RELIGION
It is easy to write the word "religion" at the head of this chapter,
but by no means easy to find anything in this materialistic period
which answers to our use of the word. In the whole mass, for example,
of the Ciceronian correspondence, there is hardly anything to show
that Cicero and his friends, and therefore, as we may presume, the
average educated man of the day, were affected in their thinking or
their conduct by any sense of dependence on, or responsibility to, a
Supreme Being. If, however, it had been possible to substitute for
the English word the Latin _religio_ it would have made a far more
appropriate title to this chapter, for _religio_ meant primarily awe,
nervousness, scruple--much the same in fact as that feeling which in
these days we call superstition; and secondarily the means taken,
under the authority of the State, to quiet such feelings by the
performance of rites meant to propitiate the gods.[530] In both of
these senses _religio_ is to be found in the last age of the Republic;
but, as we shall see, the tendency to superstitious nervousness was
very imperfectly allayed and the worship that should have allayed it
was in great measure neglected.
It may be, indeed, that in quiet country districts the joyous rural
festivals went on--we have many allusions and a few descriptions of
them in the literature of the Augustan period,--and also the worship
of the household deities, in which there perhaps survived a feeling of
_pietas_ more nearly akin to what we call religious feeling than in
any of the cults (_sacra publica_) undertaken by the State for the
people. Even in the city the cult of the dead, or what may perhaps be
better called the religious attention paid to their resting-places,
and the religious ceremonies attending birth, puberty, and marriage,
were kept up as matters of form and custom among the upper and
wealthier classes. But the great mass of the population of Rome, we
may be almost sure, knew nothing of these rites; the poor man, for
example, could no more afford a tomb for himself than a house, and his
body was thrown into some _puticulus_ or common burying-place,[531]
where it was impossible that any yearly ceremonies could be performed
to his memory, even if any one cared to do so. And among the higher
strata of society, outside of these _sacra privata_, carelessness
and negligence of the old State cults were steadily on the increase.
Neither Cicero nor any of his contemporaries but Varro has anything
to tell us of their details, and the decay had gone so far that Varro
himself knew little or nothing about many of the deities of the old
religious calendar,[532] or of the ways in which they had at one
time been worshipped. Vesta, with her simple cult and her virgin
priestesses, was almost the only deity who was not either forgotten
or metamorphosed in one way or another under the influence of Greek
literature and mythology; Vesta was too well recognised as a symbol
of the State's vitality to be subject to neglect like other and less
significant cults. The old sacrificing priesthoods, such as the
Fratres Arvales and the lesser Flamines, seem not to have been filled
up by the pontifices whose duty it was to do so: and the Flamen
Dialis, the priest of Jupiter himself, is not heard of from 89 to
11 B.C., when he appears again as a part of the Augustan religious
restoration. The explanation is probably that these offices could not
be held together with any secular one which might take the holder
away from Rome; and as every man of good family had business in the
provinces, no qualified person could be found willing to put himself
under the restriction. The temples too seem to have been sadly
neglected; Augustus tells us himself[533] that he had to restore no
less than eighty-two; and from Cicero we actually hear of thefts
of statues and other temple property[534]--sacrileges which may be
attributed to the general demoralisation caused by the Social and
Civil Wars. At the same time there seems to have been a strong
tendency to go after strange gods, with whose worship Roman soldiers
had made acquaintance in the course of their numerous eastern
campaigns. It is a remarkable fact that no less than four times in a
single decade the worship of Isis had to be suppressed,--in 58, 53,
50, and 48 B.C. In the year 50 we are told that the consul Aemilius
Paullus, a conservative of the old type, actually threw off his toga
praetexta and took an axe to begin destroying the temple, because no
workmen could be found to venture on the work.[535] These are indeed
strange times; the beautiful religion of Isis, which assuredly had
some power to purify a man and strengthen his conscience,[536] was to
be driven out of a city where the old local religion had never had any
such power, and where the masses were now left without a particle of
aid or comfort from any religious source. The story seems to ring
true, and gives us a most valuable glimpse into the mental condition
of the Roman workman of the time.
Of such foreign worships, and of the general neglect of the old cults,
Cicero tells us nothing; we have to learn or to guess at these facts
from evidence supplied by later writers. His interest in religious
practice was confined to ceremonies which had some political
importance. He was himself an augur, and was much pleased with his
election to that ancient college; but, like most other augurs of
the time, he knew nothing of augural "science," and only cared to
speculate philosophically on the question whether it is possible to
foretell the future. He looked upon the right of the magistrate to
"observe the heaven" as a part of an excellent constitution,[537]
and could not forgive Caesar for refusing in 59 B.C. to have his
legislation paralysed by the fanatical declarations of his colleague
that he was going to "look for lightning." He firmly believed in
the value of the _ius divinum_ of the State. In his treatise on the
constitution (_de Legibus_) he devotes a whole book to this religious
side of constitutional law, and gives a sketch of it in quasi-legal
language from which it appears that he entirely accepted the duty of
the State to keep the citizen in right relation to the gods, on whose
good-will his welfare depended. He seems never to have noticed that the
State was neglecting this duty, and that, as we saw just now, temples
and cults were falling into decay, strange forms of religion pressing
in. Such things did not interest him; in public life the State
religion was to him a piece of the constitution, to be maintained
where it was clearly essential; in his own study it was a matter of
philosophical discussion. In his young days he was intimate with the
famous Pontifex Maximus, Mucius Scaevola, who held that there were
three religions,--that of the poets, that of the philosophers, and
that of the statesman, of which the last must be accepted and
acted on, whether it be true or not.[538] Cicero could hardly have
complained if this saying had been attributed to himself.
This attitude of mind, the combination of perfect freedom of thought
with full recognition of the legal obligations of the State and its
citizens in matters of religion, is not difficult for any one to
understand who is acquainted with the nature of the ius divinum and
the priesthood administering it. That ius divinum was a part of the
ius civile, the law of the Roman city-state; as the ius civile,
exclusive of the ius divinum, regulated the relations of citizen to
citizen, so did the ius divinum regulate the relations of the citizen
to the deities of the community. The priesthoods administering this
law consisted not of sacrificing priests, attached to the cult of a
particular god and temple, but of lay officials in charge of that part
of the law of the State; it was no concern of theirs (so indeed they
might quite well argue) whether the gods really existed or not,
provided the law were maintained. When in 61 B.C. Clodius was caught
in disguise at the women's festival of the Bona Dea, the pontifices
declared the act to be _nefas_,--crime against the ius divinum; but
we may doubt whether any of those pontifices really believed in the
existence of such a deity. The idea of the _mos maiorum_ was still so
strong in the mind of every true Roman, his conservative instincts
were so powerful, that long after all real life had left the divine
inhabitants of his city, so that they survived only as the dead stalks
of plants that had once been green and flourishing, he was quite
capable of being horrified at any open contempt of them. And he was
right, as Augustus afterwards saw clearly; for the masses, who had
no share in the education described in the sixth chapter, who
knew nothing of Greek literature or philosophy, and were full
of superstitious fancies, were already losing confidence in the
authorities set over them, and in their power to secure the good-will
of the gods and their favour in matters of material well-being.
This is the only way in which we can satisfactorily account for the
systematic efforts of Augustus to renovate the old religious rites and
priesthoods, and we can fairly argue back from it to the tendencies of
the generation immediately before him. He knew that the proletariate
of Rome and Italy still believed, as their ancestors had always
believed, that state and individual would alike suffer unless the gods
were properly propitiated; and that in order to keep them quiet and
comfortable the sense of duty to the gods must be kept alive even
among those who had long ceased to believe in them. It was fortunate
indeed for Augustus that he found in the great poet of Mantua one who
was in some sense a prophet as well as a poet, who could urge the
Roman by an imaginative example to return to a living pietas,--not
merely to the old religious forms, but to the intelligent sense of
duty to God and man which had built up his character and his empire.
In Cicero's day there was also a great poet, he too in some sense a
prophet; but Lucretius could only appeal to the Roman to shake off the
slough of his old religion, and such an appeal was at the time both
futile and dangerous. Looking at the matter historically, and not
theologically, we ought to sympathise with the attitude of Cicero
and Scaevola towards the religion of the State. It was based on a
statesmanlike instinct; and had it been possible for that instinct to
express itself practically in a positive policy like that of Augustus,
instead of showing itself in philosophical treatises like the _de
Legibus_, or on occasional moments of danger like that of the Bona Dea
sacrilege, it is quite possible that much mischief might have
been averted. But in that generation no one had the shrewdness or
experience of Augustus, and no one but Julius had the necessary free
hand; and we may be almost sure that Julius, Pontifex Maximus though
he was, was entirely unfitted by nature and experience to undertake
a work that called for such delicate handling, such insight into the
working of the ignorant Italian mind.
