Part 17 (2/2)

Though they did not consult the G.o.ds about public undertakings until the magistrate or the general asked them to do so, they had power to stop proceedings of which they disapproved; and this at certain periods of Roman history they very frequently did. In Cicero's treatise on Divination a great deal of interesting matter may be found on this subject. Another sacred college of somewhat later date is that of the men, at first three in number, afterwards fifteen, who acted as expounders of the sacred Sibylline books, which King Tarquin purchased from the old woman or Sibyl, of c.u.mae.

Roman Religion Legal rather than Priestly.--While some of these priestly colleges exercised large powers, these powers were always regarded not as inherent but deputed. The sacred offices were not hereditary but elective; no course of training was necessary to qualify for them; men were chosen for them by the state as for any other public office, and those who became priests did not cease to be citizens but continued to sit in the Senate, and, as it might happen, to hold other offices at the same time. The growth of a priestly caste was thus effectively prevented; religion was precluded from having any free development of its own, and kept in the position of an instrument for the furtherance of ends of state. There is no great religion in which ritual is so much, doctrine and enthusiasm so little. All these priests and colleges exist for no end but to carry out with strict exact.i.tude the ritual usage which is deemed necessary to keep on good terms with the G.o.ds. They have no doctrine to teach, no fervour to communicate, they do not even tell any stories.

Punctiliousness and anxiety attend all their proceedings. To the Roman, Ihne says, ”religion turns out to be the fear lest the G.o.ds should punish them for neglect; any unusual occurrence may be a sign that the G.o.ds are withdrawing their co-operation from the state, and this must be looked into, and the due expiations used if judged necessary.” Ritual must always be carried out with the utmost precision; it is not the goodwill of the wors.h.i.+pper but his exact.i.tude that counts. He may even cheat the G.o.ds of their due if he is formally correct in his observance. For example, if the auspices (the signs derived from birds) were unfavourable, they could be repeated till a better result was obtained.

What we have described is the religion of Rome in its original form, before it accepted foreign modifications. Its G.o.ds are spirits of the woods and fields, of the market, of the foray, of the treaty, of all the aspects, in fact, which life had borne to the tribes of Central Italy, especially to the Latins and the Sabines who combined to form the state of Rome. These G.o.ds form no family and have no history, they do not, like the G.o.ds of Greece, lay hold of the imagination, nor, like those of Germany, of the affections. They are only dimly known; but they are powerful, and it is necessary to reckon with them; and the only relations which can be kept up with such beings are those of business and of law. It follows that this religion is one of constraint and not of inspiration. In this it agrees with the Roman character, which is much more inclined to order than to freedom, to law than to art. The word religion has here its origin; its primary meaning is restraint or check, since the chief feeling with which the Roman regarded his G.o.ds was that of anxiety. Not that the G.o.ds were bad; Vediovis, the bad counterpart of Jovis, is a vanis.h.i.+ng figure,--but they were ill-known, and might have cause to be angry. Wors.h.i.+p, therefore, the practical cultivation of the friends.h.i.+p of the G.o.ds, swallows up here the other elements of religion as a whole. Religion does not free the forces of human nature to realise themselves in spontaneous activity, but enchains them to the punctilious service of a nonhuman authority. Everything exciting is kept at a distance, and men are trained in obedience and scrupulousness and self-denial. They produce no beautiful works of art, and have hardly any stories to delight in; but they are reverent and conscientious; private feeling is sacrificed with an austere satisfaction to the public interest, and they accordingly build up a great power. Living in an atmosphere of magic, where unseen dangers lurk on every side, and there is virtue in words and forms correctly used to avert these dangers, the Roman develops to perfection one side of religion. To its inspirations and enthusiasms and hidden consolation he is a stranger; but he knows it better than others as a conservative and regulating force, which checks pa.s.sion, calls for wary and orderly conduct, and causes the individual to subordinate himself to the community.

