THE OLD ROMAN RELIGION
It is well known that, from the second Punic War to the revival of
Augustus, old Roman religion was falling into decay. Yet sweeping
assertions about the religious condition of any age must he taken with
some reserve. They are often unsafe about a contemporary society; they
must be still more so with regard to a society which is known to us almost
entirely through the literary remains of a comparatively small cultivated
class. Even among that limited circle, we can know only the opinions of a
few, and hardly anything of its silent members, still less of the feelings
of its women and dependents. A deep shadow rests on those remote granges
and quiet country towns in Samnium or Lombardy where character remained
untainted in the days of Nero or Domitian, and where the religion of Numa
long defied the penal edicts of Theodosius and Honorius. Lucretius, whose
mission it was to liberate men from the terrors of old Latin and Etrurian
superstition, was not contending against an imaginary foe. The sombre
enthusiasm which he throws into the conflict reveals the strength of the
enemy. The grandmother of Atticus and Terentia, the wife of Cicero, were
timorous devotees. Among the aristocratic augurs of Cicero’s day there
were firm believers in the sacred birds; and Lentulus, a confederate of
Catiline, trusted implicitly in the oracles of the Sibyl.(2708)
Still there can be no doubt that in the governing and thinking class of
the last century of the Republic, scepticism and even open contempt for
the old religion were rampant. Many causes were at work to produce this
decadence of old Roman faith. It was hardly possible for the cultivated
Roman of the days of Scipio Aemilianus, or of Cicero and Caesar, who had
fought and travelled in many lands, and studied their mythologies and
philosophies, to acquiesce in the faith of the simple farmers of Latium,
who founded the Ambarvalia and Lupercalia, who offered the entrails of a
dog to Robigus(2709) and milk to Pales and Silvanus, who worshipped
Jupiter Feretrius under the mountain oak.(2710) Since those far-off days,
Latium had come under many influences, and added many new deities to her
pantheon. The gods of Hellas had come to be identified with the gods of
Rome, or to share their honours. Syncretism had been at work in Italy
centuries before the days of Plutarch and Aristides. And the old Italian
deities, who had only a shadowy personality, with no poetry of legend to
invest them with human interest, melted into one another or into forms of
alien mythology. Greek literature became familiar to the educated from the
Hannibalic war, and a writer like Euripides, who had a great popularity,
must have influenced many by the audacious skill with which he lowered the
dignity and dimmed the radiance of the great figures of Greek legend. The
comic stage improved upon the lesson. Early in the second century Ennius
translated the Sacred Histories of Euhemerus, and familiarised his
countrymen with a theory which reduced Jupiter and Saturn, Faunus and
Hercules, to the stature of earthly kings and warriors. But Greek
philosophy was the great solvent of faith. The systems of the New Academy
and Epicurus were openly or insidiously hostile to religious belief. But
they had not so long and powerful a reign over the Roman mind as Stoicism,
and, although the earlier Stoicism extended a philosophic patronage to
popular religion, it may be doubted whether it stimulated faith. There was
indeed a certain affinity between Stoical doctrine and old Roman religion,
as there was between Stoic morals and old Roman character. In resolving
the gods by allegory and pseudo-scientific theory into various potencies
of the great World-Soul, the follower of Zeno did not seem to do much
violence to the vaguely personified abstractions of the old Latin creed.
Above all, with the exception of Panaetius, the Stoic doctors did not
throw doubt on the powers of divination and augury, so essential an
element in the religion of Rome. The power to read the future was a
natural corollary to the providence and benevolence of the gods.(2711)
Yet, although the Stoic might strive to discover the germ of truth, he did
not conceal his contempt for the husk of mythology in which it was hidden,
and for many of the practices of worship.(2712)
Quintus Scaevola and Varro applied all the forces of subtle antiquarianism
and reverence to sustain the ancestral faith. But they also drew the line
sharply between the religion of philosophy and the religion of the State.
