The Religion of Numa
J >> Jesse Benedict Carter >> The Religion of NumaThe result of accentuating the political importance of these three
colleges was that the whole body of the state religion became actuated
with a political spirit, and the whole structure was remodelled along
the lines of this new valuation. The immediate effect of this was that
the priests themselves became entirely absorbed in politics. To be sure
Sulla was not responsible for all of this, because the tendency had been
in this direction ever since the time of the Punic wars. In the good old
days of Roman religion the office of priest had been in the main its own
reward, and though the priests formed by no means a separate class, and
the individual priest had many secular interests and occasionally some
political ones, he was not supposed to hold political office. In the
time of the Punic wars, however, the tide began to turn. The earliest
recorded instance of a priest holding a high political office is in the
year B.C. 242 when the Flamen Martialis or special priest of Mars was
chosen Consul; but when the gentleman in question started to go to the
war, he was forbidden by the Pontifex Maximus. In B.C. 200 the Flamen
Dialis, or special priest of Juppiter, was allowed to be made aedile,
but his brother had to be especially authorised to take the oath of
office in his stead, since the priest of Juppiter, the god of oaths, was
himself not allowed to take an oath. In the course of the next century
such cases became more common, and where the thing was not allowed, the
priesthood became unpopular, and was sometimes left entirely vacant.
This last thing happened, for instance, in the case of the Flaminium
Diale, a position which was unfilled from B.C. 87 till B.C. 11. But the
evil effects of politics were not confined to the emptying of certain
priesthoods, which after all were of no very great importance, except as
their presence tended to sustain the _morale_ of the old religious
ritual. Its effects were much more disastrous in the very important
priesthoods which had now become essentially political offices. The
exclusively political interests of the incumbents, combined with the
fact that each man was elected by general vote of the people and without
any special fitness for the position, as had been the case in the old
days, tended to break down all the traditions of the college, and thus
to destroy much of the knowledge which was being handed down largely by
oral tradition. There arose therefore an ignorance of the ritual of the
cult which was great just in proportion as the knowledge originally
present had been accurate and intricate. But even this was not all; the
arranging of the yearly calendar, with its complicated intercalation of
days to bring into harmony the solar and the lunar years, was still in
the hands of the priests, and here the results of their growing
ignorance were most appalling. The calendar became terribly disordered;
and this again had its reaction on religion, for the calendar month
occasionally fell so out of gear with the natural seasons that it was
impossible to celebrate some of the old Roman festivals, which had a
distinct bearing on certain seasons of the year.
Thus the greatest enemies of the religion of the state were those of its
own household, the priests, who turned the reverent formalism of the old
days into a mockery, and made their priesthood merely a means of
political influence.
Now that the old Roman gods had been changed into new-fangled Greek
gods, and the old Roman priesthoods into modern political clubs, it is
little wonder that the religion of the fathers ceased to satisfy their
descendants. But while history shows that specific religious creeds have
often proved mortal and subject to change and decay, the same history
makes clear that the religious instinct is a constant factor in
humanity; and we must not suppose for a moment that the religious need
of the Roman community had ceased to exist, simply because the religion
of the state had ceased to satisfy it. From the day when the Sibyl gave
her first oracles to Rome on down to the time of Sulla, the desire for
the sensational and the extraordinary in religion had been steadily
growing. It had its birth in the idea that there was such a thing as a
direct communion with the deity, and that the oracles were an immediate
command from him. It was nourished by the sense of foreignness in the
Greek ceremonies gradually introduced into the cult. It fed on the more
sensational aspects of certain of the gods brought in: on the
enthusiastic rites of Bacchus, on the miracle-working of Aesculapius, on
the Stygian mystery of Dis and Proserpina. But its fulfilment was to
come from the East, that inexhaustible fountain of religious energy. In
the Magna Mater it recognised its own. This was the first undiluted
Orientalism which came to Rome. But the state itself had received it,
and had managed in some unaccountable way to put upon this outlandish
Eastern cult the stamp of Rome's nationality, that stamp which no nation
ever successfully and permanently resisted; and thus the reception of
the cult on the part of the state was not only a disgraceful thing,
tending to degrade true religion and spread the contagion of
Orientalism, but it also made those whose appetite had been aroused
eager for other deities, whose cult would have the great additional
charm of being unlicensed by the state, and hence savouring of
unlawfulness.
