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Roman Empire | Roman Religious Practices
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LECTURE XII - THE PONTIFICES AND THE SECULARISATION OF RELIGION
In the last lecture we saw how the new experiences of the Roman people,
during the period from the abolition of the kingship to the war with
Hannibal, led to the introduction of foreign deities and showy
ceremonies of a character quite strange to the old religion. But there
was another process going on at the same time. The authorities of that
old religion were full of vigour in this same period; it may even be
said, that as far as we can trace their activity in the dim light of
those early days, they made themselves almost supreme in the State. And
the result was, in brief, that religion became more and more a matter of
State administration, and thereby lost its chance of developing the
conscience of the individual. It is indeed quite possible, as has
recently been maintained,[556] that it stood actively in the way of such
development. I have no doubt that there was a germ of conscience, of
moral feeling, in the religio of old days--the feeling of anxiety and
doubt which originally suggested the cura and caerimonia of the
State; but the efforts of the authorities in this period were spent in
gradually destroying that germ. True, they did not interfere with the
simple religion of the family, which had its value all through Roman
history; but the attitude of the individual towards public worship will
react on his attitude towards private worship, which may also have lost
some part of its vitality in this period.
The religious authorities of which I speak are of course the two great
colleges of pontifices and augurs. Of the latter, and of the system of
divination of which they held the secrets, I will speak in the next
lecture. Here we have to do with the pontifices and their work in this
period, a thorny and somewhat technical subject, but a most important
one for the history of Roman religious experience.
I have so far assumed that this college existed in the age of the kings,
and assisted the Rex in the administration of the ius divinum. It is
legitimate to do this, but as a matter of fact we do not know for
certain what was the origin of the college itself, or of its mysterious
name. In the period we have now reached we come, however, upon a
striking fact, which is luckily easy to interpret; the king's house, the
Regia, has become the office of the head of the college, the pontifex
maximus, and also the meeting-place of the college for business.[557]
Obviously this head, whether or no he existed during the kingly period,
has stepped into the place of the Rex in the control of the ius
divinum. Again, we know that in the third century B.C., when written
history begins, the pontifices and their head had reached a very high
level of power, as we shall presently see more in detail; the process of
the growth of this power must therefore lie in the two preceding
centuries, during which Rome was slowly attaining that paramount
position in Italy in which we find her at the time of the Punic wars.
Thirdly, we know that in that third century B.C. the college was laid
open to plebeians as well as to members of the old patrician gentes, and
that one of the most famous of all its many distinguished heads was not
only not a patrician, but a Latin from Cameria, Ti. Coruncanius. Putting
these three facts together we can divine in outline the history of the
pontifices during these two centuries. With the instinct for order and
organisation that never failed them, the Romans have constructed a
permanent power to take charge of their ius divinum, i.e. all
their relations to the deities with whom they must maintain a pax; the
circumstances of their career during two centuries have exalted this
power to an extraordinary degree of influence, direct and indirect,
internal and external; and, lastly, in a period which saw the gradual
amalgamation into a unified whole of privileged and unprivileged,
patres and plebs, they have with wonderful wisdom thrown open to all
citizens the administration of that ius which was essential to the
welfare of the united community. These are indisputable facts; and they
are thoroughly characteristic of the practical wisdom of the Roman
people in that early age.
In order to understand how the pontifices attained their great position,
the one thing needful is to examine the nature of their work. This I
propose to do next, and then to attempt to sum up the result of their
activity on the Roman religious system.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the college in the
early history of Roman law; and for us in particular that importance
lies in the fact that they were the sole depositaries of the religious
law in the period during which the civil law was being slowly
disentangled from it. If we look at the so-called leges regiae, which
are probably the oldest rules of law that have come down to us (though
they may have been made into a collection as late as the very end of the
Republic),[558] we see at once that they belong to the ius divinum;
and there is little doubt that they were extracted from those books of
the pontifices which I shall have to explain later on.[559] In other
words, it is the maintenance of the pax deorum that they are chiefly
concerned with; the crime of the citizen is a violation of that pax,
and the deity most concerned will punish the community unless some
expiatory step is taken to re-establish the right relation between the
human and divine inhabitants of the city. "Pellex aram Iunonis ne
tangito; si tanget, Iunoni crinibus demissis agnum feminam caedito." "Si
parentem puer verberit, ast olle plorassit, puer divis parentum sacer
esto."[560] The harlot who touches the altar of Juno, the deity of
married women, breaks the pax with that deity, and she must offer a
piacular sacrifice to renew it; the son who strikes a parent is made
over as the property of the divi parentum, i.e. those of the whole
community,[561] the peaceful relation with whom his act has imperilled.
