Chapter 5

Servius explains _circumtulit_ by _purgavit_. As early as Livius Andronicus (second century B.C.) we find "classem lustratur" of fishes swimming round a fleet (Ribb. _Trag. Fragmenta_, p. 1).

[441] Marquardt, p. 324, for the _februa_ of the Luperci, _R.F._ p. 320 foll., and the explanations there given. More will be found alluded to in Van Gennep, _Les Rites de passage_, p. 249. To my mind none are quite convincing. The Romans believed that blows with these _februa_ (strips of the victim's skin) made women fertile; they were therefore clearly magical implements, but beyond this we do not seem to get. (See also Deubner in _Archiv_, 1910, p. 495 foll.)

[442] Varro, _L.L._ vi. 13, "Februum Sabini purgamentum, et id in sacris nostris verbum." Cp. Varro, _ap. Nonium_, p. 114; Ovid, _Fasti_, ii. 19 foll., where he calls _februa piamina, purgamenta_, in the language of the _ius divinum_.

[443] _L.L._ vi. 11.

[444] Servius, _ad Aen._ x. 32; xi. 842; cp. i. 136.

[445] See _R.F._ p. 127, for the same rite in the Church of England (Brand, _Popular Antiquities_, p. 292).

[446] _Les Rites de passage_, ch. ii.

[447] For boundary marks in historical times see _Gromatici auctores_, vol. ii. p. 250 foll. (Rudorff).

[448] If the cattle were in the woodland beyond the settlement, as they would be in summer, they could not be protected in this way: like an army going into the country of _hostes_ (see above, p. 216) they were treated in another way, which we may connect with the ritual of the Parilia, as Dr. Frazer has beautifully shown in his paper on St. George and the Parilia (_Revue des études ethnographiques et sociologiques_, 1908, p. 1 foll.).

[449] _Georg._ i. 338 foll.

[450] Varro, _L.L._ v. 143; Servius, _Aen._ v. 755 (from Cato); Plutarch, _Romulus_, xi.

[451] See above, p. 117.

[452] Buecheler, _Umbrica_, pp. 12 foll. and 42 foll.

[453] The deities of the city were invoked to preserve the name, the magistrates, rites, men, cattle, land, and crops: a list in which the name is the only item that carries us back to pre-Christian times.

[454] Buecheler, _Umbrica_, pp. 21 and 84 foll.

[455] Livy xl. 6 init.

[456] See above, p. 96.

[457] Numbers xxxi. 19.

[458] Festus, p. 117.

[459] See Hülsen-Jordan, _Röm. Topographie_, vol. iii. p. 495; Von Domaszewski, _Abhandlungen_, p. 217 foll.

[460] Suggested by Van Gennep, _Les Rites de passage_, p. 28.

[461] Livy iii. 28. 11.

[462] Farnell, _Evolution of Religion_, p. 132 foll.

[463] The account of _lustratio_ given in this lecture is adapted from the author's chapter on the same subject in _Anthropology and the Classics_, Oxford University Press, 1908.

LECTURE X

THE FIRST ARRIVAL OF NEW CULTS IN ROME

I said in my first lecture that the whole story of Roman religious experience falls into two parts: first, that of the formularisation of rules and methods for getting effectively into right relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe; secondly, that of the gradual discovery of the inadequacy of these, and of the engrafting on the State religion of Rome of an ever-increasing number of foreign rites and deities. The first of these stories has been occupying us so far, and before I leave it for what will be practically an introduction to succeeding lectures, it will be as well for me to sum up the results at which we have already arrived.

I began with what I called the protoplasm of religion, the primitive ideas and practices which form the psychological basis of the whole growth. The feeling of awe and anxiety about that which is mysterious and unknown, the feeling which the Romans called _religio_, seems to have manifested itself in Italy, as elsewhere, in those various ways which I discussed in my second and third lectures, in the various forms of magic, negative and positive. We find unmistakable evidence of the existence of those strict rules of conduct called taboos, which fetter the mind and body of primitive man, which probably arise from an ineffective desire to put himself in right relations with forces he does not understand, and which have their value as a social discipline. Again, we find surviving in historical Rome numerous forms of active or positive magic, by which it was thought possible to compel or overcome those powers, so as to use them for your own benefit and against your enemies. But I was careful to point out that on the whole little of all this evidence of the early existence of magic at Rome is to be found in the public religion of the Roman State, and that the natural inference from this is that at one time or another there must have been a very powerful influence at work in cutting away these obsolete root-leaves of the plant that was to be, and in making of that plant a neat, well-defined growth.

I went on to deal with the first stage in the working of this influence, which we found reflected in the religion of the family as we know it in historical times. The family, settled on the land, with its homestead and its regular routine of agricultural process, developed a more effective desire to get into right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe. Anxiety is greatly lessened both in the house and on the land, because within those limits there is a "peace" (or covenant) between the divine and human inhabitants who have taken up their residence there. The supernatural powers, conceived now (whatever they may have been before) as spirits, are friendly if rightly propitiated, and much advance has been made in the methods of propitiation; magic and religion are still doubtless mixed up together in these, but the tendency seems to be to get gradually rid of the more inadequate and blundering methods. In fact, man's knowledge of the Divine has greatly advanced; spirits have some slight tendency to become deities, and magic is in part at least superseded by an orderly round of sacrifice and prayer, which is performed daily within the house, and within the boundary of the land at certain seasons of the year. This stage of settlement and routine was the first great revolution in the religious experience of the Romans, and supplied the basis of their national character.

The second revolution which we can clearly discern, and far the most important as a factor in Roman history, is that of the organisation of the religion of the city-state of Rome. Doubtless there were stages intermediate between the two, but they are entirely lost to us. We had to concentrate our attention on the city of the four regions--the first city we really know--and to examine the one document which has survived from it, the so-called calendar of Numa. In my fifth lecture I explained the nature of that calendar, and noted how it reflects the life of a people at once agricultural and military, and how it must presuppose the existence of a highly organised legal priesthood, or of some powerful genius for political as well as religious legislation. The tradition of a great priest-king is not wholly to be despised, for it expresses the feeling of the Romans that religious law and order were indispensable parts of their whole political and social life. During the rest of these lectures I have been trying to interrogate this religious calendar, with such help as could be gained from any other sources, on two points: (1) the conception, or, if we can venture to use the word, the knowledge, which the Romans of that early city-state had of the Divine; (2) the chief forms and methods of their worship. We saw that they did not think of the divine beings as existing in human form with human weaknesses, but as invisible and intangible functional powers, _numina_. Each had its special limited sphere of action; and some were now localised within the _pomoerium_, or just outside it within the _ager Romanus_, and worshipped under a particular name. I suggested that this very settlement had probably some influence in preparing them for assuming a more definite and personal character, should the chance be given them. In regard to the forms of cult with which they were propitiated, I found in the ritual of sacrifice and prayer a genuine advance towards a really religious attitude to the deity, the sacrifices being meant to increase his power to benefit the community, and the prayers to diminish such inclination as he might have to damage it; but that there are in these certain survivals of the age of magic, which are, however, only formal, and have lost their original significance. I found some curious examples of such survivals in the rite of _devotio_, and in vows generally a somewhat lower type of method in dealing with the supernatural. But, on the other hand, the forms of _lustratio_, at the bottom of which seems to lie the idea of getting rid of evil spirits and influences, present very beautiful examples of what we may really call religious ceremony.

There was, then, in this highly-organised religion of the city-state, in some ways at least, a great advance. But in spite of this gain, it had serious drawbacks. Most prominent among these was the fact that it was the religion of the State as a whole, and not of the individual or the family. Religion, I think we may safely say, had placed a certain consecration upon the simple life of the family, which was, in fact, the life of the individual; for the essence of religion in all stages of civilisation lies in the feeling of the individual that his own life, his bodily and mental welfare, is dependent on the Divine as he and his regard it. But to what extent can it be said that religion so consecrated the life of the State as to enable each individual in his family group to feel that consecration more vividly? That would have constituted a real advance in religious development; that was the result, if I am not mistaken, of the religion of the Jewish State, which with all the force of a powerful hierarchical authority addressed its precepts to the mind and will of the individual. But at Rome, though the earliest traces and traditions of law show a certain consecration of morality, inasmuch as the criminal is made over as a kind of propitiatory sacrifice to the deity whom he has offended, yet in the ordinary course of life, so far as I can discern, the individual was left very much where he was, before the State arose, in his relation to the Divine.

In no other ancient State that we know of did the citizen so entirely resign the regulation of all his dealings with the State's gods to the constituted authorities set over him. His obligatory part in the religious ritual of the State was simply _nil_, and all his religious duty on days of religious importance was to abstain from civil business, to make no disturbance. Within the household he used his own simple ritual, the morning prayer, the libation to the household deities at meals; and it is exactly here that we see a _pietas_, a sense of duty consecrated by religion, which seems to have had a real ethical value, and reminds us of modern piety. But in all his relations with the gods _qua_ citizen, he resigned himself to the trained and trusted priesthoods, who knew the secrets of ritual and all that was comprised in the _ius divinum_; and by passive obedience to these authorities he gradually began to deaden the sense of _religio_ that was in him. And this tendency was increased by the mere fact of life in a city, which as time went on became more and more the rule; for, as I pointed out, the round of religious festivals no longer exactly expressed the needs and the work of that agricultural life in which it had its origin.

It would be an interesting inquiry, if the material for an answer were available, to try and discover how this gradual absorption of religion (or rather religious duties) by the State and its authorities affected the morality of the individual Roman. It has often been maintained of late that religion and morality have nothing in common; and even Dr. Westermarck,[464] who, unlike most anthropologists, treats the whole subject from a psychological point of view, seems inclined to come to this conclusion. For myself, I am rather disposed to agree with another eminent anthropologist,[465] that religion and morality are really elemental instincts of human nature, primarily undistinguishable from each other; and if that be so, then the over-elaboration of either the moral or religious law, or of the two combined, will tend to weaken the binding force of both. If, as at Rome, the citizen is made perfectly comfortable in his relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, owing to the complete mastery of the _ius divinum_ by the State and its officials, there will assuredly be a tendency to paralyse the elemental religious impulse, and with it, if I am not mistaken, the elemental sense of right and wrong. For in the life of a state with such a legalised religious system as this, so long at least as it thrives and escapes serious disaster, there will be few or none of those moments of peril and anxiety in which "man is brought face to face with the eternal realities of existence,"[466] and when he becomes awakened to a new sense of religion and duty. In the life of the family, the critical moments of birth, puberty, marriage, and death regularly recur, and keep up the instinct, because man is then brought face to face with these eternal facts; there is no need of extraordinary perils, such as tempests or pestilences, to keep the instinct alive. But in the life of the State as such there were no such continually recurring reminders; even the old agricultural perils were out of sight of the ordinary citizen. Thus the farthest we can go in ascribing a moral influence to the State religion is in giving it credit for helping to maintain that sense of law and order which served to keep the life of the family sound and wholesome. That it did to some extent perform this service I have already pointed out;[467] and it is a remarkable fact that the decay of the State religion was coincident, in the last two centuries B.C., with the decay of the family life and virtues. But on the whole, as we shall see, the _ius divinum_ had rather the effect of hypnotising the religious and moral instinct than of keeping it awake. It needed new perils for the State as a whole to re-create that feeling which is the root of the growth of conscience; and when the craving did at last come upon the Roman, which in times of doubt and peril has come upon individuals and communities in all ages, for support and comfort from the Unseen, it had to be satisfied by giving him new gods to worship in new ways--aliens with whom he had nothing in common, who had no home in his patriotic feeling, no place in his religious experience.[468]

I wish to conclude this first part of my subject by giving some account of the first beginning of this introduction of new deities, _di novensiles_ as they were called,[469] into the old Roman religious world. Those, however, of whom I shall speak here were not introduced as the result of disaster or distress, but were simply the inevitable consequence of the growing importance of the city on the Tiber--of the beginnings of her commercial and political relations with her neighbours, and also of her own development in the arts of civilisation. The religious system with which I have so far been dealing was the exclusive property, we must remember, of those _gentes_, with the families composing them, which formed the original human material of the State, and were known as _patrician_. If we had no other reason for being sure of this, the fact that all State priesthoods were originally limited to patrician families would be sufficient to prove it;[470] even down to the latest times the _rex sacrorum_, the three _flamines maiores_, and the _Salii_ were necessarily of patrician birth--a fact which had much to do with their tendency to disappear in the last age of the Republic.

But in the course of the period within which the Numan calendar was drawn up, this community of patrician burghers began to suffer certain changes. A population of "outsiders," as in so many Greek cities, had gained admittance to the site of Rome, though not into its political and religious organism.[471] So solid a city, in such an important position, was sure to attract such settlers, whether from the Latins dwelling about it, or from the Etruscans on the north, or the Greek cities along the coast southwards and in Sicily. The Latins were, of course, of the same stock as the Romans, and already in some loose political relation to them; and as each Latin city was open, like Rome, to Greek and Etruscan influences, we should probably see in Latium an indirect channel of communication between those peoples and Rome, to be reckoned in addition to the direct and obvious one. As Dr. J. B. Carter has well said,[472] "the Latins, becoming rapidly inferior to Rome, were enabled to do her at least this service, that of absorbing the foreign influences which came, and in certain cases of Latinising them, and thus transmitting them to Rome in a more or less assimilated condition." As Dr. Carter has been the first to explain the arrival of these new religious influences to English readers, I shall in what follows closely follow his footsteps. They indicate and also reflect a change from agricultural economy and habits to a society interested in trade and travel: I say interested, because we cannot be quite sure how far the old Romans engaged in such pursuits themselves, as well as admitting from outside those who did, with their worships. They indicate also the growth of an industrial population, organised in gilds, as in the Middle Ages; here beyond doubt the workers were mainly of native birth. Lastly, they indicate an advance in military efficiency and, as a result of this military progress, some change in the relation of Rome to her fellow-communities of Latium.

Perhaps the first of these new deities to arrive was the famous Hercules Victor or Invictus of the _ara maxima_ in the Forum Boarium, who continued for centuries to accept the tithes of the booty of generals and the profits of successful merchants. Virgil in the eighth _Aeneid_[473] makes Evander show his guest this altar and the celebration of its festival, and tell him the tale of Cacus and the oxen and the cave on the Aventine hard by; the poet, like every one else until the last few years, believed the cult to be primeval and Roman. But one of the many gains for the history of Roman religion which have recently been secured--even since the publication of my _Roman Festivals_--is the certainty that the Italian Hercules is really the Greek Heracles acclimatised in the sister peninsula, and that the cult of the _ara maxima_, though that altar was inside the sacred boundary of the _pomoerium_, was not native in Rome.[474] It seems, however, almost certain that it did not come direct from any part of Hellas, though its position, close to the Tiber and its landing-place, might naturally lead us to think so. It is almost impossible to believe that Heracles would have been allowed inside the _pomoerium_, had he been introduced by foreigners in the strict sense of the word. No doubt much has yet to be learnt about Hercules in Italy; but recent painstaking researches have made it possible for us to acquiesce in the belief that this Hercules of the _ara_ came from a Latin city,--from that Tibur which by tradition was of Greek origin--"Tibur Argeo positum colono,"--and which, like its neighbour Praeneste, was curiously receptive of foreign influence.[475] It is believed that the Greek traders from Campania and Magna Graecia made their way northwards through Latium, and thus eventually reached Rome with the deity whom they seem to have always carried with them. He was, in the words of Dr. Carter,[476] a deity of whom, by the contagion of commerce, the Romans already felt a great need, a god of great power from whom came success in the practical undertakings of life; and it was quite natural that his shrine should be in the busy cattle-market of the city, if we remember that the wealth of the early Romans, _pecunia_ as they called it, mainly consisted in sheep and oxen. As Heracles in various forms was to be met with all over the Mediterranean coasts, it would indeed be strange if he were not found in the growing city commanding the central water-way of Italy; and his appearance there may be said to have put Rome in touch with the Mediterranean business of that day. There he was destined to remain, with all the honour of an oldest cult, though other cults of the same god came in later, and were established quite close to him; and though never a State deity of much importance, he exercised a wholesome influence in matters of trade, as the god who sanctioned your oath, and who accepted the tithe of your gain which you had vowed at the outset of an enterprise.[477]

In the same period, though the traditional date of their temple is later, came the Twin Brethren, Castor and Pollux, and found their way, like Hercules, into the city within the _pomoerium_. The famous temple of Castor (before whom his brother gradually gave way) was at the end of the Forum under the Palatine, close to the fountain of Juturna, where the Twins watered their horses after the battle of Lake Regillus; and there the beautiful remains of the latest reconstruction of it still stand.[478] This position alone should make us feel confident that the cult did not come direct from Greek sources; and it had its origin, perhaps, in the period when Rome was in close relation with Latin cities, which themselves had been gradually absorbing the cults and products of the Greeks of Campania. There is a strong probability that it came from Tusculum, with which the legend of the Regillus battle is closely connected, and where the cult had beyond doubt taken strong root.[479] Like the Hercules of the _ara maxima_, the Twins were no doubt brought by the course of trade, which was continually pushing up from the south; for they too were favourites of the merchant adventurer, and throughout Hellas were the special protectors of the seafarer. Their connection with horses is well known, and not as yet satisfactorily explained in its Roman aspect; but Dr. J. B. Carter thinks that they first became prominent in Greece when the Homeric use of chariots was abandoned for a primitive kind of cavalry, and that "the Castor-cult moved steadily northward (from Magna Graecia), carried, as it were, on horseback," and that when it reached Rome it became connected with the reorganisation of the cavalry. This seems to be almost pure guess-work, and, attractive as it is, I fear we cannot put much faith in it.[480] The position in the Forum, and the well-known connection of both twins with oaths,[481] seem to me rather to suggest a more natural origin in trade. I would suggest that the equine character of the cult in Latium was secondary, and that the connection of the temple and cult with the Roman cavalry was a natural result, but not a primary feature, of its introduction. I should be inclined to look on it as coming in with the building of the temple, which was probably of later origin than the original introduction of the cult.

Some time after the calendar was drawn up, a deity was established on the Aventine, _i.e._ not within the _pomoerium_, whose arrival marks a development in the organisation of handicraft. We cannot indeed _prove_ that the settlement of Minerva on the Aventine took place so early, but we have strong grounds for the conclusion.[482] This temple was in historical times the religious centre of trade-gilds; and these gilds were by universal Roman tradition ascribed to Numa as founder, which simply means that they were among the oldest institutions of the City-state. As Minerva does not appear in the calendar, had no _flamen_, and therefore must have been altogether outside the original patrician religious system, the natural inference is that the temple was founded, like the shrines of Hercules and the Twin Brethren, towards the end of the period we are dealing with, and was from the first the centre of the gilds. Of those mentioned by Plutarch in his life of Numa (ch. 17), we know that the following gilds belonged to Minerva: _tibicines_, _fabri_ (carpenters?), _fullones_, _sutores_; and it is a reasonable guess that the others, _coriarii_, _fabri aerarii_, and _aurifices_, were also under her protection. These trades, as Waltzing remarks in his great work on Roman gilds,[483] are all in keeping with the rudimentary civilisation of primitive Rome; they are those which were first carried on outside of the family. Workers in iron are not among them; bronze is still the common metal.

Now of course we must not go so far as to assume that none of these trades existed before the cult of Minerva came to Rome; but from her close association with them all through Roman history, and from the fact that the Romans were originally an agricultural folk, as the calendar shows, with a simple economy and simple needs, it is legitimate to connect the arrival of the goddess with the growth of town life and the demand for articles once made in rude fashion chiefly on the farms, and with a period of improvement in manufacture, and the use of better materials and better methods. Whence, then, did these improvements come? This is only another way of asking the question, Whence did Minerva come?

By the common consent of investigators she came from the semi-Latin town of Falerii in southern Etruria, where these arts were practised by Etruscans, or those who had learnt of Etruscans.[484] Her name is Italian, not Etruscan;[485] she was an old Italian deity taken over by the invading Etruscans from the peoples whose land they occupied. But while in the hands of Etruscans she had adopted Greek characteristics, especially those of Athene, the patroness of arts and crafts. She soon, indeed, appeared with some of the character of Athene Polias, as we shall see at the end of this lecture; but her real importance, far down into the period of the Empire, was in the temple on the Aventine, and in connection with the crafts. The dedication day of the temple was March 19, which was known, as we learn on the best authority, also as _artificum dies_.[486]

There was another famous temple on the Aventine which by universal consent is attributed to the same period as that of Minerva. Diana does not appear in the calendar, and had no _flamen_; Roman tradition ascribed her arrival to Servius Tullius, and we shall not be far wrong if we place it at or towards the end of the age of the kingship. The temple was celebrated as containing an ancient statue of Diana, the oldest or almost the oldest representation of a deity in human form known at Rome, which was a copy of a rude image of Artemis at Massilia, of the type of the famous [Greek: xoanon] of the Ephesian Artemis.[487] It also contained a _lex templi_ in Greek characters, and a treaty or charter of a federation of Latin cities with Rome as their head, which was seen by Dionysius of Halicarnassus when in Rome in the time of Augustus.[488]

The explanation of the arrival of Diana is simple. The _dies natalis_ of the temple is the same as that of the famous shrine of the same goddess at Aricia--the Ides of August.[489] Aricia was at this time the centre of a league of cities including Tusculum and Tibur, with both of which, as we have just seen, Rome was closely connected at this time; a league which is generally supposed to have superseded that of Alba, marking some revolution in Latium consequent on the fall of Alba.[490] Diana was a wood-spirit, a tree-spirit, as Dr. Frazer has taught us, with some relation to the moon and to the life of women; of late she has become familiar to every one, not as she was known later, in the disguise of Artemis, but as the deity of that shrine--"pinguis et placabilis ara Dianae"--of which the priest was the Rex Nemorensis: he who "slew the slayer and shall himself be slain."[491] But in those days it was only the fact that she was the chief local deity of Aricia, the leading city of the new league, which brought her suddenly into notice. When the strategic position of Rome gave her in turn the lead in Latium, Diana passed on from Aricia to the Tiber, entered on a new life, and eventually took over the attributes of Artemis, with whom she had much in common. The Diana whom we know in Roman literature is really Artemis; but Diana of the Aventine, when she first arrived there, was the wood-spirit of Aricia, and her temple was an outward sign of Rome's new position in Latium: it was built by the chiefs of the Latin cities in conjunction with Rome, and is described by Varro as "commune Latinorum Dianae templum."[492] It was appropriately placed on the only Roman hill which was then still covered with wood, and was outside the _pomoerium_.

There was one other goddess, a Latin one, who was traditionally associated with this period, and especially with king Servius Tullius--Fortuna, or Fors Fortuna; she does not appear in the calendar, had no _flamen_, and must have been introduced from outside. But it was long before Fortuna became of any real importance in Rome, and I shall leave her out of account here. She had two homes of renown in Latium, at Antium and Praeneste, and was in each connected with a kind of oracle, which seems to have been specially resorted to by women before and after childbirth. She was also very probably a deity of other kinds of fertility; and in course of time she took on the characteristics of the Greek Tyche, and became a favourite deity of good luck.[493]

Let us pause for one moment to reflect on the character of these new deities of whom I have been speaking: Hercules, Castor, Minerva, Diana. It must be confessed that, as compared with the great deities of the calendar, they are uninteresting; with the exception, perhaps, of Hercules, they do not seem to have any real _religious_ significance. They are local deities brought in from outside, and have no root in the mind of the Roman people as we have so far been studying it. They seem to indicate the growth of a population in which the true old Roman religious instinct was absent; they represent commerce, business, handicraft, or politics, pursuits in which the old Roman and Latin farmers were not directly interested; they were suffered to be in Rome because the new population and the new interests must of necessity have their own worships, but they were not taken into the heart and mind of the people. So at least it seems to us, after we have been examining the development of the native religious plant from its root upwards. But we must remember that of that new population, its life and its needs, we know hardly anything, and it would not be safe to assume that the conception of Minerva had no influence on the conscience of the artisan, or that of Hercules no power of binding the trader to honest dealing and respect for his oath. As for Diana, though, as Dr. Carter says, she had been introduced "as part of a diplomatic game, not because Rome felt any religious need of her," the fact that the Latin treaty was kept in her temple has a certain moral as well as political significance which ought not to be overlooked. It is impossible to put ourselves mentally in the position of the men who brought these cults to Rome, or of the Romans who granted them admittance; but we shall be on the safe side if we imagine the former at least to have had a conviction that their dealings at Rome would not prosper unless they were carried out with the blessing of their own gods.

But we now come, in the last place, to the foundation of a cult of a very different kind from these, and of far greater import than any of them in the history of Roman religious experience. We have seen that the temple of Diana on the Aventine meant the transference of the headship of the Latin league from Aricia to Rome. When Rome took over this headship, and by removing its religious centre to Rome--or, perhaps more accurately, by offering Diana of Aricia a new home by the Tiber--removed also any danger of a new power growing up in Latium outside her own influence, she seems to have taken another important step in the same direction. Archæological evidence confirms the tradition that at this time the temple of Jupiter Latiaris, the real and original god of the league, on the Alban hill, was rebuilt;[494] and as the remains of its foundation are of Etruscan workmanship, we may believe that the work was undertaken at that period of an Etruscan dominion in Rome which no one now seriously doubts, and which is marked by the Etruscan name Tarquinius, and by the old tradition that Servius Tullius was really an Etruscan bearing the Etruscan name Mastarna.[495] Now those in power at Rome at this time, whoever they were, not content with rebuilding the ancient temple of Jupiter on the Alban hill, conceived the idea of also building a great temple at Rome, on the steep rock overlooking the Forum, to the same deity of the heaven who had long presided over the Latin league. The tradition was that this temple was vowed by the first Tarquinius, begun by the second, and finally dedicated by the first consul Horatius in the year 509.[496] It is quite possible that this tradition indicates the truth in outline--that it was an Etruscan who conceived the idea of the great work, and that the foreign domination gave way to a Roman reaction before the temple was ready for dedication. We cannot know what exactly was the Etruscan intention as to the cult; but we know that the temple was built in the Etruscan style, that its foundations were of Etruscan masonry,[497] and that the deities inhabiting it were three--a _trias_--a feature quite foreign to the native Roman religion.[498] Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva had each a separate dwelling (_cella_) within the walls of the temple, which, in order to meet this innovation, was almost as broad as it was long. Whether this trias was the one originally intended by the Etruscan king or kings it is impossible to say; but I have great doubts of it. I confess that I have no ground but probability to go on when I conjecture that a long period elapsed between the beginning of this great undertaking and the final completion, and that in the meantime many things had happened of which we have no record; that when the temple was finished it was in Roman hands, though retaining its Etruscan characteristics, and especially the combination of three deities; and that those three deities were essentially Roman in conception. Roman, too, was the idea that one of the three should be paramount; the two goddesses never attained to any special significance, and the temple always remained essentially the dwelling of the great Jupiter, the Father of heaven.[499]

The cult-titles of this Jupiter, Optimus Maximus, the best and greatest, seem to raise him to a position not only far above his colleagues in the temple, but above all other Jupiters in Latium or elsewhere, and presumably above all other deities. They thus suggest a deliberate attempt to place him in a higher position than even the Jupiter Latiaris of the Mons Albanus, whose temple had been rebuilt in the same period. The very novelty of such cult-titles betrays both power and genius in their originator; they are wholly unlike any we have met with so far; they do not suggest a function or a locality or a connection with some other deity; they stand absolutely alone in the history of the Roman religion till far on in the Empire.[500] Here is no _numen_ needed at a particular season to bless some agricultural operation; Jupiter Optimus Maximus seems hardly to be limited by space or season, and is to be always there looking down on his people from his seat on the hill which was henceforward to be called Capitolinus, because the space which had been prepared there for his reception bore the name of Capitolium, the place of headship.[501] These titles, Best and Greatest, call for reflection, for more thought than we are apt to give them; one wonders whether they can be as old as tradition claimed, and in fact at least one recent writer has been tempted, without sufficient reason, to date the whole foundation two centuries later than the Tarquinii.[502] To me they rather suggest the hypothesis that the break-up of the Etruscan domination in Rome was the work of a man or men inspired by a new national feeling which ascribed the revolution to the great god of the race, to whose shrine on the same hill the kings had been used to bring the spoils of their enemies[503]; and that they took advantage of the uncompleted Etruscan temple, with its huge foundations and underground _favissae_, to settle there a new Jupiter, better and greater than any other, to whom his people would be for ever grateful, and in whom they would for ever put their trust. All older associations with cults of the Heaven-god were to be banished from the Capitolium, just as all other deities were believed to have fled from the spot, save only Terminus; the ancient priest of Jupiter, the Flamen Dialis, had no special connection with this temple and its cult, which were under the immediate charge of an _aedituus_ only.[504] Here was the centre of the public worship of the State as a whole, not only of the old patrician State; and no such ancient curiosity as the Flamen Dialis, who, as I have suggested, was a survival from some older era of Latin religious history, was to be supreme there. Here the Consul of the free Republic was to offer, on entering office, the victim--the white heifer of the Alban cult--which his predecessor had vowed, and himself to bind his successor to a like sacrifice; and this he did on behalf of patrician and plebeian alike. Here the victorious general was to deposit his spoils, reaching the temple in the solemn procession of the _triumphus_, and wearing the _ornamenta_ of the deity himself; for here, contrary to all precedent in the worship of Romans, there was an image of the god wrought in terra cotta and brought from Etruria.[505] It is in connection with such solemn events as these that we may find the origin of those imposing processions which for centuries were to impress the minds of the Roman people, and indeed of their enemies also, with the might and magnificence of their Empire; for apart from the triumphal processions with which we are all familiar, the scene at the entrance of new consuls on their office must have been most impressive. They were accompanied by the other magistrates, the Senate, the priests in their robes of office, and by an immense crowd of citizens. After the ceremony the Senate met _in the temple_ to transact the first religious business of the year. Here too the tribal assembly met for the purpose of enrolling the new levies before each season of war, in order that the youths who were to fight the battles of Rome might realise the presence of Rome's great protecting deity. Even in the most degenerate days of the Roman religion, though Jupiter had suffered from the ridicule of playwrights or the speculations of philosophers, an orator's appeal to the Best and Greatest looking down on the Forum from his seat above it, could not fail to move the hearers; "Ille, ille Iuppiter restitit," cried Cicero in the peril of the Catilinarian conspiracy, "ille Capitolium, ille haec templa, ille cunctam urbem, ille vos omnes salvos esse voluit."[506]

Nor was it only the State as represented by its officials that could and did address itself to the worship of this great god. It seems probable that the new idea of a single guardian deity, with his two attendant goddesses, for which the Romans were indebted to the genius (whoever he may have been) who released them from the yoke of the Etruscan, opened the cult to the individual in a way which must have been a novelty in the religious life of the people.[507] The most memorable example of this is in the famous story told of Scipio, the conqueror of Hannibal, which is not likely to be an invention of the annalists. As Gellius records it, it stands thus: Scipio was wont to ascend to the temple just before daylight, to order the _cella Iovis_ to be opened for him, and there to remain alone for a long time, as if taking counsel with the god about the affairs of the State. The dogs, it was said, which guarded the entrance, astonished the temple-keepers by treating him always with respect, while they would attack or bark at others.[508]

The reader may remark, that during the last few minutes I have wandered quite away from the Roman religion which we have so far been trying to understand, and he will be right. I have but just touched on this great cult, which properly belongs to Rome of the Republic, in order to show how great a change must have taken place, how great a revolution must have been consummated, when this temple arose on its Etruscan substructures. We have marked two forward steps in the social and political experience of the Romans: the settlement of the family on the land and the organisation of the City-state with its calendar. Here is a third, the liberation of that State from a foreign dominion, and the development, in matters both internal and external, which subjection and liberation alike brought with them. In regard to religious experience, the first produced the ordered worship of the household, which had a lasting effect on the Roman character; the second produced the _ius divinum_, the priesthoods and the ritual for the service of the various _numina_ which had consented to take up their abode in the city and its precincts. These two taken together changed doubt and anxiety into confidence, stilled the _religio_ natural to uncivilised man, and developed the machinery of magic into forms and ceremonies which were more truly religious. Now we note a third great social step forward, which brings with it a new conception and expression of the religious unity of the State; henceforward, alongside of a multiplicity of cults and of priests attached to them, we have one central worship to which all free citizens may resort, and a trinity of guardian deities, of whom one, Jupiter Best and Greatest, is the one presiding genius of the whole State.