And Varro went so far as to say that the popular religion was the creation
of early statesmen,(2713) and that if the work had to be done again, it
might be done better in the light of philosophy. The Stoic in Cicero, as
Seneca did after him, treated the tales of the gods as mere anile
superstition.(2714) It is probable that such was the tone, in their
retired debates, of the remarkable circle which surrounded Scipio and
Laelius. Panaetius, their philosophic guide, had less sympathy than any
great Stoic with popular theology.(2715) Polybius gave small place to
Providence in human affairs, and regarded Roman religion as the device of
statesmen to control the masses by mystery and terror.(2716) Yet these men
were enthusiastic champions of a system which they regarded as irrational,
but which was consecrated by immemorial antiquity. Laelius defended the
institutions of Numa in a speech of golden eloquence which moved the
admiration of Cicero, just as Symmachus defended them five centuries later
before the council of Valentinian.(2717) The divorce between esoteric
belief and official profession must have insidiously lowered the moral
tone of those who were at once thinkers and statesmen. Such a false
position struck some of the speakers in Cicero’s theological dialogues,
and it makes his own opinions an enigma.(2718) The external and
utilitarian attitude to the State religion hardly secured even punctual or
reverent conformity in the last age of the Republic. Divination and augury
had become mere engines of political intrigue, and the aristocratic
magistrate could hardly take the omens without a smile. Varro could not
repress the fear that the old religion, on which he expended such a wealth
of learning, might perish from mere negligence.(2719) The knowledge of
liturgical usage began to fade, and Varro had to recall the very names of
forgotten gods. An ancient priesthood of the highest rank remained
unfilled for seventy years.(2720) Scores of the most venerable temples
were allowed to fall into ruin,(2721) and ancient brotherhoods like the
Titii and Fratres Arvales are hardly heard of for generations before the
reforms of the Augustan age.
It is not within the scope of this work to enter minutely into the subject
of that great effort of reform or reaction. It is commonly said that the
cool imperial statesman had chiefly political ends in view, and especially
the aggrandisement and security of the principate. And certainly Ovid, who
strove to interest his countrymen in the revival of their religion, does
not display much seriousness in religion or morals. He treats as lightly
the amours of Olympus as the intrigues of the Campus Martius and the
Circus. Yet it may well have been that after the terrible orgies of civil
strife through which the Roman world had passed, Augustus was the
convinced representative of a repentant wish to return to the old paths.
The Roman character, through all wild aberrations of a trying destiny, was
an enduring type. And Augustus, if he may have indulged in impious revels
in his youth, which recall the wanton freaks of Alcibiades,(2722) had two
great characteristics of the old Roman mind, formalism and superstition.
He had an infinite faith in dreams and omens. He would begin no serious
business on the Nones.(2723) When he had to pronounce a funeral oration
over his sister, Octavia, he had a curtain drawn before the corpse, lest
the eyes of the pontiff might be polluted by the sight of death.(2724) We
may think that his religious revival was not inspired by real religious
sentiment. Yet it is well to remind ourselves that old Roman religion,
while it consecrated and solemnised the scenes and acts of human life, was
essentially a formal religion; the _opus operatum_ was the important
thing. Its business was to avert the anger or win the favour of dim
unearthly powers; it was not primarily to purify or elevate the soul.
Above all, it was interwoven from the beginning with the whole fabric of
society and the State. Four centuries after Augustus was in his grave, it
was only by a violent wrench, which inflicted infinite torture even on
pagan mystics of the Neoplatonist school, that Rome was severed from the
gods who had been the guardians and partners of her career for twelve
hundred years. The altar of Victory which Augustus had placed in the
Senate-house, and before which twelve generations of senators after him
offered their prayers for the chief of the State, the most sacred symbol
of the pagan Empire, was only removed after a fierce, obstinate struggle.