This attitude of inconsistency and compromise must seem to a modern
unsatisfactory and strained, and he turns with relief to the
courageous outspokenness of the great poem of Lucretius on the Nature
of Things, of which the main object was to persuade the Romans to
renounce for good all the mass of superstition, in which he included
the religion of the State, by which their minds were kept in a prison
of darkness, terror, and ignorance. Lucretius took no part whatever in
public life; he could afford to be in earnest; he felt no shadow of
responsibility for the welfare of the State as such. The Epicurean
tenets which he held so passionately had always ranked the individual
before the community, and suggested a life of individual quietism;
Lucretius in his study could contemplate the "rerum natura" without
troubling himself about the "natura hominum" as it existed in the
Italy of his day. "Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,"--so
wrote of him his great successor and admirer, yet added, with a tinge
of pathos which touches us even now, "Fortunatus et ille deos qui
novit agrestes." Even at the present day an uncompromising unbeliever
may be touched by the simple worship, half pagan though it may seem to
him, of a village in the Apennines; but in the eyes of Lucretius all
worship seemed prompted by fear and based on ignorance of natural law.
Virgil's tender and sympathetic soul went out to the peasant as he
prayed to his gods for plenty or prosperity, as it went out to all
living creatures in trouble or in joy.
But it is nevertheless true that Lucretius was a great religious poet.
He was a prophet, in deadly earnest, calling men to renounce their
errors both of thought and conduct. He saw around him a world full of
wickedness and folly; a world of vanity, vexation, fear, ambition,
cruelty, and lust. He saw men fearing death and fearing the gods;
overvaluing life, yet weary of it; unable to use it well, because
steeped in ignorance of the wonderful working of Nature.[539] He saw
them, as we have already seen them, the helpless victims of ambition
and avarice, ever, like Sisyphus, rolling the stone uphill and never
reaching the summit.[540] Of cruelty and bloodshed in civil strife
that age had seen enough, and on this too the poet dwells with bitter
emphasis;[541] on the unwholesome luxury and restlessness of the
upper classes,[542] and on their unrestrained indulgence of bodily
appetites. In his magnificent scorn he probably exaggerated the evils
of his day, yet we have seen enough in previous chapters to suggest
that he was not a mere pessimist; there is no trace in his poem of
cynicism, or of a soured temperament. We may be certain that he was
absolutely convinced of the truth of all he wrote.
So far Lucretius may be called a religious poet, in that with profound
conviction and passionate utterance he denounced the wickedness of
his age, and, like the Hebrew prophets, called on mankind to put away
their false gods and degrading superstitions, and learn the true
secret of guidance in this life. It is only when we come to ask what
that secret was, that we feel that this extraordinary man knew far too
little of ordinary human nature to be either a religious reformer
or an effective prophet: as Sellar has said of him,[543] he had no
sympathy with human activity. His secret, the remedy for all the
world's evil and misery, was only a philosophical creed, which he had
learnt from Epicurus and Democritus. His profound belief in it is one
of the most singular facts in literary history; no man ever put such
poetic passion into a dogma, and no such imperious dogma was ever
built upon a scientific theory of the universe. He seems to have
combined two Italian types of character, which never have been united
before or since,--that of the ecclesiastic, earnest and dogmatic,
seeing human nature from a doctrinal platform, not working and
thinking with it; and secondly the poetic type, of which Dante is the
noblest example, perfectly clear and definite in inward and outward
vision, and illuminating all that it touches with an indescribable
glow of pure poetic imagination.
Lucretius' secret then is knowledge,[544]--not the dilettanteism of
the day, but real scientific knowledge of a single philosophical
attempt to explain the universe,--the atomic theory of the Epicurean
school. Democritus and Epicurus are the only saviours,--of this
Lucretius never had the shadow of a doubt. As the result of this
knowledge, the whole supernatural and spiritual world of fancy
vanishes, together with all futile hopes or fears of a future life.
The gods, if they exist, will cease to be of any importance to
mankind, as having no interest in him, and doing him neither good nor
harm. Chimaeras, portents, ghosts, death, and all that frightens the
ignorant and paralyses their energies, will vanish in the pure light
of this knowledge; man will have nothing to be afraid of but himself.
Nor indeed need he fear himself when he has mastered "the truth." By
that time, as the scales of fear fall from his eyes, his moral balance
will be recovered; the blind man will see. What will he see? What is
the moral standard that will become clear to him, the sanction of
right living that will grip his conscience?
It is simply the conviction that as this life is all we have in past,
present, or future, it _must be used well_. After all then, Lucretius
is reduced to ordinary moral suasion, and finds no new power or
sanction that could keep erring human nature in the right path. And
we must sadly allow that no real moral end is enunciated by him;
his ideal seems to be quietism in this life, and annihilation
afterwards.[545] It is a purely self-regarding rule of life. It is not
even a social creed; neither family nor State seems to have any part
in it, much less the unfortunate in this life, the poor, and the
suffering. The poet never mentions slavery, or the crowded populations
of great cities. It might almost be called a creed of fatalism, in
which Natura plays much the same part as Fortuna did in the creed of
many less noble spirits of that age.[546] Nature fights on; we cannot
resist her, and cannot improve on her; it is better to acquiesce and
obey than to try and rule her.
Thus Lucretius' remedy fails utterly; it is that of an aristocratic
intellect, not of a saviour of mankind.[547] So far as we know, it was
entirely fruitless; like the constitution of Sulla his contemporary,
the doctrine of Lucretius roused no sense of loyalty in Roman or
Italian, because it was constructed with imperfect knowledge of the
Roman and Italian nature. But it was a noble effort of a noble mind;
and, apart from its literary greatness, it has incidentally a lasting
value for all students of religious history, as showing better than
anything else that has survived from that age the need of a real
consecration of morality by the life and example of a Divine man.
Thus while the Roman statesman found it necessary to maintain the ius
divinum without troubling himself to attempt to put any new life into
the details of the worship it prescribed, content to let much of it
sink into oblivion as no longer essential to the good government of
the State, the greatest poetical genius of the age was proclaiming in
trumpet tones that if a man would make good use of his life he must
abandon absolutely and without a scruple the old religious ideas of
the Graeco-Roman world. But there was another school of thought which
had long been occupied with these difficulties, and had reached
conclusions far better suited than the dogmatism of Lucretius to the
conservative character of the Roman mind, for it found a place for
the deities of the State, and therefore for the ius divinum, in a
philosophical system already widely accepted by educated men. This
school may be described as Stoic, though its theology was often
accepted by men who did not actually call themselves Stoics; for
example, by Cicero himself, who, as an adherent of the New Academy,
the school which repudiated dogmatism and occupied itself with
dialectic and criticism, was perfectly entitled to adopt the tenets
of other schools if he thought them the most convincing. Its most
elaborate exponent in this period was Varro, and behind both Varro and
Cicero there stands the great figure of the Rhodian Posidonius[548],
of whose writings hardly anything has come down to us. It is worth
while to trace briefly the history of this school at Rome, for it is
in itself extremely interesting, as an attempt to reconcile the old
theology--if the term may be used--with philosophical thought, and it
probably had an appreciable influence on the later quasi-religious
Stoicism of the Empire.
We must go back for a moment to the period succeeding the war with
Hannibal. The awful experience of that war had done much to discredit
the old Roman religious system, which had been found insufficient of
itself to preserve the State. The people, excited and despairing,
had been quieted by what may be called new religious prescriptions,
innumerable examples of which are to be found in Livy's books.
