affected by the current of mysticism that was then running. But to me it
is still more interesting to find it moving him in a practical matter of
which he has himself left the truth on record; for Cicero is a real
human being for whom all who are familiar with his letters must have
something in the nature of affection, and with whom, too, we feel
genuine sympathy in the calamity which now fell upon him. It was early
in 45 B.C. that he lost his only and dearly loved daughter, and the blow
to his sensitive temperament, already hardly tried by political anxiety,
was severe. We still have the private letters which he wrote to Atticus
after her death from his solitude at Astura on the edge of the
melancholy Pomptine marshes;[824] and here, if our minds are
sufficiently divested of modern ideas and trained to look on death with
Roman eyes, we may be startled to find him thinking of her as still in
some sense surviving, and as divine rather than human: as a deity or
spirit to whom a _fanum_ could be erected. He makes it clear to Atticus,
who is acting as his business agent at Rome, that he does not want a
mere tomb (_sepulcrum_), but a _fanum_, which as we have seen was the
general word for a spot of ground sacred to a deity. "I wish to have a
_fanum_ built, and that wish cannot be rooted out of my heart. I am
anxious to avoid any likeness to a tomb, not so much on account of the
penalty of the law, as in order to attain as nearly as possible to an
_apotheosis_. This I could do if I built it in the villa itself, but ...
I dread the changes of owners. Wherever I construct it on the land, I
think that I could secure that posterity should respect its
sanctity."[825] The word here translated sanctity is _religio_; we may
remember that all burial places were _loca religiosa_, not consecrated
by the State, yet hallowed by the feeling of awe or scruple in
approaching them; but Cicero is probably here using the word rather in
that wider sense in which it so often expresses the presence of a deity
in some particular spot.[826]
Atticus was a man of the world and probably an Epicurean, and his
friend in two successive letters half apologises for this strong
desire. "I should not like it to be known by any other name but
_fanum_,--unreasonably, you will perhaps say." And again, "you must bear
with these silly wishes (_ineptiae_) of mine."[827] But this only makes
the intensity of his feeling about it the more plain and significant; he
really seems to want Tullia to be thought of as having passed into the
sphere of divinity, however vaguely he may have conceived of it. Perhaps
he remembered his own words in Scipio's dream, "Deum te esse scito."
The ashes of Tullia rested in the family tomb, but the godlike thing
imprisoned in her mortal body was to be honoured at this _fanum_, which,
strange as it may seem to us, her father wished to erect in a public and
frequented place. She does not fade away into the common herd of Manes,
but remains, though as a spirit, the same individual Tullia whom her
father had loved so dearly.
I long ago explained the old Roman idea of Manes,[828] a vague
conception of shades of the dead dwelling below the earth, and hardly,
if at all, individualised. But in Tullia's case we meet with a clear
conception of an individual spirit; and this alone would lead us to
suspect a Pythagorean influence at work, such as that under which Virgil
wrote the famous words "Quisque suos patimur Manes," which simply mean
"Each individual of us must endure his own individual ghosthood."[829]
This process of individualisation must have been gradually coming on,
but the steps are lost to us; we only know that the earliest sepulchral
inscription which speaks to it, in the vague plural Di Manes so familiar
in later times, is dateable somewhere about this very time.[830] My
friend Dr. J. B. Carter would explain it, in part at least, by the Roman
conception of Genius to which I alluded just now, and doubtless this
must be taken into account. For myself I would rather think of it as the
natural result of the growth of individualism in the living human being
during the last two centuries B.C. Surely it was impossible for
personality to grow as it did in that period without a corresponding
growth of the idea of individual immortality in the minds of all who
believed in a future life of any kind at all. The Epicureans did not so
believe; but Roman Stoics instructed by Panaetius and Posidonius might
not only believe in immortality but in an immortality of the individual.
