Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

by Samuel Dill

One undoubted cause of the success of Mithra in the West was the spirit of fraternity and charity which was fostered in his guilds. The hopeless obscurity and depression of the plebeian and servile classes had some alleviation in companies where, for the moment, the poor and lowly-born found himself on an equality with his social superiors. Plebeians and the slaves had a great part in the propagation of the eastern worships, and especially that of the God of Light.[3154] In his [pg 613]mysteries and guilds the highest dignities were open to them.[3155] Moreover, from the size of the chapels it is clear that the congregations were generally small, so that the members of lower social importance were not lost in a crowd.[3156] Growing numbers were accommodated, not by enlarging, but by multiplying the shrines.

In the sacraments of Mithra, Tertullian and other Apologists perceived a diabolic parody of the usages of the Church.[3157] The acceptio of the neophytes, the sacramentum, in which they were pledged to secrecy and holy service, the sign or brand made on the brow of the Miles, the ablutions or baptism with holy water, as in the rites of Isis, whatever their origin, could not fail, in an age of death-struggle for supremacy, to arouse the suspicions and fears of the champions of the Church.[3158] Finally, the consecrated bread and mingled water and wine, which were only offered to the higher grades, may well have seemed the last and worst profanation of the most solemn Christian rite. The draught from the mystic cup, originally the juice of Haoma, was supposed to have supernatural effects. It imparted not only health and prosperity and wisdom, but also the power to conquer the spirits of evil and darkness, and a secret virtue which might elude the grasp of death.[3159]

The temples in which these rites took place repeated for ages the same original type. Mithra and his cave are inseparable ideas, and the name spelaeum, antrum, or specus, remained to the end the regular designation of his chapels.[3160] In country places, grottoes or recesses on the side of a rocky hill might supply a natural oratory of the ancient type.[3161] But, in the centre of great towns, the skill of the architect had to simulate the rude structure of the original cavern. Entering through an open portico, the worshipper found himself in an antechapel, through which he passed into another chamber which was called the apparatorium, where the priests and neophytes arrayed themselves in their robes or masques before the holy [pg 614]rites.[3162] Thence they descended by stairs to the level of the cave-like crypt, which was the true sanctuary. On each side there ran a bench of stone, on which was ranged the company of the initiated.[3163] The central aisle led up to the apse, against the walls of which was set the sculptured scene of the slaying of the bull, surrounded by the symbolic figures and emblems of Chaldaean star-lore, with altars in front.[3164] This was the holiest place, and, from some remains, it would seem to have been railed in, like the chancel of one of our churches.[3165] The neophyte, as he approached, must have been impressed by a dazzling scene. On either side the congregation knelt in prayer. Countless lamps shed their brilliant light on the forms of ancient Hellenic gods, or on the images of the mighty powers of earth or ether[3166]—above all, on the sacred scene which was the memorial of the might of the “unconquered.” The ancient rhythmic litany was chanted to the sound of music; the lights came and went in startling alternations of splendour and gloom. The draught of the sacred cup seemed to ravish the sense. And the votary, as in the Isiac vision in Apuleius, for a moment seemed borne beyond the bounds of space and time into mystic distances.[3167]

The Persian cult owed much of its success to imperial and aristocratic favour. The last pagan emperor of the West, the last generation of the pagan aristocracy, were devotees of the Sun-god. It is a curious thing that even under the early Empire Mithraism seems never to have suffered from the suspicion and persecution with which other alien worships had to contend.[3168] Its close league with the cult of the Great Mother, which, since the second century B.C., had been an established institution, may have saved Mithra from official mistrust. He also emerged into prominence in the age in which imperial jealousy of guilds and colleges was visibly relaxing its precautions.[3169] A more satisfying explanation may perhaps be found in the sympathy of the Flavian dynasty[3170] and the [pg 615]princes of the third century for the religious ideas of the East, and in the manifest support which heliolatry lent to growing absolutism and the worship of the Caesars.

