The Religion of Numa
J >> Jesse Benedict Carter >> The Religion of NumaWe have now seen the principal elements which went to make up the family
religion and that part of the state religion which was an enlargement
and an imitation of the family religion. But even in the most primitive
times a Roman's life was not bounded by his own hut and the phenomenon
of death. There was work to be done in life, a living to be gained, and
here, as everywhere, there were hosts of unseen powers who must be
propitiated. His religion was not only coincident with every phase of
private life, it was also closely related to the specific occupations
and interests of the people, and just as the interests of the community,
its means of livelihood, were agriculture and stock-raising, so the gods
were those of the crops and the herds. Some years ago the late Professor
Mommsen succeeded in extracting from the existing stone calendars a list
of the religious festivals of the old Roman year, and also in proving
that this list of festivals was complete in its present condition at a
time before the city of Rome was surrounded by the wall which Servius
Tullius built, and that it therefore goes back to the old kingdom, the
time of what has been called the "Religion of Numa." We cannot go
through all the festivals in detail, but it is extremely interesting to
notice that almost every one of them is connected with the life of the
farmer and represents the action of propitiation towards some god or
group of gods at every time in the Roman year which was at all critical
for agricultural interests.
It must not be forgotten also that this list is not absolutely complete,
because it represents merely the official state festivals, and not even
all of them but only those which fell upon the same day or days every
year, so that they could be engraved in the stone to form a perpetual
calendar. All state festivals, of which there were several, which were
appointed in each particular year according to the backward or forward
estate of the harvest, were omitted from the list, though they were
celebrated at some time in every year; and naturally the public
calendars contained no reference to the many private and semi-private
ceremonies of the year, with which the state had nothing official to do,
festivals of the family and the clan, and even local festivals of
various districts of the city.
In this list of peaceful deities of the farm there is one god whose
character has been very much misunderstood because of the company which
he keeps; this is the god Mars. It has become the fashion of late to
consider him as a god of vegetation, and a great many ingenious
arguments have been brought forward to show his agricultural character.
But the more primitive a community is, the more intense is its struggle
for existence, and the more rife its rivalries with its neighbours.
Alongside of the ploughshare there must always have been the sword or
its equivalent, and along with Flora and Ceres there must always have
been a god of strife and battle. That Mars was this god in early as well
as later times is shown above all things by the fact that he was always
worshipped outside the city, as a god who must be kept at a distance.
Naturally his cult was associated with the dominant interest of life,
the crops, and he was worshipped in the beautiful ceremony of the
purification of the fields, which Mr. Walter Pater has so exquisitely
described at the opening of _Marius the Epicurean_. But he was regarded
as the protector of the fields and the warder off of evil influences
rather than as a positive factor in the development of the crops. Then
too in the early days of the Roman militia, before the regular army had
come into existence, the war season was only during the summer after the
planting and before the harvest, so that the two festivals which marked
the beginning and the end of that season were also readily associated
with the state of the crops at that time.
But the most interesting and curious thing about this old religion is
not so much what it does contain as what it does not. It is not so much
what we find as what we miss, for more than half the gods whom we
instinctively associate with Rome were not there under this old regime.
Here is a partial list of those whose names we do not find: Minerva,
Diana, Venus, Fortuna, Hercules, Castor, Pollux, Apollo, Mercury, Dis,
Proserpina, Aesculapius, the Magna Mater. And yet their absence is not
surprising when we realise that almost all of the gods in this list
represent phases of life with which Rome in this early period was
absolutely unacquainted. She had no appreciable trade or commerce, no
manufactures or particular handicrafts, and no political interests
except the simple patriarchal government which sufficed for her present
needs. Her gods of water were the gods of rivers and springs; Neptune
was there, but he was not the ocean-god like the Greek Poseidon. Vulcan,
the god of fire, who was afterwards associated with the Greek Hephaistos
and became the patron of metal-working, was at this time merely the god
of destructive and not of constructive fire. Even the great god Juppiter
who was destined to become almost identical with the name and fame of
Rome was not yet a god of the state and politics, but merely the
sky-god, especially the lightning god, Juppiter Feretrius, the
"striker," who had a little shrine on the Capitoline where later the
great Capitoline temple of Juppiter Optimus Maximus was to stand.
Another curious characteristic of this early age, which, I think, has
never been commented on, is the extraordinarily limited number of
goddesses. Vesta is the only one who seems to stand by herself without a
male parallel. Each of the others is merely the contrasted potentiality
in a pair of which the male is much more famous, and the only ones in
these pairs who ever obtained a pronounced individuality did so because
their cult was afterwards reinforced by being associated with some
extra-Roman cult. The best illustration of this last is Juno. We may go
further and say that it-seems highly probable that the worship of female
deities was in the main confined to the women of the community, while
the men worshipped the gods. This distinction extended even to the
priesthoods where the wife of the priest of a god was the priestess of
the corresponding goddess. Such a state of affairs is doubly interesting
in view of the pre-eminence of female deities in the early Greek world,
which has been so strikingly shown by Miss Jane Harrison in her recent
book, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_.
