The Religion of Numa
J >> Jesse Benedict Carter >> The Religion of NumaAnd so the Romans adopted the Greek gods of the dead, and thus, at least
theoretically, put their dead ancestors into subjection to the Greeks
just as they themselves, the descendants, were sitting at the feet of
the Greeks in this life. But though the enactment of the Senate gave
these gods Roman citizenship, and the priests of the Sibylline books
were in duty bound to perform the ritual of the cult, be it said to the
credit of the Romans, the gods themselves never took a very deep hold of
the religious life of the people in general. Their names, to be sure,
crept into a few of the old formulae and stood side by side with the
older deities, and Proserpina was made much of by the Roman poets; but
the real tests of devotion, dedicatory inscriptions, are almost entirely
absent. Strangely enough the only thing which seems to have caught
their fancy was the weird ritual of the nightly sacrifice at the
Tarentum, and especially its repetition after one hundred years. This
idea of the hundred years is Roman rather than Greek, and it is at least
open to question whether it may not have been added to the instructions
in the oracle to give the whole matter an added Roman colour. Thus in
B.C. 249 were instituted the Secular Games, which were repeated with
approximate accuracy in B.C. 146, and would doubtless have been again
between B.C. 49 and 46, had not the Civil War completely filled men's
minds and made human sacrifices to the dead, in battle, an almost daily
occurrence. Meantime the Roman annalists were working backwards in their
own peculiar fashion, and building out into the past a series of
fictitious celebrations preceding B.C. 249, one hundred years apart,
back into the time of the kingdom. On the other hand we shall have
occasion later to speak of the restoration of the games and their
reorganisation by Augustus.
Under the test of adversity nations are very much like individuals, and
a national weakness, which is often entirely concealed in normal
conditions, comes prominently and disastrously to the surface in the
hour when strength is most needed. The war with Hannibal was just such a
crisis in Rome's history, and under its influence Rome's dependence upon
the Sibylline books was more pronounced than ever. The seeds of
superstition sown during the earlier centuries burst now into full
blossom, destined to produce the fruit, the gathering of which was to be
the bitter task of the closing centuries of the republic. The story of
the Second Punic War, regarded merely from the military standpoint,
reads for Rome almost like a nightmare, with its long succession of
apparently easy victories turning one by one into defeats; but when we
add to this that other chronicle, of which Livy is equally fond, the
long lists of portents and prodigies sent by the angered gods, and when
we realise that to the masses of the people the wrath of the gods was
more terrible and just as real as the hostility of Hannibal, then we
have not the heart to reproach them for their religious frenzy. Seen by
themselves, the jumping of a cow out of a second-story window, or the
images of the gods shedding tears, do not seem very serious matters, but
endow us with three hundred years of hereditary dread of these things,
give us the instinctive interpretation of them as the turning away from
us of the powers upon which we rely for help, nay their positive
opposition to us and our hopes--and our condition in the presence of
these phenomena would be very different.
Thus almost every year between B.C. 218 and 201 had its share of
religious ceremonial, and the Sibylline books, which had hitherto been,
in theory at least, merely an alternative method of religious procedure
permitted to exist alongside of the older and more conservative forms,
became now the order of the day. Like a Homeric picture in which the
quarrels of the gods in Olympus run parallel to the battles of Greeks
and Trojans on the plains of Troy, so every victory which Rome won over
Hannibal on the field of battle was bought at the price of a victory of
Greek gods over Roman gods in the field of religion; and further,
although Rome succeeded in keeping Hannibal outside of her own walls,
her gods did not succeed in defending the _pomerium_ against the Greek
gods, and it is during this Second Punic War that this, the greatest
safeguard of old Roman religion and customs, was broken down, and the
new gods gained entire possession of the city, placing their temples on
the spots hitherto held most sacred. From now on all distinction ceases,
and it is scarcely possible to speak of a Roman in contrast to a
Graeco-Roman cult. It is important however to observe that this
breakdown occurred because of excess of religious zeal rather than
through neglect and indifference, and though we may indeed notice a
gradual deterioration of the deities introduced by the books, all the
way down from the busy working gods like Ceres and Mercury and Neptune
to the more miraculous Aesculapius, and the cult of Dis or Proserpina
with its possibilities of weird fantastic worship, there have been
however as yet only scanty traces of the orgiastic element. But this was
the next step, and it was not long in coming. The rapid campaigns of the