The religious revival of Augustus may not have aroused any deep religious
sentiment; that, as we shall see, was to come from a different source. But
it gave a fresh life to the formal religion of the State, which maintained
itself till within a few years before the invasion of Alaric. The title
Augustus which the new emperor assumed was one which, to the Roman mind,
associated him with the majesty of Jupiter and the sanctity of all holy
places and solemn rites.(2725) It was the beginning of that theocratic
theory of monarchy which was to culminate, under the influence of
Sun-worship, in the third century, and to propagate itself into ages far
removed from the worship of Jupiter or the Sun. Although the counsels of
Maecenas, recorded by Dion Cassius, may be apocryphal, Augustus acted in
their spirit.(2726) As triumvir he had raised a shrine to Isis,(2727) as
emperor he frowned on alien worships.(2728) His mission was to restore the
ancient religion of Latium. He burnt two thousand books of spurious
augury, retaining only the Sibylline oracles.(2729) He restored the
ancient temples, some of them, like those of Jupiter Feretrius and Juno
Sospita, coeval with the Roman State, and encouraged his friends to do the
same for other venerable monuments of devotion. The most lavish gifts of
gold and jewels were dedicated in the Capitoline temples. The precision of
ancient augury was restored. Ancient priesthoods which had been long
vacant were filled up, and the sacred colleges were raised in dignity and
wealth.(2730) Special care was taken to recall the vestals to the chaste
dignity from which they had fallen for a hundred years. Before taking his
seat, each senator was required to make a prayer, with an offering of
incense and wine before the altar. Three worships, specially connected
with the fortunes of Augustus or his race,—those of Venus Genetrix, Mars
Ultor, and the Palatine Apollo,—were revived with added splendour.(2731)
The emperor paid special attention to the ancient sacred colleges, such as
the Salii and Arvales, which went back to days far earlier than the
Republic. Amid all the cares of State, he attended their meetings
punctually. The dangerous right of co-optation was quietly withdrawn, till
the members in the end owed their appointment to the sacerdotal chief of
the State.(2732) The colleges became the most courtly and deferential
supports of the prince’s power. Prayers for his safety soon found a place
in their antique litanies. It has been said with some truth that the Salii
and Arvales seem to be thinking more of the emperors than of the gods. The
colleges had a courtly memory for all anniversaries in the imperial
family. The Arval brothers achieved the infamy of complimenting Nero on
his return after the murder of Agrippina,(2733) and made vows of equal
fervour for all the emperors of the year 69.(2734)
But it was through the chief pontificate that the emperors did most at
once to fortify and dignify their secular power, and to prolong the reign
of the old Latin religion. It was the highest religious dignity of ancient
Rome. The college of which the emperor, as Pontifex Maximus, was head
exercised a supreme and comprehensive control over the whole field of
religion.(2735) It was charged with the duty of maintaining the ancestral
purity and exactness of the national worship, and of repressing tendencies
to innovation and the adoption of alien rites. It selected the virgins who
guarded the eternal fire, and sat in judgment on erring vestals and their
betrayers. It had special jurisdiction in questions of adoption, burial,
and sacred sites.(2736) From Augustus every emperor was also chief
pontiff;(2737) even the Christian princes from Constantine to Valentinian
and Valens bear the honoured title in the inscriptions, and accepted the
pontifical robes.(2738) Thus the emperors strove in their religious
attributes to connect themselves with the sacred tradition of Numa and the
Roman kings. And, as time went on, the imperial house claimed a growing
share in the pontifical honours. Nero, indeed, had been a member of all
the sacred colleges as well as chief pontiff.(2739) But down to the reign
of Vespasian only one of the “Caesares” could belong to the sacred
college. But his sons Titus and Domitian were co-opted to the pontificate
and all the priestly colleges before his death.(2740) From Hadrian the
pontificate and all the highest sacerdotal honours were held by all
designated successors of the emperor.(2741) Antoninus Pius has the
insignia of four priestly colleges on his coins.(2742) M. Aurelius was one
of the Salian brotherhood in his eighth year,(2743) and was received into
all the colleges at nineteen.(2744) Commodus had reached the same sacred
honours before he assumed the toga,(2745) and in five years more was
Pontifex Maximus. Thus deeply had the policy of Augustus sunk into the
minds of his successors. It is little wonder that never in the great days
of the Republic were the forms of ancient religion more scrupulously
observed than in the reign of M. Aurelius.(2746)
