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Roman Empire | Roman Religious Practices
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LECTURE XI - CONTACT OF THE OLD AND NEW IN RELIGION
I said at the beginning of my first lecture that Roman religious
experience can be summed up in two stories. The first of these was the
story of the way in which a strong primitive religious instinct, the
desire to put yourself in right relation with the Power manifesting
itself in the universe, religio as the Romans called it, was gradually
soothed and satisfied under the formalising influence of the settled
life of the agricultural family, and still more so under the organising
genius of the early religious rulers of the City-state. This story I
tried to tell in the last few lectures. The second story was to be that
of the gradual discovery of the inadequacy of this early formalised and
organised religion to cope with what we may call new religious
experience; that is, with the difficulties and perils met with by the
Roman people in their extraordinary advance in the world, and with the
new ideas of religion and morals which broke in on them in the course of
their contact with other peoples. This story I wish to tell in the
present course of lectures. It is a long and complicated one, including
the introduction of new rites and ideas of the divine, the anxious
attempts of the religious authorities to put off the evil day by
stretching to the uttermost the capacity of the old forms, and the final
victory of the new ideas as Roman life and thought became gradually
hellenised.
[*] This Lecture was the first of a second and separate
course.
I propose to divide the story thus. In the latter part of this first
lecture I will deal with the first introduction of Greek rites into the
State worship under the directions of the so-called Sibylline books.
Then I will turn to the efforts of the lay priesthoods, pontifices and
augurs, to meet the calls of new experience by formalising the old
religion still more completely in the name of the State, until it became
a mere skeleton of dry bones, without life and power. That will bring us
to the great turning-point in Roman history, the war with Hannibal, to
the religious history of which I shall devote my fourth lecture; and the
fifth will pursue the subject into the century that followed. In the
next lecture I hope to sketch the influence on Roman religious ideas of
the Stoic school of philosophy, and in the seventh to discuss, so far as
I may be able, the tendency towards mysticism prevalent in the last
period of the life of the Republic. My eighth lecture I intend to devote
to the noble attempt of Virgil to combine religion, legend, philosophy,
and consummate art in a splendid appeal to the conscience of the Roman
of that day. Then I turn to the more practical attempt of Augustus to
revive the dying embers of the old religion; and in my last lecture I
shall try to estimate the contribution, such as it was, of the religious
experience we have been discussing, to the early Christian church.
We shall shortly hear so much of petrifaction and disintegration, that
it may be as well, before I actually begin my story, to convince
ourselves that the old religion was in its peculiar way a real
expression of religious feeling, and not merely a set of meaningless
conventions and formulae. It was the positive belief of the later Romans
that both they and their ancestors were religiosissimi mortales,[510]
full to the brim, that is, of religious instinct, and most scrupulous in
fulfilling its claims upon them; for the word religio had come, by the
time (and probably long before the time) when it was used by men of
letters, to mean the fulfilment of ritualistic obligation quite as much
as the anxious feeling which had originally suggested it.[511] Cicero,
writing in no rhetorical mood, declared that, as compared with other
peoples, the Romans were far superior "in religione, id est cultu."[512]
This is in his work on the nature of the gods; in an oration he
naturally puts it more strongly: "We have overcome all the nations of
the world, because we have realised that the world is directed and
governed by the will of the gods."[513] Sallust, Livy, and other Roman
prose writers have said much the same thing[514]; the Aeneid as a
whole might be adduced as evidence, and in a less degree all the poets
of the Augustan age. Foreigners, too, were struck with the strange
phenomenon, in an age of philosophic doubt. Polybius in the second
century B.C. declared his opinion that what was reckoned among other
peoples as a thing to be blamed, deisidaimonia, both in public and
private life, was really what was holding together the Roman state.[515]
Even in the wild century that followed, Posidonius could repeat the
assertion of Polybius, and in the age of Augustus, Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, then resident at Rome, looking back on the early history
of Rome, stated his conviction that one needed to know the pietas of
the Romans in order to understand their wonderful career of
conquest.[516] Aulus Gellius, in a curious passage in which he notes
that the Romans had no deity to whose activity they could with
certainty ascribe earthquakes, describes them as "in constituendis
religionibus atque in dis immortalibus animadvertendis castissimi
cautissimique,"--a rhetorical but happy conjunction of epithets. He
means that they would order religious rites, though ignorant of the
numen to whom they were due.[517]
It might be argued that these later writers knew really little or
nothing about the primitive Romans, and that these passages only prove
that this people had an extraordinary scrupulosity about forms and
ceremonies in this as in other departments of action. But the argument
will not hold; the survival of all this formalism into an age of
disintegration really proves beyond a doubt that there must have been a
time when these forms really expressed anxieties, fears, convictions,
the earliest germs of conscience.
