The Religious Experience of the Roman People / From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus

by W. Warde Fowler

[851] La Religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins, vol. i. p. 310.

[852] Cic. Tusc. i. 16. 37. For the eschatology of the sixth Aeneid, a curious mélange of religion, philosophy, and folklore, see Norden's work on Virgil, Aeneid, vi. (index, p. 468). Norden believes, I may note, that the philosophical and religious elements in it are mainly derived from Posidonius. Cp. also Glover, Studies in Virgil, ch. x. (Hades). For popular beliefs in Hades, etc., under the Empire, see Friedländer's Sittengeschichte, vol. iii. last chapter.

[853] Weil, Études sur l'antiquité grecque, p. 12, quoted by Glover, p. 218.

[854] See above, p. 105.

[855] Since this lecture was written a most interesting discussion of Greek ideas, Achaean and Pelasgic, about the relation of soul and body after death, has appeared in Mr. Lawson's Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, especially in chapters v. and vi., confirming me, to some extent at least, in the conjecture I had here hazarded. The working of the imagination in regard to a future state is in Greece, in his view, peculiar to the older or Pelasgic population; and if the Etruscans were of Pelasgic stock, as is now believed by many, their imaginative grotesqueness, a degraded form perhaps of the original characteristic, acting on the ideas of a still more primitive population of which the Lemuria is a survival, might explain the later prevalence of a gruesome eschatology at Rome. But whoever studies Mr. Lawson's chapters closely will find serious difficulties in the way even of such a hypothesis as this.

[856] Ovid, Fasti, v. 430 foll.; R.F. p. 109. Wissowa, R.K. p. 192, attributes the ideas of larvae (ghosts) and of Orcus, not to religion, but to popular superstition. If he here means by religion the State religion and the Parentalia in particular, I can agree with him.

[857] Dr. Carter allows this in Hastings' Dict. of Religion and Ethics, vol. i. (Roman section of article "Ancestor Worship.")

[858] See R.F. p. 334.

[859] R.F. p. 107.

[860] Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, ii. 693 foll.