The Religion of Numa
J >> Jesse Benedict Carter >> The Religion of NumaIt is important to notice closely exactly what happened when these
deities were introduced, partly because they form the first recorded
instance, and hence may well have acted as a model for subsequent
repetitions of the act, but also because we have a more definite
knowledge of the phenomena in this case than in many others. In the
first place it is clear that the deities were felt to be foreign: not
only was their temple built out the Aventine way, in the valley of the
Circus Maximus, outside the _pomerium_, but--a much more significant
fact--their Greek names were dropped, and they were given Roman names
instead, to make them seem less out of place. Then too these Roman names
were not new names, translations of their Greek titles, but were the
names of already existing Roman deities with whom they were easily
identified, so that we see at once that their coming was no real
enrichment of the Roman Olympus; what they stood for was already
represented there, and their coming was simply a reduplication, with the
consequent result that as these parvenus increased in prominence and
influence, they robbed of all their vitality the sober old Roman deities
to whom they had attached themselves. What were these original deities
who were thus doomed to death in B.C. 496? Demeter took the name of the
old Roman goddess Ceres, a goddess of fertility, about whom we know just
enough to assert that she belonged to the old religion of Numa and that
she was at heart quite a different person from Demeter. All the rest is
lost, submerged under the new Demeter-Ceres with her temple built by
Greek architects and her April games. It is this new Ceres who soon
develops an extraordinary political importance because her temple is to
the Plebeians as a class what the temple of Minerva is to the unions of
organised labour. It is there that they have their meeting-place, and
the temple itself is always their treasury as contrasted with the Saturn
temple, the treasury of the state as a whole. The very officers of the
Plebeians, the famous Plebeian aediles, get their name from association
with this temple (_aedes_). This political side of her activity is the
only real advantage, except the grain itself, connected with her
importation; the two form at best a poor economic compensation for the
ever increasing immoral effects of the public games of Ceres.
But though Ceres is the most important of the three deities economically
and politically, we must not forget the other two, both of whom are
interesting, though one of them more for what she is not than for what
she is. Along with Demeter came Dionysos and Demeter's daughter Kore:
the three were associated in the solemn mysteries of Eleusis, but none
of the beauty of these ideas went over into the Roman cult. Demeter was
merely the deified grain-traffic, and Dionysos was little else than the
god of wine, while poor Kore fell out without any particular content for
a curious reason that we shall see in a moment. The only old Roman deity
with whom Dionysos could be identified was the god Liber, who had had a
rather interesting history, and who had done enough along the line of
self-development to deserve a better fate than to be crushed to
insignificance under the prominence of his new namesake. Liber was at
this time a flourishing god of fertility and, since the introduction of
the grape into Italy, especially the patron of the fruit of the vine,
but he had made his own career, and there was a time when he had no
individuality of his own but was merely a cult-adjective of the great
god Juppiter, the giver of all fertility in every phase of life. Thus
out of the original Juppiter-Liber there had grown the independent god
Liber; and now this Liber lost his individuality by identification with
Dionysos. Finally comes Kore, Demeter's daughter. Here the Romans were
hard put to it to find a goddess who represented any similar content,
and after all this was no light task because Kore has little meaning
unless she is taken also as Persephone, Pluto's bride--a process which
required a mythological knowledge and appreciation in which the Romans
of the early republic were totally lacking. But there was an old goddess
Libera, a shadowy potentiality contrasted and paired with the masculine
Liber, and they chose her and gave Kore her name. We have a curious
proof of how little the Romans knew of Kore-Libera, and of how purely
mechanical both the introduction of Kore and her identification with
Libera were, in the fact that about two hundred and fifty years later,
as we shall see, Persephone, the real Kore, was introduced into Rome as
an altogether new deity, and existed there side by side with Libera for
at least a century before people began to realise that Proserpina and
Libera stood for the same Greek goddess.
It was necessary to go into these details in order that we might
understand as much as possible of the process by which the gods of the
Sibylline books were assimilated into the body of Roman religion. We see
how in the main they were superfluous and therefore unnecessary and even
undesirable because by their presence they robbed old Roman deities of
their existence, and how those elements in them which were least in
accord with the old Roman spirit were most apt to develop, and how in
general their adoption was a purely mechanical process, like any act in
witchcraft, where the form is all important because the meaning cannot
be understood, and how totally different therefore the estate of these
gods was in Rome from what it had been in Greece, because in Rome they
were introduced, stripped of all their mythology, worshipped only for
their practical bearings, and compelled therefore to work for their
living.