With such rules as these the civil magistrate of the republic can have
had nothing to do; they belong to an older period of thought and of
government, and survived in the books of the college which under the
republic continued to administer the ius divinum; for these rules
doubtless continued to exist side by side with the civil law as it
gradually developed itself, and the necessary modes of expiation were
known to the pontifices only. Roman society was indeed so deeply
penetrated for many ages with the idea of religio--the dread of
violating the pax deorum,--that the idea of law as a matter of the
relation of man to man, as "the interference of the State in the
passions and interests of humanity only," must have gained ground by
very slow degrees. This primitive religious law then, i.e. the
regulation of the proper steps to be taken to avoid a breach of the pax
deorum, was entirely in the hands of the religious authorities, the Rex
at first and then the pontifices, as the only experts who could know the
secrets of the ius divinum; and from their decisions and prescriptions
there could be no appeal, simply because there was no individual or body
in the State to whom an appeal was conceivable. But after the rule of
the Etruscan kings, with all its disturbing influences, and after the
revolution which got rid of them, there must have been an age of new
ideas and increased mental activity, and also of increasing social
complexity, the signs of which in the way of trade and industry we have
already found in certain facts of religious history. In the domain of
law this meant new problems, new difficulties; and these were met in the
middle of the fifth century B.C., if the received chronology is to be
accepted,[562] by the publication of the XII. Tables.
In order to get some idea of the work of the pontifices at this time,
let us consider one or two of these difficulties and problems.
Within the family every act, every relation, was matter of religion; the
numina had to be considered in regard to it. The end and aim, then as
throughout Roman history, was the maintenance of the sacra of the
family, without which it could not be conceived as existing--the due
worship of its deities, and the religious care of its dead. Take
marriage as an example: "the entry of a bride into the household--of one
who as yet had no lot in the family life--meant some straining of the
relation between the divine and human members,"[563] and the human part
of the family must be assured that the divine part is willing to accept
her before the step can be regarded as complete. She has to enter the
family in such a way as to share in its sacra; and if confarreatio
was (as we may believe) the oldest form of patrician marriage,[564] the
bride was subjected to a ceremony which was plainly of a sacramental
character--the sacred cake of far being partaken of by both bride and
bridegroom in the presence of the highest religious authority of the
State. In the simplest form of society there would be no call for
further priestly interference in marriage; but in a society growing more
numerous and complex, exceptions, abnormal conditions begin to show
themselves, and new problems arise, which must be solved by new
expedients, prescriptions, permissions, devices, or fictions. For these
the religious authorities are solely responsible; for what is a matter
of religious interest to the family is also matter of religious interest
to the State, simply because the State is composed of families in the
same sense as the human body is composed of cellular tissue. All this,
we believe, was once the work of the Rex, perhaps with the college of
pontifices to help him; when the kingship disappeared it became the work
of that college solely, with the pontifex maximus as the chief
authority.
So, too, in all other questions which concerned the maintenance of the
family, and especially in regard to the devolution of property. I am
here only illustrating the way in which the pontifical college acquired
their paramount influence by having a quantity of new and difficult work
forced upon them, and it is not part of my plan to explain the early
history of adoptions and wills; but I may give a single concrete
illustration for the benefit of those who are not versed in Roman law.
It must constantly have happened, in that disturbed period which brought
the kingship to an end, that by death or capture in war a family was
left without male heirs. Daughters could not take their place, because
the sacra of a family could not be maintained by daughters, who would,
in the natural order of things, be sooner or later married and so become
members of other families. Hence the expedient was adopted of making a
filius familias of another family a member of your own; and this, like
marriage, involved a straining of the relations between the human and
divine members of your family, and was thus a matter for the religious
authorities to contrive in such a manner as to preserve the pax
between them. The difficulty was overcome by the practical wisdom of the
pontifical college, which held a solemn inquiry into the case before
submitting it to the people in specially summoned assembly (comitia
calata);[565] and thus the new filius familias was enabled not only
to renounce his own sacra (detestatio sacrorum), but to pass into
the guardianship of another set of sacra, without incurring the anger
of the numina concerned with the welfare of either.
