Chapter V: The Worship of Sacred Utensils 489 (11)

There was one other goddess, a Latin one, who was traditionally associated with this period, and especially with king Servius Tullius--Fortuna, or Fors Fortuna; she does not appear in the calendar, had no _flamen_, and must have been introduced from outside. But it was long before Fortuna became of any real importance in Rome, and I shall leave her out of account here. She had two homes of renown in Latium, at Antium and Praeneste, and was in each connected with a kind of oracle, which seems to have been specially resorted to by women before and after childbirth. She was also very probably a deity of other kinds of fertility; and in course of time she took on the characteristics of the Greek Tyche, and became a favourite deity of good luck.[493]

Let us pause for one moment to reflect on the character of these new deities of whom I have been speaking: Hercules, Castor, Minerva, Diana. It must be confessed that, as compared with the great deities of the calendar, they are uninteresting; with the exception, perhaps, of Hercules, they do not seem to have any real _religious_ significance. They are local deities brought in from outside, and have no root in the mind of the Roman people as we have so far been studying it. They seem to indicate the growth of a population in which the true old Roman religious instinct was absent; they represent commerce, business, handicraft, or politics, pursuits in which the old Roman and Latin farmers were not directly interested; they were suffered to be in Rome because the new population and the new interests must of necessity have their own worships, but they were not taken into the heart and mind of the people. So at least it seems to us, after we have been examining the development of the native religious plant from its root upwards. But we must remember that of that new population, its life and its needs, we know hardly anything, and it would not be safe to assume that the conception of Minerva had no influence on the conscience of the artisan, or that of Hercules no power of binding the trader to honest dealing and respect for his oath. As for Diana, though, as Dr. Carter says, she had been introduced "as part of a diplomatic game, not because Rome felt any religious need of her," the fact that the Latin treaty was kept in her temple has a certain moral as well as political significance which ought not to be overlooked. It is impossible to put ourselves mentally in the position of the men who brought these cults to Rome, or of the Romans who granted them admittance; but we shall be on the safe side if we imagine the former at least to have had a conviction that their dealings at Rome would not prosper unless they were carried out with the blessing of their own gods.

But we now come, in the last place, to the foundation of a cult of a very different kind from these, and of far greater import than any of them in the history of Roman religious experience. We have seen that the temple of Diana on the Aventine meant the transference of the headship of the Latin league from Aricia to Rome. When Rome took over this headship, and by removing its religious centre to Rome--or, perhaps more accurately, by offering Diana of Aricia a new home by the Tiber--removed also any danger of a new power growing up in Latium outside her own influence, she seems to have taken another important step in the same direction. Archaeological evidence confirms the tradition that at this time the temple of Jupiter Latiaris, the real and original god of the league, on the Alban hill, was rebuilt;[494] and as the remains of its foundation are of Etruscan workmanship, we may believe that the work was undertaken at that period of an Etruscan dominion in Rome which no one now seriously doubts, and which is marked by the Etruscan name Tarquinius, and by the old tradition that Servius Tullius was really an Etruscan bearing the Etruscan name Mastarna.[495] Now those in power at Rome at this time, whoever they were, not content with rebuilding the ancient temple of Jupiter on the Alban hill, conceived the idea of also building a great temple at Rome, on the steep rock overlooking the Forum, to the same deity of the heaven who had long presided over the Latin league. The tradition was that this temple was vowed by the first Tarquinius, begun by the second, and finally dedicated by the first consul Horatius in the year 509.[496] It is quite possible that this tradition indicates the truth in outline--that it was an Etruscan who conceived the idea of the great work, and that the foreign domination gave way to a Roman reaction before the temple was ready for dedication. We cannot know what exactly was the Etruscan intention as to the cult; but we know that the temple was built in the Etruscan style, that its foundations were of Etruscan masonry,[497] and that the deities inhabiting it were three--a _trias_--a feature quite foreign to the native Roman religion.[498] Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva had each a separate dwelling (_cella_) within the walls of the temple, which, in order to meet this innovation, was almost as broad as it was long. Whether this trias was the one originally intended by the Etruscan king or kings it is impossible to say; but I have great doubts of it. I confess that I have no ground but probability to go on when I conjecture that a long period elapsed between the beginning of this great undertaking and the final completion, and that in the meantime many things had happened of which we have no record; that when the temple was finished it was in Roman hands, though retaining its Etruscan characteristics, and especially the combination of three deities; and that those three deities were essentially Roman in conception. Roman, too, was the idea that one of the three should be paramount; the two goddesses never attained to any special significance, and the temple always remained essentially the dwelling of the great Jupiter, the Father of heaven.[499]

