Part 1 (1/2)
The Religion of Ancient Rome.
by Cyril Bailey.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION--SOURCES AND SCOPE
The conditions of our knowledge of the native religion of early Rome may perhaps be best ill.u.s.trated by a parallel from Roman archaeology.
The visitor to the Roman Forum at the present day, if he wishes to reconstruct in imagination the Forum of the early Republic, must not merely 'think away' many strata of later buildings, but, we are told, must picture to himself a totally different orientation of the whole: the upper layer of remains, which he sees before him, is for his purpose in most cases not merely useless, but positively misleading.
In the same way, if we wish to form a picture of the genuine Roman religion, we cannot find it immediately in cla.s.sical literature; we must banish from our minds all that is due to the contact with the East and Egypt, and even with the other races of Italy, and we must imagine, so to speak, a totally different mental orientation before the great influx of Greek literature and Greek thought, which gave an entirely new turn to Roman ideas in general, and in particular revolutionised religion by the introduction of anthropomorphic notions and sensuous representations. But in this difficult search we are not left without indications to guide us. In the writings of the savants of the late Republic and of the Empire, and in the Augustan poets, bia.s.sed though they are in their interpretations by Greek tendencies, there is embodied a great wealth of ancient custom and ritual, which becomes significant when we have once got the clue to its meaning. More direct evidence is afforded by a large body of inscriptions and monuments, and above all by the surviving Calendars of the Roman festival year, which give us the true outline of the ceremonial observances of the early religion.
It is not within the scope of this sketch to enter, except by way of occasional ill.u.s.tration, into the process of interpretation by which the patient work of scholars has disentangled the form and spirit of the native religion from the ma.s.s of foreign accretions. I intend rather to a.s.sume the process, and deal, as far as it is possible in so controversial a subject, with results upon which authorities are generally agreed. Neither will any attempt be made to follow the development which the early religion underwent in later periods, when foreign elements were added and foreign ideas altered and remoulded the old tradition. We must confine ourselves to a single epoch, in which the native Roman spirit worked out unaided the ideas inherited from half-civilised ancestors, and formed that body of belief and ritual, which was always, at least officially, the kernel of Roman religion, and const.i.tuted what the Romans themselves--staunch believers in their own traditional history--loved to describe as the 'Religion of Numa.'
We must discover, as far as we can, how far its inherited notions ran parallel with those of other primitive religions, but more especially we must try to note what is characteristically Roman alike in custom and ritual and in the motives and spirit which prompted them.
CHAPTER II
THE 'ANTECEDENTS' OF ROMAN RELIGION
In every early religion there will of course be found, apart from external influence, traces of its own internal development, of stages by which it must have advanced from a ma.s.s of vague and primitive belief and custom to the organised wors.h.i.+p of a civilised community.
The religion of Rome is no exception to this rule; we can detect in its later practice evidences of primitive notions and habits which it had in common with other semi-barbarous peoples, and we shall see that the leading idea in its theology is but a characteristically Roman development of a marked feature in most early religions.