earlier years of the war with Hannibal had passed, Cannae (B.C. 216) had
been somewhat retrieved by Metaurus (B.C. 207), where the reinforcements
for Hannibal, led by Hasdrubal, had been cut to pieces, but the result
was not what had been hoped for, and Hannibal had not left Italy, but
entrenched in the mountains of the south he seemed to be preparing to
pass the rest of his life there. It was in this the year B.C. 205 that
the help of the books was again sought, if peradventure they might show
the way to drive Hannibal out of the country. The reply came that, when
a foreign-born enemy should wage war upon the land, he could be
conquered and driven from Italy, if the Great Mother of the gods should
be brought to Rome from Phrygia. The rest of the story is so quaintly
and withal so truthfully told by Livy (Bk. xxix.) that it will not be
amiss to quote his words:--"The oracle discovered by the Decemviri
affected the Senate the more on this account because the ambassadors who
had brought the gifts [vowed at the battle of Metaurus] to Delphi
reported that when they were sacrificing to the Pythian Apollo the omens
were all favourable, and that the oracle had given response that a
greater victory was at hand for the Roman people than that one from
whose spoils they were then bringing gifts. And as a finishing touch to
this same hope they dwelt upon the prophetic opinion of Publius Scipio
regarding the end of the war, because he had asked for Africa as his
province. And so in order that they might the more quickly obtain that
victory which promised itself to them by the omens and oracles of fate,
they began to consider what means there was of bringing the goddess to
Rome. As yet the Roman people had no states in alliance with them in
Asia Minor; however they remembered that formerly Aesculapius had been
brought from Greece for the sake of the health of the people, though
they had no alliance with Greece. They realised too that a friendship
had been begun with King Attalus [of Pergamon] ... and that Attalus
would do what he could in behalf of the Roman people; and so they
decided to send ambassadors to him, ... and they allotted them five
ships-of-war in order that they might approach in a fitting manner the
countries which they desired to interest in their favour. Now when the
ambassadors were on their way to Asia they disembarked at Delphi, and
approaching the oracle asked what prospect it offered them and the Roman
people of accomplishing the things which they had been sent to do. It is
said that the reply was that through King Attalus they would obtain what
they sought, but that when they brought the goddess to Rome they should
see to it that the best man in Rome should be at hand to receive her.
Then they came to Pergamon to the king [Attalus], and he received them
graciously and led them to Pessinus in Phrygia, and he gave over to them
the sacred stone which, the natives said, was the Mother of the gods,
and bade them carry it to Rome. And Marcus Valerius Falto was sent ahead
by the ambassadors and he announced that the goddess was coming, and
that the best man in the state must be sought out to receive her with
due ceremony." In the next year (B.C. 204) after recounting new
prodigies Livy continues:--"Then too the matter of the Idaean Mother
must be attended to, for aside from the fact that Marcus Valerius, one
of the ambassadors who had been sent ahead, had announced that she would
soon be in Italy, there was also a fresh message that she was already at
Tarracina. The Senate had to decide a very important matter, namely who
was the best man in the state, for every man in the state preferred a
victory in such a contest as this to any commands or offices which the
vote of the Senate or the people might give him. They decided that of
all the good men in the state the best was Publius Scipio.... He then
with all the matrons was ordered to go to Ostia to meet the goddess and
to receive her from the ship, to carry her to land and to give her over
to the women to carry. After the ship came to the mouth of the Tiber,
Scipio, going out in a small boat, as he had been commanded, received
the goddess from the priests and carried her to land. And the noblest
women of the land ... received her ... and they carried the goddess in
their arms, taking turn about while all Rome poured out to meet her, and
incense-burners were placed before the doors where she was carried by,
and incense was burned in her honour. And thus praying that she might
enter willingly and propitiously into the city, they carried her into
the temple of Victory, which is on the Palatine, on the day before the
Nones of April [April 4]. And this was a festal day and the people in
great numbers gave gifts to the goddess, and a banquet for the gods was
held, and games were performed which were called _Megalesia_." This
extraordinary picture is probably in the main historically correct. The
most striking part of it, the enthusiasm of the Roman populace, is
certainly not overdrawn. Thus was introduced into Rome the last deity
ever summoned by means of the books, the one whose cult was destined to
outlast that of all the others, and to do more harm and produce more
demoralisation than all the other cults together. To understand why this
was so, we must go back for a moment.