Changes introduced from without.--The Roman religion had, properly speaking, no development. What it might have become had it been left to unfold itself without interference from without, we can only guess; but it was early brought under the influence of more highly developed religions, and it proved to have so little power of resisting innovations that it speedily parted with much of its own native character. The Romans were not unconscious that their religion was an imperfect one; they never claimed, when they were conquering the world, that their religion was the only true one, or had any mission to prevail over others. They were tolerant from the first of the religions of other peoples. The G.o.ds of other peoples they always believed to be real beings, with whom it was well for them also to be on good terms. If everything in the world had its spirit, these G.o.ds also were the spirits of their own countries and nations; the very notion of deity which the Romans entertained prevented them from having any exclusive belief in their own G.o.ds or from denying the right of the G.o.ds of others.[2] When therefore they came in contact with foreign religions, they were not protected by any profound conviction of the truth of their own, and were exposed to the full force of the new ideas. The new religions came to them along with the culture of peoples much further advanced in art and in thought than they were themselves; at each such contact, therefore, they felt the foreigner to be superior to themselves in intellectual matters; and wherever this happens, the less highly gifted race is likely to change in its religion as well as in other things. We have to note the changes which were produced by such external influences.

[Footnote 2: Cf. Celsus in Origen, _Contra Celsum_, vii. 68.]

In the first place, Rome borrowed from Etruria. Etruscan religion was both more developed and more savage than that of Rome. Human sacrifice was an acknowledged feature of it; divination was carried to absurd lengths, one great branch of it consisting in the prediction of the future from the appearance of the entrails of slaughtered animals. Etruria had a h.e.l.l with regular torments for the departed; in Rome the belief in a future life was much less definite.

On the other hand, Etruria had deities who were something more than abstractions; there was a circle of twelve G.o.ds, who held meetings on high, and regulated the affairs of the world. Above them was a power, little defined, to which the G.o.ds were subject, a kind of fate. Greek influence, so notably apparent in Etruscan art, is present, too, we see, in Etruscan religion; it is through this somewhat dark pa.s.sage that Greek religious ideas first came to Rome. Under this influence various innovations took place at Rome. Before the end of the monarchy the Romans had begun to build houses for their G.o.ds, after being for 170 years, we are told, without any such arrangement. The Roman ”templum” was not originally a building, but a s.p.a.ce marked off, according to the rules of augury, for the observation of signs.

A part of the sky was also marked off for such ”observation” and ”contemplation.” On such a holy site, on the Capitoline hill, there was founded by the earlier Tarquin the temple of Jupiter which always continued to be the princ.i.p.al site of Roman religion. Its architecture was Tuscan; and it contained not only a cella or holy place for the image of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, but also a cella for Juno and one for Minerva. The latter was both an Etruscan and a Roman deity, the G.o.ddess of memory. Art was thus enlisted in the service of the G.o.ds; the divine figures acquired a reality and distinctness quite wanting to the earlier divine abstractions; and a new notion of deity was presented to the Roman mind. Other temples followed, to Jupiter under other names than that which he had in the Capitol, and to other deities. That of Faith was a very early one. It was a rule in temple-building that the image in the cella faced the west, so that the wors.h.i.+pper, praying towards it, faced the east. Here also the Roman custom is a departure from the Greek; for in Greek temples it is the rule that the image faces the east, and the wors.h.i.+pper the west. The Roman orientation of sacred buildings has pa.s.sed into the practice of the Christian Church. From Etruria the Romans also derived a great addition to the rules of divination; but the more childish parts of Etruscan divination were regarded at Rome as superst.i.tious, though private persons might frequently resort to them.

Greek G.o.ds in Rome.--While Greek ideas thus came indirectly from the north, the south of the peninsula was becoming more and more Greek, and the G.o.ds and temples of h.e.l.las, established first at the sea-ports and colonies, gradually came to Rome. This movement is connected with the Sibylline books which were acquired by the last of the kings. These books were brought to Rome from the Greek town of c.u.mae; they were written in Greek, and contained oracles which were ascribed to an old Greek prophetess. They were consulted in grave emergencies of state through the officials who had charge of them, and what they generally prescribed was that a G.o.d should be sent for from Greece, and his wors.h.i.+p set up in Rome. Many foreign wors.h.i.+ps were thus imported. First came Apollo, disguised under the Latin name of Aperta, ”opener,” for the books contained many of his oracles; he was received and wors.h.i.+pped as a G.o.d of purification, since the state was in need of that process at the time, as well as of prophecy. In the year 496 B.C. came in the same way Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus, identified with the old Latin Ceres, Libera, and Liber; and, a century later, Heracles, identified with the Latin Hercules.

