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NOTES TO LECTURE XVII

[804] For the Pythagoreanism of the Neo-platonic movement in the third century A.D. consult Bussell, Marcus Aurelius and the Later Stoics (Edin. 1910), p. 30 foll., who explains the reaction from Stoicism to Neo-Platonism. See also Caird, Gifford Lectures, ii. 162 foll.

[805] Schmekel, Die mittlere Stoa, p. 403, says that it had ceased to exist for centuries as a philosophy, but cautiously adds in a note that the knowledge of it was not extinct. The famous Orphic tablets from South Italy are taken as dating from the third and fourth centuries B.C., and if not actually Pythagorean, they are next door to being so. See Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 660.

[806] Tusc. Disp. i. 38.

[807] See, e.g., Prof. Taylor's little book on Plato (Constable), p. 11.

[808] See above, p. 349.

[809] Sextus Empiricus, adv. Physicos, ii. 281 foll.

[810] For the devotion of the believers to the founder and his ipse dixit, see Cicero, Nat. Deor. i. 5. 10.

[811] The relation of Posidonius to Roman literature has been much discussed of late. See, e.g., Norden, Virgil, Aen. vi., index, s.v. "Stoa"; Schmekel, Die mittlere Stoa, 85 foll., 238 foll.

[812] For Panaetius' enthusiasm for Plato and his teaching, see Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 32. 79; the whole passage indicates, though it does not exactly prove, an approach to the Platonic psychology.

[813] Caird, Gifford Lectures, vol. ii. p. 85.

[814] See above, p. 75. The idea that the practice of cremation influenced the ideas of the Roman about the soul was first, I think, suggested by Boissier, Religion romaine, i. 310. Cicero himself hints at this conclusion in Tusc. Disp. i. 16. 36: "In terram enim cadentibus corporibus, hisque humo tectis, e quo dictum est humari, sub terra censebant reliquam vitam agi mortuorum. Quam eorum opinionem magni errores consecuti sunt; quos auxerunt poetae."

[815] This point is well put by Dill, p. 493 of Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. See also Dieterich, Eine Mithras-Liturgie, p. 200 fol.; Stewart, Myths of Plato, 352-53.

[816] Schmekel, Die mittlere Stoa, p. 400 foll.

[817] De Rep. vi. 26.

[818] Ib. The word providet reminds us that this transcendental philosophy supplied the later Stoics with an explanation of divination. See Bouché-Leclercq, Hist. de divination, i. 68; Dill, op. cit. p. 439; Seneca, Nat. Quaest. ii. 52, fully accepted divination. Cp. Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 37. 66, where he quotes his own Consolatio; see above, p. 388. Panaetius, however, had courageously denied divination: Cic. Div. i. 3. 6; Zeller, Stoics, etc., p. 352.

[819] De Rep. vi. 15, 26, and 29.

[820] Tusc. Disp. i. 16. 36 foll. On the whole subject of the rise of the soul after death see Dieterich, Eine Mithras-Liturgie, p. 179 foll.

[821] Schmekel, op. cit. p. 438; Stewart, Myths of Plato, p. 300.

[822] For Nigidius, see Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur (ed. 2), vol. ii. p. 419 foll.

[823] "Nigidius Figulus Pythagoreus et magus in exilio moritur" is the notice of him in St. Jerome's Chronicle for the year 45 B.C.

[824] These letters are in the 12th book of those to Atticus, Nos. 12-40.

[825] Ad Att. xii. 36. The translation is Shuckburgh's.

[826] A good example is Virg. Aen. viii. 349, but it is needless to multiply instances of the religio loci. Serv. ad Aen. i. 314 defines lucus as "arborum multitudo cum religione."

[827] Ad Att. xii. 36; cp. 35. He uses the Greek word [Greek: apotheôsis] in 35. 1, which seems to have come into use in his own time; see Liddell & Scott, s.v.

[828] See above, p. 58.

[829] Aen. vi. 743. The meaning of these words seems to be quite plain, though commentators have worried themselves over them from Servius downwards. The mistake has been in not sufficiently considering the force of quisque, and puzzling too much over the vague word Manes. Henry discerned the true meaning in our own time. See his Aeneidea, vol. iii. p. 397. Cp. the words quoted above from Somn. Scip.: "mens cuiusque is est quisque." M. S. Reinach (Cultes, etc. ii. 135 foll.) is not far out: "Nous souffrons chacun suivant le degré de souillure de nos âmes."

[830] C.I.L. i. 639, with Mommsen's note.

[831] See R.F. p. 308.

[832] Tusc. Disp. i. 12. 27. For the "ius Manium," de Legibus, ii. 22 and 54 foll.

[833] Ad Att. xii. 18: "Longum illud tempus cum non ero magis me movet quam hoc exiguum," etc. Cp. Tusc. i. ad fin.

[834] Ad Fam. iv. 5. 6: "Quod si quis apud inferos sensus est, qui illius in te amor fuit pietasque in omnes suos, hoc certe illa te facere nonvult."

[835] Sall. Cat. ch. 51: "Mortem cuncta mortalium dissolvere, ultra neque curae neque gaudio locum esse." This is the Epicurean doctrine, which Caesar was said to hold.

[836] Catull. 5. 6; Pliny, N.H. vii. 188. The whole passage is worth quoting: "Post sepulturam vanae Manium ambages. Omnibus a supremo die eadem quae ante primum, nec magis a morte sensus ullus aut corpori aut animae quam ante natalem. Eadem enim vanitas in futurum etiam se propagat et in mortis quoque tempora sibi vitam mentitur, alias immortalitatem animae, alias transfigurationem, alias sensum inferis dando et Manes colendo deumque faciendo qui iam etiam homo esse desierit, ceu vero ullo modo spirandi ratio ceteris animalibus praestet, aut non diuturniora in vita multa reperiantur quibus nemo similem divinat immortalitatem," etc.