The apotheosis of the emperors began even in the time of the first Caesar, who rose to the highest divine honours before his death. But it was long a fluctuating and hesitating creed. The provinces, and particularly the cities of Asia Minor,[3171] were more eager to decree temples and divine honours to the lord of the world than even the common people of Italy. The superstitious masses and the soldiery, indeed, were equal to any enthusiasm of flattery and superstition. But the cultivated upper class, in spite of the effusive compliance of court poets,[3172] having but little belief in any Divine Powers, were not likely to yield an easy faith to the godhead of a Claudius or a Nero.[3173] The emperors themselves, belonging to this class, and often sharing its fastidious scepticism, for a time judiciously restrained a too exuberant devotion to their person.[3174] The influence of Herod may have filled the lunatic imagination of Caligula with dreams of an eastern despotism and the superhuman dignity of kings.[3175] Nero, who had visions of a new monarchy with its seat on eastern hills, may have rejoiced in being adored by Tiridates as the equal of Mithra.[3176] But the politic Augustus, while he permitted the foundation of temples and priestly orders in his honour throughout the provinces, and even in Italian towns, along with the divinity of Rome, obstinately refused to have shrines erected to him in the capital.[3177] Tiberius pursued the same policy, which was congenial to his cold, realistic temperament. Vespasian, although eastern superstition had a certain charm for him, jested on his death-bed about his own claims to divinity.[3178] It was reserved for his son Domitian to be the first emperor who claimed the salutation of “Dominus et Deus” in his lifetime.[3179] The best of the early emperors aspired to full divine honours only when their career on earth had closed.

Many historic causes made their posthumous elevation to divine rank seem not unnatural. The cult of the Manes, or good spirits of departed friends and ancestors, prepared the Roman mind to adore the memory of the father of the State. The legendary kings of the Latin race—Saturnus, Faunus, Picus, Latinus—were worshipped as Di indigetes;[3180] Romulus had vanished in a tempest and been carried up to heaven to join the company of the gods. The hero-worship of the Greeks, which raised to semi-divine state after death those who had done great deeds of service to mankind, who had founded cities, or manifested splendid gifts of mind or body, influenced the imagination of a people who had long sat at the feet of Greece. Greek cities raised altars to Rome and to Roman generals who had enslaved them.[3181] When the Senate decreed divine honours to a dead emperor, he became divus, not deus, at least to the cultivated class, and divus is a title which even modern sentiment might accord to men who have borne a great and shining part in a world-wide system of administration. The Spartan women were said to call great warriors, men who won their admiration by gallantry, “divine.”[3182] To the masses the dead emperor no doubt became a veritable god, as the image of M. Aurelius two centuries after his death was found among the penates of every pious family in the West.[3183] But the philosophic man of the world might also honestly accept the imperial apotheosis by the decree of the Senate, in the sense that another figure had been added to the rare company of those who have been lifted by fortune or merit far above their fellows, and have filled a great space in the life of humanity. People, who for generations erected shrines to the minion of Hadrian, might easily believe in the claims of the Antonine emperors to a place among the gods.