Lastly, there can hardly be a doubt that this new cult marks a more extensive communication with neighbouring peoples than the State had as yet experienced or encouraged. Etruria, Latium, and Greece, all seem to have had a hand in it. Of its relation to the Latins and Etruscans I have already spoken. It only remains for me to note the fact that it was here, in this Capitoline temple, according to unanimous tradition, that those legendary "Sibylline books" were deposited which came from a Greek source, and according to the story, from Cumae.[509] These mysterious books were destined to change the whole character of the religion of the Romans during the next two centuries; and this is why the dedication of the great temple is a convenient halting-place on our journey. I propose to begin the second part of my subject by examining the nature of this change, and then to pass on to others, until we have reached the end of the religious experience of the genuine Roman people.

NOTES TO LECTURE X.

[464] _Origin and Development of Moral Ideas_, chapters l.-lii.: "Gods as guardians of morality."

[465] Crawley, _The Tree of Life_, in a remarkable chapter on the function of religion (ch. ix.), especially p. 287 foll. "Morality," says Mr. Crawley, "is one of the results of the religious impulse." What he means here by morality is not "that elaborated by abstract thinkers," but the "morality of elemental human nature." "Elemental morality" may be a somewhat obscure term; but I think it is highly probable that Mr. Crawley is, in part at least, right in ascribing the origin of morality to the religious impulse.

[466] Crawley, _op. cit._, p. 265.

[467] Above, pp. 107-8.

[468] See the author's article in _Hibbert Journal_ for July 1907, p. 894.

[469] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 15 foll.

[470] _Ib._ p. 421: Aust, _Religion der Römer_, p. 47.

[471] I am, of course, well aware that quite recently attempts have been made to explain the _plebs_ as the original inhabitants of Latium, and the Romans as conquering invaders; _e.g._ by Prof. Ridgeway in his paper, "Who were the Romans," read to the British Academy, and by Binder in his recently published volume _Die Plebs_. The theory is a natural one, and not out of harmony with the facts as known; but it has yet to be further developed and tested, and as those who hold it are not as yet in agreement with each other, and as the evidence which alone can prove it is of a very special character, archaeological and linguistic, I have expressed myself in terms of the older view.

[472] _The Religion of Numa_, p. 30.

[473] _Aen._ viii. 184 foll.; the description of the festival is in 280 foll.; where the interesting points are the priests of the gentes appointed to look after the cult (the Potitii only are here mentioned) "pellibus in morem cincti," and the Salii "populeis evincti tempora ramis."

[474] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 219 foll.; Carter, _Religion of Numa_, p. 31 foll. The ground had been prepared for the new view by the elaborate articles in Roscher's _Mythological Lexicon_, vol. ii. pp. 2253 foll. and 2901 foll. Of late a painstaking discussion by J. G. Winter has appeared in the _University of Michigan Studies for 1910_, p. 171 foll.; he mainly confirms Wissowa's conclusions, but provisionally accepts a suggestion of mine (_R.F._ 197) that the tithe practice of the _ara maxima_ may possibly have been of Phoenician origin, and points out that E. Curtius made the same suggestion as long ago as 1845. On p. 269 he also dwells, very properly, I think, on the part which the Etruscans may have had in the dissemination of the myth and cult of the Greek Heracles. Wissowa, however, stoutly maintains that these are simply Greek and of commercial origin. It has been Wissowa's special and valuable function to elucidate the Greek origin of many Roman cults and legends; but I doubt if he has adequately considered the influence of other peoples, and in particular of Phoenicians and Etruscans. Certainly the Hercules question is not finally settled by his masterly analysis of it in _R.K._ p. 220 foll. But most of what I said in _R.F._ about the Hercules of the _ara maxima_ may now be considered obsolete; and I may add that my remarks on the supposed connection of Hercules with Genius, Dius Fidius, and Jupiter in the same work, p. 143 foll., have lost much strength since Wissowa's book appeared. Yet I am not prepared to accept the view which would deny to Hercules on Italian soil all contamination with Italian ideas; as Willamowitz-Moellendorf puts it (_Herakles_, ed. 2, vol. i. p. 25), "Die Italiker haben dem Körper, den sie übernahmen, den Odem ihrer eigenen Seele eingeblasen: aber wie der Name ist der Gestalt des Hercules hellenischer Import." There are points in connection with the Roman Hercules, _e.g._ the _nodus herculaneus_ of the bride's girdle, which Wissowa does not explain, and which, so far as I can see, can only be explained by assuming that, as might have been expected, the Greek Hercules became to some extent entangled in the web of Italian thought.

[475] The cult was Greek in detail; _Graeco ritu_, according to Varro as quoted by Macrobius iii. 6. 17; see also references in Wissowa, _R.K._ 222, note 2. Following R. Peter in the articles in Roscher, I assumed, in _R.F._ p. 194, that this might be a later reconstruction of an originally Italian cult; but for the present it is safer to look on the _Graecus ritus_ as primitive, and on the presence of Salii, a genuine Italian institution, as brought from Tibur by the gens Pinaria, of which there is a trace in that city (_C.I.L._ xiv. 3541). There also Salii were engaged in the cult of Hercules Victor, to whom tithes were also offered (_C.I.L._ xiv. 3541). The evidence for the theory that the cult came to Rome from Tibur is summarised by Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 220.

[476] _Op. cit._, p. 37.

[477] For the connection of the cult with trade, Wissowa, _R.K._ 225; and the story told in Macrobius iii. 6. 11, from Masurius Sabinus, of a _tibicen_ who became a merchant and had an interview with the god in a dream. For the connection with _oaths_, _R.F._ p. 138. I may say before leaving Hercules that though I accept the latest hypotheses provisionally, I am far from believing that the last word has been said on the subject.

[478] See, _e.g._, Lanciani, _Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome_, p. 271 foll. The date of the temple is 482 B.C., but it was vowed in 496 after the Regillus battle. The three columns still standing date from 7 B.C.

[479] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 217, who points out that the Dioscuri never appear in _lectisternia_ at Rome, as they do at Tusculum, which shows that the latter cult was more directly Greek than that at Rome, and that the Roman authorities admitted it as a Latin cult without the Greek details.

[480] Carter, _op. cit._ p. 38. There seemed to be difficulties in the way of his conclusion; the Dioscuri were very strong in the Peloponnese, yet the Spartans neglected the use of cavalry. At any rate the theory needs careful historical testing. See article "Dioscuri" in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._ It would seem natural that when once the cult had been introduced by traders it might become specially attached to the cavalry, owing to the ancient connection of the Twins with horses.

[481] Ecastor and Edepol, which were oaths used especially by women, who were not allowed to swear by Hercules, Gell. xi. 6.

[482] The reasoning will be found in full in Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 203 foll., and in his article "Minerva" in the _Mythological Lexicon_. See also Carter, _Religion of Numa_, p. 45 foll. For the position of this temple and that of Diana on the Aventine, a suburb which cannot be proved to have been then within any city wall, see Carter in _Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society for 1909_, p. 136 foll.

[483] Waltzing, _Étude historique sur les corporations romaines_, vol. i. pp. 63 and 199. The relation between town life and trades is stated with his usual insight by von Jhering, _Evolution of the Aryan_, p. 93 foll.

[484] See Müller-Deecke, _Etrusker_, ii. 47; Deecke, _Falisker_, p. 89 foll.

[485] Minerva or Menrva is assuredly not Etruscan, though frequently found on Etruscan monuments; see Deecke, _l.c._ p. 89 foll.

[486] Fasti Praenestini in _C.I.L._ i.^2 March 19. "Artificum dies (quod Minervae) aedis in Aventino eo die est (dedicata)." This is one of those additional notes in the Fast. Praen., which are believed to have been the work of Verrius Flaccus: see _Roman Festivals_, p. 12.

[487] Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 288. We know the fact from Strabo's account of Massilia, Bk. iv. p. 180.

[488] Dion. Hal. iv. 26. See _R.F._ p. 198.

[489] Statius, _Silvae_ iii. 1. 60. See Wissowa's article "Diana" in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._

[490] Wissowa, _l.c._ p. 332.

[491] _Golden Bough_, i. p. 1 foll.; _Early History of the Kingship_, Lecture I.

[492] Varro, _L.L._ 5. 43; Carter, _op. cit._ p. 55.

[493] See on Fortuna the exhaustive article by R. Peter in the _Mythological Lexicon_; Wissowa, _R.K._ 206 foll.; _R.F._ p. 161 foll., and 223 foll.; Carter, _op. cit._ p. 50 foll. Dr. Carter seems to me to be too certain of the absence of any idea of luck or chance in the original conception of Fortuna: the word _fors_, so far as we know, never had any other meaning, and the deity Fors must be a personification of an abstraction, like Ops, Fides, and Salus. See Axtell, _Deification of abstract idea in Roman literature_, p. 9, with whom I agree in rejecting the notion of Marquardt and Wissowa that she was a deity of horticulture. He rightly points out that she is not included in the list of agricultural deities in Varro, _R.R._ i. 1. 6.

[494] See Aust in his article "Jupiter" in the _Myth. Lex._ p. 689, where the evidence for the contemporaneous origin of the temple on the Alban hill and that on the Capitol is fully stated. In this case excavations have confirmed the Roman tradition, which ascribed the former temple to one or other of the Tarquinii. Jordan, _Röm. Top._ i. pt. 2. p. 9.

[495] See the speech of Claudius the emperor, _C.I.L._ xiii. 1668, printed in Furneaux' _Tacitus' Annals_, vol. ii. Gardthausen, _Mastarna_, p. 40; Müller-Deecke, _Etrusker_, i. 111. For the Etruscan name Mastarna, see Dennis, _Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_^3, ii. 506 foll.: Gardthausen gives a cut of the painting found in a tomb at Vulci in which he appears with the name attached. Even the ultra-sceptical Pais does not doubt the fact of an Etruscan domination in Rome; but he does not believe the Tarquinii and Mastarna to have been historical personages, and will not date the temples attributed to this age earlier than the fourth century B.C. See his _Ancient Legends of Roman History_, ch. vii.; _Storia di Roma_, i. 310 foll. But the names of these kings do not concern us, except so far as they connect Etruria with Roman history in the sixth century.

[496] Cic. _Rep._ ii. 24. 44; Livy i. 38. and 55; Dionys. iii. 69; iv. 59. 61. The whole evidence will be found collected in Jordan, _Topogr._ i. pt. ii. p. 9 foll., and in Aust, _Myth. Lex._, _s.v._ Jupiter, p. 706 foll. If the date 509 were seriously impugned Roman chronology would be in confusion, for this is believed to be the earliest date on which we can rely, and on it the subsequent chronology hangs: Mommsen, _Röm. Chronologie_, ed. 2, p. 198.

[497] Aust, p. 707 foll.; Jordan, _op. cit._, p. 9.

[498] _i.e._ the admission of more than one deity into a single building. The word "trias" is sometimes used of the three old Roman deities, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus (_e.g._ by Wissowa, _Myth. Lex._ _s.v._ Quirinus), but this is in a different sense. On the idea of a trias generally, see Kuhfeldt, _de Capitoliis imperii Romani_, p. 82 foll.; Cumont, _Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain_, p. 290, note 51.

[499] The technical name of the temple was aedes Iovis Opt. Max.: for other indications of Jupiter's supremacy see Aust, p. 720.

[500] On Oriental developments of Jupiter Opt. Max. see an interesting paper by Cumont in _Archiv_ for 1906, p. 323 foll. (_Iuppiter summus exsuperantissimus_). A relief in the Berlin Museum has a dedication _I.O.M. summo exsuperantissimo_; but Prof. Cumont believes the deity to have been really Oriental, introduced by Greek philosophical theologians in the last century B.C., but probably Chaldaean in origin.

[501] Jordan, _op. cit._ p. 7 and note. It is uncertain whether the whole hill had any earlier name. The Mons Saturnius of Varro, _L.L._ v. 42, with the legend of an oppidum _Saturnia_, and the Mons Tarpeius (_Rhet. ad Herenn._, iv. 32. 43; Pais, _Ancient Legends_, chs. v. and vi.) need not be taken into account.

[502] Pais, _Ancient Legends of Roman History_, ch. v.

[503] See above, p. 130.

[504] This is an inference from the fact that this Flamen is nowhere mentioned as connected with the Capitoline cult. Macrob. i. 15, 16, speaks of the ovis Idulis as sacrificed on every ides _a flamine_, and this, it is true, took place on the Capitolium (Aust, in _Lex._ _s.v._ Jupiter, 655), but (1) Festus, 290, mentions sacerdotes, Ovid, _Fasti_ i. 588, castus sacerdos only; and (2) this sacrifice may well, as O. Gilbert conjectured, have originally taken place in the Regia (_Gesch. und Topogr. Roms_, i. 236). In any case the Flamen was not in any special sense priest of Iup. Opt. Max.

[505] The _locus classicus_ for this is Pliny, _N.H._ xxxv. 157. The artist was said to have been one Volcas of Veii. Ovid, _Fasti_ i. 201, says that the god had in his hand a _fictile fulmen_. Varro believed this to be the oldest statue of a god in Rome; see above, p. 146, and Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 280, accepts his statement as probably correct.

[506] Cic. _Catil._ iii. 9. 21.

[507] Jordan, _Topogr._ i. 2. pp. 39 and 62, notes. The most convincing passages quoted by him are Suet. _Aug._ 59, and Serv. _Ecl._ iv. 50 (of boys taking toga virilis who "ad Capitolium eunt"); but was not this to sacrifice to Liber or Iuventas? _R.F._ p. 56.

[508] Gellius vi. 1. 6, from C. Oppius et Iulius Hyginus. In his famous character of Scipio (xxvi. 19) Livy seems to think that Scipio did this to make people think him superhuman or of divine descent.

[509] Ovid, _Fasti_, iv. 158. 257; Virg. _Ecl._ iv. 4, _Aen._ vi. 42; Marquardt, 352, note 7, for evidence that the books came to Cumae from Erythrae. See also Diels, _Sibyllinische Blätter_, p. 80 foll.

LECTURE XI*

CONTACT OF THE OLD AND NEW IN RELIGION

I said at the beginning of my first lecture that Roman religious experience can be summed up in two stories. The first of these was the story of the way in which a strong primitive religious instinct, the desire to put yourself in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, _religio_ as the Romans called it, was gradually soothed and satisfied under the formalising influence of the settled life of the agricultural family, and still more so under the organising genius of the early religious rulers of the City-state. This story I tried to tell in the last few lectures. The second story was to be that of the gradual discovery of the inadequacy of this early formalised and organised religion to cope with what we may call new religious experience; that is, with the difficulties and perils met with by the Roman people in their extraordinary advance in the world, and with the new ideas of religion and morals which broke in on them in the course of their contact with other peoples. This story I wish to tell in the present course of lectures. It is a long and complicated one, including the introduction of new rites and ideas of the divine, the anxious attempts of the religious authorities to put off the evil day by stretching to the uttermost the capacity of the old forms, and the final victory of the new ideas as Roman life and thought became gradually hellenised.

[*] This Lecture was the first of a second and separate course.

I propose to divide the story thus. In the latter part of this first lecture I will deal with the first introduction of Greek rites into the State worship under the directions of the so-called Sibylline books. Then I will turn to the efforts of the lay priesthoods, pontifices and augurs, to meet the calls of new experience by formalising the old religion still more completely in the name of the State, until it became a mere skeleton of dry bones, without life and power. That will bring us to the great turning-point in Roman history, the war with Hannibal, to the religious history of which I shall devote my fourth lecture; and the fifth will pursue the subject into the century that followed. In the next lecture I hope to sketch the influence on Roman religious ideas of the Stoic school of philosophy, and in the seventh to discuss, so far as I may be able, the tendency towards mysticism prevalent in the last period of the life of the Republic. My eighth lecture I intend to devote to the noble attempt of Virgil to combine religion, legend, philosophy, and consummate art in a splendid appeal to the conscience of the Roman of that day. Then I turn to the more practical attempt of Augustus to revive the dying embers of the old religion; and in my last lecture I shall try to estimate the contribution, such as it was, of the religious experience we have been discussing, to the early Christian church.

We shall shortly hear so much of petrifaction and disintegration, that it may be as well, before I actually begin my story, to convince ourselves that the old religion was in its peculiar way a real expression of religious feeling, and not merely a set of meaningless conventions and formulae. It was the positive belief of the later Romans that both they and their ancestors were _religiosissimi mortales_,[510] full to the brim, that is, of religious instinct, and most scrupulous in fulfilling its claims upon them; for the word _religio_ had come, by the time (and probably long before the time) when it was used by men of letters, to mean the fulfilment of ritualistic obligation quite as much as the anxious feeling which had originally suggested it.[511] Cicero, writing in no rhetorical mood, declared that, as compared with other peoples, the Romans were far superior "in religione, id est cultu."[512] This is in his work on the nature of the gods; in an oration he naturally puts it more strongly: "We have overcome all the nations of the world, because we have realised that the world is directed and governed by the will of the gods."[513] Sallust, Livy, and other Roman prose writers have said much the same thing[514]; the _Aeneid_ as a whole might be adduced as evidence, and in a less degree all the poets of the Augustan age. Foreigners, too, were struck with the strange phenomenon, in an age of philosophic doubt. Polybius in the second century B.C. declared his opinion that what was reckoned among other peoples as a thing to be blamed, _deisidaimonia_, both in public and private life, was really what was holding together the Roman state.[515] Even in the wild century that followed, Posidonius could repeat the assertion of Polybius, and in the age of Augustus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, then resident at Rome, looking back on the early history of Rome, stated his conviction that one needed to know the _pietas_ of the Romans in order to understand their wonderful career of conquest.[516] Aulus Gellius, in a curious passage in which he notes that the Romans had no deity to whose activity they could with certainty ascribe earthquakes, describes them as "in constituendis religionibus atque in dis immortalibus animadvertendis _castissimi cautissimique_,"--a rhetorical but happy conjunction of epithets. He means that they would order religious rites, though ignorant of the _numen_ to whom they were due.[517]

It might be argued that these later writers knew really little or nothing about the primitive Romans, and that these passages only prove that this people had an extraordinary scrupulosity about forms and ceremonies in this as in other departments of action. But the argument will not hold; the survival of all this formalism into an age of disintegration really proves beyond a doubt that there must have been a time when these forms really expressed anxieties, fears, convictions, the earliest germs of _conscience_.

May we not take the constant occurrence in literature of such phrases as _dis faventibus_, _dis iuvantibus_ or _volentibus_, as evidence of an idea deeply rooted at one time in the Roman mind, that nothing should be undertaken until the will of the deities concerned had been ascertained and that early form of conscience satisfied? Let us remember that the whole story of the _Aeneid_ is one of the bending of the will of the hero, as a type of the ideal Roman, to the ascertainable will of the powers in the universe.

And we have abundant evidence that as a matter of fact the good-will of the divine inhabitants of house and city was asked for whenever any kind of work was undertaken,--even the ordinary routine work of the farm or of government. In the household every morning some offering with prayer was made to the Lar familiaris in historical times, and again before the _cena_, the chief meal of the day.[518] On Kalends, Nones, Ides, and on all _dies festi_ a _corona_ was placed on the hearth, and prayer was made to the Lar; we know that this was so in the old Roman home, because in the second century B.C. Cato instructs the _vilicus_ to discharge these duties on behalf of the absent or non-resident owner.[519] Before the flocks were taken out to summer pasture, and doubtless when they returned, some religious service (so we should call it) was held,[520] just as in the Catholic cantons of Switzerland the blessing of God is asked when the cows first ascend to the alpine pastures, and again when they leave them for the valleys. Before a journey the later Romans prayed for good fortune;[521] in the old times travelling was of course unusual, and when it did occur the traveller was surrounded by so many spiritual as well as material dangers that _special_ religious measures must have been taken, as by fetials or armies on entering foreign territory. The survival of the same kind of belief and practice is also seen in private life in the religious commendations of some authors at the outset of their literary work; Varro, for example, at the beginning of his work on agriculture, calls on all the agrarian deities (_iis deis ad venerationem advocatis_) before he goes on to mention even the bibliography of his subject.[522] Livy in the last sentence of his preface would fain imitate the poets in calling on the gods to bless and favour his undertaking. And in all time of their tribulation, even if not in all time of their wealth, the pious Romans sought help from the deities from whom help might be expected; if, at least, the many instances occurring in Roman poetry may point to a practice of the ordinary individual and family.[523] So too, if we may judge by many passages in the plays of Plautus and Terence,[524]--if here we have genuine Roman usage, as is probable,--the feeling of dependence on a Power manifesting itself in the affairs of daily life is shown also in the expression of _thankfulness_ which followed success or escape from peril. Gratitude was not a prominent characteristic of the Roman, but I have already remarked on the presence of it in the practice of the _votum_, and there is at least some evidence that it was recognised as due to benignant deities as well as human beings.[525]

In public life, throughout Roman history, the forms of religious rites were maintained on all important occasions. When Varro wrote a little manual of Senatorial procedure for the benefit of the inexperienced Pompeius when consul in 70 B.C., he was careful to mention the preliminary sacrifice and _auspicatio_, performed by the presiding magistrate, who also had to see that the business _de rebus divinis_ came first on the paper of agenda.[526] At one time every speaker invoked the gods at the beginning of his oration, as well indeed he might in a situation so unusual and trying for a Roman before the days of Greek education; and the earliest speeches preserved in the literary age, _e.g._ those of Cato and the Gracchi, retained the religious exordium.[527] We have a trace of the Gracchan practice in a famous passage at the end of the work called _Rhetorica ad Herennium_ of _circ._ 82 B.C., where the death of Ti. Gracchus is graphically described.[528] But there is no need to multiply examples of public religious formalism on occasions of all kinds, on entering on an office, founding a colony, leaving Rome for a provincia, and so on; some of them I have already mentioned, others are familiar to all classical students.

So let us not hesitate for a moment to give this people credit for their religiousness. True, their neighbours, Greeks like Polybius, approved of it only with an ironical smile on their lips, as we may smile at the devoted formalism of extreme Catholic or Protestant, while we secretly--if we have some sympathy with strangely varying human nature--admire the confidence and regularity that we cannot ourselves claim. At the moment where I have thus paused before beginning my second story, at the end, that is, of the regal period, I believe that this religious system, though perhaps beginning to harden, still meant a profound belief in the Power thus manifested in many forms, and an ardent and effective desire to be in right relation to it. I believe that it contained the germ of a living and fruitful growth; but that growth was at this very moment arrested by the beginning of a process of which I shall have much to say in the next two or three lectures.

But it is hard to realise this better side of the religion of a hard and practical people, and all the more so since it is the worse side that is almost always presented to us in modern books. It is hard to realise that it was not merely a system of insurance, so to speak, against all kinds of material evils,--and here again all the more so because there is a tendency just now to reduce both religion and law to an origin in magic, leaving the religious instinct, the _feeling of dependence_, the progenitor of conscience, quite out of account. One must indeed be thoroughly familiar with Roman literature and antiquities to overcome these difficulties, to discover the spiritual residuum in the Roman character beneath all its hardness and utilitarianism. Before we pass on to the task before us, let me make two suggestions for the help of those who would endeavour to find this spiritual residuum. The first is that they should consider the history and true meaning of three great words which Latin language has bequeathed to modern speech,--_religio_, the feeling of awe, taking practical shape in the performance of authorised ceremonies; _sacrum_, that which by authoritative usage is made over without reserve to the divine inhabitants of the city; and last but not least, _pietas_, the sense of duty to god and man alike, to all divine and human beings having an authorised claim upon you. And this word _pietas_ shall introduce my second suggestion--that there is no better way of getting to understand the spirit of the Roman religion than by continual study of the _Aeneid_, where the hero is the ideal Roman, _pius_ in the best and widest sense. What makes the _Aeneid_ so helpful in this way is the poet's intimate and sympathetic knowledge of the religious ideas of the Italians, in which we may see reflected those of the Roman of the age we are now dealing with: his love too of antiquity and of all ancient rites and legends; and his conviction that the great work of Rome in the world had been achieved not only by _virtus_ but by _pietas_. What has been won by _virtus_ must be preserved by _pietas_, by the sense of duty in family and State,--that is the moral of the _Aeneid_. In no other work of Roman genius is this idea found in anything like the same degree of prominence and consistency; and when a student has steeped his mind well in the details of the Roman worship, and begins to weary of what must seem its soulless Pharisaism, let him take up the _Aeneid_ and read it right through for the story and the characters. I will venture to say that he will think better both of the Romans and their poet than he ever did before. But of the _Aeneid_ I shall have more to say later on; at present let us turn to the less inspiring topics which must occupy us for the next few lectures.

The last fact of Roman religious history which I mentioned last year was the building of the great Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and I then explained why this constituted a religious revolution. The next temple of which tradition tells us was destined for another trias, Ceres, Liber, and Libera; the traditional date was 493 B.C., the cause a famine, and the site was at the foot of the Aventine, the plebeian quarter outside the pomoerium, close to the river where corn-ships might be moored.[529] Ceres, Liber, and Libera are plainly neither more nor less than the three Greek corn deities, Demeter, Dionysus, and Persephone, in a Latin form,[530] whose worship was prominent in South Italy and Sicily; and unless we throw tradition overboard entirely, as indeed has often been done, the inference is obvious that this trias came from the Greeks of the south with an importation of corn to relieve a famine which pressed especially on the plebs. It is a fact that the temple and its cult remained always closely connected with the plebs; they were under the charge of the plebeian aediles, who also in historical times had the care of the corn-supply necessary for the city population.[531] Thus, though we need not accept in full Livy's statement that the very next year corn was imported from Etruria, Cumae, and Sicily, it cannot be denied that there is a strong consensus in the various traditions about the temple, which taken together suggest a Greek, non-patrician, and early origin. That the cult had at all times a Greek character is undisputed fact.