Such a cult, long half-consciously desired, was at length found, when in
B.C. 92 the Roman soldiery commanded by Sulla penetrated into the valley
of Comana in Cappadocia. There was a whole community, a miniature state,
devoted to the service of a goddess not unlike the Great Mother of
Pessinus, but whose cult was more ecstatic, more orgiastic, than that of
the Magna Mater, at least as Rome knew her. The king was the chief
priest, and the citizens were priests and priestesses. The war with
Mithradates brought the Roman army there again and also to another
Comana in Pontus, where there was a branch of the Cappadocian cult. It
was not the ignorant soldiery alone who were impressed by what they saw;
their leader, Sulla, was fully as much affected, and on his return to
Italy when the great crisis in his career, his march on Rome and his
storming of the Eternal City, lay before him, it was the goddess of
Comana who appeared to him in a dream and gave him courage. Thus her
cult entered Rome, and the capture of the city by Sulla has its parallel
in the capture of the hearts of the people by his companion, the goddess
of Comana. The original name of this goddess seems to have been Ma, but
the Greeks, who also knew her, had likened her to Enyo, their goddess
of strife and warfare; hence in these days of facile identification the
Romans' course was clear, and she became straightway Bellona, called by
the name of their old goddess of war. Of all the chapters of the history
of such identifications none is more curious than this. The old Bellona
had borne to Mars the same relation that Fides, the goddess of good
faith, had borne to Juppiter. She was the result of the separate
deification of one of the qualities of Mars, the breaking off of an
adjective and the turning of it into a noun; but from now on, though the
old goddess still existed and had her own temple and her own worship,
the name was also applied to this strange Oriental goddess who came in
the train of the debauched Roman army on its return from the East. But
though men might call this new-comer by the name of a sacred old
national goddess and worship her in private as they pleased, the
religion of the state, even in its sunken condition, refused to admit
her among its deities, and the priests, the _Fanatici_, with their wild
dances, to the music of cymbals and trumpets, slashing themselves with
their double axes until their arms streamed with blood, were not, at
least as yet, the official representatives of the state, the companions
of the reverend old Salii with their dignified "three-step." Even the
sanctuaries of the private cult must be kept outside the city, and the
violation of this law in B.C. 48 resulted in the raiding and
destruction of one of these private chapels. Her cult does not seem to
have become a state affair until the beginning of the third century
A.D., when Caracalla, who had extended Roman citizenship to all the
inhabitants of the provinces, gave a similar citizenship to all the
foreign deities resident in Rome. It is a curious coincidence that this
action of Caracalla's occurred just about the same year A.D. in which
the breakdown of the _pomerium_ for state cults had occurred B.C. For
the present, however, that is to say in the first century B.C., the
state retained her dignity, though the resultant unorthodox character of
the cult increased its power and influence, and made it more subversive
to morals than the Magna Mater was.
An even more interesting instance, both of the popularity of sensational
foreign cults and of the struggle of the state religion against them, is
found in the case of the Egyptian goddess Isis. The spread of Isis
worship into the Greek, and consequently also into the Roman world,
began relatively early. In the third century Isis and her companion
Serapis were well established on the island of Delos; and in the second
century we find traces of their worship in Campania, especially at
Pompeii and Puteoli. This last-named place, the seaport Puteoli, the
modern Pozzuoli, outside of Naples, was probably the door through which
Isis and her train came into Italy. Puteoli was the chief port for
Oriental ships, including Egypt, and it also had commercial relations
with Delos. At this later date it supplied Rome with gods in somewhat
the same way that Cumae, in the same neighbourhood, had done centuries
before. So far as the city of Rome itself is concerned, an apparently
trustworthy tradition traces the private cult back to the time of Sulla;
and it certainly cannot have been introduced much later than this time,
because in B.C. 58 it had became so prominent and so offensive to the
authorities of the state that they destroyed an altar of Isis on the
Capitoline. Apparently Isis was no exception to the general law of
growth by persecution, because in the course of the next decade the
state found it necessary to interfere no less than three times, _i.e._
in B.C. 53, 50, and 48. Finally the policy of suppression proved so
ineffectual that it was decided to try the opposite extreme, and to see
what could be done by state acknowledgment and state control, and so the
Triumvirs, Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, in B.C. 43 decreed the
building of a state temple for Isis. But although they had decreed the
erection of a temple, they were too much engaged in their own affairs to
build it immediately, and until the temple was built Isis could not
properly be considered among the state gods. As events turned out this
temple was never built, for in the course of the next few years the
trouble with Antony and Cleopatra began, and thus the gods of Egypt
became the gods of Rome's enemies, and so far as the state was concerned
an acknowledgment of these gods was impossible. Instead Augustus forbade
even private chapels inside the _pomerium_. The subsequent history of
Isis does not directly concern us; suffice it to say that after various
vicissitudes she was admitted to the state cult by Caracalla along with
all the other foreign deities.
