The Religion of Numa
J >> Jesse Benedict Carter >> The Religion of NumaHercules is one of the cases in this last category. Though originally,
as we have seen, a Greek god, his long residence in Tibur (Tivoli) had
made him, as it were, a naturalised citizen of Latium, and hence Rome
felt it no impropriety to take him inside her _pomerium_. At first his
worship seems to have been carried on by two clans, the Potitii and the
Pinarii, but later, during the republic, the state assumed control. But
though it was really the Greek Herakles who had come in as the latinised
Hercules, the god had paid a certain price for his admission, for he
came stripped of all the various attributes which he had had in Greece
and retaining merely his function as patron of trade and travel. It was
this practical side of his nature alone which appealed to the Romans; it
found its expression in the offering of "the tenth" at the great altar
in the Forum Boarium. This altar always remained in a certain sense the
centre of Hercules-worship in Rome. It was reinforced at an early date
by no less than three temples of Hercules in the more or less immediate
neighbourhood, all of which were characterised by the same relative
simplicity of ritual. Centuries later Herakles became known to the
Romans through direct Greek channels, and it was recognised that this
new Herakles was akin to the old Hercules, so that he too was called
Hercules. There was nothing surprising in this to the Romans, because
they considered it a matter of course that there should be found a
parallel among their own gods for each Greek deity. They never
understood the true state of affairs; it is doubtful whether they could
have understood it: namely, that in almost all their other
identifications of Roman and Greek deities, they were really doing
violence to their own native gods by superimposing upon them the
attributes of a deity with whom they had really nothing in common,
whereas, in identifying the new Herakles with their old Hercules, they
were doing a perfectly legitimate thing. For one who knows the true
state of affairs there is something pathetically amusing in the fact
that they really showed more delicacy in making their old (really
originally Greek) Hercules into the new Greek Herakles-Hercules, than
they did in throwing together Neptune and Poseidon, Mars and Ares, Diana
and Artemis. As a matter of fact they always reverenced the old cult of
the great altar, and never allowed the more sensational phases of Greek
worship to be practised there, and put off into another quarter the
temples which were built to Hercules under the various new attributes
which the new Greek cult brought with it. These temples were placed, as
was proper, outside the _pomerium_, in the southern part of the Campus
Martius.
But to return to the simple Hercules and the Servian regime, the Roman
state had now obtained a deity, of which, by the contagion of commerce,
they already felt a need, a god of great power from whom came success in
the practical undertakings of life. Hence he had a strong hold on the
Romans whose practical side was undergoing a rapid development. The idea
of trade was now represented in the religious world, it had received its
divine sanction.
The other god, who came up from Magna Graecia and whose formal
acceptance into the state-cult formed one of the earliest incidents in
the breakdown of the old agricultural religion, was Castor, with his
twin-brother Pollux, although brother Pollux was always an insignificant
partner, so much so that the temple which was subsequently built to them
both was referred to either as the temple of "Castor" alone or as the
temple of "the Castors." At various points in the old Greek world we
meet with a pair of brothers, at first not designated by individual
names but merely named as a pair. Even these pair-names do not agree,
but they represent all of them the same idea. Later when individual
names are substituted for the general pair-name, these individual names
also differ. They are gods of protection, and on the sea-coast--and most
of Greece is sea-coast--they are especially helpful as rescuers from the
dangers of the sea, and they are also very early and almost everywhere
connected with horses. But in spite of their usefulness they are not
very prominent, and it is doubtful whether they would ever have become
famous, except for one of those little accidents which make the fortunes
of gods as well as of men. It so happened that horses began to be used
in warfare more than for the mere drawing of chariots; a primitive sort
of cavalry came into being, produced by mounting heavy-armed
foot-soldiers on horseback. With this cavalry the "Twin-Brothers"
(_Dios-kouroi_ = "Sons of Zeus"), especially Castor, became prominent.
Just as the Greek merchants had taken Herakles with them when they set
out to plant colonies in Southern Italy, so the heavy-mounted horsemen
carried their god Castor with them wherever they went. The Italic tribes
in their turn were quick to seize upon this idea of cavalry, and with
it as an essential part went its divine patron, Castor. Thus the
Castor-cult moved steadily northward, carried, as it were, on horseback.