The Sibylline books were constantly consulted, and _lectisternia,
supplicationes, ludi_, in which Greek deities were prominent, were
ordered and carried out. Finally, in 204 B.C., there was brought to
Rome the sacred stone of the Magna Mater Idaea, the great deity of
Pessinus in Phrygia, and a festival was established in her honour,
called by the Greek name Megalesia. All this means, as can be seen
clearly from Livy's language,[549] that the governing classes were
trying to quiet the minds of the people by convincing them that no
effort was being spared to set right their relations with the unseen
powers; they had invoked in vain their own local and native deities,
and had been compelled to seek help elsewhere; they had found their
own narrow system of religion quite inadequate to express their
religious experience of the last twenty years. And indeed that old
system of religion never really recovered from the discredit thus cast
on it. The temper of the people is well shown by the rapidity with
which the orgiastic worship of the Greek Dionysus spread over Italy a
few years later; and the fact that it was allowed to remain, though
under strict supervision, shows that the State religion no longer had
the power to satisfy the cravings of the masses. And the educated
class too was rapidly coming under the influence of Greek thought,
which could hardly act otherwise than as a solvent of the old
religious ideas. Ennius, the great literary figure of this period,
was the first to strike a direct blow at the popular belief in the
efficacy of prayer and sacrifice, by openly declaring that the gods
did not interest themselves in mankind,[550]--the same Epicurean
doctrine preached afterwards by Lucretius. It may indeed be doubted
whether this doctrine became popular, or acceptable even to the
cultured classes; but the fact remains that the same man who did
more than any one before Virgil to glorify the Roman character and
dominion, was the first to impugn the belief that Rome owed her
greatness to her divine inhabitants.
But in the next generation there arrived in Rome a man whose teaching
had so great an influence on the best type of educated Roman that, as
we have already said, he may almost be regarded as a missionary.[551]
We do not know for certain whether Panaetius wrote or taught about the
nature or existence of the gods; but we do know that he discussed the
question of divination[552] in a work [Greek: Peri pronoias], where he
could hardly have avoided the subject. In any case the Stoic doctrines
which he held, themselves ultimately derived from Plato and the Old
Academy, were found capable in the hands of his great successor
Posidonius of Rhodes of supplying a philosophical basis for the
activity as well as the existence of the gods. These men, it must
be repeated, were not merely professed philosophers, but men of the
world, travellers, writing on a great variety of subjects; they were
profoundly interested, like Polybius, in the Roman character and
government; they became intimate with the finer Roman minds, from
Scipio the younger to Cicero and Varro, and seem to have seen clearly
that the old rigid Stoicism must be widened and humanised, and its
ethical and theological aspects modified, if it were to gain a real
hold on the practical Roman understanding. We have already seen[553]
how their modified Stoic ethics acted for good on the best Romans
of our period. In theology also they left a permanent mark on Roman
thought; Posidonius wrote a work on the gods, which formed the basis
of the speculative part of Varro's _Antiquitates divinae_, and almost
certainly also of the second book of Cicero's de _Natura Deorum_[554].
Other philosophers of the period, even if not professed Stoics, may
have discussed the same subjects in their lectures and writings,
arriving at conclusions of the same kind.
It is chiefly from the fragments of Varro's work that we learn
something of the Stoic attempt to harmonise the old religious beliefs
with philosophic theories of the universe[555]. Varro, following his
teacher, held the Stoic doctrine of the _animus mundi_ the Divine
principle permeating all material things which, in combination with
them, constitutes the universe, and is Nature, Reason, God, Destiny,
or whatever name the philosopher might choose to give it. The universe
is divine, the various parts of it are, therefore, also divine, in
virtue of this informing principle. Now in the sixteenth book of his
great work Varro co-ordinated this Stoic theory with the Graeco-Roman
religion of the State as it existed in his time. The chief gods
represented the _partes mundi_ in various ways; even the difference
of sex among the deities was explained by regarding male gods as
emanating from the heaven and female ones from the earth, according
to a familiar ancient idea of the active and passive principle in
generation. The Stoic doctrine of [Greek: daimones] was also utilised
to find an explanation for semi-deities, lares, genii, etc., and thus
another character of the old Italian religious mind was to be saved
from contempt and oblivion. The old Italian tendency to see the
supernatural manifesting itself in many different ways expressed by
adjectival titles, e.g. Mars Silvanus, Jupiter Elicius, Juno Lucina,
etc., also found an explanation in Varro's doctrine; for the divine
element existing in sky, earth, sea, or other parts of the _mundus_,
and manifesting itself in many different forms of activity, might
be thus made obvious to the ordinary human intellect without the
interposition of philosophical terms.
At the head of the whole system was Jupiter, the greatest of Roman
gods, whose title of Optimus Maximus might well have suggested that no
other deity could occupy this place. Without him it would have been
practically impossible for Varro to carry out his difficult and
perilous task. Every Roman recognised in Jupiter the god who
condescended to dwell on the Capitol in a temple made with hands, and
who, beyond all other gods, watched over the destinies of the Roman
State; every Roman also knew that Jupiter was the great god of the
heaven above him, for in many expressions of his ordinary speech he
used the god's name as a synonym for the open sky.[556] The position
now accorded to the heaven-god in the new Stoic system is so curious
and interesting that we must dwell on it for a moment.
Varro held, or at any rate taught, that Jupiter was himself that soul
of the world (animus mundi) which fills and moves the whole material
universe.[557] He is the one universal causal agent,[558] from whom
all the forces of nature are derived;[559] or he may be called, in
language which would be intelligible to the ordinary Roman, the
universal Genius.[560] Further, he is himself all the other gods and
goddesses, who may be described as parts, or powers, or virtues,
existing in him.[561] And Varro makes it plain that he wishes to
identify this great god of gods with the Jupiter at Rome, whose temple
was on the Capitol; St. Augustine quotes him as holding that the
Romans had dedicated the Capitol to Jupiter, who by his spirit
breathes life into everything in the universe:[562] or in less
philosophical language, "The Romans wish to recognise Jupiter as king
of gods and men, and this is shown by his sceptre and his seat on the
Capitol." Thus the god who dwelt on the Capitol, and in the temple
which was the centre-point of the Roman Empire, was also the
life-giving ruler and centre of the whole universe. Nay, he goes one
step further, and identifies him with the one God of the monotheistic
peoples of the East, and in particular with the God of the Jews.[563]
Thus Varro had arrived, with the help of Posidonius and the Stoics, at
a monotheistic view of the Deity, which is at the same time a kind of
pantheism, and yet, strange to say, is able to accommodate itself to
the polytheism of the Graeco-Roman world. But without Jupiter, god of
the heaven both for Greeks and Romans, and now too in the eyes of both
peoples the god who watched over the destiny of the Roman Empire, this
wonderful feat could not have been performed. The identification of
the heaven-god with the animus mundi of the Stoics was not indeed a
new idea; it may be traced up Stoic channels even to Plato. What is
really new and astonishing is that it should have been possible for a
conservative Roman like Varro, in that age of carelessness and doubt,
to bring the heaven-god, so to speak, down to the Roman Capitol, where
his statue was to be seen sitting between Juno and Minerva, and yet to
teach the doctrine that he was the same deity as the Jewish Jehovah,
and that both were identical with the Stoic animus mundi.
But did Varro also conceive of this Jupiter as a deity "making for
righteousness," or acting as a sanction for morality? It would not
have been impossible or unnatural for a Roman so to think of him, for
of all the Roman deities Jupiter is the one whose name from the most
ancient times had been used in oaths and treaties, and whose _numen_
was felt to be violated by any public or private breach of faith.[564]
We cannot tell how far Varro himself followed out this line of
thought, for the fragments of his great work are few and far between.
But we know that the Roman Stoics saw in that same universal Power or
Mind which Varro identified with Jupiter the source and strength of
law, and therefore of morality; here it is usually called reason,
_ratio_, the working of the eternal and immutable Mind of the
universe. "True law is right reason," says Cicero in a noble
passage;[565] and goes on to teach that this law transcends all human
codes of law, embracing and sanctioning them all; and that the spirit
inherent in it, which gives it its universal force, is God Himself. In
another passage, written towards the end of his life, and certainly
later than the publication of Varro's work, he goes further and
identifies this God with Jupiter.[566] "This law," he says, "came into
being simultaneously with the Divine Mind" (i.e. the Stoic Reason):
"wherefore that true and paramount law, commanding and forbidding, is
the right reason of almighty Jupiter" (summi Iovis). Once more, in the
first book of his treatise on the gods, he quotes the Stoic Chrysippus
as teaching that the eternal Power, which is as it were a guide in the
duties of life, is Jupiter himself.[567] It is characteristic of the
Roman that he should think, in speculations like these, rather of the
law of his State than of the morality of the individual, as emanating
from that Right Reason to which he might give the name of Jupiter: I
have been unable to find a passage in which Cicero attributes to this
deity the sanction for individual goodness, though there are many that
assert the belief that justice and the whole system of social life
depend on the gods and our belief in them.[568] But the Roman had
never been conscious of individual duty, except in relation to his
State, or to the family, which was a living cell in the organism of
the State. In his eyes law was rather the source of morality than
morality the cause and the reason of law; and as his religion was a
part of the law of his State, and thus had but an indirect connection
with morality, it would not naturally occur to him that even the great
Jupiter himself, thus glorified as the Reason in the universe, could
really help him in the conduct of his life _qua_ individual. It is
only as the source of legalised morality that we can think of Varro's
Jupiter as "making for righteousness."
