But what was this Sibylline influence which thus penetrated to Rome, if I am right, at the beginning of the fifth century? It is no part of my design to discuss the history of Greek mysticism, though we shall hear something more of it in a later lecture. It will be enough to remind you that in the sixth century Greece was not only full of Orphism and Pythagoreanism, but of floating oracular dicta believed to emanate from a mystic female figure, a weird figure of whom it is hard to say how far she was human or divine; and of whose origin we know nothing, except that her original home was, as we might expect, Asia Minor. She was inspired by Apollo,[538] it was said, like the Pythia, and like her too became ἔνθεοϛ (possessed) when uttering her prophecies; this is the earliest fact we know about her, for a famous fragment of Heracleitus represents her as uttering sayings "with frenzied lips,"[539]—a tradition of which Virgil has made good use in the sixth Aeneid:
non vultus, non color unus, non comptae mansere comae; sed pectus anhelum, et rabie fera corda tument.
But more to our purpose is the sober judgment of Plato a century after the first Roman experience of her, who in the Phaedrus classes her among those who have wrought much good by their inspired utterances.[540] This passage may help us to understand how ready men were at that time to turn for aid in tribulation to what they believed to be divine help, to an inspired wisdom beyond the range of the local deities of their own city-states.
This Sibyl became gradually localised in certain Greek cities, and thereby broke up, as it were, into several Sibyls. One of these Sibylline homes was at Cumae in Campania, the oldest Greek city in Italy, and this enables us to explain easily how the name and fame of the Sibyl reached Rome. Dim as is all early Roman history, the one clear fact of the sixth century is, as we have seen, the rapid advance of the Etruscans, their occupation of Rome, Praeneste, and other Latin cities, and their conquest of Campania, which is now ascribed to that same age.[541] Legend told in later days how the last Etruscan king had taken refuge at Cumae after his expulsion from Rome, and it is just possible that it may here be founding upon some dim recollection of a fact. However this may be, it is plain that it was through the great Etruscan disturbance of that period that Rome came to make trial of Sibylline utterances. In a moment of distress—the famine of which I spoke just now, and which I take to be historical because the remedy, the temple under the Aventine, was so closely connected with the corn-supply—she sent for or admitted an utterance of the Sibyl of Cumae, with whom she had come into some kind of contact through her Etruscan kings.
Let us consider that this foreign dynasty must have brought a new population to the city on the Tiber, the chief strategic point of middle Italy,—a new element of plebs, whatever the old one may have been.[542] We have seen signs, even in the religious history of this age, that commerce and industry were increasing, and that their increase was due to a movement from without, rather than to the old patrician gentes. When the Etruscan dynasty fell and the old patrician influence was restored, the government must have been face to face with new difficulties, and among them the supply of corn for an increasing population in years of bad harvest. With a fresh source of supply from the south came the cult of the Greek corn-deities at the bidding of a Sibylline utterance; and henceforward that remedy was available for other troubles. But the patrician rulers of Rome were true, it would seem, as far as was possible, to the old ways, and for a long time they used this foreign remedy very sparingly. At what date the utterances were collected in "books" and deposited in the Capitoline temple we do not know, nor have we any certain knowledge of their original nature or form. Tradition said that the collection dated from the last king's reign, and that it was placed in the care of duoviri sacris faciundis, as we have seen, who in 367 B.C. gave way to decemviri, five of whom might be members of the plebs. I am myself inclined to conjecture that this comparatively late date may be the real date of the origin of a permanent collection and a permanent college of keepers, and that the earlier duoviri were only temporary religious officers, sacris faciundis, i.e. for the carrying out of the directions of Sibylline utterances specially sought for at Cumae. They would thus be of the same class as other special commissions appointed by the Senate for administrative purposes;[543] while the decemviri, though retaining the old title, were permanent religious officers appointed to collect and take charge of a new and important set of regulations for the benefit of the community, and one which concerned the plebs at least as much as the patricians.
But I must turn to the more important question how far, down to the war with Hannibal, when I shall take up the subject afresh, the Roman religion was affected for good or harm by these utterances and their keepers. They took effect in two ways: either by introducing new deities and settling them in new temples, or by ordering and organising new ceremonies such as Rome had never seen before.
