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

by Clifford Herschel Moore

The introduction of these Greek gods is probably to be connected with the political struggles of the two centuries between 500 and 300 b.c. At the beginning of the Republic the patricians were the only ones who had considerable political rights or who enjoyed the privileges of the state religion, whereas the plebeians were struggling to secure admission to both political and priestly offices; and during these two centuries the humbler class found religious satisfaction in the worship of these new gods, whose rites were public, open to all, and not restricted to the privileged citizens, as were the rites of the older divinities. In 367/6 b.c., the plebeians secured admission to the consulate and to the College of Ten who had charge of the Sibylline Books, and by the year 300 they had obtained a right to all important political offices, including practically all the priesthoods. A social significance also attached to the temples of these new gods: that of Mercury, the god of trade, became the resort of the guild of merchants; the temple of Minerva on the Aventine the center for the various guilds of craftsmen, including that of poets. Along with the Greek gods had come also the Greek ritual. The Hellenization of Roman religion may be said to have been completed by the year 217 b.c. when, as ordered by the Sibylline Books, at the great festival of the lectisternium twelve gods were represented as sharing a sacred meal with the people; these twelve gods were Greek divinities, although all but Apollo were called by Roman names: Jupiter and Juno, Neptune and Minerva, Mars and Venus, Apollo and Diana, Volcanus and Vesta, Mercury and Ceres.[266] While the practical character of Roman religion still remained, the Romans’ concept of the gods themselves, as well as much of the ritual, had been profoundly altered.

In other fields as well Greece began her conquest of Rome before Rome entered on her political subjugation of Greece. An educated young Greek, taken captive at the fall of Tarentum in the year 272 b.c., became the teacher of his master’s children at Rome; when set free, he continued his profession under the name of Livius Andronicus. There was, however, no Roman literature available, so that he had to supply this lack by translating the Odyssey into the rude Saturnian verse current in the mouths of the Latins. In the year 240 b.c. he presented a tragedy and a comedy adapted from Greek originals, and thus through epic and dramatic poetry he became the founder of Latin literature.

We must realize that at this time the only literature existing was the Greek, which in its unexampled history of six centuries and more had originated and perfected almost every major literary form since known. It was inevitable that Andronicus and his successors should turn to the Greek for their models and that the early drama should largely consist of adaptations, chiefly from the cosmopolitan comedy of Greece. That this was possible and natural shows in part how common knowledge of the Greek language and of Greek customs was already in Rome of the third and second centuries before our era. Now these adapted plays, both tragedies and comedies, had a share in breaking down the older religious and social strictness, as we can easily see from the extant comedies of Plautus and of Terence. These prove beyond question that the later Greek drama, when adapted for Roman audiences, must have had a considerable influence upon Roman religion and Roman society. The gods are intentionally held up to ridicule; they are represented as being more immoral and baser than common men; nor is the human society which is presented in these plays an edifying spectacle. Although we should not attribute too great influence in such matters to the stage, there is no possible question that the theatre had its effect then, as it has its influence now.

At the close of the third century before our era native epic poetry began under the influence naturally of the Homeric epics. Naevius, who flourished during the Second Punic War, wrote a narrative poem, the Bellum Punicum, in the native Saturnian measure—a poem which enjoyed great success and continued to be read in Horace’s day. In it he popularized among the Romans a simple form of the legend of Rome’s connection with Troy, which is familiar to us from Virgil and Livy. His successor in this field was Ennius, who died in 169 b.c. He boldly adopted the Greek hexameter for his poetic history of Rome, the Annales, and moulded the Latin language to this measure so successfully that thereafter this remained the metre for the Roman epic. From Naevius and Ennius through Virgil to the end of the fourth Christian century, when Claudian closed the long line of classical Latin poets, every one drew his form, his imagery, and many of his incidents from the Greek epics.

The splendid results of the Second Punic War, made the more glorious by the long years of doubt and disaster, stirred the Romans to a desire to record their national history in prose form. But the only prose which had been developed for this purpose was Greek; therefore the Roman historians wrote in that language for half a century until Cato the Censor set the fashion of writing in Latin prose. So we might go on and point out how in oratory, lyric poetry, elegy, and in almost every other form of literature the Greeks were the direct models for the Romans, as in a way they have been for the literatures of all peoples since. Furthermore in poetry, history, and indeed in all classes of literature, Greek myths and legends were adopted or worked over to fit new conditions, tales and genealogies invented on Greek models, and everywhere the Greek gods were given Latin names and adapted to their new environment. The disastrous result for the indigenous religion is self-evident.

During the third and second centuries education came to mean first of all the study of the Greek language and literature. I have just spoken of some of the evidence we possess which shows that Greek was early widely known among all classes at Rome. By the Second Punic War it became customary in well-to-do and noble families to employ a private teacher (grammaticus) within the house to give instruction in the Greek language and literature; in the middle of the second century b.c., with the growth of a wider interest in the formal study of Greek literature, schools arose in which the grammatici taught a considerable number of pupils together. The Greek authors studied were first of all Homer, and then the great tragedians; among the writers of comedy Menander was the favorite; the fables of Aesop and lyric poetry also found their place. Modelled on this Greek curriculum was the study of Latin literature—Livius Andronicus, Ennius, with selections from the Roman writers of tragedy and comedy. In due season Virgil and Horace occupied the first rank. Furthermore not far from the beginning of the last century before our era Greek rhetoricians began formal instruction at Rome, and they continued to hold the field against Latin rhetoricians throughout antiquity. We see therefore that all education of every grade from the time of the Second Punic War was either Greek or modelled directly on the Greek. By it the Latin tongue was refined and perfected; but more significant for us at the present moment is the fact that thereby Latin society was made familiar with Greek social, philosophic, and religious ideas so far as they were represented in Greek literature.