But it was not only Asia Minor and Egypt which gave their cults to Rome;
the deities of Syria came too. Prominent among them was Atargatis, whose
cult seems to have touched the Italian mainland first at Puteoli. In
B.C. 54 the army of Crassus on its Eastern expedition, which was
destined to come to such a tragic end in the terrible defeat at Carrhae,
visited and plundered the sanctuary of the goddess in Syria. Thus she
became known at Rome, where she was called simply the "Syrian goddess"
(_dea Syria_) and was worshipped in a way very similar to the Magna
Mater and Bellona.
Lastly when Pompey swept the Mediterranean clean of Cilician pirates,
the sailors became acquainted with a Persian deity, Mithras, whose cult
in Rome began during our period and subsequently crowded all the other
orgiastic cults into insignificance.
We have now seen how the politicians were turning the state religion
into a tool for the accomplishment of their own selfish ends, and how
the masses of the people were seeking satisfaction for their religious
needs in sensational foreign worships, introduced from Asia Minor,
Egypt, Syria, and Persia. We must now see whether any efforts were being
made by any members of the community in behalf of the old religion, and
whether there were still in existence any traces of the pure old Roman
worship.
The latter-day philosophies of Greece had dealt a severe blow at Roman
religion by convincing the intellectual classes in the community that in
the nature of things there could be no such knowledge as that upon which
religion was based, and hence that religion was an idle thing unworthy
of a true man's interest. Yet all the philosophy in the world could not
take away from a Roman his sense of duty to the state. Now the state in
its experience had found religion so necessary that she had built up a
formal system of it and made it a part of herself. As it was the duty of
the citizen to support the state in every part of her activity, it was
clearly his duty to support the state religion. Hence there arose that
crass contradiction, which existed in Rome to a large degree as long as
these particular systems of philosophy prevailed, between the duty which
a man, as a thinking man, owed to himself, and the duty which he, as a
good citizen, owed to the state. We have seen how during the second
century before Christ no attempt was made to reconcile these two views
and how they existed side by side in such a man, for example, as Ennius,
who wrote certain treatises embodying the most extraordinary sceptical
doctrines, and certain patriotic poems in which the whole apparatus of
the Roman gods is prominently exhibited and most reverently treated. We
have also seen how this "double truth" could not but have disastrous
results on the state religion in spite of all efforts to the contrary.
