchan practice in a famous
passage at the end of the work called _Rhetorica ad Herennium_ of
_circ._ 82 B.C., where the death of Ti. Gracchus is graphically
described.[528] But there is no need to multiply examples of public
religious formalism on occasions of all kinds, on entering on an office,
founding a colony, leaving Rome for a provincia, and so on; some of them
I have already mentioned, others are familiar to all classical students.
So let us not hesitate for a moment to give this people credit for their
religiousness. True, their neighbours, Greeks like Polybius, approved of
it only with an ironical smile on their lips, as we may smile at the
devoted formalism of extreme Catholic or Protestant, while we
secretly--if we have some sympathy with strangely varying human
nature--admire the confidence and regularity that we cannot ourselves
claim. At the moment where I have thus paused before beginning my second
story, at the end, that is, of the regal period, I believe that this
religious system, though perhaps beginning to harden, still meant a
profound belief in the Power thus manifested in many forms, and an
ardent and effective desire to be in right relation to it. I believe
that it contained the germ of a living and fruitful growth; but that
growth was at this very moment arrested by the beginning of a process of
which I shall have much to say in the next two or three lectures.
But it is hard to realise this better side of the religion of a hard and
practical people, and all the more so since it is the worse side that is
almost always presented to us in modern books. It is hard to realise
that it was not merely a system of insurance, so to speak, against all
kinds of material evils,--and here again all the more so because there
is a tendency just now to reduce both religion and law to an origin in
magic, leaving the religious instinct, the _feeling of dependence_, the
progenitor of conscience, quite out of account. One must indeed be
thoroughly familiar with Roman literature and antiquities to overcome
these difficulties, to discover the spiritual residuum in the Roman
character beneath all its hardness and utilitarianism. Before we pass on
to the task before us, let me make two suggestions for the help of those
who would endeavour to find this spiritual residuum. The first is that
they should consider the history and true meaning of three great words
which Latin language has bequeathed to modern speech,--_religio_, the
feeling of awe, taking practical shape in the performance of authorised
ceremonies; _sacrum_, that which by authoritative usage is made over
without reserve to the divine inhabitants of the city; and last but not
least, _pietas_, the sense of duty to god and man alike, to all divine
and human beings having an authorised claim upon you. And this word
_pietas_ shall introduce my second suggestion--that there is no better
way of getting to understand the spirit of the Roman religion than by
continual study of the _Aeneid_, where the hero is the ideal Roman,
_pius_ in the best and widest sense. What makes the _Aeneid_ so helpful
in this way is the poet's intimate and sympathetic knowledge of the
religious ideas of the Italians, in which we may see reflected those of
the Roman of the age we are now dealing with: his love too of antiquity
and of all ancient rites and legends; and his conviction that the great
work of Rome in the world had been achieved not only by _virtus_ but by
_pietas_. What has been won by _virtus_ must be preserved by _pietas_,
by the sense of duty in family and State,--that is the moral of the
_Aeneid_. In no other work of Roman genius is this idea found in
anything like the same degree of prominence and consistency; and when a
student has steeped his mind well in the details of the Roman worship,
and begins to weary of what must seem its soulless Pharisaism, let him
take up the _Aeneid_ and read it right through for the story and the
characters. I will venture to say that he will think better both of the
Romans and their poet than he ever did before. But of the _Aeneid_ I
shall have more to say later on; at present let us turn to the less
inspiring topics which must occupy us for the next few lectures.
The last fact of Roman religious history which I mentioned last year was
the building of the great Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and
Minerva, and I then explained why this constituted a religious
revolution. The next temple of which tradition tells us was destined for
another trias, Ceres, Liber, and Libera; the traditional date was 493
B.C., the cause a famine, and the site was at the foot of the Aventine,
the plebeian quarter outside the pomoerium, close to the river where
corn-ships might be moored.[529] Ceres, Liber, and Libera are plainly
neither more nor less than the three Greek corn deities, Demeter,
Dionysus, and Persephone, in a Latin form,[530] whose worship was
prominent in South Italy and Sicily; and unless we throw tradition
overboard entirely, as indeed has often been done, the inference is
obvious that this trias came from the Greeks of the south with an
importation of corn to relieve a famine which pressed especially on the
plebs. It is a fact that the temple and its cult remained always closely
connected with the plebs; they were under the charge of the plebeian
aediles, who also in historical times had the care of the corn-supply
necessary for the city population.[531] Thus, though we need not accept
in full Livy's statement that the very next year corn was imported from
Etruria, Cumae, and Sicily, it cannot be denied that there is a strong
consensus in the various traditions about the temple, which taken
together suggest a Greek, non-patrician, and early origin. That the cult
had at all times a Greek character is undisputed fact.