Private opinion after the Augustan revival greatly varied as to matters of
faith. Men like the elder Pliny and Seneca scoffed at anthropomorphic
religion. Men like Juvenal and Tacitus maintained a wavering attitude,
with probably a receding faith. Others like Suetonius were rapacious
collectors of every scrap of the miraculous. The emperors who succeeded
Augustus were, with the exception of Nero, loyal supporters and protectors
of the religion of the State. Tiberius, although personally careless of
religion, displayed a scrupulous respect for ancient usage in filling up
the ancient priesthoods, and in guarding the Sibylline verses from
interpolations.(2747) He also frowned on the imported rites of
Egypt.(2748) Claudius, at once pedantic and superstitious, revived
venerable rites of the days of Tullus Hostilius, and, when an ill-omened
bird alighted on the temple of Jupiter, as supreme pontiff, the emperor
pronounced the solemn form of expiation before the assembled people.(2749)
Nero, and the Neronian competitors for the Empire, in the fierce conflict
which followed his death, were, indeed, often, though not always, careless
of ancient rite, but they were all the slaves of superstition.(2750) The
Flavians and Antonines were religious conservatives of the spirit of
Augustus. There is a monument to Vespasian of the year 78 A.D. as “the
restorer of temples and public ceremonies.”(2751) The restoration of the
Capitol, which had been burned down in the civil war, was one of the first
tasks of his reign. And the ceremony made such an impression on the
imagination of the youthful Tacitus, that he has recorded with studied
care the stately and accurate ritual of olden time which was observed by
the emperor.(2752) Domitian carried on the restoration on even a more
splendid scale; he was a devotee of Minerva, and a rigorous vindicator of
old ascetic religious law.(2753) The emperor Hadrian, whose character is
an enigma of contrasts, to judge by his last famous _jeu d’esprit_ on his
death-bed, probably died a sceptic. Yet his biographer tells us that he
was a careful guardian of the ancient ritual.(2754) The archaistic fashion
in literary taste, which had begun in the first century, and which
culminated in Hadrian’s reign, favoured and harmonised with a scrupulous
observance of ancient forms in religion.(2755) The genius of one too early
taken away has done more than a legion of historic critics to picture for
us the sad, dutiful piety of a spirit of the Antonine age, steeped in
philosophies which made the passing moment of vivid artistic perception
the great end of life, yet still instinct with the old Roman love of
immemorial forms at the harvest gathering or the yearly offering to the
dead members of the household.(2756) The cheerless negation of Epicurus,
and the equally withering theology of the Stoics, could not weaken in
Roman hearts the spell of ancestral pieties which clustered round the
vault near the grey old country house of the race, looking down on the
Tyrrhene sea, or the awe of ancient grove or spring sacred to Silvanus and
the Nymphs, or the calm, chastened joy in a ritual in which every act was
dictated by a love of ceremonial cleanness and exactness, and redolent of
an immemorial past. In such a household, and in such an atmosphere, the
two great Antonines were reared. The first, who was before all else an
honest country gentleman, fond of hunting, fishing, and the gladness of
the vintage at Lorium, never failed to perform all due sacrifices unless
he was ill. His coins bear the pictured legends of the infancy of
Rome.(2757) M. Aurelius was famous as a boy for his knowledge of Roman
ritual. Enrolled in the college of the Salii in his eighth year, he
performed all its sacred offices with perfect composure, reciting from
memory, with no one to dictate the form, every word of the ancient liturgy
which had in his generation become almost unintelligible.(2758) In the
terror of the Marcomannic invasion he delayed his departure for the seat
of war to summon around him all the priests; he had the city purified in
solemn, decorous fashion, not excluding even the rites of alien lands; and
for seven days the images of the gods were feasted on their couches along
all the streets.(2759)
The emperors from Augustus found religion a potent ally of sovereignty,
and the example of the master of the world was a great force. Yet it may
well be doubted whether, in the matter of religious conservatism, the
emperors were not rather following than leading public opinion. Gods were
in those times being created by the score; apotheosis was in the air from
the days of Nero to the days of the Severi. Petronius, with an
exaggeration which has a certain foundation in fact, affirms that in
Croton you could more readily light upon a god than on a man.(2760) The
elder Pliny uses almost the same strength of language. The grumbler in
Lucian indignantly complains of the fashion in which the ancient gods of
Olympus are being overshadowed by the divine _parvenus_ of every clime.
