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

by W. Warde Fowler

New also, but better in its effect, was the publicity of these proceedings, and the part taken in them by the whole population, patrician and plebeian, men, women, and children. If we can trust Livy's further statements, every one left his door open and kept open house, inviting all to come in, whether known or unknown; all old quarrels were made up, and no new ones suffered to begin; prisoners were freed from their chains, and universal good-will prevailed. These eight days were in fact kept as holidays, and doubtless by the novelty of the whole scene the astute authorities hoped to inspire fresh hope and confidence, and to divert attention from the prevailing misery, just as our soldiers in India are induced to forget the presence of cholera in a station by constant games and amusements. That this was really one leading object of the whole show is not generally recognised by historians; but it seems fully explained by the fact I mentioned just now, that in the similar trouble of 349 B.C. recourse was had for the first time to ludi scenici in order to amuse the people. In the history of the Hannibalic war we shall have plenty of opportunity of noting this kind of expedient. The Roman people, we must remember, were getting more and more to be inhabitants of a large city, and, as such, to seek for entertainment, like all citizens in all ages. The religious rites of the old calendar were perhaps by this time getting too familiar, losing their original meaning; whether they had ever been very entertaining to a city population may be doubted. Something more showy was needed; processions had always been to the taste of the Roman, and banquets, such as the epulum Iovis, which I have already noticed, often accompanied the processions.

Now, this love of show and novelty, of which we have abundant evidence later on as a Roman characteristic, taken together with the anxiety and alarm—the new religio—arising from the pestilence, will sufficiently explain the lectisternia, as these shows were called. We have here in fact the first appearance, constantly recurring in later Roman history, of a tendency to seek not only for novelty, but for a more emotional expression of religious feeling than was afforded by the old forms of sacrifice and prayer, conducted as they were by the priest on behalf of the community without its active participation. Those old forms might do for the old patrician community of farmers and warriors, but not so well for the new and ever-increasing population of artisans and other workmen, whether of Roman or foreign descent. It would seem, indeed, as if the sensitiveness of the human fibre of a primitive community increases with its increasing complexity, and with the greater variety of experience to which it is exposed; and in the case of Rome, as if the simple ancient methods of dealing with the divine inhabitants of the city were no longer adequate to the needs of a State which was steering its way to empire among so many difficulties and perils. It is not indeed certain that the new rites, or some points in them, may not have had their prototypes in old Italian usage, though the lectisternia, the actual display of gods in human form and in need of food like human beings, are almost certainly Greek in origin.[549] But so far as we can guess, the emotional element was wholly new. True, Livy tells us in two passages of his third book of occasions when men, women, and children flocked to all the shrines (omnia delubra) seeking for the pax deorum at the invitation of the senate; but the early date, the great improbability of the senate taking any such step, and the absence of any mention of the priesthoods, makes it difficult to believe that these assertions are based on any genuine record. We must be content to mark the first lectisternia in 399 as the earliest authentic example of the emotional tendency of the Roman plebs.[550]

If we can judge of this period of Roman religious history by the general tendency of the policy of the Roman government, we may see here a deliberate attempt to include the new population in worship of a kind that would calm its fears, engage its attention, and satisfy its emotion, while leaving uncontaminated the old ritual that had served the State so long. If this conclusion be a right one, then we must allow that the new ceremonial had its use. Dr. Frazer has lately told us in his eloquent and persuasive way, of how much value superstition has been in building up moral habits and the instinct of submission to civil order. His thesis might be illustrated adequately from the history of Rome alone. But from a purely religious point of view the story of the lectisternia is a sad one. The old Roman invisible numen, working with force in a particular department of human life and its environment, was a far nobler mental conception, and far more likely to grow into a power for good, than the miserable images of Graeco-Roman full-blown gods and goddesses reclining on their couches and appearing to partake of dinner like a human citizen. Such ideas of the divine must have forced men's religious ideas clean away from the Power manifesting itself in the universe, and must have dragged down the Roman numina with them in their corrupting degradation. According to our definition of it, religion was now in a fair way to disappear altogether; what was destined to take its place was not really religion at all. Nor did it in any way assist the growth of an individual conscience, as perhaps did some of the later religious forms introduced from without. It was of value for the moment to the State, in satisfying a population greatly disturbed by untoward events; and that was all.

Closely connected with the lectisternia, and following close upon them in chronological order, were the processional ceremonies called supplicationes. The historical relation between the two is by no means clear; but if we conclude, as I am fairly sure we may, that the lectisternia were shows of a joyful character, accompanied, as Livy describes the first one, with private entertainments, and meant to keep up the spirits of the plebeian population, and if we then turn to the early supplicationes, in which men, women, and children, coronati, and carrying laurel branches, went in procession to the temples, and there prostrated themselves after the Greek fashion, the women "crinibus passis aras verrentes," we shall be disposed to look on them as, in origin at least, distinct from each other.[551] We may conjecture that the appearance of the gods in human form at the doors of their temples suggested to the plebeian women a kind of emotional worship which was alien to the old Roman feeling, but familiar enough to those (and they must have been many) who knew the life of the Greek cities of Italy. It may be that they had tried it even in earlier times; but anyhow, in the fourth and third centuries B.C. advantage was taken of the pulvinaria to use them as stopping-places in the procession of a supplicatio, and the phrase becomes a common one in the annals, "supplicatio ad omnia pulvinaria indicta." The lectisternia were ordered five times in the fourth century;[552] by that time, it would seem likely, the supplicationes had become an authorised institution, and had perhaps embodied the practice of lectisternia in the way suggested above. We shall meet with them again when we come to the religious history of the war with Hannibal.

One word more before I leave this subject for the present. In all this innovation we must not forget to note the growth of individual feeling as distinguished from the old worship of civic grouping, in which the individual, as such, was of little or no account. I pointed out the first signs of this individualism when speaking of the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter, and we shall have reason to mark its rapid growth further. We are now, in fact, and must realise that we are, in a period in which, throughout the Graeco-Roman world, the need was beginning to be felt of some new rule of individualistic morality. The Roman population, now recruited from many sources, was but reflecting this need unconsciously when it insisted on new emotional rites and expiations. The Roman authorities were forced to satisfy the demand; but in doing so they made no real contribution to the history of Roman religious experience. It was impossible that they should do so; they represented the old civic form of religion, "bound up with the life of a society, and unable to contemplate the individual except as a member of it."[553] The new forms of worship, the supplicatio and lectisternium, could not be, as the old forms had in some sense been, the consecration of civic and national life. They were to the Romans as the worship of Baal to the Jews of the time of the Kings; and, unlike that poisonous cult, they could never be rooted out.[554][555]

NOTES TO LECTURE XI

[510] This is the expression of Sallust, Catil. 12. 3.

[510a] This Lecture was the first of a second and separate course.

[511] See my paper on the Latin history of the word religio, in Transactions of the Congress for the History of Religions, 1909, vol. ii. p. 172. W. Otto in Archiv, 1909, p. 533 foll.