Less than twenty-five years after Cicero's death, in the imagination
of the greatest of Roman poets, Jupiter was once more brought before
the Roman world, and now in a form comprehensible by all educated men,
whether or no they had dabbled in philosophy. What are we to say of
the Jupiter of the _Aeneid_? We do not need to read far in the first
book of the poem to find him spoken of in terms which remind us of
Varro: "O qui res hominumque deumque Aeternis regis imperiis," are the
opening words of the address of Venus; and when she has finished,
Olli subridens hominum sator atque deorum
Vultu, quo caelum tempestatesque serenat,
Oscula libavit natae, dehine talia fatur;
"Parce metu, Cytherea, manent immota tuorum
Fata tibi."
Jupiter is here, as in Varro's system, the prime cause and ruler of
all things, and he also holds in his hand the destiny of Rome and the
fortunes of the hero who was to lay the first foundation of Rome's
dominion. It is in the knowledge of his will that Aeneas walks, with
hesitating steps, in the earlier books, in the later ones with assured
confidence, towards the goal that is set before him. But the lines
just quoted serve well to show how different is the Jupiter of Virgil
from the universal deity of the Roman Stoic. Beyond doubt Virgil had
felt the power of the Stoic creed; but he was essaying an epic poem,
and he could not possibly dispense with the divine machinery as it
stood in his great Homeric model. His Jupiter is indeed, as has been
lately said,[569] "a great and wise god, free from the tyrannical and
sensuous characteristics of the Homeric Zeus," in other words, he is a
Roman deity, and sometimes acts and speaks like a grave Roman consul
of the olden time. But still he is an anthropomorphic deity, a purely
human conception of a personal god-king; in these lines he smiles on
his daughter Venus and kisses her. This is the reason why Virgil has
throughout his poem placed the Fates, or Destiny, in close relation to
him, without definitely explaining that relation. Fate, as it appears
in the Aeneid, is the Stoic [Greek: eimarmenae] applied to the idea of
Rome and her Empire; that Stoic conception could not take the form of
Jupiter, as in Varro's hands, for the god had to be modelled on the
Homeric pattern, not on the Stoic. It is perhaps not going too far to
say that the god, as a theological conception, never recovered from
this treatment; any chance he ever had of becoming the centre of a
real religious system was destroyed by the Aeneid, the _pietas_ of
whose hero is indeed nominally due to him, but in reality to the
decrees of Fate.[570]
While philosophers and poets were thus performing intellectual and
imaginative feats with the gods of the State, the strong tendency to
superstition, untutored fear of the supernatural, which had always
been characteristic of the Italian peoples, so far from losing power,
was actually gaining it, and that not only among the lower classes. As
Lucretius mockingly said, even those who think and speak with contempt
of the gods will in moments of trouble slay black sheep and sacrifice
them to the Manes. This feeling of fear or nervousness, which lies at
the root of the meaning of the word _religio_,[571] had been quieted
in the old days by the prescriptions of the pontifices and their jus
divinum, but it was always ready to break out again; as we have seen,
in the long and awful struggle of the Hannibalic war, it was necessary
to go far beyond the ordinary pharmacopoeia within reach of the
priesthoods in order to convince the people that all possible means
were being taken for their salvation. Again, in this last age of the
Republic, there are obvious signs that both ignorant and educated
were affected by the gloom and uncertainty of the times. Increasing
uncertainty in the political world, increasing doubt in the world of
thought, very naturally combined to produce an emotional tendency
which took different forms in men of different temperament. We can
trace this (1) in the importance attached to omens, portents, dreams;
(2) in a certain vague thought of a future life, which takes a
positive shape in the deification of human beings; (3) at the close of
the period, in something approaching to a sense of sin, of neglected
duty, bringing down upon State and individual the anger of the gods.
1. If we glance over the latter part of the book of prodigies,
compiled by the otherwise unknown writer Julius Obsequens from the
records of the pontifices quoted in Livy's history, we can get a fair
idea of the kind of portent that was troubling the popular mind.
They are much the same as they always had been in Roman
history,--earthquakes, monstrous births, temples struck by lightning,
statues overthrown, wolves entering the city, and so on; they are
extremely abundant in the terrible years of the Social and Civil Wars,
become less frequent after the death of Sulla, and break out again
in full force with the murder of Caesar. They were reported to the
pontifices from the places where they were supposed to have occurred,
and if thought worthy of expiation were entered in the pontifical
books. We may suppose that they were sent in chiefly by the
uneducated. But among men of education we have many examples of this
same nervousness, of which two or three must suffice. Sulla, as we
know from his own Memoirs, which were used directly or indirectly by
Plutarch, had a strong vein of superstition in his nature, and made
no attempt to control it. In dedicating his Memoirs to Lucullus he
advised him "to think no course so safe as that which is enjoined
by the [Greek: daimon] (perhaps his genius) in the night";[572]
and Plutarch tells us several tales of portents on which he acted,
evidently drawn from this same autobiography. We are told of him that
he always carried a small image of Apollo, which he kissed from time
to time, and to which he prayed silently in moments of danger.[573]
Again, Cicero tells us a curious story of himself, Varro, and Cato,
which shows that those three men of philosophical learning were quite
liable to be frightened by a prophecy which to us would not seem to
have much claim to respect.[574] He tells how when the three were
at Dyrrachium, after Caesar's defeat there and the departure of the
armies into Thessaly, news was brought them by the commander of the
Rhodian fleet that a certain rower had foretold that within thirty
days Greece would be weltering in blood; how all three were terribly
frightened, and how a few days later the news of the battle at
Pharsalia reached them. Lastly, we all remember the vision which
appeared to Brutus on the eve of the battle of Philippi, of a huge and
fearsome figure standing by him in silence, which Shakespeare has made
into the ghost of Caesar and used to unify his play. According to
Plutarch, the Epicurean Cassius, as Lucretius would have done,
attempted to convince his friend on rational grounds that the vision
need not alarm him, but apparently in vain.[575]
2. Lucretius had denied the doctrine of the immortality of the soul,
as the cause of so much of the misery which he believed it to be his
mission to avert. Caesar, in the speech put into his mouth by Sallust,
in the debate on the execution of the conspirators on December 5, 63,
seems to be of the same opinion, and as Cicero alludes to his words in
the speech with which he followed Caesar, we may suppose that Sallust
was reporting him rightly.[576] The poet and the statesman were not
unlike in the way in which they looked at facts; both were of clear
strong vision, without a trace of mysticism. But such men were the
exception rather than the rule; Cicero probably represents better the
average thinking man of his time. Cicero was indeed too full of life,
too deeply interested in the living world around him, to think much
of such questions as the immortality of the soul; and as a professed
follower of the Academic school, he assuredly did not hold any
dogmatic opinion on it. He was at no time really affected by
Pythagoreanism, like his friend Nigidius Figulus, whose works, now
lost, had a great vogue in the later years of Cicero's life, and much
influence on the age that followed. In the first book of his Tusculan
Disputations Cicero discusses the question from the Academic point of
view, coming to no definite conclusion, except that whether we are
immortal or not we must be grateful to death for releasing us from the
bondage of the body. This book was written in the last year of his
life; but ten years earlier, in the beautiful myth, imitated from the
myths of Plato, which he appended to his treatise _de Republica_, he
had emphatically asserted the doctrine. There the spirit of the elder
Scipio appears to his great namesake, Cicero's ideal Roman, and
assures him that the road to heaven (caelum) lies open to those who do
their duty in this life, and especially their duty to the State. "Know
thyself to be a god; as the god of gods rules the universe, so the god
within us rules the body, and as that great god is eternal, so does an
eternal soul govern this frail body."[577]
The _Somnium Scipionis_ was an inspiration, written under the
influence of Plato at one of those emotional moments of Cicero's
life which make it possible to say of him that there was a religious
element in his mind.[578] Some years later the poignancy of his grief
at the death of his daughter Tullia had the effect of putting him
again in a strong emotional mood. For many weeks he lived alone at
Astura, on the edge of the Pomptine marshes, out of reach of all
friends, forbidding even his young wife and her mother to come near
him; brooding, as it would seem, on the survival of the godlike
element in his daughter. These sad meditations took a practical form
which at first astonishes us, but is not hard to understand when we
have to come to know Cicero well, and to follow the tendencies of
