CHAPTER II
ROMAN RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS
Roman religious ideas were in many respects like those of the Greeks, partly because they were borrowed from the Greeks and partly because they were common to all the nations of the Mediterranean world. It may even be that some of these common forms are categories which the human mind by its constitution imposes upon some classes of phenomena, Grundideen, as ethnologists call them.[[34]] Among both Romans and Greeks we shall find deities sharply limited in their spheres, we shall find the religious act exhausted in the ritual communion, we shall find evanescent personalities among the gods. But all these things will be found in a far different degree, and at various periods many other matters will demand consideration which the Greeks did not know at all or knew to a slighter extent.
The differences in national development would of themselves require differences of treatment. Greek religion grew up in countless independent communities, which advanced in civilization at very different rates. Roman religion was developed within a single civic group, and was ultimately swamped by the institutions with which it came into contact. Again, it is much more necessary among the Romans than among the Greeks to distinguish clearly between periods. Roman political history passed through points of obvious crisis, and many institutions were plainly deflected at these points into quite new paths of development.
Real comprehension of Roman religion is a matter of recent growth. During the vogue of comparative mythology, the Roman myths were principally discussed, and the patent fact that these were mere translations from the Greek seemed a complete summing up of Roman religion. It is only when the actual Roman calendar, as recorded on stone during the reign of Augustus, came to be studied that the real character of Roman religion began to be apprehended.[[35]]
The results of this study have made it clear that during the highest development of the Roman state the official religious ritual was based upon pastoral and agricultural conditions that could scarcely be reached even in imagination. Propitiatory and dramatic rites carried out with painful precision, unintelligible formularies carefully repeated, ceremonial dances in which every posture was subject to exact regulation, all these things indicate an anxious solicitude for form that is ordinarily more characteristic of magic than of religion. Now, magic and religion have no very definite limits in anthropological discussions, but most of those who use the terms will probably agree that magic is coercive, and religion is not. We shall see at various points in Roman religion that a coercive idea was really present in the Romans’ relation with the gods, and that it followed in a measure from the way the gods were conceived.[[36]]
The personality of the Greek gods was not so sharply individualized as the myths we happen to know would indicate, but the gods were persons. That is, during the act of prayer and sacrifice there was conjured up in the mind of the worshiper a definite anthropomorphic figure, who dealt with him somewhat as a flesh and blood man would do. But what was present in a Roman’s mind in very early times—those of the kingdom and the early republic—was probably not at all like this. The name of his deity was often an abstraction, and even when this was not verbally the case, the idea was an abstract one. And this abstraction had so little plastic form that he was scarcely certain of the being’s sex to which he addressed words of very real supplication, and wholly uncertain what, if any, concrete manifestation the god might make of his presence.[[37]]
But it will be well to understand that this abstraction, which the Roman knew as Salus, or Fortuna, or Victoria, was not a philosophic achievement. It was not a Platonic “idea.” No one could doubt the fact that in times of danger safety was often attained. The means of attainment seemed frequently due to chance; that is, to the working of unintelligible forces. It was to evoke these forces and set them in operation that the Roman ritual was addressed, and whether these forces acted of their own mere motion, or whether the formularies contained potent spells, which compelled their activity, was not really of moment. That was the nature of the “abstraction” which such words as Fides, Concordia, and the rest signified to Roman minds.
In the early days a great deal of the religious practice was borrowed from the Etruscan neighbors, conquerors and subjects of Rome. The Etruscans, as far as anything can be said definitely about them, were especial adepts in all the arts by which the aid of deities, however conceived, could be secured. How much of actual religious teaching they gave the Romans, that is, how far they actually influenced and trained the emotions which the sense of being surrounded by powerful and unaccountable forces must excite, is not yet determinable. But they gave the Romans, or increased among them, the belief in the efficacy of formulas, whether of the spoken word or of action.
Although most of the Roman deities were abstractions in the sense just indicated, many others and very important ones bore personal names. These names could not help suggesting to intelligent men at all times that the god who bore one of them was himself a person, that his manifestations would be in human form, and that his mental make-up was like their own. Genetic relations between themselves and the gods so conceived were rapidly enough established. It is very likely, too, that some of these deities, perhaps Jupiter himself, were brought into Italy by kinsmen of those who brought Zeus into Greece, although the kinship must have been extremely remote. And when the gods are persons, stories about them are inevitable, arising partly as folk-lore and partly from individual poetic imagining. There are accordingly traces of an indigenous Roman or Italic mythology, but that mythology was literally overwhelmed, in relatively early times, by the artistically more developed one of the Greeks, so that its very existence has been questioned.[[38]]