Such difficult matters as these, and many more connected directly or
indirectly with the devolution of property, such as the guardianship of
women and of the incapable, the power to dispose of property otherwise
than by the original rules of succession, the law of burial and the care
of the dead,--all these, at the time of which I am speaking, must have
been among the secrets of the pontifices; and we can also suspect,
though without being sure of our facts, that the great increase of the
importance of the plebs under the Etruscan dynasty offered further
opportunities for the growth alike of the work and influence of the
college.[566] Above all, we must remember that this work was done in
secret, that the mysteries of adjustment were unknown to the people when
once they had passed out of the ken of family and gens, and that there
could have been no appeal from the pontifices to any other body. Nay,
more, we must also bear in mind that this body of religious experts was
self-electing. Until the lex Domitia of 104 B.C. both pontifices and
augurs filled up their own colleges with persons whom they believed
qualified both by knowledge and disposition. Thus it would seem that
there was every chance that in that early Rome, where neither in family
nor State could anything be undertaken without some reference to the
religious authority, where the pax deorum was the one essential object
of public and private life, a power might be developed apt one day not
only to petrify religion and stultify its worshippers, but thereby also
to cramp the energies of the community, acting as an obstacle to its
development within its walls and without. Had Roman law remained
entirely in the hands of this self-electing college, one of two things
must have happened: either that college would have become purely secular
in character, or the wonderful legal system that we still enjoy would
never have had space to grow up. But this was not to be; with the
publication of the XII. Tables a new era opens.
If we reject, as we conscientiously may, the latest attempts of
criticism to post-date the drawing up of the Tables,[567] and in fact to
destroy their historical value for us, what is their significance for
our present purpose? It is simply that in the middle of the fifth
century B.C. the pontifices lost a monopoly--ceased to be the sole
depositaries of the rules of law affecting the pax deorum, and that
new rules are being set down in writing, on the basis of old custom,
which more especially affect the relations between the human citizens.
For both the ius divinum and the ius civile are to be found in this
collection, but the latter is beginning to assert its independence. I
think we may say, without much hesitation, that this event, however
doubtful its traditional details, did actually save Rome from either of
the two consequences to which I alluded just now. The constitution
developed itself on lay and not on ecclesiastical lines, leaving the
pontifices other work to do, and Roman civil law was eventually able to
free itself from the trammels of the ius divinum.
But for another century the college still found abundant legal work to
do, for it was not likely that at Rome, the most conservative of all
city-states, it could be quickly set aside, or that the old ideas of law
could so speedily disappear. What then was this work?
When rules of civil law were written down, it was still necessary to
deal with them in two ways which were open to the pontifices, and indeed
at this early time to no one else. First, it was necessary to make their
provisions effectual by prescribing in each case the proper method of
procedure (actio). Now it is most important to grasp the fact that
procedure in the ius civile was originally of precisely the same
nature as procedure in the ius divinum, and that precisely the same
rigid exactness is indispensable in both. Action and formula in civil
law belong to the same class of practices as sacrifice and prayer in
religious law, and spring from the same mental soil. Thus, for example,
the most familiar case of action and formula in civil law, the
sacramentum, was, as the name proves, a piece of religious procedure,
i.e. the deposition in a sacred spot of a sum of money which the
suitor in the case would forfeit if he lost it, together with the
utterance of a certain formula of words which must be correctly spoken.
If we choose to go back so far, we may even see in this combination of
formularised act and speech a survival of magical or quasi-magical
belief;[568] but this is matter rather for the anthropologist than the
historian of religion. The point for us at this moment is that these
acts and formulae (legis actiones, as they are known in Roman law)
could not suddenly or rapidly pass out of the hands of that body of
skilled experts which had so long been in sole possession of them; the
publication of old and new rules of law in the XII. Tables made no
immediate difference in this respect. The consuls, the new civil
executive, were still in no sense necessarily skilled in such matters,
and were without the prestige of the former executive, the Rex; they
were also doubtless busy with other work, especially in the field.