But I am not so much concerned with the temple itself as with the date
and the manner of its foundation. It was said to have been founded in
the year 496, and dedicated in 493, in obedience to directions found in
"the Sibylline books," which books, according to the well-known
tradition, had been acquired by the last Tarquin, after some haggling,
from an old woman, and placed in the charge of _duoviri sacris
faciundis_. The story itself is worthless in detail; but the question
for us is whether it can be taken as showing that the Sibylline
influence then pervading the Greek world gained a footing at Rome in any
form so early as this. Was the temple really founded in 496, or at some
time thereabout? And was it founded in obedience to some Sibylline
direction? These questions are of real importance, for upon our answer
to them depends the date of the beginning of a gradual metamorphosis of
the Roman religious practice. The so-called Sibylline books and their
keepers were responsible, as we shall see directly, for the introduction
at Rome of what was known as the _Graecus ritus_,--for the foundation of
temples to deities of Greek origin, and for other rites which initiated
an entirely new type of religious feeling. We need to be sure when all
this began.
In the first place, so far as I can judge, it is almost impossible to
dissociate the origin of the temple from Sibylline influence. As we have
seen, the cult was Greek, and all such Greek cults of later times were
introduced by the keepers of the Sibylline books; and further, the
records of temple foundations were among the most carefully preserved
facts in Roman annals.[532] I think it is hardly possible to suppose
that a cult which came, not from Latium or southern Etruria, like those
of Diana, Minerva, and the Capitoline deities, but from some Greek
region to the south, and probably from Sicily, could have been
introduced by Roman authorities unaided by Greek influence. If that be
so, and if we can show that the temple really belongs to this early age,
then we have a strong probability that the Sibylline influence gained a
footing at Rome at the very beginning of the republican period.[533]
There is one curious fact in connection with the temple that in my
opinion goes far to prove that the traditional date is not far out.
Pliny tells us explicitly that the two Greek artists who decorated the
temple, Damophilus and Gorgasus, inscribed their names on the walls, and
he added that the work of the former would be found on the right and
that of the latter on the left.[534] Nothing more is known about them;
but I am assured that the fact that they signed their names and added
these statements suits the character of Greek art in the archaic age 580
to 450 B.C. No signatures of artists are known earlier than about 580;
then comes a period when signatures are found, sometimes with statements
such as these. And lastly, about 450, we begin to find simple signatures
without any other words.[535] Thus the presumption is a strong one that
the temple belongs to a time earlier than 450; and if that be so, then I
think the inference holds good that the Sibyl first gained a footing at
Rome about the same time. There are indeed some reasons why we should
not put this event in the period of the kings;[536] but if we accept the
traditional date of the temple we may put it any time between 509 and
496.
I have purposely used vague terms, such as Sibylline _influence_,
instead of speaking in the old manner of Sibylline _books_ or oracles,
because it is almost incredible that at so early a date it could have
been possible to divulge any contents of a store of writings such as
must have been most carefully treasured and concealed. This has been
shown conclusively to be out of the question in Diels' now famous little
book "_Sibylline Leaves_." But we may also follow Diels in assuming that
about the end of the sixth century some kind of Greek oracle or oracular
saying did actually arrive at Rome, purporting to be an utterance of the
famous Sibyl of Cumae.[537]
But what _was_ this Sibylline influence which thus penetrated to Rome,
if I am right, at the beginning of the fifth century? It is no part of
my design to discuss the history of Greek mysticism, though we shall
hear something more of it in a later lecture. It will be enough to
remind you that in the sixth century Greece was not only full of Orphism
and Pythagoreanism, but of floating oracular _dicta_ believed to emanate
from a mystic female figure, a weird figure of whom it is hard to say
how far she was human or divine; and of whose origin we know nothing,
except that her original home was, as we might expect, Asia Minor. She
was inspired by Apollo,[538] it was said, like the Pythia, and like her
too became [Greek: entheos] (_possessed_) when uttering her prophecies;
this is the earliest fact we know about her, for a famous fragment of
Heracleitus represents her as uttering sayings "with frenzied
lips,"[539]--a tradition of which Virgil has made good use in the sixth
_Aeneid_:
non vultus, non color unus,
non comptae mansere comae; sed pectus anhelum,
et rabie fera corda tument.
But more to our purpose is the sober judgment of Plato a century after
the first Roman experience of her, who in the _Phaedrus_ classes her
among those who have wrought _much good_ by their inspired
utterances.[540] This passage may help us to understand how ready men
were at that time to turn for aid in tribulation to what they believed
to be divine help, to an inspired wisdom beyond the range of the local
deities of their own city-states.
This Sibyl became gradually localised in certain Greek cities, and
thereby broke up, as it were, into several Sibyls. One of these
Sibylline homes was at Cumae in Campania, the oldest Greek city in
Italy, and this enables us to explain easily how the name and fame of
the Sibyl reached Rome. Dim as is all early Roman history, the one clear
fact of the sixth century is, as we have seen, the rapid advance of the
Etruscans, their occupation of Rome, Praeneste, and other Latin cities,
and their conquest of Campania, which is now ascribed to that same
age.[541] Legend told in later days how the last Etruscan king had taken
refuge at Cumae after his expulsion from Rome, and it is just possible
that it may here be founding upon some dim recollection of a fact.
However this may be, it is plain that it was through the great Etruscan
disturbance of that period that Rome came to make trial of Sibylline
utterances. In a moment of distress--the famine of which I spoke just
now, and which I take to be historical because the remedy, the temple
under the Aventine, was so closely connected with the corn-supply--she
sent for or admitted an utterance of the Sibyl of Cumae, with whom she
had come into some kind of contact through her Etruscan kings.