Let me take this opportunity of noting that there was, of course, no
sort of restriction on a man's belief about this or any other religious
question. It was perfectly open to every one to hold what view best
pleased him about the state of the dead: all that the State required of
him was that he should fulfil his obligations at the tombs of his own
kin. No dogma reigned in the necropolis, only duty, _pietas_,--and that
_pietas_ implied no conviction. The Parentalia in February were
originally, so far as we can discern, only a yearly renewal of the rite
of burial on its anniversary;[831] this implies civilisation and some
kind of calendar, but not a creed. Later on, in the Fasti of the
City-state, the day was fixed for all citizens without regard of
anniversaries; and here the rites become a matter of _ius_, the _ius
Manium_, to the observance of which the Manes are entitled. Still there
is no creed, though Cicero speaks of this _ius_ as based on the idea of
a future life.[832] As a fact these rites are a survival from an age in
which the dead man was believed to go on living in the grave, but that
primitive idea was no longer held by the educated. Each man was free in
all periods to believe what he pleased about the dead, and as the Romans
began to think, this freedom becomes easy to illustrate. Cicero himself
is usually agnostic, as is in keeping with his Academic tendency in
philosophy; even in one of these very letters he seems to speak of his
own non-existence after death.[833] So, too, the excellent Servius
Sulpicius, in the famous letter of condolence written to Cicero at this
time from Athens, seems to be uncertain.[834] We all know the words of
Caesar (reported by Sallust), which are often quoted with a kind of holy
horror, as though a pontifex maximus might not hold any opinion he
pleased about death, and as though his doubt were not the common doubt
of innumerable thinking men of the age.[835] Catullus wrote of death as
"nox perpetua dormienda"; Lucretius, of course, gloried in the thought
that there is no life beyond. In the following century the learned Pliny
could write of death as the relapsing into the same nothingness as
before we were born, and could scoff at the absurdities of the cult of
the dead.[836]
But when a man like Cicero was deeply touched by grief, his emotional
nature abandoned its neutral attitude, and turned for consolation to
mysticism. As I have said, he was persuading himself that Tullia was
still living,--a glorified spirit. We can gain just a momentary glimpse
of what was in his mind by turning to the fragments of the _Consolatio_
which he was now writing at Astura.
This was a _Consolatio_ of the kind which was a recognised literary form
of this and later times,[837] though in this case it was addressed by
the writer to himself; to write was for Cicero second nature, and he was
sure to take up his pen when he had feelings that needed expression. It
is unfortunately lost, all but one fragment, which he quotes himself in
the first book of his _Tusculans_, and one or two more preserved by the
Christian writer Lactantius, a great admirer of Cicero, who came near to
catching the beauty of his style. The passage quoted by himself is
precious.[838] It insists on the spiritual nature of the soul, which can
have nothing in common with earth or matter of any kind, seeing that it
thinks, remembers, foresees: "ita quicquid est illud, quod sentit, quod
sapit, quod vivit, quod viget, caeleste et divinum, ob eamque rem
aeternum sit necesse est." And in the concluding words he hints strongly
at the _divinity_ of the soul, which is of the same make as God
himself,--of the same immaterial nature as the only Deity of whom we
mortals can conceive. His daughter, therefore, is not only still living
in a spiritual life, but she is in some vague sense divine; that word
_apotheosis_, which he twice uses in the letters, has a real meaning for
him at this moment; and in a fragment of the _Consolatio_ quoted by
Lactantius he makes this quite plain; "Te omnium optimam doctissimamque,
approbantibus dis immortalibus ipsis, in eorum coetu locatam, ad
opinionem omnium mortalium consecrabo."[839]
Undoubtedly Cicero is here under the influence of the Pythagoreans as
well as of his own emotion. In another chapter Lactantius seems to make
this certain;[840] he begins by combining Stoics and Pythagoreans as
both believing the immortality of the soul, goes on to deal with the
Pythagorean doctrine (or one form of it) that in this life we are
expiating the sins of another, and ends by quoting Cicero's _Consolatio_
to that effect: "Quid Ciceroni faciemus? qui cum in principio
Consolationis suae dixit, luendorum scelerum causa nasci homines,
iteravit id ipsum postea, quasi obiurgans eum qui vitam poenam non esse
putet." Another lost book, the _Hortensius_, which was written
immediately after the _Consolatio_, March to May 45,[841] shows in one
or two surviving fragments exactly the same tendency of thought and
reading.[842] Our conclusion then must be that Cicero, always