Nothing could be more natural than that the pontifices should continue
to provide the procedure for the now written law, just as they had
formerly supplied it for the unwritten.[569]
So, too, with the interpretation of the Tables; this was the second
part of the work that still remained to them. Writing was in that age a
mystery to the mass of the population, and doubtless the idea was still
in their minds that there was something supernatural about it. Writing,
in fact, as well as formularised action and speech, may have had the
flavour of magic about it. However that may be, there can be no doubt
that the interpretation of a legal document was in those days a much
more serious, if a less arduous business, than it is now. Here again,
then, it seems perfectly natural that there should be no rapid or
violent change in the personnel of those deemed capable of such
interpretation; there was no other body of experts capable of the work;
the pontifices remained iuris-consulti, i.e. interpreters and
advisers, and in the course of two and a half centuries accumulated an
amount of material that formed a basis for the first published system of
Roman law, the ius Aelianum or tripartita of 200 B.C. It is most
useful to remember, as proof of this, that one member of the college was
selected every year for the special purpose of helping the people with
advice in matters of civil law, both in regard to interpretation and the
choice of legis actiones; so we are expressly told by Pomponius, who
adds that this practice continued for about a hundred years after the
publication of the Tables, i.e. till the election of the first praetor
in 366.[570] After that date the ius civile emerges more distinctly
from the old body of law, which included also the ius divinum, and its
interpretation was no longer a matter purely for religious experts. In
337 we hear of the first plebeian praetor--truly a momentous event,
showing that the old profound belief is dying out, which demanded a
religious and patrician qualification for all legal work. And at the end
of the fourth century comes the publication, not only of the legis
actiones, but of the Fasti, i.e. even of that most vital part of the
ius divinum, which distinguished the times and seasons belonging to
the numina from those belonging to the human citizens.[571] One might
well suppose that the power of the pontifices was on the wane, for they
had lost another monopoly.
And indeed in one sense this was so. It must have been so, for as the
range of the State's activity increased, the sphere of religious
influence became relatively less. Marriage, for example, though it still
needed a religious ceremony in common opinion, ceased to need it in the
eye of the law--a change which is familiar to us in our own age. The
pontifex was no longer indispensable to the suitor at law, nor to the
citizen who wished to know on what day he might proceed with his suit.
The college undoubtedly ceased to be the powerful secretly-acting body
in whose hands was the entire religio of the citizen, i.e. the
decision of all points on which he might feel the old anxious
nervousness about the good-will of the gods. But now we mark a change
which gave the old institution new life and new work. At the end of this
fourth century (300 B.C.) it was thrown open to plebeians by the lex
Ogulnia; and, as I have already mentioned, within a few years we come
upon a plebeian pontifex maximus, who was not even a Roman by birth, yet
one of the most famous in the whole series of the holders of that great
office. Most probably, too, the numbers of the members have already been
increased from five to nine, of whom five must be plebeian. These
members begin to be found holding also civil magistracies, and the
pontifex maximus was often a consul of the year. It is quite plain then
that this priestly office is becoming more and more secularised; it
expands with the new order of things instead of shrinking into itself.
It leaves religion, in the proper sense of the word, far behind. The
sacrificing priests, the flamines, etc., who were the humbler members in
a technical sense of the same college, go on with their proper and
strictly religious work under the supervision of the pontifex
maximus,[572] but they steadily become of less importance as the greater
members become secularised in their functions and their ambitions. And
these greater members, instead of becoming stranded on a barren shore of
antique religion, boldly venture into a new sphere of human life, and
add definite secular work to their old religious functions.