The influence of Egypt and Persia lent its force to stimulate native and original tendencies to king-worship, and to develop the principate of Augustus into the theocratic despotism of Aurelian and Diocletian. The eastern peoples were always eager to lavish on the emperors the adoration which they had been used to offer to their native princes. The ancient [pg 617]Pharaohs had been revered as incarnations of the deity and gods upon earth.[3184] The Ptolemies inherited and utilised so useful a superstition. These ideas spread into Italy with the diffusion of the Isiac cult among the upper class, and through the influence of travellers and envoys who kept up a fruitful intercourse between Alexandria and Rome. But Egypt went rather too far for the western mind in its apotheosis of kings.[3185] A more potent and congenial influence came from the lands of the remoter East. The Persians prostrated themselves before their monarchs, but they did not actually adore them as gods. They reverenced the daemon, or, in Roman phrase, the “genius Caesaris,” without worshipping the monarch himself.[3186] The king was supposed to be enlightened, inspired, and guarded by a heavenly grace; his brow was crowned by a divine aureole. Yet he was not the equal of God. But the majesty and fortune of kings was something divine and supernatural; they reigned by special grace and had a divine protection. The dynasties who succeeded to the great heritage of the East exploited these ideas to the full, and the most solemn oath was by the Fortune of the King.[3187] The superstition of Chaldaea, which connected all human destiny with the orbs of heaven, exercised a profound influence for many centuries both in the East and West. And the Sun, the monarch of the heavens, often identified with Mithra, was regarded as the special patron of kings, enduing them with irresistible power, and guarding their lofty destiny. These ideas spread easily from Pontus and Commagene into the western world. In eastern cities, Caligula and Nero had altars raised to them as solar deities,[3188] and Tiridates offered to Nero the adoration due to Mithra.[3189] The enigmatical goddess Fortuna, who seems to have had early associations with the Sun,[3190] gained fresh strength from the ideas of the divinised destiny of eastern monarchs. According to Plutarch, Tyche left the regions of Assyria and Persia to make her home on the Palatine.[3191] The [pg 618]republican “Fortune of the Roman People” naturally passed into the “Fortuna Augusti,” which appears on the imperial coins from the reign of Vespasian. In the age of the Antonines, the image of the goddess in gold always stood in the prince’s bed-chamber, and was transferred at the hour of his death to his successor.[3192] With the reign of Commodus, who was himself initiated both in the Isiac and Mithraic mysteries, begins the temporary triumph of the oriental cults, which was to reach its height in the reign of Julian. The absence of full materials for the history of the third century,[3193] a century crowded with great events, and pregnant with great spiritual movements, should perhaps impose greater caution in tracing the development of imperial power than some writers have always observed. Yet there can be little doubt that the monarchy of the West tended to become a theocratic despotism, and that Persian Sun-worship had a large share in this development. There was always a sober sense in the West which rebelled against the oriental apotheosis of the prince.[3194] Yet the iterated adulation, so often recorded faithfully in the Augustan History, reveals an extraordinary abasement of the upper class before the person of the emperor.[3195] The emperors never, indeed, claimed like the Sassanids to be “brothers or sons of the Sun and Moon.”[3196] But in their official style and insignia there were many approaches to the divine claims of the monarchs of the East. The title invictus, sacred to Mithra and the Sun, was assumed by Commodus, and borne by his successors.[3197] The still more imposing title of “eternal,” springing from the same origin, came into vogue in the third century, and appears in the edicts of the last shadowy emperors of the fifth. From the reign of Nero, the imperial crown with darting rays, symbolised the solar ancestry of the prince. Gallienus used to go forth crowned in this manner, and with gold dust in his hair, and raised a colossal statue of himself in the garb of the Sun.[3198] The coins of Aurelian, who built the great temple of the Sun from the spoils of Palmyra, bear the legend “deo et domino nato.”[3199] The West probably never took [pg 619]these assumptions so literally as the East. But metaphor and imagery tended to become a real faith. The centre of the great religion which was to be the last stronghold of paganism, was the prototype of the emperor in the starry world, and his protector on earth. And the solar grace which surrounded the prince found an easy explanation in the mystic philosophy of the soul’s descent which had been absorbed by Mithraism. In coming to earth from the empyrean, the future lord of the world received a special gift of grace and power from the great luminary which is the source of light and life. The religion of the Sun thus tended to become a great spiritual support of an absolutism which was more and more modelling itself on the royalty of the East. The cult of the Sun, which was established in such splendour in 273 A.D. by Aurelian, must have had a great effect in preparing for the oriental claims of monarchy from the reign of Diocletian. Thirty years after the foundation of the stately shrine on the Esquiline, and only twenty years before the conversion of Constantine, all the princes of the imperial house, Jovii Herculii, Augusti, Caesares, as an inscription tells, united to restore a temple of Mithra at Carnuntum, his holy city on the Danube.[3200] But the days of Mithra as the god of kings were numbered. After the establishment of the Christian Empire, he had a brief illusory triumph in the reign of Julian, and again in the short-lived effort of reaction led by Eugenius and Nicomachus Flavianus, which had a tragic close in the battle on the Frigidus. Yet his mystic theology was the theme of debate among Roman nobles, trained in the philosophy of Alexandria, long after his last chapels had been buried in ruins; and his worship lingered in secluded valleys of the Alps or the Vosges into the fifth century.[3201] The theocratic claim of monarchy, to which Mithra lent his support for so many generations, was destined, in its symbols and phrases, to have a long reign.