impressionable, and in his way also religious, had in this year 45 a
real religious experience. He was brought face to face with one of the
mysterious facts of life, and with one of the great mysteries of the
universe, and the religious instinct awoke within him. How many others,
even in that sordid and materialistic age, may have had the like
experience, with or without a mystical philosophy to guide their
thoughts? In the last words of the famous Laudatio Turiae, of which I
have written at length in my _Social Life in the Age of Cicero_,[843] we
may perhaps catch an echo of a similar religious feeling: "Te di Manes
tui ut quietam patiantur atque ita tueantur opto" (I pray that thy
divine Manes may keep thee in peace and watch over thee). These words,
expressing the hope of a practical man, not of a philosopher, are very
difficult to explain, except as the unauthorised utterances of an
individual. They hardly find a parallel either in literature or
inscriptions. We must not press them, yet they help us to divine that
there was in this last half-century B.C. some mystical yearning to
realise the condition of the loved ones gone before, and the relation of
their life to that of the living. This religious instinct, let us note
once for all, is not identical with the old one which we expressed by
the formula about the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The
religious instinct of the primitive Roman was concerned only with this
life and its perils and mysteries; the religious instinct of Cicero's
time was not that of simple men struggling with agricultural perils, but
that of educated men whose minds could pass in emotional moments far
beyond the troubles of this present world, to speculate on the great
questions, why we are here, what we are, and what becomes of us after
death.
But what of the ordinary Roman of this age--what of the man who was not
trained to think, and had no leisure or desire to read? What did he
believe about a future life, or did he believe anything? This brings us
to a curious question about which I must say a very few words--did this
ordinary Roman, as Lucretius seems to insist, believe in Hades and its
torments? Not in one passage only does Lucretius insist on this. "That
fear of Hell" (so Dr. Masson translates him) "must be driven out
headlong, which troubles the life of man from its inmost depth, and
overspreads everything with the blackness of death, and permits no
pleasure to be pure and unalloyed."[844] I need not multiply quotations;
evidently the poet believed what he said, though he may be using the
exaggeration of poetical diction. And to a certain extent he is borne
out by the literature of his time. In fact Polybius, writing nearly a
century earlier of the Romans and their religion, implies that such
notions were common, and that they were invented by "the ancients" to
frighten the people into submission.[845] Cicero, though he of course
thinks of them as merely the fables of poets, seems to suggest that the
ordinary man did believe in them; thinking of his own recent loss, he
says that our misery would be unbearable when we lose those we love, if
we really thought of them as "_in iis malis quibus vulgo
opinantur_."[846] Of course all these fables were Greek, not Roman.
There is no reason to believe that the old Romans imagined their own
dead experiencing any miseries in Orcus--the old name, as it would seem,
for the dimly imagined abode of the Manes, afterwards personified after
the manner of Plutus.[847] No doubt they believed that the dead were
ghosts, desiring to get back to their old homes, who, in the
well-ordered religion of the City-state, were limited in this strong
desire to certain days in the civic year.[848] But their first
acquaintance with Hades and its tortures may probably be dated early,
_i.e._ when they first became acquainted with Etruscan works of art,
themselves the result of a knowledge of Greek art and myth.[849] Early
in the second century B.C. Plautus in the _Captivi_ alluded to these
paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans
habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for
illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely
enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves
were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his
work on the Roman religion of the early empire.[851] In the theatre,
with women and children present, Cicero says in the first book of his
_Tusculans_, the crowded auditorium is moved as it listens to such a
"grande carmen" as that sung by a ghost describing his terrible journey
from the realms of Acheron; and in another passage of the same book he
mentions both painters and poets as responsible for a delusion which
philosophers have to refute.[852] I need not say that the Roman poets
too continually use the imagery of Tartarus; but they use it as
literary tradition, and in the sixth _Aeneid_ it is used also to enforce
the idea of duty to the State which is the real theme of the poem.
