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

by W. Warde Fowler

This, then, so far as I can describe it without going too far into detail, is the feeling, the religio, which was needed in the Italy of that day. We may, perhaps, venture to compare its revival in the work of Virgil with the return to nature in the English poetry of a century ago, which also brought with it a revival of religious fervency. Though Virgil and Wordsworth are in many ways as unlike as two poets can be, they are alike in the possession of that gentle and trustful outlook on the world of nature which stimulates the mind to think of itself in its relation to the Power. We do not need to analyse the process or to put it into any logical shape; we may rest content with it as a fact in the history of Roman religious experience.

In Virgil's case, as in Wordsworth's, this feeling had the effect of reconciling the poet's mind to the old forms of religious worship. Reconcile is, perhaps, hardly the right word; we may doubt whether he had ever quarrelled with them. As he believed in the Power and its manifestations, so too he believed in the traditional modes of propitiating it, not asking himself the raison d'être of this or that ceremony, still less looking on them with pity and contempt, like Lucretius, but accepting them in his broad humanity as part of the life and thought of man in Italy.

fortunatus et ille Deos qui novit agrestes.[878]

Let us mark the word novit. The husbandman has come to recognise these emanations of the Power and to know them as friends; the word could not have been used of malignant spirits. As I said in an early lecture, man advances in his knowledge of the Power as he advances in civilisation. So the rural rites have a claim on his sympathy no less than the men who performed them; he knew them in their detail, and he knew them in the spirit which animated them. He must have studied them in detail, and not only the rural cults, but those of the city too; every gesture in worship has an interest for him, and so great is our respect for his accuracy that we accept what he tells us even if we cannot explain it.[879] His careful learning in all these details has been the means of preserving for us large sources of knowledge; for Servius, Macrobius, and other commentators accumulated stores of it in endeavouring to interpret him.

Now, this is not mere antiquarianism in Virgil, any more than is the detail of old life which abounds in Scott's poems and novels. These two men had the same wide, sympathetic outlook on the world. Scott was interested in everything and everybody, whether living or dead long ago, and in all they did; and I think we may say the same of Virgil, though he is said to have been rather reserved and shy than genial and talkative like Scott. Virgil's mind was not so much "curious," I think, as sympathetic, and his delight in these religious details arises from his love of Italy and all that man did in it. He caught the spirit of the old Italian worship, which, as we saw, demanded that each act should be performed accurately according to rules laid down. He recognises the necessity, and with true Italian instinct he acts upon it as he writes. He knows that these acts of cult are one outward expression of that quality which had made Rome great—pietas, the sense of duty to family, State, and Deity.

So far I have been considering what I may call the psychological basis of Virgil's religion—the man's sympathetic nature and wide outlook, which included in its love of Italy even the old practical worship of Italians. I have now to go on to the poet's greatest work, in which the idea of duty was not merely recognised in religious acts but exemplified in an ideal Roman. It is mainly in the Aeneid that we see him looking forward as well as backward, for it is there that we have the chart of the Roman's duty drawn to the scale of his past history, and meant to guide him in the future in still more glorious travel.

There are two ways in which we may contemplate the Aeneid as a whole and the teaching it offered the Roman of that day. We may think of it (if I may for a moment use musical language) as a great fugue, of which the leading subject is the mission of Rome in the world. Providence, Divine will, the Reason of the Stoics, or, in the poetical setting of the poem, Jupiter, the great protecting Roman deity, with the Fates behind him somewhat vaguely conceived,[880] had guided the State to greatness and empire from its infancy onwards, and the citizens of that State must be worthy of that destiny if they were to carry out the great work. This mighty theme pervades the whole poem and, like the subject of a fugue, enters and re-enters from time to time in thrilling tones. It is given out in the prophecy put into the mouth of Jupiter himself at the beginning of the first book; it is heard in still more magnificent music from the shade of old Anchises in the last moments of the hero's visit to Hades in the sixth book, and again in the description of the shield which Venus gives her son.[881] Though the poem is unequal and some parts of it are left without the final touches, yet whenever the poet comes upon this great theme the tone is that of a full organ. This is, I think, apart from those exquisite beauties of detail which are for those only who have been initiated in the Virgilian mysteries, what chiefly moves the modern reader of Virgil. There are drawbacks which, for us moderns at least, detract from the general effect: the intervention of gods and goddesses after the Homeric manner, but without the charm of Homer; the seeming want of warm human blood in the hero; the stern decrees of Fate overruling human passions and interests; but he who keeps the great theme ever in mind, watching for it as he reads, as one watches for the new entry of a great fugue-subject, will never fail to see in the Aeneid one of the noblest efforts of human art—to understand what makes it the world's second great epic.

