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

by Clifford Herschel Moore

But while this mingling of the Greek and the Jew was going on at Alexandria, a new power was rising in Italy, which, having secured the mastery of the western half of the Mediterranean, turned its attention toward the East. Let us call to mind the position of Rome at the close of the Second Punic War in 202 b.c. She was mistress of practically the entire Italian peninsula from the Alps to the Straits of Messina; by her two wars with Carthage she had gained Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and a large part of Spain—in short at the end of the third century before our era Rome was the dominant power in the West. Within the next two centuries she was destined to take and in no small degree to Latinize all of modern Spain and Portugal, the whole of France and Belgium, a part of Holland, the Rhine districts, Switzerland, southern Germany, and Austria below the Danube; she was to extend her power over the greater part of the Balkan peninsula including Greece; and she was to become mistress of the most of Asia Minor, of Syria and Palestine, of Egypt, and of all northern Africa with the exception of what is now Morocco. The whole civilized world, and many lands to which this name could hardly be applied, were brought under her sway before the close of the first Christian century.

In their conquests of eastern lands Roman soldiers came directly into contact with Asiatic, Syrian, and Egyptian forms of religion, so that on their return to the West they brought with them some knowledge of eastern gods. But the influence of oriental cults had begun before Rome entered on her military conquests; for a long time she had had mercantile and diplomatic relations with Asia Minor and Egypt. Trade indeed was one of the great channels through which gods no less than goods moved from the East to the West. The Greeks of western Asia Minor, of Delos, of southern Italy and Sicily were the middlemen who assisted in these transfers. Furthermore, beginning with the second pre-christian century, enormous numbers of slaves were brought from Asia Minor and the neighboring lands to Italy and the West. These slaves were of every degree from the most ignorant to the highly cultivated, but whatever their class they brought with them their own religions, which they practised in their captivity and thus made known to their masters. At a later period, under the Empire, auxiliary troops, enlisted in the eastern provinces, were stationed at many points in the West. The remains of shrines and hundreds of inscriptions found along the Danube and the Rhine, in remotest Britain, in Spain and Portugal, as well as in France and other lands, show that these auxiliary troops did much to introduce oriental gods to the areas in which they served. So traders, slaves, and soldiers became the great agents in transfer of those oriental religions, which in the first three centuries of our era were spread over all the western part of the Roman Empire.

Yet the first oriental deity to be received at Rome was invited there by vote of the Senate. In one of the darkest hours of the Second Punic War, in 205 b.c., the Sibylline Books declared that Hannibal would be forced to leave Italy if the great Mother of the Gods could be brought from Phrygia to Rome. King Attalus of Pergamum, a friend and ally of the Romans, readily gave up the meteoric stone which represented the goddess, and in 204 this was received with great ceremony at Rome. Thirteen years later the divinity was installed in her permanent home on the Palatine, where the ruins of her temple may still be seen. The character of her worship was wholly different from that of any god hitherto known at Rome, and the citizens must have been greatly shocked when they first beheld it; Phrygian priests dancing and mutilating themselves furnished an appalling contrast to the sober ritual of the state. So offensive were these performances that no Roman was allowed to become a priest of the goddess until after the close of the Republic. Only on April 4 did a state official—the city praetor—offer sacrifice in the temple of the goddess, and on this same day sodalities formed among the aristocracy dined together in her honor; in 194 plays were presented on her festal day, and three years later with the dedication of her temple there were established in her honor the Ludi Megalenses, which, however, did not differ essentially from similar festivals in honor of Roman gods. But the temple service was restricted to the imported Phrygian priests, who were allowed on certain days to dance through the streets to the sound of their wild music, singing hymns to the goddess, and taking up collections for the support of the worship. Under the Empire Roman citizens were admitted to the priestly offices. Yet from the first the goddess was held in high esteem, for the promise of the Sibylline Books had been fulfilled—Hannibal had been forced to withdraw to Africa, and the Roman cause had triumphed with divine help.

Other divinities came in what may be described as unofficial ways, through the agencies that I have already mentioned. For example, as early as the third century before our era, the worship of the goddess Isis and her associates Serapis, Anubis, and the rest, spread from Alexandria into Sicily and southern Italy, as it had extended in the same period to Delos and the other islands of the Aegean Sea, and to the coast of Asia Minor. Before 105 b.c. a temple had been built at Puteoli, the important seaport of that day on the Bay of Naples, which had close commercial relations with Delos and other ports in the East. The temple of Isis at Pompeii was erected at about the same period. Within half a century a shrine of the goddess had been established on the very Capitol at Rome, where she maintained herself in spite of many efforts to dislodge her. This Egyptian cult had been introduced by immigrant traders and slaves, but it soon spread to other classes. About 38 a.d., a temple to the goddess was erected on the Campus Martius not far from the Pantheon. There is today in front of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva a little east of the Pantheon an elephant carrying on his back a small obelisk at which he casts an amusing look. That obelisk originally stood before the temple of Isis, which was the chief center of the Egyptian cult at Rome to the end of paganism.

The campaigns of Sulla and Pompey in Asia Minor had brought the soldiers into contact with the worship of a Cappadocian “Mother-goddess,” Mâ, to whom the Romans gave the Italian name of Bellona. The cult of this divinity was apparently carried on privately at Rome during the last half-century of the Republic, but the goddess did not receive official recognition before the third Christian century.