But I am not so much concerned with the temple itself as with the date and the manner of its foundation. It was said to have been founded in the year 496, and dedicated in 493, in obedience to directions found in "the Sibylline books," which books, according to the well-known tradition, had been acquired by the last Tarquin, after some haggling, from an old woman, and placed in the charge of _duoviri sacris faciundis_. The story itself is worthless in detail; but the question for us is whether it can be taken as showing that the Sibylline influence then pervading the Greek world gained a footing at Rome in any form so early as this. Was the temple really founded in 496, or at some time thereabout? And was it founded in obedience to some Sibylline direction? These questions are of real importance, for upon our answer to them depends the date of the beginning of a gradual metamorphosis of the Roman religious practice. The so-called Sibylline books and their keepers were responsible, as we shall see directly, for the introduction at Rome of what was known as the _Graecus ritus_,--for the foundation of temples to deities of Greek origin, and for other rites which initiated an entirely new type of religious feeling. We need to be sure when all this began.

In the first place, so far as I can judge, it is almost impossible to dissociate the origin of the temple from Sibylline influence. As we have seen, the cult was Greek, and all such Greek cults of later times were introduced by the keepers of the Sibylline books; and further, the records of temple foundations were among the most carefully preserved facts in Roman annals.[532] I think it is hardly possible to suppose that a cult which came, not from Latium or southern Etruria, like those of Diana, Minerva, and the Capitoline deities, but from some Greek region to the south, and probably from Sicily, could have been introduced by Roman authorities unaided by Greek influence. If that be so, and if we can show that the temple really belongs to this early age, then we have a strong probability that the Sibylline influence gained a footing at Rome at the very beginning of the republican period.[533]

There is one curious fact in connection with the temple that in my opinion goes far to prove that the traditional date is not far out. Pliny tells us explicitly that the two Greek artists who decorated the temple, Damophilus and Gorgasus, inscribed their names on the walls, and he added that the work of the former would be found on the right and that of the latter on the left.[534] Nothing more is known about them; but I am assured that the fact that they signed their names and added these statements suits the character of Greek art in the archaic age 580 to 450 B.C. No signatures of artists are known earlier than about 580; then comes a period when signatures are found, sometimes with statements such as these. And lastly, about 450, we begin to find simple signatures without any other words.[535] Thus the presumption is a strong one that the temple belongs to a time earlier than 450; and if that be so, then I think the inference holds good that the Sibyl first gained a footing at Rome about the same time. There are indeed some reasons why we should not put this event in the period of the kings;[536] but if we accept the traditional date of the temple we may put it any time between 509 and 496.

I have purposely used vague terms, such as Sibylline _influence_, instead of speaking in the old manner of Sibylline _books_ or oracles, because it is almost incredible that at so early a date it could have been possible to divulge any contents of a store of writings such as must have been most carefully treasured and concealed. This has been shown conclusively to be out of the question in Diels' now famous little book "_Sibylline Leaves_." But we may also follow Diels in assuming that about the end of the sixth century some kind of Greek oracle or oracular saying did actually arrive at Rome, purporting to be an utterance of the famous Sibyl of Cumae.[537]

But what _was_ this Sibylline influence which thus penetrated to Rome, if I am right, at the beginning of the fifth century? It is no part of my design to discuss the history of Greek mysticism, though we shall hear something more of it in a later lecture. It will be enough to remind you that in the sixth century Greece was not only full of Orphism and Pythagoreanism, but of floating oracular _dicta_ believed to emanate from a mystic female figure, a weird figure of whom it is hard to say how far she was human or divine; and of whose origin we know nothing, except that her original home was, as we might expect, Asia Minor. She was inspired by Apollo,[538] it was said, like the Pythia, and like her too became [Greek: entheos] (_possessed_) when uttering her prophecies; this is the earliest fact we know about her, for a famous fragment of Heracleitus represents her as uttering sayings "with frenzied lips,"[539]--a tradition of which Virgil has made good use in the sixth _Aeneid_:

non vultus, non color unus, non comptae mansere comae; sed pectus anhelum, et rabie fera corda tument.

But more to our purpose is the sober judgment of Plato a century after the first Roman experience of her, who in the _Phaedrus_ classes her among those who have wrought _much good_ by their inspired utterances.[540] This passage may help us to understand how ready men were at that time to turn for aid in tribulation to what they believed to be divine help, to an inspired wisdom beyond the range of the local deities of their own city-states.

This Sibyl became gradually localised in certain Greek cities, and thereby broke up, as it were, into several Sibyls. One of these Sibylline homes was at Cumae in Campania, the oldest Greek city in Italy, and this enables us to explain easily how the name and fame of the Sibyl reached Rome. Dim as is all early Roman history, the one clear fact of the sixth century is, as we have seen, the rapid advance of the Etruscans, their occupation of Rome, Praeneste, and other Latin cities, and their conquest of Campania, which is now ascribed to that same age.[541] Legend told in later days how the last Etruscan king had taken refuge at Cumae after his expulsion from Rome, and it is just possible that it may here be founding upon some dim recollection of a fact. However this may be, it is plain that it was through the great Etruscan disturbance of that period that Rome came to make trial of Sibylline utterances. In a moment of distress--the famine of which I spoke just now, and which I take to be historical because the remedy, the temple under the Aventine, was so closely connected with the corn-supply--she sent for or admitted an utterance of the Sibyl of Cumae, with whom she had come into some kind of contact through her Etruscan kings.

Let us consider that this foreign dynasty must have brought a new population to the city on the Tiber, the chief strategic point of middle Italy,--a new element of plebs, whatever the old one may have been.[542] We have seen signs, even in the religious history of this age, that commerce and industry were increasing, and that their increase was due to a movement from without, rather than to the old patrician _gentes_. When the Etruscan dynasty fell and the old patrician influence was restored, the government must have been face to face with new difficulties, and among them the supply of corn for an increasing population in years of bad harvest. With a fresh source of supply from the south came the cult of the Greek corn-deities at the bidding of a Sibylline utterance; and henceforward that remedy was available for other troubles. But the patrician rulers of Rome were true, it would seem, as far as was possible, to the old ways, and for a long time they used this foreign remedy very sparingly. At what date the utterances were collected in "books" and deposited in the Capitoline temple we do not know, nor have we any certain knowledge of their original nature or form. Tradition said that the collection dated from the last king's reign, and that it was placed in the care of _duoviri sacris faciundis_, as we have seen, who in 367 B.C. gave way to _decemviri_, five of whom might be members of the plebs. I am myself inclined to conjecture that this comparatively late date may be the real date of the origin of a _permanent collection_ and a _permanent college of keepers_, and that the earlier _duoviri_ were only temporary religious officers, _sacris faciundis_, _i.e._ for the carrying out of the directions of Sibylline utterances specially sought for at Cumae. They would thus be of the same class as other special commissions appointed by the Senate for administrative purposes;[543] while the decemviri, though retaining the old title, were permanent religious officers appointed to collect and take charge of a new and important set of regulations for the benefit of the community, and one which concerned the plebs at least as much as the patricians.

But I must turn to the more important question how far, down to the war with Hannibal, when I shall take up the subject afresh, the Roman religion was affected for good or harm by these utterances and their keepers. They took effect in two ways: either by introducing new deities and settling them in new temples, or by ordering and organising new ceremonies such as Rome had never seen before.

The introduction of a new deity now and again was not of great account from the point of view of religion, except in so far as it encouraged the new ceremonies; the Romans had never taken much personal interest in their deities, and the arrival (outside the pomoerium in each case) of Hermes under the name of Mercurius, or Poseidon bearing the name of the old Roman water _numen_ Neptunus, or even of Asclepios with a Romanised name Aesculapius, would not be likely to affect greatly their ideas of the divine. These facts have rather a historical than a religious significance; Hermes Empolaios, for example, suggests trade with Greek cities, perhaps in grain,[544] and belongs therefore to the same class as Ceres, Liber, Libera, of whom I have already spoken. The arrival of Poseidon-Neptune may mean, as Dr. Carter has suggested, a kind of "marine insurance" for the vessels carrying the grain from Greek ports.[545] The settling of Aesculapius in the Tiber island in 293, as the result of a terrible pestilence, is interesting as being the first fact known to us in the history of medicine at Rome; the temple became a kind of hospital on the model of Epidaurus, where the god had been brought in the form of a snake by an embassy sent for the purpose, and the priests who served it were probably Greeks skilled in the healing art.[546] This last case is a curious example of new Roman religious experience, but it can hardly be said to have any deep significance in the religious history of Rome. Of the obliteration of the old _numen_ Neptunus by the Greek god who took his name we know nothing for good or ill; we are ignorant of the real meaning of the old _numen_, and cannot tell whether the loss of him was compensated by the usefulness of his name in Roman literature to represent the Greek god of the sea.

Let us turn to the much more important subject of the new ceremonies ordered by the Sibylline "books." The first authentic case of such innovation occurred in 399 B.C., during the long and troublesome siege of the dangerous neighbour city Veii; I call it authentic because all the best modern authorities so reckon it, though it occurred before the destruction of old records during the capture of the city by the Gauls. The circumstances were such as to fix themselves in the memory of the people, and in one way or another they found their way into the earliest annals, probably those of Fabius Pictor, composed during the Second Punic War.[547]

The previous winter, Livy tells us,[548] was one of extraordinary severity; the roads were blocked with snow, and navigation on the Tiber stopped by the ice. This miserable winter was followed too suddenly by a hot season, in which a plague broke out which consumed both man and beast, and continued so persistently that the Senate ordered the Sibylline books to be consulted. This persistence is the first point we should notice; "Cuius insanabili pernicie quando nec causa nec finis inveniebatur,"--so wrote Livy, evidently meaning to express an extremity of trouble which would not give way to ordinary religious remedies. We may compare his account of the next recorded consultation of the books (Livy vii. 2), when neither the old rites nor even the new ones were sufficient to secure the _pax deorum_ and abate another pestilence, and recourse was had to yet another remedy in the form of _ludi scenici_. The times were out of joint,--the peace of the gods was broken, and thus the community was no longer in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The result was a revival of _religio_, of the feeling of alarm and anxiety out of which the whole religious system had grown. The old deities might seem to be forsaking their functions, since the old rites had ceased to appeal to them. Mysterious and persistent pestilence is a great tamer of human courage; it is a new experience that man knows not how to meet, and in ancient life it was also a new _religious_ experience.

The remedy was as new as the pestilence, and almost as pernicious. During eight days Rome saw three pairs of deities reclining in the form of images on couches, before which were spread tables covered with food and drink. Whether in this first case they were taken out of the temples and exposed to view in certain places, _e.g._ the forum, is not clear; later on, in the days of _supplicationes_, of which more will be said presently, they were visited in procession. The three pairs were Apollo and Latona, Diana and Hercules, Mercurius and Neptunus; all of them Greek, or, as in the case of Diana, Mercurius, and Neptunus, Roman deities in their new Greek form. We cannot trace the special applicability of all of them to the trouble they were thus invoked to appease,--another point that suggests a complete revolution in the Roman ways of contemplating divine beings. These are not functional _numina_, but foreigners whose ways were only known to the manipulators of the Sibylline utterances. They seem like quack remedies, of which the action is unknown to the consumer.

New also, but better in its effect, was the publicity of these proceedings, and the part taken in them by the whole population, patrician and plebeian, men, women, and children. If we can trust Livy's further statements, every one left his door open and kept open house, inviting all to come in, whether known or unknown; all old quarrels were made up, and no new ones suffered to begin; prisoners were freed from their chains, and universal good-will prevailed. These eight days were in fact kept as holidays, and doubtless by the novelty of the whole scene the astute authorities hoped to inspire fresh hope and confidence, and to divert attention from the prevailing misery, just as our soldiers in India are induced to forget the presence of cholera in a station by constant games and amusements. That this was really one leading object of the whole show is not generally recognised by historians; but it seems fully explained by the fact I mentioned just now, that in the similar trouble of 349 B.C. recourse was had for the first time to _ludi scenici_ in order to amuse the people. In the history of the Hannibalic war we shall have plenty of opportunity of noting this kind of expedient. The Roman people, we must remember, were getting more and more to be inhabitants of a large city, and, as such, to seek for entertainment, like all citizens in all ages. The religious rites of the old calendar were perhaps by this time getting too familiar, losing their original meaning; whether they had ever been very entertaining to a city population may be doubted. Something more showy was needed; processions had always been to the taste of the Roman, and banquets, such as the epulum Iovis, which I have already noticed, often accompanied the processions.

Now, this love of show and novelty, of which we have abundant evidence later on as a Roman characteristic, taken together with the anxiety and alarm--the new _religio_--arising from the pestilence, will sufficiently explain the _lectisternia_, as these shows were called. We have here in fact the first appearance, constantly recurring in later Roman history, of a tendency to seek not only for novelty, but for a more emotional expression of religious feeling than was afforded by the old forms of sacrifice and prayer, conducted as they were by the priest on behalf of the community without its active participation. Those old forms might do for the old patrician community of farmers and warriors, but not so well for the new and ever-increasing population of artisans and other workmen, whether of Roman or foreign descent. It would seem, indeed, as if the sensitiveness of the human fibre of a primitive community increases with its increasing complexity, and with the greater variety of experience to which it is exposed; and in the case of Rome, as if the simple ancient methods of dealing with the divine inhabitants of the city were no longer adequate to the needs of a State which was steering its way to empire among so many difficulties and perils. It is not indeed certain that the new rites, or some points in them, may not have had their prototypes in old Italian usage, though the _lectisternia_, the actual display of gods in human form and in need of food like human beings, are almost certainly Greek in origin.[549] But so far as we can guess, the emotional element was wholly new. True, Livy tells us in two passages of his third book of occasions when men, women, and children flocked to all the shrines (_omnia delubra_) seeking for the _pax deorum_ at the invitation of the senate; but the early date, the great improbability of the senate taking any such step, and the absence of any mention of the priesthoods, makes it difficult to believe that these assertions are based on any genuine record. We must be content to mark the first _lectisternia_ in 399 as the earliest authentic example of the emotional tendency of the Roman plebs.[550]

If we can judge of this period of Roman religious history by the general tendency of the policy of the Roman government, we may see here a deliberate attempt to include the new population in worship of a kind that would calm its fears, engage its attention, and satisfy its emotion, while leaving uncontaminated the old ritual that had served the State so long. If this conclusion be a right one, then we must allow that the new ceremonial had its use. Dr. Frazer has lately told us in his eloquent and persuasive way, of how much value superstition has been in building up moral habits and the instinct of submission to civil order. His thesis might be illustrated adequately from the history of Rome alone. But from a purely religious point of view the story of the _lectisternia_ is a sad one. The old Roman invisible _numen_, working with force in a particular department of human life and its environment, was a far nobler mental conception, and far more likely to grow into a power for good, than the miserable images of Graeco-Roman full-blown gods and goddesses reclining on their couches and appearing to partake of dinner like a human citizen. Such ideas of the divine must have forced men's religious ideas clean away from the Power manifesting itself in the universe, and must have dragged down the Roman _numina_ with them in their corrupting degradation. According to our definition of it, religion was now in a fair way to disappear altogether; what was destined to take its place was not really religion at all. Nor did it in any way assist the growth of an individual conscience, as perhaps did some of the later religious forms introduced from without. It was of value for the moment to the State, in satisfying a population greatly disturbed by untoward events; and that was all.

Closely connected with the _lectisternia_, and following close upon them in chronological order, were the processional ceremonies called _supplicationes_. The historical relation between the two is by no means clear; but if we conclude, as I am fairly sure we may, that the _lectisternia_ were shows of a joyful character, accompanied, as Livy describes the first one, with private entertainments, and meant to keep up the spirits of the plebeian population, and if we then turn to the early _supplicationes_, in which men, women, and children, _coronati_, and carrying laurel branches, went in procession to the temples, and there prostrated themselves after the Greek fashion, the women "crinibus passis aras verrentes," we shall be disposed to look on them as, in origin at least, distinct from each other.[551] We may conjecture that the appearance of the gods in human form at the doors of their temples suggested to the plebeian women a kind of emotional worship which was alien to the old Roman feeling, but familiar enough to those (and they must have been many) who knew the life of the Greek cities of Italy. It may be that they had tried it even in earlier times; but anyhow, in the fourth and third centuries B.C. advantage was taken of the _pulvinaria_ to use them as stopping-places in the procession of a _supplicatio_, and the phrase becomes a common one in the annals, "supplicatio ad omnia pulvinaria indicta." The _lectisternia_ were ordered five times in the fourth century;[552] by that time, it would seem likely, the _supplicationes_ had become an authorised institution, and had perhaps embodied the practice of _lectisternia_ in the way suggested above. We shall meet with them again when we come to the religious history of the war with Hannibal.

One word more before I leave this subject for the present. In all this innovation we must not forget to note the growth of individual feeling as distinguished from the old worship of civic grouping, in which the individual, as such, was of little or no account. I pointed out the first signs of this individualism when speaking of the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter, and we shall have reason to mark its rapid growth further. We are now, in fact, and must realise that we are, in a period in which, throughout the Graeco-Roman world, the need was beginning to be felt of some new rule of individualistic morality. The Roman population, now recruited from many sources, was but reflecting this need unconsciously when it insisted on new emotional rites and expiations. The Roman authorities were forced to satisfy the demand; but in doing so they made no real contribution to the history of Roman religious experience. It was impossible that they should do so; they represented the old civic form of religion, "bound up with the life of a society, and unable to contemplate the individual except as a member of it."[553] The new forms of worship, the _supplicatio_ and _lectisternium_, could not be, as the old forms had in some sense been, the consecration of civic and national life. They were to the Romans as the worship of Baal to the Jews of the time of the Kings; and, unlike that poisonous cult, they could never be rooted out.[554][555]

NOTES TO LECTURE XI

[510] This is the expression of Sallust, _Catil._ 12. 3.

[511] See my paper on the Latin history of the word _religio_, in _Transactions of the Congress for the History of Religions_, 1909, vol. ii. p. 172. W. Otto in _Archiv_, 1909, p. 533 foll.

[512] Cic. _de Nat. Deorum_, ii. 8.

[513] Cic. _Harusp. resp._ 19.

[514] Livy xliv. 1. 11; Sallust, _l.c._; Gellius, _Noct. Att._ ii. 28. 2.

[515] Polyb. vi. 56.

[516] Posidonius ap. Athenaeum vi. 274 A; Dion. Hal. ii. 27. 3.

[517] Gell. ii. 28.

[518] Marquardt, iii. 126.

[519] Cato, _R.R._ 142.

[520] Calpurnius, _Eclogue_, v. 24. I have described a similar scene in the Alps in _A Year with the Birds_, ed. 2, p. 126.

[521] Petronius, _Sat._ 117: "His ita ordinatis, quod bene feliciterque eveniret precati deos, viam ingredimur." I owe this reference, as others in this context, to Appel's treatise _de Romanorum precationibus_, p. 56 foll.

[522] Varro, _R.R._ i. 1.

[523] _e.g._ Virg. _Aen._ v. 685 (Aeneas during the burning of the fleet); _Aen._ xii. 776 (Turnus in extremity). Cp. Tibull. iii. 5. 6 (in sickness).

[524] A good example is _Captivi_, 922: "Iovi disque ago gratias merito magnas quom te redducem tuo patri reddiderunt," etc.

[525] For gratitude to human beings see Valerius Maximus v. 2. A good example of gratitude to a deity is in Gell. _N.A._ iv. 18; but it is told of Scipio the elder, who was eccentric for a Roman. When accused by a tribune of peculation in Asia he said, "Non igitur simus adversum deos ingrati et, censeo, relinquamus nebulonem hunc, eamus hinc protinus Iovi Optimo Maximo gratulatum." Public gratitude to the gods is frequent in later _supplicationes_, _e.g._ Livy xxx. 17. 6.

[526] Gellius, _N.A._ xiv. 7. 9.

[527] Servius ad _Aen._ xi. 301 ("praefatus divos solio rex infit ab alto").

[528] This was in a _contio_: "Cum Gracchus deos inciperet precari." See above, Lecture VII. note 13.

[529] See _R.F._ p. 74 foll.; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 243. For the relation of the pomoerium to the wall, see above, p. 94.

[530] The process is amusingly explained by Carter in _The Religion of Numa_, p. 72 foll.

[531] _R.F._ p. 75.

[532] See Aust, _De aedibus sacris P.R._, passim.

[533] Lately this has been denied by Pais, _Storia di Roma_, i. 339.

[534] Pliny, _N.H._ 35, 154.

[535] I owe the information to my friend Prof. Percy Gardner.

[536] See Carter, _op. cit._ p. 66; but I am not sure that his reasons are conclusive.

[537] Diels, _Sibyllinische Blätter_, p. 6 foll., and cp. 79.

[538] It should be noted that the cult of Apollo in Rome was older than the introduction of Sibylline influence; so at least it is generally assumed. Wissowa, however (_R.K._ p. 239), puts it as "gleichzeitig." The date of the Apollinar in pratis Flaminiis, the oldest Apolline fanum in Rome (outside pomoerium), is unknown; that of the temple on the same site was 431 (Livy iv. 25 and 29). There is little doubt that the Apollo-cult spread from Cumae northwards, and was by this time well established in Italy. (The foundation of the temple of 431, consisting of opus quadratum, still in part survives: Hülsen-Jordan, _Rom. Topographie_, iii. 535).

[539] Heracleitus, _fragm._ xii., ed. Bywater.

[540] _Phaedrus_, p. 244.

[541] So Korte in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._, _s.v._ "Etrusker."

[542] The present tendency is to take the plebs as representing an older population of Latium before the arrival of the patricians; see, _e.g._, Binder, _Die Plebs_, p. 358 foll. But the plebs of later days is not to be explained on one hypothesis only.

[543] _e.g._ in religious matters the _duoviri aedi dedicandae_; Mommsen, _Staatsrecht_, ii. 601 foll.

[544] Carter, _Religion of Numa_, p. 77 foll. It is uncertain whether there was a Roman Mercurius of earlier origin, or whether the name Mercurius (_i.e._ concerned in trade) was a new invention to avoid using the Greek name, as in the case of the trias Ceres, Liber, Libera.

[545] Carter, _op. cit._ 81. The connection of this Poseidon-Neptunus and Hermes-Mercurius is confirmed by the fact that the two were paired in the first _lectisternium_, 399 B.C. Livy v. 13.

[546] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 254.

[547] See Diels, _Sib. Blätter_, p. 12, note 1.

[548] Livy v. 13.

[549] I have discussed the possibility of the epulum Iovis being an old Italian rite in _R.F._ p. 215 foll. For the Greek origin of these shows see _Dict. of Antiquities_, ed. 2, _s.v._ "lectisternia."

[550] Livy iii. 5. 14, and 7. 7.

[551] The plebeian tendencies of the time are suggested, _e.g._, by the fact that immediately before the first _lectisternium_ a plebeian was elected military tribune (Livy v. 13). The fourth century is of course the period of plebeian advance in all departments, and ends with the opening of the priesthoods to the plebs by the lex Ogulnia, and the publication of the Fasti. Plebeian too, I suspect, was the keeping open house and promiscuous hospitality which is recorded by Livy of the first _lectisternia_; this was the practice of the plebs on the Cerealia (April 19), and was perhaps an old custom connected with the supply of corn and the temple of Ceres (see above, p. 255). It was not imitated by the patrician society, with its reserve and exclusiveness, till the institution of the Megalesia in 204 B.C. See Gellius xviii. 2. 11.

[552] The expression _crinibus demissis_ is found in a lex regia (Festus, _s.v._ "pellices"); the harlot who touches Juno's altar has to offer a lamb to Juno "crinibus demissis." This is therefore Roman practice.

[553] For the _supplicationes_ see Wissowa, _R.K._ 357 foll.; Marq. 48 and 188; and the author's article in _Dict. of Antiquities_. The passages already referred to as doubtful evidence (Livy iii. 5. 14, 7. 7) describe all the features of the _supplicatio_ as early as the first half of the fifth century. A list of later passages in Livy will be found in Marq. 49, note 4. On the whole I doubt if much was made of these rites before the third century and the Punic wars.

[554] Wissowa, _R.K._ 356, note 7.

[555] Caird, _Gifford Lectures_, vol. ii. p. 46.

LECTURE XII

THE PONTIFICES AND THE SECULARISATION OF RELIGION

In the last lecture we saw how the new experiences of the Roman people, during the period from the abolition of the kingship to the war with Hannibal, led to the introduction of foreign deities and showy ceremonies of a character quite strange to the old religion. But there was another process going on at the same time. The authorities of that old religion were full of vigour in this same period; it may even be said, that as far as we can trace their activity in the dim light of those early days, they made themselves almost supreme in the State. And the result was, in brief, that religion became more and more a matter of State administration, and thereby lost its chance of developing the conscience of the individual. It is indeed quite possible, as has recently been maintained,[556] that it stood actively in the way of such development. I have no doubt that there was a germ of conscience, of moral feeling, in the _religio_ of old days--the feeling of anxiety and doubt which originally suggested the _cura_ and _caerimonia_ of the State; but the efforts of the authorities in this period were spent in gradually destroying that germ. True, they did not interfere with the simple religion of the family, which had its value all through Roman history; but the attitude of the individual towards public worship will react on his attitude towards private worship, which may also have lost some part of its vitality in this period.

The religious authorities of which I speak are of course the two great colleges of pontifices and augurs. Of the latter, and of the system of divination of which they held the secrets, I will speak in the next lecture. Here we have to do with the pontifices and their work in this period, a thorny and somewhat technical subject, but a most important one for the history of Roman religious experience.

I have so far assumed that this college existed in the age of the kings, and assisted the Rex in the administration of the _ius divinum_. It is legitimate to do this, but as a matter of fact we do not know for certain what was the origin of the college itself, or of its mysterious name. In the period we have now reached we come, however, upon a striking fact, which is luckily easy to interpret; the king's house, the _Regia_, has become the office of the head of the college, the pontifex maximus, and also the meeting-place of the college for business.[557] Obviously this head, whether or no he existed during the kingly period, has stepped into the place of the Rex in the control of the _ius divinum_. Again, we know that in the third century B.C., when written history begins, the pontifices and their head had reached a very high level of power, as we shall presently see more in detail; the process of the growth of this power must therefore lie in the two preceding centuries, during which Rome was slowly attaining that paramount position in Italy in which we find her at the time of the Punic wars. Thirdly, we know that in that third century B.C. the college was laid open to plebeians as well as to members of the old patrician gentes, and that one of the most famous of all its many distinguished heads was not only not a patrician, but a Latin from Cameria, Ti. Coruncanius. Putting these three facts together we can divine in outline the history of the pontifices during these two centuries. With the instinct for order and organisation that never failed them, the Romans have constructed a _permanent_ power to take charge of their _ius divinum_, _i.e._ all their relations to the deities with whom they must maintain a _pax_; the circumstances of their career during two centuries have exalted this power to an extraordinary degree of influence, direct and indirect, internal and external; and, lastly, in a period which saw the gradual amalgamation into a unified whole of privileged and unprivileged, _patres_ and _plebs_, they have with wonderful wisdom thrown open to all citizens the administration of that _ius_ which was essential to the welfare of the united community. These are indisputable facts; and they are thoroughly characteristic of the practical wisdom of the Roman people in that early age.