At last it reached Latium, and there the little town of Tusculum,
afterwards so famous as the residence of Cicero, became in some
unaccountable way an important cult-centre, and did for Castor what
Tibur had done for Hercules, _i.e._ latinised him, so that Rome received
him not as an alien but as one of her kin. There can be little doubt
that the Roman cult actually did come from Tusculum, and that in its
introduction into Rome, as in every other step on its march, it was
connected with the reorganisation of the cavalry. This would seem to
imply that Tusculum was famous for its cavalry and that Rome took the
idea of it from her--statements for which we have unfortunately no other
confirmation, though we have abundant proof of the cult at Tusculum and
of Rome's close association with it.
Castor was thus the patron of the "horsemen" (_equites_) and his great
day was July 15, when the horsemen's parade took place. Possibly this
had been the date of the festival at Tusculum, a day especially
appropriate because it was the Ides of the month, and the Ides were
sacred to Juppiter, whose sons Castor and Pollux (_Dios-kouroi_) were
supposed to be. It is extremely interesting in the light of this
knowledge of the true state of affairs to see how legend later
explained the coming of Castor and Pollux. It was an incident in the
mythical war which was supposed to have taken place after the last
Tarquin had been driven out, and the republic had been started. The
adversaries of Rome, allied with Tarquin, notably Octavius Mamilius of
Tusculum, fought against the Romans in the battle of Lake Regillus on
July 15, B.C. 499. The Romans won, and the first news of victory was
brought to Rome by the miraculous appearance of Castor and Pollux who
were seen watering their horses in the Forum at the spring of Juturna. A
temple on this spot was then vowed and fifteen years later, B.C. 484, it
was completed and dedicated. Tusculum, July 15, and the dedication of
the temple in B.C. 484 are seemingly the only historical facts in this
legend; and long before B.C. 499 Castor was worshipped in Rome,
especially on July 15. The site of his original worship was without
doubt the same locality in the Forum where his temple was subsequently
built, for it is an almost invariable rule that the earliest temples are
built on the actual site of, or close to, the old altar or shrine which
preceded the formal temple. Like Hercules therefore he was received
inside the _pomerium_, and probably for a similar reason, because it was
felt that he was a god of Tusculum, and hence a god of Rome's kinsfolk.
We have an additional confirmation of this feeling in the way in which
the later direct cult of Castor was treated. This cult, connecting
Castor with healing and the interpretation of dreams, and emphasising
his function as a rescuer from the dangers of the sea, would have been
without meaning for the old Romans who worshipped him merely as a patron
of horsemen and horsemanship. The new ideas seem to have had as their
centre a later temple in the Circus Flaminius and thus Hercules and
Castor may again be paralleled, since they have, each of them, an old
cult-centre inside the _pomerium_, Hercules in the Forum Boarium, Castor
in the Forum, and a later cult-centre, for more advanced ideas, in each
case in the Circus Flaminius.
Although it was Greek influence which ultimately caused the destruction
of Roman religion, and although the cults of Hercules and of Castor are
the first definite effects of this influence, it cannot be said that the
destruction had in any sense begun, because in their slow journey
northward, and in their long residence at Tibur and Tusculum
respectively, the two cults had lost all that was pernicious. The Roman
instinct, which felt them to be akin to itself, did not go amiss; they
were indeed akin to the new Rome with its new interest in trade and its
increased interest in warfare, for the trader and the warrior have gone
side by side in all ages of the world's history, whether it be a
primitive instinct to grasp territory for commercial purposes or a more
civilised endeavour to obtain an open port.
The beginnings of Greek influence have thus been exhibited in the case
of Hercules and of Castor, and it remains to inquire what Etruria did.
There is no race about which we know so much and yet so little as about
the Etruscans. They have always been and still are a riddle, and as our
knowledge of them increases we seem further than ever from a solution,
and what we gain in positive knowledge is more than counterbalanced by
the increased sense of our ignorance. Altogether aside from the problem
of the origin of the Etruscans, and the race to which they belonged, is
the other problem of their disappearance. In a certain sense Etruria
steps out of history quite as mysteriously as she entered into it, nay
even more mysteriously, for we are always willing to allow a certain
percentage of mystery as the legitimate accompaniment of prehistoric
history, but when in the light of more or less historic times a nation
steps off the stage of the world's history, and leaves practically no
heritage behind her, we have a right to be amazed. Of all the peoples in
Italy Rome ought in the order of events to have been her successor, and
yet when we contrast the influence of Etruria on Rome with the influence
of the Greek colonies of Southern Italy we see an amazing difference.