May we not take the constant occurrence in literature of such phrases as
dis faventibus, dis iuvantibus or volentibus, as evidence of an
idea deeply rooted at one time in the Roman mind, that nothing should be
undertaken until the will of the deities concerned had been ascertained
and that early form of conscience satisfied? Let us remember that the
whole story of the Aeneid is one of the bending of the will of the
hero, as a type of the ideal Roman, to the ascertainable will of the
powers in the universe.
And we have abundant evidence that as a matter of fact the good-will of
the divine inhabitants of house and city was asked for whenever any kind
of work was undertaken,--even the ordinary routine work of the farm or
of government. In the household every morning some offering with prayer
was made to the Lar familiaris in historical times, and again before the
cena, the chief meal of the day.[518] On Kalends, Nones, Ides, and on
all dies festi a corona was placed on the hearth, and prayer was
made to the Lar; we know that this was so in the old Roman home, because
in the second century B.C. Cato instructs the vilicus to discharge
these duties on behalf of the absent or non-resident owner.[519] Before
the flocks were taken out to summer pasture, and doubtless when they
returned, some religious service (so we should call it) was held,[520]
just as in the Catholic cantons of Switzerland the blessing of God is
asked when the cows first ascend to the alpine pastures, and again when
they leave them for the valleys. Before a journey the later Romans
prayed for good fortune;[521] in the old times travelling was of course
unusual, and when it did occur the traveller was surrounded by so many
spiritual as well as material dangers that special religious measures
must have been taken, as by fetials or armies on entering foreign
territory. The survival of the same kind of belief and practice is also
seen in private life in the religious commendations of some authors at
the outset of their literary work; Varro, for example, at the beginning
of his work on agriculture, calls on all the agrarian deities (iis deis
ad venerationem advocatis) before he goes on to mention even the
bibliography of his subject.[522] Livy in the last sentence of his
preface would fain imitate the poets in calling on the gods to bless and
favour his undertaking. And in all time of their tribulation, even if
not in all time of their wealth, the pious Romans sought help from the
deities from whom help might be expected; if, at least, the many
instances occurring in Roman poetry may point to a practice of the
ordinary individual and family.[523] So too, if we may judge by many
passages in the plays of Plautus and Terence,[524]--if here we have
genuine Roman usage, as is probable,--the feeling of dependence on a
Power manifesting itself in the affairs of daily life is shown also in
the expression of thankfulness which followed success or escape from
peril. Gratitude was not a prominent characteristic of the Roman, but I
have already remarked on the presence of it in the practice of the
votum, and there is at least some evidence that it was recognised as
due to benignant deities as well as human beings.[525]
In public life, throughout Roman history, the forms of religious rites
were maintained on all important occasions. When Varro wrote a little
manual of Senatorial procedure for the benefit of the inexperienced
Pompeius when consul in 70 B.C., he was careful to mention the
preliminary sacrifice and auspicatio, performed by the presiding
magistrate, who also had to see that the business de rebus divinis
came first on the paper of agenda.[526] At one time every speaker
invoked the gods at the beginning of his oration, as well indeed he
might in a situation so unusual and trying for a Roman before the days
of Greek education; and the earliest speeches preserved in the literary
age, e.g. those of Cato and the Gracchi, retained the religious
exordium.[527] We have a trace of the Gracchan practice in a famous
passage at the end of the work called Rhetorica ad Herennium of
circ. 82 B.C., where the death of Ti. Gracchus is graphically
described.[528] But there is no need to multiply examples of public
religious formalism on occasions of all kinds, on entering on an office,
founding a colony, leaving Rome for a provincia, and so on; some of them
I have already mentioned, others are familiar to all classical students.
