FREETHOUGHT IN ANCIENT ROME
§ 1
The Romans, so much later than the Greeks in their intellectual development, were in some respects peculiarly apt—in the case of their upper class—to accept freethinking ideas when Greek rationalism at length reached them. After receiving from their Greek neighbours in Southern Italy, in the pre-historic period, the germs of higher culture, in particular the alphabet, they rather retrograded than progressed for centuries, the very alphabet degenerating for lack of literary activity[1] in the absence of any culture class, and under the one-idea’d rule of the landowning aristocracy, whose bent to military aggression was correlative to the smallness of the Roman facilities for commerce. In the earlier ages nearly everything in the nature of written lore was a specialty of a few priests, and was limited to their purposes, which included some keeping of annals.[2] The use of writing for purposes of family records seems to have been the first literary development among the patrician laity.[3] In the early republican period, however, the same conditions of relative poverty, militarism, and aristocratic emulation prevented any development even of the priesthood beyond the rudimentary stage of a primitive civic function; and the whole of these conditions in combination kept the Roman Pantheon peculiarly shadowy, and the Roman mythology abnormally undeveloped.
The character of the religion of the Romans has been usually explained in the old manner, in terms of their particular “genius” and lack of genius. On this view the Romans primordially tended to do whatever they did—to be slightly religious in one period, and highly so in another. Teuffel quite unconsciously reduces the theorem to absurdity in two phrases: “As long as the peculiar character of the Roman nation remained unaltered” ... (Hist. of Roman Lit. ed. Schwabe, Eng. tr. 1900, i, 2): “the peculiar Roman character had now come to an end, and for ever” (id. p. 123). By no writer has the subject been more unphilosophically treated than by Mommsen, whose chapter on Roman religion (vol. i, ch. xii) is an insoluble series of contradictions. (See the present writer’s Christianity and Mythology, pp. 115–17.) M. Boissier contradicts himself hardly less strangely, alternately pronouncing the Latin religion timid and confident, prostrate and dignified (La religion romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins, 4e édit. i, 7, 8, 26, 28). Both writers ascribe every characteristic of Roman religion to the character of “the Romans” in the lump—a method which excludes any orderly conception. It must be abandoned if there is to be any true comprehension of the subject.
Other verdicts of this kind by Ihne, Jevons, and others, will no better bear examination. (See Christianity and Mythology, pt. i, ch. iii, § 3.) Dr. Warde Fowler, the latest English specialist to handle the question, confidently supports the strange thesis (dating from Schwartz) that the multitude of deities and daimons of the early Latins were never thought of as personal, or as possessing sex, until Greek mythology and sculpture set the fashion of such conceptions, whereupon “this later and foreign notion of divinity so completely took possession of the minds of the Romans of the cosmopolitan city that Varro is the only writer who has preserved the tradition of the older way of thinking” (The Religious Experience of the Roman People, 1911, p. 147). That is to say, the conception of the Gods in the imageless period was an “older way of thinking,” in which deities called by male and female names, and often addressed as Pater and Mater, were not really thought of as anthropomorphic at all! How the early Romans conceived their non-imaged deities Dr. Fowler naturally does not attempt to suggest. We get merely the unreasoned and unexplained negative formula that “we may take it as certain that even the greater deities of the calendar, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and Vesta, were not thought of as existing in any sense in human form, nor as personal beings having any human characteristics. The early Romans were destitute of mythological fancy....”
Either, then, the early Romans were psychologically alien to every other primitive or barbaric people, as known to modern anthropology, or, by parity of reasoning, all anthropomorphism is the spontaneous creation of sculptors, who had no ground whatever in previous psychosis for making images of Gods. The Greeks, on this view, had no anthropomorphic notion of their deities until suddenly sculptors began to make images of them, whereupon everybody promptly and obediently anthropomorphized!
The way out of this hopeless theorem is indicated for Dr. Fowler by his own repeated observation that the Roman jus divinum, in which he finds so little sign of normal “mythological fancy,” represented the deliberately restrictive action of an official priesthood for whom all religio was a kind of State magic or “medicine.” He expressly insists (p. 24) on “the wonderful work done by the early authorities from the State in eliminating from their rule of worship (jus divinum) almost all that was magical, barbarous, or, as later Romans would have called it, superstitious” (Lect. ii, p. 24; cp. Lect. iii.). He even inclines to the view that the patrician religion “was really the religion of an invading race, like that of the Achæans in Greece, engrafted on the religion of a primitive and less civilized population” (pp. viii, 23). This thesis is not necessary to the rebuttal of his previous negation; but it obviously resists it, unless we are to make the word “Roman” apply only to patricians. An invading tribe might, in the case of Rome as in that of the Homeric Greeks, abandon ordinary and localized primitive beliefs which it had held in its previous home, and thereafter be officially reluctant to recognize the local superstitions of its conquered plebs.
But the Roman case can be understood without assuming any continuity of racial divergence. Livy shows us that the Latin peasantry were, if possible, more given to superstitious fears and panics than any other, constantly reporting portents and prodigia which called for State ritual, and embarrassing military policy by their apprehensions. A patrician priesthood, concerned above all things for public polity, would in such circumstances naturally seek to minimize the personal side of the popular mythology, treating all orders of divinity as mere classes of powers to be appeased. The fact (id. p. 29) that among the early Romans, as among other primitives, women were rigidly excluded from certain sacra points to a further ground for keeping out of official sight the sex life of the Gods. But the very ritual formula of the Fratres Arvales, Sive deus sive dea (p. 149), proves that the deities were habitually thought of as personal, and male or female.
Dr. Fowler alternately and inconsistently argues that the “vulgar mind was ready to think of God-couples” (p. 152), and that the conjunctions of masculine and feminine names in the Roman Pantheon “do not represent popular ideas of the deities, but ritualistic forms of invocation” (p. 153). The answer is that the popular mind is the matrix of mythology, and that if a State ritual given to minimizing mythology recognized a given habit of myth-making it was presumably abundant outside. In short, the whole academic process of reducing early Roman religion to something unparalleled in anthropology is as ill-founded in the data as it is repugnant to scientific thought.