In order to understand how the pontifices attained their great position, the one thing needful is to examine the nature of their work. This I propose to do next, and then to attempt to sum up the result of their activity on the Roman religious system.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the college in the early history of Roman law; and for us in particular that importance lies in the fact that they were the sole depositaries of the religious law in the period during which the civil law was being slowly disentangled from it. If we look at the so-called _leges regiae_, which are probably the oldest rules of law that have come down to us (though they may have been made into a collection as late as the very end of the Republic),[558] we see at once that they belong to the _ius divinum_; and there is little doubt that they were extracted from those books of the pontifices which I shall have to explain later on.[559] In other words, it is the maintenance of the _pax deorum_ that they are chiefly concerned with; the crime of the citizen is a violation of that _pax_, and the deity most concerned will punish the community unless some expiatory step is taken to re-establish the right relation between the human and divine inhabitants of the city. "Pellex aram Iunonis ne tangito; si tanget, Iunoni crinibus demissis agnum feminam caedito." "Si parentem puer verberit, ast olle plorassit, puer divis parentum sacer esto."[560] The harlot who touches the altar of Juno, the deity of married women, breaks the _pax_ with that deity, and she must offer a piacular sacrifice to renew it; the son who strikes a parent is made over as the property of the _divi parentum_, _i.e._ those of the whole community,[561] the peaceful relation with whom his act has imperilled. With such rules as these the civil magistrate of the republic can have had nothing to do; they belong to an older period of thought and of government, and survived in the books of the college which under the republic continued to administer the _ius divinum_; for these rules doubtless continued to exist side by side with the civil law as it gradually developed itself, and the necessary modes of expiation were known to the pontifices only. Roman society was indeed so deeply penetrated for many ages with the idea of _religio_--the dread of violating the _pax deorum_,--that the idea of law as a matter of the relation of man to man, as "the interference of the State in the passions and interests of humanity only," must have gained ground by very slow degrees. This primitive religious law then, _i.e._ the regulation of the proper steps to be taken to avoid a breach of the _pax deorum_, was entirely in the hands of the religious authorities, the Rex at first and then the pontifices, as the only experts who could know the secrets of the _ius divinum_; and from their decisions and prescriptions there could be no appeal, simply because there was no individual or body in the State to whom an appeal was conceivable. But after the rule of the Etruscan kings, with all its disturbing influences, and after the revolution which got rid of them, there must have been an age of new ideas and increased mental activity, and also of increasing social complexity, the signs of which in the way of trade and industry we have already found in certain facts of religious history. In the domain of law this meant new problems, new difficulties; and these were met in the middle of the fifth century B.C., if the received chronology is to be accepted,[562] by the publication of the XII. Tables.

In order to get some idea of the work of the pontifices at this time, let us consider one or two of these difficulties and problems.

Within the family every act, every relation, was matter of religion; the _numina_ had to be considered in regard to it. The end and aim, then as throughout Roman history, was the maintenance of the _sacra_ of the family, without which it could not be conceived as existing--the due worship of its deities, and the religious care of its dead. Take marriage as an example: "the entry of a bride into the household--of one who as yet had no lot in the family life--meant some straining of the relation between the divine and human members,"[563] and the human part of the family must be assured that the divine part is willing to accept her before the step can be regarded as complete. She has to enter the family in such a way as to share in its _sacra_; and if _confarreatio_ was (as we may believe) the oldest form of patrician marriage,[564] the bride was subjected to a ceremony which was plainly of a sacramental character--the sacred cake of _far_ being partaken of by both bride and bridegroom in the presence of the highest religious authority of the State. In the simplest form of society there would be no call for further priestly interference in marriage; but in a society growing more numerous and complex, exceptions, abnormal conditions begin to show themselves, and new problems arise, which must be solved by new expedients, prescriptions, permissions, devices, or fictions. For these the religious authorities are solely responsible; for what is a matter of religious interest to the family is also matter of religious interest to the State, simply because the State is composed of families in the same sense as the human body is composed of cellular tissue. All this, we believe, was once the work of the Rex, perhaps with the college of pontifices to help him; when the kingship disappeared it became the work of that college solely, with the pontifex maximus as the chief authority.

So, too, in all other questions which concerned the maintenance of the family, and especially in regard to the devolution of property. I am here only illustrating the way in which the pontifical college acquired their paramount influence by having a quantity of new and difficult work forced upon them, and it is not part of my plan to explain the early history of adoptions and wills; but I may give a single concrete illustration for the benefit of those who are not versed in Roman law. It must constantly have happened, in that disturbed period which brought the kingship to an end, that by death or capture in war a family was left without male heirs. Daughters could not take their place, because the _sacra_ of a family could not be maintained by daughters, who would, in the natural order of things, be sooner or later married and so become members of other families. Hence the expedient was adopted of making a _filius familias_ of another family a member of your own; and this, like marriage, involved a straining of the relations between the human and divine members of your family, and was thus a matter for the religious authorities to contrive in such a manner as to preserve the _pax_ between them. The difficulty was overcome by the practical wisdom of the pontifical college, which held a solemn inquiry into the case before submitting it to the people in specially summoned assembly (_comitia calata_);[565] and thus the new _filius familias_ was enabled not only to renounce his own _sacra_ (_detestatio sacrorum_), but to pass into the guardianship of another set of _sacra_, without incurring the anger of the _numina_ concerned with the welfare of either.

Such difficult matters as these, and many more connected directly or indirectly with the devolution of property, such as the guardianship of women and of the incapable, the power to dispose of property otherwise than by the original rules of succession, the law of burial and the care of the dead,--all these, at the time of which I am speaking, must have been among the secrets of the pontifices; and we can also suspect, though without being sure of our facts, that the great increase of the importance of the _plebs_ under the Etruscan dynasty offered further opportunities for the growth alike of the work and influence of the college.[566] Above all, we must remember that this work was done in secret, that the mysteries of adjustment were unknown to the people when once they had passed out of the ken of family and gens, and that there could have been no appeal from the pontifices to any other body. Nay, more, we must also bear in mind that this body of religious experts was _self-electing_. Until the lex Domitia of 104 B.C. both pontifices and augurs filled up their own colleges with persons whom they believed qualified both by knowledge and disposition. Thus it would seem that there was every chance that in that early Rome, where neither in family nor State could anything be undertaken without some reference to the religious authority, where the _pax deorum_ was the one essential object of public and private life, a power might be developed apt one day not only to petrify religion and stultify its worshippers, but thereby also to cramp the energies of the community, acting as an obstacle to its development within its walls and without. Had Roman law remained entirely in the hands of this self-electing college, one of two things must have happened: either that college would have become purely secular in character, or the wonderful legal system that we still enjoy would never have had space to grow up. But this was not to be; with the publication of the XII. Tables a new era opens.

If we reject, as we conscientiously may, the latest attempts of criticism to post-date the drawing up of the Tables,[567] and in fact to destroy their historical value for us, what is their significance for our present purpose? It is simply that in the middle of the fifth century B.C. the pontifices lost a monopoly--ceased to be the sole depositaries of the rules of law affecting the _pax deorum_, and that new rules are being set down in writing, on the basis of old custom, which more especially affect the relations between the human citizens. For both the _ius divinum_ and the _ius civile_ are to be found in this collection, but the latter is beginning to assert its independence. I think we may say, without much hesitation, that this event, however doubtful its traditional details, did actually save Rome from either of the two consequences to which I alluded just now. The constitution developed itself on lay and not on ecclesiastical lines, leaving the pontifices other work to do, and Roman civil law was eventually able to free itself from the trammels of the _ius divinum_.

But for another century the college still found abundant legal work to do, for it was not likely that at Rome, the most conservative of all city-states, it could be quickly set aside, or that the old ideas of law could so speedily disappear. What then was this work?

When rules of civil law were written down, it was still necessary to deal with them in two ways which were open to the pontifices, and indeed at this early time to no one else. First, it was necessary to make their provisions effectual by prescribing in each case the proper method of procedure (_actio_). Now it is most important to grasp the fact that procedure in the _ius civile_ was originally of precisely the same nature as procedure in the _ius divinum_, and that precisely the same rigid exactness is indispensable in both. Action and formula in civil law belong to the same class of practices as sacrifice and prayer in religious law, and spring from the same mental soil. Thus, for example, the most familiar case of action and formula in civil law, the _sacramentum_, was, as the name proves, a piece of religious procedure, _i.e._ the deposition in a sacred spot of a sum of money which the suitor in the case would forfeit if he lost it, together with the utterance of a certain formula of words which must be correctly spoken. If we choose to go back so far, we may even see in this combination of formularised act and speech a survival of magical or quasi-magical belief;[568] but this is matter rather for the anthropologist than the historian of religion. The point for us at this moment is that these acts and formulae (_legis actiones_, as they are known in Roman law) could not suddenly or rapidly pass out of the hands of that body of skilled experts which had so long been in sole possession of them; the publication of old and new rules of law in the XII. Tables made no immediate difference in this respect. The consuls, the new civil executive, were still in no sense necessarily skilled in such matters, and were without the prestige of the former executive, the Rex; they were also doubtless busy with other work, especially in the field. Nothing could be more natural than that the pontifices should continue to provide the procedure for the now written law, just as they had formerly supplied it for the unwritten.[569]

So, too, with the _interpretation_ of the Tables; this was the second part of the work that still remained to them. Writing was in that age a mystery to the mass of the population, and doubtless the idea was still in their minds that there was something supernatural about it. Writing, in fact, as well as formularised action and speech, may have had the flavour of magic about it. However that may be, there can be no doubt that the interpretation of a legal document was in those days a much more serious, if a less arduous business, than it is now. Here again, then, it seems perfectly natural that there should be no rapid or violent change in the _personnel_ of those deemed capable of such interpretation; there was no other body of experts capable of the work; the pontifices remained _iuris-consulti_, _i.e._ interpreters and advisers, and in the course of two and a half centuries accumulated an amount of material that formed a basis for the first published system of Roman law, the _ius Aelianum_ or _tripartita_ of 200 B.C. It is most useful to remember, as proof of this, that one member of the college was selected every year for the special purpose of helping the people with advice in matters of civil law, both in regard to interpretation and the choice of _legis actiones_; so we are expressly told by Pomponius, who adds that this practice continued for about a hundred years after the publication of the Tables, _i.e._ till the election of the first praetor in 366.[570] After that date the _ius civile_ emerges more distinctly from the old body of law, which included also the _ius divinum_, and its interpretation was no longer a matter purely for religious experts. In 337 we hear of the first _plebeian_ praetor--truly a momentous event, showing that the old profound belief is dying out, which demanded a religious and patrician qualification for all legal work. And at the end of the fourth century comes the publication, not only of the _legis actiones_, but of the Fasti, _i.e._ even of that most vital part of the _ius divinum_, which distinguished the times and seasons belonging to the numina from those belonging to the human citizens.[571] One might well suppose that the power of the pontifices was on the wane, for they had lost another monopoly.

And indeed in one sense this was so. It must have been so, for as the range of the State's activity increased, the sphere of religious influence became relatively less. Marriage, for example, though it still needed a religious ceremony in common opinion, ceased to need it in the eye of the law--a change which is familiar to us in our own age. The pontifex was no longer indispensable to the suitor at law, nor to the citizen who wished to know on what day he might proceed with his suit. The college undoubtedly ceased to be the powerful secretly-acting body in whose hands was the entire _religio_ of the citizen, _i.e._ the decision of all points on which he might feel the old anxious nervousness about the good-will of the gods. But now we mark a change which gave the old institution new life and new work. At the end of this fourth century (300 B.C.) it was thrown open to plebeians by the lex Ogulnia; and, as I have already mentioned, within a few years we come upon a plebeian pontifex maximus, who was not even a Roman by birth, yet one of the most famous in the whole series of the holders of that great office. Most probably, too, the numbers of the members have already been increased from five to nine, of whom five must be plebeian. These members begin to be found holding also civil magistracies, and the pontifex maximus was often a consul of the year. It is quite plain then that this priestly office is becoming more and more secularised; it expands with the new order of things instead of shrinking into itself. It leaves religion, in the proper sense of the word, far behind. The sacrificing priests, the flamines, etc., who were the humbler members in a technical sense of the same college, go on with their proper and strictly religious work under the supervision of the pontifex maximus,[572] but they steadily become of less importance as the greater members become secularised in their functions and their ambitions. And these greater members, instead of becoming stranded on a barren shore of antique religion, boldly venture into a new sphere of human life, and add definite secular work to their old religious functions.

The events of the latter part of the fourth century B.C., culminating in the publication of the Fasti and the _legis actiones_, probably meant much more for the Romans than we can divine by the uncertain light of historical imagination. It is the age of expansion, internal and external; the old patrician exclusive rule was gone beyond recall; the plebeians had forced their way into every department of government, including at last even the great religious _collegia_; the old Latin league had been broken up, and the Latin cities organised in various new relations to Rome, each one being connected with the suzerain city by a separate treaty, sealed with religious sanctions. After the Samnite wars and the struggle with Pyrrhus, further organisation was necessary, and there arose by degrees a loose system of union which we are accustomed to call the Italian confederation. The adaptation of all these new conditions to the existing order of things at Rome was the work of the senate and magistrates so far as it concerned human beings only; but so far as it affected the relations of the divine inhabitants of the various communities it must have been the work of the pontifices. That work is indeed almost entirely hidden from us, for Livy's books of this period are lost, and Livy is the only historian who has preserved for us in any substance the religious side of Rome's public life. But what we have learnt in the course of these lectures will have made it plain that no political changes could take place without involving religious adaptation, and also that the only body qualified to undertake such adaptation was the pontifical college.

We may thus be quite certain, that though they had lost their old monopoly of religious knowledge, the pontifices found plenty of fresh work to do in this period. It is my belief that they now became more active than they ever had been. From this time, for example, we may almost certainly date their literary or quasi-literary activity; I mean the practice of recording the leading events of each year, which may have had its origin a century earlier, with the eclipse of the sun in or about 404 B.C.[573] I should guess that after the admission of the plebeians to the college in 300 B.C., the new members put fresh life and vigour into the old work, and developed it in various directions. It is in this period that I am inclined to attribute to the college that zeal for compiling and perhaps inventing religious formulae of all kinds, which took shape in the _libri_ or _commentarii pontificum_, and embodied that strange manual of the methods of addressing deities, which we know as _Indigitamenta_. And again, in the skilled work of the admission of new deities and the dedication of their temples, occasioned by the new organisation and condition of Italy, and lastly, in the supervision of the proper methods of expiating _prodigia_, which (though the habit is doubtless an old one) began henceforward to be reported to the Senate from all parts of the ager Romanus and even beyond, their meetings in the Regia must have been fully occupied. Our loss is great indeed in the total want of detail about the life and character of the great plebeian pontifex maximus of the first half of the third century B.C., that Titus Coruncanius whom I have already mentioned as being a Latin by birth; for Cicero declares that the _commentarii_ of the college showed him as a man of the greatest ability,[574] whose reputation remained for ages as one who was ready with wise counsel in matters both public and private. Coupling him with two other memorable holders of the office, he says that "et in senatu et apud populum et in causis amicorum et domi et militiae consilium suum fidemque praestabant."[575] This passage should be remembered as a valuable illustration of the way in which the college and its head were becoming more and more occupied with secular business; it is worth noting, too, that this great man was himself consul in the year 280, and took a useful part in the first campaign against Pyrrhus.[576] Yet Cicero makes it plain that he looked on him also as a great figure in religious matters--nay, even as a man whom the gods loved.[577]

I will finish this lecture by illustrating briefly this renewed and extended activity of the pontifices, so far as we can dimly trace it in this third century B.C. Most of it is connected more or less directly with the State religion, yet with a tendency to become more and more secular and perfunctory; the word _cura_ would express it better than _caerimonia_, and _caerimonia_ better than _religio_. The care of the calendar, for example (a technical matter which lies outside my province in these lectures), was originally of religious importance, because the oldest religious festivals marked operations of husbandry, and these, when fixed in the calendar, must occur at the right seasons.[578] It was the duty of the pontifices so to adjust the necessary intercalations as to effect this object--a duty to which they were, as it turned out, quite unequal. But continued city life broke the connection between the festivals and the agricultural work to which they originally corresponded, and what was once a _cura_ of religious import became a secular matter of which the value was not appreciated. So too with another duty, for which both the Romans and ourselves have more reason to be grateful to them--the recording of the leading events of national history.

It is uncertain what prompted the college, or rather its head, to begin making these records, though there is no doubt about the fact. But it would be natural enough that those who had charge of the calendar, which would necessitate some record of years for purposes of intercalation, should go on to mark the names of the consuls and such striking events as would make a year memorable. In any case this was what actually happened. The pontifex maximus, we are told with precision, kept a _tabula_, or whited board, on which these events were noted down, with the consuls' names attached to them, or possibly a kind of almanac, made out for the whole year, on which they could append their notes to particular days.[579] This yearly _tabula_ was no doubt at first kept secret, like all the pontifical documents, but sooner or later, perhaps at the same time as the publication of the _fasti_ and _legis actiones_, it was exposed to public view in or at the Regia.[580] This went on for at least two centuries, and the records, which in the nature of things must have grown in length and detail as events became more startling and numerous, were edited in eighty books by the pontifex maximus P. Mucius Scaevola in 123 B.C.--the year of the first tribunate of C. Gracchus. The large number of these books has long been a stumbling-block to the learned, for we are expressly told that the _annales maximi_, as the records were called, were (in spite of their name) of a very meagre character; and many conjectures have quite recently been made to explain it.[581] But guessing is almost useless, seeing that there are no data for it. The editor may have added matter of his own, amplifying and adorning after the manner of writers of his day; or he may have worked in the contents of other pontifical books, _libri_ or _commentarii pontificales_. The point for us is simply the continued activity of the pontifex maximus in this work, which must have become almost entirely secular in character. The notes may have been jejune, but they were probably accurate, and free from the perversions of family vanity or such lengthy rhetorical ornamentation as became the universal fashion among private writers of annalistic history. They were, we may suppose, exactly what our modern historical conscience demands. But all that is left of them, or almost all, is the list of consuls (_fasti consulares_) and of triumphs (_fasti triumphales_) which in their present form must, or at least may, have been extracted from them.[582] On the whole, we may reckon them as the most valuable work of the college; and they may be taken as marking a growing sense of the importance of Rome and her history, the commemoration of which is thus committed to an official who, as an individual, had invariably served the State well, and in whom all classes had perfect confidence.[583]

One important part of the work of the college in this century must have been the adjustment of the civic religion of the Italian communities to that of Rome. What deities were to be made citizens of Rome? Which were to be left in their old homes undisturbed? No doubt many other questions must have called for attention in religious matters after the conquest of Italy, but this is the one of which we know most. The temple foundations of this period have all been carefully put together (chiefly from Livy's invaluable records) by Aust,[584] and show that there was a certain tendency to bring in deities from outside, not so much because they represented some special need of the Romans, corn or art or industry, as two centuries earlier, but simply because they were deities of the conquered whom it might be prudent to adopt. The great Juno Regina of Veii was long ago induced by _evocatio_ to migrate to Rome; Fors Fortuna from Etruria, Juturna from Lavinium, Minerva Capta from Falerii, Feronia, a famous Latin goddess from Capena, Vortumnus from Volsinii,[585] all attest the same liberal tone in religious matters which on the whole marks the secular Italian policy of the Senate in this period. If we had but more information about the former, we should be able to understand the latter far better. We should like to know why in some cases the chief deity of a community came to Rome, while in others there is not trace of migration. The famous Vacuna of Reate, for example, never left her home in the Apennines, possibly because she was a kind of Vesta, who could not be spared from Reate, and was not wanted at Rome.[586]

The list of foundations also points to other tendencies and experiences of the time. We might guess that there was some attempt, with the aid of pontifical skill, to encourage agriculture or give it a fresh start after the invasion of Pyrrhus; for between 272 and 264, the years of the pacification of Italy, we find temples built to four agricultural deities, three indigenous Roman ones, Consus, Tellus, Pales, and one Etruscan garden god, Vertumnus.[587] Then we have a group of foundations in honour of deities connected with water--Juturna, Fons, Tempestates, which seem to have some reference to the naval activity of the first Punic war; they all fall between 259 and 241 B.C.[588] Lastly, we notice a fresh accession of deified abstractions,--Salus (an old deity in a new form), Spes, Honos et Virtus, Concordia, and Mens.[589] I am glad to find that the latest investigator of these religious abstractions is at one with me in believing that they simply mark a developed stage in the religious bent of the earliest Roman. If the old Romans had the habit of spiritualising a great variety of material objects, in other words, if they were in an advanced animistic stage, there seems to be no reason why they should not have begun to spiritualise mental concepts also (for which they had words, as for the material objects), even at a very early period. The whole psychological aspect of such abstractions is most interesting, but I must pass it over here, merely suggesting that each of these abstractions was doubtless deified for some particular reason, under the direction, or with the sanction, of the pontifices.[590]

But we have not as yet reached what is, after all, for our purposes the most instructive part of the work of the pontifices--I mean the archives or memoranda (_libri_ or _commentarii_) which they kept, and from which, indirectly, much of what I have had to say about the _ius divinum_ has been drawn. It is here that we see the policy of maintaining the _pax deorum_ carried to its highest point. These books contained a vast collection of formulae for every kind of process in which the deities were in any way concerned; here was the complete _pharmacopoeia_ of the _ius divinum_.[591] We must remember that the pontifex maximus and his assessors had to be ready at any moment with the correct formula for all religious acts, whether extraordinary, like the _devotio_ of Decius or the expiation of some startling "prodigium," or belonging to the ordinary course of city life, such as prayers in sacrificial ritual, _vota_ both public and private, charters (_leges_) of newly founded temples, and so on. The idea that the spoken formula (ultimately, as we saw, derived from an age of magic) was efficient only if no slip were made, seems to have gained in strength instead of diminishing, as we might have expected it to do with advancing civilisation; and the pontifices not only responded to its importunity, but actually stimulated it. _Vires acquirit eundo_ are words which apply well in all ages to the passion for organisation and precision. Though we cannot prove it, I myself have little doubt that the members of the college, or some of them, collected and invented formulae simply for the pleasure of doing it, and that the work became as congenial to them as the systematisation of the law to Jewish scribes after the captivity, or as casuistry to the confessors of the middle ages. When the art of writing became familiar to experts, the natural and primitive desire of the Roman to have exactness in the spoken word affected him also in his relations with the word as written. The scribe and the Pharisee found their opportunity. The whole public religion of the State, and to some extent also the private religion of the family, became a mass of forms and formulae, and never succeeded in freeing itself from these fetters.

We can best illustrate this superfluity of priestly zeal in that strange list of forms of invocation called _Indigitamenta_, which I have already explained with the help of Wissowa.[592] Working upon the old Roman animism, and the popular fondness for formulae, the pontifices drew up those lists in the fourth and third centuries B.C., which have so seriously misled scholars as to the genuine primitive religious ideas of the Romans. They are in the main priestly inventions, the work of ingenious formulators. We may even be tempted to look on them as an attempt to rivet the yoke of priestly formalism on the life of the individual as well as on the life of the State as a whole. But if ever this was the intention, it was too late. A people that was beginning to get into touch with the civilisation of Hellas could not possibly bear such a yoke. In the last lecture we have already seen a tendency towards emotional religion independent of the old State worship; the philosophy of individualism was to complete the work of emancipation in the last two centuries B.C. The old State religion remained, but in stunted form and with paralysed vitality; Rome was the scene of an _arrested religious development_. The feeling, the religious instinct (_religio_) was indeed there, though latent; the Romans were human beings, like the rest of us. But as we go on with the story we shall find that, when trouble or disaster brought it out of its hiding-place, it was no longer possible to soothe it on Roman principles or by Roman methods. These methods--in other words, the _ius divinum_ as formulated by the authorities--had been meant to soothe it, and had indeed so effectually lulled it to sleep, that when at last it awoke again they had lost the power of dealing with it. When the craving did come upon the Roman, which in time of peril or doubt has come upon individuals and communities in all ages, for support and comfort from the Unseen, it had to be satisfied by giving him new gods to worship in new ways, gods from Greece and the East, some of them concealed under Latin names, but still aliens, not citizens of his own State, aliens with whom he had little or nothing in common, who had no home in his patriotic feeling, no place in his religious experience.[593] As I said at the beginning of the last lecture, we must not underrate the religiousness of the Roman character, which was never entirely lost; but the secret of its comparative uselessness lies in this--that the natural desire to be right with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, and to know more of that Power, became weakened and destroyed by an over-scrupulous attention to the means taken to realise it, and by the introduction of foreign methods which had no root in the mental fibre of the people, and reflected no part of its experience. Religion was effectually divorced from life and morality.

NOTES TO LECTURE XII

[556] See Mulder, _De notione conscientiae, quae et qualis fuerit Romanis_, Leyden, 1908, cap. 2. On p. 56 he quotes Luthard (_Die antike Ethik_, p. 131), who says of the Roman religion that it was even more an affair of the State than with any other people; hence its peculiar legal character. Though Mulder overworks his point, his chapter (especially p. 61 foll.) is full of interest.

[557] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 431. The first chapter of Ambrosch's _Studien und Andeutungen_, in which the nature and history of the Regia was first really investigated, is still valuable. An excellent short account is given by Mr. Marindin in his article in the _Dict. of Antiquities_, ed. 2. It is now generally maintained that the Regia in historical times was rather a building for sacred purposes than a residence for a man and his family, and this I hold to be correct; but it may for all that have originally been the residence of the Rex and of the Pont. Max. when the Rex had disappeared.

[558] See Schanz, _Gesch. der röm. Literatur_, i. 43, where a succinct account is given of modern opinion as to the so-called _ius Papirianum_. The main argument for the late date of the collection is that Cicero does not seem to have known of it when he wrote the letter _ad Fam._ ix. 21 in 46 B.C. This of course in no way affects the primitive character of the rules themselves.

[559] The inference that the rules were found in the _Libri pontificum_ is inevitable in any case, but seems proved by the fact that one of them, that relating to the _spolia opima_, is stated by Festus, p. 189 (_s.v._ "opima"), to have been extracted from those books.

[560] Festus, _s.v._ "pellices" and _s.v._ "plorare," which latter word is interpreted as = _inclamare_.

[561] The _divi parentum_ are here generally taken as those of the particular family, and this may have been so; but cf. Wissowa, _R.K._ 192.

[562] For the attempts of Pais in Italy and Lambert in France to date the Tables at the end of the fourth century or later, see Schanz, _op. cit._ i. 41. In Germany opinion is universally in favour of the traditional date.

[563] See _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p. 135.

[564] On the religious character of _confarreatio_ see De Marchi, _La Religione nella vita privata_, i. p. 145 foll.

[565] Cic. _de Domo_, 12. 14; Gellius, v. 19.

[566] See, _e.g._ Launspach, _State and Family in Early Rome_, p. 256 foll. The last three chapters of this little book, on Patria potestas, Marriage, and Succession, will be found useful by those who cannot enter into the many disputes and difficulties which have arisen out of the attempts of writers on Roman law to adjust legal ideas to the dim early history of Rome. Binder, in his work _Die Plebs_, starts from the improbable hypothesis that the plebs was the population of the Latin part of the city as distinct from that Sabine part on the Quirinal, which he believes to have been the only patrician body; and he further believes that the plebs lived originally under "Mutterrecht," the patres under "Vaterrecht." Such a condition of society would, of course, have greatly added to the pontifical work of religious adjustment; it would have been more than even the pontifices could have successfully achieved.

[567] See above, note 7. Binder, _Die Plebs_, p. 488 foll., discusses, and in the main rejects, the arguments of Pais and Lambert.

[568] So Huvelin, in a paper in _L'Année sociologique_, 1905-6, p. 1 foll., criticised by Hubert et Mauss, _Mélanges d'histoire des religions_, p. xxiii. foll.

[569] From the religious point of view the _legis actiones_ are best explained in Marquardt, 318 foll. Cp. Muirhead, _Roman Law_, ed. 1899, pp. 246-7; Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, index _s.v._ "legis actio," and especially p. 87.

[570] The famous passage of Pomponius is in the _Digest_, i. 2. 2, sec. 6 (for the work of Aelius, see _Dig._ i. 2. 2, 38) "ex his legibus ... actiones compositae sunt, quibus inter se homines disceptarent: quas actiones ne populus prout vellet institueret, certas sollemnesque esse voluerunt.... Omnium tamen harum et interpretandi scientia et actiones apud collegium pontificum erant, ex quibus constituebatur, quis quoquo anno praeesset privatis."

[571] Livy ix. 46 "civile ius, repositum in penetralibus pontificum, evulgavit (Cn. Flavius), fastosque circa forum in albo proponit, ut quando lege agi posset sciretur." Cp. Val. Max. ii. 5. 2. _Civile ius_ is here usually taken as meaning the procedure; but this is a passage which may give some countenance to those who would put the publication of the XII. Tables later than the traditional date.

[572] For the relation of the Flamines, Vestals, and Rex sacrorum to the pontifex maximus, see Wissowa, _R.K._ 432 foll.

[573] See above, p. 283. For the eclipse, Cic. _Rep._ i. 16. 25; and for the various scientific determinations of its exact date, Schanz, _Gesch. der röm. Lit._ vol. i. (ed. 2) p. 37. "Ex hoc die," writes Cicero, "quem apud Ennium et in maximis annalibus consignatum videmus, superiores solis defectiones reputatae sunt."

[574] Cic. _Brutus_, 55 "longe plurimum ingenio valuisse."

[575] _De Orat._ iii. 33. 134.

[576] See _Dict. of Classical Biography_, _s.v._ "Coruncanius."

[577] _Nat. deor._ ii. 165. Coruncanius is mentioned as one of those whom the gods love, if indeed they take an interest in human affairs.

[578] See above, p. 100 foll.; and _Roman Festivals_, p. 3.