So let us not hesitate for a moment to give this people credit for their
religiousness. True, their neighbours, Greeks like Polybius, approved of
it only with an ironical smile on their lips, as we may smile at the
devoted formalism of extreme Catholic or Protestant, while we
secretly--if we have some sympathy with strangely varying human
nature--admire the confidence and regularity that we cannot ourselves
claim. At the moment where I have thus paused before beginning my second
story, at the end, that is, of the regal period, I believe that this
religious system, though perhaps beginning to harden, still meant a
profound belief in the Power thus manifested in many forms, and an
ardent and effective desire to be in right relation to it. I believe
that it contained the germ of a living and fruitful growth; but that
growth was at this very moment arrested by the beginning of a process of
which I shall have much to say in the next two or three lectures.
But it is hard to realise this better side of the religion of a hard and
practical people, and all the more so since it is the worse side that is
almost always presented to us in modern books. It is hard to realise
that it was not merely a system of insurance, so to speak, against all
kinds of material evils,--and here again all the more so because there
is a tendency just now to reduce both religion and law to an origin in
magic, leaving the religious instinct, the feeling of dependence, the
progenitor of conscience, quite out of account. One must indeed be
thoroughly familiar with Roman literature and antiquities to overcome
these difficulties, to discover the spiritual residuum in the Roman
character beneath all its hardness and utilitarianism. Before we pass on
to the task before us, let me make two suggestions for the help of those
who would endeavour to find this spiritual residuum. The first is that
they should consider the history and true meaning of three great words
which Latin language has bequeathed to modern speech,--religio, the
feeling of awe, taking practical shape in the performance of authorised
ceremonies; sacrum, that which by authoritative usage is made over
without reserve to the divine inhabitants of the city; and last but not
least, pietas, the sense of duty to god and man alike, to all divine
and human beings having an authorised claim upon you. And this word
pietas shall introduce my second suggestion--that there is no better
way of getting to understand the spirit of the Roman religion than by
continual study of the Aeneid, where the hero is the ideal Roman,
pius in the best and widest sense. What makes the Aeneid so helpful
in this way is the poet's intimate and sympathetic knowledge of the
religious ideas of the Italians, in which we may see reflected those of
the Roman of the age we are now dealing with: his love too of antiquity
and of all ancient rites and legends; and his conviction that the great
work of Rome in the world had been achieved not only by virtus but by
pietas. What has been won by virtus must be preserved by pietas,
by the sense of duty in family and State,--that is the moral of the
Aeneid. In no other work of Roman genius is this idea found in
anything like the same degree of prominence and consistency; and when a
student has steeped his mind well in the details of the Roman worship,
and begins to weary of what must seem its soulless Pharisaism, let him
take up the Aeneid and read it right through for the story and the
characters. I will venture to say that he will think better both of the
Romans and their poet than he ever did before. But of the Aeneid I
shall have more to say later on; at present let us turn to the less
inspiring topics which must occupy us for the next few lectures.