The most vital question which can be put to almost any religion is that
in regard to its expansive power and its adaptability to new conditions.
Society is bound to undergo changes, and a young social organism, if
normal, is continually growing new cells. New conditions are arising and
new interests are coming to the front. In addition, if the growth is to
be continuous, new material is being constantly absorbed, and the simple
homogeneous character of the old society is being entirely changed by
the influx of foreign elements. This is what occurred in ancient Rome,
and it is because ancient Roman religion was not capable of organic
development from within, that the curious things happened to it which
our history has to record. It is these strange external accretions which
lend the chief interest to the story, while at the same time they
conceal the original form so fully as to render the writing of a history
of Roman religion extremely difficult.
Yet it must not be supposed because Roman religion was unable to adapt
itself to the new constitution of society with its contrasted classes,
and to the new commercial and political interests which attracted the
attention of the upper classes, that it was absolutely devoid within
itself, within its own limitations, of a certain capability of
development. For several centuries after outside influences began to
affect Rome, her original religion kept on developing alongside of the
new forms. The manner in which it developed is thoroughly significant of
the original national character of the Romans.
We have seen that from the very beginning the nature of the gods as
powers rather than personalities tended to emphasise the value and
importance of the name, which usually indicated the particular function
or speciality of each deity and was very often the only thing known
about him. In the course of time as the original name of the deity began
to be thought of entirely as a proper name without any meaning, rather
than as a common noun explaining the nature of the god to which it was
attached, it became necessary to add to the original name some adjective
which would adequately describe the god and do the work which the name
by itself had originally done. And as the nature of the various deities
grew more complicated along with the increasing complications of daily
life, new adjectives were added, each one expressing some particular
phase of the god's activity. Such an adjective was called a _cognomen_,
and was often of very great importance because it began to be felt that
a god with one adjective, _i.e._ invoked for one purpose, was almost a
different god from the same god with a different adjective, _i.e._
invoked for another purpose. Thus a knowledge of these adjectives was
almost as necessary as a knowledge of the name of the god. The next step
in the development was one which followed very easily. These important
adjectives began to be thought of as having a value and an existence in
themselves, apart from the god to which they were attached. The
grammatical change which accompanied this psychological movement was the
transfer of the adjective into an abstract noun. Both adjectives and
abstract nouns express quality, but the adjective is in a condition of
dependence on a noun, while the abstract noun is independent and
self-supporting. And thus, just as in certain of the lower organisms a
group of cells breaks off and sets up an individual organism of its own,
so in old Roman religion some phase of a god's activity, expressed in an
adjective, broke off with the adjective from its original stock and set
up for itself, turning its name from the dependent adjective form into
the independent abstract noun. Thus Juppiter, worshipped as a god of
good faith in the dealings of men with one another, the god by whom
oaths were sworn under the open sky, was designated as "Juppiter,
guarding-good-faith," Juppiter Fidius. There were however many other
phases of Juppiter's work, and hence the adjective _fidius_ became very
important as the means of distinguishing this activity from all the
others. Eventually it broke off from Juppiter and formed the abstract
noun _Fides_, the goddess of good faith, where the sex of the deity as a
goddess was entirely determined by the grammatical gender of abstract
nouns as feminine.
This is all strange enough but there is one more step in the development
even more curious yet. This abstract goddess _Fides_ did not stay long
in the purely abstract sphere; she began very soon to be made concrete
again, as the Fides of this particular person or of that particular
group and as this Fides or that, until she became almost as concrete as
Juppiter himself had been, and hence we have a great many different
_Fides_ in seeming contradiction to the old grammatical rule that
abstract nouns had no plural. Now all this development in the field of
religion throws light upon the character of the Roman mind and its
instinctive methods of thought, and we see why it is that the Romans
were very great lawyers and very mediocre philosophers. Both law and
philosophy require the ability for abstract thought; in both cases the
essential qualities of a thing must be separated from the thing itself.
But in the case of philosophic thought this abstraction, these
qualities, do not immediately seek reincarnation. They continue as
abstractions and do not immediately descend to earth again, whereas for
law such a descent is absolutely necessary because jurisprudence is
interested not so much in the abstraction by itself, but rather in the
abstract as presented in concrete cases. Hence a type of mind which
found it equally easy to make the concrete into the abstract and then to
turn the abstract so made into a kind of concrete again, is _par
excellence_ the legal mind, and no better proof of the instinctive
tendency to law-making on the part of the Romans can be found than in
the fact that the same habits of mind which make laws also governed the
development of their religion.
