|
Roman Empire | Roman Religious Practices
Prev
| Next
| Contents
PREFACE
Lord Gifford in founding his lectureship directed that the lectures
should be public and popular, i.e. not restricted to members of a
University. Accordingly in lecturing I endeavoured to make myself
intelligible to a general audience by avoiding much technical discussion
and controversial matter, and by keeping to the plan of describing in
outline the development and decay of the religion of the Roman
City-state. And on the whole I have thought it better to keep to this
principle in publishing the lectures; they are printed for the most part
much as they were delivered, and without footnotes, but at the end of
each lecture students of the subject will find the notes referred to by
the numbers in the text, containing such further information or
discussion as has seemed desirable. My model in this method has been the
admirable lectures of Prof. Cumont on "les Religions Orientales dans le
Paganisme Romain."
I wish to make two remarks about the subject-matter of the lectures.
First, the idea running through them is that the primitive religious (or
magico-religious) instinct, which was the germ of the religion of the
historical Romans, was gradually atrophied by over-elaboration of
ritual, but showed itself again in strange forms from the period of the
Punic wars onwards. For this religious instinct I have used the Latin
word religio, as I have explained in the Transactions of the Third
International Congress for the History of Religions, vol. ii. p. 169
foll. I am, however, well aware that some scholars take a different view
of the original meaning of this famous word, which has been much
discussed since I formed my plan of lecturing. But I do not think that
those who differ from me on this point will find that my general
argument is seriously affected one way or another by my use of the word.
Secondly, while I have been at work on the lectures, the idea seems to
have been slowly gaining ground that the patrician religion of the early
City-state, which became so highly formalised, so clean and austere, and
eventually so political, was really the religion of an invading race,
like that of the Achaeans in Greece, engrafted on the religion of a
primitive and less civilised population. I have not definitely adopted
this idea; but I am inclined to think that a good deal of what I have
said in the earlier lectures may be found to support it. Once only, in
Lecture XVII., I have used it myself to support a hypothesis there
advanced.
I have retained the familiar English spelling of certain divine names,
e.g. Jupiter (instead of Iuppiter), as less startling to British
readers.
I wish to express my very deep obligations to the works of Prof. Wissowa
and Dr. J. G. Frazer, and also to Mr. R. R. Marett, who gave me useful
personal help in my second and third lectures. From Prof. Wissowa and
Dr. Frazer I have had the misfortune to differ on one or two points; but
"difference of opinion is the salt of life," as a great scholar said to
me not long ago. In reading the proofs I have had much kind and valuable
help from my Oxford friends Mr. Cyril Bailey and Mr. A. S. L.
Farquharson, who have read certain parts of the work, and to whose
suggestions I am greatly indebted. The whole has been read through by my
old pupil Mr. Hugh Parr, now of Clifton College, to whom my best thanks
are due for his timely discovery of many misprints and awkward
expressions. The loyalty and goodwill of my old Oxford pupils never seem
to fail me.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|