And yet throughout the whole powerful poem we have testimony to the pupillary character of Roman thought in relation to Grecian. However much the earnest student may outgo his masters in emphasis and zeal of utterance, he never transcends the original irrationality of asserting that “the Gods” exist; albeit it is their glory to do nothing. It is in picturing their ineffable peace that he reaches some of his finest strains of song,[21] though in the next breath he repudiates every idea of their control of things cosmic or human. He swears by their sacred breasts, proh sancta deum pectora, and their life of tranquil joy, when he would express most vehemently his scorn of the thought that it can be they who hurl the lightnings which haply destroy their own temples and strike down alike the just and the unjust. It is a survival of a quite primitive conception of deity,[22] alongside of an advanced anti-religious criticism.
The explanation of the anomaly seems to be twofold. In the first place, Roman thought had not lived long enough—it never did live long enough—to stand confidently on its own feet and criticize its Greek teachers. In Cicero’s treatise On the Nature of the Gods, the Epicurean and the Stoic in turn retail their doctrine as they had it from their school, the Epicurean affirming the existence and the inaction of the Gods with equal confidence, and repeating without a misgiving the formula about the Gods having not bodies but quasi-bodies, with not blood but quasi-blood; the Stoic, who stands by most of the old superstitions, professing to have his philosophical reasons for them. Each sectarian derides the beliefs of the other; neither can criticize his own creed. It would seem as if in the habitually militarist society, even when it turns to philosophy, there must prevail a militarist ethic and psychosis in the intellectual life, each man choosing a flag or a leader and fighting through thick and thin on that side henceforth. On the other hand, the argumentation of the high-priest Cotta in the dialogue turns to similar purpose the kindred principle of civic tradition. He argues in turn against the Epicurean’s science and the Stoic’s superstition, contesting alike the claim that the Gods are indifferent and the claim that they govern; and in the end he brazenly affirms that, while he sees no sound philosophic argument for religious beliefs and practices, he thinks it is justifiable to maintain them on the score of prescription or ancestral example. Here we have the senatorial or conservative principle,[23] availing itself of the skeptical dialectic of Carneades. In terms of that ideal, which prevailed alike with believers and indifferentists,[24] and mediated between such rival schools as the Epicurean and Stoic, we may partly explain the Epicurean theorem itself. For the rest, it is to be understood as an outcome partly of surviving sentiment and partly of forced compromise in the case of its Greek framers, and of the habit of partizan loyalty in the case of its Roman adherents.
In the arguments of Cotta, the unbelieving high-priest, we presumably have the doctrine of Cicero himself,[25] who in the Academica avows his admiration of Carneades’s reasoning, and in the De Divinatione follows it, but was anchored by officialism to State usage. With his vacillating character, his forensic habit, and his genius for mere speech, he could not but betray his own lack of intellectual conviction; and such weakness as his found its natural support in the principle of use and wont, the practice and tradition of the commonwealth. On that footing he had it in him to boast like any pedigreed patrician of the historic religiousness of Rome, he himself the while being devoid of all confident religious belief. His rhetoric on the subject can hardly be otherwise estimated than as sheer hustings hypocrisy. Doubtless he gave philosophic colour to his practice by noting the hopeless conflict of the creeds of the positive sects, very much as in our own day conservative dialectic finds a ground for religious conformity in the miscarriages of the men of science.[26] But Cicero does not seem even to have had a religious sentiment to cover the nakedness of his political opportunism. Not only does he in the Tusculan Disputations put aside in the Platonic fashion all the Homeric tales which anthropomorphize and discredit the Gods;[27] but in his treatise On Divination he shows an absolute disbelief in all the recognized practices, including the augury which he himself officially practised; and his sole excuse is that they are to be retained “on account of popular opinion and of their great public utility.”[28] As to prodigies, he puts in germ the argument later made famous by Hume: either the thing could happen (in the course of nature) or it could not; if it could not, the story is false; if it could, non esse mirandum—there is no miracle.[29] In his countless private letters, again, he shows not a trace of religious feeling,[30] or even of interest in the questions which in his treatises he declares to be of the first importance.[31] Even the doctrine of immortality, to which he repeatedly returns, seems to have been for him, as for so many Christians since, only a forensic theme, never a source of the private consolation he ascribed to it.[32] In Cicero’s case, in fine, we reach the conclusion that either the noted inconstancy of his character pervaded all his thinking, or that his gift for mere utterance, and his demoralizing career as an advocate, overbore in him all sincere reflection. But, indeed, the practical subversion of all rational ethic in the public life of late republican Rome, wherein men claimed to be free and self-governing, yet lived by oppressing the rest of the world, was on all hands fatal to the moral rectitude which inspires a critical philosophy.
Modern scholarship still clings to the long-established view that Cicero was practically right, and that Lucretius was practically wrong. Augustus, says Dr. Warde Fowler, was fortunate in finding in Virgil “one who was in some sense a prophet as well as a poet, who could urge the Roman by an imaginative example to return to a living pietas—not merely to the old religious forms, but to the intelligent sense of duty to God and man which had built up his character and his empire. In Cicero’s day there was also a great poet, he too in some sense a prophet; but Lucretius could only appeal to the Roman to shake off the slough of his old religion, and such an appeal was at the time both futile and dangerous. Looking at the matter historically, and not theologically, we ought to sympathize with the attitude of Cicero and Scaevola towards the religion of the State. It was based on a statesmanlike instinct; and had it been possible for that instinct to express itself practically in a positive policy like that of Augustus, it is quite possible that much mischief might have been averted” (Social Life at Rome, pp. 325–26).