In the year 291, on the occurrence of a plague, Asclepios, in Latin Aesculapius, was brought from Epidauros; and when the crisis of the contest with Hannibal was at hand (204 B.C.) Cybele, the great mother of the G.o.ds, was fetched from Pessinus in Phrygia. The people of that town generously handed over to the Roman amba.s.sadors the field-stone which was their image of the G.o.ddess, and her journey to Rome had the desired effect, in the expulsion of Hannibal from Italy. The Venus of Mount Eryx in Sicily arrived in Rome about the same time; a G.o.ddess combining the characters of Aphrodite and Astarte, and quite different from the simple old Roman Venus, who was a G.o.ddess of Spring, and presided over gardens.

The process of which these are the outward landmarks went on during the whole period of the Republic, and resulted in the subst.i.tution of what may be called with Mommsen the Graeco-Roman, for the old Roman religion. The change was a very profound one. Not only were some new G.o.ds added to the old ones, not only did Greek art come to be employed in Roman temples, not only were new rites introduced, such as the _lectisternium_, in which couches were arranged, each with the image of a G.o.d and that of a G.o.ddess, and tables spread to regale the rec.u.mbent deities. The very notion of deity was changed; the Greek G.o.d, represented by an image in human form and moving freely in the upper world, was subst.i.tuted for the Latin G.o.d who was the unseen side of an act or process or quality, from which he had his name, and apart from which he was not. The following is a list of the princ.i.p.al Roman G.o.ds and of the Greek ones with whom they were identified:--Jupiter (Zeus), Juno (Hera), Neptunus (Poseidon), Minerva (Athene), Mars (Ares), Venus (Aphrodite), Diana (Artemis), Vulca.n.u.s (Hephaestus), Vesta (Hestia), Mercurius (Hermes), Ceres (Demeter). The identifications are by no means accurate; Jupiter and Vesta, as we have seen, are the only two Roman G.o.ds who are really identical with Greek G.o.ds, the other equations are founded on accidental resemblances, and are more arbitrary than real. The result of them was, however, that the Romans forgot to a large extent their own G.o.ds, and got Greek ones instead. With the divine figures they took over the mythology of Greece, and thus the G.o.ds came to be well known with all their weaknesses, instead of as before surrounded with mystery and awe. The wors.h.i.+p founded on the earlier conception of the deity, and kept up with unwavering regularity, was inapplicable to these new G.o.ds, and inevitably lost all its reality. This is not the only cause, but it is one of the chief causes which prepared for the fearful spectacle presented by Roman religion at the end of the Republic, when men of learning and distinction officiated as the heads of a religion in which they had no belief, and which they scoffed at in their writings.

Among the wors.h.i.+ps which came to Rome from the East there were several which are not of Greek, but of Oriental origin. The wors.h.i.+p of Cybele belongs to Asia Minor, though it had spread over Greece; that of Dionysus also came to Greece from Asia. The practice of both these cults was accompanied by excitement and self-abandonment on the part of the wors.h.i.+ppers; and they formed a great contrast to the staid and formal wors.h.i.+p of the Romans, the only admissible pa.s.sion in which was a calm pa.s.sion for correctness. The wors.h.i.+p of Cybele was carried on by eunuchs, it had noisy processions, and depended on begging for its support. When the Romans brought it to their city, they ordained that Roman citizens should not fill leading offices in it; but it flourished so strongly, among the numerous foreigners in the capital and among the poor, as to show that it met a great want there. The wors.h.i.+p of Bacchus had to be suppressed by the state; it was carried on at nocturnal meetings, which even citizens attended, and it led to all kinds of irregularities. As the subject of this chapter is not the religions of Rome, but the Roman religion, we do not here review the numerous foreign wors.h.i.+ps which were brought to the capital from every part of the Empire, and made Rome, towards the close of the Republic, the residence of the G.o.ds of every nation. The Romans as we saw were not led by any convictions of their own to deny the truth of foreign religions; and their policy as rulers also inclined them to tolerate all wors.h.i.+ps which did not offend against civil order. In the provinces it was the rule not to interfere with local religion; at Rome the authorities recognised not the imported religion itself, of which the state did not feel called to judge, but the a.s.sociation practising it, which received permission to do so.