And, as we shall presently see, the inscriptions reveal an immense
propaganda of worships in tone and spirit apparently hostile to the old
religion of the Latin race. Yet the inscriptions also show that the old
gods had really little to fear from the new. A survey of the index to
almost any volume of the Corpus will convince the student that the Trinity
of the Capitol,—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva,—that Hercules and Silvanus,
the Nymphs, Semo Sancus and Dea Dia, Mars and Fortuna, so far from being
neglected, were apparently more popular than ever.(2761) In an age of
growing monotheism the King of the gods was, of course, still supreme in
his old ascendency. Jupiter is worshipped under many titles; he is often
coupled or identified with some provincial deity of ancient fame.(2762)
But Jupiter is everywhere. The Lord of the thunder and the tempest has
shrines on the high passes of the Apennines or the Alps,(2763) and
soldiers or travellers leave the memorials of their gratitude for his
protection on perilous journeys.(2764) The women of Campanian towns go in
procession to implore him to send rain.(2765) Antoninus Pius built a
temple to Juno Sospita of Lanuvium, where the goddess had a sacred grove,
and a worship of great antiquity.(2766) The Quinquatria of Minerva were
not only celebrated with special honour by Domitian, but by large and
powerful classes who owned her divine patronage, physicians and artists,
orators and poets.(2767) Some of the old Latin deities seem to have even
grown in popularity under the early Empire. Hercules, the god of plenty,
strong truth, and good faith, whose legend is intertwined with the most
venerable names in Roman story, has his altars and monuments
everywhere.(2768) Combining with his own native Latin character the poetic
prestige of his brother of Greek legend, he became the symbol of
world-wide conquest, and was associated in the end with the triumph of the
“unconquered” Mithra. His image is stamped upon the coins of some of the
emperors. Septimius Severus, Caracalla, and Diocletian took him for their
great divine patron and ensample.(2769) Silvanus, too, the god of the
primeval forest, and, when the forest had receded, the god of the shepherd
and the farmer, the guardian of boundaries, acquired a strange vogue in
what was eminently an age of cities. One is apt, however, to forget
sometimes that it was an age which had also a charming country life. A
Roman cavalry officer in Britain has left a memorial of his gratitude to
Silvanus for the capture of a wild boar of surpassing size and
strength,(2770) which had long defied the hunter. In one of the forest
cantons of the Alps a procurator of the imperial estates inscribed his
gratitude in a pretty set of verses to the god of the wilds, whose image
was enshrined in the fork of a sacred ash.(2771) It is the record of many
a day passed in lonely forest tracks, coupled with a prayer to be restored
safely to Italian fields and the gardens of Rome. The nymphs and river
gods had all their old honours. Chapels and hostelries, in the days of
Pliny, rose on the banks of the Clitumnus, where the votaries easily
combined pleasure with religious duty. The nymphs receive votive thanks
for the discovery of hidden springs, or for the reappearance of some
fountain long dried up.(2772) Aesculapius, who had been naturalised in
Italy since the beginning of the third century B.C., sprang to a foremost
place in the age of the Antonines. Whether it was “an age of
valetudinarians,” as has been said, may be doubtful; but it was an age
eagerly in quest of the health which so often comes from the quiet mind.