The last fact of Roman religious history which I mentioned last year was
the building of the great Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and
Minerva, and I then explained why this constituted a religious
revolution. The next temple of which tradition tells us was destined for
another trias, Ceres, Liber, and Libera; the traditional date was 493
B.C., the cause a famine, and the site was at the foot of the Aventine,
the plebeian quarter outside the pomoerium, close to the river where
corn-ships might be moored.[529] Ceres, Liber, and Libera are plainly
neither more nor less than the three Greek corn deities, Demeter,
Dionysus, and Persephone, in a Latin form,[530] whose worship was
prominent in South Italy and Sicily; and unless we throw tradition
overboard entirely, as indeed has often been done, the inference is
obvious that this trias came from the Greeks of the south with an
importation of corn to relieve a famine which pressed especially on the
plebs. It is a fact that the temple and its cult remained always closely
connected with the plebs; they were under the charge of the plebeian
aediles, who also in historical times had the care of the corn-supply
necessary for the city population.[531] Thus, though we need not accept
in full Livy's statement that the very next year corn was imported from
Etruria, Cumae, and Sicily, it cannot be denied that there is a strong
consensus in the various traditions about the temple, which taken
together suggest a Greek, non-patrician, and early origin. That the cult
had at all times a Greek character is undisputed fact.
But I am not so much concerned with the temple itself as with the date
and the manner of its foundation. It was said to have been founded in
the year 496, and dedicated in 493, in obedience to directions found in
"the Sibylline books," which books, according to the well-known
tradition, had been acquired by the last Tarquin, after some haggling,
from an old woman, and placed in the charge of duoviri sacris
faciundis. The story itself is worthless in detail; but the question
for us is whether it can be taken as showing that the Sibylline
influence then pervading the Greek world gained a footing at Rome in any
form so early as this. Was the temple really founded in 496, or at some
time thereabout? And was it founded in obedience to some Sibylline
direction? These questions are of real importance, for upon our answer
to them depends the date of the beginning of a gradual metamorphosis of
the Roman religious practice. The so-called Sibylline books and their
keepers were responsible, as we shall see directly, for the introduction
at Rome of what was known as the Graecus ritus,--for the foundation of
temples to deities of Greek origin, and for other rites which initiated
an entirely new type of religious feeling. We need to be sure when all
this began.
In the first place, so far as I can judge, it is almost impossible to
dissociate the origin of the temple from Sibylline influence. As we have
seen, the cult was Greek, and all such Greek cults of later times were
introduced by the keepers of the Sibylline books; and further, the
records of temple foundations were among the most carefully preserved
facts in Roman annals.[532] I think it is hardly possible to suppose
that a cult which came, not from Latium or southern Etruria, like those
of Diana, Minerva, and the Capitoline deities, but from some Greek
region to the south, and probably from Sicily, could have been
introduced by Roman authorities unaided by Greek influence. If that be
so, and if we can show that the temple really belongs to this early age,
then we have a strong probability that the Sibylline influence gained a
footing at Rome at the very beginning of the republican period.[533]
There is one curious fact in connection with the temple that in my
opinion goes far to prove that the traditional date is not far out.
Pliny tells us explicitly that the two Greek artists who decorated the
temple, Damophilus and Gorgasus, inscribed their names on the walls, and
he added that the work of the former would be found on the right and
that of the latter on the left.[534] Nothing more is known about them;
but I am assured that the fact that they signed their names and added
these statements suits the character of Greek art in the archaic age 580
to 450 B.C. No signatures of artists are known earlier than about 580;
then comes a period when signatures are found, sometimes with statements
such as these. And lastly, about 450, we begin to find simple signatures
without any other words.[535] Thus the presumption is a strong one that
the temple belongs to a time earlier than 450; and if that be so, then I
think the inference holds good that the Sibyl first gained a footing at
Rome about the same time. There are indeed some reasons why we should
not put this event in the period of the kings;[536] but if we accept the
traditional date of the temple we may put it any time between 509 and
496.