Unfortunately however it was not these abstract deities who could save
old Roman religion. They were merely the logical outcome of the deities
already existing, merely new offspring of the old breed. They did not
represent any new interests, but were merely the individualisation of
certain phases of the old deities, phases which had always been present
and were now at most merely emphasised by being worshipped separately.
THE REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS
Like a lofty peak rising above the mists which cover the tops of the
lower-lying mountains, the figure of Servius Tullius towers above the
semi-legendary Tarquins on either side of him. We feel that we have to
do with a veritable character in history, and we find ourselves
wondering what sort of a man he was personally--a feeling that never
occurs to us with Romulus and the older kings, and comes to us only
faintly with the elder Tarquin, while the younger Tarquin has all the
marks of a wooden man, who was put up only to be thrown down, whose
whole _raison d'etre_ is to explain the transition from the kingdom to
the republic on the theory of a revolution. Eliminate the revolution,
suppose the change to have been a gradual and a constitutional one, and
you may discard the proud Tarquin without losing anything but a
lay-figure with its more or less gaudy trappings of later myths. But it
is not so with Servius; his wall and his constitution are very real and
defy all attempts to turn their maker into a legend. Yet on the other
hand we must be on our guard, for much of the definiteness which seems
to attach to him is rather the definiteness of a certain stage in Rome's
development, a certain well-bounded chronological and sociological
tract. It is dangerous to try to limit too strictly Servius's personal
part in this development; and far safer, though perhaps less
fascinating, to use his name as a general term for the changes which
Rome underwent from the time when foreign influences began to tell upon
her until the beginning of the republic. He forms a convenient title
therefore for certain phases of Rome's growth. And yet even this is not
strictly correct, for Servius stands not so much for the coming into
existence of certain facts, as for the recognition of the existence of
these facts. The facts themselves were of slow growth, covering probably
centuries, but the actions resulting from them, and the outward changes
in society, came thick and fast and may well have taken place, all of
them, within the limits of one man's life. The foundation fact upon
which all these changes were based is the influence of the outside world
on the Roman community. Until this time there had been little to
differentiate Rome from any other of the hill-communities of Italy, of
which there were scores in her immediate neighbourhood; nor was she the
only one to come into contact with the outside world. It was the effect
which that influence had upon her as contrasted with her neighbours
which made the difference. When we ask why this influence affected her
differently we find no satisfactory answer, and are in the presence of a
mystery--the world-old insoluble mystery of the superiority of one tribe
or one individual over others apparently of the same class. Political
history is wont to tell this chapter of Rome's story under the title of
the "Rise of the Plebeians," but the presence of the Plebeians was only
the outward symbol of an inward change. This change was the breaking up
of the monotonous one-class society of the primitive community with its
one--agricultural--interest, and the formation of a variegated
many-class society with manifold interests, such as trade, handicraft,
and politics. It was the awakening of Rome into a world-life out of her
century-long undisturbed bucolic slumber.
There were at this time two peoples in Italy, who by reason of their
older culture were able to be Rome's teachers. One lay to the north of
her, the mysterious Etruscans, whose culture fortunately for Rome had
only a very moderate influence, because the Etruscan culture had already
lost much of its virility, possibly also because it was distinctly felt
to be foreign, and hence could effect no insidious entry, and probably
because Rome was at this time too strong and young and clean to take
anything but the best from Etruria. The other lay to the south, the
Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, separated from Rome for the present by
many miles of forest and by hostile tribes. Around her in Latium were
her own next of kin, the Latins, becoming rapidly inferior to her, but
enabled to do her at least this service, that of absorbing the foreign
influences which came, and in certain cases latinising them, and thus
transmitting them to Rome in a more or less assimilated condition.
The three great facts in the life of Rome during this period are the
coming of Greek merchants and Greek trade from the south, the coming of
Etruscan artisans and handicraft from the north, and the beginnings of
her political rivalry and gradual prominence in the league of Latin
cities around her. Each one of these movements is reflected in the
religious changes of the period. In regard to the first two this is not
surprising, for the ancient traveller, like his mythical prototype
Aeneas, carried his gods with him. Thus there were worshipped in private
in Rome the gods of all the peoples who settled within her walls, and
the presence of these gods was destined to make its influence felt. Your
primitive polytheist is very catholic in his religious tastes; for, when
one is already in possession of many gods, the addition of a few more is
a minor matter, especially when, as was now the case in Rome, these
deities are the patrons of occupations and interests hitherto entirely
unknown to the Roman, and hence not provided for in his scheme of gods.
It was therefore in no spirit of disloyalty to the already existing
gods, and with no desire to introduce rival deities, that the new cults
began to spread until they became so important as to call for state
recognition.