The cult-titles of this Jupiter, Optimus Maximus, the best and greatest, seem to raise him to a position not only far above his colleagues in the temple, but above all other Jupiters in Latium or elsewhere, and presumably above all other deities. They thus suggest a deliberate attempt to place him in a higher position than even the Jupiter Latiaris of the Mons Albanus, whose temple had been rebuilt in the same period. The very novelty of such cult-titles betrays both power and genius in their originator; they are wholly unlike any we have met with so far; they do not suggest a function or a locality or a connection with some other deity; they stand absolutely alone in the history of the Roman religion till far on in the Empire.[500] Here is no _numen_ needed at a particular season to bless some agricultural operation; Jupiter Optimus Maximus seems hardly to be limited by space or season, and is to be always there looking down on his people from his seat on the hill which was henceforward to be called Capitolinus, because the space which had been prepared there for his reception bore the name of Capitolium, the place of headship.[501] These titles, Best and Greatest, call for reflection, for more thought than we are apt to give them; one wonders whether they can be as old as tradition claimed, and in fact at least one recent writer has been tempted, without sufficient reason, to date the whole foundation two centuries later than the Tarquinii.[502] To me they rather suggest the hypothesis that the break-up of the Etruscan domination in Rome was the work of a man or men inspired by a new national feeling which ascribed the revolution to the great god of the race, to whose shrine on the same hill the kings had been used to bring the spoils of their enemies[503]; and that they took advantage of the uncompleted Etruscan temple, with its huge foundations and underground _favissae_, to settle there a new Jupiter, better and greater than any other, to whom his people would be for ever grateful, and in whom they would for ever put their trust. All older associations with cults of the Heaven-god were to be banished from the Capitolium, just as all other deities were believed to have fled from the spot, save only Terminus; the ancient priest of Jupiter, the Flamen Dialis, had no special connection with this temple and its cult, which were under the immediate charge of an _aedituus_ only.[504] Here was the centre of the public worship of the State as a whole, not only of the old patrician State; and no such ancient curiosity as the Flamen Dialis, who, as I have suggested, was a survival from some older era of Latin religious history, was to be supreme there. Here the Consul of the free Republic was to offer, on entering office, the victim--the white heifer of the Alban cult--which his predecessor had vowed, and himself to bind his successor to a like sacrifice; and this he did on behalf of patrician and plebeian alike. Here the victorious general was to deposit his spoils, reaching the temple in the solemn procession of the _triumphus_, and wearing the _ornamenta_ of the deity himself; for here, contrary to all precedent in the worship of Romans, there was an image of the god wrought in terra cotta and brought from Etruria.[505] It is in connection with such solemn events as these that we may find the origin of those imposing processions which for centuries were to impress the minds of the Roman people, and indeed of their enemies also, with the might and magnificence of their Empire; for apart from the triumphal processions with which we are all familiar, the scene at the entrance of new consuls on their office must have been most impressive. They were accompanied by the other magistrates, the Senate, the priests in their robes of office, and by an immense crowd of citizens. After the ceremony the Senate met _in the temple_ to transact the first religious business of the year. Here too the tribal assembly met for the purpose of enrolling the new levies before each season of war, in order that the youths who were to fight the battles of Rome might realise the presence of Rome's great protecting deity. Even in the most degenerate days of the Roman religion, though Jupiter had suffered from the ridicule of playwrights or the speculations of philosophers, an orator's appeal to the Best and Greatest looking down on the Forum from his seat above it, could not fail to move the hearers; "Ille, ille Iuppiter restitit," cried Cicero in the peril of the Catilinarian conspiracy, "ille Capitolium, ille haec templa, ille cunctam urbem, ille vos omnes salvos esse voluit."[506]