The first effort which was made to improve the situation was not so much
an attempt at reconciliation as a frank statement of the difficulties of
the case. The problem had advanced considerably toward solution when
once it had been clearly stated. The man who had the courage to make the
statement was Quintus Mucius Scaevola, a famous lawyer as well as the
head of the college of Pontiffs (Pontifex Maximus). He was a
contemporary of Sulla, and was admirably fitted for his task because he
not only represented religion in his position as Pontifex Maximus, but
could speak also in behalf of the state both theoretically as a lawyer,
and practically because he had filled almost all the important political
offices (consul, B.C. 95). The treatise in which he made his statements
has been lost to us, but we may obtain a fair idea of what he said from
a quotation by the Christian writer Augustine in his wonderful book _The
City of God_ (iv. 27). For Scaevola the double truth of Ennius has grown
into a triple truth, and there are no less than three distinct
religions: the religion of poets, of philosophers, and of statesmen. The
religion of the poets, by which he means the mythological treatment of
the gods, he condemns as worthless because it tells a great many things
about the gods which are not true and which are entirely unworthy of
them. The religion of philosophers he does not consider suitable to the
state, because it contains many things which are superfluous, and some
which are injurious. The superfluous things may be allowed to pass, but
the injurious things, by which he evidently means the doctrines of
Euhemeros, are a very serious matter, not because they are untrue but
because the knowledge of them is inexpedient for the masses. The
religion of the statesman can have no part in these things, even if they
are true; and a man as a citizen of the state must believe in many
things, or profess belief in them, which the same man, as an individual
and a philosopher, knows are false. Scaevola's honest well-intentioned
effort to support the religion of the state was naturally a failure. The
very "masses" in whose behalf Scaevola was calling on his
fellow-citizens to undergo these casuistical gymnastics soon cared more
for Bellona and Isis than for all the gods of Numa together. But we
cannot help admiring Scaevola for his patriotism, though we may not envy
him his ethics. The state religion could never be supported on the
arguments of expediency; every one granted its expediency, and still it
fell; its worst enemies, the politicians, granted it most of all, and
they were the only ones who put the doctrine to any practical use. It
was precisely this discovery of its expediency and its great practical
value which caused its downfall. From the practical standpoint the
problem was settled once and for all, but as a matter of theory it
remained for the next generation, in the person of Varro, to provide a
more satisfactory solution, and to effect something of a compromise
between the truth of philosophy and the truth of religion.
Marcus Terentius Varro came to the work equipped with all the learning
of his time and possessed of a greater knowledge of facts than any other
Roman of his or any other day. So far as the problem of religion was
concerned, he embodied this learning in the sixteen books of _Divine
Antiquities_, which he very appropriately dedicated to Julius Caesar in
his capacity as Pontifex Maximus. If Ennius's _Sacra Historia_ be left
out of account, his book was the first treatise on systematic theology
which Rome ever had. In this work he desired to accomplish three things:
first, by a review of the history of Rome to show how essential the
state religion was; second, by an examination of Greek mythology to
purify the state religion from its immoral influences; third, to show
that the state religion so purified was fully in accord with Stoic
philosophy. In regard to the "three religions," therefore, he agreed
with Scaevola in casting out entirely the religion of the poets, and in
accepting both the others, but he differed from Scaevola in that he
denied the contradiction between them and asserted that they were not
two truths but two forms of the same truth. We are not able to go into
the details of his attempt, because unfortunately the books in which he
wrote it have been lost to us, and we have again merely the quotation in
Augustine's _City of God_. But we know that in general he tried to show
that the formal doctrines of the state religion were merely a popular
presentation of the truths of the Stoic philosophy, and that the whole
system of Roman gods could be reduced in theory to the great
philosophical contrast between the sky and the earth, the procreative
and the conceptive elements. A man might therefore hold fast to both
religions as to a simpler creed and a more abstruse one. Hence a man's
belief as a good citizen and his belief as an intelligent individual
were not in contrast so far as the truth was concerned, but merely in
the matter of form, in the manner of presentation. Varro's heroic
effort, supported as it was by all the learning of his day and all the
influence that his fame lent to his words, was nevertheless a failure.
The religion of the state was dead; politics had killed it. It was a
political power alone which could restore life to it, but that was the
work of an emperor, Augustus, and not of a scholar, Varro.
While Varro, with the weapon of philosophy, was attempting to defend the
religion of the state against its enemies, the poets and the
philosophers, a poet, also armed with philosophy, was trying to defend
the Roman people against its worst enemy, superstition. It may not seem
as though Lucretius belonged among the friends of old Roman religion,
and as though the _De Rerum Natura_ were exactly a religious poem, and
yet his work was in so far helpful to old Roman religion in that it
attacked the excesses of a latter-day superstition which had alienated
the hearts of the people from their old beliefs. Superstition is a
parasite which lives on scepticism, and with the killing of the parasite
scepticism sometimes dies as well; and it is open to question whether
Lucretius's book was not of considerable service in the cause of
religion. For religion still lived at Rome, though it is the fashion of
the writers on the ethics of the close of the republic to emphasise
almost entirely the scepticism of the day, dwelling on the attitude of a
Cicero or a Caesar, and forgetting the infinite number of "little
people," especially outside of Rome in the country, who still believed
in the old religion of the fathers, and who still performed the old
festivals of Numa, people who knew no more about Isis than they did
about Stoic philosophy. Their presence is disclosed to us in a few
republican inscriptions, but better yet in the continuance of the rites
of family worship down into the latest days of Rome, rites which did not
form a part of the restoration of Augustus, and which therefore, had
they died now, would never have come to life again. It is by just so
much more our duty to remember these people, as they have been forgotten
by history, if we ever expect to obtain a picture of Roman religion in
its true proportions. They were besides the people upon whom Augustus
built in the restoration, to which we now turn.
