These exact formulae of invocation and sacrifice were really the outward expression of a fear of the unknown, and its power to hinder and injure man; for the old Roman did not know his gods intimately, inasmuch as they took no human shape, and did not dwell in buildings made by hands. We have illustrated this ignorance of his again and again, and the vagueness and fluidity of the religious conceptions of the Roman mind. The remedy for this weakness was found, as with the Jews, in a remarkable formularity of ritual, both as regards time, place, and method of worship: in a series of elaborate prescriptions drawn up by experts, going even so far as to anticipate the consequence of an unintentional omission or error by piacular acts. This in time, and under State organization, became a science, and finds its parallel in the science of legal formulae. But there was a difference between the two sciences, even for the Roman. In religious acts, the human mind is dealing with the unseen and unknown, not with human beings who can be calculated with or outwitted. His fear of the unknown was thus for the primitive Roman a wholesome discipline; and his attitude towards it he aptly and characteristically called religio, because it bound him to the performance of certain regulated duties, calculated to keep his footsteps straight as he walked daily in this unseen world: duties which even in the family and clan must have been to some extent systematized, and which when the city-state was reached took the definite form of a calendar of public prayers, sacrifices, and festivities.
Now surely in this motive of fear, thus remedied by exact ritual, we may trace a true civilizing element—the idea of Duty, Pietas, which as Cicero defined it, was ‘iustitia erga deos’: righteous dealing towards the gods, in expectation of righteous treatment on their part. And he would be a bold man who should assert that ‘iustitia erga deos’ had no effect in inducing the habit of ‘iustitia erga homines’: in other words that it could not react upon conduct. In the pietas of the one typical Roman in literature both these elements are equally present. The pietas of Aeneas is a sense of duty towards god and man alike; to his father, his son, and his people, as well as to the will of the gods, and to that solemn mission which is at once the religion of his life and the key to the great Roman poem[[1512]]. This is indeed that same sense of duty and responsibility which governed every Roman in authority in the best days of the State, whether paterfamilias, patronus, priest, or magistrate, and which was the motive power in the working of a constitution which lasted for centuries though only resting on a basis of trust. In this pietas, it is true, we find no sense of contrition for sin, no humbling of the individual self before an almighty Governor of the world; but we do find a very sensitive conscientiousness, arising from the dread of neglect or trespass in the discharge of religious observance, in the trust committed by family or State to its constituted representative. And this trust included also the discharge of duties to other men, the neglect of which might bring down the anger of the Unknown, and even compel the surrender of a criminal as sacer to an offended deity. We find abundant evidence of this aspect of the religio in the language of solemn oaths and treaties, and especially in connexion with the cult of the great Jupiter.
I maintain then that in this Roman religion, in spite of its dryness and formality, there was a distinct ethical and civilizing element. And in conclusion I may perhaps raise the question whether it was really, as has been so often asserted, such a conception of the unseen as could never admit of elevation and expansion. A religion, which in its best and simplest forms, could bind men together in the orderly dutiful life of family, gens, state, and federation, could hardly, if left to itself, have speedily become an inanity, even though based on the motive of fear rather than that of brotherly love. But this religion, as the State became more fully matured, came under the influence of two retarding causes. First, its ritual, always obnoxious to formularism, was gradually deprived of its meaning by great priesthoods which from causes which need not be here discussed became powerful political agencies. Secondly, the contact with a mature system of polytheism, adorned and in some sort materialized by art and literature, drew away the mind of the simple and wondering Roman from the task of developing his religious ideas in his own way. When a new world of thought broke on the conquering Roman of the Republic, his own religious motives were already drying up under the influence of a powerful State-organization. His pietas lived on after a fashion for centuries, but more and more it lost that hold on the conscience, that appeal to trust and responsibility, which had once promised it a vigorous life and growth. While foreign gods and cults attracted his attention and admiration, or appealed to his sense that there was no quarter from which supernatural aid might not be called in for the advancement of his State, they failed to bind his conscience with the wholesome motives which lay at the root of his old native religio. And neither in the reaction of the fourth century B.C., nor in the protests of an austere Cato in the second, nor in the elaborate revival of Augustus, much less in any later effort of philosopher or autocrat to return to the old ways, was any permanent resuscitation of discipline or conduct possible. The problem of giving a real religion to the world-state into which the Roman dominion had then grown, was not to be solved either by Roman pietas or Hellenic polytheism.
NOTES ON TWO COINS.
A. Denarius of P. Licinius Stolo (p. 42).
Obv. AVGVSTVS TR POT Augustus, laureate, on horse-back to r.
Rev. P. STOLO Helmet (apex) between two shields.
IIIVIR
Coin.