I have purposely used vague terms, such as Sibylline influence,
instead of speaking in the old manner of Sibylline books or oracles,
because it is almost incredible that at so early a date it could have
been possible to divulge any contents of a store of writings such as
must have been most carefully treasured and concealed. This has been
shown conclusively to be out of the question in Diels' now famous little
book "Sibylline Leaves." But we may also follow Diels in assuming that
about the end of the sixth century some kind of Greek oracle or oracular
saying did actually arrive at Rome, purporting to be an utterance of the
famous Sibyl of Cumae.[537]
But what was this Sibylline influence which thus penetrated to Rome,
if I am right, at the beginning of the fifth century? It is no part of
my design to discuss the history of Greek mysticism, though we shall
hear something more of it in a later lecture. It will be enough to
remind you that in the sixth century Greece was not only full of Orphism
and Pythagoreanism, but of floating oracular dicta believed to emanate
from a mystic female figure, a weird figure of whom it is hard to say
how far she was human or divine; and of whose origin we know nothing,
except that her original home was, as we might expect, Asia Minor. She
was inspired by Apollo,[538] it was said, like the Pythia, and like her
too became [Greek: entheos] (possessed) when uttering her prophecies;
this is the earliest fact we know about her, for a famous fragment of
Heracleitus represents her as uttering sayings "with frenzied
lips,"[539]--a tradition of which Virgil has made good use in the sixth
Aeneid:
non vultus, non color unus,
non comptae mansere comae; sed pectus anhelum,
et rabie fera corda tument.
But more to our purpose is the sober judgment of Plato a century after
the first Roman experience of her, who in the Phaedrus classes her
among those who have wrought much good by their inspired
utterances.[540] This passage may help us to understand how ready men
were at that time to turn for aid in tribulation to what they believed
to be divine help, to an inspired wisdom beyond the range of the local
deities of their own city-states.
This Sibyl became gradually localised in certain Greek cities, and
thereby broke up, as it were, into several Sibyls. One of these
Sibylline homes was at Cumae in Campania, the oldest Greek city in
Italy, and this enables us to explain easily how the name and fame of
the Sibyl reached Rome. Dim as is all early Roman history, the one clear
fact of the sixth century is, as we have seen, the rapid advance of the
Etruscans, their occupation of Rome, Praeneste, and other Latin cities,
and their conquest of Campania, which is now ascribed to that same
age.[541] Legend told in later days how the last Etruscan king had taken
refuge at Cumae after his expulsion from Rome, and it is just possible
that it may here be founding upon some dim recollection of a fact.
However this may be, it is plain that it was through the great Etruscan
disturbance of that period that Rome came to make trial of Sibylline
utterances. In a moment of distress--the famine of which I spoke just
now, and which I take to be historical because the remedy, the temple
under the Aventine, was so closely connected with the corn-supply--she
sent for or admitted an utterance of the Sibyl of Cumae, with whom she
had come into some kind of contact through her Etruscan kings.
Let us consider that this foreign dynasty must have brought a new
population to the city on the Tiber, the chief strategic point of middle
Italy,--a new element of plebs, whatever the old one may have been.[542]
We have seen signs, even in the religious history of this age, that
commerce and industry were increasing, and that their increase was due
to a movement from without, rather than to the old patrician gentes.
When the Etruscan dynasty fell and the old patrician influence was
restored, the government must have been face to face with new
difficulties, and among them the supply of corn for an increasing
population in years of bad harvest. With a fresh source of supply from
the south came the cult of the Greek corn-deities at the bidding of a
Sibylline utterance; and henceforward that remedy was available for
other troubles. But the patrician rulers of Rome were true, it would
seem, as far as was possible, to the old ways, and for a long time they
used this foreign remedy very sparingly. At what date the utterances
were collected in "books" and deposited in the Capitoline temple we do
not know, nor have we any certain knowledge of their original nature or
form. Tradition said that the collection dated from the last king's
reign, and that it was placed in the care of duoviri sacris faciundis,
as we have seen, who in 367 B.C. gave way to decemviri, five of whom
might be members of the plebs. I am myself inclined to conjecture that
this comparatively late date may be the real date of the origin of a
permanent collection and a permanent college of keepers, and that
the earlier duoviri were only temporary religious officers, sacris
faciundis, i.e. for the carrying out of the directions of Sibylline
utterances specially sought for at Cumae. They would thus be of the same
class as other special commissions appointed by the Senate for
administrative purposes;[543] while the decemviri, though retaining the
old title, were permanent religious officers appointed to collect and
take charge of a new and important set of regulations for the benefit of
the community, and one which concerned the plebs at least as much as the
patricians.