thought in these years. He might erect a tomb to her memory,--but
that would not satisfy him; it would not express his feeling that the
immortal godlike spark within her survived. He earnestly entreats
Atticus to find and buy him a piece of ground where he can build a
_fanum_, i.e. a shrine, to her spirit. "I wish to have a shrine built,
and that wish cannot be rooted out of my heart. I am anxious to avoid
any likeness to a tomb ... in order to attain as nearly as possible to
an apotheosis."[579] A little further on he calls these foolish ideas;
but this is doubtless only because he is writing to Atticus, a man
of the world, not given to emotion or mysticism. Cicero is really
speaking the language of the Italian mind, for the moment free from
philosophical speculation; he believes that his beloved dead lived
on, though he could not have proved it in argument. So firmly does
he believe it that he wishes others to know that he believes it, and
insists that the shrine shall be erected in a frequented place![580]
Though the great Dictator did not believe in another world, he
consented at the end of his life to become Jupiter Julius, and after
his death was duly canonised as Divus, and had a temple erected to
him. But the many-sided question of the deification of the Caesars
cannot be discussed here; it is only mentioned as showing in another
way the trend of thought in this dark age of Roman history. Whatever
some philosophers may have thought, there cannot be a doubt that the
ordinary Roman believed in the godhead of Julius.[581]
3. We saw in an earlier chapter with what gay and heedless frivolity
young men like Caelius were amusing themselves even on the very eve of
civil war. In strange contrast with this is the gloom that overspread
all classes during the war itself, and more especially after the
assassination of the Dictator. Caesar seemed irresistible and godlike,
and men were probably beginning to hope for some new and more stable
order of things, when he was suddenly struck down, and the world
plunged again into confusion and doubt; and it was not till after
the final victory of Octavian at Actium, and the destruction of the
elements of disunion with the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, that
men really began to hope for better times. The literature of those
melancholy years shows distinct signs of the general depression, which
was perhaps something more than weariness and material discomfort;
there was almost what we may call a dim sense of sin, or at least of
moral evil, such a feeling, though far less real and intense, as that
which their prophets aroused from time to time in the Jewish people,
and one not unknown in the history of Hellas.
The most touching expression of this feeling is to be found in the
preface which Livy prefixed to his history--a wonderful example of the
truth that when a great prose writer is greatly moved, his language
reflects his emotion in its beauty and earnestness. Every student
knows the sentence in which he describes the gradual decay of all that
was good in the Roman character: "donec ad haec tempora, quibus nec
vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus, perventum est"; but it is
not every student who can recognise in it a real sigh of despair, an
unmistakable token of the sadness of the age.[582] In the introductory
chapters which serve the purpose of prefaces to the _Jugurtha_ and
_Catiline_ of Sallust, we find something of the same sad tone, but
it does not ring true like Livy's exordium; Sallust was a man of
altogether coarser fibre, and seems to be rather assuming than
expressing the genuine feeling of a saddened onlooker. In one of his
earliest poems, written perhaps after the Perusian war of 41 B.C.[583]
even the lively Horace was moved to voice the prevailing depression,
fancifully urging that the Italian people should migrate, like the
Phocaeans of old, to the far west, where, as Sertorius had been told
in Spain, lay the islands of the blest, where the earth, as in the
golden age, yields all her produce untilled:
Iuppiter ilia piae secrevit litora genti
Ut inquinavit aere tempus aureum;
Aere, dehinc ferro duravit saecula, quorum
Piis secunda vate me datur fuga.
It may be, as has recently been suggested, that the famous fourth
Eclogue of Virgil, "the Messianic Eclogue," was in some sense meant as
an answer to this poem of Horace. "There is no need," he seems to say
in that poem, written in the year 39, "to seek the better age in a
fabled island of the west. It is here and now with us. The period upon
which Italy is now entering more than fulfils in real life the dream
of a Golden Age. A marvellous child is even now coming into the world
who will see and inaugurate an era of peace and prosperity: darkness
and despair will after a while pass entirely away, and a regenerate
Italy,--regenerate in religion and morals as in fertility and
wealth,--will lead the world in a new era of happiness and good
government."[584]
But the Golden Age, so fondly hoped for, so vaguely and poetically
conceived, was not to come in the sense in which Virgil, or any other
serious thinker of the day, could dream of it. I may conclude this
chapter with a few sentences which express this most truly and
eloquently. "When there is a fervent aspiration after better things,
springing from a strong feeling of human brotherhood, and a firm
belief in the goodness and righteousness of God, such aspiration
carries with it an invincible confidence that some how, some where,
some when, it must receive its complete fulfilment, for it is prompted
by the Spirit which fills and orders the Universe throughout its whole
development. But if the human organ of inspiration goes on to fix the
how, the where, and the when, and attributes to some nearer object the
glory of the final blessedness, then it inevitably falls into such
mistakes as Virgil's, and finds its golden age in the rule of the
Caesars (which was indeed an essential feature of Christianity),
or perhaps, as in later days, in the establishment of socialism or
imperialism. Well for the seer if he remembers that the kingdom of God
is within us, and that the true golden age must have its foundation in
penitence for misdoing, and be built up in righteousness and loving
kindness."[585]
EPILOGUE
These sketches of social life at the close of the Republican period
have been written without any intention of proving a point, or any
pre-conceived idea of the extent of demoralisation, social, moral, or
political, which the Roman people had then reached. But a perusal of
Mr. Balfour's suggestive lecture on "Decadence" has put me upon making
a very succinct diagnosis of the condition of the patient whose life
and habits I have been describing. The Romans, and the Italians, with
whom they were now socially and politically amalgamated, were not in
the last two centuries B.C. an old or worn-out people. It is at any
rate certain that for a century after the war with Hannibal Rome and
her allies, under the guidance of the Roman senate, achieved an amount
of work in the way of war and organisation such as has hardly been
performed by any people before or since; and even in the period dealt
with in this book, in spite of much cause for misgiving at home, the
work done by Roman and Italian armies both in East and West shows
beyond doubt that under healthy discipline the native vigour of the
population could assert itself. We must not forget, however severely
we may condemn the way in which the work was done, that it is to
these armies, in all human probability, that we owe not only the
preservation of Graeco-Italian culture and civilisation, but the
opportunity for further progress. The establishment of definite
frontiers by Pompeius and Caesar, and afterwards by Augustus and
Tiberius, brought peace to the region of the Mediterranean, and with
it made possible the development of Roman law and the growth of a new
and life-giving religion.
But peoples, like individuals, if offered opportunities of doing
themselves physical or moral damage, are only too ready to accept
them. Time after time in these chapters we have had to look back to
the age following the war with Hannibal in order to see what those
opportunities were; and in each case we have found the acceptance
rapid and eager. We have seen wealth coming in suddenly, and misused;
slave-labour available in an abnormal degree, and utilised with
results in the main unfortunate; the population of the city increasing
far too quickly, yet the difficulties arising from this increase
either ignored or misapprehended. We have noticed the decay of
wholesome family life, of the useful influence of the Roman matron, of
the old forms of the State religion; the misconception of the true end
of education, the result partly of Greek culture, partly of political
life; and to these may perhaps be added an increasing liability to
diseases, and especially to malaria, arising from economic blunders
in Italy and insanitary conditions of life in the city. All these
opportunities of damage to the fibre of the people had been freely
accepted, and with the result that in the age of Cicero we cannot
mistake the signs and symptoms of degeneracy.
But it would be a mistake to jump to the conclusion that this
degeneracy had as yet gone too far to be arrested. It was assuredly
not that degeneracy of senility which Mr. Balfour is inclined to
postulate as an explanation of decadence. So far as I can judge, the
Romans were at that stage when, in spite of unhealthy conditions of
life and obstinate persistence in dangerous habits, it was not too
late to reform and recover. To me the main interest of the history of
the early Empire lies in seeking the answer to the question how far
that recovery was made. If these chapters should have helped any
student to prepare the ground for the solution of this problem their
object will have been fully achieved.
