"HOUSE OF COLA DI RIENZO," BY PONTE ROTTO
The architecture of this supposed dwelling of the last of the Roman Tribunes is a bizarre mixture of styles and epochs. It has been suggested that a series of initial letters which surmount a doggerel inscription are those of the many titles which Rienzo bestowed upon himself. The people know the house as that "of Pontius Pilate."
The nobles, on the other hand, often owed their titles not only to the Pope but to their respective Communes, which, until the one fount of honour was defined to be the sovereign, frequently bestowed titles on their citizens. This privilege was enjoyed by the abbots of Monte Cassino in the thirteenth century. The popes have always conferred titles of nobility, as did the Holy Roman Empire, whose heir in this matter the Pope claims to be. At present an Heraldic Commission is sitting in Rome to regulate the use of titles, many of which have been assumed for generations without any warrant. Henceforth every one will be called upon to prove his right to the title he bears, and it will be illegal for the Communes to describe any one who has not done so with "a handle to his name." Foreign titles, and among them papal titles, will in all cases have to be ratified and allowed by the sovereign of Italy.
CHAPTER IX
ROMAN RELIGION
When we think of Rome as the cradle of more than one civilisation, we should also recollect that the Roman has matured two great religions: the religion of ancient Rome and the religion of Western Christendom. Not that we can think of the Roman as a religious people, in the sense in which the Asiatic has always been and remains to this day religious, the sense in which the Hebrew or the sense in which the Egyptian was religious. The Roman never had either the imaginative philosophy which produced the religion of Greece, nor the metaphysical mysticism which made the Hindu faiths. He had in fact in common with the Hebrew, whom he was so totally unlike, a complete absence of the metaphysical temper, of mysticism, of asceticism; and like the Hebrew he did not apply any richness of imagination to religion. What he had was a genius for bringing the other world to the support of this, and what he created was the conception of religion as piety to the State; and it is in this form that it survives in the sympathies and the sentiment of the Roman people. In the pagan world this State was secular, in the Christian world this State is the Catholic Church; but in both cases the spiritual came to the support of the temporal—ancient Rome deified the State by making it the subject of the Roman piety; Christian Rome moulded religion into a citizenship, and the Church became a civitas. Civis romanus sum, "I am a Roman citizen," has never ceased to be the all-embracing formula of Roman orthodoxy.
The original Roman theogony was Etruscan. Behind the veil were the three great gods, the shrouded gods, answering to the Jove, Juno, and Minerva (Menerva) of later times. Round them were their "Senate," the twelve gods and goddesses known to the Romans as the Dii Consentes; and everywhere was the great Latin cult of Vesta, the cult of the hearth. But when Rome was built its first king made of these elements the Roman religion: Numa as a matter of fact appears to have been the Roman Moses, and to have led his people forth not to the worship of their one tribal god who was above all gods, God and Lord, the unique divine realisation of the Hebrew people, to become the root of the monotheism of the Western world, but to the worship of a unit which made of the State the family, of the commonwealth the family's hearth. It was, perhaps, his genius which made the hearth-divinity preside over the little polity and confuse and identify for ever the pieties of the home with the pieties of citizenship. It is these two elements—the theological unit of Judæa and the political unit of Latium—which meeting in Rome in the age of Claudius created the religion of the West. Not once but twice had the Romans come and wrested the sceptre from Judaea; under Titus, and again in the Roman organisation of Christianity venerunt Romani et tulerunt eorum locum et gentem.