The Religion of Numa
J >> Jesse Benedict Carter >> The Religion of NumaBut this passion for identifying Greek gods with Roman ones did not
confine itself to finding a parallel for the greater gods of Greece; and
less known deities were introduced into Rome in the same way. The old
Roman god, Faunus, in whose honour the ancient festival of the
_Lupercalia_ was yearly celebrated, had as his associate a goddess,
Fauna, who was better known as the "good goddess" (Bona Dea). Eventually
this new title Bona Dea crowded out the old title Fauna, so that it was
almost entirely forgotten. Bona Dea was a goddess of women, and the most
characteristic feature of her worship was the exclusion of men from
taking part in it. Now there was a Greek goddess, called Damia, also a
goddess of women, from whose cult also men were excluded, and her cult
spread from Greece to the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, especially
Tarentum, and so eventually to Rome. But by the time she arrived in Rome
the connexion of Fauna and Bona Dea had been entirely forgotten. Damia
was surely a Bona Dea, yes she was _the_ Bona Dea, for was not the proof
at hand in the fact that men were excluded from both cults? So a temple
was built for her, probably shortly after the Second Punic War, and from
the time no one ever thought of poor Fauna again, except scholars and
poets, who amused themselves, as was their wont, by putting her in
various genealogical relationships to Faunus, as sister, wife, or
daughter, while Damia lived and prospered under the stolen title of the
Bona Dea.
We see from this on what a small resemblance such identifications were
based, in this case merely on the presence of a similar minor injunction
in the laws of each cult. But we have here at least a genuine cult which
had arrived and was asking for admission, and in so far we are better
off than in most instances, where nothing substantial was gained by the
identification. Two forces were now at work assisting in this fusion of
Greek and Roman gods, namely art and literature. The capture of Syracuse
marked an epoch in Rome's artistic career; for several centuries she had
employed Greek architects and had also become acquainted with the
artistic types of certain Greek gods, but now all at once a wealth of
Greek sculpture was disclosed to her, and she could not rest content
until all her gods were represented in the fashion of man. The adoption
of the Greek type, in those cases where an identification had already
been effected, was not difficult and was in the main successful, though
there followed almost inevitably an enrichment of the Greek element in
the Roman god because of the presence of some attribute in the statue,
which brought its own myth with it. But there were certain Roman gods
for whom Greek parallels could not be found, and in these cases a
compromise, usually rather an awkward one, had to be effected, as for
example when the Roman gods of the storeroom, the _Di Penates_, were
represented by statues of the Greek Castor and Pollux. In such cases
confusion was sure to follow, and subsequent antiquarians would be
tempted to write treatises proving the original connexion of Castor or
Pollux with the Penates, as gods of protection in general, etc.
Literature too in its own way was fully as misleading, and Roman
scholars became fascinated with the labyrinths of Alexandrian mythology,
and straightway began to build Roman myths as rapidly as possible,
establishing lists of old Latin kings and all sorts of genealogies, and
weaving as many Greek mythological figures as possible into the legends
of the foundation of Italic towns.
It was the ceremonial of the cult however which most often offered the
best means of identification, as we have seen above in the case of Bona
Dea-Damia, where the exclusion of men from the rites was the main point
of similarity. In a similar way the old Roman god of the harvest,
Consus, was identified with the Greek ocean-god Poseidon because
horse-races were a characteristic feature of the festivals of each; and
the old Roman goddess of women and of childbirth was given as her Greek
parallel the Greek goddess Leukothea, the helper of those in peril at
sea, because in both cases slaves were forbidden to take part in the
cult.
But the effect of the capture of Rome by these Greek gods and Greek
ceremonials was not confined to the mere addition of new ideas, and the
transformation of certain old Roman deities. This would have been
comparatively harmless, but there was inevitably another result: the
consequent neglect of all Roman deities for whom no Greek parallels were
forthcoming, and the forgetting of all the original Roman ideas which
were crowded into the background by the novel and more brilliant Greek
ideas. Even the festivals of the old Roman year were treated in the same
cavalier manner. The interest of the people continued only with those
ceremonies which frightened them or pleased them. There were certain
festivals, for example the _Lupercalia_, the old ceremony of
purification on February 15, for which a reverence was still felt; and
others like the _Parilia_, the birthday of Rome, on April 21, or the
Anna Perenna festival on March 15, which involved open-air celebrations
and picnics. These and others like them were always kept up, while many
others were totally neglected. Naturally for the present the forms were
continued by the state; the festivals were celebrated at least by the
priests; and every temple received sacrifice on its birthday. The wheels
of the state religion were still running, but the power behind them had
stopped, and it was only momentum which kept them in motion.
