The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of Christianity

by Clifford Herschel Moore

By their geographical position the early Romans were exposed to influences from two superior civilizations—the Etruscan at the north, the Greek in southern Italy. The Etruscans had entered Italy probably from the East at some time between the eleventh and the eighth centuries b.c.; but before their coming they had advanced in culture beyond the Latins whose territories they touched on the Tiber. By the sixth century certainly the Romans had come into close political and commercial relations with them, and indeed had already felt their power, for an Etruscan dynasty ruled at Rome. In spite of the patriotic efforts of Roman historians, we can now see that the Etruscan domination lasted long after the traditional expulsion of the kings. From their northern neighbors the Romans took many political and social institutions as well as certain religious elements. The most important of the latter were the College of the Haruspices, the Great Games in the Circus, the Triumph, and the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, which was established by the Tarquins to strengthen their political position.

But far greater was the influence of the Greeks, whose colonies, firmly established, rich and prosperous, fringed the whole southern part of the Italian peninsula. From them the Romans got their alphabet, their weights and measures, and certain political institutions; but most important of all for our present interest, they received from them religious influences which finally so overlaid the early Roman religion that the Romans themselves could not well discover its original elements, and we are hardly in a better situation. Furthermore, if we can believe that there is a kernel of historic truth in the story that King Tarquin the Proud sent an embassy to consult the oracle at Delphi, Rome was not wholly without connection with Greece proper in the sixth century before our era. We have then in Rome of the sixth and earlier centuries an example of a state whose rude civilization was brought into close and intensive contact with the higher civilizations about her. It was inevitable that the results should be rapid and profound.

Of Roman religion before it was influenced by the Greeks and the Etruscans we have comparatively little knowledge. Our literary sources for that period are late and fragmentary, and consist almost wholly of the speculations of the learned. But we have preserved in fragmentary form some twenty stone calendars, dating from the early empire. These calendars are not unlike that classic work known to us all, the Old Farmer’s Almanack, in that they not only enumerate the days and the months, but also note religious festivals and great historic events. In all of them two styles of letters are employed. The larger letters in part indicate one class of religious festivals; other festivals and historical notices are inscribed in letters of smaller size. Theodor Mommsen was the first to see the meaning of this difference. He showed that the religious festivals recorded in the larger letters represented the earliest stage of Roman religion known to us.[263] Some forty-five fixed public festivals in the year’s round are thus indicated. We cannot now discover the character of a number of these, and the functions of some of the gods who belonged to that earliest stage were as obscure to the scholars of the time of Cicero as they are to us today. But we can determine the approximate date at which this earliest period of Roman religion closed, so to speak, for there is no mention in these entries of the triad of the Capitol—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. As I have just said, tradition tells us that this group was introduced by the Tarquin dynasty in the first half of the sixth century before our era; so that the date that can be set for the close of this first stage of Roman religion is somewhere about 600-550 b.c.

An examination of the character of the earliest festivals shows the stage of civilization which had been attained by the Romans. Some thirteen or fourteen among those whose nature can be discovered had to do with agriculture, a few perhaps with grazing, a few others with war; certain ones were connected with the household and the cult of dead ancestors, or were the occasions on which special efforts were made to avert the baneful influences of the dead. The Romans then at this stage were a simple agricultural people, busy with their efforts to get a living from the soil with the aid of their flocks and herds, and engaged in armed conflicts with the neighbors. Their religion had little in it that showed the exercise of the imagination; it was confined rather to those elements which a life rooted in the ground, possessing no broad outlook, required. The heavenly bodies, the sun, moon, and stars, and the operations of nature were not deified; and the social relations, which later furnished many abstract divinities, as yet had no place among the divine powers. Only those things which had to do with the Roman’s daily life in his own neighborhood received his devotion.