Whatever we may think of the powers of the old Olympians, there can be no
doubt about the beneficent influence of the god of Epidaurus. He was
summoned to Rome 300 years before Christ, and obtained a home in the
island in the Tiber, where for ages he gave his succour in dreams. His
worship spread far and wide, and was one of the last to succumb to the
advance of the Church.(2773)
The unassailable permanence of the old religion may perhaps be still more
vividly realised in the long unbroken life of sacred colleges, such as the
Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The Arval brotherhood was probably the
oldest sacred corporation of Latium, as its liturgy, preserved in the Acta
from the reign of Augustus to that of Gordian, is the oldest specimen of
the Latin language.(2774) According to the legend, the first members were
the twelve sons of Acca Larentia, the foster-mother of Romulus, and
Romulus himself first held the dignity of master of the brotherhood.(2775)
Its patron goddess, Dea Dia,(2776) was, as her very name suggests, one of
those dim shadowy conceptions dear to old Roman awe, who was worshipped in
the still solitude of ancient groves, on whose trunks no axe of iron might
ever ring,(2777) a power as elusive and multiform to picturing fancy as
the secret forces which shot up the corn ear from the furrow. The whole
tone of the antique ritual savours of a time when the Latin race was a
tribe of farmers, believing with a simple faith that the yearly increase
of their fields depended on the favour of secret unearthly powers. The
meetings of the college took place on three days in May, the precise dates
being fixed and solemnly announced by their master on the 3rd of
January.(2778) The festival began and ended in the master’s house at Rome,
the intermediate day being spent in a sacred grove on the right bank of
the Tiber, about four miles from the city. There was much feasting, at
which the brethren were attended by the Camilli, four sons of high-born
senators. Corn of the new and the preceding year was touched and blessed;
libations and incense were offered to the goddess, and all the rites were
performed with many changes of costume, which were rigidly observed.(2779)
In the ceremonies which took place in the grove, an expiatory sacrifice of
two porkers and a white cow was always offered, to atone for the use of
any iron implement, or other infringement of the ancient rubric.(2780) Fat
lambs were offered in sacrifice to Dea Dia, and ancient earthen vessels of
rude make, resembling those of the age of Numa, were adored upon the
altar.(2781) Ears of corn, plucked in some neighbouring field, were
blessed and passed from the hand of one member to another, and back again
in reverse order, and, at last, in the closed temple, along with solemn
dancing, the famous chant was intoned from ancient scrolls, the words of
which had long become strange even to the antiquary. After another meal in
the hall of the brotherhood, the members passed on to the circus and gave
the signal for the races to begin.(2782)
This ritual, so little heard of before the time of Augustus, is chiefly
known to us from the Acta which have been recovered from the site of the
ancient grove. The monuments of it extend from the reign of Augustus to
the year 241 A.D.(2783) Members of the highest aristocracy and princes of
the imperial house appear on its lists. Its membership was a high
distinction, and was sometimes conferred by the potent recommendation of
the emperor.(2784) The college evidently became a great support of the
imperial power.
The emperors were elected _magistri_ of the College, and we can read that
Caligula, Nero, Vespasian, and Titus were present at its meetings. In the
opening days of January the most solemn vows are made in old Roman fashion
for the emperor’s safety, to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, to Salus and Dea
Dia, and they are duly paid by offerings of oxen with gilded horns.(2785)
So servile or so devoted to the throne was the brotherhood, that their
prayers were offered with equal fervour for three emperors in the awful
year 69 A.D.(2786) The vows made for Galba in the first week of January
were alertly transferred to the cause of Otho the day after Galba’s
murder.(2787) The college met to sacrifice in honour of Otho’s pontificate
on the day (March 14) on which he set out to meet his doom in the battle
on the Po. Thirteen days after his death, while the spring air was still
tainted with the rotting heaps on the plain of Bedriacum, vows as fervent
or as politic were registered for Vitellius. In the summer of the
following year, the arrival of Vespasian in the capital was celebrated by
the Arval brothers with sacrifices to Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Fortuna
Redux.(2788)
The college, as a matter of course, paid due honour to the emperor’s
birthday and all important anniversaries in his family. It is interesting
to see how for years the Neronian circle, the Othos and Vitellii, along
with Valerii and Cornelii, appear in all the records of the college.(2789)
It was apparently devoted to Nero. The brothers celebrate his birthday and
all the civic and sacerdotal honours heaped upon him.(2790) They make vows
for his wife Octavia, and soon after, for the safety of Poppaea in
childbirth. The matricide dreaded to return from Campania after his
unnatural crime, but his admirers knew well the abasement of the Roman