It is only when we realise these things that we can understand how it
was possible that the most learned scholars at the close of the republic
were so desperately ignorant concerning old Roman religion. In regard to
many of the old Roman gods they know absolutely nothing, and try to
disguise their ignorance behind a show of learning based on etymological
sleight-of-hand; in regard to the rest their information is so tangled
with Greek ideas that it is often almost impossible to unravel the mass
and separate the old from the new. This unravelling has been the tedious
occupation of the last half century in the study of Roman religion; and
so patiently and successfully has it been accomplished that, although we
would give almost anything for a few books of Varro's _Divine
Antiquities_, it is tolerably certain that the possession of these books
would not change in the least the fundamental concepts underlying the
modern reconstruction of ancient Roman religion; though it is equally
certain that these books would emphasise just so much more strongly,
what we already realise, that this modern reconstruction is in distinct
contradiction to many of Varro's favourite theories. It is an
accomplishment of which History may well be modestly proud, that modern
scholars have been able to eliminate, to a large degree, the personal
equation and the myopic effects of his own time from the statements of
the greatest scholar of Roman antiquity, and thus though handicapped by
the possession of merely a small percentage of the facts which Varro
knew, to arrive at a concept of the whole matter infinitely more correct
than that which his books contained.
During this second century before Christ, therefore, the state religion
was apparently unchanged so far as the outward form was concerned. The
terminology and the ceremonies were much the same as before, but the
content was quite different: Greek gods and Greek ideas had displaced
Roman gods and Roman ideas, and the official representatives of
religion, the state priests, were carrying the whole burden of worship
on their own shoulders, because popular interest had been in the main
deflected and was working along other lines. These lines of rival
interest were superstition and scepticism, phenomena which at first
sight appear as distinct opposites, but which are on the contrary very
closely akin, so that they usually occur together not only in the same
age, but frequently even in the same individual. They are purely
relative terms, and the essence of superstition consists in its surplus
element, just as the essence of scepticism lies in its deficiency. No
religion judged from the standpoint of the worshipper can properly be
called a superstition, but if once we can establish the essential things
in a religion, then any large addition to those essential things savours
of superstition. Speaking with historical sympathy we have no right
therefore to designate early Roman religion as a superstition--it may of
course be relatively so in comparison with other religious forms--but
once we have established the essential elements in that early religion,
we may consider the introduction of new and entirely different elements
as superstition. The old religion of Rome consisted in the exact and
scrupulous fulfilment of a large number of minute ceremonials. The
result of this careful fulfilment of ritual was that the powers around
man did him no harm but rather good, and that was the end of the whole
matter. Religion did not command or even permit special inquiries into
these powers; it was not only not man's duty to try to know the gods, it
was his positive duty to try not to. Through the influence of Greece
there had now come into Rome an altogether new idea, nourished largely
by the Sibylline books, and represented most fully in the Magna Mater,
the idea of the perpetual service of a god, a consecration to him, to
the exclusion of all other things, and a life given over to the
orgiastic performance of cult acts, which produced a state of ecstasy
and consequently a communion with the deity. Along with this there went
a belief in the possibility, by means of certain books and certain men,
of obtaining from the gods a knowledge of the future. It is these
surplus beliefs, quite contrary to the spirit of old Roman religion,
which may justly be called superstition.
The Sibylline books had aroused these feelings, a knowledge of the
oracle at Delphi had increased them, the rites of Aesculapius had
carried them farther, but it was not until the Magna Mater came that
they seem to have burst forth in any large degree. But aside from the
rapid growth of the Magna Mater cult itself we have in this second
century two instances of this tendency. The first was connected with the
god Dionysos-Liber, innocent enough at his first reception in B.C. 493,
in the company of Demeter-Ceres and Kore-Libera. To be sure the state
had introduced him merely as the god of wine, but the mystery element in
Dionysos took firm hold on private worship, and the Bacchanalian clubs
or societies began to spread over Italy. In the course of about three
centuries they had become a formidable menace to the morals and even the
physical security of the inhabitants of Rome. Their meetings instead of
occurring three times a year took place five times a month, and finally
in B.C. 186 the famous Bacchanalian trial took place, of which Livy (Bk.
xxxix.) gives such a graphic account, and to which a copy of the
inscription of the decree of the Senate, preserved to our day, gives
such eloquent testimony, providing as it does severe penalties for
subsequent offenders, and recognising on the other hand large liberty of
conscience.
