at ita me di deaeque, superi et inferi et medioxumi,
but immediately goes on to specify these deities more particularly by their names and relationships—and gets the latter wrong. Melaenis corrects him in a way which (as Aust notes)[753] could only have seemed comical to a Roman audience if they had already some acquaintance with the divine family gossip.
itaque me Iuno regina et Iovi' supremi filia itaque me Saturnus eiius patruos—ME. ecastor, pater. AL. itaque me Ops opulenta, illius avia—ME. immo mater quidem.
Perhaps it was the fancy of the age for divine genealogy that is here being made fun of rather than the gods themselves; but in any case the passage shows how irrecoverably lost was the real impersonal character of the old Roman numen, and how impossible it must have been in such an age to believe that anything was really to be gained by the once solemn rites of the ius divinum.
But the most remarkable evidence is in the Amphitruo,[754] where Jupiter and Mercurius are among the dramatis personae. This comedy is extremely amusing, and was quite capable of entertaining the Parisians in the form given it by Molière; but for them it could hardly have been so funny as for the Greeks in the age of the New Comedy and their disciples the Romans of Plautus' day, who saw Zeus and Hermes, Jupiter and Mercurius, brought by their own misdoings into absurd and degrading situations. Jupiter personates Amphitruo, and so gains admission to his wife, Alkmene! Comment is needless, unless we take the last line of the play as a comment:—
Nunc, spectatores, Iovi' summi causa clare plaudite!
I do not propose to follow further the downfall of the old Roman ideas about the objects of worship, or the neglect and decay of the ius divinum. They do not fall within the scope of my subject—the religious experience of the Roman people. So long as there was any life in these ideas and in the cult which was the practical expression of them, they formed part of that experience. But I think I have sufficiently proved that the life has gone out of the ideas, and that the worship has consequently become meaningless. Ideas about the divine may be discussed by philosophers as the Romans begin to read and in some degree to think; and the outward forms of the cult may be maintained in such particulars as most closely concern the public life of the community; but as a religious system expressing human experience we have done with these things.
NOTES TO LECTURE XV
[706] Polybius vi. 56.
[707] Livy xxxi. 4 ad fin., cp. xxv. 2, xxvii. 36, etc. For the Iovis epulum see R.F. 216 foll. and the references there given. Wissowa, R.K. foll. 111. 385 foll. I am not sure that I am right in limiting the human partakers of the epulum of Nov. 13 to the plebeian magistrates.