But I must turn to the more important question how far, down to the war
with Hannibal, when I shall take up the subject afresh, the Roman
religion was affected for good or harm by these utterances and their
keepers. They took effect in two ways: either by introducing new deities
and settling them in new temples, or by ordering and organising new
ceremonies such as Rome had never seen before.
The introduction of a new deity now and again was not of great account
from the point of view of religion, except in so far as it encouraged
the new ceremonies; the Romans had never taken much personal interest in
their deities, and the arrival (outside the pomoerium in each case) of
Hermes under the name of Mercurius, or Poseidon bearing the name of the
old Roman water numen Neptunus, or even of Asclepios with a Romanised
name Aesculapius, would not be likely to affect greatly their ideas of
the divine. These facts have rather a historical than a religious
significance; Hermes Empolaios, for example, suggests trade with Greek
cities, perhaps in grain,[544] and belongs therefore to the same class
as Ceres, Liber, Libera, of whom I have already spoken. The arrival of
Poseidon-Neptune may mean, as Dr. Carter has suggested, a kind of
"marine insurance" for the vessels carrying the grain from Greek
ports.[545] The settling of Aesculapius in the Tiber island in 293, as
the result of a terrible pestilence, is interesting as being the first
fact known to us in the history of medicine at Rome; the temple became a
kind of hospital on the model of Epidaurus, where the god had been
brought in the form of a snake by an embassy sent for the purpose, and
the priests who served it were probably Greeks skilled in the healing
art.[546] This last case is a curious example of new Roman religious
experience, but it can hardly be said to have any deep significance in
the religious history of Rome. Of the obliteration of the old numen
Neptunus by the Greek god who took his name we know nothing for good or
ill; we are ignorant of the real meaning of the old numen, and cannot
tell whether the loss of him was compensated by the usefulness of his
name in Roman literature to represent the Greek god of the sea.
Let us turn to the much more important subject of the new ceremonies
ordered by the Sibylline "books." The first authentic case of such
innovation occurred in 399 B.C., during the long and troublesome siege
of the dangerous neighbour city Veii; I call it authentic because all
the best modern authorities so reckon it, though it occurred before the
destruction of old records during the capture of the city by the Gauls.
The circumstances were such as to fix themselves in the memory of the
people, and in one way or another they found their way into the earliest
annals, probably those of Fabius Pictor, composed during the Second
Punic War.[547]
The previous winter, Livy tells us,[548] was one of extraordinary
severity; the roads were blocked with snow, and navigation on the Tiber
stopped by the ice. This miserable winter was followed too suddenly by a
hot season, in which a plague broke out which consumed both man and
beast, and continued so persistently that the Senate ordered the
Sibylline books to be consulted. This persistence is the first point we
should notice; "Cuius insanabili pernicie quando nec causa nec finis
inveniebatur,"--so wrote Livy, evidently meaning to express an extremity
of trouble which would not give way to ordinary religious remedies. We
may compare his account of the next recorded consultation of the books
(Livy vii. 2), when neither the old rites nor even the new ones were
sufficient to secure the pax deorum and abate another pestilence, and
recourse was had to yet another remedy in the form of ludi scenici.
The times were out of joint,--the peace of the gods was broken, and thus
the community was no longer in right relation to the Power manifesting
itself in the universe. The result was a revival of religio, of the
feeling of alarm and anxiety out of which the whole religious system had
grown. The old deities might seem to be forsaking their functions, since
the old rites had ceased to appeal to them. Mysterious and persistent
pestilence is a great tamer of human courage; it is a new experience
that man knows not how to meet, and in ancient life it was also a new
religious experience.
