The unassailable permanence of the old religion may perhaps [pg 540]be still more vividly realised in the long unbroken life of sacred colleges, such as the Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The Arval brotherhood was probably the oldest sacred corporation of Latium, as its liturgy, preserved in the Acta from the reign of Augustus to that of Gordian, is the oldest specimen of the Latin language.[2774] According to the legend, the first members were the twelve sons of Acca Larentia, the foster-mother of Romulus, and Romulus himself first held the dignity of master of the brotherhood.[2775] Its patron goddess, Dea Dia,[2776] was, as her very name suggests, one of those dim shadowy conceptions dear to old Roman awe, who was worshipped in the still solitude of ancient groves, on whose trunks no axe of iron might ever ring,[2777] a power as elusive and multiform to picturing fancy as the secret forces which shot up the corn ear from the furrow. The whole tone of the antique ritual savours of a time when the Latin race was a tribe of farmers, believing with a simple faith that the yearly increase of their fields depended on the favour of secret unearthly powers. The meetings of the college took place on three days in May, the precise dates being fixed and solemnly announced by their master on the 3rd of January.[2778] The festival began and ended in the master’s house at Rome, the intermediate day being spent in a sacred grove on the right bank of the Tiber, about four miles from the city. There was much feasting, at which the brethren were attended by the Camilli, four sons of high-born senators. Corn of the new and the preceding year was touched and blessed; libations and incense were offered to the goddess, and all the rites were performed with many changes of costume, which were rigidly observed.[2779] In the ceremonies which took place in the grove, an expiatory sacrifice of two porkers and a white cow was always offered, to atone for the use of any iron implement, or other infringement of the ancient rubric.[2780] Fat lambs were offered in sacrifice to Dea Dia, and ancient earthen vessels of rude make, resembling those of the age of Numa, were adored upon the altar.[2781] Ears of corn, plucked in some neighbouring field, were [pg 541]blessed and passed from the hand of one member to another, and back again in reverse order, and, at last, in the closed temple, along with solemn dancing, the famous chant was intoned from ancient scrolls, the words of which had long become strange even to the antiquary. After another meal in the hall of the brotherhood, the members passed on to the circus and gave the signal for the races to begin.[2782]
This ritual, so little heard of before the time of Augustus, is chiefly known to us from the Acta which have been recovered from the site of the ancient grove. The monuments of it extend from the reign of Augustus to the year 241 A.D.[2783] Members of the highest aristocracy and princes of the imperial house appear on its lists. Its membership was a high distinction, and was sometimes conferred by the potent recommendation of the emperor.[2784] The college evidently became a great support of the imperial power.
The emperors were elected magistri of the College, and we can read that Caligula, Nero, Vespasian, and Titus were present at its meetings. In the opening days of January the most solemn vows are made in old Roman fashion for the emperor’s safety, to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, to Salus and Dea Dia, and they are duly paid by offerings of oxen with gilded horns.[2785] So servile or so devoted to the throne was the brotherhood, that their prayers were offered with equal fervour for three emperors in the awful year 69 A.D.[2786] The vows made for Galba in the first week of January were alertly transferred to the cause of Otho the day after Galba’s murder.[2787] The college met to sacrifice in honour of Otho’s pontificate on the day (March 14) on which he set out to meet his doom in the battle on the Po. Thirteen days after his death, while the spring air was still tainted with the rotting heaps on the plain of Bedriacum, vows as fervent or as politic were registered for Vitellius. In the summer of the following year, the arrival of Vespasian in the capital was celebrated by the Arval brothers with sacrifices to Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Fortuna Redux.[2788]
The college, as a matter of course, paid due honour to the emperor’s birthday and all important anniversaries in his [pg 542]family. It is interesting to see how for years the Neronian circle, the Othos and Vitellii, along with Valerii and Cornelii, appear in all the records of the college.[2789] It was apparently devoted to Nero. The brothers celebrate his birthday and all the civic and sacerdotal honours heaped upon him.[2790] They make vows for his wife Octavia, and soon after, for the safety of Poppaea in childbirth. The matricide dreaded to return from Campania after his unnatural crime, but his admirers knew well the abasement of the Roman aristocracy, and promised him an enthusiastic reception. The Arval brotherhood, which then included a Regulus and a Memmius, redeemed the promise, and voted costly sacrifices for his safe restoration to the capital.[2791] They execrate the secret plots against his sacred person, and offer thanksgiving for the detection of the Pisonian conspiracy.[2792]