The same love of mystery and longing for knowledge which produced the
Bacchanalian clubs accorded a warm reception to astrology and made men
listen with eagerness to those who could tell their fortunes or guide
their lives by means of the stars. We do not know when the bearers of
this knowledge first arrived in Rome, but Cato, in his _Farm Almanac_,
our earliest piece of prose literature, in giving rules for the
behaviour of the farm bailiff especially enjoins the intending landowner
that his bailiff should not be given to the consultation of Chaldaean
astrologers. Within half a century the problem of the Chaldaeans grew so
serious that state interference was necessary, and in B.C. 139 the
praetor Cn. Cornelius Hispalus issued an edict ordering the Chaldaeans
to leave Rome and Italy within ten days.
The same age which produced this growth of superstition brought also the
antidote for it in the shape of a sceptical philosophy, but the only
trouble was that this philosophy not only cured superstition but in
doing so killed the genuine religious spirit underlying it. It cast out,
to be sure, the seven devils of superstition, but when men returned to
themselves again, they found their whole spiritual house swept and
garnished. With the death of the direct pupils of Aristotle, the Greek
mind had thought out all the problems of philosophy of which man at that
time was able to conceive. The following generations of philosophers
devoted themselves either to the elaboration of detail or to a renewed
examination of the foundations of belief, with the result that their
smaller minds came to smaller conclusions, and the end of their
investigations was one increased scepticism. The schools of the day
showed many slight variations and bore many different names, but they
all agreed in being more or less pervaded by a sceptical spirit, and by
accenting ethics as against metaphysics, though they defined ethics very
differently according to their starting point.
One of the earliest philosophical influences which reached Rome was
however that of a pre-Socratic school, the school of Pythagoras. This
was natural enough in itself, as the headquarters of the school was in
Southern Italy, but it is curious and significant that the first
pronounced instance of its influence occurred shortly after the Second
Punic War, and in connexion with a clever fraud which was perpetrated
with a view to influencing religion. In the year B.C. 181 a certain man
reported that when he was ploughing his field, which lay on the other
side of the Tiber, at the foot of the Janiculum, the plough had laid
bare two stone sarcophagi, stoutly sealed with lead, and bearing
inscriptions in Greek and Latin according to which they purported to
contain, one of them the body of King Numa, the other, his writings.
When they were opened the one which ought to have contained the body was
empty, in the other lay two rolls, each roll consisting of seven books;
the one set of seven was written in Latin and treated of pontifical law,
the other consisted of philosophical writings. They were examined, found
to be heretical and subversive to true religion, and were accordingly
burned in the Comitium. The connexion of Numa and Pythagoras,
historically impossible but believed in at this time, makes it
practically certain that this was a clever attempt to introduce the
philosophy of Pythagoras into Rome under the holy sanction of the name
of Numa. Fortunately the zeal of the city praetor frustrated the scheme.
But the doctrines of philosophy, which thus failed to enter by the door
of religion, found the door of literature wide open for them. As the
irony of fate would have it, Cato, the stalwart enemy of Greek
influence, had brought back from Sardinia with him the poet Ennius, and
at about the time when the false books of Numa were burning in the
Comitium Ennius was giving to the world a Latin translation of the
_Sacred History_ of the Greek Euhemerus. This Euhemerus, a Sicilian who
had lived about a century before this time, earned his title to fame by
writing a novel of adventure and travel, in which he described a trip
which he had taken in the Red Sea along the coast of Arabia to the
wonderful island of Panchaia, where he found a column with an
inscription on it telling the life history of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus,
who were thus shown to have been historical characters afterwards
elevated into deities. It was this theological element in his book which
made him famous. This theory of the historical origin of the gods is
even to-day called Euhemerism, and has exerted a baleful influence over
writers on mythology from its author's day down to our own. These then
were the doctrines which Ennius presented to the Romans in their own
tongue, and it is pathetic to realise that his _Sacred History_ formed
the first formal treatise on theology which Rome ever possessed. Born
under such an evil star, it is small wonder that her theological
speculations never reached great metaphysical heights.