[579] Our knowledge of this _tabula_ chiefly depends on a passage in the Danielian scholiast on Virg. _Aen._ i. 373: "ita enim annales conficiebantur. Tabulam dealbatam quotannis pontifex maximus habuit, in qua praescriptis consulum nominibus et aliorum magistratum, digna memoratu notare consueverat domi militiaeque terra marique gesta per singulos dies. Cuius diligentiae annuos commentarios in octoginta libros veteres retulerunt, eosque a pontificibus maximis, a quibus fiebant, annales maximos appellarunt." The explanation of the name is no doubt wrong; but all the rest of this passage can be relied on; cp. Cic. _de Orat._ ii. 12. 52; Dion. Hal. i. 73, 74; Gell. ii. 28. 6; Cic. _Legg._ i. 2. 6. For the idea of the almanac, see Cichorius in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._, _s.v._ "annales maximi."

[580] _Proponebat tabulam domi_, Cic. _de Orat._ ii. 12. 52. This must refer to the official residence of the Pont. Max.; see above, p. 271.

[581] These attempted solutions of an insoluble problem may be found in brief in Schanz, _Gesch. der röm. Lit._ i. 37. Perhaps the boldest is that of Cantorelli, that the annales were constructed not out of the tabula but out of the commentarii; but this is in conflict with the passage in the scholiast on Virgil. To me the difficulty does not seem overwhelming; events occurring "domi militiaeque, terra marique," may have filled considerable space, and yet have been meagre in the eyes of the rhetoricians of the last century B.C.

[582] Schanz, _op. cit._ p. 35.

[583] The great authority of the Pont. Max. is well shown in the story of Tremellius the praetor, who in the middle of the second century B.C. was fined (by a tribune?) "quod cum M. Aemilio pontifice maximo iniuriose contenderat, sacrorumque quam magistratuum ius potentius fuit." Livy, _Epit._ 47.

[584] _De aedibus sacris populi Romani_, p. 10 foll.

[585] Aust, _op. cit._ p. 14 foll. See also _R.F._ p. 340 foll.

[586] For Vacuna, Wissowa, _R.K._ pp. 44 and 128. She was later, but probably without good reason, identified with Victoria. The conjecture that she was a hearth deity rests on the lines of Ovid, _Fasti_, vi. 305, which I have before referred to in another context:

ante focos olim scamnis considere longis mos erat et mensae credere adesse deos. nunc quoque cum fiunt antiquae sacra Vacunae, ante Vacunales stantque sedentque focos.

[587] Aust, p. 14. For Vertumnus the _locus classicus_ is Propert. v. 2. It is not certain that the connection with gardens was primitive.

[588] _R.F._ p. 341.

[589] _R.F._ p. 341.

[590] See Axtell, _The Deification of Abstract Ideas in Roman Literature and Inscriptions_ (Chicago, 1907), p. 59 foll., where the views of Mommsen, Boissier, Marquardt, and Wissowa are discussed. Axtell's own conclusion is given on p. 62 foll. In the main it seems to agree with that hazarded in my _Roman Festivals_, p. 190.

[591] For the evidence as to the contents of the _commentarii_, which are now generally identified with the _libri_, see Wissowa, _R.K._ 32 and 441; Schanz, _op. cit._ i. 32; and the article "Commentarii" in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._ As Wissowa remarks (p. 441, note 6), we are greatly in need of a complete collection of all fragments of these archives.

[592] See above, p. 159 foll. The conviction that these lists are of comparatively late and priestly origin, which has long been growing on me, was originally suggested by the learned article "Indigitamenta" by R. Peter in Roscher's _Lexicon_, vol. ii. p. 175 foll.

[593] I have here adopted some sentences from my article in the _Hibbert Journal_ for 1907, p. 854.

LECTURE XIII

THE AUGURS AND THE ART OF DIVINATION

"The one great corruption to which all religion is exposed is its separation from morality. The very strength of the religious motive has a tendency to exclude, or disparage, all other tendencies of the human mind, even the noblest and best. It is against this corruption that the prophetic order from first to last constantly protested.... Mercy and justice, judgment and truth, repentance and goodness--not sacrifice, not fasting, not ablutions,--is the burden of the whole prophetic teaching of the Old Testament."[594]

The over-formalising, or ritualising, of any religion is sure to bring about that result against which the Jewish prophets protested. We saw at the end of the last lecture how the pontifices contributed to such a result. We are now to study the contribution of the other great college, the augurs. For instead of developing, as did the wise man or seer of Israel, into the mouthpiece of God in His demand for the righteousness of man, the Roman diviner merely assisted the pontifex in his work of robbing religion of the idea of righteousness. Divination seems to be a universal instinct of human nature, a perfectly natural instinct, arising out of man's daily needs, hopes, fears; but though it may have had the chance, even at Rome, it never has been able, except among the Jews, to emerge from its cramping chrysalis of magic and become a really valuable stimulant of morality.

By divination I mean the various ways and methods by which, in all stages of his development, man has persuaded himself that what he is going to do or suffer will turn out well or ill for him. It is probably judicious, with Dr. Tylor and with the majority of recent anthropologists, to consider it as belonging to the region of magic;[595] and it is obvious that it affords excellent examples of that inadequacy which characterises magical attempts to overcome the difficulties man meets with in his struggle for existence.[596] It belongs, like other forms of magic, to a stage in which man's idea of his relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe is both rude and rudimentary. But it shares with magic the power or property of surviving, in form at least, through the animistic stage into that of religion, and it is largely practised at the present day even among highly civilised peoples.

But I must observe, before I go on, that divination as an object of anthropological inquiry still stands in need of a thorough scientific examination. At present it seems to puzzle anthropologists;[597] and the reason probably is that the material for studying it inductively has not as yet been collected and sifted. Strange to say, it does not appear in the index to Dr. Westermarck's great work, which I have so often quoted: it is hardly to be found even in the _Golden Bough_: nor can I find a thoroughgoing treatment of it in any other books about the early history of mankind. And any sort of guesswork under these circumstances only increases our difficulties. Some years ago the great German philosophical lawyer, von Jhering, in an interesting work called the _Evolution of the Aryan_, made some most ingenious attempts to explain the origin of Roman divination. He fancied that the practice of examining the entrails of a victim, for example, began in the course of Aryan migration, because when you encamped in a new region you would catch and kill some of the native cattle in order to see whether they were wholesome enough to tempt you to stay.[598] Again, the study of the flight of birds was prompted by the desire to get information about the mountain passes and the course of great rivers; and this study grew into an elaborate art as the leader of the host, the prototype of the Roman augur, gained experience by constant observation from elevated ground.[599] Such a theory as this last might be worth something if it were based upon known facts; as it is, it is only most ingenious guesswork. This great legal writer did not know, as we do now, that divination by both these methods is found all over the world, and cannot be explained by any supposed needs of migrating Aryans.

Whatever be the origin of the several forms of divination, the object of the practice in ancient Italy and Greece is beyond doubt--to find out whether the Power with whom you wish to be in right relation is favourable to certain human operations, or willing to aid in removing certain forms of human suffering. According to our definition, it was a part of religion, whether or no it belonged originally to magic. It was a practical expression of that doubt or anxiety to which I believe the Romans attached the word _religio_. In the agricultural period it must have been specially useful and even inevitable,[600] because the tiller of the soil is always in need of knowledge as to the best times and seasons for his operations, and his out-of-door life gives him constant opportunity of observing natural phenomena, _diosemeia_, signs from heaven, and the utterances and movements of birds and other animals. It is interesting to reflect that these last may often be of real service in foretelling the weather, which is so important to the farmer. As I write this on a December day I recall the fact that I have myself within the last week successfully foretold a spell of cold after observing a great arrival of winter thrushes from the north. This particular branch of augury is, in fact, neither so inadequate nor so absurd as most others. Von Jhering may turn out to be right in his notion that at least some forms of divination have their origin in practical needs and in the skill of uncivilised man in discerning the signs of the weather--a skill which it is well to remember far exceeds that of the house-dweller of modern civilisation. But with the growth of the City-state and the habits of life in a town, these early instincts and methods of the agriculturist came to be caught up into a system of religious practice, adapted to the conditions of civil and political existence; thus they gradually lost their original meaning and such real value as they ever possessed. I have pointed out that the Roman festivals and the ritual of the oldest calendar gradually got out of relation with the agricultural life in which they for the most part originated:[601] so it was with divination, which in the hands of the State authorities became formalised into a set of rules for ascertaining the good-will of the gods, and obtaining their sanction for the operations of the community, which had no scientific basis whatever, no relation to truth and fact. Of all the methods for putting yourself in right relation with the Power, this was the least valuable, and indeed the most harmful; it came in course of time to be a positive obstacle to efficiency and freedom of action, it wasted valuable time, and it often served as the means of promoting private ends to the detriment of the public interest.

Before I go on to consider the development of the highly formalised system of public divination, let me clear the ground by a few remarks about such forms of the practice as were not sanctioned by the State. That these existed throughout Roman history there is no doubt, as they existed in Greece, among the Jews, and elsewhere in the East, alongside of the advanced and organised methods of official and authorised experts.

Our information about private divination is scattered about in Roman literature, and even when brought together there is not a great deal of it. What is prominent both in Roman literature and Roman history is the divination authorised by the State and systematised by its authorities; even in Cicero's treatise _de Divinatione_, though the subject-matter is of a general kind, drawn from Greece as well as Rome, it is, I think, apart from philosophical questions, chiefly the art of augurs and haruspices that interests the writer, who was himself an augur when he wrote it. In Greek literature exactly the opposite is the case; there we hear little of State-authorised divination, and a great deal of wandering soothsayers, soothsaying families, and oracles which (except at Delphi) were not under the direct control of a City-state.[602] The methods of divination are much the same in both peninsulas, and indeed vary little all the world over; the difference lies simply in this,--that at Rome the adoption and systematisation by the State of certain methods, especially those which dealt with birds and lightning, had the effect of discrediting, if not excluding, an immense amount of private practice of this kind. I mean that if the State strongly sanctions some forms of divination, working them by its own officials, it casts a shadow of discredit over the rest. As the _ius divinum_ tended to exclude magic and the barbarous in ritual, so did the _ius augurale_, which was a part of it, exclude the quack in divination. And in this particular department of human delusion the result may be said to have been happy; for though divination belongs to religion as having survived from an earlier stage into a religious one, yet it is the least valuable, the least fruitful, part of it.[603] True, the augural systematisation, as we shall see, had a sinister effect on political progress; but even there the very emptiness and absurdity of the whole business helped to bring contempt on it, and, as Cicero tells us in a well-known passage, even old Cato declared that he could not imagine why a _haruspex_ did not laugh when he met a brother of the craft.[604] In Greece, on the contrary, it might, I believe, be shown that the absence of systematisation by the State only served to prolong the credit and influence of the professional quack.

Greece was at all periods full of these quacks; did the sham prophet exist at Rome in the period we have now under review? Later on the Oriental soothsayer found his way there; of these _Chaldaei_ and _mathematici_ I shall have a word to say in another lecture, and we shall see how the State authorities made occasional attempts to exclude them. Of the _frantic_ type of diviner, the [Greek: entheos], so common in Greece, we hear nothing in the sober Roman annals; the idea of a human being "possessed by a spirit of divination" seems foreign to the Roman character.[605] The only soothsayer, so far as I know, who appears in Roman legend in a private capacity is that Attus Navius who gave Tarquinius Priscus the benefit of his knowledge; and he is represented as a respectable Sabine, and his art as an augural one learnt from the Etruscans.[606] There are, indeed, ancient traces of a prophetic art at Rome, but, as the historian of divination has well observed, they are all connected not with human beings, but with divinities, a fact which explains the Latin word _divinatio_.[607] To take what is perhaps the best example, the ancient deity Carmenta, who had a flamen and a double festival in the month of January, may very probably represent some dim tradition of a _numen_ at whose shrine women might gain some knowledge as to their fortunes in childbirth, just as outside Rome, at Praeneste and Antium, Fortuna seems to have had this gift in historical times.[608] So St. Augustine interpreted Carmenta,[609] probably following Varro; and to Virgil she was the "_vates fatidica_, cecinit quae prima futuros Aeneadas magnos et nobile Pallanteum."

But Carmenta, Picus, Faunus, are dim mythical figures which for us can have no bearing on Roman religious experience; it would be more to the point to ask what was the original meaning and history of the word _vates_, if the question were answerable in the absence of an early Roman literature. All we can say about this is that this word had, as a rule, a certain dignity about it, which enabled it eventually to stand for a poet, and that it rarely has a sinister sense, unless accompanied by some adjective specially used in order to give it.[610] The real word for a quack is _hariolus_, and the fact that it is comparatively rare suggests that the character it expresses was not a common one. It occurs here and there in fragments of old plays, where, unluckily, we cannot be quite sure whether it represents a Greek or a Latin idea. The following lines from the Telamo of Ennius shows us the _hariolus_, as well as the word _vates_ with a discreditable adjective attached:

sed superstitiosi vates impudentesque harioli aut inertes, aut insani, aut quibus egestas imperat, qui sibi semitam non sapiunt, alteri monstrant viam, quibu' divitias pollicentur, ab iis drachmam ipsi petunt.[611]

A more satisfactory bit of evidence as to the existence of the quack in the second century B.C., when Greece and the East were beginning to pour their unauthorised religionists into Italy, is the interesting passage in old Cato's book on agriculture, in which he urges that the bailiff of an estate should not be permitted to consult either a _haruspex_, _augur_, _hariolus_, or _Chaldaeus_.[612] But on the whole, such little evidence as we possess seems to confirm the view I hazarded just now, that the overwhelming prestige of State authority at Rome discouraged and discredited the quack diviner both in public and private life. His work in private life was largely that of fortune-telling, of foretelling the future in one sense or another; and this was exactly what the State authorities never did and never countenanced, at any rate until the stress of the Hannibalic war, and then only in a very limited sense. Their object was a strictly religious one, to get the sanction of the divine members of the community for the undertakings of the human ones. Even the so-called Sibylline oracles, as we saw, were not prophecies; and the augural art never provided an answer to the question, "What is going to happen?" but only to that much more religious one, "Are the deities willing that we should do this or that?"[613]

But before I leave the subject of private divination, I must note that there was a department of it which may be called legitimate, as distinguished from that of the quack. I mean the _auspicia_ of the family religion, and also the comparatively harmless folklore about omens of all sorts and kinds.

Naturally we have little information about legitimate _auspicia_ in the life of the family; but we have seen that the religious instinct of the Roman forbade him to face any important undertaking or crisis without making sure of the sanction of the _numina_ concerned, and among the methods of insurance (if I may use a convenient word) the _auspicia_ must have had a place from the earliest times. No important thing was done, says Cicero in the _de Divinatione_, "nisi auspicato, ne privatim quidem."[614] Valerius Maximus says the same in so many words, and some other evidence has been collected by De Marchi in his work on the private religion of the Romans.[615] But only in the case of marriage do we hear of _auspicia_ in historical times, and even there they seem to have degenerated into a mere form. "Auspices nuptiarum, re omissa, nomen tantum tenent"--so Cicero wrote of his own time;[616] he seems to be thinking of augury by means of birds, for he adds, "nam ut nunc extis sic tunc avibus magnae res impetrari solebant." As we have already seen, the object of the examination of a victim's entrails was simply to ascertain its fitness to be offered; but by Cicero's time the Etruscan art of divination by this method must have penetrated into private life. I think we may conjecture that in the life of the family on the land the _auspicia_, as the word itself implies, were worked chiefly by observation of birds. Nigidius Figulus, the learned mystic of Cicero's time, wrote a book, _de Augurio Privato_, of which one fragment survives which has to do with this kind of divination, and with the distinction between omens from birds seen on the right or left, and from high or low flyers.[617] In the familiar ode of Horace beginning, "Impios parrae recinentis omen,"[618] the _corvus_ and _cornix_ are mentioned besides the _parra_, and in that wholesome old out-of-door life of the farm, as I said just now, there was a certain basis of truth and fact in the observation of such presages. But Horace mentions other animals, wolf, fox, and snake, and some at least of the folklore about omens which is to be found in Pliny's descriptions of animals may help us to appreciate the nature of the old Roman ideas on this subject. The tiller of the land and the shepherd on the uplands used their eyes and ears, not wholly without advantage to themselves; but in the life of the city such observation became gradually formal and meaningless, and degenerated into the superstition reflected in Horace's ode. I must parenthetically confess to a personal feeling of regret that this people, who in their early days had good opportunities, made little or no contribution to the knowledge of animals and their habits.[619] But I must pass on to the more important subject of divination as developed and formalised by the authorities of the State.

In explaining the ritual of the _ius divinum_ I laid stress on the fact that its main object was to maintain the _pax deorum_, the right relation between the divine and human citizens.[620] To make this _pax_ secure, it was necessary that in every public act the good-will of the gods should be ascertained by obtaining favourable auspices--it must be done _auspicato_. To take the first illustration that occurs, Livy describes a dictator about to fight a battle as leaving his camp _auspicato_, after sacrificing to obtain the _pax deorum_.[621] It is for this reason that the _auspicia_ have a leading place in the foundation legends of the city. We are all familiar with the story of the _auspicia_ of Romulus and Remus, which goes back at least as far as Ennius;[622] and we find them also in the foundation of _coloniae_ in historical times.[623] I do not know that I can better express the place which the _auspicia_ occupied in the mind of the Roman than by quoting the words which Livy puts into the mouth of Appius Claudius in 367 B.C., when supposed to be inveighing against the opening of the consulship to plebeians: "Auspiciis hanc urbem conditam esse, auspiciis bello ac pace, domi militiaeque, omnia geri, quis est qui ignoret?" He goes on to argue that these _auspicia_ belong to patricians only, that no plebeian magistrate is created _auspicato_, that the man who wants to allow plebeians to become curule magistrates, _tollit ex civitate auspicia_. "Nunc nos, tanquam iam nihil pace deorum opus sit, omnes caerimonias polluimus."[624] This is, of course, only Livy's rhetoric, but it represents the fundamental Roman idea of the public _auspicia_.

The passage is also useful because it alludes to the fact that the right of taking the _auspicia_ belonged ultimately to the whole patrician body of fully qualified citizens.[625] But so far as we can discern in the dim light of the earliest period, this body entrusted the right and duty to its chief magistrate, the Rex, exactly as it entrusted him with the _imperium_, the supreme power of command in civil matters. Thus the _auspicia_ and the _imperium_ were indissolubly connected; as Dr. Greenidge says,[626] "they are the divine and human side of the same power," and may be found together in a thousand passages in Roman literature and inscriptions. But at the side of the Rex we find, according to tradition, two helpers or advisers called _augures_, the three together perhaps forming a _collegium_.[627] Now there was certainly an important difference between the Rex and the augurs; the latter were aiders and interpreters, but the Rex only was said _habere auspicia_, just as the whole patrician body had this right, though they delegated it to the Rex during his lifetime, and on his death received it again. The man who "habet auspicia" has the right of _spectio_, _i.e._ of taking the auspices in a particular case,[628] of watching the sky or the conduct of the sacred fowls in eating; this right the augurs never had. Their power was limited to guidance and interpretation. This follows necessarily from the fundamental principle that the _auspicia_ and the _imperium_ were indissolubly connected; for the augur, of course, never possessed the _imperium_ by virtue of his office. It is true that of the augur in the regal period we know almost nothing; his art, as we shall see directly, was kept strictly secret, and he was bound by oath not to reveal it.[629] But we may safely argue back in general terms from the relation of magistrate and augur under the later Republic to the relation of augur and Rex, from whom descended the magistrate's _imperium_. The one essential thing to remember is that _it was in all periods the magistrate who was responsible_, under the sanction and advice of his assistants the pontifices and augurs, for the maintenance of the _pax deorum_. The lay element in the actual working of the constitution never lost this prerogative. Rome was never hierarchically governed.

It would be going beyond the scope of these lectures if I were to plunge at this point into the thorny question of the exact relation between magistrate and augur in respect of details. Nor do I propose to go into the minutiae of augural lore, which are not instructive, like those of sacrifice, for our survey of Roman religious experience. It will be sufficient to state in outline what I believe to be necessary for our purpose.[630] The person who had the _auspicia_, _i.e._ originally the Rex, like the later magistrate, had to watch for signs from heaven; in order to do so he marked out a _templum_, a rectangular space, by noting certain objects, trees or what not, beyond which, whether he looked at earth or sky, he need take no notice of what he saw. The spot where he took up his position for this purpose was itself a rectangular space,[631] marked out on a similar principle; in each case the space was _liberatus effatus_, _i.e._ freed from previous associations by a form of words, and ready, if need were (as in the case of _loca sacra_) to be further handed over to the deities as their property; this consecration, however, did not, of course, follow in the ordinary procedure of the _auspicia_. In the _urbana auspicia_ all _loca effata_ must be within the sacred boundary of the _pomoerium_. Within this the magistrate watched in silence at the dead of night for such signs as he especially asked for (_auspicia impetrativa_); those which offered themselves without such specification (_oblativa_) he was not bound to take cognisance of unless some one claimed his attention for them. The signs were originally in the regal period, if we may guess from the word _auspicium_, only such as birds supplied, and the space in which they were watched for was not complicated by the divisions of the later augural art.[632] The business of the augur was, we may suppose, to see that the details were carried out correctly, and to interpret the signs; but those signs were not sent to _him_, for he was not the actual representative of the State in this ritual.

If the constitutional position and duty of the augurs have now been made sufficiently clear, I may go on to explain briefly, as in the case of the pontifices, how the office became gradually secularised, and the duty formalised, so that if there ever had been anything of a really religious character in this art, any genuine belief in the manifestation by the Power of his will in matters of State life, such character, such belief, had become by the second century B.C. entirely paralysed and destroyed. But the history of the augurate is much more difficult to follow than that of the pontificate. The work of the pontifices touched the life of every day, public and private, at many points, with the result that their secrets ceased to be secrets by the end of the fourth century B.C. The work of the augurs was occasional, and more technical than that of the other college; it can hardly be said to have affected the religion of family life, nor did it continually bear upon public life, as did the pontifical knowledge of the _ius divinum_ and the calendar. Hence the augural lore was never published, under pressure of public opinion, and neither ancient nor modern scholars have had to waste their time in investigating it. Books were indeed written about it in later times by one or two curious students, but in the time of Cicero, who was himself an augur, the neglect of it was general, even by members of the college.[633]

This mysterious augural lore was preserved in books, like that of the pontifices; and in all probability these books were put together in the same period as the latter, viz., the two centuries immediately following the abolition of the kingship.[634] I think there is a strong probability that the augurate emerged from the age of Etruscan rule which marks the latter part of the kingly period, with increased importance and fresh activity, the result of immediate contact with Etruscan methods of divination.[635] It is likely that they began in this way to cultivate the art of divination by lightning, which was peculiarly Etruscan, and to divide their _templum_ into _regiones_, which, as I said just now, were not apparently needed for the observation of omens from birds. How far they carried this art we cannot tell, owing to the loss of their books and the commentaries upon them; but about the Etruscan discipline we do know something. Those who wish to have a glimpse of it may consult the first chapter of the fourth volume of Bouché-Leclercq's _History of Divination_, as a more intelligible account than any known to me.[636] But all I need to insist on now is the likelihood that the augurs began the Republican period with a power of interpretation which was the more important because the art was changed; it is now the depository not only of the old bird lore, but of the new lightning lore. And as this last became the peculiar characteristic of the art of public divination, and as the augurs were, like the pontifices, a close self-electing corporation until 104 B.C. and a close self-electing _patrician_ body until the lex Ogulnia of 300 B.C., holding secret meetings every month on the _arx_,[637] and recording their lore in books which were never made public, they might well have grown into a powerful hierarchy, _if they had only been possessed of the right of spectio_. What saved Rome from this fate was simply the fact that the college was a body of interpreters only, or, in other words, the principle that the _auspicia_ belonged exclusively to the magistrate. The _auspicia_ were in fact a matter of public law, not of religion, properly speaking; the idea on which they were based, that the sanction of the deities was needed for every public action, very early lost its true significance, and the process of taking them became a mere form, the religious character of which was almost entirely forgotten. They ceased to be matter of religion just as the amulet or any other form of preventive magic fails to be reckoned as within the sphere of religion; the feeling was there that they must be attended to (though even that feeling lost its strength in course of time), but only as a matter of custom, not because the Power was really believed to sanction an act in this way.

Thus it seems that the importance of the augurs belongs to Roman public law, and not to the history of Roman religious experience. It will be found fully explained, in that connection, in Mommsen's _Staatsrecht_, or in Dr. Greenidge's volume on _Roman Public Life_.[638] All we have to note here is the complete secularisation of what was once really a part of the Roman religion; the augurs themselves were public men and could hold magistracies, and their art of interpretation came to be used for secular and political purposes only. They could declare a magistrate _vitio creatus_, whether they had been present at the taking of the auspices or not; they could also on appeal stop the proceedings at a public assembly, whether for election or legislation; it may be said of them that in one way or another they had a veto on every public transaction.[639] As Cicero expresses it in his _ius divinum_, in the second book of his work on the constitution: "Quae augur iniusta nefasta vitiosa dira defixerit inrita infectaque sunto, quique non paruerit, capital esto."[640] But in spite of the fine words _iniusta nefasta vitiosa_, there was no religious principle involved in this solemn injunction. When Bibulus in 59 B.C. sought as consul to stop Caesar's proceedings by using his right of _spectio_, all he had to do was to announce that he was going to look for lightning (_obnuntiare_); and if there had been the smallest remnant of religious belief left in the Roman mind about such transactions, it would quietly have acquiesced, in the conviction that Jupiter would send lightning to the Roman magistrate who asked for it; as it was, Caesar took no notice, and the Roman people only laughed. Caesar was at the time, let us note, the head of the Roman religion, pontifex maximus. So with the augurs as the interpreters of the magisterial _spectio_; proud as Cicero was of becoming an augur, with all the old surviving elective ritual,[641] he never, we may be sure, believed for a moment that he had the power of interpreting the will of the gods. A century before his augurship the whole business of public divination had been regulated by statute, like any other secular matter; and in his own day it was an open question with men of education whether there were such a thing as divination at all.[642] True, as we shall see, the _illegitimate_ forms of divination were at this very time gaining ground, as the current of superstition increased in strength which marks this last period of the republic; but the augur's art and the _spectio_ of the magistrate were still surviving as mere constitutional fossils, and were not destined to share largely in Augustus' heroic attempt to put fresh life into the _ius divinum_. _Vile damnum_, as Tacitus said of the foreign quacks banished to Sardinia by Tiberius; for neither in the sphere of religion nor later in that of politics can the art of divination be said to have had any lasting value.

I have not dealt at any length with the augurs and the State system of divination, but I hope I have said enough to show that, as I hinted at the beginning of this lecture, it affords an excellent illustration of the way in which the religious instinct, the desire to be in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, was first soothed and satisfied, then hypnotised and paralysed, by the formalisation and gradual secularisation of religious processes. The desire to obtain the sanction of the Power by seeking for favourable signs or omens seems to be a universal instinct of human nature, though a perverse one; if left to itself it will apparently pass into the region of harmless folklore, where it does not seriously interfere with human progress, either secular or religious; but where, as at Rome, it is taken up into the ritual of a religious system, and is further allowed to express itself mechanically in the region of public law, it exhausts itself rapidly, loses all its original significance, and becomes a clog on human progress.

In ancient Italy this instinct for divination was nowhere so strongly and so perversely developed into a mechanical system as in Etruria, and it is highly probable that this development contributed largely to the rapid political and moral decay of the Etruscan people. The narrow aristocratic constitution of the Etruscan cities, worked by a kind of priestly nobility, seems to have afforded great opportunities for the cultivation of the perverse art which (as we are now beginning to recognise) this people had brought with them from the East.[643] I have already suggested that an Etruscan dominion at Rome had very probably unfortunate results in developing and formalising the art of the augurs. But the age of the Tarquinii was not the only one in which the sinister influence of this strange people was brought to bear on Roman religious institutions; and before I close this lecture I must say a very few words about a second invasion of Etruscan perversity, which began some two centuries and a half later. This was the result of that renewed _religio_, that feeling of anxiety and sometimes of despair characteristic of the last half of the third century B.C., the perilous era of the Punic wars, with which I shall deal more particularly in the next lecture. The state religion could not soothe it; neither pontifices nor augurs had any sufficient native remedy for it, and as the ritual of worship was reinforced from Greece and the East, so the ritual of divination was reinforced from Etruria.