The events of the latter part of the fourth century B.C., culminating in
the publication of the Fasti and the legis actiones, probably meant
much more for the Romans than we can divine by the uncertain light of
historical imagination. It is the age of expansion, internal and
external; the old patrician exclusive rule was gone beyond recall; the
plebeians had forced their way into every department of government,
including at last even the great religious collegia; the old Latin
league had been broken up, and the Latin cities organised in various new
relations to Rome, each one being connected with the suzerain city by a
separate treaty, sealed with religious sanctions. After the Samnite wars
and the struggle with Pyrrhus, further organisation was necessary, and
there arose by degrees a loose system of union which we are accustomed
to call the Italian confederation. The adaptation of all these new
conditions to the existing order of things at Rome was the work of the
senate and magistrates so far as it concerned human beings only; but so
far as it affected the relations of the divine inhabitants of the
various communities it must have been the work of the pontifices. That
work is indeed almost entirely hidden from us, for Livy's books of this
period are lost, and Livy is the only historian who has preserved for us
in any substance the religious side of Rome's public life. But what we
have learnt in the course of these lectures will have made it plain that
no political changes could take place without involving religious
adaptation, and also that the only body qualified to undertake such
adaptation was the pontifical college.
We may thus be quite certain, that though they had lost their old
monopoly of religious knowledge, the pontifices found plenty of fresh
work to do in this period. It is my belief that they now became more
active than they ever had been. From this time, for example, we may
almost certainly date their literary or quasi-literary activity; I mean
the practice of recording the leading events of each year, which may
have had its origin a century earlier, with the eclipse of the sun in or
about 404 B.C.[573] I should guess that after the admission of the
plebeians to the college in 300 B.C., the new members put fresh life and
vigour into the old work, and developed it in various directions. It is
in this period that I am inclined to attribute to the college that zeal
for compiling and perhaps inventing religious formulae of all kinds,
which took shape in the libri or commentarii pontificum, and
embodied that strange manual of the methods of addressing deities, which
we know as Indigitamenta. And again, in the skilled work of the
admission of new deities and the dedication of their temples, occasioned
by the new organisation and condition of Italy, and lastly, in the
supervision of the proper methods of expiating prodigia, which (though
the habit is doubtless an old one) began henceforward to be reported to
the Senate from all parts of the ager Romanus and even beyond, their
meetings in the Regia must have been fully occupied. Our loss is great
indeed in the total want of detail about the life and character of the
great plebeian pontifex maximus of the first half of the third century
B.C., that Titus Coruncanius whom I have already mentioned as being a
Latin by birth; for Cicero declares that the commentarii of the
college showed him as a man of the greatest ability,[574] whose
reputation remained for ages as one who was ready with wise counsel in
matters both public and private. Coupling him with two other memorable
holders of the office, he says that "et in senatu et apud populum et in
causis amicorum et domi et militiae consilium suum fidemque
praestabant."[575] This passage should be remembered as a valuable
illustration of the way in which the college and its head were becoming
more and more occupied with secular business; it is worth noting, too,
that this great man was himself consul in the year 280, and took a
useful part in the first campaign against Pyrrhus.[576] Yet Cicero makes
it plain that he looked on him also as a great figure in religious
matters--nay, even as a man whom the gods loved.[577]
I will finish this lecture by illustrating briefly this renewed and
extended activity of the pontifices, so far as we can dimly trace it in
this third century B.C. Most of it is connected more or less directly
with the State religion, yet with a tendency to become more and more
secular and perfunctory; the word cura would express it better than
caerimonia, and caerimonia better than religio. The care of the
calendar, for example (a technical matter which lies outside my province
in these lectures), was originally of religious importance, because the
oldest religious festivals marked operations of husbandry, and these,
when fixed in the calendar, must occur at the right seasons.[578] It was
the duty of the pontifices so to adjust the necessary intercalations as
to effect this object--a duty to which they were, as it turned out,
quite unequal. But continued city life broke the connection between the
festivals and the agricultural work to which they originally
corresponded, and what was once a cura of religious import became a
secular matter of which the value was not appreciated. So too with
another duty, for which both the Romans and ourselves have more reason
to be grateful to them--the recording of the leading events of national
history.
It is uncertain what prompted the college, or rather its head, to begin
making these records, though there is no doubt about the fact. But it
would be natural enough that those who had charge of the calendar, which
would necessitate some record of years for purposes of intercalation,
should go on to mark the names of the consuls and such striking events
as would make a year memorable. In any case this was what actually
happened. The pontifex maximus, we are told with precision, kept a
tabula, or whited board, on which these events were noted down, with
the consuls' names attached to them, or possibly a kind of almanac, made
out for the whole year, on which they could append their notes to
particular days.[579] This yearly tabula was no doubt at first kept
secret, like all the pontifical documents, but sooner or later, perhaps
at the same time as the publication of the fasti and legis actiones,
it was exposed to public view in or at the Regia.[580] This went on for
at least two centuries, and the records, which in the nature of things
must have grown in length and detail as events became more startling and
numerous, were edited in eighty books by the pontifex maximus P. Mucius
Scaevola in 123 B.C.--the year of the first tribunate of C. Gracchus.