Furthermore in this earliest stage the gods were hardly conceived anthropomorphically. Varro says that for the first hundred and seventy years of Roman history the Romans did not represent their gods by statues. According to his chronology this brings us to the founding of the Capitoline temple in which the Etruscan triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva were worshipped. In general we may say that his statement is true, for the Romans were in the aniconic stage until they learned from their neighbors to represent their divinities by images in human form. In this primitive period the Roman thought of his gods not as individuals but as powers (numina), resident in and associated with departments. This is an idea extremely difficult for us to grasp with our sophisticated minds. To the early Roman Janus, for example, was not the god of the door or the threshold, he was the door or the threshold—not simply resident in it, but not even distinguished from the object itself. So Vesta was the fire on the hearth; Saturn was the sown grain; Ceres the growing grain; Flora the blossoming flower; Fons the spring of water; and so on. The circle of such powers could never be closed, as the number of departments in which divine powers might reside was indefinite. Yet even in this early stage certain numina were regarded as more prominent than others. At the head of the list stood Janus, the numen of the door or passage, whose importance was such that still in later times his priest, the rex sacrorum, took precedence of all others, and prayers began with an appeal to him. Jupiter was the god of the sky and of all the phenomena which seem to have their origin there; Juno the feminine counterpart of Jove; Mars the god of war and protector of the land; Quirinus a similar divinity, belonging originally perhaps to a separate settlement on the Quirinal Hill. The list closed with Vesta, the goddess of the hearthfire, with whose name the ancient litanies always ended. These were the great gods of the period before Greek influence came. Yet in this earliest time the divinities had little, if any, personality in our sense of the word. They were simply powers. Personalities and anthropomorphic forms they acquired under the influence of the Greeks, who had left the primitive stage many centuries behind them and had long represented their divinities in human shape.

The religion of the early Romans was at once both simple and elaborate. There were no temples in the later sense; no cult images of the gods. But religion was thought to consist primarily in the employment of a scrupulous care in all dealings with the divine powers, that is to say the ritual had to be exactly performed so that the numina might be forced, if need be, to perform the things the suppliant desired. Such a concept naturally led to the development even in this earliest time of an elaborate ritual, on the exact performance of which all depended. This character Roman religion maintained to the end. So fixed was the ritual that the ancient litanies could not be changed. We have still preserved the songs of the Arval Brothers and of the Salii, which are of such primitive form that in the historical period they were largely unintelligible to those who sang them; yet no syllable of the venerable formulae might be varied. Furthermore religion was regarded as a state affair. It was by state action that certain gods had been recognized and given a kind of citizenship; no others therefore were of concern to the Romans unless the state adopted them also by formal decree. The state likewise determined where and when worship should be carried on. These legislative enactments, according to tradition, had followed the actual establishment of the state by Romulus; and in the historical period the establishment of the religious organization of a colony, for example, was regularly subsequent to the political. In fact the Romans said that the earliest religious system had been established by King Numa, as the political system had been made by Romulus, for they had a natural tendency to regard their institutions as the creations of individuals. The historical significance of this belief for us is that the “religion of Numa” marked the earliest stage of which the Romans were conscious. It is that indicated in the calendars by the entries in large letters.

The Romans further thought of their religion as a contract between the state and its gods. This view comes out clearly in the vows made at the beginning of the year or of a campaign. At such seasons the king, and later the consuls or other officials, promised that if the divine powers should prosper them against their foes, and should grant them abundant harvests, increase of the crops and herds, then the state, when the gods had done their part, would in its turn pay the price promised in the form of votive gifts and sacrifices. Livy furnishes us many illustrations. For example, in a crisis during the struggle with the Samnites the Roman leader prayed thus to the goddess of war: “Bellona, if thou wilt today grant us victory, then I promise thee a temple.”[264] Another is the vow made near the beginning of the Second Punic War: “If the state of the Roman People, the Quirites, shall be preserved, as I would have it preserved, for the next five years in these wars—the war which the Roman People is carrying on with the Carthaginians and the wars which they have with the Gauls who live this side the Alps,—then the Roman People, the Quirites, will give a gift, etc.”; a long list of the offerings to be made follows.[265]