The Etruscans seem to have educated their diviners with care and system. We do not know the details of such education, but it seems likely that there were schools of these prophets, by means of which the art was handed down and developed.[644] The word for the person thus trained was _haruspex_ in its Italian form as known to us, though it had an Etruscan original.[645] The art acquired was of three kinds--the interpretation of lightning; the explanation and interpretation of the entrails of victims, and especially of the liver; and, thirdly, the explanation and expiation of portents and prodigia.[646] All three departments seem to have been carried to an extreme degree of perverse development. To give an idea of it I need but refer to recent discussions of the relation between the divisions marked on a bronze model of a victim's liver (found in 1877 at Piacenza), in which are written the Etruscan names of a great number of deities, and the somewhat similar divisions of the templum of the heavens as given by Martianus Capella in explanation of the celestial dwellings of the Italian deities. A study of this unprofitable subject, of which the only interest lies in the illustration it offers of the prostitution of human ingenuity, will be found in a little work by Carl Thulin, published in the series called _Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten_.[647]

Just as the Roman authorities had recourse from time to time to the Sibylline books, so also they occasionally, though not apparently before the Punic wars, sought the help of the trained Etruscan diviners. We shall come across instances of this in the next two lectures, and I need not specify them now. They seem to have used their art in all its departments; and in the most degraded of these, the examination of entrails, it was found so convenient to have their services in a campaign that in course of time one at least seems to have accompanied every Roman army.[648] The complicated art of augury might in fact be dispensed with if you had a _haruspex_ ready and willing at a moment's notice to give you a good report of the victim's liver. To keep up the supply of experts, the senate, probably in the second century B.C., determined to select and train ten boys of noble family in each Etruscan city. This was the last service that the degenerate Etruscan people rendered to its conquerors, and a more degrading one it is impossible to imagine. These foreign diviners were never admitted to the dignity of a _collegium_;[649] they rather played the part of the domestic chaplain kept to say grace before meat. For a moment they attract our attention in connection with the persecution of Cicero by his political enemies, and the _consecratio_ after his exile of the site of his house on the Palatine hill.[650] For a moment again we meet with them in the reign of Claudius, who was interested in the Etruscans and wrote a work about them, and once raised the question in the senate of the revival of the haruspices and their art--such part of it, at least, as might seem worth preserving--"ne vetustissima Italiae disciplina per desidium exolesceret."[651] And strange to say, though in fact no part of this ancient Italian discipline was in the least worth preserving, it survived in outward form into the fourth century of the empire.[652] We read with astonishment in the code of the Christian emperor Theodosius, that if the imperial palace or other public buildings are struck by lightning the haruspices are to be consulted, according to ancient custom, as to the meaning of the portent.[653] Thirteen years after the death of Theodosius, in 408, Etruscan experts offered their services to Pompeianus, prefect of Rome, to save the city from the Goths. Pompeianus was tempted, but consulted Innocent, the Bishop of Rome, who "did not see fit to oppose his own opinion to the wishes of the people at such a crisis, but stipulated that the magic rites should be performed secretly." What followed is uncertain. "The Christian historian says that the rites were performed, but were unavailing; the pagan Zosimus affirms that the aid of the Tuscans was declined."[654] So hard died the futile arts of the most unfruitful of all Italian races.

NOTES TO LECTURE XIII

[594] Stanley's _Jewish Church_ (ed. 1906), vol. i. p. 398 foll.

[595] _Hist. de divination dans l'antiquité_, vol. i. p. 7 foll.; divination is "contemplative," magic "active." But this learned author did not deal with divination except as it existed in Greece and Italy; and in view of our present extended knowledge this differentia is not instructive.

[596] See Tylor's article in the last edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and his _Gifford Lectures_, Pt. ii. ch. iv.; Haddon, _Magic and Fetishism_, p. 40. Bouché-Leclercq, _Hist. de divination dans l'antiquité_, vol. i. p. 7, distinguishes divination from magic; but his knowledge of the subject was limited to civilised races.

[597] Mr. Marett seems doubtful about it: see his _Threshold of Religion_, pp. 42 and 83. In the latter passage he says that it may or may not be treated as a branch of magic, and may be "originally due to some dim sort of theorising about causes, the theory engendering the practice rather than the practice the theory." I should doubt whether, when the facts have been fully collected, this will be the conclusion to which they point.

[598] _Evolution of the Aryan_, Drucker's translation, p. 369.

[599] _Ib._ pp. 364, 374.

[600] A curious survival of divination from the agricultural period, which was taken over by the State, but not fixed to a day in the calendar, is the _augurium canarium_. The exta of red puppies which had been sacrificed were consulted, apparently with a view to ascertain the probability of the corn ripening well (Festus, p. 285, quoting Ateius Capito). See _R.F._ p. 90, and the references there given; also Cic. _de Legibus_, ii. 20; Fest. 379; and Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, p. 2328.

[601] See above, p. 102.

[602] See Dr. Jevons' account in Gardner and Jevons, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, ch. vii.

[603] Bouché-Leclercq in the introduction to his first volume (p. 3) expresses a different opinion. He thinks that the benefit conferred by divination in the conduct of life was the most valuable part of religion. With this I entirely disagree.

[604] Cic. _de Divinatione_, ii. 51.

[605] See Bouché-Leclercq, iv. 119 foll. In a recently published essay, _De antiquorum daemonismo_, by J. Tamburnino (Giessen, 1909), the only genuine Roman evidence adduced of possession is Minucius Felix, _Octavius_, ch. 27, _i.e._ it belongs to the late second century A.D. In the so-called Italian oracles there is no question of it: _e.g._ the lots at Praeneste were worked by a boy (Cic. _de Div._ ii. 86).

[606] Livy i. 36; Cic. _de Div._ i. 17. It is Dion. Hal. iii. 70 who says that his art was Etruscan.

[607] Bouché-Leclercq, iv. 120.

[608] For Carmenta see _R.F._ 167 and 291 foll. For Fortuna, _ib._ 223 foll.; cp. 170 foll.

[609] Aug. _de Civ. Dei_, iv. 11; he uses the plural _Carmentes_; see _R.F._ as above. Virgil, _Aen._ viii. 336.

[610] As "superstitiosi vates" in the passage of Ennius quoted below. In his imaginary _ius divinum_ Cicero uses the word for "fatidici" authorised by the State (_de Legg._ ii. 20). He is perhaps thinking of the haruspices.

[611] Ribbeck, _Fragm. tragicorum Romanorum_, p. 55. For hariolus outside the play-writers, Cic. _de Nat. Deor._ i. 20. 55, where it is combined with haruspices, augures, vates, and coniectores (interpreters of dreams). _Ad Att._ viii. 11. 3.

[612] Cato, _R.R._ ch. 54; cp. Columella, i. 8 and xi. 1.

[613] See P. Regell, _De augurum publicorum libris_, p. 6 "Omnia illa auguria quae futurarum rerum aliquid predicunt ... augurum publicorum disciplinae abroganda sunt: aut privati sunt augurii, aut Tuscorum disciplinae." Cp. Cic. _de Har. Resp._ 9. 18.

[614] Cic. _de Div._ i. 16. 28; Val. Max. ii. 1. 1.

[615] _La Religione nella vita domestica_, i. 153 foll.; 232 foll.

[616] Cic. _de Div._ i. 16, 28.

[617] This fragment is preserved in Gellius vii. 6. 10. Nigidius may be responsible for many of Pliny's omens. Regell, _op. cit._ p. 8.

[618] Hor. _Odes_, iii. 27. 1 foll.

[619] Exactly the same misfortune occurred in the middle ages. The monks had abundant opportunity of observation, but were occupied with other matters, and have left behind them no works on natural history.

[620] See above, p. 169 foll.

[621] Livy vi. 12.

[622] See the fragment of Ennius' _Annales_ in Cic. _de Div._ i. 107.

[623] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 450; _Lex coloniae Genetivae_, 66 and 67.

[624] Livy vi. 41.

[625] See a good account in the _Dict. of Antiquities_, vol. i. 252 and 255; and Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, _s.v._ "auspicia."

[626] _Roman Public Life_, p. 162.

[627] Wissowa, _R.K._ 451, note 2; Marq. 241.

[628] Mommsen, _Staatsrecht_, i. 86.

[629] Wissowa, _R.K._ 451, note 7; Plut. _Quaest. Rom._ 99; Pliny, _Ep._ 4. 8. Plutarch asks why an augur can never be deprived of his office, and answers that the secrecy of his art made it impossible. Cp. Paulus, 16.

[630] The latest authoritative account of the auspicia is in Pauly-Wissowa, _s.v._, where the necessary literature and material will be found for a study of an extremely complicated subject.

[631] The technical term was _templum minus_, in contradistinction to the _templum maius_, _i.e._ the space in which he was to look for signs. See Bouché-Leclercq, iv. 197; Fest. 157. The usual place was the _arx_, where was the _auguraculum_, on which the magistrate taking the auspices "pitched his tent" (_tabernaculum_), looking to the east, with the north as his left or lucky side. Von Jhering, _op. cit._ p. 364, makes some ingenious use of this procedure to support his theory that the origin of such institutions is to be found in the period of migration.

[632] That the division of the _templum_ into _regiones_ was necessary only for the _auguria caelestia_, and not for the observation of birds, is the conclusion drawn by Wissowa (_R.K._ 457, note 2) from the words of Cicero (_de Legibus_, ii. 21) in his _ius divinum_: "caelique fulgura regionibus ratis temperanto" (_i.e._ the magistrates).

[633] Cicero expressly says that even old Cato complained of the neglect of the auspicia by the college: _de Div._ i. 15. 28; above, in sec. 25, he had said the same thing of the augurs of his own day, _i.e._ including himself. We know of a work on the _auspicia_ by M. Messalla, an augur, from which Gellius, xiii. 15, quotes a lengthy extract (cp. ch. 14). This man was consul in 53 B.C.; Schanz, _Gesch. der röm. Lit._, ii. 492. Just at the same time Appius Claudius, Cicero's predecessor as governor of Cilicia, wrote _libri augurales_, to which Cicero more than once alludes in his correspondence with Appius: _ad Fam._ iii. 9. 3 and 11. 4. It is plain that the old augural lore is now treated only as a curiosity, of which the secrecy need no longer be respected.

[634] P. Regell, _De augurum publicorum libris_, whose excellent little work has never been superseded, thinks (p. 19) that the _libri_ were the result of the neglect of the art, _i.e._ that it was necessary to put it in writing, because otherwise it would be forgotten. "Tota eius vita," he says, "lenta est mors." The lore was complete about the time of the decemvirate, but _decreta_ must have been continually added (p. 23). The nucleus may be represented in Cicero, _de Legibus_, ii. 20. 21, and perhaps existed in Saturnian verse (Festus, 290). The additions in the way of decree or comment would probably range over the fourth and third centuries B.C. like those of the pontifices. No doubt the Hannibalic war had the effect of diminishing the importance of the lore, as the next lecture should show. On the whole we may put the great period of the college between the decemvirate and the war with Hannibal.

[635] This is the opinion of Bouché-Leclercq, _op. cit._ vol. iv. p. 205 foll.; cp. Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 457. Cicero calls the augurs "interpretes Iovis Optimi maximi" (_de Legibus_, ii. 20), and herein could hardly have made a mistake, as he was himself an augur. As the great deity was of Etruscan origin in this form, I should conjecture that the college took new ground and gained new influence under the Etruscan dynasty.

[636] Cp. also Müller-Deecke, _Die Etrusker_, ii. 165 foll. Our knowledge comes chiefly from the learned but obscure writer Martianus Capella (ed. Eyssenhardt), who wrote under the later Empire.

[637] For these meetings see Cic. _de Div._ i. 41. 90; Regell, p. 23. They were obsolete in Cicero's time, but seem to have still existed in the time of Scipio Aemilianus: Cic. _Lael._ 2. 7.

[638] _Staatsrecht_, i. 73 foll.; Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, p. 172 foll.

[639] The best account of the constitutional power of the augurs is in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encyclopädie_, _s.v._ "augur," vol. i. p. 2334 foll.; cp. Wissowa, _R.K._ 457-8.

[640] _De Legibus_, ii. 21.

[641] The outward form of _co-optatio_ was still preserved, like our "election" of a bishop by a chapter. Cicero was co-opted by Hortensius after nomination by two other augurs. See his interesting account of this in his _Brutus_, ch. i. The survival may be taken as throwing light on the original secrecy and closeness of the _collegium_.

[642] For the _leges Aelia et Fufia_, cf. Greenidge, _op. cit._ p. 173. The Stoics of the last century B.C. were divided on this point. See below, p. 399. In the second book of his _de Divinatione_, following the Academic or agnostic school, he himself confutes his brother Quintus' argument for divination contained in Bk. I.

[643] This is the view of Thulin, _Die Götter des Martianus Capella und der Bronzeleber von Piacenza_ (Giessen, 1906), p. 7 foll., and it seems at present to hold the field: see Gruppe, _Die mythologische Literatur aus den Jahren 1898-1905_, p. 336.

[644] Müller-Deecke, vol. ii. p. 7 foll.

[645] See Deecke's note on p. 12 of Müller-Deecke, vol. ii. It is possibly connected with _hariolus_.

[646] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 470, and Müller-Deecke, vol. ii. 165 foll.

[647] See above, note 50.

[648] References to Livy will be found in Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 473, note 11. One of these, to Livy xxvii. 16. 14, is worth quoting as suggesting that a _haruspex_ might give useful advice in spite of his art: "Hostia quoque caesa consulenti (Fabio) deos haruspex, cavendum a fraude hostili et ab insidiis, praedixit."

[649] They were not _sacerdotes publici Romani_, nor is a _collegium_ mentioned till the reign of Claudius: Tac. _Ann._ xi. 15. The proper term seems to have been _ordo_, which occurs in inscriptions of the Empire: Marq. p. 415.

[650] typo fixed: 54: See the oration _De haruspicum responsis_ (especially 5. 9), the genuineness of which is now generally acknowledged. Asconius quotes it as Cicero's (ed. Clark, p. 70): so also Quintilian, v. 11. 42.

[651] Tac. _Ann._ 11. 15.

[652] The _haruspices_ mentioned in inscriptions (above, note 56) were not the genuine article; they were Romans and _equites_. Probably this was only one of the many ways of finding dignity or employment for persons of good birth under the Empire.

[653] _Cod. Theod._ xvi. 10. 1 (of the year 321 A.D.), quoted by Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 475, note 1. In ix. 16. 3. 5, however, the practice of consulting such experts is strictly prohibited.

[654] The story is told in Prof. Dill's _Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire_, ed. 1, p. 41.

LECTURE XIV

THE HANNIBALIC WAR

We have noticed two different, if not opposing, tendencies in Roman religious experience since the disappearance of the kingship. First, there was a tendency towards the reception of new and more emotional forms of worship, under the direction of the Sibylline books and their keepers; secondly, we have seen how, in the hands of pontifices and augurs, religious practice became gradually so highly formularised and secularised that the real religious instinct is hardly discernible in it, except indeed in the degraded form of scruple as to the exact performance of the ritual laid down. There was also, towards the end of that period, a third tendency beginning to show itself, which was eventually to complete the paralysis of the old religion--a tendency to neglect and despise the old religious forms. This need not surprise us, if we keep in mind two facts: (1) that Rome is now continually in close contact with Greece and her life and thought; (2) that it seems to be inevitable in western civilisation that a hard and fast system of religious rule should eventually arouse rebellion in certain minds. Already there are a few signs that the regulations of the _ius divinum_ are not invariably treated with respect.

As long ago as 293 B.C. and the last struggle with the Samnites, we find a trace of this neglect or carelessness. One of the chicken-keepers (_pullarii_) reported falsely to the consul Papirius that the sacred chickens had given good omen in their eating: this was discovered by a young nephew of Papirius, "iuvenis ante doctrinam deos spernentem natus," as Livy calls him, and came to the consul's ears. Papirius' reception of the news was characteristic of the way in which a Roman could combine practical common-sense with the formal respect claimed by his _ius divinum_; he declared that the omen had been reported to him as good, and therefore "populo Romano exercituique egregium auspicium est." The umpire had decided favourably for him, and there was an end of the matter, except indeed that that umpire was placed in the forefront of the battle that the gods might punish him themselves, and there of course he died.[655] A generation later we have a case of far more pronounced contempt in the familiar story of P. Claudius Pulcher and his colleague Junius, each of whom lost a Roman fleet after neglecting the warning of the _pullarius_: of Claudius it is told that he had the sacred chickens thrown into the sea.[656] Another well-known story is that of Flaminius, the democrat consul who, as we shall learn directly, was defeated and killed at Trasimene after leaving Rome with none of his religious duties performed.[657] The famous Marcellus of this second Punic war, though himself an "augur optimus," according to Cicero, declined to act upon an _auspicium ex acuminibus_--electric sparks seen at the end of the soldiers' spears--and was accustomed to ride in his litter with blinds drawn, so that he should not see any evil omen.[658] Assuredly the transition from superstition to reason had its ludicrous side even in public life.

But it is not the gradual approach of rationalism that is the subject of this lecture. For years after the death of Flaminius we have no trace of it: that was no time for speculating, and it would have been dangerous. The religious history of the time, as recorded by Livy, shows on the contrary that _religio_ in the old sense of the word is once more occupying the Roman mind--the sense of awe in the presence of the Unknown, the sense of sin or of duties omitted, or merely a vague sense of terror that suggested recourse to the supernatural. No wonder: for though Italy had been invaded within the memory of living man, it was not then invaded by one who had sworn to his father in infancy to destroy the enemy root and branch. Instinctively both Romans and loyal Italians knew that they were face to face with a struggle for life and death. It is hard for us to realise the terror of the situation as it must have been in those days of slow communication and doubtful news. It is to Livy's credit that he recognised it fully, and all who look on history as something more than wars and battles must be eternally grateful to him for searching the records of the pontifices for evidence of a people's emotion and the means taken to soothe it. Polybius has nothing to tell us of this but a few generalisations, drawn from his own experience a century later.[659] In all essential attributes of a Roman historian Livy is far the better of the two. I propose to follow his guidance in trying to gain some knowledge of the revived _religio_ of the age and the way in which it was dealt with by the authorities.

It is in the winter of 218-17, when Hannibal was wintering in north Italy after his victory at the Trebbia, that Livy first brings the matter before us.[660] He uses the word I have just now and so often used: men's minds were _moti in religionem_, and they reported many _prodigia_ which were uncritically accepted by the vulgar. He begins with Rome, and here it is worth noting that these portents issue from the crowded haunts of the markets, the _forum olitorium_, and the _forum boarium_, both close to the river and the quays. In the latter place, for example, an ox was said to have climbed to the third story of a house, whence it threw itself down, terrified by the panic of the inhabitants--a story which incidentally throws light on the housing of the lower population at the time.[661] Other wonders were announced from various parts of Italy,[662] and the decemviri were directed to have recourse to the Sibylline books, except for the _procuratio_ of one miracle, common in a volcanic country, the fall of pebble-rain.[663] This had a _procuratio_ to itself by settled custom, the _novendiale sacrum_,[664] an expiation parallel with that which, in the religion of the family, followed a birth or a death. For the rest, the whole city was subjected to _lustratio_,[665] and, in fact, the whole population was busy with the work. A _lectisternium_ was ordered for Iuventas,[666] the deity of the young recruits, a _supplicatio_ for Hercules at one of his temples, and five special victims were ordered for _Genius_--directions which have been variously interpreted. I am disposed to think of them as referring to the capacity of the State to increase its male population in the face of military peril. That the authorities were looking ahead is clear from the fact next stated, that one of the praetors had to undertake a special vow if the State should survive for ten years. These measures, ordered by the books, "magna ex parte levaverant religione animos." Unfortunately, the wayward consul Flaminius spoilt their endeavours by wilfully neglecting his religious duties at the Capitol, and also at the Alban mount, where he should have presided at the Latin festival, and hurrying secretly to the seat of war, lest his command should be interfered with by the aristocrats.

Spring came on, and with the immediate prospect of a crisis the _religio_ broke out afresh.[667] Marvels were reported from Sicily and Sardinia, as well as Italy and Rome. We need not trouble ourselves with them, except so far as to note that one, at least, was pure invention; at Falerii, where there was an oracle by lots,[668] one tablet fell out of the bundle with the words written on it, _Mavors telum suum concutit_. The mental explanation of all this is lost to us;[669] it would be interesting to know how the reports really originated and were conveyed to Rome. That a widely spread _religio_ is really indicated we can hardly doubt. The steps taken to soothe it, the religious prescriptions, are of more value to us. The Senate received the reports, and the consul then introduced the question of procuration. Besides decreeing, no doubt with the sanction of the pontifices, certain ordinary measures, the Senate referred the matter to the decemviri and the Sibylline books. A _fulmen_, weighing fifty pounds, was awarded to Jupiter, and gifts of silver to his consorts in the Capitoline temple. Then follow directions which show that the _religio_ of women was to be particularly cared for. Juno Regina of the Aventine was to have a tribute collected by matrons, and she and the famous Juno Sospita of Lanuvium were to have special sacrifices; and it is probable that another Juno Regina, she of Ardea, was the object of a sacrifice, which the decemviri themselves undertook in the forum of that city.[670] This prominence of Juno may be a counterpart, I think, to the special attention shown to Hercules and Genius in the previous winter.[671] And it is interesting to notice that the libertinae were directed to collect money for their own goddess Feronia.[672]

It is evident that Livy, in detailing these directions from the books of the pontifices,[673] took them in the chronological order in which they were to be carried out; for the day sacred to Juno Regina of the Aventine is September 1, that of Feronia November 13, and the last instruction he mentions is in December, when Saturnus was to have a sacrifice and _lectisternium_ at his own temple in the forum (prepared by senators), and a _convivium publicum_. This meant, we note with interest, the Graecising of this old Roman cult, which now took the form which is so familiar to us of public rejoicing by all classes, including slaves.[674] But long before these dates the terrible disaster of Trasimene had forced the Senate, at the urgent persuasion of the dictator Fabius, to have recourse to the sacred books again.[675] Never before had they been so frequently consulted; the ordinary _piacula_ of the pontifices were not thought of; a consul had grievously broken the _pax deorum_, and what remedy was possible no Roman authority could tell. The prescriptions of the books were many and various; the most interesting of them is the famous _ver sacrum_, an old Italian custom, already referred to, but here prescribed by a Greek authority. This was submitted to the people in Comitia, and carried with quaint provisions suited to protect them against any unconscious mistake in carrying out the vow, such as might produce further _religio_. We will only notice that though, according to the old tradition, it was to Mars that the Italian stocks were wont in time of famine and distress to dedicate the whole agricultural produce of the year, together with the male children born that spring,[676] in this crisis it is to Jupiter that the vow is made. It is the Roman people only who here make the vow, and they make it, I doubt not, to that great Jupiter of the Capitol who for 300 years has been their guardian, and in whose temple are kept the sacred books that ordered it.[677]

But the authorities were determined to make now a supreme effort to still the alarm, and to restore the people to cheerfulness. They went on to vow _ludi magni_, _i.e._ extra games beside the usual yearly _ludi Romani_, at a cost of 333,333 and one-third asses, three being the sacred number. Then a _supplicatio_ was decreed, which was attended not only by the urban population, but by crowds from the country, and for three days the decemviri superintended a _lectisternium_ on a grand scale, such as had never been seen in Rome before, in which twelve deities in pairs, Roman and Greek indistinguishable from each other, were seen reclining on cushions. If Wissowa interprets this rightly,[678] as I think he does, it marks a turning-point in the religious history of Rome. The old distinction between _di indigetes_ and _di novensiles_ now vanishes for good; the showy Greek ritual is applied alike to Roman and to Greek deities; the Sibylline books have conquered the _ius divinum_, and the decemviri in religious matters are more trusted physicians than the pontifices. The old Roman State religion, which we have been so long examining, may be said henceforward to exist only in the form of dead bones, which even Augustus will hardly be able to make live.

So far, however, all had been orderly and dignified. But after Cannae we begin to divine that the stress of disaster is telling more severely on the nervous fibre of the people. Two Vestals were found guilty of adultery always a suspicious event; in such times a wicked rumour once spread would have its own way. One killed herself; the other was buried alive at the Colline gate. A _scriba pontificis_, who had seduced one of them, was beaten to death by the pontifex maximus. Such a violation of the _pax deorum_ was itself a prodigium, and again the books were consulted, and an embassy was sent to Delphi with Fabius Pictor as leader.[679] Greece is looming ever larger in the eyes of the frightened Roman.

Under such circumstances it is hardly astonishing to read of a new (or almost new) and horrible rite, in which a Greek man and woman and a Gallic man and woman (slaves, no doubt) were buried alive in the _forum boarium_ in a hole closed by a big stone, which had already, says Livy, been used for human victims--"minime Romano sacro." As in the case of the Vestals, blood-shedding is avoided, but the death is all the more horrible. What are we to make of such barbarism? Technically, it must have been a sacrifice to Tellus and the Manes, like the _devotio_ of Decius, and like that also, it probably had in it a substratum of magic.[680] As regards the choice of victims it baffles us, for if we can understand the selection of a Gallic pair at a time when the Gauls of North Italy were taking Hannibal's side, it is not so easy to see why the Greeks were just now the objects of public animosity. Diels has suggested that Gelo, son of Hiero of Syracuse, deserted Rome for Carthage after Cannae,[681] and wanting a better explanation we may accept this, and imagine, if we can, that the cruel death of a pair of Greek slaves need not be taken as expressing any general feeling of antagonism or hatred for things Greek. But, after all, the most astonishing fact in the whole story is this--that the abominable practice lasted into the Empire; Pliny, at least, emphatically states that his own age had seen it, and heard the solemn form of prayer which the magister of the quindecemviri used to dictate over the victims.[682] Pliny, we may note, also speaks of the _forum boarium_ as the scene of the sacrifice, where also the first gladiatorial games were exhibited.[683] Rome was already accustomed to see horrors there.

As we have now reached the climax of the religious panic of these years, I may pause here for a moment to refer to an interesting matter which I mentioned in my third lecture. At this very time, if we accept Wissowa's conjecture, the twenty-seven puppets of straw known as Argei, which were thrown over the _pons sublicius_ by the Vestals on the ides of May, were being substituted as surrogates for the sacrifice by drowning of the same number of Greeks (Argei); an atrocity which he fancies actually took place somewhere in the interval between the first and second Punic wars, under orders found in the Sibylline books.[684] All scholars know that there were in the four regions of the old city twenty-seven (or twenty-four) chapels, _sacella_, which were also called Argei, and have caused great trouble to topographers and archaeologists.[685] To complete his hypothesis, Wissowa conjectures that these too date from this same age, and were distributed over the city in order to take away the miasma caused by some great pestilence or other trouble, of which, owing to the loss of Livy's second decade, we have no information. But neither have we a scrap of information about the building of the chapels, or the drowning of the twenty-seven Greeks, an atrocity so abominable that the only way in which we might conceivably account for its disappearance in the records would be the hypothesis of a conspiracy of silence, an impossible thing at Rome. The loss of Livy's second decade cannot of itself be an explanation; such an event is just what an epitomator would have seized on, yet there is no trace of it in the surviving epitomes, nor in any other author who may have had Livy before him. Varro knew nothing of it, so far as we can tell; where he refers to the Argei he makes no mention of such an astonishing origin either of puppets or chapels. If there had been a record in the books of the pontifices, it is impossible to imagine that he was not aware of it.

On the contrary, he quotes no official record, but a line of Ennius which attributes the origin of the Argei to Numa:[686]

libaque fictores Argeos et tutulatos.

Now Ennius was born in 239[687] B.C., and was, therefore, living when the whole astonishing business began. How does he come to ascribe to Numa institutions which were to himself exactly as the building of the Forth Bridge might be to an Edinburgh man of middle age? Why, too, if these institutions were of such recent date, did the Romans of the last two centuries B.C. invent all sorts of wild explanations of them, at which Wissowa very properly scoffs? It is for him to explain why these explanations were needed. It is inconceivable that in a large city, with colleges of priests preserving religious traditions and formulae, all memory of the remarkable origin of _sacella_ and puppets should have so completely vanished as to leave room for the growth of such a crop of explanations. These will be found in my _Roman Festivals_, p. 112, and whoever reads them will conclude at once, I am sure, that the Romans knew nothing at all about the true history of the Argei. We may still class this curious ceremony with some of the primitive magical or quasi-magical rites of the ancient settlement. We are not entitled to cite it as an example of the growing savagery of this trying period; and if it be argued that it is an example rather of humanity, because for the original victims straw puppets were substituted, the answer is that even if we were to grant the human sacrifice, the surrogation of puppets is a most unlikely thing to have happened.[688] It is a rare practice; Wissowa himself judiciously rejects it as an explanation of such objects as _oscilla_ and _maniae_. You cannot adopt it when you choose, to explain a difficulty, and then reject it when you choose. Why, one may ask, was this humane method not applied also to the two pairs of Gauls and Greeks just mentioned? But I need not pursue the subject further; we may be satisfied to reflect that from an anthropological point of view the Argei need never have been anything more than puppets.[689]

But to return to the religious history of the war. It would seem that the extraordinary series of performances ordered during the depression and despair that followed Cannae had succeeded for the time in quieting the _religio_. Fabius Pictor too had returned from Delphi,[690] and brought home in what seems to be hexameter verse instructions as to the worship of certain deities, with injunctions to the Romans to send gifts to the Pythian Apollo if prosperity should return to them, and ending with the significant words, "lasciviam (disorderly excitement) a vobis prohibete," which may be interpreted as "keep quiet, and do not get into a religious panic." The hexameters were Greek, but were translated for the benefit of the people; and Fabius publicly told how he had himself obeyed the voice of the oracle by sacrificing to the deities it named, and had worn the wreath, the sign that he was accomplishing religious work, during the whole of his journey home. This wreath he now deposited on the altar of Apollo. This was in 216, and it is remarkable that we hear of no new outbreak of _prodigia_, the normal symptom of _religio_, till the next year. Then we have a list; as Livy says,[691] "simplices et religiosi homines" were ready with them at any time. A panic arose in Rome, not strictly of a religious kind, which shows the nervousness of the population; a rumour went about that an army had been seen on the Janiculum, but men who were on the spot refuted it. In this case the Sibylline books were not consulted, but Etruscan haruspices were called in, who simply ordered a _supplicatio_ of the new kind, at the _pulvinaria_. This is the first, or almost the first instance of these experts being consulted; earlier statements of the kind are probably apocryphal, as I pointed out in the last lecture. It is not clear why the authorities had recourse to them at this moment; but I am inclined to think that the old remedies even of the Sibylline books and their keepers were getting stale, and that while it was thought undesirable to excite the people by new rites, it was felt that the familiar ones might gain some new prestige by being recommended by new experts. The old prescription, given by a new physician, may gain in authority. The next year again, 213, brought another crop of _prodigia_, but Livy dismisses them with the simple words, "His procuratis ex decreto pontificum."[692] It is reasonable to suppose that a reaction was taking place in the minds of the senators and pontifices, and that they were determined to take as little notice as possible of disturbing symptoms, relying on the prestige of the Delphic oracle, and acting on its advice to suppress _lascivia_.