The large number of these books has long been a stumbling-block to the
learned, for we are expressly told that the annales maximi, as the
records were called, were (in spite of their name) of a very meagre
character; and many conjectures have quite recently been made to explain
it.[581] But guessing is almost useless, seeing that there are no data
for it. The editor may have added matter of his own, amplifying and
adorning after the manner of writers of his day; or he may have worked
in the contents of other pontifical books, libri or commentarii
pontificales. The point for us is simply the continued activity of the
pontifex maximus in this work, which must have become almost entirely
secular in character. The notes may have been jejune, but they were
probably accurate, and free from the perversions of family vanity or
such lengthy rhetorical ornamentation as became the universal fashion
among private writers of annalistic history. They were, we may suppose,
exactly what our modern historical conscience demands. But all that is
left of them, or almost all, is the list of consuls (fasti consulares)
and of triumphs (fasti triumphales) which in their present form must,
or at least may, have been extracted from them.[582] On the whole, we
may reckon them as the most valuable work of the college; and they may
be taken as marking a growing sense of the importance of Rome and her
history, the commemoration of which is thus committed to an official
who, as an individual, had invariably served the State well, and in whom
all classes had perfect confidence.[583]
One important part of the work of the college in this century must have
been the adjustment of the civic religion of the Italian communities to
that of Rome. What deities were to be made citizens of Rome? Which were
to be left in their old homes undisturbed? No doubt many other questions
must have called for attention in religious matters after the conquest
of Italy, but this is the one of which we know most. The temple
foundations of this period have all been carefully put together (chiefly
from Livy's invaluable records) by Aust,[584] and show that there was a
certain tendency to bring in deities from outside, not so much because
they represented some special need of the Romans, corn or art or
industry, as two centuries earlier, but simply because they were deities
of the conquered whom it might be prudent to adopt. The great Juno
Regina of Veii was long ago induced by evocatio to migrate to Rome;
Fors Fortuna from Etruria, Juturna from Lavinium, Minerva Capta from
Falerii, Feronia, a famous Latin goddess from Capena, Vortumnus from
Volsinii,[585] all attest the same liberal tone in religious matters
which on the whole marks the secular Italian policy of the Senate in
this period. If we had but more information about the former, we should
be able to understand the latter far better. We should like to know why
in some cases the chief deity of a community came to Rome, while in
others there is not trace of migration. The famous Vacuna of Reate, for
example, never left her home in the Apennines, possibly because she was
a kind of Vesta, who could not be spared from Reate, and was not wanted
at Rome.[586]
The list of foundations also points to other tendencies and experiences
of the time. We might guess that there was some attempt, with the aid of
pontifical skill, to encourage agriculture or give it a fresh start
after the invasion of Pyrrhus; for between 272 and 264, the years of the
pacification of Italy, we find temples built to four agricultural
deities, three indigenous Roman ones, Consus, Tellus, Pales, and one
Etruscan garden god, Vertumnus.[587] Then we have a group of foundations
in honour of deities connected with water--Juturna, Fons, Tempestates,
which seem to have some reference to the naval activity of the first
Punic war; they all fall between 259 and 241 B.C.[588] Lastly, we notice
a fresh accession of deified abstractions,--Salus (an old deity in a new
form), Spes, Honos et Virtus, Concordia, and Mens.[589] I am glad to
find that the latest investigator of these religious abstractions is at
one with me in believing that they simply mark a developed stage in the
religious bent of the earliest Roman. If the old Romans had the habit of
spiritualising a great variety of material objects, in other words, if
they were in an advanced animistic stage, there seems to be no reason
why they should not have begun to spiritualise mental concepts also (for
which they had words, as for the material objects), even at a very early
period. The whole psychological aspect of such abstractions is most
interesting, but I must pass it over here, merely suggesting that each
of these abstractions was doubtless deified for some particular reason,
under the direction, or with the sanction, of the pontifices.[590]
But we have not as yet reached what is, after all, for our purposes the
most instructive part of the work of the pontifices--I mean the archives