=1. Magic.=--Anthropology has taught us that in many primitive societies religion--a sense of man's dependence on a power higher than himself--is preceded by a stage of magic--a belief in man's own power to influence by occult means the action of the world around him. That the ancestors of the Roman community pa.s.sed through this stage seems clear, and in surviving religious practice we may discover evidence of such magic in various forms. There is, for instance, what anthropology describes as 'sympathetic magic'--the attempt to influence the powers of nature by an imitation of the process which it is desired that they should perform. Of this we have a characteristic example in the ceremony of the _aquaelicium_, designed to produce rain after a long drought. In cla.s.sical times the ceremony consisted in a procession headed by the pontifices, which bore the sacred rain-stone from its resting-place by the Porta Capena to the Capitol, where offerings were made to the sky-deity, Iuppiter, but[1] from the a.n.a.logy of other primitive cults and the sacred t.i.tle of the stone (_lapis ma.n.a.lis_), it is practically certain that the original ritual was the purely imitative process of pouring water over the stone. A similar rain-charm may possibly be seen in the curious ritual of the _argeorum sacra_, when puppets of straw were thrown into the Tiber--a symbolic wetting of the crops to which many parallels may be found among other primitive peoples. A sympathetic charm of a rather different character seems to survive in the ceremony of the _augurium canarium_, at which a red dog was sacrificed for the prosperity of the crop--a symbolic killing of the red mildew (_robigo_); and again the slaughter of pregnant cows at the _Fordicidia_ in the middle of April, before the sprouting of the corn, has a clearly sympathetic connection with the fertility of the earth. Another prominent survival--equally characteristic of primitive peoples--is the sacredness which attaches to the person of the priest-king, so that his every act or word may have a magic significance or effect. This is reflected generally in the Roman priesthood, but especially in the ceremonial surrounding the _flamen Dialis_, the priest of Iuppiter. He must appear always in festival garb, fire may never be taken from his hearth but for sacred purposes, no other person may ever sleep in his bed, the cuttings of his hair and nails must be preserved and buried beneath an _arbor felix_--no doubt a magic charm for fertility--he must not eat or even mention a goat or a bean, or other objects of an unlucky character.
=2. Wors.h.i.+p of Natural Objects.=--A very common feature in the early development of religious consciousness is the wors.h.i.+p of natural objects--in the first place of the objects themselves and no more, but later of a spirit indwelling in them. The distinction is no doubt in individual cases a difficult one to make, and we find that among the Romans the earlier wors.h.i.+p of the object tends to give way to the cult of the inhabiting spirit, but examples may be found which seem to belong to the earlier stage. We have, for instance, the sacred stone (_silex_) which was preserved in the temple of Iuppiter on the Capitol, and was brought out to play a prominent part in the ceremony of treaty-making. The fetial, who on that occasion represented the Roman people, at the solemn moment of the oath-taking, struck the sacrificial pig with the _silex_, saying as he did so, 'Do thou, Diespiter, strike the Roman people as I strike this pig here to-day, and strike them the more, as thou art greater and stronger.' Here no doubt the underlying notion is not merely symbolical, but in origin the stone is itself the G.o.d, an idea which later religion expressed in the cult-t.i.tle specially used in this connection, _Iuppiter Lapis_. So again, in all probability, the _termini_ or boundary-stones between properties are in origin the objects--though later only the site--of a yearly ritual at the festival of the Terminalia on February the 23rd, and they are, as it were, summed up in 'the G.o.d Terminus,' the great sacred boundary-stone, which had its own shrine within the Capitoline temple, because, according to the legend, 'the G.o.d' refused to budge even to make room for Iuppiter. The same notion is most likely at the root of the two great domestic cults of Vesta, 'the hearth,' and Ia.n.u.s, 'the door,' though a more spiritual idea was soon a.s.sociated with them; we may notice too in this connection the wors.h.i.+p of springs, summed up in the subsequent deity Fons, and of rivers, such as Volturnus, the cult-name of the Tiber.
=3. Wors.h.i.+p of Trees.=--But most conspicuous among the cults of natural objects, as in so many primitive religions, is the wors.h.i.+p of trees.
Here, though doubtless at first the tree was itself the object of veneration, surviving instances seem rather to belong to the later period when it was regarded as the abode of the spirit. We may recognise a case of this sort in the _ficus Ruminalis_, once the recipient of wors.h.i.+p, though later legend, which preferred to find an historical or mythical explanation of cults, looked upon it as sacred because it was the scene of the suckling of Romulus and Remus by the wolf. Another fig-tree with a similar history is the _caprificus_ of the Campus Martius, subsequently the site of the wors.h.i.+p of Iuno Caprotina. A more significant case is the sacred oak of Iuppiter Feretrius on the Capitol, on which the _spolia opima_ were hung after the triumph--probably in early times a dedication of the booty to the spirit inhabiting the tree. Outside Rome, showing the same ideas at work among neighbouring peoples, was the 'golden bough' in the grove of Diana at Aricia. Nor was it only special trees which were thus regarded as the home of a deity; the tree in general is sacred, and any one may chance to be inhabited by a spirit. The feeling of the country population on this point comes out clearly in the prayer which Cato recommends his farmer to use before making a clearing in a wood: 'Be thou G.o.d or G.o.ddess, to whom this grove is sacred, be it granted to us to make propitiatory sacrifice to thee with a pig for the clearing of this sacred spot'; here we have a clear instance of the tree regarded as the dwelling of the sacred power, and it is interesting to compare the many similar examples which[2] Dr. Frazer has collected from different parts of the world.
