The introduction of Greek gods had begun centuries before. As early as 493 B.C., at a time of serious famine, a temple had been built to Demeter, Dionysus, and Persephonê; many others followed; resemblances among the native gods quickly led to identifications; and new forms of worship tended to displace the old. After another crisis (206 B.C.) the "Great Mother," Cybelê, the Phrygian goddess of Mount Ida, was imported. The black aerolite which was supposed to be her abode, was presented by King Attalus to the ambassadors of the Roman senate. The goddess was solemnly welcomed at the Port of Ostia, and was ultimately carried by noble Roman ladies on to the Palatine hill.
The history of later days was full of notes upon religion. Cæsar interspersed them among the narratives of his campaigns in Gaul; Tacitus drew on his recollections as an officer in active service for his description of the Germans. There was as yet no literature in Wales or Ireland to embody the Celtic traditions; and the Scandinavian Saga was unborn. But the geographers, like Strabo (first century A.D.), collected a great deal of material that must have been gathered ultimately from travellers, soldiers, traders, and slaves. A wise and gentle philosophic Greek, Plutarch of Chæronea in Bœotia (A.D. 46-120), student at the university of Athens, lecturer on philosophy at Rome, and finally priest of Pythian Apollo in his native city, is at home in many religions. Beside altars to the Greek gods Dionysus, Herakles, and Artemis, in his own streets, were those of the Egyptian Isis and Anubis. The treatise on Isis and Osiris (commonly ascribed to him) is an early essay in comparative religion. In the latter half of the second century the traveller Pausanias passes through Greece, describing its sacred sites, noting its monuments, recording mythological traditions, and observing archaic rites. In this fascinating guide-book to religious practice are survivals of ancient savagery, still lingering at country shrines, set down with curious unconsciousness of their significance. The historical method is as yet only in its infancy. But Pausanias rightly discerned that its first business is to know the facts.
In Rome, where ritual tradition held its ground with extraordinary tenacity amid the decay of belief, Marcus Terentius Varro, renowned for his wide learning (116-28 B.C.), devoted sixteen books of his great treatise on Antiquities to "Divine Things." Like so many other precious works of ancient literature it has disappeared, but its contents are partly known through its use by St. Augustine in his famous work on "The City of God." Following a division of the gods by the chief pontiff Mucius Scævola, he treated religion under three heads. In the form presented by the poets' tales of the gods it was mythical. Founded by the philosophers upon nature (physis) it was physical. As administered by priests and practised in cities it was civil. It was an old notion that religion was a legal convention imposed by authority for purposes of popular control; and Varro does not disdain to declare it expedient that States should be deceived in such matters. This police-notion long regulated public custom, and tended to render the identification of deities presenting superficial resemblances all the more easy.
By this time the origin of the term "religion" had begun to excite interest, as its meaning began slowly to change. Varro's contemporaries, Cicero (106-43 B.C.) and Lucretius (about 97-53), discussed its derivation. Cicero connected it with the root legere, to "string together," to "arrange"; while Lucretius found its origin in ligare, to "bind." Philology gives little help when it speaks with uncertain voice. More important is the primitive meaning which Mr. Warde Fowler defines as "the feeling of awe, anxiety, doubt, or fear, which is aroused in the mind by something that cannot be explained by a man's experience or by the natural course of cause and effect, and which is therefore referred to the supernatural." It has nothing to do at the outset with any special rites or doctrines. It is not concerned with state-usage or with priestly law. In its adjectival form "religious days" or "religious places" are not days or places consecrated by official practice; they are days and places which have gathered round them man's sentiments of awe and scruple. The word thus came to be applied to anything that was in some way a source or embodiment of mysterious forces. The naturalist Pliny can even say that no animal is "more full of religion than the mole," because strange medicinal powers were supposed to reside in its heart and teeth.
But, on the other hand, a new use of it passes into Roman literature in the writings of Cicero. The feeling of awe still lies in the background, but the word takes on a reference to the acts which it prompts, and thus comes to denote the whole group of rites performed in honour of some divine being. These make up a particular cult or worship, ordained and sanctioned by authority or tradition. "Religion" thus comes to mean a body of religious duties, the entire series of sacred acts in which the primitive feeling is expressed. Roman antiquity conceived these as under the care of priesthoods, legitimated by the State. Around them lay a fringe of superstitions, which a hostile critic like Lucretius could also sum up under the same term. And thus in an age when philosophy was addressing itself to the whole question of man's relation to the world and its unseen Rulers, and a single word was wanted to describe his attitude to the varied spectacle, "religion" was at hand to fill the place. It covered the whole field of human experience, and as different nations presented it in different forms, it became possible to speak of "religions" in the sense of separate systems of worship and belief. The champion of Christianity naturally distinguished his religion as the true from the false; and over against the multiformity of polytheism he set the unity of the faith of the Church.