M. Renan has hazarded the opinion that, if the Christian Church had been stricken with some mortal weakness, Mithraism might have become the religion of the western world. And, indeed, its marvellously rapid diffusion in Italy and the [pg 620]provinces along the Danube and the Rhine, in the second and third centuries, might well have inspired the hope of such a splendid destiny. Although it was primarily a kingly and military creed, it appealed in the end to all classes, by many various attractions. Springing from remote regions of the East, it seemed instinctively to seize the opportunity offered by a marvellous political unity, along with anarchy in morals and religion, to satisfy the imperious needs of a world eager for spiritual light and hope, but distracted among the endless claimants for its devotion. Philosophy had long tried and was still trying to find a spiritual synthesis, and to draw from old mythologies a support for life and conduct. Might not religion succeed where philosophy had failed? Or rather, might not religion gather up into itself the forces of philosophy, and transmute and glorify them in a great concrete symbol? Might not the claims of the past be harmonised with the higher intuitions of a more instructed age, and the countless cults embraced within the circuit of the Roman power be reconciled with the supreme reverence for one central divine figure, as the liberties of an Alpine canton, like those of a great city of Asia, were sheltered under the unchallenged supremacy of Rome? Mithra made the effort, and for the time he succeeded. In his progress to what seemed an almost assured victory, he swept into his orbit the Greek and Latin and Phrygian gods—nay, even the gods of Celtic cantons.[3202] They all found a place in his crypts, beside his own sacred image and the Persian deities of his original home. Their altars were ranged around his chapels, and were duly visited by his priests. Yet, though the Persian deity might seem very cosmopolitan and liberal in his indulgence to parochial devotion, he never abated his own lofty claims, and he never forgot his ancestry. While he might ally himself with Magna Mater and Jupiter Dolichenus, he coldly repulsed any association with Isis and Serapis, who were his rivals for oecumenical sway. The old hostility between the worships of Persia and Egypt was only softened in the internecine conflict of both with a more powerful foe. It is only in the last stone records that a votary of Mithra is found combining a devotion to Isis.[3203] The claims of the Sun-god to spiritual primacy are [pg 621]expounded in the orations of Julian and the dissertations of Praetextatus in the Saturnalia of Macrobius. Monotheism in the pagan world was not, indeed, a new thing. It goes back to the philosophers of Ionia and Elea, to Aeschylus and Plato. Nor was syncretism unknown to earlier ages. The Greeks of the days of Herodotus identified the gods of Egypt with their own, as Julius Caesar and Tacitus identified Gallic and German deities with those of the Roman pantheon.[3204] But the monotheistic syncretism of Mithra was a broader and more sweeping movement. Local and national gods represented single aspects of nature. Mithra was seated at the centre on which all nature depends. If nature-worship was to justify itself in the eyes of philosophic reason, men must rise to the adoration of the Sun-king, the head of a great hierarchy of divine forces, by means of which he acts and diffuses his inexhaustible energy throughout the universe. And such is the claim made for him by Praetextatus, in the Saturnalia of Macrobius, who was a high adept in the mysteries of Mithra.

But the world needed more than a great physical force to assuage its cravings; it demanded a moral God, Who could raise before the eyes of men a moral ideal, and support them in striving to attain it; One Who could guide and comfort in the struggles of life, and in the darkness of its close, Who could prepare the trembling soul for the great ordeal, in which the deeds done in the body are sifted on the verge of the eternal world. In fulfilling his part, Mithra could rely on his own early character as a god of truth and righteousness, a mediator between the powers of good and evil: he had also the experience of the classic mysteries, stretching back to the legendary Orpheus, which, in whatever crude, shadowy symbolism, had taught for ten centuries the doctrine of a moral sequence between this life and the next. The descent of the soul into gross material form, and its possible ascent again, if duly fortified, to ethereal worlds, was common to Mithra and the Orphic and Pythagorean systems. Such a system on one side sad and pessimist, on another was full of the energy of hope. And Mithraism combined the two. It was a religion of strenuous effort and warfare, with the prospect of high rewards in some far-off eternal life.

It is little wonder that the Fathers, from the second century, saw in Mithra the most formidable foe of Christ. Indeed, the resemblances between the two religions, some of them superficial, others of a deeper kind, were very striking. How far some of these were due to a common stock of ideas in East and West, how far they were the result of conscious borrowing and mutual imitation, seems to be an insoluble problem. The most learned student of the cult of Mithra is the most cautious in his conclusions on the subject.[3205] On the one hand, the two religions, in outlying regions of the Empire, long followed different lines of dispersion. Christianity from its origin in the religion of Israel, spread at first among the cities on the Mediterranean, chiefly where there were colonies of Jews.[3206] On the other hand, outside Italy, Mithraism, which was propagated by soldiers and imperial officers, followed the line of the camps and centres of commerce chiefly along the great rivers of the northern frontier. Yet at Ostia and Rome and elsewhere, the two eastern religions must have been early brought face to face. In the syncretism of that age, the age of Gnosticism, rites and doctrines passed easily from one system to another. Mithra certainly absorbed much from kindred worships of Asia Minor, from Hellenic mysteries, and from Alexandrian philosophy. It is equally certain that the Church did not disdain a policy of accommodation, along with the consecration of altars of Christ in the old shrines of paganism. The cult of local heroes was transferred to saints and martyrs. Converts found it hard to part with consecrated phrases and forms of devotion, and might address Jesus in epithets sacred to the Sun. Some Christians in the fifth century still saluted the rising sun with a prayer.[3207]