[Illustration: _Stanfords Geog. Estab. London_]
INDEX
Accius
_Aedicula_
Aediles, the
Aemilia, Via. _See_ Via Aemilia
Aemilius, Pons. See Pons Aemilius
Aeneas
Aerarium, the
Aesopus, the actor
Afranius
Africa, province of
Agrippa
Alexandria
Alexis (Atticus's slave)
Amafinius
_Ambitu, lex de_
Anio, the river
Anna Perenna, festival of
_Annona_
Antioch
Antiochus (the physician)
Antium, Cicero's villa at
Antony
_Apodyterium_
Apollinares, Ludi. _See_ Ludi Apollinares
Apollonia
Appia, Via. _See_ Via Appia
Appius Claudius Caecus
Aqua Appia
Aqua Tepula
Aqueducts
Ara maxima
Ara Pacis
_Argentarii_
Argiletum, the
Arpinum, Cicero's villa at
_Ars amatoria_ (Ovid's)
Arval brothers, the
Arx, the
Asia, province of
Astura, Cicero's villa at
_Atellanae, fabulae_. See _Fabulae Atellanae_
_Atrium_
_sutorium_,
Vestae
Atticus
house of,
wealth of,
as money-lender,
the sister of,
the slave of,
Cicero's letters to, _passim_,
Augury
Augustus
alleged proposal of, to remove the capital,
attitude of towards _plebs urbana_,
water-supply under,
the grandfather of,
as a social reformer,
marriage laws of,
furthers public comfort,
restoration of temples by,
attempts at religious revival,
Aventine hill
Baiae
Balbus, Cornelius, the younger
Bankruptcy laws
Basilicae, the
Baths, public
Bath-rooms
Bauli
Bithynia, province of
_Blanditia_
Bona Dea, festival of
Boscoreale
_Brutus_ (Cicero's)
Brutus, Decimus
_Bulla_
Byzantium
Caecilius
Caelian hill
Caelius Autipater
Caelius (M.) Rufus
Caesar, Julius
alleged proposal of, to remove the capital
extends one of the Basilicae,
reduces
corn gratuities;
regulations of, for the government of the city;
debts of;
character of;
as historian;
joined by Caelius;
restores credit in Italy;
and Cleopatra;
clemency of;
sale of prisoners by;
dismisses surrendered armies;
foundation at Corinth by;
entertained by Cicero;
habits of;
as aedile;
summons Publilius to Rome;
as Pontifex Maximus;
speech of, in Sallust;
consents to be deified;
and _passim_
_Calceus_
_Caldarium_
Calvus
Camillus
Campagua, the
Campania
Campus Martius
Caninius
Capena, Porta. _See_ Porta Capena
Capital at Rome
Capitol, the
Capitoline hill
Capua
_Carceres_, the
Carinae, the
Carmentalis, Porta. _See_ Porta Carmentalis
_Castella_
Castor, temple of
Catiline
Cato major
Cato minor
Catullus
Catulus the elder
_Cena_
Censor, the
_Censoria locatio_
Ceres
Ceriales, Ludi. _See_ Ludi Ceriales
Cethegus
Chariot-racing
Chrysippus
Cicero, birthplace of;
house of;
borrows money;
as a man of business;
and the publicani;
relation of, to the governing aristocracy;
letters of;
as a philosopher;
and Clodia;
views on education;
influence of philosophers upon;
and the slave question;
and the use of slaves for seditious purposes;
villas of;
undertakes the Ludi Romani;
religious views of;
and _passim_
Cicero, Marcus
Cicero, Quintus
Cilician pirates
Circus Flaminius
Circus Maximus
Cleopatra
Clients
Clivus Capitolinus
Clivus sacer
Cloaca maxima
Clodia
Clodius
Cluvius
_Coemptio_
_Coenaculum_
Coinage
_Collegia_
Colline gate, Sulla's victory at the,
Colosseum, the
Columella
Comedy
_Comissatio_
Comitium, the
_Commercii, ius_
_Compluvium_
Concordia, temple of
_Conducticii_
_Confarreatio_
_Coniugalia praecepta_ (Plutarch's)
_Connubii, ius_
Constantine, arch of
Consul, the
Consus, altar of
_Contubernium_
_Convivium_
_Copa_ ("Virgil's")
Corfinium
Cornelia
Cornelius
Crassus
Cumae, Cicero's villa at
Curia, the
Curio
Debtors
_Declamatio_
_Deductio_
Democritus
_Deorum, De Natura_ (Cicero's)
Diana, temple of
_Die natali, De_ (Censorinus's)
_Diffarreatio_
Diomedes, villa of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Dionysus, worship of
Di Penates. _See_ Penates
Diphilus, the actor
Divorce
_Dolia_
_Domus_
_Dos_
Drama, the
Dyrrhachium, importation of corn
into; battle of
Egypt
Emetics, use of
Ennius
Epicureanism
Epicurus
_Epulum Jovis_
Equester, Ordo. _See_ Ordo equester
Equirria
Equites. _See_ Ordo equester
_Ergastula_
Esquiline hill
Etruscans, the
Evander
_Exedra_
Fabius, arch of
_Fabri ferrarii_
_Fabulae Atellanae_; palliatae;
_togatae_
_Familiae urbanae_
Fate
_Fercula_
_Feriae_
_Festa_
_Figuli_
Figulus, Nigidius
Flaccus, Verrius
Flamen Dialis;
Quirinalis
Flaminius
_Flammeum_
Florales, Ludi. _See_ Ludi Florales
_Foeneratores_
_Foenus_
Formiae, Cicero's villa at
Forum Boarium
Forum Romanum
Friedländer
Frontinus
_Fullones_
Funeral games
Furrina, the grove of
Gabinius
Gellius, Aulus
Genseric
Gilds. _See_ Collegia
Gladiators
Gracchus, Gaius
Gracchus, Tiberius
_Grammaticus_
_Grassatores_
Greeks
Hannibal
Hercules
Hirtius
_Honorum, ius_
Horace
Hortensius
Horti Caesaris
_Ientaculum_
_Impluvium_
_Institutio Oratoris_ (Quintilian's)
_Insulae_
_Inventione, De_ (Cicero's)
Isis, worship of
_Iura_
_Ius civile_
_Ius divinum_
_Ius gentium_
Janiculum, the
Janus, "temple" of
Julius Obsequens
Juno, temple of
Jupiter
Jupiter Farreus; Julius;
Optimus Maximus, temple of;
Stator, temple of
Juturna, spring of
"King," game of
Laberius
Lar
Lares, shrine of
_Latifundium_
Latina, Via. _See_ Via Latina
Latins, the
Latium
Law-courts, the
_Lectisternia_
_Lectus_; _consularis_
_genialis_
_Legibus, De_ (Cicero's)
Lentulus
Lepidus
Liberalia, the
_Libertinus_
Libertus
Liternum, Scipio's villa at
Livius Andronicus
Livy
Lucretius
Lucretius Vespillo, Q.
Lueullus
Ludi, Apollinares; Ceriales;
Florales;
Magni, _see_ Romani; Megalenses;
Novemdiales; Plebeii;
Romani;
Victoriae
Ludus Trojae
Lupercal, the
Lupercalia, the
_Magister_
Magna Mater
_Mancipes_
_Manes_
_Mangones_
_Manus_
Marcius Rex, Q.