=4. Wors.h.i.+p of Animals.=--Of the wors.h.i.+p of animals we have comparatively little evidence in Roman religion, though we may perhaps detect it in a portion of the mysterious ritual of the Lupercalia, where the Luperci dressed themselves in the skins of the sacrificed goats and smeared their faces with the blood, thus symbolically trying to bring themselves into communion with the sacred animal. We may recognise it too in the a.s.sociation of particular animals with divinities, such as the sacred wolf and woodp.e.c.k.e.r of Mars, but on the whole we may doubt whether the wors.h.i.+p of animals ever played so prominent a part in Roman religion as the cult of other natural objects.
=5. Animism.=--Such are some of the survivals of very early stages of religious custom which still kept their place in the developed religion of Rome, but by far the most important element in it, which might indeed be described as its 'immediate antecedent,' is the state of religious feeling to which anthropologists have given the name of 'Animism.' As far as we can follow the development of early religions, this att.i.tude of mind seems to be the direct outcome of the failure of magic. Primitive man begins to see that neither he nor his magicians really possess that occult control over the forces of nature which was the supposed basis of magic: the charm fails, the spell does not produce the rain and when he looks for the cause, he can only argue that these things must be in the hands of some power higher than his own. The world then and its various familiar objects become for him peopled with spirits, like in character to men, but more powerful, and his success in life and its various operations depends on the degree in which he is able to propitiate these spirits and secure their co-operation. If he desires rain, he must win the favour of the spirit who controls it, if he would fell a tree and suffer no harm, he must by suitable offerings entice the indwelling spirit to leave it. His 'theology' in this stage is the knowledge of the various spirits and their dwellings, his ritual the due performance of sacrifice for purposes of propitiation and expiation. It was in this state of religious feeling that the ancestors of Rome must have lived before they founded their agricultural settlement on the Palatine: we must try now to see how far it had retained this character and what developments it had undergone when it had crystallised into the 'Religion of Numa.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Frazer, _Golden Bough_, vol. i. pp. 81 ff.
[2] _Golden Bough_, vol. i. pp. 181-185.
CHAPTER III
MAIN FEATURES OF THE RELIGION OF NUMA
=1. Theology.=--The characteristic appellation of a divine spirit in the oldest stratum of the Roman religion is not _deus_, a G.o.d, but rather _numen_, a power: he becomes _deus_ when he obtains a name, and so is on the way to acquiring a definite personality, but in origin he is simply the 'spirit' of the 'animistic' period, and retains something of the spirit's characteristics. Thus among the divinities of the household we shall see later that the Genius and even the Lar Familiaris, though they attained great dignity of conception, and were the centre of the family life, and to some extent of the family morality, never quite rose to the position of full-grown G.o.ds; while among the spirits of the field the wildness and impishness of character a.s.sociated with Faunus and his companion Inuus--almost the cobolds or hobgoblins of the flocks--reflects clearly the old 'animistic' belief in the natural evilness of the spirits and their hostility to men. The notion of the _numen_ is always vague and indefinite: even its s.e.x may be uncertain. 'Be thou G.o.d or G.o.ddess' is the form of address in the farmer's prayer already quoted from Cato: 'be it male or female' is the constant formula in liturgies and even dedicatory inscriptions of a much later period.