$Unique_ID{bob00824} $Pretitle{} $Title{History Of Religions Chapter II} $Subtitle{} $Author{Foot Moore, George} $Affiliation{} $Subject{gods religion greek roman first old time temple part rome} $Date{1913} $Log{} Title: History Of Religions Book: Religions Of The Romans Author: Foot Moore, George Date: 1913 Chapter II Apollo was the first of the greater Greek gods to be thus received, probably at the same time with the Sibylline oracles, and like them he came from Cumae. It was particularly in his quality of god of healing that he was first worshipped in Rome (Apollo Medicus), and his temple, in the neighbourhood of the Circus Flaminius, was erected in 431 B. C. in fulfillment of a vow made two years before in time of plague. Other Greek deities were introduced at the instance of the Sibylline oracles. Thus, soon after the expulsion of the kings, the crops failed badly and the import of grain was unsatisfactory. The oracle bade propitiate Demeter, Dionysos, and Kore. A temple was accordingly vowed, which was consecrated to them in 493 B. C. under the Latinised names, Ceres, Liber, Libera. About the same time, perhaps, indeed upon the same occasion, a temple was erected to Hermes, the god of merchants, under the name Mercurius, and in connection with it a kind of corn exchange and a merchants' guild appeared. In similar emergencies in the following centuries the help and protection of other Greek gods were sought: thus, a pestilence in 293 B. C. was the occasion of sending for Aesculapius, the divine physician, from Epidaurus, and the founding of his temple on the island in the Tiber. Temples were erected in this period, not only for the Greek deities, who had long dwelt in houses made with hands, but for the old Roman gods; and by degrees the latter also came to be represented by images after Greek types and doubtless the work of foreign artists. The Greek forms of worship made a much stronger appeal to the senses than the old Roman rites, and reckoned more upon the presence and participation of the people. The "supplications," whether to avert calamities, or to secure the success of an enterprise such as a campaign, or as thanksgivings after a deliverance or a victory, in which multitudes moved in procession from temple to temple through all the city; the choruses of maidens, or, as in the Secular Festival, of well-born youths and maidens; the games, which, as they multiplied, tended more and more to become mere spectacles for the assembled throngs, were singularly unlike the old-fashioned Roman cults. Equally foreign were the lectisternia in the temples, where, before puppet images of the gods reclining on cushions, tables were spread with food, or, on occasion, companies of gods and goddesses brought together in some public place around the festal board. The first instance of the latter was in 339 B. C., when, in a time of pestilence, an eight-day feast of this kind was given to Apollo and Latona, Hercules and Diana, Mercury and Neptune. In 217 B. C. was held a great lectisternium of the twelve gods, Juppiter and Juno, Neptune and Minerva, Mars and Venus, Apollo and Diana, Vulcan and Vesta, Mercury and Ceres. Here Greek and Latin gods mingle indiscriminately, but the circle of twelve gods and the grouping in pairs is purely Greek. It was but one step farther when the gilded statues of the twelve gods were set up in the Forum after the pattern of the Agora in Athens. Thus the old worship was by degrees put completely into the shadow by the more popular, aesthetic, and emotional ritual. There was a darker side to these foreign improvements in religion: it was the Sibylline oracles which prescribed the burying alive of a pair of Greeks - man and woman - and a pair of Gauls, as a peculiarly efficacious piaculum in time of great public apprehension; three cases are recorded in which this was done (226, 216, and 114 B. C.). The twenty-seven puppets of rushes annually thrown into the Tiber from the old pile bridge are called Argei, that is, in the oracular cant, Greeks, and are perhaps substitutes for an expiation by human lives; but the matter is obscure. The Greek gods who came in under their own names were few compared with those who were rebaptised with the names of Latin deities to whom they had some resemblance in attributes or functions. They brought along their own cults and myths - nothing was Latin about them but their appellations. Venus, an old Italian goddess of gardens - especially, it seems, of kitchen and market gardens - had to lend her name, perhaps by association of blooming beauty, to Aphrodite, when from her Sicilian seat in Eryx the cult of that divinity reached Rome. Her first temple was erected on the Capitol in 215 B. C. at the direction of the Sibylline oracles, and others followed. Ceres and Libera, as we have seen, were understood to be Latin for Demeter and Kore; Poseidon figured as Neptunus; Pluto and Persephone as Dis pater and Proserpina, and so on through the catalogue. Nor was it enough for Roman religion to annex the whole Greek pantheon. In 205 B.C., in the crisis of the war with Hannibal, the custodians of the oracles found it in their books that the sacred stone