But this great destiny of Rome has been accomplished by the service of man; by his loyalty, self-sacrifice, and sense of duty; by that quality known to the Romans as pietas; and the second lesson or reminder of the Aeneid lies in the exemplification of this truth in the person and character of the hero. We moderns find it hard to interest ourselves in the character of Aeneas. But as Prof. Nettleship remarked long ago,[882] a Roman reader would not have thought him dull or uninteresting; if that had been so, the poem could hardly have become popular from the moment of its publication. I am inclined to think that the development of the character of Aeneas under stress of perils, moral and material, was much more obvious to the Roman than it is to us, and much more keenly appreciated. For him it was the chief lesson of the poem, which makes it as it were a "whole duty of the Roman"; and as this lesson is really a part of Roman religious experience I am going to occupy the rest of this lecture with it.

The development of the character of Aeneas, under the influence of perils and temptations through which he is guided by Jupiter and the Fates, is not a subject which has received much attention from modern criticism.[883] Yet to me, at least, it would be surprising if the leading character of the poem were, so to speak, a statue once and for all conceived and executed by the artist, instead of a human being subjected to various experiences which work upon his character as well as his career. There were circumstances in Virgil's time which made it natural that a poet of a serious and philosophical turn of mind should be interested in the development of character and make it part of his great subject. We have more than once had occasion to notice the growth of individualism in the last two centuries B.C. Beyond doubt personal character had a great interest at this time for thinking men, apart from its development; the world was ruled by individuals, and at no time has so much depended on the disposition of individuals. Men had long begun to take themselves very seriously, and to write their own biographies. So entirely had the individual emancipated himself from the State, that he had almost forgotten that the State existed and claimed his pietas; he worked and played for his own ends.[884] Even the armies of that melancholy age were known and thought of, not as the servants of the State, but as Sullani, Pompeiani, and so on. This almost arrogant self-assertion of the individual was a fact of the time, and could not be suppressed entirely; it was henceforward impossible to return to the old times when the State was all in all and the individual counted for little.

But in the Aeneid, if I am not mistaken, there is an almost perfect balance between the two conflicting interests. The State is the pivot on which turns all that is best in individual human character; in other words, Aeneas is not playing his own game, but fulfilling the order of destiny which was to bring the world under Roman dominion. Individualism of the wrong type, that of Dido, Turnus, Mezentius, has to be escaped or overcome by the hero, for whom the call of duty is that of the State to be; but, all the same, the hero is an individual, and one conceived not merely as a type or a force. True, he is typical of Roman pietas, and bears his constant epithet accordingly; but if we look at him carefully we shall see that his pietas is at first imperfect, and that his individualism has to be tamed and brought into the service of the State with the help of the State's deities. This is what makes the Aeneid a religious poem; the character of Aeneas is pivoted on religion; religion is the one sanction of his conduct. There is no appeal in the Aeneid to knowledge, or reason, or pleasure,—always to the will of God. Pietas is Virgil's word for religion, as it had been Cicero's in his more exalted moments. In the Dream of Scipio we read that "piis omnibus retinendus est animus in custodia corporis: nec iniussu eius a quo ille est vobis datus, ex hominum vita migrandum est, ne munus humanum adsignatum a deo defugisse videamini."[885] In these words, as is shown by those that follow, the munus hominum is exactly what it is in the Aeneid, duty to Man and the State, and as it is laid down for man by God, it is also duty to Him. The State finds its perfection in the individual so long as he thus fulfills the will of God.[886]