The importation of grain from Cumae meant more to Rome than the mere
satisfaction of her physical needs; it meant much more than the addition
of three deities to her state-cult, for the grain thus imported was
carried from Cumae to Ostia by sea and so up the Tiber to Rome, and the
whole matter therefore marks one of the important steps in Rome's
interest in commerce generally but especially in ocean commerce. As yet
she did not do the actual carrying herself, but she began to be
interested in it, and the sea began to mean something to this inland
town. This increased interest in trade in general and this inceptive
interest in those who "go down to the sea in ships" have both of them
left their reflexion in the religious life of the time; two new deities
are introduced, both of them almost certainly by means of the Sibylline
oracles, though some accidental blanks in our historical tradition have
deprived us of details.
The chronicle of the year B.C. 495 tells us that there was a dispute in
that year as to who should dedicate the temple of Mercury. This is
Mercury's first appearance in our sources. The circumstances of the
vowing of the temple have been omitted through some oversight, but in
spite of this the connexion of his introduction with the Sibylline books
is beyond all reasonable doubt, for the simple reason that the guardians
of the oracles always looked after his cult in all subsequent time.
Notwithstanding the suddenness of his appearance and the silence of the
chronicle, his story is quite clear and his past history easy to
restore, at least in outline.
The versatile Hermes, who as messenger of the gods plays a part in so
many Greek myths, became in the course of time among other things
associated with travelling, as god of roads, and also with trade,
partly because trading necessitates travelling, and partly because
Hermes was also the protector of the market-place in which the trading
was done. Thus he was called "Hermes Protector of the Merchant"
(_Empolaios_) and in this capacity went into the colonies of Greece,
including those of Southern Italy. Thus Hermes travelled with the grain
merchant from Cumae and became known to the Romans. They however knew
him merely as the god of trade, and their name for him is nothing but
the translation into Latin of his Greek cult-title: _Empolaios_ =
_Mercurius_. For a long time it was thought that there had existed a
Mercurius among the original gods of Rome, but the traces of this old
god are apparent rather than real and suggest one phase of that pastime
of which the later Romans were so fond, that of writing history
backwards and putting an artificial halo of antiquity about the gods
whom they borrowed from Greece. Thus Mercury was received into the
state-cult at about the time when the grain trade began, and was, as it
were, the divine representative of the interest which the Roman state
took in the whole transaction. His temple was outside the _pomerium_ on
the Aventine side of the Circus Maximus. It was in this temple of the
merchant god that the primitive Chamber of Commerce (_collegium
mercatorum_) had its beginning, an association, partly sacral, partly
commercial, whose members, the _mercuriales_, are frequently met with
in literature and also in inscriptions, one of which has been found as
far away as the island of Delos. In the actual cult of the Romans
Mercury never regained the many-sidedness which he had lost in coming to
them merely as a god of trade. In this capacity he appears on the
sextans of the old copper coinage, and under the empire he went into the
provinces as the companion of Mars, since the merchant went side by side
with the soldier. On the contrary when in the third century before
Christ Greek literature came to Rome, this simple idea of Mercury was
reinforced by many new Greek ideas and he entered into Roman poetry with
all the attributes and functions of Hermes; but this had little or no
effect on the cult and there were no great rivals to the old temple near
the Circus Maximus, no cult-centre with advanced Greek ideas, as we have
seen spring up in the case of Hercules, Castor, Minerva, and Diana.
We have already seen how the rise of the grain trade brought four new
deities to Rome, but there is one more chapter to our story. The grain
itself and the trade itself had now obtained their divine complements,
but the sea had not yet received its due; it too must have its parallel
among the gods of Rome. And so it came to pass that again under the
influence of the fateful books, though exactly when or how we cannot
say, the Greek Poseidon came into Rome. The sea had always meant much
to the Greeks, and the joyful shout of Xenophon's troops "The sea! the
sea!" finds an echo all through the centuries of Greek history before
and after the Anabasis. But the multitude of islands and harbours in
Greece is in marked contrast to the dearth of them in Italy, where even
to-day there is no good port of call on the west coast between Naples
and Civitavecchia--and the latter would be useless, were it not for
Trajan's mole. In Italy accordingly the sea-god Poseidon was worshipped
only in the Greek colonies, where however he had two famous cults, one
at Tarentum, later called Colonia Neptunia, and one at Paestum, whose
old name was Poseidonia. The Romans had worshipped deities of water in
abundance, as became an agricultural people, for water meant life, and
drought, death; but their deities were those of the sweet waters of
springs and rivers, they knew no god of the sea. But when the oracles
brought Poseidon to Rome he was identified with an old Roman water-god
Neptune, whose cult henceforward included the sea. We do not know where
the shrine of the old sweet-water Neptune had been, but his old festival
had occurred on July 23. The new Poseidon-Neptune was given a temple
outside the _pomerium_ in the Campus Martius, but the new was connected
with the old in so far at least that the dedication day of the new
temple was July 23, the day of the old Neptune festival.