The introduction of a new deity now and again was not of great account from the point of view of religion, except in so far as it encouraged the new ceremonies; the Romans had never taken much personal interest in their deities, and the arrival (outside the pomoerium in each case) of Hermes under the name of Mercurius, or Poseidon bearing the name of the old Roman water numen Neptunus, or even of Asclepios with a Romanised name Aesculapius, would not be likely to affect greatly their ideas of the divine. These facts have rather a historical than a religious significance; Hermes Empolaios, for example, suggests trade with Greek cities, perhaps in grain,[544] and belongs therefore to the same class as Ceres, Liber, Libera, of whom I have already spoken. The arrival of Poseidon-Neptune may mean, as Dr. Carter has suggested, a kind of "marine insurance" for the vessels carrying the grain from Greek ports.[545] The settling of Aesculapius in the Tiber island in 293, as the result of a terrible pestilence, is interesting as being the first fact known to us in the history of medicine at Rome; the temple became a kind of hospital on the model of Epidaurus, where the god had been brought in the form of a snake by an embassy sent for the purpose, and the priests who served it were probably Greeks skilled in the healing art.[546] This last case is a curious example of new Roman religious experience, but it can hardly be said to have any deep significance in the religious history of Rome. Of the obliteration of the old numen Neptunus by the Greek god who took his name we know nothing for good or ill; we are ignorant of the real meaning of the old numen, and cannot tell whether the loss of him was compensated by the usefulness of his name in Roman literature to represent the Greek god of the sea.
Let us turn to the much more important subject of the new ceremonies ordered by the Sibylline "books." The first authentic case of such innovation occurred in 399 B.C., during the long and troublesome siege of the dangerous neighbour city Veii; I call it authentic because all the best modern authorities so reckon it, though it occurred before the destruction of old records during the capture of the city by the Gauls. The circumstances were such as to fix themselves in the memory of the people, and in one way or another they found their way into the earliest annals, probably those of Fabius Pictor, composed during the Second Punic War.[547]
The previous winter, Livy tells us,[548] was one of extraordinary severity; the roads were blocked with snow, and navigation on the Tiber stopped by the ice. This miserable winter was followed too suddenly by a hot season, in which a plague broke out which consumed both man and beast, and continued so persistently that the Senate ordered the Sibylline books to be consulted. This persistence is the first point we should notice; "Cuius insanabili pernicie quando nec causa nec finis inveniebatur,"—so wrote Livy, evidently meaning to express an extremity of trouble which would not give way to ordinary religious remedies. We may compare his account of the next recorded consultation of the books (Livy vii. 2), when neither the old rites nor even the new ones were sufficient to secure the pax deorum and abate another pestilence, and recourse was had to yet another remedy in the form of ludi scenici. The times were out of joint,—the peace of the gods was broken, and thus the community was no longer in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The result was a revival of religio, of the feeling of alarm and anxiety out of which the whole religious system had grown. The old deities might seem to be forsaking their functions, since the old rites had ceased to appeal to them. Mysterious and persistent pestilence is a great tamer of human courage; it is a new experience that man knows not how to meet, and in ancient life it was also a new religious experience.
The remedy was as new as the pestilence, and almost as pernicious. During eight days Rome saw three pairs of deities reclining in the form of images on couches, before which were spread tables covered with food and drink. Whether in this first case they were taken out of the temples and exposed to view in certain places, e.g. the forum, is not clear; later on, in the days of supplicationes, of which more will be said presently, they were visited in procession. The three pairs were Apollo and Latona, Diana and Hercules, Mercurius and Neptunus; all of them Greek, or, as in the case of Diana, Mercurius, and Neptunus, Roman deities in their new Greek form. We cannot trace the special applicability of all of them to the trouble they were thus invoked to appease,—another point that suggests a complete revolution in the Roman ways of contemplating divine beings. These are not functional numina, but foreigners whose ways were only known to the manipulators of the Sibylline utterances. They seem like quack remedies, of which the action is unknown to the consumer.