Nor was it only the State as represented by its officials that could and did address itself to the worship of this great god. It seems probable that the new idea of a single guardian deity, with his two attendant goddesses, for which the Romans were indebted to the genius (whoever he may have been) who released them from the yoke of the Etruscan, opened the cult to the individual in a way which must have been a novelty in the religious life of the people.[507] The most memorable example of this is in the famous story told of Scipio, the conqueror of Hannibal, which is not likely to be an invention of the annalists. As Gellius records it, it stands thus: Scipio was wont to ascend to the temple just before daylight, to order the _cella Iovis_ to be opened for him, and there to remain alone for a long time, as if taking counsel with the god about the affairs of the State. The dogs, it was said, which guarded the entrance, astonished the temple-keepers by treating him always with respect, while they would attack or bark at others.[508]

The reader may remark, that during the last few minutes I have wandered quite away from the Roman religion which we have so far been trying to understand, and he will be right. I have but just touched on this great cult, which properly belongs to Rome of the Republic, in order to show how great a change must have taken place, how great a revolution must have been consummated, when this temple arose on its Etruscan substructures. We have marked two forward steps in the social and political experience of the Romans: the settlement of the family on the land and the organisation of the City-state with its calendar. Here is a third, the liberation of that State from a foreign dominion, and the development, in matters both internal and external, which subjection and liberation alike brought with them. In regard to religious experience, the first produced the ordered worship of the household, which had a lasting effect on the Roman character; the second produced the _ius divinum_, the priesthoods and the ritual for the service of the various _numina_ which had consented to take up their abode in the city and its precincts. These two taken together changed doubt and anxiety into confidence, stilled the _religio_ natural to uncivilised man, and developed the machinery of magic into forms and ceremonies which were more truly religious. Now we note a third great social step forward, which brings with it a new conception and expression of the religious unity of the State; henceforward, alongside of a multiplicity of cults and of priests attached to them, we have one central worship to which all free citizens may resort, and a trinity of guardian deities, of whom one, Jupiter Best and Greatest, is the one presiding genius of the whole State.

Lastly, there can hardly be a doubt that this new cult marks a more extensive communication with neighbouring peoples than the State had as yet experienced or encouraged. Etruria, Latium, and Greece, all seem to have had a hand in it. Of its relation to the Latins and Etruscans I have already spoken. It only remains for me to note the fact that it was here, in this Capitoline temple, according to unanimous tradition, that those legendary "Sibylline books" were deposited which came from a Greek source, and according to the story, from Cumae.[509] These mysterious books were destined to change the whole character of the religion of the Romans during the next two centuries; and this is why the dedication of the great temple is a convenient halting-place on our journey. I propose to begin the second part of my subject by examining the nature of this change, and then to pass on to others, until we have reached the end of the religious experience of the genuine Roman people.

NOTES TO LECTURE X.

[464] _Origin and Development of Moral Ideas_, chapters
l.-lii.: "Gods as guardians of morality."

[465] Crawley, _The Tree of Life_, in a remarkable
chapter on the function of religion (ch. ix.),
especially p. 287 foll. "Morality," says Mr. Crawley,
"is one of the results of the religious impulse." What
he means here by morality is not "that elaborated by
abstract thinkers," but the "morality of elemental human
nature." "Elemental morality" may be a somewhat obscure
term; but I think it is highly probable that Mr. Crawley
is, in part at least, right in ascribing the origin of
morality to the religious impulse.

[466] Crawley, _op. cit._, p. 265.

[467] Above, pp. 107-8.

[468] See the author's article in _Hibbert Journal_ for
July 1907, p. 894.

[469] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 15 foll.

[470] _Ib._ p. 421: Aust, _Religion der Roemer_, p. 47.

[471] I am, of course, well aware that quite recently
attempts have been made to explain the _plebs_ as the
original inhabitants of Latium, and the Romans as
conquering invaders; _e.g._ by Prof. Ridgeway in his
paper, "Who were the Romans," read to the British
Academy, and by Binder in his recently published volume
_Die Plebs_. The theory is a natural one, and not out
of harmony with the facts as known; but it has yet to be
further developed and tested, and as those who hold it
are not as yet in agreement with each other, and as the
evidence which alone can prove it is of a very special
character, archaeological and linguistic, I have
expressed myself in terms of the older view.

[472] _The Religion of Numa_, p. 30.