of the Mother of the Gods (Mater Deum Magna Idaea), the goddess of Pessinus in Phrygia, must be fetched to Rome. A ship was accordingly despatched to Pergamon, whither Attalos had transported the stone, and it reached Rome in 204 B. C., where it was received with exuberant rejoicings. The great temple on the Palatine was dedicated in 191 B. C. Games were held in honour of the goddess, in connection with which, in 194 B. C., the first stage plays were exhibited. The Ludi Megalenses took their place among the annual festivals, beginning on April 4, on which day the Praetor Urbanus offered sacrifice at the temple. The cult of the Great Mother was conducted by Phrygian priests; and down to the end of the republic it was against the law for a Roman citizen to enter this priesthood. The outlandish garb of the trousered and bonneted priests, the emasculated Galli in woman's dress, the frenzied enthusiasm, gave the Romans their first experience of the religions of the East, and fascinated while it repelled. The Phrygian goddess was the forerunner of a long procession of Oriental deities which streamed toward Rome; but she was the last to get an invitation from the Sibylline Books. Most of the foreign gods who were brought in by authority were summoned in time of distress, when plague or famine or disastrous war or dire prodigies seemed to demand new and potent expiations; they did not come to supplant the old Roman gods, but their rites were resorted to to rid the state of some strange evil, or, like Mercurius, to preside over interests which had no patron in the old religion. The principle of specialisation which is characteristic of the Roman religion continued to produce new deities or differentiate old ones. After the Aphrodite of Eryx had come in as Venus Erycina, and the prodigious debauching of three vestals had led to the introduction of Aphrodite Apostrophia as Venus Verticordia (114 B. C.), we find a Venus Felix with the attributes of Fortuna, a Venus Victrix, and Venus Genetrix, to whom the Julian Caesars traced their lineage through Aeneas. Each of these had her own temple, priesthood, and festivals, and was, in spite of the common name, to all intents and purposes a distinct goddess. A glance at a list of the titles of Juppiter will show how many different local and functional deities are comprehended under the one appellation -Juppiter Feretrius, Fulgur, Stator, Victor, Optimus Maximus, are but a few of the multitude. This is less distinctive, however, than the continual enrichment of the pantheon with deities who bear the names of qualities or conditions, such as Concordia, Spes (Bona Spes), Pietas, all of which were worshipped in the prime of the republic. Such cases are often conceived by modern authors as the deification of abstractions, and thought, therefore, to imply a somewhat advanced stage of religious development. It is only the modern, however, who conceives them as abstract: the power which works harmony among citizens is for the antique apprehension no more abstract than the power that works the germination of grain in the earth. Another group of similar deities seem to be split off from the great gods in specific characters; thus Felicitas comes to stand independently by the side of Juppiter Felix, or Victoria by Juppiter Victor; so also, perhaps, Salus, Fides, Libertas. Another group, in later times, are the virtues of princes, beginning with Clementia Caesaris (44 B. C.); under the empire this hypostasis of imperial qualities - actual or desiderated - reached great proportions under the impulsion of the emperor worship. Mention has already been made of the college of augurs who invited, observed, and interpreted signs in heaven and on earth by which the gods indicated their consent or disapproval of public acts in peace or war, and of the Sibylline Books with their official exegetes. A third method of divination was borrowed from the Etruscans, among whom the art had been highly developed. The practitioners of this method, the haruspices, were, until after the fall of the republic, Etruscans, and were summoned to Rome by the Senate when occasion demanded. In earlier centuries little is heard of them, but in the time of the second Punic war they become more prominent; in the second century B. C. they were officially consulted about public prodigies almost as frequently as the Sibylline oracles, and in the first century twice as often. Generals had haruspices on their staff to divine for them concerning g the plan and issue of campaigns. They were often resorted to also in private affairs, and seem to have been in especial favour with the aristocracy. The Disciplina Etrusca was embodied in numerous books dealing with different branches of the art. The haruspices interpreted omens and portents of many kinds; they were the recognised experts in all the freaks of lightning, the science of which was contained in their Libri Fulgurales. Other books treated of the rites to be observed in laying out a city, the definition of its bounds by a pomoerium, the location and dedication of temples, and the like. The art for which the haruspices were peculiarly famous, however, and from which