aristocracy, and promised him an enthusiastic reception. The Arval
brotherhood, which then included a Regulus and a Memmius, redeemed the
promise, and voted costly sacrifices for his safe restoration to the
capital.(2791) They execrate the secret plots against his sacred person,
and offer thanksgiving for the detection of the Pisonian conspiracy.(2792)
The extant prayers and congratulations for the safety of Vespasian are
much more quiet and restrained than those for his cruel son
Domitian.(2793) The public joy at Domitian’s safe return from ambiguous
victories in Germany or Dacia is faithfully re-echoed, and effusive
supplications are recorded for his safety from all peril and for the
eternity of the Empire whose bounds he has enlarged. There is a sincerer
tone in the prayers, in the spring of 101, for the safe return of Trajan,
when he was setting out for his first campaign on the Danube, and on his
home-coming four years later.(2794) The Arval records of Hadrian’s reign
are chiefly noteworthy for his letters to the college, recommending his
friends for election.(2795) In the reign of Antoninus Pius the Acta
register those perfervid acclamations which meet us in the later Augustan
histories:(2796)—“O nos felices qui te Imperatorem videmus; Di te servent
in perpetuo; juvenis triumphis, senex Imperator!” The young M. Aurelius is
first mentioned in 155 A.D. Probably the sincerest utterance in the Arval
liturgies is the petition for his safety, and that of L. Verus, from peril
in the years when the Quadi and Marcomanni swept down through Rhaetia and
the Julian Alps to the shores of the Adriatic.(2797)
It was thus that the antique ritual of a rustic brotherhood was converted
into a potent support of the imperial power. No part of the Augustan
revival was perhaps so successful. Probably few of the emperors, or of the
aristocratic brothers who intoned the litany for the safety of the
imperial house, had much faith in its efficacy. But the ceremony linked
the principate with the most venerable traditions of Latium, and with
Romulus the first master of the college. When we read the minute and
formal record of these coarse sacrifices and rude, fantastic rites, with
the chanting of prayers no longer understood, we are amazed at the
prolongation for so many ages of religious ideas which the Roman mind
might appear to have outgrown. Yet in such inquiries there is often a
danger of treating society as a uniform mass, moving together along the
same lines, and permeated through all its strata by the same influences.
In another chapter we have shown that the masses were probably never so
superstitious as in the second century. And the singular thing is that the
influx of foreign religions, due to the wide conquests of Rome, never to
the end seems to have shaken the supreme attachment of the people to their
ancient gods. It is true that the drift towards monotheism was felt even
among the crowd. But while the educated might find expression for that
tendency in the adoration of Isis or the Sun, the dim monotheism of the
people turned to the glorification of Jupiter. Dedications to him are the
most numerous in all lands. He is often linked with other gods or all the
gods,(2798) but he is always supreme. And, while he is the lord of tempest
and thunder,(2799) he is also addressed by epithets which show that he is
becoming a moral and spiritual power. On many a stone he appears as the
governor and preserver of all things, monitor, guardian, and heavenly
patron, highest and best of the heavenly hierarchy.(2800) Yet it is
equally clear that other gods are worshipped in the same spirit as of old.
Roman religion was essentially practical. Prayer and vow were the means to
win temporal blessings. The gods were expected, in return for worship, to
be of use to the devotee. It is evident from the inscriptions that this
conception of religion was as prevalent in the age of the Antonines, or of
the oriental princes, as it was under the Republic. The sailor still
offers thanks for his preservation to Neptune and the gods of the
sea.(2801) The successful merchant still honours Mercury.(2802) Minerva
Memor receives thanks for succour in sickness. A lady of Placentia even
pays her vows for the recovery of her hair.(2803) The reappearance of a
hidden spring is still attributed to the grace of the Nymphs.(2804) And in
many a temple the healing power of Aesculapius is acknowledged by grateful
devotees.(2805)
A more difficult problem is presented by the attitude of the cultivated
class to the old mythologies. Since the days of Xenophanes and of Plato,
philosophy had revolted against the degradation of the Divine character by
ancient legend. It had taught for ages the unity of the mysterious Power
or Goodness which lies behind the shifting scene of sense. Moreover,
philosophy for generations had deserted the heights of speculative
inquiry, and addressed itself to the task of applying the spiritual truth
which the schools had won to the problems of practical religion and human
life. Alike in Cicero, in Seneca, in Plutarch, and M. Aurelius, there are
conceptions of God and the worship due to Him, of prayer, of the relation
of conduct to religion, which seem irreconcilable with conformity to the
old religion of Rome. How could a man, nourished on such spiritual ideas
and refined by a thousand years of growing culture, take part in a gross
materialistic worship, and even gallantly defend it against all
assailants?