[473] _Aen._ viii. 184 foll.; the description of the
festival is in 280 foll.; where the interesting points
are the priests of the gentes appointed to look after
the cult (the Potitii only are here mentioned) "pellibus
in morem cincti," and the Salii "populeis evincti
tempora ramis."

[474] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 219 foll.; Carter, _Religion of
Numa_, p. 31 foll. The ground had been prepared for the
new view by the elaborate articles in Roscher's
_Mythological Lexicon_, vol. ii. pp. 2253 foll. and 2901
foll. Of late a painstaking discussion by J. G. Winter
has appeared in the _University of Michigan Studies for
1910_, p. 171 foll.; he mainly confirms Wissowa's
conclusions, but provisionally accepts a suggestion of
mine (_R.F._ 197) that the tithe practice of the _ara
maxima_ may possibly have been of Phoenician origin, and
points out that E. Curtius made the same suggestion as
long ago as 1845. On p. 269 he also dwells, very
properly, I think, on the part which the Etruscans may
have had in the dissemination of the myth and cult of
the Greek Heracles. Wissowa, however, stoutly maintains
that these are simply Greek and of commercial origin. It
has been Wissowa's special and valuable function to
elucidate the Greek origin of many Roman cults and
legends; but I doubt if he has adequately considered the
influence of other peoples, and in particular of
Phoenicians and Etruscans. Certainly the Hercules
question is not finally settled by his masterly analysis
of it in _R.K._ p. 220 foll. But most of what I said in
_R.F._ about the Hercules of the _ara maxima_ may now be
considered obsolete; and I may add that my remarks on
the supposed connection of Hercules with Genius, Dius
Fidius, and Jupiter in the same work, p. 143 foll., have
lost much strength since Wissowa's book appeared. Yet I
am not prepared to accept the view which would deny to
Hercules on Italian soil all contamination with Italian
ideas; as Willamowitz-Moellendorf puts it (_Herakles_,
ed. 2, vol. i. p. 25), "Die Italiker haben dem Koerper,
den sie uebernahmen, den Odem ihrer eigenen Seele
eingeblasen: aber wie der Name ist der Gestalt des
Hercules hellenischer Import." There are points in
connection with the Roman Hercules, _e.g._ the _nodus
herculaneus_ of the bride's girdle, which Wissowa does
not explain, and which, so far as I can see, can only be
explained by assuming that, as might have been expected,
the Greek Hercules became to some extent entangled in
the web of Italian thought.

[475] The cult was Greek in detail; _Graeco ritu_,
according to Varro as quoted by Macrobius iii. 6. 17;
see also references in Wissowa, _R.K._ 222, note 2.
Following R. Peter in the articles in Roscher, I
assumed, in _R.F._ p. 194, that this might be a later
reconstruction of an originally Italian cult; but for
the present it is safer to look on the _Graecus ritus_
as primitive, and on the presence of Salii, a genuine
Italian institution, as brought from Tibur by the gens
Pinaria, of which there is a trace in that city
(_C.I.L._ xiv. 3541). There also Salii were engaged in
the cult of Hercules Victor, to whom tithes were also
offered (_C.I.L._ xiv. 3541). The evidence for the
theory that the cult came to Rome from Tibur is
summarised by Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 220.

[476] _Op. cit._, p. 37.

[477] For the connection of the cult with trade,
Wissowa, _R.K._ 225; and the story told in Macrobius
iii. 6. 11, from Masurius Sabinus, of a _tibicen_ who
became a merchant and had an interview with the god in a
dream. For the connection with _oaths_, _R.F._ p. 138. I
may say before leaving Hercules that though I accept the
latest hypotheses provisionally, I am far from believing
that the last word has been said on the subject.

[478] See, _e.g._, Lanciani, _Ruins and Excavations of
Ancient Rome_, p. 271 foll. The date of the temple is
482 B.C., but it was vowed in 496 after the Regillus
battle. The three columns still standing date from 7
B.C.

[479] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 217, who points out that the
Dioscuri never appear in _lectisternia_ at Rome, as they
do at Tusculum, which shows that the latter cult was
more directly Greek than that at Rome, and that the
Roman authorities admitted it as a Latin cult without
the Greek details.