The influence of Greece on Rome was progressive, and we are able to
indicate at least three distinct periods and phases of it, so far as
religion is concerned: first, the informal coming of a few Greek gods
who adapted themselves more or less completely to the old Roman
character; such are Hercules and Castor and even Apollo, though Apollo
was indirectly responsible for the second period, because he was the
cause of the coming of the Sibylline books. The influence of these books
produced the second period, with its characteristics of ever-growing
superstition, and greater pomp in cult acts, but though the sobriety of
the old days had changed into a restless activity, the new gods who came
in and the new cult acts introduced were still of such a character that
Romans could take part in the worship without shame. But just as the
staid Apollo had produced the books, so now as their last bequest the
books brought in the Great Mother, and the third period had begun, the
period of orgiastic Oriental worship, which prevailed, at least among
certain classes, until the establishment of Christianity. We may well
ask who this Great Mother was, and why this one Greek cult should be so
different from all the rest.
At different points in Asia Minor and in Crete a goddess was worshipped,
originally without proper name, as the great source of all fertility,
the mother of all things, even of the gods. Mount Dindymos in Phrygia
was one of the chief centres of the cult, and there the Great Mother was
known also as Cybele. From these various centres the cult spread over
all the Greek world, but wherever it went, it always gave evidence of
its birthplace by certain strange Oriental elements both in its myths
and in its rites. Its devotees were a noisy orgiastic band, who filled
the streets with their dances, and the air with their singing and the
clashing of their symbols, to the accompaniment of the rattling of coin
in the money box--for the collection of money from the bystanders was
always a part of the performance.
This then was what the "best man in the state" and the grave Roman
matrons went forth from Rome to receive--a sacred stone representing the
goddess, and a band of noisy emasculated priests; and this was what they
opened their gates to, and took up into their holy of holies, the
Palatine hill, the birthplace of Rome. The Greeks had again come bearing
gifts, and like the Trojans who broke down their walls and took the
wooden horse up into their citadel, Romans, the reputed descendents of
these Trojans, were carrying up to their most sacred hill another gift
of Greece which was to capture their city. They put the image in the
temple of Victoria on the Palatine until such time as its own temple was
ready to receive it, and the goddess of Victory seemed to respond to its
presence, for did not Hannibal leave Italy the very next year? And who
would be so impious as to suggest that to Scipio and not Cybele belonged
the glory, and that a strong Roman army in Africa affected Hannibal
more than a sacred stone on the Palatine?
It may well be doubted whether anything but such a great exigency would
ever have induced Rome to accept such an utterly foreign cult; and when
the nightmare of the war was past, the Senate awoke to the realisation
that a very serious act had been committed. To their credit be it said
that they did what they could to minimise the evil. The goddess had
brought her own priests with her, the cult was in their hands, and there
the law decreed it must stay, and no Roman citizen could become a
priest. That this law was really enforced is shown by several cases
where punishment, even transportation across the sea, was meted out to
transgressors. Then too the worship must be in the main confined to the
precincts of the temple on the Palatine, and only on certain days of the
year were the priests allowed to perform in the streets of the city. It
is significant of the strength of Roman law that these enactments held
good for three and a half centuries, and were not changed until the
reign of Antoninus Pius.
In the introduction of the Great Mother the Sibylline books performed
their last and most notable achievement. Hereafter they introduced no
new deities, and were consulted only occasionally, chiefly for political
purposes, for example in B.C. 87 against the followers of Sulla, and in
B.C. 56 in connexion with a scheme of purely political import. Their
work was done, and we have seen in what it consisted. For three hundred
years they had been encouraging the growth of superstition. From their
vantage ground of the temple of Juppiter Optimus Maximus, the essence of
all that was most patriotically Roman in Rome, they had been giving
forth these infallible oracles which seemed so much superior to the
simple "yes and no" answers with which the old Romans had been content
in their dealings with the gods. In times of peril by pestilence and by
battle they had given advice, and the pestilence had ceased and the
battle had turned to victory. It seemed indeed that the Sibyl deserved
the gratitude of Rome. Time alone could teach them what the books had
really given them. It was only in the coming generations that it became
evident that the abuse of faith, the substitution of incantation for
devotion, was destructive of true religion. It is the effect of this
substitution on the various classes of society under the new and trying
social conditions of the last two centuries of the republic that forms
the theme of our next chapter.