It was in the first century of our era, however, that a flood of divinities came from the East to the West. Of these I can mention only a few. From northern Syria slaves and traders brought the Syrian goddess Atargatis, whom they made known as far as Britain under the name of Dea Syria. From many Syrian towns came the local Baalim, who were regularly identified with Iupiter Optimus Maximus. So Adad, the consort of Atargatis at Hierapolis in Syria, was known in the West; the Baal of Heliopolis, Baalbec, was worshipped as Iupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus, not only in Italy, but in the Balkan peninsula, along the Danube and the Rhine, and in Gaul. The Syrian port Berytus, the modern Beyrout, became apparently a center for the export, so to speak, of these oriental divinities. We have inscriptions which show that an association of Syrian merchants coming from this city was settled at Puteoli, where they formed a religious society, cultores Iovis Heliopolitani Berytenses, which carried on the worship of the Baal of Heliopolis at the end of the first and the beginning of the second century of our era. A dedication to the same god, from Nîmes in southern France, was set up by a retired centurion, who tells us that his home was Beyrout; and likewise in the third century at Zellhausen near the Rhine another centurion paid his devotions to the gods and wrote himself down as from the same place. From the little town of Doliche in Commagene, a district of northern Syria, soldiers carried their warlike god to the western borders of the Roman world; Damascus furnished Iupiter Optimus Maximus Damascenus; and I might quote many other illustrations. More important, however, than these divinities was the god Mithras, whose worship originated in Persia, but had long been established in Asia Minor. It was to become prominent in the West at the close of the first Christian century.

I have already said that these oriental gods were known over virtually all the western world. We naturally find the evidence for their worship most abundant in the great centers of trade and in those districts where soldiers were quartered. In Italy the ports of Puteoli on the Bay of Naples and of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, together with the capital, Rome, were the greatest centers. But the oriental cults were found throughout the Italian peninsula. In the provinces of the Gauls and the Germanies we find two great areas—the populous valleys of the Rhone and the upper Garonne, and the Rhine valley. The chief centers, as we should expect, were for the most part the larger towns or army headquarters: Marseilles, Arles, Orange, Die, Vaison, Vienne, Nîmes, Narbonne, and Bordeaux; Lyons, Trèves, Mayence, Heddernheim, and Cologne. Occasionally a small town showed remarkable devotion to some cult, as did Lactoure in Aquitaine, where the Great Mother of the Gods was especially popular in the latter third of the second and the first half of the third century of our era. In like fashion these cults flourished along the valley of the Danube and even in remote Dacia, which included approximately modern Rumania and Transylvania; dedications are also found in the more important towns in Africa, Spain, and Britain, being most abundant in the last named province along the line of Hadrian’s wall.

With regard to the centuries during which these oriental religions flourished our evidence, aside from that for the Great Mother, shows clearly that some entered southern Italy in the second century b.c. or even earlier, and that they began at Rome about 100 b.c.; there they lasted to the very close of the fourth century of our era, almost a hundred years after the recognition of Christianity by Constantine. In the provinces of the Roman Empire these cults did not become prominent until about 100 a.d., and they ceased before the close of the third century. When in 307 a.d. Diocletian, Galerius, and Licinius restored a shrine of Mithras, “the protector of their empire,” at Carnuntum on the Danube, they were honoring a god whose potency in the European provinces had ended more than a generation before.[287] The reasons for the decay of these cults we shall consider later. But I should like you now to observe that in Rome these religions flourished for a good century longer than they did in the western provinces. The explanation of this fact is to be found in that sharp conflict between paganism and Christianity which went on through the fourth century, when the pagan party rallied its forces of every sort for a final defense against the advance of Christianity. This movement at Rome, which had slight influence elsewhere save perhaps in some of the largest cities, produced a pagan revival which helped to maintain the adopted oriental religions for over a century after they had lost all vitality in the provinces.

The character of these oriental religions offers a marked contrast to that of the Roman. In my last lecture I pointed out that this latter was a formal, practical, bread-and-butter sort of religion, one that was natural to an unimaginative agricultural people; it was a religion in which the worship of the gods consisted primarily in the exact performance of ritual to secure practical blessings of a material kind. I further tried to show that this religion offered no satisfaction to man’s deeper questionings, made slight appeal to religious emotion, and had little moral effect except in the emphasis which it laid on duty; we also saw that the forms of Greek religion, which were imported into Italy, were serviceable chiefly in that they were cults in which all classes of citizens could share, and because they offered certain aesthetic satisfactions; I likewise spoke of the way in which the Greco-Roman religion of the state fell into decay after the end of the third century before our era, so that before Cicero’s day the intellectual class had lost their belief in it. This did not mean, however, that men had lost their religious longing. Far from it. For there is abundant proof that under the stimulus of Greek philosophy and mysticism, questionings as to the nature of man, his relation to divinity, and his immortality became more earnest. To these questions the Greco-Roman religion offered no answer.

The oriental gods, however, were of a very different sort from those of Greece and Rome: they required a spiritual devotion on the part of their devotees and they made strong appeals to the religious emotions. These appeals were increased by the exotic character of these foreign cults, for it seems to be a characteristic of the human mind in time of special need or distress to seek some foreign source of help or relief. Egypt and the East made a far greater appeal to the imagination at the close of the Roman Republic and in the early Empire than they do even today. Furthermore many of these religions could claim the warrant of great age: Isis and Osiris had been mighty in Egypt for two thousand years; the Great Mother of the Gods belonged to a class of Asiatic mother-goddesses of immemorial antiquity; and Mithras came from a period beyond the knowledge of the Roman world. Whenever records failed, pious tradition supplied the need. The devotees formed closed communities, sacred brotherhoods, to which admission was obtained through rites of initiation. Their rituals were essentially mysteries, in which through emotional experiences and revelations the devout gained assurance of divine aid here and hereafter. Furthermore these oriental religions had proselyting priests who recruited the number of devotees by their appeals, and each religion numbered among its followers considerable bodies of men who followed a certain holy life—they were known as sacrati, “the consecrated.” There was, in fact, much in common between these oriental mysteries and the greater mysteries of Greece and the Orphic religion.