But in this same year the _lascivia_ broke out again with unprecedented force. The cause was not only, as Livy explains it, the dreary continuance of the war with varying success; if we read between the lines we may guess that the break-up of family life occasioned by the deaths of so many heads of houses and their sons, had opened the way for _feminine_ excitement and for the introduction of external rites such as an old Roman _paterfamilias_ would no more have tolerated than the pontifices themselves. "Tanta religio," says Livy,[693] "et ea magna ex parte externa, civitatem incessit, _ut aut homines, aut dii repente alii viderentur facti_"; it seemed as if the old religious system, in spite of all its highly formalised apparatus of expiation, was being deliberately set aside. "Nec iam in secreto modo atque intra parietes abolebantur Romani ritus: sed in publico etiam ac foro Capitolioque (this is the hardest cut of all) _mulierum_ turba erat, nec sacrificantium nec precantium deos patrio more." To understand such an amazing religious rebellion against the _ius divinum_ we must remember that 80,000 men had fallen at Cannae, besides great numbers in the two previous years, and that therefore the real effective human support of that _ius_ had in great part given way. Private priests and prophets, vermin to be found all over the Graeco-Roman world, had captured for gain the minds of helpless women, and of the ruined and despairing population of the country now flocking into Rome. The aediles and triumviri capitales, responsible for the order of the city, could do nothing; the Senate had to commission the praetor urbanus to rid the people of these _religiones_. When in those days the Senate and magistrates took such a matter in hand, further rebellion was impossible. All we are told is that the praetor issued an edict ordering that all who possessed private forms of prophecy or prayer, or rules of sacrifice, should bring them to him before the kalends of April next; and that no one should sacrifice in public with any strange or foreign rite. I do not know that the wonderful good sense of this decree has ever been commented on. To take violent or cruel measures would have been dangerous in the extreme at such a psychological moment. Livy tells this story at the very end of the year 213, and the kalends of April referred to must be those of the next year; there was, therefore, plenty of time to obey the order, and in the meantime the excitement might subside of itself. The mischief was not absolutely and suddenly stopped; in private houses the new rites were allowed to go on,--a policy adhered to in time to come,--but the _ius divinum_ of the Roman State, the public worship of the Roman deities, must not be tampered with. This wise policy seems to have succeeded for the time; for even after the capture of Tarentum by Hannibal, and the prospect of an attack in that direction from Macedonia, we do not hear of any renewed outbreak. _Prodigia_ are reported as usual, but the remedy thought sufficient is only a single day's _supplicatio_ and a _sacrum novendiale_. The consuls, however, in the true Roman spirit, devoted themselves for several days to religious duties before leaving Rome for their commands.

This was at the beginning of the year 212. But after the Latin festival at the end of April we hear of a new _religio_, and a very curious one.[694] It looks as though certain Latin oracles, written in Saturnian verse, and attributed to an apocryphal _vates_ of the suspicious name of Marcius, had got abroad in the panic of the previous year, and had been confiscated by the praetor urbanus charged, as we saw, with the suppression of religious mischief. He had handed them on to the new praetor urbanus of 212. One of them prophesied the disaster of Cannae which had already happened; the other gave directions for instituting games in honour of Apollo, including one which placed the religious part of these _ludi_ in the hands of the decemviri. I strongly suspect that the whole transaction was a plan on the part of the Senate and the religious colleges, in order to quiet the minds of the people by a new religious festival in honour of a great deity of whose prestige every one had heard, for he had been long established in Rome; he is now to take a more worthy place there, to be incorporated in the _ius divinum_ in a new sense, in gratitude perhaps for his recent advice given to Fabius Pictor at Delphi. Possibly also he is to be regarded here as the Greek deity of healing, though we do not hear of any pestilence at the time; but four years later it was in consequence of an epidemic that these _ludi_ were renewed and made permanent. The main object of the moment was no doubt to amuse the people and occupy their minds. The whole population took part in the games, wearing wreaths as partakers in a sacred rite; the matrons were not left out; and every one kept his house door open and feasted before the eyes of his fellow-citizens.[695]

If it be asked why these games in honour of a Greek god should have been suggested by a Latin oracle, the answer is, I think, that the latter was used rather as a pretext for a pre-conceived plan; if it be true that the Marcian verses had won some prestige among the vulgar, it was an adroit stroke to invent one that might be used in this way. This is the only way in which we can satisfactorily account for the direction to the decemviri to undertake the necessary sacrifices. The government seizes a chance of taking the material of _religio_ out of the hands of the vulgar and utilising it for its own purposes. It was clever too to give the alleged Latin oracles the sanction of the _Graecus ritus_; "decemviri Graeco ritu hostiis sacra faciant," says the oracle. The keepers consulted the sacred books as to the projected _ludi_, and henceforward, as it would seem, these Latin oracles were placed in their keeping to be added to the Sibylline books in the collection on the Capitol. The amalgamation of Roman and Greek religion is complete. If there were any doubt of it after the _lectisternia_ to the twelve gods which we noticed just now, all such doubt is removed by the religious events of this year 212--that famous year in which Hannibal came within sight of Rome, and fell away again, never to return.

The student of Roman religious history, and of all religious psychology, as he follows carefully the extracts from the priestly records which Livy has embodied in his story of the last years of the great struggle, will find much to interest him. Even little things have here their significance. He will still find relics of the scruple about the minutiae of the _ius divinum_ to which the Romans had become habituated under priestly rule--_religio_ in that sense in which it is least really religious. He will find a Flamen Dialis resigning his priesthood because he had made a blunder in putting the _exta_ of a victim on the altar;[696] only too ready, it may have been, to take an opportunity of getting free of those numerous taboos which deprived the priest of Jupiter of all possibility of active life. Such a conjecture finds support in the curious fact that his successor was a youth of such bad character that his relations induced the pontifex maximus to select him for the sacred post, in hopes that the restrictive discipline he would have to undergo might improve his morals and make him a better citizen.[697] About the later history of this youth I may have something to say in the next lecture. Again, we find _religio_ of the scrupulous kind sadly worrying the stout old warrior Marcellus shortly before his death[698]: "Aliae atque aliae obiectae animo religiones tenebant." One of these _religiones_ was a curious one; he had vowed a temple of Honos and Virtus--two deities together; and the pontifices made difficulties, insisting that two deities could not inhabit the same _cella_, for if it should be struck by lightning, how were you to tell, in conducting the _procuratio_, to which of them to sacrifice? The difficulty was solved by building two temples. Such quaintnesses of the old type of religious idea are thus still found, but they are becoming mere survivals.

The _prodigia_ continue, and occasionally, as a new crisis in the war was known to be approaching, became exacerbated. In 208, just before the old consul Marcellus left the city to meet his death, he and his colleague were terribly pestered with them, and could not succeed in their sacrificing (_litare_). For many days they failed to secure the _pax deorum_.[699] When it was known that Hasdrubal was on his way from Spain, and that the greatest peril of the war was approaching, special steps were taken to make sure of that _pax_.[700] The pontifices ordered that twenty-seven maidens--a number of magical significance both in Greece and Italy[701]--should chant a _carmen_ composed by the poet Livius Andronicus; and in the elaborate ritual that followed, as the result of the striking of the temple of Juno on the Aventine by lightning, the decemviri and haruspices from Etruria also had a share. The procession of the maidens, singing and dancing through the city till they reached the temple of Juno by the Clivus Publicius, was a new feature in ritual, and must have been a striking one. Doubtless it was all a part of a deliberate policy to keep the women of the city in good humour, and in touch with the religion of the State, instead of going after other gods, as they had already gone and were again to go with amazing and perilous fervour. For Juno Regina of the Aventine was their special deity; and in this case they were authorised--all _matronae_ living within ten miles of the city--to contribute in money to a noble gift to the temple.

Hasdrubal was defeated and killed (207), and the danger passed away. Then, when the news reached Rome (if Livy's account may be relied on), there followed such an outburst of gratitude to the deities as we have never yet met with, and shall not meet with again in Roman history.[702] It was not only that the State ordered a _supplicatio_ of three days thanksgiving; men and women alike took advantage of it to press in crowds to the temples, the materfamilias with her children, and in her finest robes: "cum omni solutae metu, perinde ac si debellatum foret, deis immortalibus grates agerent." I would draw attention to the fact that here is no mere fulfilment of a vow, of a bargain, as some will have it; in this moment of real religious emotion the first thought is one of thankfulness that the _pax deorum_ is restored, and that the Power manifesting itself in the universe, though in the humble form of these dwellers in Roman temples, would permit the long-suffering people once more to feel themselves in right relation to him. As we go on with our studies in the two centuries that follow, let us bear this moment in mind; it will remind us that the religious instinct never entirely dies out in the heart of any people.

I would fain stop at this point, and have done with the war and its religious troubles; but there is one more event which cannot be omitted,--the solemn advent of a new deity, this time neither Greek nor Italian. After the Metaurus battle, the dreaded Hannibal yet remained in Italy, and so long as he was there the Romans could know no security. So far as religion could help them every possible means had been used; there seemed no expedient left. In 205 a pretext for inspecting the Sibylline books was found in an unusual burst of pebble-rain; and there, as it was given out, an oracle was deciphered, which foretold that Hannibal would have to leave Italy if the Magna Mater of Pessinus were brought to Rome.[703] In whose brain this idea originated we do not know, but it was a brilliant one. The eastern cult was wholly unknown at Rome, was something entirely new and strange, a fresh and hopeful prescription for an exhausted patient. The project was seized on with avidity, and supported by the influence of Delphi and of that strange soldier mystic the great Scipio.[704] The best man in the State was to receive the goddess, and when, after many months, she came to Italy in the form of a black stone, it was Scipio who was chosen for the duty. For Attalus, king of Pergamus, had consented to let her go from her Phrygian home; and when she arrived at Ostia, Scipio with all the Roman matrons went thither by land; alone he boarded the ship, received the goddess from her priests, and carried her to land, where the noblest women of the State received her,--received the black stone, that is,--and carried it in their arms in turns, while all Rome poured out to meet her, and burned incense at their doors as she passed by. And praying that she might enter willingly and propitiously into the city, they carried her into the temple of Victory on the Palatine on the 4th of April, henceforward to be a festal day, the popular Megalesia.

This Magna Mater was the first Oriental deity introduced into Rome, and the last deity introduced by the Sibylline books. It is probable that no Roman then knew much about the real nature of her cult and its noisy orgiastic character and other degrading features; it was sufficient to have found a new prescription, and once more to have given the people, and especially the women, a happy moment of hope and confidence. But the truth came out soon enough; and though the goddess must have her own priests, it was ordered by a _Senatusconsultum_ that no Roman should take part in her service.[705] Though established in the heart of the city, and ere long to have her own temple, she was to continue a foreign deity outside the _ius divinum_. As such she belongs to those worships with which I am not called upon by the plan of these lectures to deal.

Hannibal withdrew at last from Italy, and in 202 the war came to an end. Looking at the divine inhabitants of the city in that year, we may see in them almost as much a _colluvies nationum_ as in the human population itself. Under such circumstances neither the old City-state nor its religion could any longer continue to exist. The decay of the one reflects that of the other; the failure to trust the _di indigetes_, the constant desire to try new and foreign manifestations of divine power, were sure signs that the State was passing into a new phase. In the next two centuries Rome gained the world and lost her own soul.

NOTES TO LECTURE XIV

[655] The story is told in Livy x. 40 and 41, and must have been taken by him from the records of the pontifices, which had almost certainly begun by this date (see above, p. 283). While on these chapters the reader may also note the curious vow of this Papirius to Jupiter Victor at the end of ch. xlii.; and the description of the religious horrors of the Samnites witnessed by the army, and especially the words "respersae fando infandoque sanguine arae" (see above, p. 196), which clearly indicate a practice abhorrent to Romans.

[656] Val. Max. i. 5. 3 and 4; Cic. _de Div._ i. 16. 29; Livy, _Epit._ xix.

[657] The _locus classicus_ is Livy xxi. 63.

[658] Cic. _de Div._ ii. 36. 77. I find an illustration of this effect of lightning in Major Bruce's _Twenty Years in the Himalaya_, p. 130: "Directly the ice-axes begin to hum (in a storm) they should be put away."

[659] He notices it in connection with the war only in iii. 112. 6, after the battle of Cannae: a striking passage, but cast in general language.

[660] Livy xxi. 62 foll. Wissowa comments on this passage in _R.K._ p. 223.

[661] See the author's _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p. 28 foll.

[662] The rule seems to have been that no _prodigia_ were accepted, and _procurata_ by the authorities, which were announced from beyond the ager Romanus. See Mommsen in O. Jahn's edition of the _Periochae_ of Livy's books, and of Iulius Obsequens, preface, p. xviii. But this does not appear from the records of this war; and, at any rate, the religious panic was Italian as well as Roman.

[663] Red sand still occasionally falls in Italy, brought by a sirocco from the Sahara, and this accounts for the _prodigium_, "_pluit sanguine_," which is often met with. I have a record of it in the _Daily Mail_ of March 11, 1901. But the _lapides_ were probably of volcanic origin.

[664] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 328.

[665] This must have been a special performance of the yearly Amburbium, of which unluckily we known hardly anything (Wissowa, _R.K._ 130).

[666] _R.F._ p. 56, where unfortunately the word is misprinted Pubertas. Wissowa, _R.K._ 126, thinks of Hebe in a Latin form; in his view it must be a Greek deity, being brought in by the decemviri and the books. But we shall find that these begin now to interfere with Roman cults, and in such a crisis we need not wonder at it. Wissowa allows that we do not know where this Hebe can have come from, nor, I may add, why she should have come. That there was some special meaning in the combination Juventas, Hercules, Genius I feel sure, and I conjecture that it may be found in the urgent need of a supply of _iuvenes_. Hercules and Genius seem both to represent the male principle of life (_R.F._ 142 foll.). Juventas speaks for herself, but we may remember that the _tirones_ sacrificed to her on the day of the Liberalia (17th March), and that Liber is almost certainly another form of Genius (_R.F._ 55).

[667] Livy xxii. 1.

[668] It is only from this passage that we know of the oracle. See Bouché-Leclercq, _Hist. de divination_, iv. 146. That of Caere is mentioned in Livy xxi. 62. Both cities were mainly Etruscan.

[669] Livy xxvii. 37 betrays some knowledge of the infectious nature of prodigy-reporting: "Sub unius prodigii, ut fit, mentionem, alia quoque nuntiata."

[670] Pliny, _N.H._ xxxv. 115, where the verses are quoted as inscribed on the paintings in her temple at Ardea. Note that Juno is here called the wife of Jupiter by a Greek artist from Asia.

[671] For Juno as the woman's deity and guardian spirit, see above, p. 135. To refer this prominence of the goddess to her connection with Carthage and mythical enmity to the Romans, as we see it in the _Aeneid_, is premature; we must suppose that each Juno was still a local deity, and no general conception in the later Greek sense is as yet possible.

[672] For Feronia, see _R.F._ 252 foll.

[673] The _procurationes_ ordered were doubtless recorded in the _annales maximi_. The books of the decemviri, we must suppose, were burnt with the oracles in 38 B.C. (Diels, _Sib. Blätter_, p. 6 note).

[674] Wissowa, _R.K._ 170; Marq. 586 foll.

[675] Livy xxii. 9-10.

[676] See above, p. 204 foll.; Strabo, p. 250; Festus, p. 106.

[677] If it be asked why Jupiter is here without his titles Optimus Maximus, the answer is that just below, where _ludi magni_ are vowed to him, as all such _ludi_ were, he is also simply Jupiter.

[678] _R.K._ 356. In his view the new amalgam of twelve gods was known as _di Consentes_, an expression of Varro's which has been much discussed. See Müller-Deecke, _Etrusker_, ii. 83; _C.I.L._ vi. 102; Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, 190 foll. In _de Re Rust._ i. 1, Varro speaks of twelve _dei consentes, urbani_, whose gilded statues stood in the forum.

[679] Livy xxii. 57.

[680] See above, p. 207. Orosius' account of this is worth reading; he calls it "obligamentum hoc magicum" (iv. 13). He mentions a Gallic pair and a Greek woman, and dates it in 226 (227 according to Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 227). Cp. Plut. _Marcell._ 3. Livy's words, "iam ante hostiis humanis, minime Romano sacro, imbutum," agree with this. There must have been an outbreak of feeling and recourse to the Sibylline books in the stress of the Gallic war.

[681] _Sib. Blätter_, p. 86.

[682] Pliny, _N.H._ xxviii. 12 and 13. Plutarch, _l.c._, confirms him. Pliny, it may be noticed, is here writing of spells, etc., among which he classes the _precatio_ of this rite.

[683] The first gladiatorial show was in 264 B.C. (Val. Max. ii. 4. 7).

[684] The arguments are stated fully in his _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, 211 foll.

[685] The best account of these, or rather of the Argean itinerary, of which fragments are preserved in Varro, _L.L._ v. 45 foll., is still that of Jordan in his _Römische Topographie_, ii. 603 foll. The extracts seem to be from a record of directions for the passage of a procession round the _sacella_ (or _sacraria_, Varro v. 48). Though quoting these, Varro has nothing to say of their origin, which would be strange indeed if they were of such comparatively late date.

[686] In Varro, _L.L._ vii. 44. There is no doubt that the line is from Ennius; it is also quoted as his in Festus, p. 355.

[687] Schanz, _Gesch. der röm. Literatur_, vol. i. ed. 3, p. 110.

[688] Some examples of substitution will be found in Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, i. 469. It is of course a well-known phenomenon, but is now generally rejected as an explanation of _oscilla_, _maniae_, etc. (see Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 355, and Frazer, _G.B._ ii. 344). I know of no case of it on good evidence at Rome, unless it be one in the _devotio_, of an effigy for the soldier, ("ni moritur," Livy viii. 10).

[689] See _Roman Festivals_, p. 117, with references to Mannhardt; Frazer, _G.B._ ii. 256; Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, v. 181.

[690] Livy xxiii. 11. See also Diels, _Sib. Blätter_, pp. 11 and 92.

[691] Livy xxiv. 10.

[692] _Ib._ xxiv. 44.

[693] _Ib._ xxv. 1.

[694] _Ib._ xxv. 12. On the Marcian oracles and their metre, see Bouché-Leclercq, _Hist. de divination_, iv. 128 foll.; Wissowa, _R.K._ 463 note 2; Diels, _op. cit._ p. 7 foll.

[695] See above, Lect. xi. p. 262. For the Apolline games, _R.F._ p. 179 foll.

[696] Livy xxvi. 23.

[697] _Ib._ xxvii. 8.

[698] _Ib._ xxvii. 25; Plut. _Marcellus_, p. 28.

[699] _Ib._ xxvii. 23.

[700] _Ib._ xxvii. 37.

[701] The idea that this number was "chthonic" and a monopoly of the Sibylline utterances was started by Diels, _Sib. Blätter_, p. 42 foll., with imperfect anthropological knowledge, and has led Wissowa and others into wrong conclusions, _e.g._ as to the Argei. See an article criticising Wissowa in _Classical Rev._ 1902, p. 211. On the whole subject of the number three and its multiples, see Usener, "Dreizahl," in _Rheinisches Museum_ for 1903, and Goudy, _Trichotomy in Roman Law_ (Oxford, 1910), p. 5 foll.

[702] Livy xxvii. 51. For gratitude among Romans, see above, p. 202. A gift of thanksgiving was sent to Delphi (Livy xxviii. 45).

[703] _Ib._ xxix. 10 foll. For other references see _R.F._ p. 69 foll.

[704] _Ib._ xxix. 10.

[705] Dion. Hal. ii. 19; _R.F._ p. 70.

LECTURE XV

AFTER THE HANNIBALIC WAR

The long and deadly struggle with Hannibal ended in 201 B.C., and no sooner was peace concluded than the Senate determined on war with Macedon. This decision is a critical moment in Roman history, for it initiated not only a long period of advance and the eventual supremacy of Rome in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also an age of narrow aristocratic rule which remained unquestioned till revolution broke out with Tiberius Gracchus. But we cannot safely deny that it was a just decision. Hannibal was alive, and his late ally, Philip of Macedon, now in sinister coalition with Antiochus of Syria, might be capable of invading exhausted Italy. To have an enemy once more in the peninsula would probably be fatal to Rome and Italy, and one more effort was necessary in order to avert such a calamity; an effort that must be made at once, while Carthage lay prostrate.

It is necessary to grasp fully the danger of the moment if we are to understand the part played by religion (if I may use the word) in bringing about the desired result. It was most difficult to persuade a people worn out by one war that it was essential for their safety that they should at once face another. Historians naturally look on the success of the Senate in this task as due to its own prestige, and to the skilful oratory of the Consul in the speech to the people which Livy has reproduced in his own admirable rhetoric. But a closer examination of the chapters at the beginning of the historian's thirty-first book will show that religion too was used, in accordance with the experience of the late war, to put pressure on the voters and to inspire their confidence. As we saw in the last lecture, they had been constantly cheered and braced by religious expedients,--their often-recurring _religio_ had been soothed and satisfied; now the same means were to be used positively rather than negatively, to help in urging them to a definite course of action. Some sixty years later Polybius, writing of the extreme religiousness of the Romans, expressed his conviction that religion was invented for political objects, and only serves as the means of bridling the fickle and unreasoning Demos; for if it were possible to have a State consisting of wise men only, no such institution would be necessary.[706] The philosophic historian is here thinking mainly of the way in which religion was turned to account by the Roman authorities in his own lifetime. We cannot have a better illustration of this than the events of the year 200 B.C.

Already, in the autumn of the previous year, the ground had been prepared. To the plebeian games in November there had been added a feast of Jupiter (_Iovis epulum_), as had been done more than once during the late war.[707] Jupiter, in the form of his image in the Capitoline temple, lay on his couch at the feast of the outgoing plebeian magistrates, with his face reddened with minium as at a triumph, and Juno and Minerva sat each on her _sella_ on either side of him; and to give practical point to this show, corn from Africa was distributed at four asses the modius, or at most one quarter of the normal price. When the new consuls entered on office on the ides of the following March, further religious steps were at once taken; the political atmosphere was charged with religiosity. On the first day of their office the consuls were directed by the Senate, doubtless with the sanction of the pontifices, to _sacrifice to such deities as they might select_, with a special prayer for the success of the new war which Senate and people (the latter by a clever anticipation) are contemplating. Haruspices from Etruria had been adroitly procured, and no doubt primed, who reported that the gods had accepted this prayer, and that the examination of the victims portended extension of the Roman frontier, victory, and triumph.[708] Yet, in spite of all this, the people were not yet willing; in almost all the centuries, when the voting for the war took place, they rejected the proposal of the Senate. Then the consul Sulpicius was put up to address them, and at the end of Livy's version of his speech we find him clinching his political arguments with religious ones. "Ite in suffragium, bene iuvantibus dis, et quae Patres censuerunt, vos iubete. Huius vobis sententiae non consul modo auctor est, sed etiam di immortales; qui mihi sacrificanti ... laeta omnia prosperaque portendere." Thus adjured, the people yielded; and as a reward, and to stifle any _religio_ that might be troubling them, they are treated to a _supplicatio_ of three days, including an "_obsecratio circa omnia pulvinaria_" for the happy result of the war; and once more, after the levy was over,--a heavy tax on the patience of the people,--the consul made vows of _ludi_ and a special gift to Jupiter, in case the State should be intact and prospering five years from that day.[709]

Exactly the same religious machinery was used a few years later to gain the consent of the people for a war of far less obvious necessity,--that with Antiochus of Syria. It was at once successful. The haruspices were again on the spot and gave the same report; and then, _solutis religione animis_, the centuries sanctioned the war. The vow that followed, of which Livy gives a modernised wording, was for _ludi_ to last ten continuous days, and for gifts of money at all the _pulvinaria_, where now, as we gather from these same chapters, the images of the gods were displayed on their couches during the greater part of the year.[710]

We may realise in accounts like these how far we have left behind us the old Roman religion we discussed in earlier lectures. That religion did not any longer supply the material needed; it was not suited to be the handmaid of a political or military policy; it was a real religion, not invented for political purposes, to use Polybius' language, but itself a part of the life of the State, whether active in war, or law, or politics. In the ceremonies I have just been describing almost all the features are foreign,--the _pulvinaria_, the haruspices, perhaps even the _Iovis epulum_; and we feel that though the _religio_ in the minds of the people is doubtless a genuine thing, yet the means taken to soothe it are far from genuine,--they are _mala medicamenta_, quack remedies. Such is the method by which a shrewd, masterly government compels the obedience of a _populus religiosus_. After long experience of such methods, can we wonder that Polybius could formulate his famous view of religion, or that a great and good Roman lawyer, himself pontifex maximus, could declare that political religion stands quite apart from the religion of the poets, or that of the philosophers, and must be acted on, whether true or false?[711]

The reporting of _prodigia_ goes on with astonishing vigour in this period, and seems to have become endemic. I only mention it here (for we have had quite enough of it already) because the question arises whether it is now used mainly for political purposes, or to annoy a personal rival or enemy. This does not appear clearly from Livy's accounts, but in an age of personal and political rivalries, as this undoubtedly was, it can hardly have been otherwise. Certain it is that the interests of the State were grievously interfered with in this way. The consuls at this time, and until 153 B.C., did not enter on office until March 15, and they should have been ready to start for their military duties as soon as the levies had been completed; instead of which, they were constantly delayed by the duty of expiating these marvels. In 199 Flamininus, whose appointment to the command in Macedonia had of course annoyed the friends of the man he was superseding, was delayed in this way for the greater part of the year, and yet he is said to have left Italy at an earlier date than most consuls.[712] Thus the change to January 1 for the beginning of the consular year, which took place in 153 B.C., was an unavoidable political necessity. Even the Sibylline books came to be used for personal and political purposes. In the year 144 the praetor Marcius Rex was commissioned to repair the Appian and Aniensian aqueducts and to construct a new one. The _decemviri sacris faciundis_, consulting the books, as it was said, for other reasons, found an oracle forbidding the water to be conveyed to the Capitoline hill, and seem on this absurd ground to have been able to delay the necessary work. Our information is much mutilated, but the real explanation seems to be that there was some personal spite against Marcius, who, however, eventually completed the work.[713] Nearly a century later a Sibylline oracle, beyond doubt invented for the purpose, was used to prevent Pompeius from taking an army to Egypt to restore Ptolemy Auletes to his throne. But all students of Roman history in the last two centuries B.C. are familiar with such cases of the prostitution of religion or religious processes, and I have already said enough about it in the lecture on divination.[714]

I do not, of course, mean to assert that personal and political motives account for all or the greater number of _prodigia_ reported. There is plenty of evidence that the genuine old _religio_ could be stirred up by real marvels, which the government were bound to expiate in order to satisfy public feeling. Thus in 193 B.C. earthquakes were so frequent that the Senate could not meet, nor could any public business be done, so busy were the consuls with the work of expiation. At last the Sibylline books were consulted and the usual religious remedies applied; but the spirit of the age is apparent in the edict of the consuls, prompted by the Senate, that if _feriae_ had been decreed to take place on a certain day for the expiation of an earthquake, no fresh earthquake was to be reported on that same day.[715] This delicious edict, unparalleled in Roman history, caused the grave Livy to declare that the people must have grown tired, not only of the earthquakes, but of the _feriae_ appointed to expiate them.

