In the infant days of the nation there had been no such things as gods in human shape, or in recognisable shape at all. There were only "powers" or "influences" superior to mankind, by whose aid or concurrence man must work out his existence. The early Romans and such Italian tribes as they became blended with were, as they still are, extremely superstitious. In a pre-scientific age they, like other peoples, were at a loss to understand what produced thunder and lightning, rain, the fertility or failure of crops, the changes of the seasons, the flow or cessation of springs and streams, the intoxication or exhilaration proceeding from wine, and a multitude of other phenomena. Fire was a perplexing thing; so was wind: the woods were full of mysterious sounds and movements. They could comprehend neither birth nor death, nor the fructification of plants. The consequence was a feeling that these things were due to unseen agencies; and the attempt was made to bring those powers into some sort of relation with mankind, either by the compulsion of magical operations and magical formulae, or by sacrifices and offerings of propitiation, or by promises. A superhuman power might be placed under a spell, or placated with food and drink, or persuaded by a vow. Such "powers" were exceedingly numerous. Greatest of all, and recognised equally by all, was the power working in the sky with the thunder and the rain. Its presence was everywhere alike, and its operations most palpable at every season. Countless others were concerned with particular localities or with particular functions. Every wood, if not every tree, and also every fountain, was controlled by some such higher "power"; every manifestation or operation of nature came from such an "influence." There was no kind of action or undertaking, no new stage of life or change of condition, which did not depend for help or hindrance upon a similar power. At first the "powers" bore no distinctive names, and were conceived in no definite shapes. They were not yet gods. The human being who sought to work upon them to favour him could only do, say, and offer such things as he thought likely to move them. But in process of time it became inevitable that these superhuman agencies should be referred to under some sort of title, and the title literally expressed the conception. Hence a multitude of names. Not only was there the ever-prominent Jupiter or "sky-father"; there a veritable multitude of powers with provinces great and small. Among the larger conceptions the power concerned with the sowing of seed was Saturn that with the growth of crops was Ceres, that with the blazing of fire was Vesta. Among the smaller the power which taught a babe to eat was Edulia that which attended the bringing home of a bride was Domiduca. The ability to speak or to walk was supposed to be imparted by separate agencies named accordingly. Flowers depended on Flora and fruits on Pomona.
[Illustration: FIG. 109.—JUPITER.]
But to assign a name is a great step towards creating a "power" into a "god," and such agencies began to take shape in the mind of those who named them. This was the second stage. Jupiter, Ceres, Saturn, and almost all the rest became "gods." The powers in the woodlands—a Silvanus or Faunus—became embodied, like the more modern gnomes and kobbolds. Once imagine a shape, and the tendency is to give it visible form in an image "like unto man," and to honour it with an abode—a temple or shrine. The earliest Romans known to us erected no images or temples, but they were not long in creating them. Particularly rapid was the reducing of a god to human form when they came into close contact with the Etruscans and the Greeks. For all the important deities poetry and art combined to evolve an appropriate bodily form, which gradually became conventional, so that the ordinary notion of a Jupiter, a Juno, a Mercury, or a Ceres was approximately that which had been gathered from the statue thus developed. This trouble was not taken with all the most ancient divinities. Many of the old rural and local deities, and many of those with quite minor provinces, were left vague and unrealised. They were represented in no temples and by no statues. Naturally as the Roman state grew from a set of neighbouring farms into a great city, and from a small settlement into a vast empire, the little local gods fell into the background. The deities which concerned the state, and to which it erected temples, were those with the more far-reaching operations—such as the gods identified with the sky and its thunders, with war, with fertility, with the sea, with the hearth-fire of all Rome. The rest might well be left to localities or to domestic worship.
From the early days of Rome there existed a calendar for festivals to certain divinities important to the little growing town, and a code of ceremonies to be performed in their honour, and of formulae of prayer to be offered to them. The later Romans, in their characteristic conservatism, adhered to those festivals, to that ritual, and to those formulae, even when some of the deities had ceased to be of appreciable account, and when neither the meaning of the ritual nor the sense of the old words was any longer understood by the very priests who used them.
Reflect a moment on this situation. First, we have a number of deities of the first rank, housed in temples, embodied in statues, and recognised in all the Roman world; next a number of minor divinities whose operations and worship may be remotely rural or otherwise local, and whose functions are by no means always distinguishable from those of the greater gods; then a series of more or less unintelligible ceremonials carried out by ancient rule in honour of divinities often practically forgotten; outside these a number of vague powers presiding over small domestic and other actions; finally, a peculiar Roman tendency—in keeping with the last—to erect into divinities, and to symbolise in statue housed in temples, all manner of abstract qualities and states, such as Hope, Harmony, Peace, Wealth, Health, Fame, and Youth.
[Illustration: FIG. 110.—A SACRIFICE.]
Reflect again that, when the Romans, as they spread, came into contact with Greeks, Egyptians, or other foreigners, they met with deities whose provinces were necessarily often identical with or closely akin to their own. Then remember that there is no church and no official document to define the complete list of Roman gods. Does it not follow, as a matter of course, on the one hand, that the importation of new gods was an easy matter, and on the other, that no individual Roman could draw the line as to the number of even the old-established deities in whom he should or should not believe?
The guardians of the public religion were satisfied if the due rites were paid by the state to those deities, on those dates, and precisely in that manner, which happened to be prescribed in the official religious books. For the rest they left matters to the individual.
So much it has been necessary to say in order to account for existing attitudes. We must use the plural, since the attitude of the state officials is but one of several, and, inasmuch as the state officials themselves were not a theological caste but only secular servants of the community administering the regulations for external worship as laid down in the records, it often happened that their official attitude had nothing to do with their individual beliefs. Often they did not know or care whether there was a real religious efficacy in the acts which they performed; sometimes all that they knew was that they were doing what the state required to be done properly by some one.
Cicero quotes a dictum of a Pontifex Maximus that there was one religion of the poet, another of the philosopher, and another of the statesman. This is true, but it is hardly adequate. We must at least add that of the common people. A well-known statement of more modern birth puts the case—rather too strongly—that at our period all religions were regarded by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the statesman as equally useful. We may begin with the ordinary people of whatever station, who were not poets nor thinkers nor magistrates. It is an error to suppose that such Romans of the first century were either atheistic or indifferent to religion. Their fault was rather that they were too superstitious, ready to believe too much rather than too little, but to believe without relating their belief to conduct. They did not question the existence of the traditional gods, nor the characters attributed to them; they were ready to perform their dues of worship and to make their due offerings, but all this had no bearing upon their own morality. They believed with the terror of the superstitious in omens and portents, and in rites of expiation and purification to avert the threatened evil. They were alarmed by thunder and lightning, earthquakes, bad dreams, ravens seen on the wrong side of the road, and other evil tokens. They commonly accepted the existence of malign spirits, including ghosts. They were prepared to believe that on occasion a statue had bled or turned round on its base; that an ox had spoken in human language; or that there had been a rain of blood. There were doubtless exceptions, and superstition was less dire and oppressive than once it was. More than fifty years before our date Cicero had said that even old women no longer shuddered at the terrors of an underworld, and fifty years after it the satirist asserts the same of children. But both writers are speaking somewhat hyperbolically. Doubtless it had been wondered how two augurs could look at each other without a smile, but there is nothing to show that even a minority of augurs were acutely conscious of anything to smile at.