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

by W. Warde Fowler

LECTURE X

THE FIRST ARRIVAL OF NEW CULTS IN ROME

I said in my first lecture that the whole story of Roman religious experience falls into two parts: first, that of the formularisation of rules and methods for getting effectively into right relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe; secondly, that of the gradual discovery of the inadequacy of these, and of the engrafting on the State religion of Rome of an ever-increasing number of foreign rites and deities. The first of these stories has been occupying us so far, and before I leave it for what will be practically an introduction to succeeding lectures, it will be as well for me to sum up the results at which we have already arrived.

I began with what I called the protoplasm of religion, the primitive ideas and practices which form the psychological basis of the whole growth. The feeling of awe and anxiety about that which is mysterious and unknown, the feeling which the Romans called religio, seems to have manifested itself in Italy, as elsewhere, in those various ways which I discussed in my second and third lectures, in the various forms of magic, negative and positive. We find unmistakable evidence of the existence of those strict rules of conduct called taboos, which fetter the mind and body of primitive man, which probably arise from an ineffective desire to put himself in right relations with forces he does not understand, and which have their value as a social discipline. Again, we find surviving in historical Rome numerous forms of active or positive magic, by which it was thought possible to compel or overcome those powers, so as to use them for your own benefit and against your enemies. But I was careful to point out that on the whole little of all this evidence of the early existence of magic at Rome is to be found in the public religion of the Roman State, and that the natural inference from this is that at one time or another there must have been a very powerful influence at work in cutting away these obsolete root-leaves of the plant that was to be, and in making of that plant a neat, well-defined growth.

I went on to deal with the first stage in the working of this influence, which we found reflected in the religion of the family as we know it in historical times. The family, settled on the land, with its homestead and its regular routine of agricultural process, developed a more effective desire to get into right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe. Anxiety is greatly lessened both in the house and on the land, because within those limits there is a "peace" (or covenant) between the divine and human inhabitants who have taken up their residence there. The supernatural powers, conceived now (whatever they may have been before) as spirits, are friendly if rightly propitiated, and much advance has been made in the methods of propitiation; magic and religion are still doubtless mixed up together in these, but the tendency seems to be to get gradually rid of the more inadequate and blundering methods. In fact, man's knowledge of the Divine has greatly advanced; spirits have some slight tendency to become deities, and magic is in part at least superseded by an orderly round of sacrifice and prayer, which is performed daily within the house, and within the boundary of the land at certain seasons of the year. This stage of settlement and routine was the first great revolution in the religious experience of the Romans, and supplied the basis of their national character.

The second revolution which we can clearly discern, and far the most important as a factor in Roman history, is that of the organisation of the religion of the city-state of Rome. Doubtless there were stages intermediate between the two, but they are entirely lost to us. We had to concentrate our attention on the city of the four regions—the first city we really know—and to examine the one document which has survived from it, the so-called calendar of Numa. In my fifth lecture I explained the nature of that calendar, and noted how it reflects the life of a people at once agricultural and military, and how it must presuppose the existence of a highly organised legal priesthood, or of some powerful genius for political as well as religious legislation. The tradition of a great priest-king is not wholly to be despised, for it expresses the feeling of the Romans that religious law and order were indispensable parts of their whole political and social life. During the rest of these lectures I have been trying to interrogate this religious calendar, with such help as could be gained from any other sources, on two points: (1) the conception, or, if we can venture to use the word, the knowledge, which the Romans of that early city-state had of the Divine; (2) the chief forms and methods of their worship. We saw that they did not think of the divine beings as existing in human form with human weaknesses, but as invisible and intangible functional powers, numina. Each had its special limited sphere of action; and some were now localised within the pomoerium, or just outside it within the ager Romanus, and worshipped under a particular name. I suggested that this very settlement had probably some influence in preparing them for assuming a more definite and personal character, should the chance be given them. In regard to the forms of cult with which they were propitiated, I found in the ritual of sacrifice and prayer a genuine advance towards a really religious attitude to the deity, the sacrifices being meant to increase his power to benefit the community, and the prayers to diminish such inclination as he might have to damage it; but that there are in these certain survivals of the age of magic, which are, however, only formal, and have lost their original significance. I found some curious examples of such survivals in the rite of devotio, and in vows generally a somewhat lower type of method in dealing with the supernatural. But, on the other hand, the forms of lustratio, at the bottom of which seems to lie the idea of getting rid of evil spirits and influences, present very beautiful examples of what we may really call religious ceremony.