Marius
Mars; temple of
Martial
_Matrimonium, iustum_
Megaleuses, Ludi. See Ludi Megalenses
_Mensa_
_Mensae_; _rationes_
_Meridiatio_
_Metae_, the
Metellus Celer
Metellus Macedonicus
Milo
Mimes
Minerva, temple of
_Missio in bona_
_Missus_
Molo
Mommsen
Money-lenders
_Moretum_ ("Virgil's")
_Mos majorum_
_Muliones_
_Munera_
_Nefas_
_Negotiatores_
_Negotium_
Nepos, Cornelius
Neptunalia, the
Nicomedes, king of Bithynia
Novemdiales, Ludi. _See_ Ludi Novemdiales
_Novas homo_
Numa
_Nummularii_
_Obaerati_
_Oecus_
_Officiis, De_ (Cicero's)
_Operarii_
_Opifices_
Oppia, lex
Oppius Mons
_Oratore, De_ (Cicero's)
Ordo equester;
senatorius
Oseans, the
Ostia
Ovid
Pacuvius
Palatine hill
_Palliatae, fabulae_. See _Fabulae
palliatae_
Panaetius
_Pantomimus_
_Participes_
_Patronus_
Paullus, L. Aemilius
_Paupereuli_
_Peculium_
Penates, the;
temple of the
Pergamum
_Peristylium_
_Permutatio_
_Pero_
_Perscriptio_
_Persona_
Phaedrus the Epicurean
Philippi, battle of
Philippus (tribune)
Philo the Academician
Philodemus
_Pietas_
Piso, Calpurnius
_Pistores_
Plaetoria, lex
Plautus
Plebeii, Ludi. _See_ Ludi Plebeii
Pliny, the elder; the younger
Plutarch
Pollio, Asinius
Polybius
Pomerium
Pompeii
Pompeius
house of
theatre of
Pomponia
Pons Aemilius
Ponte Rotto
Pontifex Maximus
Porta Capena
Carmentalis
Esquilina
Portunus
Posidonius
Praecia
_Praedes_
_Praediola_
Praetor, the
_Prandium_
Priesthoods
_Promagister_
_Pronuba_
Provinces, the
_Provocations_, _ius_
Ptolemy Auletes
_Publicani_
_Publicum_
Publilius Syrus
Punic wars
Puteoli, Cicero's villa at
_Puticulus_
Pythagoreanism
_Quaestiones Conviviales (Plutarch's)_
Quaestorship, the
Quintilian
Quirinal (hill)
Quirinus
Rabirius Postumus
_Redemptor_
Regia, the
_Religio_
Religion
_Repetundis, quaestio de_
_Republica, De_ (Cicero's)
_Res_, _mancipi_
_Rex, the_
_Rex sacrorum_
_Rhetorica ad Herennium_
Romulus
Roscius, the actor
Rostra, the
Rutilius
Sabines, the
_Saccarii_
_Sacra_,
_privata_;
_publica_;
via, _see_ Via Sacra
St. Peter, church of
Salaminians, the
Sallust
Samnium
San Gregorio, via di
Sarpedon
Sassia
Saturnalia, the
_Saturninus_
Saturnus, temple of
Scaevola, Mucius
Scaurus
Scipio Aemilianus,
Asiaticus,
Nasica,
Sempionia
Senate, the
Senatorius, ordo. _See_ Ordo senatorius
Senec,
"Servian wall"
Servilius
Sibylline books, the
Slaves
_Societates publicanorum_
_Socii_
_Sodalicia, collegia_. See _Collegia_
_Soleae_
_Somnium Scipionis_ (Cicero's)
Spanish silver mines
Spartacus
_Spina_
_Sponsalia_
_Sportula_
Stoics, the
_Stola matronalis_
Strabo
Subura, the
_Suffragii, ius_
Sulla
Sulla, P.
Sulpicius (S.), Rufus
Sun-dials
_Supplicationes_
_Synthesis_
_Tabellarii
Tabernae
Tabernae argentariae
Tablinum
Tabulae
Tabulae novae_
Tabularia, the
_Tepidarium_
Terence
Terentia
Theatre, the
Theatre, building of a
Thurii
Tiber
Tiber island
_Tibicines_
Tibur
Time, divisions of, in the day
Tiro (Cicero's slave)
_Tirocinium fori_
Titus, arch of
_Toga_; _libera_; _praetexta_; _virilis_
_Togatae, fabulae_. See _Fabulae togatae_
Tragedy
_Tributum_
_Triclinia_
Triumph, a
Trofei di Mario
Tullia (Cicero's daughter)
Tullianum, the
_Tunica_
Turia, the story of
Tusculum, Cicero's villa at
_Tutela_
_Tutor_
Twelve Tables, the
_Usus_
Valerius Maximus
Varro
Varro, Terentius (consul)
Veii
Velabrum, the
Velia, the
_Venationes_
Venus Victrix, temple of
Verres
Vesta; temple of
Vestal Virgins
Veterans, Roman
Via Aurelia; Appia; Collatina; Latina; Sacra
Victoriae, Ludi. See Ludi Victoriae
Vicus Tuscus
_Vilicus_
_Villa pseudurbana_
Vinalia, the
_Vindicta_
Virgil
Voconia, lex
Water-clocks, introduction of
THE END
APPENDIX
Page 1, l. 12. _totam aestimare Romam_: to appreciate Rome in its
entirety.
Page 3, l. 12. _Hinc ad Tarpeiam_, etc.: he leads him next to the
Tarpeian Rock and to the Capitol, now of gold, once thick with wild
bushes.
Page 4, l. 24. _Hinc septem_, etc.: from here you may see the seven
hills of the sovereign city, and appreciate Rome as a whole, the Alban
and the Tusculan hills, and all the cool suburban retreats.
Page 10, l. 1. _rerum_, etc. Rome became a supreme thing of beauty.
Page 10, l. 13. _nativa praesidia_: natural defences.
Page 10, l. 21. _regionum_, etc. A site in the middle of Italy,
singularly fitted by nature for the development of the city.
Page 17, l. 2. _nec ferrea_, etc.: nor has he seen the hardships of
the law, the mad forum, or the archives of the people.
Page 22, l. 2. _Ille, ille_, etc.: he it was, Jupiter himself, who
withstood the attack, he who willed it that the Capitol, that these
temples, that the whole city and you all should be safe.
Page 29, footnote 1. _in montibus_, etc.: built between mountains and
valleys, raised and almost suspended on high, through the stones of
its buildings, with its back streets.
Page 39, l. 6. _ubi semel_, etc.: he who has once strayed from the
right path will come to calamity.
Page 52, l. 11. _lanificium_: the working of wool.
Page 55, l. 26. _graffiti_: ancient scribblings, scratched, painted,
or otherwise marked on a wall, column, tablet, or other surface.
Page 61, l. 4. _quaestio de repetundis_: court for extortion.
Page 64, l. 15. _familiarem_, etc.: intimate with L. Lucullus,
wealthy, of intractable character.
Page 73, l. 14. _qui de censoribus_, etc.: whosoever shall have
secured a contract from the censors shall not be accepted as associate
or shareholder.
Page 73, footnote 2. _Asiatici_, etc.: of the public revenue of Asia,
he had a very small share.
Page 91, l. 3. _fortissimus_, etc.: a most powerful and important
farmer of the public revenue.
Page 93, l. 20. _insanum forum_: the forum in its maddening bustle.
Page 116, l. 12. _doctissimus_, etc.: the most learned of that time.
Page 121, l. 11. _monumentum_, etc.: a monument more enduring than
bronze.
Page 123, l. 20. _vere humanus:_ truly refined.
Page 127, l. 23. _omnia_, etc.: he transforms himself into all
portentous shapes.
Page 130, l. 20. _ménager ses transitions:_ to pass gradually over to
the other side.
Page 132, l. 18. _de vi:_ of criminal violence.
Page 133, l. 9. _Uni se_, etc.: they are addicted to one and the same
practice, that they may cautiously cheat and craftily contend, outdo
each other in blandishments, feign honesty, set snares as if they were
all enemies to each other.
Page 133, l. 28. _rari nantes_, etc.: few and scattered swimmers in
the vast abyss.
Page 142 (bottom). _Claudite_, etc.: close the doors, maidens, enough
have we sung. And you, noble couple, live happily and apply your
vigorous youth to the assiduous task of wedlock.
Page 149, footnote 2. _Si quid_, etc.: if a woman act reprehensibly or
disgracefully, he punishes her; if she has drunk wine, if she has done
something wrong with a stranger, he condemns her. If you surprise your
wife in the act of adultery, you may with impunity kill her without
any form of judgment; but if she caught you in adultery, she would not
dare touch you, for she has no right.
Page 150, l. 11. _liberorum_, etc.: in order to have children.
Page 155, l. 22. _Odi_, etc.: I hate and I love. You ask perhaps how
that can be. I do not know, I feel it, and am distressed.
Page 155 (bottom). _Elle apportait_, etc.: she revealed in her private
behavior, in her affections, the same vehemence and the same passion
which her brother showed in public life. Ready for all excesses, and
not blushing to confess them, loving and hating with fury, incapable
of controlling herself, and opposed to all constraint, she did not
belie the great and haughty family from which she was sprung.
Page 178,1. 3. _rusticorum_, etc.:
The farmer-soldier's manly brood
Was trained to delve the Sabine sod,
And at an austere mother's nod
To hew and fetch the fagot wood.
Page 178, l. 20. _Maxima_, etc.: the greatest concern must be shown
for children.