With the introduction of Neptune, the sea-god, the state had
accomplished, as it were, a sort of divine marine insurance; the
transport of the grain was now watched over by a Roman god; but it was
not to be expected that the cult of a sea-god would ever mean very much
to the Romans. The maritime commerce of the Eternal City was very slow
in developing, and it grew to its subsequent proportions, not because
the Romans of Italy engaged in it, but because those foreigners who took
to the sea by nature later became Romans. Nor did naval warfare fall to
her lot until the First Punic War, and even then her victories were
gained by the tactics of land fighting transferred to the decks of two
ships, her own and the enemy's, fastened together by landing-bridges,
and the glory of victory was due not to Neptune but to Mars. It was not
until the civil wars at the close of the republic that real naval
battles occurred, and that Neptune received his share of glory for the
victory at Actium in B.C. 31, and later over Sextus Pompeius, in a
temple erected by Agrippa in the Campus Martius, behind the beautiful
columns of which the Roman Stock-Exchange transacts its business to-day.
In the first decade of the republic therefore, as we have seen, a group
of Greek gods was introduced by the Sibylline oracles, no one of whom
can be said to have been really needed, no one of whom except the
sea-element in Neptune represented any new and vital principles not
already present in the religious world, if not of Numa, at least of
Servius. The best that can be said of these gods is that one or two of
them, notably Mercury and Neptune, exerted no positively detrimental
influences on later generations. For the next two centuries our
chronicles are silent, so far as the actual introduction of new deities
by the aid of the books is concerned, and it is not until B.C. 293 that
the narrative of new gods begins again. But in other ways the oracles
were not idle during these two hundred years. We must rid ourselves of
the idea that it was necessary that their consultation should always
result in the importation of some new Greek deity. The oracles might
order the carrying out of some new religious rite regarding the deities
already present, and these religious rites, especially the public
processions so frequently performed, feed the ever-growing superstition
of the populace. It is essential to a charm or incantation that it
should contain something strange or foreign, it is above all things help
from without; and when the gods send prodigies and portents, when their
statues weep and sweat blood, when cattle speak, and meteors fall from
the sky, something strange and unusual must be done to counteract these
things. Among the foreign acts thus ordered the sacred procession occurs
frequently. It started from the temple of Apollo in the Campus Martius
and passed into the city through the Porta Carmentalis, went across the
Forum and then outside the _pomerium_ again to the temple of Ceres, and
then to the temple of Juno Regina on the Aventine. It was therefore a
power from without which came into their city to purify them and to
carry away out of the city again the impurities of which it had rid the
community.
It is also characteristic of such semi-magical things that they lose
their effects after a few applications, and other things must be sought
always more complicated and more strange. Thus from the beginning of the
republic down through the Second Punic War we have a series of
extraordinary measures, growing more and more complicated until in the
religious frenzy of the years after Cannae even human sacrifices are
performed at the command of the books. In this the third century before
Christ deities begin again to be introduced, and it is to this century
that we now turn.
