The Religion of Ancient Rome

by Cyril Bailey

CHAPTER VII[ToC]

WORSHIP OF THE STATE

Since, in the matter of religion, the Roman state is in the main but the agricultural household magnified, we shall not, in considering its worship, be entering on a new stratum of ideas, but rather looking at the development of notions and sentiments already familiar. To deal, however, with the state-worship in full would not only far exceed the limits of this sketch, but would lead us away from religious ideas into the region of what we might now call 'ecclesiastical management.' I propose therefore to confine myself to two points, firstly, the broadening of the old conceptions of the household and the fields and their adaptation to the life of the state, and secondly—to be treated very shortly and as an indication of the Roman character—the organisation of religion.

1. Development of the Worship of House and Fields.—Here we shall find two main characteristics. The state in the first place, as we have several times hinted in anticipation, establishes its own counterpart of the household and rustic cults and adapts to its own use the ideas which they involve: in the second, and particularly in connection with some of the field-deities, it evolves new and very frequently abstract notions, foreign to the life of the independent country households, but necessary and vital to the life of an organised community. Let us look first at the fate of the household deities.

Ianus.—We left Ianus as the numen of the house-door: he passes into the state exactly in the same capacity: the state too has its 'door,' the gate at the north-east corner of the Forum, and this becomes the seat of his state-cult—the door which, according to Augustan legend, is opened in the time of war and only shut when Rome is at peace with all the world. But reflection soon gets to work on Ianus: a door has two sides, it can both open and shut; therefore, as early as the song of the Salii, he has developed the cult-epithets 'Opener,' 'Shutter' (Patulci, Cloesi), and as soon as he is thought of as anything approaching a personality he is 'two-headed' (bifrons), as he appears in later representations. The door again is the first thing you come to in entering a house: the 'door-spirit' then, with that tendency to abstraction which we shall see shortly in other cases, becomes the god of beginnings. He watches over the very first beginning of human life in his character of Consevius; to him is sacred the first hour of the day (pater matutinus), the Calends of every month, and the first month of the year (Ianuarius); to him too is offered by the rex sacrorum the first sacrifice of the year, the Agonium on the 9th of January. In this capacity, moreover, his name comes first in all the formulæ of prayer, and he is looked upon—not indeed as the father of the gods—for that is a much too anthropomorphic notion—but as what we might now term their 'logical antecedent': divum deus, as the song of the Salii quaintly puts it, principium deorum, as later interpretation explained it. Yet through all he remains the most typical Roman deity: he does not acquire a temple till 217 B.C., nor a bust until quite late, nor is he ever identified with a Greek counterpart. In his capacity as pater matutinus he has a native female counterpart in Matuta, a dawn-deity, who becomes a protectress in childbirth, and as such is the centre of the matrons' festival, the Matralia of June 11.

Vesta.—The history of Vesta is perhaps less romantic, but it affords a more exact parallel between household and state. In the primitive community the king's hearth is not merely of symbolical importance, but of great practical utility, in that it is kept continually burning as the source of fire on which the individual householder may draw: hence it is the duty of the king's daughters to care for it and keep the flame perpetually alight. In Rome the temple of Vesta is the king's hearth, situated, as one would expect, in close proximity to the regia. The fire is kept continually blazing except on the 1st of March of every year, when it is allowed to go out and is ceremonially renewed. The Vestal virgins, sworn to perpetual virginity and charged with the preservation of the sacred flame, are 'the king's daughters,' living in a kind of convent (atrium Vestæ) and under the charge of the king's representative, the pontifex maximus. It is their duty too, as the natural cooks of the sacred royal household, to make the salt cake (mola salsa) to be used at the year's festivals and to preserve it and other sacred objects, such as the ashes of the Fordicidia, in the storehouse of Vesta (penus Vestæ). In the month of June from the 7th to the 15th, with a climax on the 9th, the day of the Vestalia, the matrons who all the year round have tended their own hearths, come in solemn procession bare-footed to make their homely offerings at the state-hearth, and the virgins meanwhile offer the cakes that they have made. For eight days the ceremony continues, during which time the bakers and millers keep holiday; the days are religiosi (marriages are unlucky and other taboos are observed) and also nefasti (no public business may be performed); until the ceremony closes on the 15th, with the solemn cleansing of the temple and the casting of the refuse into the Tiber, and then the normal life of the state may be renewed—Q. St. D. F. (Quando Stercus Delatum Fas) is the unique entry in the Calendars. This is all less imaginative than the development of Ianus, but the underlying feeling is intensely Roman and there could be no clearer idea of the natural adaptation of the household-cult to the religion of the state.