In this first period the religion of the family also was already fixed in the form which it retained to the end of antiquity. Vesta of the hearthfire, the Penates of the larder, the Lar of the farm, the Genius of the pater familias, were the divine powers which were worshipped in the house. Rites were paid also to the Manes, the shades of the dead. As within the home the head of the family naturally performed the priestly offices, so in the state during the regal period the king was chief priest. Advisers and assistants were given him, who with the organization of the republic acquired an independent position, so that thereafter the Pontifex Maximus and his associates, who formed the College of the Pontifices, were at the head of the state religion. Although it is impossible here to go into the details of the Roman priesthoods, it is important to note that these priestly offices were state magistracies just as much as the offices of consul and praetor, and that with a few exceptions priestly office never debarred its holder from performing any other political function. The Roman state was not burdened with sacerdotalism.

Now this early religion of which I have been giving a brief summary was the religion of a little city-state; it was suited to a small, unimaginative community. As such it remained formal and practical—a religion intended to secure material blessings; but it lacked all spiritual elements, and offered little or nothing to satisfy man’s natural hope for a happy future life. More than this, it contained little to ennoble daily life, save as it taught the lesson of duty and of fidelity towards the gods in the performance of contracts agreed upon. Yet it was not an uncomfortable religion for unreflective men, winning their existence from the soil and gaining their wealth from crops, their power through war. It did not, however, have in it the possibility of satisfying men’s higher desires.

Under the influence of the Greeks and the Etruscans the Hellenic gods were early introduced to Rome. The temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, which the Tarquin kings apparently built to establish a new religious center associated with their own dynasty, housed Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva; but they were only the Greek gods Zeus, Hera, and Athena, who had travelled to Rome by way of Etruria. In this temple the gods were represented in human form, and thereafter the process of anthropomorphizing and individualizing the divinities must have gone on apace. Some gods came by migration and trade, like the Greek Castor and Pollux, who were introduced to Rome from the neighboring town of Tusculum, and Hercules, whom Greek immigrants had established at Tibur. But the greatest influence in introducing Greek gods was the Sibylline Books. Whenever need pressed the state, these books were consulted that they might indicate what new means should be employed to win divine aid. We can name at least ten Greek divinities who were thus brought in before the outbreak of the Second Punic War. Apollo must have come at the time of the acquisition of the Sibylline Books, or soon after, for the Books were believed to contain his directions; we know that he had a temple by 433 b.c. Under the name of the Italian divinity Mercury, the Greek Hermes had received a shrine in 495; two years later the triad Ceres, Liber, and Libera, an Italian disguise for Demeter, Dionysus, and Kore, were domiciled near Mercury; and not long before 399 b.c. the Greek Poseidon, with the name of Neptunus, was established near the city walls. Then there was apparently a pause for about a century. But in 293 b.c. a serious plague ravaged the city, so that the Sibylline Books were consulted. This time they were found to say that relief was certain if the Greek god of healing, Aesculapius, were brought to Rome. The divinity consented, and two years later a temple was dedicated to him on the island in the Tiber where the hospital of San Bartolomeo today continues his kindly work. Again in the crisis of the year 249 b.c., warned by many omens, the Romans obeyed the Books’ injunction to establish on the Campus Martius a festival to the Greek Pluto and Persephone under the names Dispater and Proserpina. This festival was to be renewed every saeculum, and ultimately became the festival which Augustus celebrated with such magnificence in 17 b.c. Finally in 238 b.c. the Greek Aphrodite was adopted under the Italian name Flora. You will observe that most of the Greek gods were identified with Roman or Italian divinities long familiar to the Romans; but in every case sooner or later the Greek god so completely overshadowed his Italian counterpart that the Italian lost his identity in the Greek. Besides these divinities which I have named the popular mind identified many others, and in the end a large part of the Greek pantheon crept into the Roman system. The temple for Jupiter and his associates, Juno and Minerva, had been built on the Capitoline Hill in the Etruscan style and the three gods were represented by Etruscan terra-cotta images; but the homes of the Greek divinities were erected in the Greek style by Greek architects, and the statues of the divinities were copies of statues in Greek cities. These set models for the representation of other gods. We can readily understand how men’s concepts of their gods were profoundly influenced by their artistic representations.