In these days it seemed to the Senate that the question of philosophy
was beginning to be so serious that it might be considered as a public
danger, and that it was therefore their duty to try to cope with it.
They chose, of course, the typical Roman method of dealing with such
matters, and the philosophers were expelled from Rome. At first in B.C.
173 it was only the Epicureans who were sent out, but in B.C. 161 the
edict was broadened to include philosophers in general. However six
years later, in B.C. 155, there came to Rome an embassy of philosophers
whose mission was avowedly political and not philosophical, and who thus
could not be excluded, while at the same time they took occasion to
preach their philosophical doctrines. It was fortunate for Rome that
Stoicism, the best among all these philosophies, appealed to her most
strongly and became thus the national philosophy of Rome. Stoicism was
in many respects quite as sceptical as the others, but it had at least
this great advantage that it laid a strong emphasis on ethics, and was
in so far capable of becoming a guide of life. It might be well enough
for Greeks, whose aggressive work in the world had been done, to settle
down to an idle old age with a theory of life which practically excluded
the possibility of strong decisive action, but Rome was still young, and
most of her work was still before her. She might think herself very old
and pretend to take peculiar delight in many of the more decadent forms
of Greek thought, but in reality her leaders instinctively turned to
Stoicism, as affording a compromise between the mere thoughtless
activity of youth, which acts for the love of acting, and the jaded
philosophy of the vanity of all effort. About the middle of the century
(_circa_ B.C. 150) there existed in Rome a centre of culture and
intellectual influence, a little group of men peculiarly interesting,
because they form practically the first instance of an intellectual
coterie in the history of Rome. Their leader was the younger Scipio, who
had as his associates his friend Laelius, the poet Lucilius, whose
brilliant writings, submerged by the more brilliant satires of Horace,
form one of the most deplorable losses in Roman literature, and the
Stoic philosopher Panaitios of Rhodes. Terence had also belonged to the
circle, but he was now dead. Stoicism was the avowed philosophy of these
men, and their influence, especially that of Panaitios and Lucilius, did
much to popularise their chosen philosophical creed.
While Stoicism claimed superiority to religion and showed the
impossibility of attaching any value to religious knowledge, it
recognised the necessity of religion for the common people on grounds of
expediency, and effected a reconciliation between this denial of
religion on the one hand, and the recognition of it on the other, by
asserting that the religion of the state was justified not only by
expediency but much more by the fact that it was after all only the
presentation of the truths of Stoicism in a form which was intelligible
to the lower classes. Had this group of Scipio and his associates made
an effort to emphasise these particular doctrines of Stoicism in
relation to religion, the downfall of the state religion, which occurred
in the following century, might have been hindered. But for reasons,
which we shall see in a moment, this downfall could not have been
prevented, and it is doubtful whether the influence of any philosophical
system, even when supported by such prominent men, could have
perceptibly postponed the catastrophe. Meantime the only visible
contribution of Stoicism to the problem of religion was the growth under
her influence of the idea of a "double truth," one truth for the
intellectual classes and one for the common people, reaching its climax
in the phrase "It is expedient for the state to be deceived in matters
of religion" (_expedit igitur falli in religione civitatem_). This was
the attitude toward religion of the most intellectual men in the
community at the beginning of what was in many ways the most terrible
period in Rome's history.
The last century before Christ (more exactly B.C. 133-B.C. 27) is the
story of how Rome became an empire because she was no longer able to be
a republic; it is the history of the growth of one-man power because
many-men power had become impossible. This growth was caused not only,
nor at first even chiefly, by the grasping character of Rome's
statesmen, but by the increase of the rabble and the consequent
unmanageable character of her population, except under the firm hand of
a single master. And the reason why it took one hundred years of civil
war to change the republic into the empire was not because the spirit of
the republic was so slow in dying that its death struggles filled a
century, but merely because the republic died too easily and the way to
one-man power was so simple that there were too many candidates for the
position, and hence the civil wars between them. These civil wars were
bound to continue until the bitter lessons of experience had taught men
not only how to gain the supreme control, which was relatively easy, but
how to keep it and exclude rivals, which was much more difficult. The
ambitious leaders of this century did not have to create a throne; that
was ready to their hand. Their task was only to put defences around it.