THE DECLINE OF FAITH
It is the fashion of our day to think no evil of Greece. In art we are
experiencing another Renaissance, not like that of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries in a revival of ancient Rome, but in a movement
leading behind Rome to the classic and even the pre-classic models of
Greece. In itself it is a healthful tendency, a needed corrective to the
sensational search for novelty which characterised the closing years of
the nineteenth century. But in our admiration for the Greek spirit we
ought not to forget that after Alexander that spirit lost much of its
beauty, and aged very rapidly. We may indeed regret the fact that Rome,
like certain persons of our acquaintance, seemed at times to possess a
strong faculty for assimilating the worst of her surroundings, while
occasionally curiously unresponsive to the better things; and yet we
ought in justice to strive to realise the fact that not only is the
Greek spirit at its best an unteachable thing, but that at the
historical moment when Rome came under that influence the Greek world
was very old and weary. It was Rome's misfortune and not her fault that
when she was old enough to go to school, Alexandrianism with its
pedantic detail was the order of the day in mythology, and the timorous
post-Socratic schools were the teachers of philosophy. Naturally if Rome
had been another Greece she would have worked back from these later
forms to the truer, purer spirit, but Rome was not Greece, and no
thoughtful man ever pretended that she was. In the third century before
Christ Greece began actively to influence Rome; before that time
Hellenic influence had been confined largely to the effects on religion
produced by the Sibylline books, and to the effects on society caused by
the presence of Greek traders. But now Greek thought as embodied in the
literature began to affect Roman thought, and to bring into being a
literature based on Greek models. Three centuries of Sibylline oracles
had produced for Rome the pathological religious condition of the Second
Punic War, when she did not think twice before breaking down the
religious barrier which had hitherto separated the national from the
adopted elements in her religion, and at the same time unhesitatingly
reached out to Asia Minor for an Oriental cult, masquerading in Greek
colours, and placed on the Palatine the Great Mother of Pessinus. From
this time on two influences were steadily at work which shaped the
history of Roman religion in the two remaining centuries till the close
of the republic: one, mythology, directly affecting the forms of the
cult and the beliefs concerning the individual gods; the other,
philosophy, attacking the whole foundation of religious belief in
general.
Greece gave her gods to Rome when she herself was weary of them, she
gave her the tired gods, exhausted by centuries of handling, long ago
dragged down from Olympus, and weary with serving as lay-figures for
poets and artists, and being for ever rigged out in new mythological
garments, or jaded with the laboratory experiments of philosophers who
tried to interpret them in every conceivable fashion or else to do away
with them entirely. It is no wonder that it did not take the Romans more
than a century to come to the end of these gods, to find that the only
one among them who could satisfy their religious desires was the least
Greek of them all, the Magna Mater, and having found this to go forth to
take to themselves more like unto her, in a word, to crave the
sensational cults of the Orient. And the philosophy which Greece gave
Rome was no better than the mythology. It is not strange that human
thought experienced a reaction after a century which contained both
Plato and Aristotle, but it is a pity that Rome should have learned her
philosophy from a period of doubt and scepticism, an age in which the
lesser masters, who had known the greater ones, had gone, leaving
nothing but pupils' pupils.
The history of religion in Rome during the last two centuries of the
republic is the story of the action and reaction of these two
tendencies--the one toward the novel and sensational in worship, which
we may call superstition, the other the philosophy of doubt, which we
may call scepticism--in the presence of the established religion of the
state. This much the two centuries have in common, but here their
resemblance ends. In the first of these centuries (B.C. 200-100) the
state religion was able to hold her own, at least in outward appearance,
and to wage war against both tendencies. In the other century (B.C. 100
to Augustus) politics gained control of the state religion and so robbed
her of her strength that she was crushed between the opposing forces of
superstition and scepticism. It is to the story of the earlier of these
two centuries, the second before Christ, that we now turn.