The conformity of highly instructed minds to ancient systems which their
reason has outgrown is not always to be explained by the easy imputation
of dishonesty. And that explanation is even less admissible in ancient
than in modern times. Roman religion did not demand any profession of
faith in any theory of the unseen; all it required was ceremonial purity
and exactness. And the Roman world was never scandalised by the spectacle
of a notorious sceptic or libertine holding the office of chief pontiff.
If a man were more scrupulous himself, philosophy, whether of the Porch or
the Academy, came to his aid. It would tell him that frail humanity,
unable to comprehend the Infinite God, had parcelled out and detached his
various powers and virtues, which it adored under material forms according
to its varying needs.(2806) Or it found a place for all the gods of
heathendom, as ministering or mediating spirits in the vast abyss which
separates us from the unapproachable and Infinite Spirit.(2807) If the
legends which had gathered around the popular gods offended a tender moral
sense, men were taught that the apparent grossness was an allegorical
husk, or a freak of poetic fancy which concealed a wholesome truth. Thus a
pantheist or monotheist, who would never have created such a religious
system for himself, was trained to cultivate a double self in matters of
religion, to worship reverently with the crowd, and to believe with Zeno
or with Plato.
The heathen champion in the dialogue of Minucius Felix maintains that, in
the dimness and uncertainty of things, the safest course is to hold fast
to the gods of our fathers.(2808) The inclination of the sceptic was
fortified by the conservative instinct of the Latin race and its love of
precedent and precision of form. Moreover the religion of Numa was
probably more than any other involved and intertwined with the whole life
of the people. It penetrated the whole fabric of society; it consecrated
and dignified every public function, and every act or incident of private
life. To desert the ancient gods was to cut oneself off from Roman
society, as the Christians were sternly made to feel. No established
Church in modern Christendom has probably ever so succeeded in identifying
itself with the national life in all its aspects. Alike under the Republic
and under the Empire, religion was inseparable from patriotism. The
imperial pontiff was bound to watch over the purity and continuity of the
Latin rites. He might be a scoffer like Nero, or a spiritually-minded
Stoic like M. Aurelius, an Isiac devotee like Commodus, or devoted to the
Syrian worships like the Oriental princes of the third century. But he
took his duties seriously. He would dance with the Salii, or accept with
gratitude the mastership of the Arval brotherhood, or order a
_lectisternium_ to ward off a pestilence or a menacing invasion. The
imperial colleges still held their meetings on the eve of the revolution
of Theodosius. Antiquarian nobles still discussed nice questions of ritual
in the reign of Honorius. At the end of the fifth century the Lupercalia
were still celebrated with coarse, half-savage rites which went back to
the prehistoric times.(2809) The imperial policy, founded by Augustus, no
doubt inspired much of this conformity. But old Roman sentiment, the
passion expressed with such moving eloquence by Symmachus, to feel himself
in touch with a distant past(2810) through a chain of unbroken continuity,
was the great support of the State religion in the fourth century as in
the first. Yet, among the great nobles who were its last
champions—Flavianus, Praetextatus, or Volusianus—there was a spiritual
craving for which the religion provided little satisfaction. They sought
it in the rites and mysteries of Eastern lands which had little in common
with the old Roman religious sentiment. In these alien rites they found a
new religious atmosphere. The priest, set apart from the world, with his
life-long obligations and the daily offices in the shrine, becomes in some
way a minister to the spiritual life of his flock. Instead of cold
ceremonial observance, ecstatic emotion is aroused, often to a degree
which was perilous to character. Through a series of sacraments, with
ascetic preparation for them, the votary rose under priestly guidance to
some vision of the eternal world, with a new conception of sin; this life
and the next were linked in a moral sequence, with tremendous issues of
endless beatitude or endless degradation. In a temple of Magna Mater,
Isis, or Mithra in the reign of Julian, we are far away from the worship
of the Lares and the offering of a heifer to Dea Dia in the grove on the
Tiber. We are travelling towards the spiritual mystery and sacramental
consolations of the mediaeval Church.