Even these defences of it were not directly against the people, for the
people had no desire to overthrow the throne, but merely against the
rival candidates. Step by step from Tiberius Gracchus to Gaius Gracchus,
and on to Marius, to Sulla, to Pompey, to Julius Caesar, possession
became more and more permanent; until from being a mere momentary
position, it became nine points of the law, and Octavian made the tenure
perfect by adding an almost religious reverence to his person in the
title _Augustus_.
In the main the foreign wars of the second century before Christ gave
place to the Civil War at home, but there was one exception to this, the
war with Mithradates, king of Pontus, which on various occasions during
the early part of the century took large bodies of Romans to the Orient.
And as though to supplement this knowledge of the East, in the closing
half of the century the field of the civil struggle was enlarged so that
it too included the East and South-East. We have already seen so many
instances of the effects of political events on the course of Roman
religion that it is a matter of no surprise to us to see that both of
these struggles, the Civil War and the Oriental wars, left their marks
on religion. It would be much more surprising if they had not done so.
In the struggle of the rivals at home every possible weapon was
employed, and it was soon discovered that the priests and the
paraphernalia of religion were excellent means of political power and
influence. The religion of the state therefore became enslaved to
politics. On the other hand the campaigns in the East made the soldiers,
and eventually on their return the whole populace, acquainted with
various Oriental deities, which helped to satisfy their craving for the
sensational and the superstitious. Thus while the state religion in its
debauched condition was losing influence, the orgiastic element in
worship was gaining power through these newly acquired Oriental cults.
The story of the religion of the last century of the republic is
accordingly the history of the control of state religion by politics and
its consequent destruction, and the growth of superstition because of
the coming of new Oriental worships; and we may add to these two topics
a third: the pathetic attempts of philosophy to breathe new life into
the dead religion of the state.
When it comes to the question of the human characters whose names are
writ large on this page of religious history, the Dictator Lucius
Cornelius Sulla towers above all others. To his political insight is
largely owing the harnessing of the state religion to the chariot of the
politician, now and hereafter; and it was he who was the foremost leader
of Roman armies to the Orient, and the man who, because of his
peculiarly superstitious character, encouraged the worship of the
strange deities which were found there. In both these directions he was
ably seconded by Pompey, half a generation later. On the other hand the
futile efforts of philosophy to improve the situation were inspired
during the earlier period by the chief priest Scaevola, a contemporary
of Sulla, and during Pompey's and Caesar's time by Varro, the greatest
scholar that Rome ever produced.
Let us follow first the fortunes of the religion of the state at the
hands of the politicians. The upper and influential classes of Roman
society were now thoroughly imbued with Stoic philosophy and accordingly
with the doctrine of the "double truth" in the field of religion--the
real philosophical truth which was their own peculiar property and
which showed them clearly that all the forms of religion were vain, and
its doctrines at best a clumsy statement in roundabout parables of a
truth which they saw face to face; and that lower "truth" intended for
the masses and dictated by the pressure of necessity, the concrete state
religion in all its details, which must be preserved among the lower
classes in the interest of the state and of society. The state religion
was thus a matter of expediency and of usefulness. But once this idea of
its usefulness was put into the foreground, it was natural that the
question should immediately be asked: Was this state religion as useful
after all as it might be? Could it not be put to greater uses? If
religion existed in general for its political effects, why should it not
be used by the individual, like any other political apparatus, for his
own individual advancement? The man to whom this idea seems to have come
first in all its fullness was Sulla, and he proceeded immediately to act
upon it. The control of religion could, of course, be obtained best
through the priesthoods, and those priesthoods were naturally most worth
gaining which possessed the greatest right of interference in affairs of
state. These priesthoods were: first the Augurs, with their traditional
right to break up assemblies and to declare legislative action null and
void; then the Pontiffs, with their general control of all vexed
questions concerning the intersection of divine and human law; and
lastly the XVviri, or the keepers of the Sibylline books, in charge also
of the cults to which the oracles had given birth. Accordingly he
increased the numbers of these three priesthoods, raising each to
fifteen; and inasmuch as the old right of the colleges of the priests to
fill vacancies in their own bodies themselves had been taken away from
them in B.C. 103, and such vacancies were now filled by popular vote, it
was an easy thing for him to fill the new positions with his own men.