The wors.h.i.+p was then protected by the state--it became a _religio licita_. Amid the meeting of all the G.o.ds and the clas.h.i.+ng of all the creeds which were thus brought about at Rome, the Roman religion itself maintained its place, not as a doctrine which any one believed, for the very priests and augurs laughed at the rites and ceremonies they carried on, but as a ritual which was bound up with the whole past history of Rome, and believed to be necessary for the welfare of the state as well as for the satisfaction of the common people. In the atmosphere of discussion and of far-reaching scepticism which then prevailed it was not to be expected that faith could again find any strong support in the historical religion of Rome. The Emperor Augustus made a serious attempt to reform and revive religion. He selected the domestic wors.h.i.+p of the Lares as the most living part of the old system, and ordained that the two Lares should be wors.h.i.+pped along with the genius of the Emperor, and that Rome should be divided into districts, each with its temple of this strange trinity; while in the provinces each district was to support a wors.h.i.+p of Rome and of the Emperor in addition to its existing cults. Temples were rebuilt at Rome, new ones were raised, sacred offices were filled which had been vacant, religious games were inst.i.tuted to carry the Roman mind back to the sacred past. Livy and Virgil treated the past from a religious point of view, showing the sacred mission of the Roman race, and exhibiting the valour and piety of the founders of the state. If the Roman religion could be revived these were the proper means to do it. But the religion of the future was not to be prepared in this way.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

The sections on religion in Mommsen's _History of Rome_.

Ramsay's _Roman Antiquities_.

Wissowa, _Religion und Cultur der Romer_.

Holwerda, in De la Saussaye.

For the period of the Empire, Boissier's _La Religion Romaine_.

See also the work of c.u.mont, cited at the end of chapter x.

CHAPTER XVIII THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA

I. _The Vedic Religion_

No contrast could well be greater than that between the German religion and that of India. In the one case we have a people full of vigour, but not yet civilised; in the other a people of high organisation and culture, but deficient in vigour; the former religion is one of action, the latter one of speculation. From the original Aryan faith, to which that of the Teutons most closely approximates, Indian religion is removed by two great steps. First we have as a variety of Aryan faith the Indo-Iranian religion, that of the undivided ancestors of Persians and Indians alike, in the dim period antecedent to the Aryan settlement of India. Of this religion, the common mother of those of Persia and of India, we shall give some sketch after we have made acquaintance with the G.o.ds of India, at the beginning of our Persian chapter. Indian religion is a variety of Indo-Iranian, which is a variety of the Aryan type. Neither its genealogy nor its character ent.i.tles it to be taken as a typical example of the Aryan religions. In literary chronology it is the earliest of them, inasmuch as its books are the oldest sacred literature of Aryan faith; but in point of development it is not an early but an advanced product. The absorbing interest it offers to the student of our science is due to the fact that it presents in an unbroken sequence a growth of religious thought, which, beginning with simple conceptions and advancing to a great priestly ritual, can be seen to pa.s.s into mysticism and asceticism, and thence to the rejection of all G.o.ds and rites, and a system of salvation by individual good conduct. Nowhere else can the progress of religion through what we might call its seven ages of life be seen so clearly, nor the logical connection of these ages with each other be recognised so unmistakably. The present chapter deals with the infancy and l.u.s.ty youth of the religion as seen in Vedism; the later stages of Brahmanism and Buddhism will be spoken of in subsequent chapters.

The Rigveda.--The Vedic religion takes its name from the Rigveda, the oldest portion of Indian literature, and the earliest literary doc.u.ment of Aryan religion. Of four vedas or collections of hymns, the Rigveda is the oldest and most interesting. It contains a set of hymns which, with much more of their early religious literature, the Hindus ascribed to direct divine revelation, but which we know to have been written by men who claimed no special inspiration. Most of them date from the time when the Aryans, having made good their entry in India, but without by any means altogether subduing the former inhabitants, were dwelling in the Punjaub. The religion of the hymns is a strongly national one. The Aryans appeal to their G.o.ds to help them against the races, afterwards driven to the south and to the sea coasts, who differ from themselves in colour, in physiognomy, in language, in manners, and in religion. Nor are these conquerors by any means an uncultivated people; they had long been using metals; they built houses,--a number together in a village; they lived princ.i.p.ally by keeping cattle, but also by tillage, and by hunting.

They drank Sura, a kind of brandy, and Soma, a kind of strong ale, of which we shall hear more. They were, as a rule, monogamous, the wife occupying a high position in the household, and a.s.sisting her husband in offering the domestic sacrifice. At the head of each state was a king, as among the Greeks of Homer; he was not, however, an absolute monarch; his people met in council and controlled him. The king himself offered sacrifice for his tribe in his own house,--there were no temples,--but he was frequently a.s.sisted by a man or several men of special learning in such rites.

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