[480] Carter, _op. cit._ p. 38. There seemed to be
difficulties in the way of his conclusion; the Dioscuri
were very strong in the Peloponnese, yet the Spartans
neglected the use of cavalry. At any rate the theory
needs careful historical testing. See article "Dioscuri"
in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._ It would seem natural
that when once the cult had been introduced by traders
it might become specially attached to the cavalry, owing
to the ancient connection of the Twins with horses.

[481] Ecastor and Edepol, which were oaths used
especially by women, who were not allowed to swear by
Hercules, Gell. xi. 6.

[482] The reasoning will be found in full in Wissowa,
_R.K._ p. 203 foll., and in his article "Minerva" in the
_Mythological Lexicon_. See also Carter, _Religion of
Numa_, p. 45 foll. For the position of this temple and
that of Diana on the Aventine, a suburb which cannot be
proved to have been then within any city wall, see
Carter in _Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society for 1909_, p. 136 foll.

[483] Waltzing, _Etude historique sur les corporations
romaines_, vol. i. pp. 63 and 199. The relation between
town life and trades is stated with his usual insight by
von Jhering, _Evolution of the Aryan_, p. 93 foll.

[484] See Mueller-Deecke, _Etrusker_, ii. 47; Deecke,
_Falisker_, p. 89 foll.

[485] Minerva or Menrva is assuredly not Etruscan,
though frequently found on Etruscan monuments; see
Deecke, _l.c._ p. 89 foll.

[486] Fasti Praenestini in _C.I.L._ i.^2 March 19.
"Artificum dies (quod Minervae) aedis in Aventino eo die
est (dedicata)." This is one of those additional notes
in the Fast. Praen., which are believed to have been the
work of Verrius Flaccus: see _Roman Festivals_, p. 12.

[487] Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 288. We
know the fact from Strabo's account of Massilia, Bk. iv.
p. 180.

[488] Dion. Hal. iv. 26. See _R.F._ p. 198.

[489] Statius, _Silvae_ iii. 1. 60. See Wissowa's
article "Diana" in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._

[490] Wissowa, _l.c._ p. 332.

[491] _Golden Bough_, i. p. 1 foll.; _Early History of
the Kingship_, Lecture I.

[492] Varro, _L.L._ 5. 43; Carter, _op. cit._ p. 55.

[493] See on Fortuna the exhaustive article by R. Peter
in the _Mythological Lexicon_; Wissowa, _R.K._ 206
foll.; _R.F._ p. 161 foll., and 223 foll.; Carter, _op.
cit._ p. 50 foll. Dr. Carter seems to me to be too
certain of the absence of any idea of luck or chance in
the original conception of Fortuna: the word _fors_, so
far as we know, never had any other meaning, and the
deity Fors must be a personification of an abstraction,
like Ops, Fides, and Salus. See Axtell, _Deification of
abstract idea in Roman literature_, p. 9, with whom I
agree in rejecting the notion of Marquardt and Wissowa
that she was a deity of horticulture. He rightly points
out that she is not included in the list of agricultural
deities in Varro, _R.R._ i. 1. 6.

[494] See Aust in his article "Jupiter" in the _Myth.
Lex._ p. 689, where the evidence for the contemporaneous
origin of the temple on the Alban hill and that on the
Capitol is fully stated. In this case excavations have
confirmed the Roman tradition, which ascribed the former
temple to one or other of the Tarquinii. Jordan, _Roem.
Top._ i. pt. 2. p. 9.

[495] See the speech of Claudius the emperor, _C.I.L._
xiii. 1668, printed in Furneaux' _Tacitus' Annals_, vol.
ii. Gardthausen, _Mastarna_, p. 40; Mueller-Deecke,
_Etrusker_, i. 111. For the Etruscan name Mastarna, see
Dennis, _Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_^3, ii. 506
foll.: Gardthausen gives a cut of the painting found in
a tomb at Vulci in which he appears with the name
attached. Even the ultra-sceptical Pais does not doubt
the fact of an Etruscan domination in Rome; but he does
not believe the Tarquinii and Mastarna to have been
historical personages, and will not date the temples
attributed to this age earlier than the fourth century
B.C. See his _Ancient Legends of Roman History_, ch.
vii.; _Storia di Roma_, i. 310 foll. But the names of
these kings do not concern us, except so far as they
connect Etruria with Roman history in the sixth century.