Of these "religions" history and philosophy sought to give some account. As will be seen hereafter ([Chap. VI]), Babylon and Egypt both claimed a divine origin for their rites, their arts, and laws. Plutarch expressly defends the idea of revelation in the cases of Minos of Crete, the Persian Zoroaster, Zaleucus the shepherd legislator of the Locrians, Numa of Rome, and others. Pan was in love with Pindar, and Æsculapius conversed with Sophocles: if such divine diversions were allowed, how much more should these greater attempts for human welfare be prompted from heaven! Numa had been enabled through Camena Egeria to regulate the ceremonial law as priest-king, and pontiffs, augurs, flamens, virgins, received their duties from him with supernatural sanctions.
Philosophers, on the other hand, discussed the meaning of religion upon different lines. A wide-spread view already noted presented it as a mere instrument of policy, devised to overawe the intractable. The diversity of religions seemed to support this view. Plato's Athenian, in one of his latest works, the Laws, mentions the teaching of sophists who averred that the gods existed not by nature but by art, and by the laws of States which are different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make them. In a fragment of a drama on Sisyphus ascribed to Critias, the friend of Alcibiades, it was alleged that in the primeval age of disorder and violence laws might strike crimes committed in open day, but could not touch secret sins, hidden in the gloomy depths of conscience. A sage advised that to moralise men they must be made afraid. Let them invent gods who could see and hear all things, cognisant not only of all human actions but also of men's inmost thoughts and purposes. They were accordingly connected with the source of the most terrifying and the most beneficent phenomena, the sky, home alike of thunder and lightning, of the shining sun and fertilising rain, seat of divine powers helpful and hurtful to mankind. In the discussion on "the Nature of the Gods" (by Cicero), Cotta, of the Academic school, inquires of his Epicurean opponent Velleius, "What think you of those who have asserted that the whole doctrine concerning the immortal gods was the invention of politicians, whose notion was to govern that part of the community which reason could not influence, by religion?"
From another point of view, however, the practical universality of religion was again and again cited in proof of its truth. Antiquity was not scientific in its method of treatment, and though it did not accept all religions as altogether equal, it had no difficulty in regarding them as substantially homogeneous. The Egyptian worship of animals might be lashed with satiric scorn, but the mysteries of its religion, venerable from an immemorial past, deserved the highest respect. The process of identification of the gods of different religions was always going on as they were carried from land to land. The Apologist, therefore, like the Cretan Cleinias in Plato's Laws when the Athenian stranger asked him to prove the existence of the gods, could always appeal to two main arguments—first, the fair order of the universe and the regularity of the seasons, and secondly, the common belief of all men, both Hellenes and barbarians. This common belief, however, itself required explanation. Its value really depended on its origin. If that ranked no higher than the crouching impulses of fear, it had little worth. Even if it was sought in the sense of dependence, in quiet trust in a sheltering order, or in intelligent inference based on the demand for a cause, the question still pressed for an answer, "What made this possible?" The answer was given by the doctrine of the Logos.
The term logos has played a famous part in philosophical theology. It appears in our New Testament at the opening of the fourth Gospel, "In the beginning was the Logos." Our translators render the Greek term by the English "Word." It is derived from the verb legein, to "speak" or "say." Logos is primarily "what is said," utterance, or speech. Speech, however, must mean something. When we look out upon the objects of the world around us—rock, river, tree, horse, star—we learn to separate them into groups, because while some say quite different things to us, others speak to us, as it were, with nearly the same meaning. We recognise a common meaning in various sorts of dogs, or in still larger classes such as the whole family of birds. But in human intercourse what is said has first been thought. Logos thus takes on another meaning; it is what thinking says to itself, or what we call "reason." The processes of science consist in finding out these meanings or reasons, and getting them into intelligible relations with each other. And when the early Greek thinkers had reached the conception of the unity of the world, here was a term which could be called in to express it. The world must have a meaning; it must express some thought. And did not thought imply thinking?
The philosophy of Heracleitus "the Obscure" (at Ephesus, 500 B.C.) has received in modern times widely different interpretations; but whether or not the Stoics were right in understanding his doctrine of the Logos to imply the existence of a cosmic reason universally diffused, present both in nature and man, it is certain that such ideas appear soon afterwards in Greek literature. Pindar affirms the derivation of the soul from the gods. Plato and Euripides declare the intelligence of man both in nature and origin to be divine; and Pseudo-Epicharmus lays it down (in the second half of the fifth century) that "there is in man understanding, and there is also a divine Logos; but the understanding of man is born from the divine Logos." On this basis the Stoics worked out the conception of a fellowship between man and God which explained the universality of religion. Its seat was in human nature. Every one shared in the Generative Reason, the Seminal Word (the Logos spermatikos). In the long course of ages, says Cicero, when the time arrived for the sowing of the human race, God quickened it with the gift of souls. So we possess a certain kinship with the heavenly Powers; and while among all the kinds of animals Man alone retains any idea of Deity, among men themselves there is no nation so savage as not to admit the necessity of believing in a God, however ignorant they may be what sort of God they ought to believe in.