With the close of the Second Punic War there began for Rome a period of
very great material prosperity. This prosperity was, to be sure, not
exactly distributed, and it is not without its resemblance to some of
our modern instances of commercial prosperity, in that it was not so
much a general bettering of economic conditions as the very rapid
increase of the wealth of a relatively small number, an increase gained
at the expense of positive detriment to a large element in the
population. Thus it was that a century of which the first seventy years
provide an almost unparalleled spectacle of the increase of national
territory, accompanied, according to the ancient methods of taxation, by
a vast increase in national wealth, should close with the tragedies of
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and the legacy of class hatred which
produced the civil wars. This growth in wealth and territory was not
without its effects on the outward appearance of the state religion. The
territory was gained by a series of minor wars in the course of which
many temples were vowed; and the spoils of the war provided the means
for the fulfilment of the vows. Thus to the outward observer it might
well have seemed that the religion of the state was enjoying a time of
great prosperity. Between the close of the Punic War (B.C. 201) and the
year of Tiberius Gracchus (B.C. 133) we have accurate knowledge of the
dedication of no less than nineteen state temples, and there were
undoubtedly many others of which we have no record. Another apparently
good sign is the fact that the Sibylline books are silent, so far as the
introduction of new deities is concerned. Yet these surface indications
are deceptive. As for the Sibylline books, now that the _pomerium_ line
had been broken down, and the temples of Greek gods might be placed
anywhere in the city, it was a very simple matter for the state to bring
in any Greek god that it pleased, and likening him to a more or less
similar Roman god and calling him by the Roman name, to put up a temple
to him anywhere. It was also true that, as Roman theology was now based
on the principle that every Roman god had his Greek parallel and _vice
versa_, there were no gods left, whose names would have occurred at all
in the Sibylline books, who could not be brought in now without them.
And as for the vowing of new temples, this represented at best merely
the habit formed during more devout days; religion was moving by the
momentum acquired during the Second Punic War, and the gods to whom
these temples were erected were really Greek gods under Roman names. In
a word, not only was the state religion becoming more and more of a form
day by day, but the form was that of Greece and not of Rome. It is
extremely interesting to trace this movement in detail, to look behind
the outward appearance and see the remarkable changes that were really
taking place.
If we look at the temples which were built in the years following the
Second Punic War, we shall have no difficulty in finding examples of the
introduction of Greek gods under Roman names. During the war itself in
the year B.C. 207 a Roman general had vowed a temple to Juventas on the
occasion of a battle near Siena. Juventas was an old Roman goddess, one
of those abstract deities which had been produced by the breaking off
and becoming independent of a cult-title. She was intimately associated
with Juppiter, and had a special shrine in the Capitoline temple.
Juventas was the divine representative of the putting away of childish
things and the assumption of the responsibilities and privileges of
young manhood. This act was symbolised by the Romans in the beautiful
ceremony of putting on the toga of manhood (_toga virilis_), when the
lad was led by his father to the Capitoline temple to make sacrifices to
Juppiter, and at the same time a contribution was made to the treasury
of Juventas. But this was not the goddess in whose honour the temple
vowed at Siena was built at the Circus Maximus and dedicated B.C. 191.
This Juventas was nothing more or less than the Greek Hebe, the female
counterpart of Ganymedes, as cupbearer to the gods. Similarly in B.C.
179 a temple was dedicated to Diana at the Circus Flaminius, but this
was not the old goddess of Aricia, whose cult Rome had adopted for the
sake of increasing her influence in the Latin league. It was the Greek
Artemis, who at her first coming into Rome had been associated with
Apollo in the temple built in B.C. 431, and was now given a temple of
her own. Perhaps the strangest of all is the temple which was erected to
Mars in the Campus Martius in B.C. 138. It might well be supposed that
the Romans would keep holy the reputed father of their race, the god to
whom, under Juppiter, their success was due. On the contrary in B.C.
217, when they were carrying out a Greek ceremony of offering a banquet
to a set of gods, arranged in pairs, they showed no hesitation in
grouping together Mars and Venus to represent the Greek pair Ares and
Aphrodite, thus doing violence to Mars by bringing him into a
relationship with Venus which was entirely foreign to old Roman thought,
and identifying him with Ares, with whom he had nothing to do. Now in
B.C. 138 a temple is built to Ares under the name of Mars, close beside
the venerable old altar of Mars, one of the oldest and most sacred of
Roman shrines.