[496] Cic. _Rep._ ii. 24. 44; Livy i. 38. and 55;
Dionys. iii. 69; iv. 59. 61. The whole evidence will be
found collected in Jordan, _Topogr._ i. pt. ii. p. 9
foll., and in Aust, _Myth. Lex._, _s.v._ Jupiter, p. 706
foll. If the date 509 were seriously impugned Roman
chronology would be in confusion, for this is believed
to be the earliest date on which we can rely, and on it
the subsequent chronology hangs: Mommsen, _Roem.
Chronologie_, ed. 2, p. 198.

[497] Aust, p. 707 foll.; Jordan, _op. cit._, p. 9.

[498] _i.e._ the admission of more than one deity into a
single building. The word "trias" is sometimes used of
the three old Roman deities, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus
(_e.g._ by Wissowa, _Myth. Lex._ _s.v._ Quirinus), but
this is in a different sense. On the idea of a trias
generally, see Kuhfeldt, _de Capitoliis imperii Romani_,
p. 82 foll.; Cumont, _Religions orientales dans le
paganisme romain_, p. 290, note 51.

[499] The technical name of the temple was aedes Iovis
Opt. Max.: for other indications of Jupiter's supremacy
see Aust, p. 720.

[500] On Oriental developments of Jupiter Opt. Max. see
an interesting paper by Cumont in _Archiv_ for 1906, p.
323 foll. (_Iuppiter summus exsuperantissimus_). A
relief in the Berlin Museum has a dedication _I.O.M.
summo exsuperantissimo_; but Prof. Cumont believes the
deity to have been really Oriental, introduced by Greek
philosophical theologians in the last century B.C., but
probably Chaldaean in origin.

[501] Jordan, _op. cit._ p. 7 and note. It is uncertain
whether the whole hill had any earlier name. The Mons
Saturnius of Varro, _L.L._ v. 42, with the legend of an
oppidum _Saturnia_, and the Mons Tarpeius (_Rhet. ad
Herenn._, iv. 32. 43; Pais, _Ancient Legends_, chs. v.
and vi.) need not be taken into account.

[502] Pais, _Ancient Legends of Roman History_, ch. v.

[503] See above, p. 130.

[504] This is an inference from the fact that this
Flamen is nowhere mentioned as connected with the
Capitoline cult. Macrob. i. 15, 16, speaks of the ovis
Idulis as sacrificed on every ides _a flamine_, and
this, it is true, took place on the Capitolium (Aust, in
_Lex._ _s.v._ Jupiter, 655), but (1) Festus, 290,
mentions sacerdotes, Ovid, _Fasti_ i. 588, castus
sacerdos only; and (2) this sacrifice may well, as O.
Gilbert conjectured, have originally taken place in the
Regia (_Gesch. und Topogr. Roms_, i. 236). In any case
the Flamen was not in any special sense priest of Iup.
Opt. Max.

[505] The _locus classicus_ for this is Pliny, _N.H._
xxxv. 157. The artist was said to have been one Volcas
of Veii. Ovid, _Fasti_ i. 201, says that the god had in
his hand a _fictile fulmen_. Varro believed this to be
the oldest statue of a god in Rome; see above, p. 146,
and Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 280, accepts
his statement as probably correct.

[506] Cic. _Catil._ iii. 9. 21.

[507] Jordan, _Topogr._ i. 2. pp. 39 and 62, notes. The
most convincing passages quoted by him are Suet. _Aug._
59, and Serv. _Ecl._ iv. 50 (of boys taking toga virilis
who "ad Capitolium eunt"); but was not this to sacrifice
to Liber or Iuventas? _R.F._ p. 56.

[508] Gellius vi. 1. 6, from C. Oppius et Iulius
Hyginus. In his famous character of Scipio (xxvi. 19)
Livy seems to think that Scipio did this to make people
think him superhuman or of divine descent.

[509] Ovid, _Fasti_, iv. 158. 257; Virg. _Ecl._ iv. 4,
_Aen._ vi. 42; Marquardt, 352, note 7, for evidence that
the books came to Cumae from Erythrae. See also Diels,
_Sibyllinische Blaetter_, p. 80 foll.

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.