As Dr. Masson truly observes, we have the literature but we have not the
folklore of the age of Cicero and Virgil; and it must be confessed that
without the folklore such scanty literary evidence as I have just
mentioned does not come to much. Dr. Masson indeed concludes on this
evidence that the fear of future torments played a considerable part in
the religious notions both of the common people and possibly of some of
the educated. I think it may have been so, but on other grounds, which I
must briefly explain.
From all that I have said in these lectures about the religious ideas
represented in the earliest calendar, _i.e._ those of the governing
Romans of the earliest City-state, it will be plain that a gruesome
eschatology was an impossibility for them. Just the same may be said of
the Greek ideas represented in the Homeric poems; for with the exception
of the Nekuia of the _Odyssey_, which almost all scholars agree in
attributing to a later age than the bulk of the two Homeric epics, in
this poetry _il se fait grand jour_.[853] This is not the first time
that I have compared the religion of the Roman patricians to that of
Homer;[854] and there is a growing conviction among experts that we have
in each case the ideas of a comparatively civilised immigrant
population, whose religion, though it has developed in very different
ways, has the common characteristic of cleanness and brightness. In
Italy it is practical, in Homer imaginative; but in both it is free from
the brutal and the grotesque. Even the eschatology of the eleventh
_Odyssey_ is not cruel, it is comparatively colourless; and, as I said
just now, this also may be said of the Roman ideas of Orcus and the
Manes.
In each case it is life, not death, that is of interest to the living;
death is rather a negation than anything distinctly realised. The state
of the dead in Homer is shadowy and _triste_, a state not to be desired,
as Achilles so painfully expresses it in a famous passage; but the
_life_ of the Achaean in the poems is vivid--nay, such a vivid
realisation of life can alone account for the production of such poems.
So, too, the immigrant population at Rome, to whom is due the regulation
of the religion as we know it, and the inspiring force that made for
ordered government and warlike enterprise, was too full of practical if
not of imaginative vitality to be apt to dwell upon the possibilities of
existence after death, to conceive of such existence as either happy or
miserable, the reward or the punishment for things done in this world.
But in each peninsula this immigrant race was living in the midst of a
far more primitive population; and it is perhaps to this population that
we must look for the origin of the more detailed and imaginative notions
of the life of the dead. Of the Greeks in this matter I have not space
here to speak, nor am I competent to do so. But the conviction is
steadily gaining ground that in early Rome we have to recognise the
existence of two races; whether the older of these was Ligurian, as
Prof. Ridgeway thinks, or primitive Latin, _i.e._ old Italic, as Binder
believes, does not matter for our present purpose;[855] nor are the
arguments drawn from religion which these writers have used at all
convincing to my intelligence. But they have not noticed what is to me a
really valid argument, viz. the double festival of the dead in the
calendar of Numa. In February we find the cheerful and orderly festival
of the Parentalia, the yearly renewal of the seemly rite of burial; in
May, on the other hand, the student of the calendar is astonished to
find three several days called Lemuria, the rites belonging to which are
never mentioned, except where Ovid treats us to a grotesque account of
the driving out of ancestral spirits from the house.[856] No one
doubts, I think, that the Lemuria represents an older stratum of thought
about the dead than the other festival,[857] but no one, so far as I
know, has ventured to claim the Lemures and their three days as
belonging to the religion of the more primitive race. If I make this
suggestion now, it must be taken as a hypothesis only, but as a
hypothesis it can at least do no harm. If I am asked why Lemuria should
have been admitted into the patrician calendar, I answer that I have
long held that a few of the non-patrician religious customs were
absorbed into the religion of the city of the four regions, the
Lupercalia, for example;[858] and nothing could be more likely than that
the old barbarous ideas about the dead should win this amount of
respect, seeing that by the limitation to three days in the year order
and decency might be brought into their service. I may repeat, with a
slight addition, what I wrote ten years ago about these two Roman
festivals of the dead: "If we compare Ovid's account of the grotesque
domestic rites of the Lemuria with those of February, which were of a
systematic, cheerful, and even beautiful character, we may feel fairly
sure that the latter represent the organised life of a City-state, the
former the ideas of an age when life was wilder and less secure, and the
fear of the dead, of ghosts and demons, was a powerful factor in the
minds of the people. If we may argue from Ovid's account, it is not
impossible that the Lemuria may have been one of those periodical
expulsions of demons of which we hear so much in the _Golden Bough_, and
which are performed on behalf of the community as well as in the
domestic circle among savage peoples. It is noticeable that the offering
of food to the demons is a feature common to these practices, and that
it also appears in those described by Ovid."[859] To this I should now
add the suggestion above made, that the Lemuria represents the ideas of
the older race that occupied the site of Rome, while the Parentalia is
originally the festival of the patrician immigrants.