The remedy was as new as the pestilence, and almost as pernicious.
During eight days Rome saw three pairs of deities reclining in the form
of images on couches, before which were spread tables covered with food
and drink. Whether in this first case they were taken out of the temples
and exposed to view in certain places, e.g. the forum, is not clear;
later on, in the days of supplicationes, of which more will be said
presently, they were visited in procession. The three pairs were Apollo
and Latona, Diana and Hercules, Mercurius and Neptunus; all of them
Greek, or, as in the case of Diana, Mercurius, and Neptunus, Roman
deities in their new Greek form. We cannot trace the special
applicability of all of them to the trouble they were thus invoked to
appease,--another point that suggests a complete revolution in the Roman
ways of contemplating divine beings. These are not functional numina,
but foreigners whose ways were only known to the manipulators of the
Sibylline utterances. They seem like quack remedies, of which the action
is unknown to the consumer.
New also, but better in its effect, was the publicity of these
proceedings, and the part taken in them by the whole population,
patrician and plebeian, men, women, and children. If we can trust Livy's
further statements, every one left his door open and kept open house,
inviting all to come in, whether known or unknown; all old quarrels were
made up, and no new ones suffered to begin; prisoners were freed from
their chains, and universal good-will prevailed. These eight days were
in fact kept as holidays, and doubtless by the novelty of the whole
scene the astute authorities hoped to inspire fresh hope and confidence,
and to divert attention from the prevailing misery, just as our soldiers
in India are induced to forget the presence of cholera in a station by
constant games and amusements. That this was really one leading object
of the whole show is not generally recognised by historians; but it
seems fully explained by the fact I mentioned just now, that in the
similar trouble of 349 B.C. recourse was had for the first time to ludi
scenici in order to amuse the people. In the history of the Hannibalic
war we shall have plenty of opportunity of noting this kind of
expedient. The Roman people, we must remember, were getting more and
more to be inhabitants of a large city, and, as such, to seek for
entertainment, like all citizens in all ages. The religious rites of the
old calendar were perhaps by this time getting too familiar, losing
their original meaning; whether they had ever been very entertaining to
a city population may be doubted. Something more showy was needed;
processions had always been to the taste of the Roman, and banquets,
such as the epulum Iovis, which I have already noticed, often
accompanied the processions.
Now, this love of show and novelty, of which we have abundant evidence
later on as a Roman characteristic, taken together with the anxiety and
alarm--the new religio--arising from the pestilence, will sufficiently
explain the lectisternia, as these shows were called. We have here in
fact the first appearance, constantly recurring in later Roman history,
of a tendency to seek not only for novelty, but for a more emotional
expression of religious feeling than was afforded by the old forms of
sacrifice and prayer, conducted as they were by the priest on behalf of
the community without its active participation. Those old forms might do
for the old patrician community of farmers and warriors, but not so well
for the new and ever-increasing population of artisans and other
workmen, whether of Roman or foreign descent. It would seem, indeed, as
if the sensitiveness of the human fibre of a primitive community
increases with its increasing complexity, and with the greater variety
of experience to which it is exposed; and in the case of Rome, as if the
simple ancient methods of dealing with the divine inhabitants of the
city were no longer adequate to the needs of a State which was steering
its way to empire among so many difficulties and perils. It is not
indeed certain that the new rites, or some points in them, may not have
had their prototypes in old Italian usage, though the lectisternia,
the actual display of gods in human form and in need of food like human
beings, are almost certainly Greek in origin.[549] But so far as we can
guess, the emotional element was wholly new. True, Livy tells us in two
passages of his third book of occasions when men, women, and children
flocked to all the shrines (omnia delubra) seeking for the pax
deorum at the invitation of the senate; but the early date, the great
improbability of the senate taking any such step, and the absence of any
mention of the priesthoods, makes it difficult to believe that these
assertions are based on any genuine record. We must be content to mark
the first lectisternia in 399 as the earliest authentic example of the
emotional tendency of the Roman plebs.[550]