their name is perhaps derived, was the consultation of the liver of victims. The Romans inspected the entrails of sacrifices to see whether they were normal or not, from which they inferred the assent or dissent of the god to whom the question was directed; but the Etruscans mapped out the liver into regions, and from the size, shape, and markings of the several parts read off specific signs from different gods. Of peculiar significance was the configuration of the caput jocineris (called by modern anatomists processus pyramidalis or caudatus), which is extremely variable; a large caput was a good omen; a small, deformed, or missing one spelled disaster; a cleft one, dissension, civil war, and so on. A bronze model of a sheep's liver, laid out as a divining chart and bearing in its numerous fields legends in Etruscan, has been preserved. Among the Greeks, also, divination by the liver was much employed and the same prominence is given to the processus pyramidalis. ^1 It has been proved beyond question that this pseudoscience is of Babylonian origin; model livers in clay have been found, laid out in regions, and with the processus pyramidalis schematised in the same fashion as the bronze liver of Piacenza, and many omen texts interpret the indications given by abnormalities in the various parts of the organ and in the gall-bladder. ^2 When and by what route the art reached Italy is unknown. [Footnote 1: The oldest instances are in Aeschylus.] [Footnote 2: See above, p. 227.] The influx of Greek gods and the progressive Hellenisation of the Roman religion in the last two centuries of the republic was only part of the triumphant march of Greek culture, which was accelerated by the annexation of Macedonia and the conquest of Corinth (146 B. C.), virtually bringing all Greece under Roman dominion. Roman literature began with translations and imitations of Greek authors; art and science were not only Greek, but remained for the most part in Greek hands. Education meant the study of the Greek language and literature; increasing numbers of youth of the upper classes completed their education by travel in Greece and study in Greek schools. The first professors of philosophy and rhetoric who exhibited their wares in Rome were shown the door by decree of the senate (173 B. C.?). A few years after, the censors issued a characteristic edict against the new education: "It has been reported to us that there are men calling themselves Latin rhetoricians, who have introduced a new kind of education, and that young men go to school to them and sit there whole days through. Our forefathers ordained what they wished their children to learn and what schools they wished them to go to. This new business, at variance with the use and custom of our ancestors, we do not approve nor think right. Wherefore we have decided to apprise both those who keep these schools and those who frequent them that we disapprove them." M. Porcius Cato took it for the mission of his life to stem the incoming tide of Greek culture with all its denationalising consequences. But such efforts were like keeping out the sea with a broom. To those who were ambitious of this new culture, the religion of their fathers, like the old Roman virtues and ideals, seemed irretrievably antiquated and out of mode. In more thoughtful minds acquaintance with Greek philosophy raised questions which went to the root, not of one form of religion, but of all. The poet Ennius (died 169 B. C.) in his Epicharmus reduced the gods to the elements, and he did into Latin the rationalistic Euhemerus who made them dead men. A century later Lucretius (died 55 B. C.), in his De Natura Rerum, set forth the mechanical materialism of Epicurus as a gospel of deliverance from the fear of death and hell. In the last century of the republic Epicureanism was a fashionable philosophy, numbering among its adherents some serious thinkers and many who found its teachings agreeable to their inclinations; after the time of Augustus it sank into insignificance. The Roman temperament had much greater affinity to Stoicism, especially on its ethical side; and from the days of the younger Scipio many of the noblest spirits were addicted to it. The system of Panaetius, however, the first Stoic teacher of note at Rome, was on some points more sceptical than those of his predecessors; he denied the soul even the temporary immortality which the school generally had allowed it (till the next burning up of the world), and doubted or denied the reality of divination, which most of the Stoics treated as a point of orthodoxy. He is also, in all probability, the author of the classification of the gods which his disciple Scaevola propounded: There are three classes of gods, those of the poets, those of the philosopher, and those of the statesman. The mythical theology of the poets is full of absurd and degrading fables; the philosophical theology cannot be made the religion of a state, for it is in part beyond the intelligence of the commonalty, in part it would be bad for them - for example, if they should be told that the gods do not look like their images, that in reality god has no age, nor sex, nor