It is necessary to point out (1) that the early Roman’s “sense of duty to God and man” was never of a kind that could fitly be termed “intelligent”; and (2) that it was his character that made his creed, and not his creed his character, though creed once formed reacts on conduct. Further, it may be permitted to suggest that we might consider historical problems morally, and to deprecate the academic view that “statesmanship” is something necessarily divorced from veracity. The imperfect appeal of Lucretius to the spirit of truth in an ignorant and piratical community, living an increasingly parasitic life, was certainly “futile”; but it is a strange sociology that sees in it something “dangerous,” while regarding the life of perpetual conquest and plunder as a matter of course, and the practice of systematic deceit as wholesome.
The summary of the situation is that Cicero’s policy of religious make-believe could no more have “saved” Rome than Plato’s could have saved Athens, or than that of Augustus did save the empire. It went downhill about as steadily after as before him; and it continued to do so under Christianity as under paganism. The decline was absolutely involved in the policy of universal conquest; and neither creeds nor criticism of creeds could have “averted” the result while the cause subsisted. But there is something gratuitously anti-rational in the thesis that such a decay might have been prevented by a politic manipulation of beliefs known to be false, and that some regeneration was really worked in Rome by the tale of pious Æneas. In his Religious Experience of the Roman People (1911) Dr. Fowler is more circumspect.
In the upper-class Rome of Cicero’s day his type seems to have been predominant,[33] the women alone being in the mass orthodox,[34] and in their case the tendency was to add new superstitions to the old. Among public men there subsisted a clear understanding that public religion should continue for reasons of State. When we find an eminent politician like the elder M. Æmilius Scaurus prosecuted in the year 103 B.C. on a charge of neglecting certain religious ceremonies connected with his offices, we know that there had been neither conscientious abstention on his part nor sincere religious resentment on the other side, but merely a resort by political enemies, after Greek precedent, to a popular means of blackening an antagonist; for the same Scaurus, who was a member of the college of augurs, had actually rebuilt or restored the temple of Fides, said to have been founded by Numa, and that of Mens (Prudence), which had been set up after the great defeat of the Romans at the Trasimene lake;[35] the early and the late procedure alike illustrating the political and pragmatic character of the State religion.[36] In the supreme figure of Julius Cæsar we see the Roman brain at its strongest; and neither his avowed unbelief in the already popular doctrine of immortality,[37] nor his repeatedly expressed contempt for the auspices,[38] withheld him from holding and fulfilling the function of high pontiff. The process of skepticism had been rapid among the men of action. The illiterate Marius carried about with him a Syrian prophetess; of Sulla, who unhesitatingly plundered the temple of Delphi, it was said that he carried a small figure of Apollo as an amulet;[39] of Cæsar, unless insofar as it may be true that in his last years, like Napoleon, he grew to believe in omens as his powers failed, under the stress of perpetual conflict,[40] it cannot be pretended that he was aught but a convinced freethinker.[41] The greatest and most intellectual man of action in the ancient world had no part in the faith which was supposed to have determined the success of the most powerful of all the ancient nations.
Dean Merivale, noting that Cæsar “professed without reserve the principles of the unbelievers,” observes that, “freethinker as he was, he could not escape from the universal thraldom of superstition in which his contemporaries were held” (Hist. of the Romans under the Empire, ed. 1865, ii, 424). The reproach, from a priest, is piquant, but misleading. All the stories on which it is founded apply to the last two or three years of Cæsar’s life; and supposing them to be all true, which is very doubtful, they would but prove what has been suggested above—that the overstrained soldier, rising to the dizzy height of a tremendous career, partly lost his mental balance, like so many another. (Cp. Mackail, Latin Literature, 1895, p. 80.) Such is the bearing of the doubtful story (Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxviii, 2) that after the breaking down of a chariot (presumably the casualty which took place in his fourfold triumph; see Dio Cassius, xlviii, 21) he never mounted another without muttering a charm. M. Boissier (i, 70) makes the statement of Pliny apply to Cæsar’s whole life; but although Pliny gives no particulars, even Dean Merivale (p. 372) connects it with the accident in the triumph. To the same time belongs the less challengeable record (Dio Cassius, lx, 23) of his climbing on his knees up the steps of the Capitol to propitiate Nemesis. The very questionable legend, applied so often to other captains, of his saying, I have thee, Africa, when he stumbled on landing (Sueton. Jul. 59), is a proof not of superstition but of presence of mind in checking the superstitious fears of the troops, and was so understood by Suetonius; as was the rather flimsy story of his taking with him in Africa a man nicknamed Salutio (Sueton. ibid.) to neutralize the luck of the opposing Cornelii. The whole turn given to the details by the clerical historian is arbitrary and unjudicial. Nor is he accurate in saying that Cæsar “denied the Gods” in the Senate. He actually swore by them, per Deos immortales, in the next sentence to that in which he denied a future state. The assertion of the historian (p. 423), that in denying the immortality of the soul Cæsar denied “the recognized foundation of all religion,” is a no less surprising error. The doctrine never had been so recognized in ancient Rome. A Christian ecclesiastic might have been expected to remember that the Jewish religion, believed by him to be divine, was devoid of the “recognized foundation” in question, and that the canonical book of Ecclesiastes expressly discards it. Of course Cæsar offered sacrifices to Gods in whom he did not believe. That was the habitual procedure of his age.