It is probable that the Romans had always worshipped certain powers of
healing, but what their names were under the old regime we do not know,
except that possibly they were connected with the gods of water. At the
close of the kingdom they received, as we have seen, Apollo the divine
healer, Apollo Medicus, and this was originally the only side of his
activity which he exercised at Rome. At various seasons of plague during
the early centuries of the republic they called on him for help, and on
one such occasion (B.C. 431) they built him a temple. But in the course
of time men began to think lightly of the old family physician who had
stood by the Romans during more than two centuries; his methods were too
conservative, they were felt not to be thoroughly up to date. A new god
of healing had appeared in Rome, the Greek god Asklepios, whom myth
called Apollo's son, though originally he had had no connection with
Apollo. His great sanctuary was at Epidauros, and from there his cult
spread over all the Greek world. At first he was known at Rome only in
the worship of private individuals, who had brought him up from the
Greek colonies of Southern Italy, probably Tarentum or Metapontum; but
his cult was contagious, and the stories of his miraculous cures were
eagerly heard. It is no wonder then that in the presence of a great
pestilence in B.C. 293, when the Sibylline books were consulted, "it was
found in the books," as Livy says, "that Aesculapius must be brought to
Rome from Epidauros." The war with Pyrrhus however was on, and nothing
could be done that year except the setting apart of a solemn day of
prayer and supplication to Aesculapius. It is interesting to observe how
much the Romans have changed since the time exactly two centuries before
(B.C. 493), when Ceres and her companions, the first gods introduced by
the books, received their temple. That was the acknowledgment of gods
well known at Rome, and even then they were immediately identified with
already existing Roman gods; now they actually send an expedition not
only outside of Rome but of Italy itself to bring in the cult of a god
whom they accept by his Greek name. In the following year (B.C. 292) the
expedition started for Epidauros to bring back the god, that is the
sacred snake which was both his symbol and his visible presence. Such an
importation of a sacred snake from Epidauros is not unique in the case
of Rome, but was the normal method of establishing a branch cult. Snakes
were kept at Epidauros for just this purpose, and many branches were
thus established. It is an extremely interesting question as to the
practical medical value of the methods of healing practised at Epidauros
and its branches. For a long time those best fitted to express a
technical opinion, modern physicians who examined the matter, found
nothing good in them, and their opinion seems to receive confirmation
from some of the inscriptions recently discovered at Epidauros, which
tell the most extraordinary tales of miraculous cures. And yet many of
these tales are not intended as actual facts, but rather as pious
legends, proclaimed for the edification of the devout, in order that
their faith might be quickened. Before we condemn the whole affair, we
must realise two facts; one is that some of the most able minds of
Greece, men who were otherwise by no means remarkable for their
religious faith, believed implicitly in Epidauros and went there to be
cured; and the other is that the miraculous action of the god was always
supplemented by medicines, in which there may well have been some real
value.
We are told too much rather than too little about this embassy to
Epidauros, for the atmosphere of this third century is different from
that of the early republic. Greek literature was beginning to influence
Rome, and those generations were being born who were to be the pioneers
in Roman literature. Thus Roman mythology was commencing along Greek
lines and with Greek models, and one of the points where legend grew
thickest and fastest is in this coming of Aesculapius. The plain facts
are evidently that the committee went to Epidauros, obtained the snake,
brought it back safely to Rome, and established the sanctuary on the
island in the Tiber, where a temple was built and dedicated January 1,
B.C. 291. Probably this was the first use to which the island had ever
been put, and from this time dates the first bridge connecting it with
the city; the other bridge, to the right bank, was much later. The
Romans had always considered the island a disadvantage rather than an
advantage. Even in legend it was cursed, for it sprang from the wheat of
the Tarquins. They had always desired to be cut off from it, and had
always feared lest it might act as a means of approach for the enemy
from the opposite bank. The few real facts of Aesculapius's coming grew
into a romantic account of how, to the great surprise and terror of the
sailors, the snake went of its own accord into the Roman ship; and how
it stayed aboard until they reached Antium, and then suddenly swam
ashore and coiled itself up in a sacred palm tree in the enclosure of
the temple of Apollo there; and how, when they were in despair of ever
getting it back again, it returned peaceably to them at the end of three
days, and all went well on the journey to Ostia and up the Tiber until
they were passing the island, when the snake went ashore to make its
permanent home there.
It was a pretty fancy which at a later date formed the island into the
likeness of a boat by building a prow and stem of travertine at either
end, the traces of which may still be seen; and it is a curious instance
of the many survivals of ancient Rome in the modern city, that the
Hospital of S. Bartolommeo stands on the site of the old Aesculapius
sanctuary, and so far as we can tell, twenty-two centuries of suffering
humanity have had the burden of their pain lightened there, in
uninterrupted succession since that new year's day, above three hundred
years before Christ, when the hospital of Aesculapius of Epidauros was
formally opened.