limbs. The established religion can, therefore, be nothing but an institution of the state, and its civil theology only a device of wise statesmen, adapted to the needs and capacities of the masses. It is noteworthy that Scaevola (died 82 B.C.), who maintained this theory, was himself the official head of the state religion, Pontifex Maximus. The same doctrine is frankly avowed by Varro. So far as its influence extended, the effect of such teaching was to undermine religion both as belief and observance. The Stoic pantheism might be for individual thinkers a satisfactory substitute for religion; but, as its adherents clearly saw, it was nothing for the man in the street, who could hardly recognise more than the name of his god in their "Juppiter omnipotens, rerum regumque repertor, progenitor genetrixque deum, deus unus et idem." Besides, Stoicism declared the whole public cultus, with its images and sacrifices, not only senseless but harmful. It must be set down on the other side, however, that the ethics of Panaetius did good service in a time when a clarifying of moral notions and a fortifying of conscience was much needed; all the more because he addressed himself not to the wise, but to those who were striving after wisdom. Cicero founded on him his own tractate, De Officiis; Ambrose christianised Cicero, and through him the Stoic may be said to have furnished the basis of the first systematisation of Christian ethics. Posidonius, the most eminent Stoic teacher in the first half of the century before our era, went back to the common doctrine of the school on the principal points in which Panaetius departed from it - the periodical universal conflagrations, demons, and divination. On the other hand, he took a more conciliatory attitude than the older Stoics to other schools, and was disposed to find a large element of truth common to them all. His anthropology, in particular, is influenced by Plato and Aristotle, and this in turn affects his ethics - the heart of his philosophy - and his theology. This drawing together of what may be called the positive schools, in opposition to the Epicureans and to the Sceptics, is one of the signs of the times, and accounts in part for the eclectic tendency which appears on all hands. The Stoic criticism of the popular religion had itself a religious motive: it offered, at least to the educated, in its own theology something better. The Academic scepticism, on the contrary, was directed against all positive theologies, and especially against the Stoics - their proofs of the existence of gods, their conception of the nature of god, their doctrine of providence, their defence of divination and prophecy. But here also the compromises of the time appear, and a man like Cicero, who, if he had to profess an allegiance, called himself an Academic, is rather a sceptical eclectic than a thorough-going disciple of the New Academy. And for all his theoretical scepticism, he finds probable grounds for believing in the existence of God, the unity of the godhead, the supernatural order and governance of the world, divine providence, and the immortality of the soul. Many, however, who had only a superficial acquaintance with the matter, rested in the belief that philosophy had somehow disproved religion; while, as for philosophy itself, it was a babel of conflicting opinions, and nothing certain. It was not religion only that suffered from this temper: as in the time of the sophists in Greece, the discussion of ethical questions acted as a solvent on customary morality. It was no longer enough to say of a course of conduct that it was mos majorum, the Roman way; the ancestors were allowed no presumption - why, indeed, should it be supposed that they were wiser than the young men of the day? What authority have the traditional notions of virtue? Let us have the reason of it! But in the schools there was much controversy over both the ends and the standards of the moral life, and interest always finds it easy to turn the scales of probability. The denationalising effect of an alien culture and the mental and moral confusion wrought by an imported philosophy were not, however, the chief cause of the decadence of religion in the last century of the republic. For that we must look to the far-reaching economic and political changes which came over the Roman people in that age, disintegrating the social structure and destroying the moral fibre of all classes. Enormous wealth, gained often by extortion and usury, flowed from the provinces to Italy, and was lavished in insensate and corrupting luxury; the small free landholders were ruined by competition with imported grain and with slave labour, their farms were absorbed in vast latifundia, while they themselves thronged into the cities to swell the hungry and turbulent proletariat. The strife of classes and factions or the insatiate ambition of individuals over and over precipitated bloody civil wars, with their train of proscriptions and distributions, which fill chapter after chapter of Roman history from the Gracchi to the last triumvirate; demagogues reduced political corruption to a science. The virtues that had made Rome