Possibly the most interesting cases are those of the two gods who came
from the south, Hercules and Castor, interesting because they were the
forerunners of that great multitude of Greek gods who later came in
proudly by special invitation, and even more interesting yet because,
though they were Greek as Greek could be, they came into Rome, as it
were, incognito, and were so far from being known as Greek, that, when
the same gods came in afterwards more directly, these new-comers were
felt to be quite a different thing, and their worship was carried on in
another part of the city away from the old-established cults.
In the Greek world Herakles and Hermes were the especial patrons of
travellers, and as travelling was never done for pleasure but always for
business, they became the patrons of the travelling merchant. It was
also natural that they should go with the settlers away from the
mother-city into the new colony. Thus it was that they came from the
mother-land into the colonies of Magna Graecia in Southern Italy, and
once being established there made their way slowly but inevitably
northwards. The story of Hermes, under the name of Mercury, belongs to a
later chapter, but that of Herakles = Hercules must be recounted here.
It is only within the last few years that the scholarly world has been
persuaded that there was no such thing as an original Italic Hercules;
at first sight it was very difficult to believe, because there seemed to
be so many apparently very old Italic legends centering in Hercules. But
it has been shown, either that these legends never existed and rest
solely upon false interpretation of monuments, or that, though they did
exist at an early date, they were introduced under Greek influence. It
was the trading merchant therefore who brought Herakles northward. And
as the god went, his name was softened into Hercules, and with the
assimilation of the name to the tongue of the Italic people, there went
hand in hand an adaptation of his nature to their needs, so that by
degrees he became thoroughly italicised both in form and content. It is
probable that the cult came into Rome as well as into the other cities
of Latium, but in Rome it was confined to a few individuals, and at
first obtained no public recognition. On the contrary, for reasons that
we are at a loss to find, this Greek cult seems to have reached very
large proportions in the little town of Tibur (Tivoli), fourteen miles
north-east of Rome. There it dominated all other worship and lost so
much of its foreign atmosphere that it became thoroughly latinised. In
the course of time the Roman state acknowledged this Tivoli cult of
Hercules and accepted a branch of it as its own. But the extraordinary
thing about this acknowledgment is that the Romans felt it to be a Latin
and not a foreign cult. They showed this intimate and friendly feeling
by permitting an altar to Hercules to be erected within the city proper,
in the Forum Boarium. But in order to understand the significance of
this act a word of digression is necessary.
Under the old Roman regime every act of life was performed under the
supervision of the gods, and this godly patronage was especially
emphasised in acts which affected the life of the community. No act was
of greater importance for the community than the choice of a home, the
location of a settlement. Thus the founding of an ancient city was
accompanied by sacred rites, chief among which was the ploughing of a
furrow around the space which was ultimately to be enclosed by the wall.
This furrow formed a symbolic wall on very much the same principle as
that on which the witch draws her circle. The furrow was called the
_pomerium_ and was to the world of the gods what the city wall was to
the world of men. It did not however always coincide with the actual
city wall, and the space it embraced was sometimes less, sometimes more,
than that embraced by the city wall; and just as new walls covering
larger territory could be built for the city, so a new _pomerium_ line
could be drawn. As was becoming for a spiritual barrier there was
nothing to mark it except the boundary stones through which the
imaginary line passed. The wall, which Servius built and which continued
to be the outer wall of Rome for a period of eight or nine hundred years
until the third Christian century, was at the time of its building
coincident in the main with the line of the _pomerium_, with one very
important exception: namely that all the region of the Aventine, which
was inside the limits of the political city and embraced by the Servian
wall, lay outside the _pomerium_ line and was in other words outside the
religious city. It continued thus all through the republic and into the
empire until the reign of Claudius. Originally the _pomerium_ line
played an important part in the religious world and it continued to do
so until the middle of the republic, during the Second Punic War, when
its sanctity was destroyed and it lost its real religious significance,
though it remained as a formal institution. As a divine barrier it
served originally in the world of the gods very much the same purpose as
the material wall of stone did in the world of men. Before the problem
of foreign gods had begun to exist for the Romans, in the good old days
when they knew only the gods of their own religion, the _pomerium_
served to keep within the bounds of Rome all the beneficent kindly gods
whose presence was not needed outside in the fields, and it served fully
as important a purpose in keeping outside of Rome the gods who were
feared rather than loved, for example the dread war-god Mars. When
foreign gods began to be introduced into Rome they might, of course, be
worshipped inside the _pomerium_ by private individuals, but when the
state acknowledged them it was more prudent that her worship should be
outside the sacred wall. Thus it came to pass that the foreign gods, who
were taken into the cult of the Roman state, were given temples in the
Campus Martius or over on the Aventine, and the two or three cases where
they were publicly worshipped inside the _pomerium_ form no real
exception to this rule--such an exception would be, in fact, quite
unthinkable in the strictly logical system of Roman worship--but these
gods were allowed inside because they came to Rome from her kinsfolk,
the Latins, and were not felt to be foreign.