or memoranda (libri or commentarii) which they kept, and from which,
indirectly, much of what I have had to say about the ius divinum has
been drawn. It is here that we see the policy of maintaining the pax
deorum carried to its highest point. These books contained a vast
collection of formulae for every kind of process in which the deities
were in any way concerned; here was the complete pharmacopoeia of the
ius divinum.[591] We must remember that the pontifex maximus and his
assessors had to be ready at any moment with the correct formula for all
religious acts, whether extraordinary, like the devotio of Decius or
the expiation of some startling "prodigium," or belonging to the
ordinary course of city life, such as prayers in sacrificial ritual,
vota both public and private, charters (leges) of newly founded
temples, and so on. The idea that the spoken formula (ultimately, as we
saw, derived from an age of magic) was efficient only if no slip were
made, seems to have gained in strength instead of diminishing, as we
might have expected it to do with advancing civilisation; and the
pontifices not only responded to its importunity, but actually
stimulated it. Vires acquirit eundo are words which apply well in all
ages to the passion for organisation and precision. Though we cannot
prove it, I myself have little doubt that the members of the college, or
some of them, collected and invented formulae simply for the pleasure of
doing it, and that the work became as congenial to them as the
systematisation of the law to Jewish scribes after the captivity, or as
casuistry to the confessors of the middle ages. When the art of writing
became familiar to experts, the natural and primitive desire of the
Roman to have exactness in the spoken word affected him also in his
relations with the word as written. The scribe and the Pharisee found
their opportunity. The whole public religion of the State, and to some
extent also the private religion of the family, became a mass of forms
and formulae, and never succeeded in freeing itself from these fetters.
We can best illustrate this superfluity of priestly zeal in that strange
list of forms of invocation called Indigitamenta, which I have already
explained with the help of Wissowa.[592] Working upon the old Roman
animism, and the popular fondness for formulae, the pontifices drew up
those lists in the fourth and third centuries B.C., which have so
seriously misled scholars as to the genuine primitive religious ideas of
the Romans. They are in the main priestly inventions, the work of
ingenious formulators. We may even be tempted to look on them as an
attempt to rivet the yoke of priestly formalism on the life of the
individual as well as on the life of the State as a whole. But if ever
this was the intention, it was too late. A people that was beginning to
get into touch with the civilisation of Hellas could not possibly bear
such a yoke. In the last lecture we have already seen a tendency towards
emotional religion independent of the old State worship; the philosophy
of individualism was to complete the work of emancipation in the last
two centuries B.C. The old State religion remained, but in stunted form
and with paralysed vitality; Rome was the scene of an arrested
religious development. The feeling, the religious instinct (religio)
was indeed there, though latent; the Romans were human beings, like the
rest of us. But as we go on with the story we shall find that, when
trouble or disaster brought it out of its hiding-place, it was no longer
possible to soothe it on Roman principles or by Roman methods. These
methods--in other words, the ius divinum as formulated by the
authorities--had been meant to soothe it, and had indeed so effectually
lulled it to sleep, that when at last it awoke again they had lost the
power of dealing with it. When the craving did come upon the Roman,
which in time of peril or doubt has come upon individuals and
communities in all ages, for support and comfort from the Unseen, it had
to be satisfied by giving him new gods to worship in new ways, gods from
Greece and the East, some of them concealed under Latin names, but still
aliens, not citizens of his own State, aliens with whom he had little or
nothing in common, who had no home in his patriotic feeling, no place in
his religious experience.[593] As I said at the beginning of the last
lecture, we must not underrate the religiousness of the Roman
character, which was never entirely lost; but the secret of its
comparative uselessness lies in this--that the natural desire to be
right with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, and to know
more of that Power, became weakened and destroyed by an over-scrupulous
attention to the means taken to realise it, and by the introduction of
foreign methods which had no root in the mental fibre of the people, and
reflected no part of its experience. Religion was effectually divorced
from life and morality.
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