Let us turn to another and more interesting feature of this age, which is plainly visible in the sphere of religion, as in other aspects both of private and public life: I mean the growth of _individualism_. Men, and indeed women also, as we shall see, are beginning to feel and to assert their individual importance, as against the strict rules and traditions, civil or religious, of the life of the family and the State. This is a tendency that had long been at work in Greece, and is especially marked in the teaching of the two great ethical schools of the post-Alexandrian period, the Epicureans and Stoics. The influence of Greece on the Romans was already strong enough to have sown the seeds of individualism in Italy; but the tendency was at the same time a natural result of enlarged experience and expanding intelligence among the upper classes. The second century B.C. shows us many prominent men of strong individual character, who assert themselves in ways to which we have not been accustomed in Roman history, _e.g._ Scipio the elder, Flamininus, Cato, Aemilius Paulus and his son, Scipio Aemilianus; and among lesser and less honourable men we see the tendency in the passionate desire for personal distinction in the way of military commands, triumphs, and the giving of expensive games. This is the age in which we first hear of statues and portrait busts of eminent men; and magistrates begin to put their names or types connected with their families on the coins which they issue.[716]

In religion this tendency is seen mainly in the attempts of the individual, often successful, to shake himself free of the restrictions of the old _ius divinum_. I pointed out long ago that it was a weak point in the old Roman religion that it did little or nothing to encourage and develop the individual religious instinct; it was formalised as a religion of family and State, and made no appeal, as did that of the Jews, to the individual's sense of right and wrong.[717] The sense of sin was only present to the Roman individual mind in the form of scruple about omissions or mistakes in the performance of religious duties. Thus religion lost her chance at Rome as an agent in the development of the better side of human nature. As an illustration of what I mean I may recall what I said in an early lecture, that the spirit of a dead Roman was not thought of as definitely individualised; it joined the whole mass of the Manes in some dimly conceived abode beneath the earth; there is no singular of the word Manes. It is only in the third century B.C. that we first meet with memorial tombstones to individuals, like those of the Scipios, and not till the end of the Republican period that we find the words Di Manes representing in any sense the spirit of the individual departed.[718]

In practical life the quarrel of the individual with the _ius divinum_ takes the form of protest against the restrictions placed on the old sacrificing priesthoods, these of the Flamines and the Rex sacrorum, who, unlike the pontifices and augurs, were disqualified from holding a secular magistracy.[719] These priesthoods must be filled up, and when a vacancy occurred, the pontifex maximus, who retained the power of the Rex in this sphere, as a kind of _paterfamilias_ of the whole State, selected the persons, and could compel them to serve even if they were unwilling. But the interests of public life are now far more attractive than the duties of the cults,--the individual wishes to assert himself where his self-assertion will be noted and appreciated.

These attempts at emancipation from the _ius divinum_ were not at first successful. In 242 a flamen of Mars was elected consul; he hoped to be in joint command with his colleague Lutatius of the naval campaign against Carthage. But the _ius divinum_ forbade him to leave Italy, and the pontifex maximus inexorably enforced it.[720] Of this quarrel we have no details; but in 190 a similar case is recorded in full. A flamen Quirinalis, elected praetor, who had Sardinia assigned him as his province, was stopped by the _ius divinum_ administered by another inexorable pontifex maximus; and it was only after a long struggle, in which Senate, tribunes, and people all took part, that he was forced to submit. So great was his wrath that he was with difficulty persuaded not to resign his praetorship.[721] Naturally it became difficult to fill these priesthoods, for it was invidious to compel young men of any promise to commit what was practically political suicide. The office of _rex sacrorum_ was vacant for two years between 210 and 208;[722] and in 180 Cornelius Dolabella, a _duumvir navalis_, on being selected for this priesthood, absolutely refused to obey the pontifex maximus when ordered to resign his secular command. He was fined for disobedience, and appealed to the people; at the moment when it became obvious that the appeal would fail, he contrived to escape by getting up an unlucky omen. _Religio inde fuit pontificibus inaugurandi Dolabellae_; and here we have the strange spectacle of the _ius divinum_ being used to defeat its own ends. Such a state of things needs no comment.[723]

But the most extraordinary story of this kind is that of a flamen of Jupiter,--a story which many years ago I told in detail in the _Classical Review_. Here I may just be allowed to reproduce it in outline. In the year 209 a young C. Valerius Flaccus, the black sheep of a great family, was inaugurated against his will as Flamen Dialis by the pontifex maximus P. Licinius.[724] It was within the power of the head of the Roman religion to use such compulsion, but it must have been difficult and unusual to do so without the consent of the victim's relations. In this case, as Livy expressly tells us, it was used because the lad was of bad character,--_ob adolescentiam negligentem luxuriosamque_; and it is pretty plain that the step was suggested by his elder brother and other relations, in order to keep him out of mischief. For, as we have seen, the taboos on this ancient priesthood were numerous and strict, and among the restrictions laid on its holder was one which forbade him to leave his house for a single night. Thus we learn not only that this priesthood was not much accounted of in those days, but also that for the _cura_ and _caerimonia_ of religion a pure mind was no longer needed. But it might be utilised as a kind of penal settlement for a libertine noble; and it is not impossible that a century and a quarter later the attempt to put the boy Julius Caesar into the same priesthood, though otherwise represented by the historians, may have had the same object.[725] But the strange thing in the case of Flaccus is that this very _cura_ and _caerimonia_, if Livy's account is to be trusted, had such a wholesome disciplinary effect, that the libertine became a model youth, the admiration of his own and other families. Relying on his excellent character he even asserted the ancient right of this flamen to take his seat in the Senate, a right which had long been in abeyance _ob indignitatem flaminum priorum_; and he eventually gained his point, in spite of obstinate opposition on the part of a praetor. Some years later, in 200, this same man was elected curule aedile.[726] This was clearly the first example of an attempt to combine the priesthood with a magistracy, for a difficulty at once arose and was solved in a way for which no precedent is quoted. Among the taboos on this priest there was one forbidding him to take an oath; yet the law demanded that a magistrate must take the usual oath within five days of entering on office.[727] Flaccus insisted on asserting his individuality in spite of the _ius divinum_, and the Senate and people both backed him up. The Senate decreed that if he could find some one to take the oath for him, the consuls might, if they chose, approach the tribune with a view to getting a relieving _plebiscitum_; this was duly obtained, and he took the oath by proxy. In his year of office as aedile we find him giving expensive _ludi Romani_; and in 184 he only missed the praetorship by an unlucky accident.[728] In this story we find the self-assertion of an individual supported by Senate, consuls, and people in breaking loose from the antiquated restrictions of a bygone age, and we cannot but sympathise with it. But Roman history is full of surprises, and among these I know none more amazing than the successful attempt of Augustus two centuries later to revive this priesthood with all its absurdities.[729]

The self-assertion of members of the great families against the _ius divinum_ was inevitable, and in the instances just noticed the attitude of compromise taken up by the government was only what was to be expected in an age of stress and change and new ideas. But in less than twenty years after the peace with Carthage this government found itself suddenly face to face with what may be called a religious rebellion chiefly among the lower orders, including women; and the authorities unhesitatingly reverted to the position of conscientious guardians of the religious system of the City-state. They began to realise that they had been holding a wolf by the ears ever since the beginning of the Hannibalic war; that they had a population to deal with which was no longer pure Roman or even pure Italian, and that even the genuine Romans themselves were liable to be moved by new currents of religious feeling. During the war they had done all that was possible to meet the mental as well as the material troubles of this population, even to the length of introducing the worship, under certain restrictions, of the great Phrygian Mother of the gods. But now, in 186, the sudden outbreak of Dionysiac orgies in Italy showed them that all their remedies were stale and insufficient, and that the wolf was getting loose in their hands.

Dionysus had long been housed at Rome, under the name of Liber, in that temple of Ceres, Liber, and Libera which was discussed in detail in my eleventh lecture.[730] But it is not likely that many Romans recognised the identity of Liber and Dionysus, and it is quite certain that the characteristic features of the Dionysiac ritual were entirely unknown at Rome for three centuries after the foundation of the temple. That ritual, as it existed in Greece from the earliest times, retaining the essential features which it bore in its original Thracian home,[731] has lately been thoroughly examined and clearly expounded by Dr. Farnell in the fifth volume of his _Cults of the Greek States_, and the student of the Roman religious history of this period would do well to study carefully his fifth chapter. In most Greek states, as at Athens, in spite of occasional outbreaks, the wilder aspects of the cult had not been encouraged, but at Delphi and at Thebes, _i.e._ on Parnassus and Cithaeron, the more striking phenomena of the genuine ritual are found down to a late period. Dr. Farnell has summed these up under three heads at the beginning of his account: "The wild and ecstatic enthusiasm that it inspired, the self-abandonment and communion with the deity achieved through orgiastic rites and a savage sacramental act, and the prominence of women in the ritual, which in accordance with a certain psychic law made a special appeal to their temperament."[732] It meant in fact exactly that form of religious ecstasy which was peculiarly abhorrent to the minds of the old Romans, who had built up the _ius divinum_ with its sober ritual and its practical ideas of the supernatural powers around them. We found nothing in our studies of this religion to lead us to suppose for an instant that it had any mental effect such as "the transcending of the limits of the ordinary consciousness and the feeling of communion with the divine nature."[733] The Latin language indeed had no native words for the expression of such emotions.[734]

But it would be a great mistake to suppose that there was no soil in Italy, or even at Rome, where such emotional rites might take root. We may believe that the dignity and sobriety of the Roman character was in part at least the result of the discipline of ordered religion in family and state; but this is not to say that the Romans were never capable of religious indiscipline,--far from it. The Italian rural festival, then as now, was lively and indecorous, so far as we can guess from the few glimpses we get of it; and at Rome the ancient festival of Anna Perenna, in which women took part, was a scene of revelry as Ovid describes it,[735]--of dancing, singing, and intoxication, and we need not wonder that it found no place in the ancient calendar of the _ius divinum_. And we have lately had occasion to notice, in the new ritual instituted under the direction of the Sibylline books, and more especially during the great war, clear indications that the natural emotions of women, even of Roman women, had to be satisfied by shows and processions in which they could share, and that the ideal dignity of the Roman matron had often given way under the terrible stress of public and domestic anxiety and peril. No wonder then that when Roman armies had been for years in Greece, and Greeks were flocking into Rome in larger numbers every year, the Dionysiac rites should find their way into Italy, and no wonder too that they should instantly find a congenial soil, exotics though they were.

The story of the Bacchanalia is told by Livy in his best manner, and whether or no it be literally true in every particular, is full of life and interest. It is the fashion now to reject as false whatever is surprising; and the latest historian of Rome dismisses Livy's account of the discovery of the mischief as "an interesting romance."[736] Fortunately we are not now concerned with this romance, if such it be; I only propose to dwell on one or two points more nearly concerned with our subject.

First, let us note that the seeds of this evil crop were sown in Etruria, the most dangerous neighbour of the Romans from a religious point of view; for it is hardly too much to say that all Greek influences that filtered through Etruria on their way to Rome were contaminated in the process. According to the story,[737] a common Greek religious quack (_sacrificulus et vates_, as Livy calls him), of the type held up to scorn by Plato in the _Republic_,[738] came to Etruria and began to initiate in the rites; drunkenness was the result, and with drinking came crime and immorality of all kinds. From Etruria the mischief spread to Rome, and was there discovered accidentally. According to the evidence given, it began with a small association of women, who met openly in the daytime only three times a year. Then it fell under the direction of a priestess from Campania,--Rome's other most dangerous neighbour in regard to religion and morals,--who gave it a sinister turn. The meetings were held at night, and were accompanied not only by the characteristic features of the old Thracian ritual, but, as in Etruria, by the most abominable wickedness. It was said to have infected a large part of the population, including young members of noble families; for with the true missionary instinct, young people only were admitted by the hierophants. We need not necessarily believe all this; but it is certain, from the steps taken by the government, about which there is no doubt, that it is in the main a true account. The storm and stress of the long war with Hannibal would be enough to account for the phenomena, even if they were not in keeping with well-known psychical facts.

Let us now turn for a moment to the attitude of the government in this extraordinary episode of Roman religious experience. The danger is dealt with entirely by the Senate and the magistrates; the authorities of the _ius divinum_ as such have nothing to do with it. It is characteristic of the age that it is not dealt with as a matter of religion merely, but as a conspiracy--_coniuratio_.[739] This is the word used by Livy, and we find it also in the document called _Senatusconsultum de Bacchanalibus_, part of which has most fortunately come down to us. This is the word also used, we may note, of the conspiracy of Catiline in the century following, and it always conveys the idea of _rebellion_ against the order and welfare of the State. In this case it was rebellion against the whole body of the _mos maiorum_, the [Greek: êthos] of the City-state of Rome. For it was an attempt to supersede the ancient religious life of that State by _externa superstitio, prava religio_--_prava_, because _deorum numen praetenditur sceleribus_; and hence, as Livy expresses it in the admirable speech put into the mouth of the consul, the Roman gods themselves felt their _numen_ to be contaminated.[740] All the speeches in Livy, except perhaps the military ones, are worth careful study by those who would enter into the Roman spirit as conceived by an Augustan writer; and this is one of the most valuable of them.

Lastly, let us note the steps taken by the government in this emergency. It is treated as a matter of police, both in Rome and Italy; the guilty are sought out and punished as conspirators against the State, and a precedent of tremendous force is hereby established for all future dealings with _externa superstitio_, which held good even to the last struggle with Christianity. Where foreign rites are believed to be dangerous to the State or to morality, they must be rigidly suppressed in the Roman world; when they are harmless they may be tolerated, or even, like the cult of the Magna Mater, received into the sacred circle of Roman worships.[741] But there is yet another lesson to be learnt from the conduct of the government at this crisis. Who would have suspected, while reading the horrible story, and noting the almost arbitrary energy with which the _coniuratio_ was stamped out, that the Dionysiac rites would even now be tolerated under certain conditions? That this was so is a fact attested not only by Livy, but by the _Senatusconsultum_ itself.[742] The government was now forced to recognise the fact that there were Romans for whom the _ius divinum_ no longer sufficed, and who needed a more emotional form of religion. If any one (so ran in effect the _Senatusconsultum_) felt conscientiously that he could not wholly renounce the new religion, he might apply in person to the praetor urbanus; and the praetor would lay the matter before a meeting of the Senate, at which not less than a hundred must be present. The Senate may give leave for the worship, provided that no more than five persons be present at it; and that there be no common fund for its support, nor any permanent priest to preside at it. These clauses, says Aust,[743] are a concession to the strong spiritual current of feeling which sought for something fresher and better to take the place of the old religion of forms; and on the whole we may agree with him. All religious revivals are liable to be accompanied by moral evil, but they all express unmistakably a natural and honourable yearning of the human spirit.

Not long after this, in 181, the government put its foot down firmly on what seems to have been another attempt, though in this case a ludicrous one, to introduce strange religious ideas at Rome. We have the story of this on the authority not only of Livy, but of the oldest Roman annalist, Cassius Hemina, from whose work Pliny has preserved a fragment relating to this matter.[744] Cassius must almost certainly have been alive in 181, and would remember the event;[745] and though his account and Livy's differ in details, we may take the story as in the main true. A secretary (_scriba_), who had land on the Janiculan hill, dug up there a stone coffin with an inscription stating that the king Numa was buried in it. No remains of a body were found, but in a square stone casket inside the coffin were found books written on paper (_charta_) and supposed to be writings of Numa about the Pythagorean philosophy. These writings were read by many people, and eventually by a praetor, who at once pronounced them to be subversive of religion. That anything supposed to emanate from Numa should have this character was of course impossible; and it is plain that the writings were believed even at the time to be absurd forgeries, drawn up with the idea of investing strange doctrines with the authority of Numa's name; for the legend of a religious connection between Numa and Pythagoras must have been known at the time. The discoverer appealed to the tribunes, who referred the matter to the senate; and the senate authorised the praetor to burn the books in the Comitium, which was done in the presence of a large assembly.

In a later lecture I shall have something to say of the revival of Pythagoreanism in the time of Cicero, and I need not now attempt to explain what such a revival might mean. All we need to note is that something subversive of the Roman religion was believed to be circulating in 181 in Roman society under the assumed authority of Numa's name, and that the senate, warned by recent experience, determined to stamp it out at once. They seem to have suddenly become alive to the fact that Greece, and in this instance mainly Magna Graecia, was sending clever agents to Rome for the propagation of ideas which might make the people less tractable to authority. In the stress of the great war, indeed for years afterwards, they had probably never had leisure to reflect on the inevitable result of the writings of a man like Ennius, who was not improbably responsible for the propagation of these very Pythagorean notions.[746] Now a reaction seems to set in against the flowing tide of admiration for everything Greek;[747] but it was too late to arrest the flood. All that could be hoped for was that in the lives and minds of the wiser Romans the new Greek civilisation might so leaven the old Roman ignorance that no permanent harm should be done to the instincts of _virtus_ and _pietas_: and to some extent this hope was realised. But for the masses there was no such hope. What Greek teaching reached their minds was almost wholly that of the _ludi scenici_; and I must now say a word in conclusion about this unwholesome influence--unwholesome, that is, so far as it affected the old religious ideas.

I had occasion, when dealing with Dr. Frazer's notion that the Roman religion admitted such ideas as the marriage of the gods with all its natural consequences,[748] to point out that his evidence was almost wholly derived from the play-writers of the very period on which we are now engaged. I said that he seems to be justified in concluding that there was a popular idea of such a kind, which the State religion did not recognise; but that it can very easily be explained as the natural effect of a degenerate Greek mythology, popularised by Greek dramas adapted to the Roman stage, upon certain peculiarities of the Roman theology, and especially the functional combination of male and female divine names in Italian invocations of the deities. Nothing could be more natural than that playwrights should take advantage of such combinations to invent or translate comic passages to please a Roman audience, "now largely consisting of semi-educated men who had lost faith in their own religion, and a host of smaller people of mixed descent and nationality." We do not know enough of the older comedies to be at all sure how far they had gone in this direction, though we are certain, to use the words of Zeller,[749] that it was impossible to transplant Greek poetry to Roman soil without bringing Greek mythology with it; or, as I should put it, without subordinating the old reasonable idea of the Power manifesting itself in the universe to the Greek fancy for clothing that Power in the human form and endowing it with human faults and frailties.

But of the two great literary figures of the age we have now reached, Ennius and Plautus, we know beyond all doubt that they taught the ignorant Roman of their day not only to be indifferent to his deities, but to laugh at them. Just at the very time when the forged books of Numa were being burnt in the Comitium, Ennius' famous translation of the _Sacred History of Euhemerus_ was becoming known at Rome, in which was taught the doctrine of the human origin of all deities; and though we have hardly a fragment left of the comedies of Ennius, we may presume that he would not have hesitated for a moment to make the gods ridiculous on the stage. It was he who wrote the celebrated lines in his tragedy of Telamo:[750]

ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum, sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus,

which (as I have said elsewhere)[751] strike a direct blow at the efficacy of sacrifice and prayer by openly declaring that the gods did not interest themselves in mankind. This is the same Epicurean doctrine afterwards preached by Lucretius, and I must return to it in the next lecture. At present let us select a couple of specimens of the more explicit evidence of the extant plays of Plautus, which began to be exhibited at Rome just about the end of the war with Hannibal.

Here is an example of the way in which the family relationships of Greek gods could be made amusing under Roman names. Alcesimarchus in the _Cistellaria_ wishes to make a strong asseveration, and begins:[752]

at ita me di deaeque, superi et inferi et medioxumi,

but immediately goes on to specify these deities more particularly by their names and relationships--_and gets the latter wrong_. Melaenis corrects him in a way which (as Aust notes)[753] could only have seemed comical to a Roman audience if they had already some acquaintance with the divine family gossip.

itaque me Iuno regina et Iovi' supremi filia itaque me Saturnus eiius patruos--ME. ecastor, pater. AL. itaque me Ops opulenta, illius avia--ME. immo mater quidem.

Perhaps it was the fancy of the age for divine genealogy that is here being made fun of rather than the gods themselves; but in any case the passage shows how irrecoverably lost was the real impersonal character of the old Roman _numen_, and how impossible it must have been in such an age to believe that anything was really to be gained by the once solemn rites of the _ius divinum_.

But the most remarkable evidence is in the Amphitruo,[754] where Jupiter and Mercurius are among the _dramatis personae_. This comedy is extremely amusing, and was quite capable of entertaining the Parisians in the form given it by Molière; but for them it could hardly have been so funny as for the Greeks in the age of the New Comedy and their disciples the Romans of Plautus' day, who saw Zeus and Hermes, Jupiter and Mercurius, brought by their own misdoings into absurd and degrading situations. Jupiter personates Amphitruo, and so gains admission to his wife, Alkmene! Comment is needless, unless we take the last line of the play as a comment:--

Nunc, spectatores, Iovi' summi causa clare plaudite!

I do not propose to follow further the downfall of the old Roman ideas about the objects of worship, or the neglect and decay of the _ius divinum_. They do not fall within the scope of my subject--the religious experience of the Roman people. So long as there was any life in these ideas and in the cult which was the practical expression of them, they formed part of that experience. But I think I have sufficiently proved that the life has gone out of the ideas, and that the worship has consequently become meaningless. Ideas about the divine may be discussed by philosophers as the Romans begin to read and in some degree to think; and the outward forms of the cult may be maintained in such particulars as most closely concern the public life of the community; but as a religious system expressing human experience we have done with these things.

NOTES TO LECTURE XV

[706] Polybius vi. 56.

[707] Livy xxxi. 4 _ad fin._, cp. xxv. 2, xxvii. 36, etc. For the _Iovis epulum_ see _R.F._ 216 foll. and the references there given. Wissowa, _R.K._ foll. 111. 385 foll. I am not sure that I am right in limiting the human partakers of the epulum of Nov. 13 to the plebeian magistrates.

[708] Livy xxxi. 5. The importance of the words "prolationem finium" does not seem to have been noticed by historians. If they are genuine they indicate an undoubtedly aggressive attitude.

[709] Livy xxxi. 7 and 8.

[710] Livy xxxvi. 1.

[711] Augustine, _Civ. Dei_, iv. 27: "Relatum est in litteras doctissimum pontificem Scaevolam disputasse tria genera tradita deorum: unum a poetis, alterum a philosophis, tertium a principibus civitatis. Primum genus nugatorium dicit esse, quod multa de diis fingantur indigna, etc. Expedire igitur falli in religione civitates."

[712] Livy xxxii. 9, cp. 28. In connection with these _prodigia_ it may be worth noting that in xxxii. 30 we are told that a consul vowed a temple to Juno Sospita, who had in her famous seat at Lanuvium been a constant centre of marvel-mongering. Livy xxxiv. 53 places the building of this temple _in foro olitorio_ three years later, if we may read there Sospitae instead of the Matutae of the MSS. with Sigonius: (cp. Aust, _de Aedibus_, p. 21, and Wissowa, _R.K._ 117). This interesting deity had been taken into the Roman worship in 338 B.C., but not moved from Lanuvium, which had peculiar religious relations with Rome. See _Myth. Lex._ vol. ii. p. 608, where the attributes of this Juno in art are described by Vogel. The date of the temple at Rome was 194. Whether the object of it was to diminish the portents at Lanuvium it is impossible to say, but judging from the records of _prodigia_ in Julius Obsequens it had that effect. I find only four _prodigia_ reported from Lanuvium after this date.

[713] See the passage in Frontinus, _de Aqueductibus_, i. 7 (C. Herschel's edition gives the reading of the best MS.), and the mutilated passage in the new epitomes of Livy found by Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt (_Oxyrrhyncus Papyri_, vol. iv. pp. 101 and 113). The general bearing of the two passages taken together seems to me to be that given in the text.

[714] Cic. _ad Fam._ i. 1 and 2. A somewhat similar case in 190 B.C. will be found in Livy xxxviii. 45, where the oracle forbade a Roman army to cross the Taurus range.

[715] Livy xxxiv. 55.

[716] Livy xxxviii. 56, mentions statues which were believed to be those of Scipio the elder, his brother Lucius, and Ennius, "in Scipionum monumento" outside the Porta Capena, and another of Scipio at Liternum, where he had a villa; this one Livy says that he saw himself blown down by a storm. On statues and busts at Rome, see Pliny xxxiv. 28 foll.; Mrs. Strong, _Roman Sculpture_, p. 28 foll.; _Cambridge Companion to Latin Studies_, p. 550 foll.; and for coins, p. 456.

[717] See above, p. 240, for the remarkable exception in the case of the elder Scipio, whose practice when in Rome was to go up to the Capitoline temple before daybreak and contemplate the statue of Jupiter; the dogs never barked at him, and the aedituus opened the _cella Iovis_ at his summons. I see no good ground for rejecting this story, which is not likely to have been invented. It can be traced back to two writers, Oppius, the friend of Caesar, and Julius Hyginus, the librarian of Augustus (Gell. vi. 1. 1), and was probably based on tradition. Livy mentions it in xxvi. 19, and suggests that this and other ways of Scipio were assumed to impress the multitude. The Roman mind was naturally averse from such individualism in religion; but Scipio was beyond doubt more familiar than his contemporaries with Greek ideas. In a chapter on Idealism in his little book on _Religion and Art in Ancient Greece_, Professor Ernest Gardner writes: "The statue (of Athene) by Phidias within the Parthenon offered not merely that form in which she would choose to appear if she showed herself to mortal eyes, but actually showed her form as if she had revealed it to the sculptor. To look upon such an image helped the worshipper as much as--perhaps more than--any service or ritual, to bring himself into communion with the goddess, and to fit himself, as a citizen of her chosen city, to carry out her will in contributing his best efforts to its supremacy in politics, in literature, and in art." That Scipio had some feeling of this kind need not be doubted, though the statue was not a great work of art like that of Phidias. Cp. Lucretius, vi. 75 foll.

[718] See below, p. 386.

[719] Marquardt, 332, and Mommsen, _Staatsrecht_, i. ed. 2, p. 463 foll.

[720] Livy, _Epit._ xix.

[721] Livy xxxvii. 51: "Religio ad postremum vicit, ut dicto audiens esset flamen pontifici." Here _religio_ is used in the sense of obligation to the _ius divinum_.

[722] Livy xxvii. 6; cp. 36.

[723] This story is told in Livy xl. 42.

[724] Livy xxvii. 8. For the compelling power (_capere_) of the Pont. Max., see Marq. 314. The story may have come from the annals of the Valerii Flacci, and also from those of the pontifices; it was apparently well known, as Valerius Maximus knew it (vi. 9. 2).

[725] Velleius ii. 43.

[726] Livy xxxi. 50.

[727] For the oath see "Lex incerta reperta Bantiae," lines 16 and 17, in Bruns, _Fontes Iuris Romani_. The oath taboo is mentioned by Gellius 10. 15. 3.; Festus 104, and Plutarch, _Quaest. Rom._ 113.

[728] Livy xxxii. 7; xxxix. 39.

[729] Tac. _Ann._ iv. 16.

[730] See above, p. 255.

[731] Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. v. p. 85 foll. Very interesting is the modern survival of Dionysiac rites recently discovered in Thrace by Mr. Dawkins (_Hellenic Journal_, 1906, p. 191).

[732] Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. v. p. 150.

[733] Quoted by Farnell, p. 151, from Rohde's _Psyche_.

[734] It is possible that _superstitio_ may originally have had some such meaning; see W. Otto in _Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_, 1909, p. 548 foll.; Mayor's edition of Cic. _de Nat. Deorum_, note on ii. 72 foll.

[735] Ovid, _Fasti_, iii. 523 foll. See also _Roman Society in the Age of Cicero_, p. 289.

[736] See Mr. Heitland's _History of the Roman Republic_, vol. ii. p. 229 note, and cp. Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._ _s.v._ "Bacchanalia."

[737] Livy xxxix. 8 foll.

[738] Plato, _de Rep._ 364 B; cp. _Laws_, 933 D.

[739] "Quaestio de clandestinis coniurationibus decreta est," Livy xxxix. 8; so also in chs. 14 and 17. Cp. _Sctm. de Bacchanalibus_, line 13, "conioura (se)." This document is, strictly speaking, a letter to the magistrates "in agro Teurano" in Bruttium embodying the orders of the Senatus consultum. It will be found in Bruns, _Fontes Iuris Romani_, or in Wordsworth, _Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin_.

[740] Livy xxxix. 16: "Omnia, dis propitiis volentibusque, faciemus, qui quia suum numen sceleribus libidinibusque contaminari indigne ferebant," etc.

[741] Mommsen, _Strafrecht_, p. 567 foll.

[742] Livy xxxix. 18 _ad fin._ _Sctm. de Bacch._ lines 3 foll.

[743] _Religion der Römer_, p. 78.

[744] Livy xl. 29 seems to have put his account together from Cassius Hemina and other annalists, so far as we can judge from the reference to them in Pliny, _N.H._