If we can judge of this period of Roman religious history by the general
tendency of the policy of the Roman government, we may see here a
deliberate attempt to include the new population in worship of a kind
that would calm its fears, engage its attention, and satisfy its
emotion, while leaving uncontaminated the old ritual that had served the
State so long. If this conclusion be a right one, then we must allow
that the new ceremonial had its use. Dr. Frazer has lately told us in
his eloquent and persuasive way, of how much value superstition has been
in building up moral habits and the instinct of submission to civil
order. His thesis might be illustrated adequately from the history of
Rome alone. But from a purely religious point of view the story of the
lectisternia is a sad one. The old Roman invisible numen, working
with force in a particular department of human life and its environment,
was a far nobler mental conception, and far more likely to grow into a
power for good, than the miserable images of Graeco-Roman full-blown
gods and goddesses reclining on their couches and appearing to partake
of dinner like a human citizen. Such ideas of the divine must have
forced men's religious ideas clean away from the Power manifesting
itself in the universe, and must have dragged down the Roman numina
with them in their corrupting degradation. According to our definition
of it, religion was now in a fair way to disappear altogether; what was
destined to take its place was not really religion at all. Nor did it in
any way assist the growth of an individual conscience, as perhaps did
some of the later religious forms introduced from without. It was of
value for the moment to the State, in satisfying a population greatly
disturbed by untoward events; and that was all.
Closely connected with the lectisternia, and following close upon them
in chronological order, were the processional ceremonies called
supplicationes. The historical relation between the two is by no means
clear; but if we conclude, as I am fairly sure we may, that the
lectisternia were shows of a joyful character, accompanied, as Livy
describes the first one, with private entertainments, and meant to keep
up the spirits of the plebeian population, and if we then turn to the
early supplicationes, in which men, women, and children, coronati,
and carrying laurel branches, went in procession to the temples, and
there prostrated themselves after the Greek fashion, the women "crinibus
passis aras verrentes," we shall be disposed to look on them as, in
origin at least, distinct from each other.[551] We may conjecture that
the appearance of the gods in human form at the doors of their temples
suggested to the plebeian women a kind of emotional worship which was
alien to the old Roman feeling, but familiar enough to those (and they
must have been many) who knew the life of the Greek cities of Italy. It
may be that they had tried it even in earlier times; but anyhow, in the
fourth and third centuries B.C. advantage was taken of the pulvinaria
to use them as stopping-places in the procession of a supplicatio, and
the phrase becomes a common one in the annals, "supplicatio ad omnia
pulvinaria indicta." The lectisternia were ordered five times in the
fourth century;[552] by that time, it would seem likely, the
supplicationes had become an authorised institution, and had perhaps
embodied the practice of lectisternia in the way suggested above. We
shall meet with them again when we come to the religious history of the
war with Hannibal.
One word more before I leave this subject for the present. In all this
innovation we must not forget to note the growth of individual feeling
as distinguished from the old worship of civic grouping, in which the
individual, as such, was of little or no account. I pointed out the
first signs of this individualism when speaking of the temple of the
Capitoline Jupiter, and we shall have reason to mark its rapid growth
further. We are now, in fact, and must realise that we are, in a period
in which, throughout the Graeco-Roman world, the need was beginning to
be felt of some new rule of individualistic morality. The Roman
population, now recruited from many sources, was but reflecting this
need unconsciously when it insisted on new emotional rites and
expiations. The Roman authorities were forced to satisfy the demand; but
in doing so they made no real contribution to the history of Roman
religious experience. It was impossible that they should do so; they
represented the old civic form of religion, "bound up with the life of a
society, and unable to contemplate the individual except as a member of
it."[553] The new forms of worship, the supplicatio and
lectisternium, could not be, as the old forms had in some sense been,
the consecration of civic and national life. They were to the Romans as
the worship of Baal to the Jews of the time of the Kings; and, unlike
that poisonous cult, they could never be rooted out.[554][555]
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