The extant prayers and congratulations for the safety of Vespasian are much more quiet and restrained than those for his cruel son Domitian.[2793] The public joy at Domitian’s safe return from ambiguous victories in Germany or Dacia is faithfully re-echoed, and effusive supplications are recorded for his safety from all peril and for the eternity of the Empire whose bounds he has enlarged. There is a sincerer tone in the prayers, in the spring of 101, for the safe return of Trajan, when he was setting out for his first campaign on the Danube, and on his home-coming four years later.[2794] The Arval records of Hadrian’s reign are chiefly noteworthy for his letters to the college, recommending his friends for election.[2795] In the reign of Antoninus Pius the Acta register those perfervid acclamations which meet us in the later Augustan histories:[2796]—“O nos felices qui te Imperatorem videmus; Di te servent in perpetuo; juvenis triumphis, senex Imperator!” The young M. Aurelius is first mentioned in 155 A.D. Probably the sincerest utterance in the Arval liturgies is the petition for his safety, and that of L. Verus, from peril in the years when the Quadi and Marcomanni swept down through Rhaetia and the Julian Alps to the shores of the Adriatic.[2797]
It was thus that the antique ritual of a rustic brotherhood was converted into a potent support of the imperial power. No part of the Augustan revival was perhaps so successful. Probably few of the emperors, or of the aristocratic brothers who intoned the litany for the safety of the imperial house, had much faith in its efficacy. But the ceremony linked the principate with the most venerable traditions of Latium, and with Romulus the first master of the college. When we read the minute and formal record of these coarse sacrifices and rude, fantastic rites, with the chanting of prayers no longer understood, we are amazed at the prolongation for so many ages of religious ideas which the Roman mind might appear to have outgrown. Yet in such inquiries there is often a danger of treating society as a uniform mass, moving together along the same lines, and permeated through all its strata by the same influences. In another chapter we have shown that the masses were probably never so superstitious as in the second century. And the singular thing is that the influx of foreign religions, due to the wide conquests of Rome, never to the end seems to have shaken the supreme attachment of the people to their ancient gods. It is true that the drift towards monotheism was felt even among the crowd. But while the educated might find expression for that tendency in the adoration of Isis or the Sun, the dim monotheism of the people turned to the glorification of Jupiter. Dedications to him are the most numerous in all lands. He is often linked with other gods or all the gods,[2798] but he is always supreme. And, while he is the lord of tempest and thunder,[2799] he is also addressed by epithets which show that he is becoming a moral and spiritual power. On many a stone he appears as the governor and preserver of all things, monitor, guardian, and heavenly patron, highest and best of the heavenly hierarchy.[2800] Yet it is equally clear that other gods are worshipped in the same spirit as of old. Roman religion was essentially practical. Prayer and vow were the means to win temporal blessings. The gods were expected, in return for worship, to be of use to the devotee. It is evident from the inscriptions that this conception of religion was as [pg 544]prevalent in the age of the Antonines, or of the oriental princes, as it was under the Republic. The sailor still offers thanks for his preservation to Neptune and the gods of the sea.[2801] The successful merchant still honours Mercury.[2802] Minerva Memor receives thanks for succour in sickness. A lady of Placentia even pays her vows for the recovery of her hair.[2803] The reappearance of a hidden spring is still attributed to the grace of the Nymphs.[2804] And in many a temple the healing power of Aesculapius is acknowledged by grateful devotees.[2805]
A more difficult problem is presented by the attitude of the cultivated class to the old mythologies. Since the days of Xenophanes and of Plato, philosophy had revolted against the degradation of the Divine character by ancient legend. It had taught for ages the unity of the mysterious Power or Goodness which lies behind the shifting scene of sense. Moreover, philosophy for generations had deserted the heights of speculative inquiry, and addressed itself to the task of applying the spiritual truth which the schools had won to the problems of practical religion and human life. Alike in Cicero, in Seneca, in Plutarch, and M. Aurelius, there are conceptions of God and the worship due to Him, of prayer, of the relation of conduct to religion, which seem irreconcilable with conformity to the old religion of Rome. How could a man, nourished on such spiritual ideas and refined by a thousand years of growing culture, take part in a gross materialistic worship, and even gallantly defend it against all assailants?