Penates, Lares, and Genius.—The other household deities too have their counterpart, though not so prominently marked, in the worship of the state. The magistrates, on entering office, took oath by Iuppiter and the Di Penates populi Romani Quiritium, and that the conception was as wide in the state as in the household is shown by the fact that on less formal occasions the formula appears as Iuppiter et ceteri di omnes immortales. The Penates of the state then would include all the state-deities; but that their original character is not lost sight of we can see from the statement of Varro that in the penus Vestæ (the 'state storehouse') were preserved their sigilla—not apparently sensuous representations, but symbolic objects, such as we have seen before in cases like that of the silex of Iuppiter. The Lares again find their counterpart in the Lares Praestites of the state, and their rustic festival, the Compitalia, has its urban reproduction, which, as it involved considerable license on the part of populace and slaves, was often in the later period of the Republic a cause of serious political disturbance. Even the Genius, though rather vaguely, passes over to the state and we hear of the Genius populi Romani or the Genius urbis Romæ, with regard to which Servius quotes from an inscription on a shield the characteristic addition, sive mas sive femina: in much later times we find the exact counterpart of the domestic worship of the Genius of the pater familias in the cult of the Genius of the Emperor—the foundation of the whole of the imperial worship.

We have observed already how the cults of the fields were taken over by the state and their counterparts established in the great festivals of the Calendar. Naturally enough most of the deities concerned, existing only for the part they played in these festivals, retained their original character without further development. But with a few it was different: it was their fate to acquire new characteristics and new functions, and, developing with the needs of the community, to become the great gods of the state: of these we must give some brief account.

Iuppiter.—We have known Iuppiter hitherto either in connection with certain very primitive survivals, or in the genuine Roman period as a sky-numen, concerned with the grape-harvest in the two Vinalia and the Meditrinalia, and the recipient at the family meal of a daps as a general propitiation before the beginning of the sowing. As sky-god he passes to the state: Lucetius (lux) is his title in the song of the Salii and to him are sacred the Ides of every month—the time of the full moon, when there is most light in the heavens by night as well as day. In his agricultural connection he has his wine-festivals in the state as in the country, and the household daps becomes the more elaborate epulum Iovis, in which the whole community, as it were, entertained him at a banquet. As a sky-deity, too, he is particularly concerned with the thunderbolt and the lightning-flash (Iuppiter Fulmen, Fulgur), and to him are sacred the always ominous spots which had been struck by lightning (bidentalia): with the more alarming occurrence of lightning by night he has a special connection under the cult-title Iuppiter Summanus. But as the little community grew, and especially perhaps after the union of the two settlements, the worship of Iuppiter Feretrius, associated with the sacred oak upon the Capitol—the hill between Palatine and Quirinal—comes more and more into prominence as a bond of union and the central point of the state's religious life: it tends indeed to take the place of priority, which had previously been occupied by Ianus. The community goes to war with its neighbours, and after a signal victory the spolia opima must be dedicated on the sacred oak: indeed Iuppiter is in a special sense with them in the battle and must now be worshipped as the 'stayer of rout' (Stator) and the 'giver of victory' (Victor). War is a new province of the state's activity, but, characteristically enough, it does not evolve its own numen, but enlarges the sphere of the somewhat elastic spirits already existing. So too in the internal organisation of the state there is felt the need of a religious sanction for public morality, and Iuppiter—though vaguely at first—takes on him the character of a deity of justice. In this connection he is primarily the god of oaths: we have seen how his sacred silex was used in the oath of treaty: it is also the most solemn witness to the oath of the citizen. Iuppiter Lapis becomes specially the Dius Fidius, a cult-title which subsequently sets up for itself and produces a further offshoot in the abstract Fides. Finally, towards the end of our period the Iuppiter of the Capitol emerges triumphant, as it were, from his struggle with his rivals and, with the new title of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus,—the 'best and greatest,' that is, of all the Iuppiters—takes his place as the supreme deity of the Roman state and the personification of the greatness and majesty of Rome itself. To his temple hereafter the Roman youth will come to make his offering when he takes the dress of manhood; here the magistrates will do sacrifice before entering on their year of office: here the victorious general will pass in procession with the spoils of his victory: on the walls shall be suspended treaties with foreign nations and offerings sent by subject princes and states from all quarters of the world: all that Rome is to be, will be, as it were, embodied in the sky-spirit of the sacred oak, the god of justice and of victory in war.