The influence of these Greek colonies on Rome prepared the way for the
direct influence of the Greek motherland, so that one passed over into
the other by imperceptible gradations, but the influence of Etruria on
Rome not only led to nothing but was in itself of a most superficial
sort. Etruria must have had some literature, yet we search the history
of Roman literature in vain for any traces of the influence of that
literature on Rome, with the one exception of books on divination and
the interpretation of lightning. We know too little of her manners and
customs to be able to tell exactly how much they may have influenced
Rome, and yet it is worth noting that the things which Roman writers
actually refer to Etruria, are all of them most superficial: a few of
the insignia of political office; a few of the trappings of one or two
ritualistic acts; a branch of divination, by the consultation of the
entrails (_haruspicina_), which was of secondary importance compared to
augury; and the most depraved form of Roman public sport, the
gladiatorial games. The only fundamental institution of Rome which it is
the habit to ascribe to Etruria, the idea of the so-called _templum_ or
division of the sky into regions as an axiom of augury, seems to have
been quite as much a general Italic idea as a specifically Etruscan one.
Even in art her influence was relatively slight, and though her
architects seem to have built the earliest formal temples for Rome, they
were soon succeeded in this work by the Greeks. We seek in vain for a
complete and satisfactory explanation of this limitation of her
influence, but certain thoughts suggest themselves, which, as far as
they go, are probably correct. All that we know of Etruria impresses us
with the fact that hers was an outward civilisation unaccompanied by an
inward culture, that it was a formal rather than a spiritual growth, an
artificial acquisition from without rather than a development from
within outwards. It was strong but with its strength went brutality, it
was interested in art but for its sensual rather than its spiritual
aspects. Now the idealism of youth is present in nations just as in
individuals, though probably a nation is less conscious of it than an
individual. It is with the nation one of the effects of the instinct of
self-preservation, and for a youthful nation to absorb the vices of an
old decadent one would be self-destruction. Thus the youthful Rome
rejected most of the Etruscan poison, and thus nature purified herself,
and Etruria was buried in the pit of her own nastiness.
There was however one town which acted as an interpreter between Rome
and Etruria, and was the original cult-centre for a very great goddess,
spreading her cult in both directions, into Rome and into Etruria. The
town was Falerii and the goddess was Minerva, who in a certain sense
entered Rome three times, once direct from Falerii to Rome, and once
from Falerii to Rome by way of Etruria, and finally, when Falerii was
captured by the Romans, again direct to Rome. In the earliest period
there are scarcely any traces of the worship of Minerva in Latium or
Southern Italy, and we are absolutely certain that she was not known in
Rome. In the country north of Rome, however, the situation is different
There she is found quite frequently, especially in Etruria under the
name of MENERVA or MENRVA. Yet she cannot have been an Etruscan goddess,
because the name itself is Italic and not Etruscan. She is therefore
neither Roman, nor Etruscan, nor Latin, at least so far as we know Latin
in Latium. If we can find a place however where a Latin people is under
strong Etruscan influence, we shall be near the solution. Such a place
is Falerii, in the country of the Faliscans. To the ancients it appeared
so thoroughly Etruscan that they go out of their way to explain that it
was not. As a matter of fact it was the only Latin town on the right
bank of the Tiber, and because of its locality it was early brought into
vital connection with the Etruscans, so vital that while it never lost
all of its original Latin character, it lost enough of it to exercise a
very considerable direct influence over Etruria, and to be to a very
large extent influenced by her in turn. We cannot of course positively
prove that Minerva was originally worshipped only at Falerii, and that
her cult spread entirely from this one point, but we have at least
strong negative evidence, and so far as the general history of ancient
religion is concerned there is nothing impossible in such a spread.
Religious history shows many parallels to this; for example the classic
case of the god Eros of Thespiae, in Boeotia, who would have lived and
died merely a little insignificant local god, if it had not been for the
Boeotian poet Hesiod who adopted Eros into his poetry and thus gave him
a start in life by which he ultimately succeeded in going all over the
Greek world, and then passing into Rome as Cupid; and so into all later
times.