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE
Politics had caused the downfall of the state religion. Weakened by the
attacks of a sceptical philosophy, driven from the hearts of the common
people by the rival cults of the Orient, the state religion had finally
lost all its influence by the abuse of it as a political tool. Its
priesthoods were deserted, its temples were falling into ruins with the
grass carpeting their mosaic pavements and the spiders weaving new altar
cloths. To us with our modern ideas it would have seemed impossible that
this state religion could ever rise again; and probably no other state
religion that the world has ever seen could have been brought to life
again, because no other state religion has ever been so absolutely a
part of the state, unless the state itself were a theocracy; and
possibly no lesser genius than Augustus could have accomplished the task
even under the slightly more favourable conditions which the state
religion of Rome offered. Whether Julius Caesar would have attempted the
restoration is one of the many questions which his death left
unanswered. Certainly thoughtful men of his day hoped that he would, and
it was in this hope that Varro dedicated his _Divine Antiquities_ to
him; and another contemporary, Granius Flaccus, his book _On the
Invocation of the Gods_. But except for one law which he caused to be
enacted "concerning the priesthoods," we have no knowledge either of his
accomplishment or of his intentions, and the great task was left
practically untouched for the master-hand of Augustus.
In order that we may understand what Augustus did and how he managed to
succeed in relation to the state religion we must obtain some idea of
the whole scheme of Augustus in relation to the state at large, of which
his religious reorganisation was merely a part. One of the cleverest
characterisations of the Emperor Augustus which has ever been written
was that by the late Professor Mommsen, but its relatively secluded
position in the Latin preface to an edition of Augustus's great
autobiography, the _Res Gestae_, has prevented it from being generally
known. Mommsen describes Augustus as "a man who wore most skilfully the
mask of a great man, though himself not great." This epigrammatic
statement is undoubtedly clever but it is not just, although it is the
opinion concerning Augustus which we would expect a man to hold who,
like Mommsen, had an almost unbounded admiration for Julius Caesar.
There have been scattered through the pages of history even down to our
own day men of whom we say that they were not great men, though they did
a great work. In certain cases doubtless we can separate the man from
his work and justify the assertion, but in other cases we are deceived
by the man himself just as his contemporaries were and as he wished them
to be. For it occasionally happens that a man who is called to rule over
men and to reorganise a disordered government is able best to accomplish
his end by a gentle diplomacy, a conciliatory manner, which is often
misunderstood by those who surround him and who interpret gentleness of
spirit as smallness of spirit and self-restraint as weakness. It would
be truer to describe Augustus as a man who wore most skilfully the mask
of an ordinary man though himself an extraordinary man. The more we
study the chaotic condition of Rome under the Second Triumvirate and the
more fully we realise not only the total disorganisation of the forms of
government but also the absolute demoralisation of the individual
citizen, the more we appreciate the almost impossible task which was set
for Augustus and which he successfully accomplished. For one hundred
years (B.C. 133-31), from Tiberius Gracchus to Actium, hardly a decade
had passed which had not brought forth some terrible revolution for
Rome. Even the great Caesar had failed, had not divined aright the only
treatment to which the disease of the age would yield, for although the
blows which actually killed Caesar may have been merely an accident in
history, the deed of irresponsible men, his fall was no accident but was
the inevitable logical outcome of his imperial policy. But Augustus
succeeded in establishing a form of government which enabled himself and
his connexion to occupy the throne for almost a hundred years, and even
then though revolutions came, his constitution was the main bulwark of
government in succeeding centuries. It would take us too far from our
present subject to answer in any completeness the question of how he
succeeded, but a word or two may be said in general, and the rest will
become clearer when we examine his reorganisation of religion.