Publius Æbutius was a young man of knightly rank, whose father was dead and whose mother, Duronia, had married again. His stepfather, having abused the property of Æbutius, and being unwilling to give an account, conspired with the unnatural mother so to manage that her son would not be in a position to demand an accounting. They agreed that the Bacchanalian rites were the only way to effect the ruin of the young man. Accordingly, his mother informed him that during his sickness she had vowed that, if through the kindness of the gods he should recover, she would initiate him into the rites of the Bacchanalians. She instructed him for ten days how to prepare himself, and promised that on the tenth she would conduct him to the place of meeting. The youth very innocently agreed to this, thinking that it was only the due of the gods by whose favor he enjoyed his restored health. All would have gone as his mother desired, had it not been for the fact that he had formed a strong attachment for a courtesan named Hispala Fecenia. This young freedwoman was of a character far superior to the mode of life into which she had been forced while still a slave. Hispala knew more of the world than did Æbutius; and when he informed her that he was about to be initiated into the rites of the Bacchanalians, she declared that it would be better for him and also for her to lose their lives than that he should do such a thing. She told him that when she was a slave she had been taken to those rites by her mistress, though since her emancipation she had been exceedingly careful to avoid the place. She said that she knew it to be the haunt of all kinds of debauchery. Before they parted, the young man gave her his solemn promise that he would keep clear of those rites. The result of his adherence to this was that his mother and stepfather drove him from home, and he was goaded into telling the whole affair to the Consul Postumius, after first taking counsel with his aunt Æbutia.
After certain inquiries, Hispala was brought into the presence of the consul, to whom she gave a full account of the origin of the mysteries. She said that, at first, the rites were performed only by women. No man was admitted. At that time, they had three stated days in the year on which persons were initiated, but only in the daytime. The matrons then used to be appointed priestesses in rotation. Paculla Minia, a Campanian, when priestess, rearranged the whole system, alleging that she did so by the direction of the gods. She introduced men, the first being her own sons; she changed the time of celebration from day to night; and instead of three days in the year, appointed five days in each month for initiation. From the time that the rites were made thus common, and the licentious freedom of the night was added, there was nothing wicked, nothing flagitious, that had not been practised among them. To think nothing unlawful was the grand maxim of their religion.
After Hispala had made this revelation, Postumius proceeded to lay the whole matter before the Senate. A vigorous prosecution of the Bacchanalians ensued; and it was found that over seven thousand men and women had taken the oath of the association, thus proving that the rapid growth of a religion gives no assurance of the truth of its doctrines or the purity of its principles. Those who were found to be most deeply stained by evil practices were put to death; many put an end to themselves, so as to avoid punishment at the hands of the authorities; the others were imprisoned. The women who were condemned were delivered to their relations, or to those under whose guardianship they were, to be punished in private; but if there did not appear any proper person of the kind to execute the sentence, the punishment was nevertheless inflicted, but in private and by a person appointed by the court.
The Senate also passed a vote, on the suggestion of the Consul Postumius, that the city quæstors should give to both Æbutius and Hispala a certain goodly sum of money out of the public treasury, as a reward for discovering the iniquitous Bacchanalian ceremonies. Æbutius was exempted from compulsory service in the army; and to Hispala it was granted that she should enjoy the unique privileges of disposing in any way she chose of her property; that she should be at liberty to wed a man of honorable birth, and that there should be no disgrace to him who should marry her; and that it should be the business of the consuls then in office, and of their successors, to take care that no injury should ever be offered to her.
Though the Bacchanalian abuses were thus strenuously dealt with by the Roman authorities, this and other like parasitical growths which fastened themselves upon the religious instincts of the people were not to be shaken off. Among the many noxious developments that crept over and eventually choked the life out of the sturdy ancient stock, we find every vicious substitute for religion known to the ante-Christian world. During the decadence of Rome, the ancient national religion became disintegrated and almost wholly superseded. Many of the empresses patronized the foreign orgiastic cults; and, taking the many-sided development of Roman religion as a whole, the strange spectacle is presented of a remarkable improvement in philosophy accompanying a great deterioration in morals. On the one hand, there were those who were struggling to a conception of the transcendental nature of the deity and the unity of nature; on the other hand were those who were doing in the name of the gods everything that is considered unworthy of humanity. And in all the evil fructification of base conceptions of religion, as well as in the knowledge of the higher philosophy, woman had her full share. No Roman woman was irreligious, however great the obliquity of her moral character, though sometimes her piety took a form so bizarre that the fact outruns imagination. Agrippina the Younger, for an example, was created priestess to the deified Claudius, whom she had cajoled into marrying her despite the fact that he was her uncle.
It must not be imagined, however, that because Roman religion developed these excesses through the infusion of Oriental superstitions, it came to be devoid of those uplifting influences which are the province of faith in the divine. There were never wanting those who, loving the good, the beautiful, and the true, supported their aspirations by their belief in the providence of deity; and the doctrine of a future life, though held only with much vacillation by the philosophers, was continually resorted to for comfort by the multitude. How widespread were these ideas, and how greatly similar to our own were the thoughts of those ancient Romans, are matters lost sight of by people who need no further reason for dismissing a religion from their consideration than the mere fact that it is pagan. Plutarch, who defended the dogma of the unity of God, of His providence, and of the immortality of the soul, wrote to his wife: "You know that there are those who persuade the multitude that the soul, when once freed from the body, suffers no inconvenience nor evil." The more positive, though less philosophical, faith of the people is illustrated by the words a mother carved upon the sepulchre of her child: "We are afflicted by a cruel wound; but thou, renewed in thy existence, livest in the Elysian fields. The gods order that he who has deserved the light of day should return under another form; this is a reward which thy goodness has gained thee. Now, in a flowery mead, the blessed, marked with the sacred seal, admit thee to the flock of Bacchus, where the Naiades, who bear the sacred baskets, claim thee as their companion in leading the solemn processions by the light of the torches." Except for somewhat of the imagery, and the pagan names, this woman's faith might easily be accepted as Christian.
IV
THE PASSING OF OLD ROMAN SIMPLICITY
With the spread of her foreign conquests, Rome herself was subjugated by a rapid revolution in thought and habit. From the middle of the second century before Christ, we look in vain for the old Republic. Religion, manners, morals, occupations, amusements--all have changed. The old-time Roman character is passing away, like a tide, through the narrowing channel of the ever-decreasing number of those who cling to the ancient ideals. Morality has started upon that ebb of which the days of Caligula and Nero saw the lowest mark to which a civilized people ever fell. The Romans could not withstand the temptations incidental to conquest. Physically invincible, they were not armed against the onset of foreign vices. The State grew inordinately wealthy by pillage and exaction; a single campaign yielded booty to the value of nine million six hundred thousand dollars. Scipio wept when he took Carthage; for well he knew that his people were in no way prepared to assume such extensive dominion, except at the cost of national character. Polybius says that after the conquest of Macedon men believed themselves able to enjoy in all security the conquest of the world and the spoils thereof.