The coming of the god of healing in the opening years of the third
century may well be regarded as an omen of the great suffering which
that century was to bring to Rome. It was a century of almost
uninterrupted warfare: first the Samnite war; then the war with Pyrrhus
and Rome's conquest of Southern Italy; then after a breathing spell of
about a decade the first war with Carthage, and Rome's bitter
apprenticeship in fighting at sea; then campaigns in Cisalpine Gaul; and
finally the war with Hannibal roughly filling the last two decades, the
most fearful contest in all Rome's history, with her most terrible enemy
in her own land of Italy. It is little to be wondered at therefore that
this was in the main a century of religious depression, a time when the
fear of the gods filled every man's heart and when every trifling
apparent irregularity in the course of nature was exaggerated into a
portent declaring the wrath of the gods and needing some immediate and
extraordinary propitiation. It is in just such a moment as this in the
middle of the century (B.C. 249) that the next recorded instance of new
gods occurs. The first war with Carthage was in progress, Rome had just
suffered a terrible defeat off the north-western point of Sicily, at
Drepana, a defeat all the more hideous because it was supposed to have
been caused by the impiety of the Consul Clodius, who, hearing that the
sacred chickens would not eat, perpetrated his grim jest by saying "let
them drink then instead," and drowning them all. But to cap it all the
wall of Rome was struck by lightning. Then action was necessary and the
books were consulted. They ordered that sacrifice should be made to Dis
and Proserpina, a black steer to Dis, and a black cow to Proserpina,
three successive nights, out on the Campus Martius, at an altar which
was called the _Tarentum_, and that the ceremony should be repeated at
the end of a hundred years. Here the myth-makers of later times have
been even more busily at work than they were in the case of Aesculapius.
The Aesculapius story was fitted out by them merely with a few
miraculous details, a few legendary ornaments, but the story of Dis and
Proserpina was so covered with their fabrications that it has only
recently been freed from them and seen in its true light, and certain
phases were so absolutely perverted that there are still a number of
very difficult points. To get a clear understanding of the situation we
must begin quite a distance back.
Taken as a whole, religious beliefs are among the most conservative
things in the world; the individual may grow as radical as you please,
but his effect on the general religious consciousness of his time is
extremely slight. Occasionally the number of radical individuals grows
larger and certain classes of society are affected by their views, but
even, in the periods of religious development which we are apt to think
of as most iconoclastic, society taken in the large, and on the average
of all classes, is not much more radical than in apparently normal
times. And while religion as a whole is conservative, there is one
section of it more conservative than all the rest, a section from which
change is almost excluded, that is the beliefs concerning the dead. In
our discussion of the religion of Numa we saw the very primitive
character of Roman beliefs in this field, the firm retention of the old
animistic idea of the dead, the tendency to class the dead together as a
mass and to believe in a collective rather than an individual
immortality, and above all the abhorrence of the dead and the
disinclination to dwell on their condition and to paint imaginary
pictures of life beyond the grave. In view of these feelings it is not
strange that we have great difficulty in finding any old Roman gods of
the dead, aside from the dead who are themselves all gods. These dead as
gods (_Di Manes_) and possibly Mother Earth (_Terra Mater_) are the only
rulers in the Lower World. In Greece on the contrary death was almost as
natural as life, and though the conditions in early times were not
unlike those in Rome, as Rohde in his _Psyche_ has so wonderfully
described them, the Greek soon grew beyond this, and the world of the
dead became almost as well known to him as the world of the living.
There was a kingdom of the dead, and a king and queen ruled over them.
These rulers were called by different names in different parts of
Greece, but the names which they had in certain parts of the
Peloponnesus, Hades the king of the dead and Persephone his bride, were
destined to survive the rest. The cult of this royal pair travelled far
and wide, but its most notable development occurred in Attica, where
Persephone became Kore the daughter of Demeter, stolen by Hades to
become his bride, while Hades himself under the sunny skies of Athens
lost some of his terrors and became Pluto, the god of riches, especially
the rich blessings of the earth. But all this was very foreign to Rome,
and while the Greeks were thinking these thoughts, the Romans were going
quietly along, content with their simple _Di Manes_. No better proof of
this can be desired than the one accidentally given us in the
introduction of Demeter and her daughter Kore into Rome as Ceres and
Libera in B.C. 493, and the absolute colourlessness and pointlessness of
Libera, in a word the entire lack of connexion in the religious
consciousness of Rome between Libera and Persephone. But in B.C. 249,
almost two and a half centuries later, matters were on a different
basis; Rome had been learning a great deal that was foreign to her old
beliefs, and there was no longer anything impossible to her in the idea
of individual rulers of the dead. Thus at the command of the books Pluto
and Persephone were received into the state-cult, though the strangeness
of the situation was acknowledged, at least in so far that they
translated Pluto into the Latin Dis; Persephone to be sure was left
alone, or more strictly speaking was accommodated to the Latin tongue by
being changed to Proserpina. It is of course impossible that the Romans
of B.C. 249 were entirely ignorant of Pluto and Persephone until the
Sibylline books bade them be brought in. Here again the traders from
Southern Italy had been their teachers; and the name _Tarentum_ of the
altar where the sacrifice was to be made may possibly indicate the town
of Tarentum as the source of the cult. The Romans knew Tarentum only too
well since the eventful war with Pyrrhus, which lay only a generation
back in their history.