I have earlier said that the temples of the Greek gods at Rome were built in Greek style by Greek architects, and that the images of the gods within were copies of famous Greek works of art. By these the Romans’ ideas as to the personality of their divinities were fixed in the Greek concepts. As Rome extended her conquests over Greek lands, first in southern Italy and Sicily, and then in Greece proper, she acquired as part of the spoils of war great treasures of Greek sculpture and painting; the number of statues and other works of art which were brought home by Memmius alone after the destruction of Corinth in 146 b.c. can hardly be estimated. A large number of them represented the gods, and intensified the process of Hellenization with which we are now concerned, for the statues and other representations of Cronos, Zeus, Hera, Ares, and Athena readily represented Saturn, Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Minerva. In cases where the similarity was not so close, the nearest Greek analogy was selected; if none was satisfactory, still the best was made of the case, as when the Greek representations of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, came to do service for the Lares Praestites. Among the spoils of war were many Greek paintings, for which mythological scenes were favorite subjects, and such frequently represented the baser, sensual side of traditional religion. The effect on the ignorant was to give them a lower concept of divinity; the intellectual classes were disgusted with the gods of such a sort and rejected them.

But the most potent influence that came from Greece to Rome was naturally philosophy. We cannot fix any date for the introduction of Greek philosophic thought at Rome, yet it certainly became influential soon after the close of the Second Punic War. We have already seen that long before this time the Greek philosophic systems were highly developed and had done much to drive the traditional gods from their high places. It was inevitable that these philosophies should have a swift effect when they once became known to the newly Hellenized Roman society of the second century b.c. The poet Ennius, who belonged to the first half of that century, was a man of strong religious bent and moral convictions, and he heartily scorned the superstitious notions of his day. He had been already influenced by Epicurean scepticism with regard to the existence of the gods, and the following words, spoken by Teucer in one of his tragedies, may well have represented his own view: “I have always said, and I shall always say, that the gods of heaven exist, but I believe that they have no care for what the race of man does. For if they had such care, it would be well with the good and ill with the wicked; which is not the case now.”[267] It is the ancient difficulty of justifying the ways of God to men. Ennius adopted the easy solution by denial, which he had already learned from Epicureanism.

The same poet also translated and made known to the Romans the Sacred History of Euhemerus. This was a romantic tale written in the third century before our era in which the author told of an imaginary voyage which he had made from Arabia to the island Panchaea in the Indian Ocean; there he found inscribed on a column the history of the supposed gods Uranus, Cronos, and Zeus, and learned that they and the other gods and heroes had been originally historical persons who were raised to their high position because of the services they had rendered mankind. This Sacred History was an interesting example of the rationalizing tendency of the age that produced it; its effect upon the Roman, whose belief in the traditional religion was already shaken, we can readily understand. Unquestionably Ennius’ work and the plays of the comedians hastened the work of unbelief, although they were only two of many factors that contributed to the ultimate result.

The first half of this same second century was also a time of religious unrest. Whatever may have been the reason, whether the common longing for mystic assurance of safety and salvation had come naturally to the front in the Roman and Italian mind, or whether the large number of Greeks, slaves, traders, and other members of the lower and immigrant classes had moved the natives by mystic practices which they had brought with them, certain it is that a considerable part of the Romans found no satisfaction for their deeper longings in the traditional religion, and turned to a form of the Greek mysteries.[268] The mysteries of Bacchus which had gradually made their way up the peninsula from the Greek cities of the south led to such excesses in 186 b.c. that the Roman senate felt obliged to adopt stern measures; yet it is significant that it did not dare to forbid the celebration of these mysteries, but attempted only to control them. The Bacchic mysteries offered essentially the same religious satisfaction that the great mysteries at Eleusis did. Their influence at this time in Italy shows how conscious men had become of larger religious desires and how little the current forms of religion satisfied them. The conservatives in the state abhorred the Bacchic rites and would have no more part in them than in philosophy, towards which they showed an amusing timidity. Five years after the regulation of the mysteries an attempt was made to introduce at Rome some philosophic books which were generally regarded as subversive in their tendencies. The method of their introduction was the same one which has been used many times for similar purposes. Some farmers plowing in their fields at the foot of the Janiculum found two stone chests or coffins with inscriptions upon them in both Latin and Greek, saying that in one King Numa Pompilius had been buried, and that in the other were the books of the sacred law established by him. On opening the sarcophagi it was discovered that the body of the king had disappeared, but in the second chest were found two rolls of seven books each; one set was in Latin and treated of the pontifical law, the other, in Greek, dealt with Greek philosophy—tradition said it was the philosophy of Pythagoras. After solemn deliberation by the officials it was found that these books tended to destroy religion, and a timid senate ordered them to be publicly burned.[269] Again about 173 b.c., the senate required the Epicurean philosophers, Aldus and Philiscus, to leave the state;[270] and once more in 161 it passed a vote banishing the Greek philosophers and rhetoricians.[271] In 156/5 an embassy from Athens included the Peripatetic philosopher Critolaus, the Academic Carneades, and the Stoic Diogenes, who during their stay at Rome exhibited their skill in disputation and their eloquence in speeches before the people. The populace was charmed, but old fashioned people were horrified at such exhibitions. Cato the Censor was so shocked that he moved in the senate that the Roman youth should not be allowed to listen to such teachings.[272] But it was too late; philosophers might be driven from the state, but philosophy had found a foothold at Rome.