We are accustomed to think of Minerva as the Latin name for Athena, the
daughter of Zeus, and unconsciously we clothe Minerva with all the glory
of Athena and endow her with Athena's many-sidedness. In reality the
little peasant goddess of Falerii had originally nothing in common with
Athena except the fact that both of them were interested in handicraft
and the handicraftsman, but Athena had a hundred other interests
besides, while this one thing seems to have filled the whole of
Minerva's horizon. When Minerva went on her travels into Etruria, she
came among a people who eventually learned from the representations of
Greek art a very considerable amount of Greek mythology, and who, when
they heard of Athena, saw her resemblance to Minerva and began thus to
associate the two. But even in this association Minerva was still
pre-eminently the goddess of the artisan and the labouring man, she was
the patroness of the works of man's hands rather than of the works of
his mind, and as such she was brought into Rome by Etruscan and
Faliscan workmen. At first she was worshipped merely by these workmen in
their own houses, but by degrees as the number of these workmen
increased and as a knowledge of their handicraft spread to native
Romans, Minerva became so prominent that the state was compelled to
acknowledge her, and to accept her among the gods of the state. But it
was a very different acknowledgment from that of Hercules or Castor;
these gods had been received inside the _pomerium_, but Minerva was
given a temple outside, over on the Aventine. None the less her cult
throve, and her power was soon shown both religiously and socially. Her
great festival was on the 19th of March, a day which had been originally
sacred to Mars, but the presence of Minerva's celebrations on that day
soon caused the associations with Mars to be almost entirely forgotten.
Socially her temple became the meeting-place of all the artisans of
Rome, it was at once their religious centre and their business
headquarters. There they met in their primitive guilds (_collegia_) and
arranged their affairs, and thus it continued to be as long as pagan
Rome lasted. The respect shown to these guilds of Minerva is nowhere
more clearly exhibited than in an incident which happened in the time of
the Second Punic War, several centuries after the introduction of the
cult. Terrified by adverse portents the Roman Senate instructed the old
poet Livius Andronicus to write a hymn in honour of Juno and to train a
chorus of youths and maidens to sing it. The hymn was sung, and was such
a great success that the gratitude of the Senate took the form of
granting permission to the poets of the city to have a guild of their
own, and a meeting-place along with the older guilds in the temple of
Minerva on the Aventine. This was the Roman state's first expression of
literary appreciation; from her standpoint it was flattery indeed, for
were not poets by this decree made equal to butchers, bakers, and
cloth-makers, and was not poetry acknowledged to be of some practical
use and adjudged a legitimate occupation?
The history of the cult of Minerva is much more complicated than that of
Hercules or Castor. Like them she was subjected to strong Greek
influence, and, as we shall see later, not very long after her
introduction she was taken into the company of Juppiter and Juno, thus
forming the famous Capitoline triad. Also temples were built to her
individually under various aspects of the worship of Athena with whom
she gradually became identified, but in the old Aventine temple the
original idea of Minerva, the working man's friend, continued
practically unchanged. Doubtless the society of Servius's day, who
witnessed the coming of Minerva, did not realise what this introduction
meant, and how absolutely necessary it was for Rome's future
development that the artisan class should be among her people, and that
this class should be represented in the world of the gods. They little
knew that in the temple on the Aventine was being brought to expression
the trade-union idea, which was to pass over into the mediaeval guild of
both workmen and masters, still under religious auspices, and to find a
latter-day parody in the modern labour-union, with its spirit of
hostility to employers, and its indifference, at least as an
organisation, to things religious.
Trade and handicraft were thus added to the Roman world, of men on
earth, and of the gods above the earth, and it remains for us to
consider the awakening of the political spirit and its corresponding
religious phenomenon; but before we do this, we must clear the way by
casting aside one ancient hypothesis connected with Servius's religious
reforms, which is not correct, at least in the way in which the ancients
meant it.