There was, then, in this highly-organised religion of the city-state, in some ways at least, a great advance. But in spite of this gain, it had serious drawbacks. Most prominent among these was the fact that it was the religion of the State as a whole, and not of the individual or the family. Religion, I think we may safely say, had placed a certain consecration upon the simple life of the family, which was, in fact, the life of the individual; for the essence of religion in all stages of civilisation lies in the feeling of the individual that his own life, his bodily and mental welfare, is dependent on the Divine as he and his regard it. But to what extent can it be said that religion so consecrated the life of the State as to enable each individual in his family group to feel that consecration more vividly? That would have constituted a real advance in religious development; that was the result, if I am not mistaken, of the religion of the Jewish State, which with all the force of a powerful hierarchical authority addressed its precepts to the mind and will of the individual. But at Rome, though the earliest traces and traditions of law show a certain consecration of morality, inasmuch as the criminal is made over as a kind of propitiatory sacrifice to the deity whom he has offended, yet in the ordinary course of life, so far as I can discern, the individual was left very much where he was, before the State arose, in his relation to the Divine.

In no other ancient State that we know of did the citizen so entirely resign the regulation of all his dealings with the State's gods to the constituted authorities set over him. His obligatory part in the religious ritual of the State was simply nil, and all his religious duty on days of religious importance was to abstain from civil business, to make no disturbance. Within the household he used his own simple ritual, the morning prayer, the libation to the household deities at meals; and it is exactly here that we see a pietas, a sense of duty consecrated by religion, which seems to have had a real ethical value, and reminds us of modern piety. But in all his relations with the gods qua citizen, he resigned himself to the trained and trusted priesthoods, who knew the secrets of ritual and all that was comprised in the ius divinum; and by passive obedience to these authorities he gradually began to deaden the sense of religio that was in him. And this tendency was increased by the mere fact of life in a city, which as time went on became more and more the rule; for, as I pointed out, the round of religious festivals no longer exactly expressed the needs and the work of that agricultural life in which it had its origin.

It would be an interesting inquiry, if the material for an answer were available, to try and discover how this gradual absorption of religion (or rather religious duties) by the State and its authorities affected the morality of the individual Roman. It has often been maintained of late that religion and morality have nothing in common; and even Dr. Westermarck,[464] who, unlike most anthropologists, treats the whole subject from a psychological point of view, seems inclined to come to this conclusion. For myself, I am rather disposed to agree with another eminent anthropologist,[465] that religion and morality are really elemental instincts of human nature, primarily undistinguishable from each other; and if that be so, then the over-elaboration of either the moral or religious law, or of the two combined, will tend to weaken the binding force of both. If, as at Rome, the citizen is made perfectly comfortable in his relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, owing to the complete mastery of the ius divinum by the State and its officials, there will assuredly be a tendency to paralyse the elemental religious impulse, and with it, if I am not mistaken, the elemental sense of right and wrong. For in the life of a state with such a legalised religious system as this, so long at least as it thrives and escapes serious disaster, there will be few or none of those moments of peril and anxiety in which "man is brought face to face with the eternal realities of existence,"[466] and when he becomes awakened to a new sense of religion and duty. In the life of the family, the critical moments of birth, puberty, marriage, and death regularly recur, and keep up the instinct, because man is then brought face to face with these eternal facts; there is no need of extraordinary perils, such as tempests or pestilences, to keep the instinct alive. But in the life of the State as such there were no such continually recurring reminders; even the old agricultural perils were out of sight of the ordinary citizen. Thus the farthest we can go in ascribing a moral influence to the State religion is in giving it credit for helping to maintain that sense of law and order which served to keep the life of the family sound and wholesome. That it did to some extent perform this service I have already pointed out;[467] and it is a remarkable fact that the decay of the State religion was coincident, in the last two centuries B.C., with the decay of the family life and virtues. But on the whole, as we shall see, the ius divinum had rather the effect of hypnotising the religious and moral instinct than of keeping it awake. It needed new perils for the State as a whole to re-create that feeling which is the root of the growth of conscience; and when the craving did at last come upon the Roman, which in times of doubt and peril has come upon individuals and communities in all ages, for support and comfort from the Unseen, it had to be satisfied by giving him new gods to worship in new ways—aliens with whom he had nothing in common, who had no home in his patriotic feeling, no place in his religious experience.[468]

I wish to conclude this first part of my subject by giving some account of the first beginning of this introduction of new deities, di novensiles as they were called,[469] into the old Roman religious world. Those, however, of whom I shall speak here were not introduced as the result of disaster or distress, but were simply the inevitable consequence of the growing importance of the city on the Tiber—of the beginnings of her commercial and political relations with her neighbours, and also of her own development in the arts of civilisation. The religious system with which I have so far been dealing was the exclusive property, we must remember, of those gentes, with the families composing them, which formed the original human material of the State, and were known as patrician. If we had no other reason for being sure of this, the fact that all State priesthoods were originally limited to patrician families would be sufficient to prove it;[470] even down to the latest times the rex sacrorum, the three flamines maiores, and the Salii were necessarily of patrician birth—a fact which had much to do with their tendency to disappear in the last age of the Republic.