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$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{gods
religion
greek
roman
first
old
time
temple
part
rome}
$Date{1913}
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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.