But what has all this to do with the eschatology which Lucretius
attributes to the common people at Rome in his own day? Simply this,
that the ideas at the root of the Lemuria may well have provided the raw
material for such an eschatology, while those at the root of the
Parentalia could not have done this. Dr. Westermarck has recently shown
that primitive religions do spontaneously generate the idea of moral
retribution after death, _e.g._ the notion that the souls of bad people
may reappear as evil spirits or obnoxious animals.[860] We have no proof
whatever of the existence of such notions at Rome; but I contend that
the permanence of this type of belief about the dead which is
represented by the Lemuria--a permanence which is attested by Ovid's
description--raises a presumption that the lower stratum of the Roman
population, if the chance were given it, would the more readily
understand the pictures of Etruscan artists and the allusions of Greek
playwrights, and the more easily become the prey of the eschatological
horrors which Lucretius describes as terrifying them. The material was
there from the earliest times, and all that was needed was for Greeks
and Etruscans to work upon it.
Before leaving this point it may be worth while to remember that though
the well-to-do and educated classes cremated their dead, the poor of the
crowded city population of the period I am now dealing with enjoyed no
such orderly and cleanly funeral rites. The literary evidence is
explicit on this point, and has been confirmed by modern excavation on
the Esquiline, where we know from Varro and Horace that the poor and the
slaves were thrown _en masse_ into _puticuli_, _i.e._ holes where it was
impossible that any memorial ceremonies could be kept up.[861] Horace's
lines are familiar (_Sat._ 8. 8):
huc prius angustis eiecta cadavera cellis
conservus vili portanda locabat in arca.
hoc miserae plebi stabat commune sepulcrum, etc.
It is dangerous to be too confident about the effect on the religious
imagination of different ways of dealing with the dead; but it is at
least not improbable that any inherited tendency to believe in a
miserable future for the soul would be confirmed and maintained by so
miserable a fate for the body. The mass of the population had little
chance of ridding itself of eschatological superstition.
Thus I am inclined to come to Dr. Masson's conclusion, though on
somewhat different grounds. I think it quite possible that the
uneducated in the age of the poet may have really been inoculated with
these ideas of cruel retribution, and that in many cases this may have
resulted in despair or at least discomfort. Only we must remember that
in a great city like Rome, as in Paris or London to-day, both the
miseries and the enjoyments of life would tend to accustom the minds of
the lower strata to consider the present rather than the future; the
necessities and pleasures of the moment are with them the only material
of thought. Neither comfort nor remonstrance could reach them from
pulpit or from missioner; neither fear nor hope could largely enter into
their lives. In fact I half suspect that most of them were, after all,
so long as they were healthy and active, much what Lucretius would have
them be--free from all religious scruple; but, alas, utterly destitute
of the intellectual support which he claimed from the study of
philosophy. We can well understand how it was among the lower population
of the great cities that early Christianity found its chance. They had
no education or philosophy to stand between them and the gospel of
redemption.