Page 185, l. 8. _Avarus_, etc.:
The covetous is the cause of his own misery.
Bravery is increased by daring and fear by hesitation.
You can more easily discover fortune than cling to it.
The wrath of the just is to be dreaded.
A man dies every time that he is bereft of his kin.
Man is loaned, not given to life.
The best strife is rivalry in benignity.
Nothing is pleasing unless renewed by variety.
Bad is the plan which cannot be altered.
Less often would you err if you knew how much you don't know.
He who shows clemency always comes out victorious.
He who respects his oath succeeds in everything.
Where old age is at fault youth is badly trained.
Page 187, l. 7. _Grais_, etc.: the muse gave genius to the Greeks and
the pride of language, covetous of nothing but of praise. But the
Roman youths by long reckonings learn to split the coin into a hundred
parts. Let young Albinus say: "If you take one away from five pence,
what results?" "A groat." Good, you'll thrive.
Page 189, l. 1. In _grammaticis_, etc.: in the study of literature,
the perusal of the poets, the knowledge of history, the interpretation
of words, the peculiar tone of pronunciation.
Page 191, l. 9. _Orator est_, etc.: an orator, my son, is an upright
man skilled in speaking.
Page 191, l. 11. _Rem tene_, etc.: master the subject; the words will
follow.
Page 196, l. 9. _vir bonus_, etc.: see page 191, l. 9.
Page 196, l. 13. _Non enim_, etc.: eloquence and oratorical aptness
obtain good results if they be swayed by a right understanding and by
the discretion and control of the mind.
Page 210, footnote 1. _Mancipiis_, etc.: avoid being like the
Cappadocian monarch, rich in slaves and penniless in purse.
Page 211, footnote 1. _pone aedem_, etc.: behind the temple of Castor
are those to whom you'd be sorry to lend money.
Page 215, l. 18. _An te ibi_, etc.: would you stay there among those
harlots, prostitutes of bakers, leavings of the breadmakers, smeared
with rank cosmetics, nasty devotees of slaves?
Page 216, footnote 2. _agrum_, etc.: in cultivating the fields or in
hunting, servile occupations, etc.
Page 233, l. 5. _Nec turpe_, etc.: what a master commands cannot be
disgraceful.
Page 233, footnote 3. _Coli rura_, etc.: it is a bad practice to fill
the fields with men from the workhouse, or to have anything done by
men who are forsaken by hope.
Page 235, footnote 2. _Regum_, etc.: we have taken the tyrant's
temper.
Page 239, l. 10. _ante focos_, etc.: it was customary once to take
places in the long benches before the fireplace, and to trust that the
gods were present at our table.
Page 246, l. 5. _nunc vero_, etc.: but now from morning till evening,
on holidays and working days, the whole people, senators and
commoners, busy themselves in the forum and retire nowhere, etc. (See
page 133, l. 9, and translation of that passage.)
Page 246, footnote 2. _Urbem_, etc.: remain in the city, Rufus; stay
there and live in that light. All foreign travel is humble and lowly
for those that can work for the greatness of Rome.
Page 247, footnote 1. _Frequens_, etc.: constant change of abode is a
sign of unstable mind.
Page 248, l. 12. _contentio_, etc.: not a straining of the mind, but a
relaxation.
Page 259, l. 12. _locus_, etc.: a pleasant site, on the sea itself,
and can be seen from Antium and Circeii.
Page 265, footnote 3. _Ut illum_, etc.: may the gods confound him who
first invented the hours, and who first placed a sundial in this city.
Pity on me! They have cut up my day in compartments. Once when I was
a boy my stomach was my clock, and it was much more fitting and
reliable; it never failed to warn me except when there was nothing;
now, even when there is something, there is no eating unless it so
please the sun. For the whole city is full of sun-dials, and most of
the people crawl on in need of food and drink.
Page 269, footnote 1. _Romae_, etc.: in Rome it was for a long time a
joy and a pride to open up the house at early morning and attend to
the legal needs of the clients.
Page 275, l. 20. _Nesciit vivere_: he did not know how to live.
Page 277, l. 10. _ad noctem_: late into the night.
Page 280, l. 17. _Saepe tribus_, etc.: often you would see three
couches with four guests apiece.
Page 283, l. 21. [Greek: Emetikhaeu], etc.: he was under the
emetic cure, and consequently ate and drank freely and with much
satisfaction; and everything certainly was good and well served; nay
more, I may say that
"Though the cook was good,
'Twas Attic salt that flavored best the food."
Page 283, footnote 1. _qua lege_, etc.: which law did not determine
the expense, but the kind of victuals and the manner of cooking them.
Page 285, l. 11. _Agricolo_, etc.: the farmer is the first who after
a long day of toil in the fields adapted rustic songs to the laws of
metre; the first in satisfied leisure to modulate a song on his reed,
which he would say before the gods decked with flowers. It was the
farmer, O Bacchus, who with his face colored with reddish minium,
taught his untrained feet the first movements of the dance.
Page 287, l. 13. _Quippe etiam_, etc.: for even on holy days, divine
and human laws allow us to perform certain works. No religion has
forbidden to clear the channels, to raise a fence before the corn, to
lay snares for birds, to fire the thorns, and plunge in the wholesome
river a flock of bleating sheep.
Page 303, l. 2. _lex de ambitu_: law concerning the courting of
popular favor in canvassing.
Page 307, l. 4. _Eandem_, etc.: a time will come when you will bewail
that valor of yours.
Page 309, l. 7. _Spectatum_, etc.: they come to see, but they come
also to be seen.
Page 313, l. 27. _summuts artifex_: consummate artist.
Page 314, l. 3. _gravis_: serious.
Page 314, l. 4. _gravitas_: seriousness.
Page 315, l. 14. _Fescennina_, etc.: the rude Fescennine farce grew
from rites like these, where rustic taunts were hurled in alternate
verse; and the pleasing license, tolerated from year to year,
gambolled, etc.
Page 317, l. 18. _Nihil mihi_, etc.: know well that I lacked nothing
except company with whom to laugh in a friendly way and intelligently
over these things.
Page 324, l. 28. _mos maiorum_: the customs of our ancestors.
Page 327, l. 12. _Felix_, etc.: blessed is he who succeeded in knowing
the causes of events.
Page 327, l. 16. _Fortunatus_, etc.: fortunate he also who knows the
rustic gods.
Page 333, l. 6. _lectisternia_: a feast of the gods during which their
images on pillars were placed in the streets.
Page 333, l. 6. _supplicationes_: religious solemnities for
supplication.
Page 333, l. 6. _ludi_: games.
Page 339, l. 23. _numen_: godhead, deity.
Page 340, footnote 3. _idem etiam_, etc.: he says also that Jupiter is
the power of this law, eternal and immutable, which is the guide, so
to speak, of our life and the principle of our duties; a law which he
calls a fatal necessity, an eternal truth of future things.
Page 341, l. 15. _qua_: as.
Page 341, l. 26. _O qui res_, etc.: thou who rulest with eternal sway
the doings of men and gods.
Page 342, l. 1. _Olli_, etc.: the sire of men and gods, smiling to
her with that aspect wherewith he clears the tempestuous sky, gently
kissed his daughter's lips; then thus replies: Cytherea, cease from
fear; immovable to thee remain the fates of thy people.
Page 351, l. 13. _Iuppiter_, etc.: Jove reserved these shores for the
just, when he alloyed the golden age with brass; with brass, then with
iron he hardened the ages, from which there shall be a happy escape
according to my predictions.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Martial iv. 64. 12.]
[Footnote 2: _Aen_. viii. 90. foll. The Capitoline hill, which Virgil
means by "arx" a conspicuous object from the river just below the
Aventine, and would have been much more conspicuous in the poet's
time. There is a view of it from this point in Burn's _Rome and the
Campagna_, p. 184.]
[Footnote 3: Plutarch, _Cato minor_ 39. Cato was expected to land
at the commercial docks _below_ the Aventine (see below), where the
senate and magistrates were awaiting him, but with his usual rudeness
rowed past them to the navalia.]
[Footnote 4: _Aen._ viii. 363. Possibly Virgil meant to put this
dwelling on the site of the future Regia, just below the Palatine and
between it and the Forum. See Servius _ad loc._]
[Footnote 5: The modern visitor would cross by the Ponte Rotto, which
is in the same position as the ancient bridge, just below the Tiber
island.]
[Footnote 6: Livy v. 54.]
[Footnote 7: The Fratres Arvales.]