great - integrity, frugality, justice, loyalty, piety - belonged to an order that had passed away; the Roman home, with its stern but just paternal discipline, the dignity of the mother, the fidelity of the wife, were part of that bygone order. Divorce was of every-day occurrence in high society, and was thought no shame; young libertines such as the associates of Catiline made open mock of virtue and honour. "Italy," it has been said by a recent historian, "was living through the fever of moral disintegration and incoherence which assails all civilised societies that are rich in the manifold resources of culture and enjoyment, but tolerate few restraints on the feverish struggle of contending appetites." Religion was unable to stay this demoralisation, and itself fell more and more into decay. The cults of the Greek rite suffered less, at least outwardly, from this decay than the old national religion, for they not only possessed greater popular attractions in their showy festivals, but were in the hands of a professional temple priesthood who had a direct interest in the maintenance of worship. The old Roman gods, on the other hand, were not merely neglected, but in many instances forgotten; their priesthoods died out, and with them all knowledge of their functions and rites. Varro could only catalogue them as Di incerti - gods about whom he could learn nothing definite. The priestly colleges, the Pontifices and the Augures, were increased in the first century B. C. to fifteen members each, and vacancies were filled, not as before by the members of the college itself, but by a form of popular election from a list made up by the members of the college. The offices were thus drawn into the turbulent currents of politics, and doubtless men were often chosen who knew little about their duties and cared less. Under such circumstances, the traditional knowledge of the vast and complex body of ancient ritual and of the augural science which it was the business of these corporations to preserve and apply rapidly declined, and it shortly came to pass that the most diligent students of antiquity found no one who could answer their questions. The pontifices, who had to keep the calendar in order, were so incompetent or so negligent that the agricultural festivals no longer fell in the proper seasons, and it was not until Caesar's reform that the year was put to rights again. The ancient offices of the Rex Sacrorum and the great flamines, which were restricted to the dwindling patrician families, were hedged about with so many prescriptions and restrictions that it became difficult or impossible to find any one willing to fill them, in spite of the many honours and privileges that attached to the position. The Rex Sacrorum could hold no political office; the Flamen Dialis, none outside the city. The latter had to wear at all times his priestly vestments, and might never go bareheaded; a table of oblations had to be always spread at the foot of his bed; he must have a wife to whom he was married in the ancient form of confarreatio, and whom he might not divorce; if she died, he had to lay down his office; he might not utter an oath, see armed men or mount a horse, leave the city for a single night (in late times, not over three nights), come in contact with a dead body or approach a grave, touch or even name things associated with death and the nether world (goats, dogs, beans, ivy), touch uncooked meat or leavened bread; he might neither wear nor look upon anything that resembled bonds - even his finger-ring must not be completely closed; he must not pass under a vine with long propagines; he could be shaved only with a bronze razor, his barber must be a free man, the trimmings of his beard must be buried at the foot of an arbor felix, and many more rules of a similar kind, for an infraction of which he was deposed. These restrictions were so vexatious that after 87 B. C. the post remained vacant for three-quarters of a century, until in 11 B. C. Augustus succeeded in filling it again. The priestly associations, also, in whose hands certain particular ceremonies lay, like the Fratres Arvales and the Sodales Titii, died out, and when Augustus revived them the interrupted tradition could only be in part picked up again. A more conspicuous witness to the general indifference to religion were the many ruinous temples and abandoned holy places. The one religious observance that showed no signs of waning interest was the games. The old Roman ferioe were, indeed, put quite into the background by the new-fashioned games given under the direction and at the charges of the magistrates. Beginning with the Ludi Romani (probably in 366 B. C.) and the Ludi Plebeii (216 B. C.), these games multiplied as time went on, and were celebrated with increasing splendour, while their association with religion became looser and looser; the throngs who filled the circus were there to enjoy a great spectacle whose connection with religion was as external and nominal as that of a bull-fight on a saint's day. The ancient household religion was also much neglected - in part consequence, in part cause, of the relaxation of the family tie.