[837] There is an essay on this form of literature in the Études morales sur l'antiquité of Constant Martha, p. 135 foll.

[838] Tusc. Disp. i. 27. 66.

[839] Lact. Inst. i. 15. 20.

[840] Lact. iii. 18.

[841] See Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol. ii. p. 376.

[842] Fragments 54 and 55.

[843] P. 158 foll.

[844] Lucr. vi. 764 foll. Cp. iii. 966 foll.; Masson, Lucretius, i. p. 402. Mr. Cyril Bailey also reminds me of Lucr. iii. 31-93, and 1053 to end; and adds a decided opinion that the poet is not here thinking of the common Roman, but of the educated Roman brought up on Greek and Graeco-Roman poetry and philosophy.

[845] Polyb. vi. 56.

[846] Tusc. i. 46. 111.

[847] See Roscher's Myth. Lex. s.v. "Orcus";
Wissowa, R.K. p. 192.


[848] See above, p. 107.

[849] Müller-Deecke, Etrusker, ii. 108 foll. Illustrations can be seen in Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, ed. 2.

[850] Captivi, v. 4. 1.

[851] La Religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins, vol. i. p. 310.

[852] Cic. Tusc. i. 16. 37. For the eschatology of the sixth Aeneid, a curious mélange of religion, philosophy, and folklore, see Norden's work on Virgil, Aeneid, vi. (index, p. 468). Norden believes, I may note, that the philosophical and religious elements in it are mainly derived from Posidonius. Cp. also Glover, Studies in Virgil, ch. x. (Hades). For popular beliefs in Hades, etc., under the Empire, see Friedländer's Sittengeschichte, vol. iii. last chapter.

[853] Weil, Études sur l'antiquité grecque, p. 12, quoted by Glover, p. 218.

[854] See above, p. 105.

[855] Since this lecture was written a most interesting discussion of Greek ideas, Achaean and Pelasgic, about the relation of soul and body after death, has appeared in Mr. Lawson's Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, especially in chapters v. and vi., confirming me, to some extent at least, in the conjecture I had here hazarded. The working of the imagination in regard to a future state is in Greece, in his view, peculiar to the older or Pelasgic population; and if the Etruscans were of Pelasgic stock, as is now believed by many, their imaginative grotesqueness, a degraded form perhaps of the original characteristic, acting on the ideas of a still more primitive population of which the Lemuria is a survival, might explain the later prevalence of a gruesome eschatology at Rome. But whoever studies Mr. Lawson's chapters closely will find serious difficulties in the way even of such a hypothesis as this.

[856] Ovid, Fasti, v. 430 foll.; R.F. p. 109. Wissowa, R.K. p. 192, attributes the ideas of larvae (ghosts) and of Orcus, not to religion, but to popular superstition. If he here means by religion the State religion and the Parentalia in particular, I can agree with him.

[857] Dr. Carter allows this in Hastings' Dict. of Religion and Ethics, vol. i. (Roman section of article "Ancestor Worship.")

[858] See R.F. p. 334.

[859] R.F. p. 107.

[860] Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, ii. 693 foll.

[861] Varro, L.L. v. 25; Paulus p. 216; Hülsen-Jordan, Röm. Topogr. iii. p. 268 foll. The remains of these puticuli were unluckily very imperfectly reported, and have been lost in the building of the Rome of to-day. On the question of the religious aspect of the two ways of disposing of the dead, burial and cremation, it is as well to remember Dieterich's warning in Mutter Erde, p. 66, note: "den Versuch, aus der Verbreitung und dem Wechsel der Sitte des Verbrennens und Begrabens für meine Untersuchung Schlüsse zu gewinnen, habe ich völlig aufgegeben, als ich angesichts der ungeheueren Materialen meines Kollegen von Duhn die Unmöglicheit solcher Schlüsse einsehen musste." In Mr. Lawson's book quoted above it seems to me to be proved that the object of both methods is the same, viz. to destroy the body as quickly as possible in order to prevent the soul from re-entering it and annoying the survivors.

[862] This is well explained by Cumont in his Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, p. 196 foll., following Bouché-Leclercq's work on astrology in Greece. Cumont thinks that astrology took over the business of the augurs and haruspices, which was now dropped, and this is true in the main as regards the individual, but not as regards the State; see above, p. 308 foll.

[863] For Fortuna in the writings of Caesar, etc., see Classical Review, vol. xvii. p. 153. The locus classicus for Fortuna as a deity under the early empire is Pliny, N.H. ii. 22.

[864] Cato, R.R. ch. v. 4.

[865] Val. Max. i. 3. 2, who no doubt was following Livy; for in the Epitomes of some lost books of Livy discovered at Oxyrrhyncus by Grenfell and Hunt (Oxyrrh. Papyri, vol. iv. p. 101), the same fact is alluded to. For the embassy, Maccab. i. 14. 24; xv. 15-24. Two extracts from the text of Valerius, which is here lost, both state that proselytising Jews were at this time driven from Rome; the Jupiter Sabazius, whose cult they were propagating, can hardly be other than that of Jehovah; see Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ, pt. ii. vol. ii. p. 233 of the English translation. The expulsion of Chaldaei may, however, have been a separate measure of the praetor Hispalus.

[866] Plutarch, Marius, 42.

[867] Suet. Aug. 1. I have seen a learned work about a century old, now entirely forgotten, in which it is maintained that Virgil's fourth Eclogue is simply a genethliacon of Augustus; the arguments, which are ingenious but futile, are drawn from the poem of Manilius.

[868] Tacitus, Hist. i. 22.





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