The conformity of highly instructed minds to ancient systems which their reason has outgrown is not always to be explained by the easy imputation of dishonesty. And that explanation is even less admissible in ancient than in modern times. Roman religion did not demand any profession of faith in any theory of the unseen; all it required was ceremonial purity and exactness. And the Roman world was never scandalised by the spectacle of a notorious sceptic or libertine holding the office of chief pontiff. If a man were more scrupulous himself, philosophy, whether of the Porch or the Academy, came to his aid. It would tell him that frail [pg 545]humanity, unable to comprehend the Infinite God, had parcelled out and detached his various powers and virtues, which it adored under material forms according to its varying needs.[2806] Or it found a place for all the gods of heathendom, as ministering or mediating spirits in the vast abyss which separates us from the unapproachable and Infinite Spirit.[2807] If the legends which had gathered around the popular gods offended a tender moral sense, men were taught that the apparent grossness was an allegorical husk, or a freak of poetic fancy which concealed a wholesome truth. Thus a pantheist or monotheist, who would never have created such a religious system for himself, was trained to cultivate a double self in matters of religion, to worship reverently with the crowd, and to believe with Zeno or with Plato.
The heathen champion in the dialogue of Minucius Felix maintains that, in the dimness and uncertainty of things, the safest course is to hold fast to the gods of our fathers.[2808] The inclination of the sceptic was fortified by the conservative instinct of the Latin race and its love of precedent and precision of form. Moreover the religion of Numa was probably more than any other involved and intertwined with the whole life of the people. It penetrated the whole fabric of society; it consecrated and dignified every public function, and every act or incident of private life. To desert the ancient gods was to cut oneself off from Roman society, as the Christians were sternly made to feel. No established Church in modern Christendom has probably ever so succeeded in identifying itself with the national life in all its aspects. Alike under the Republic and under the Empire, religion was inseparable from patriotism. The imperial pontiff was bound to watch over the purity and continuity of the Latin rites. He might be a scoffer like Nero, or a spiritually-minded Stoic like M. Aurelius, an Isiac devotee like Commodus, or devoted to the Syrian worships like the Oriental princes of the third century. But he took his duties seriously. He would dance with the Salii, [pg 546]or accept with gratitude the mastership of the Arval brotherhood, or order a lectisternium to ward off a pestilence or a menacing invasion. The imperial colleges still held their meetings on the eve of the revolution of Theodosius. Antiquarian nobles still discussed nice questions of ritual in the reign of Honorius. At the end of the fifth century the Lupercalia were still celebrated with coarse, half-savage rites which went back to the prehistoric times.[2809] The imperial policy, founded by Augustus, no doubt inspired much of this conformity. But old Roman sentiment, the passion expressed with such moving eloquence by Symmachus, to feel himself in touch with a distant past[2810] through a chain of unbroken continuity, was the great support of the State religion in the fourth century as in the first. Yet, among the great nobles who were its last champions—Flavianus, Praetextatus, or Volusianus—there was a spiritual craving for which the religion provided little satisfaction. They sought it in the rites and mysteries of Eastern lands which had little in common with the old Roman religious sentiment. In these alien rites they found a new religious atmosphere. The priest, set apart from the world, with his life-long obligations and the daily offices in the shrine, becomes in some way a minister to the spiritual life of his flock. Instead of cold ceremonial observance, ecstatic emotion is aroused, often to a degree which was perilous to character. Through a series of sacraments, with ascetic preparation for them, the votary rose under priestly guidance to some vision of the eternal world, with a new conception of sin; this life and the next were linked in a moral sequence, with tremendous issues of endless beatitude or endless degradation. In a temple of Magna Mater, Isis, or Mithra in the reign of Julian, we are far away from the worship of the Lares and the offering of a heifer to Dea Dia in the grove on the Tiber. We are travelling towards the spiritual mystery and sacramental consolations of the mediaeval Church.