The writing of the earlier period of Rome's history is sometimes
complicated rather than helped by the statements of the generally
well-meaning but often misguided historians of later times. Their real
knowledge of the facts was in many cases no greater than ours, while
they lacked what modern historians possess: a breadth of view and a
knowledge of the phenomena of history in many periods and among many
nations. The study of the social and religious movements under Servius
presents us with an interesting illustration of this. It was customary
namely to ascribe to Servius Tullius the introduction of the cult of
Fortuna, and Plutarch takes occasion twice in his _Moralia_ to describe
the interest of Servius in this cult and to recount the extraordinary
number of temples which he built to the great goddess of chance under
her various attributes. The Romans of Plutarch's day thought of Fortuna
in very much the way in which their poets, especially Horace, described
her, as a great and powerful goddess of chance, the personification of
the element of apparent caprice which seems to be present in the running
of the universe. It is very much our way of thinking of her, and of
course both our own concept and the later Roman concept go back to
Greece. But Greece had not always had this idea of the goddess of luck.
The older purer age of Greek thought was permeated with the idea of the
absolute immutable character of the divine will, a belief which
precluded the possibility of chance or caprice. The earliest Greek Tyche
(Fortuna) was the daughter of Zeus who fulfilled his will; and that his
will through her was often a beneficent will is shown in the tendency to
think of her as a goddess of plenty. It was only the growth of
scepticism, the failure of faith to bear up under the apparently
contradictory lessons of experience, which brought into being in the
Alexandrian age Tyche, the goddess of chance, the winged capricious
deity poised on the ball. It was this habit of thought which eventually
gave the Romans that idea of Fortuna which has became our idea because
it is the prevalent one in Roman literature and life in the periods with
which we are most familiar. Now if Fortuna be thought of in this latter
way, it is a very easy matter to connect her with Servius Tullius, for
the legendary accounts of Servius's career picture him as a very child
of "fortune," raised from the lowest estate to the highest power, the
little slave boy who became king. What goddess would he delight to
honour, if not the goddess of the happy chance which had made him what
he was?
All this is very pretty, but it is unfortunately quite impossible,
because whatever the time may have been when Fortuna began to be
worshipped in Rome, it is certain that the idea of chance did not enter
into the concept of her until long after Servius's day. Instead the
early Fortuna was a goddess of plenty and fertility, among mankind as a
protectress of women and of childbirth, among the crops and the herds as
a goddess of fertility and fecundity. Her full name was probably Fors
Fortuna, a name which survived in two old temples across the river from
Rome proper, in Trastevere, where she was worshipped in the country by
the farmers in behalf of the crops. Fortuna is thus merely the cult-name
added to the old goddess Fors to intensify her meaning, which finally
broke off from her and became independent, expressing the same idea of
a goddess of plenty. Later under Greek influence the concept of luck,
especially good-luck, slowly displaced the older idea. The possibility
of such a transition from fertility to good-luck is shown us in the
phrase "_arbor felix_," which originally meant a fruitful tree and later
a tree of good omen. As regards Fortuna and Servius therefore there is
no inherent reason why they should have been connected, and whenever it
was that Fortuna began to exist, be it before or after Servius, she came
into the world as a goddess of plenty and did not turn into a goddess of
luck till centuries after her birth.
It must not be supposed that Rome in this sixth century before Christ
could take into herself all these traders and artisans, and become thus
interested also among her own citizens in these new employments, without
receiving a corresponding impulse toward a larger political life. Thus
there began that ever-increasing participation in the affairs of the
Latin league, which was her first step toward acquiring a world
dominion. It is probable that Rome had always belonged to this league,
but at first as a very insignificant member. Those were the days in
which Alba Longa stood out as leader, a leadership which she afterwards
lost, but of which the recollection was retained because the Alban Mount
behind Alba Longa remained the cult-centre, connected with the worship
of the god of the league, the Juppiter of the Latins (Juppiter
Latiaris), not only until B.C. 338 when the league ceased to exist, but
even later when Rome kept up a sentimental celebration of the old
festival. In the course of time, for reasons which we do not know, Alba
Longa's power declined and the mantle of her supremacy fell upon Aricia,
a little town still in existence not far from Albano. The coming of
Aricia to the presidency of the league started a religious movement
which is one of the most extraordinary in the checkered history of Roman
religion. The ultimate result of this movement was the introduction of
the goddess Diana into the state-cult of Rome, where she was
subsequently identified with Apollo's sister Artemis. But this is a long
story, and to understand it we must go back some distance to make our
beginning.