Part 7 (1/2)

But if Epicurus was decorous, Evemerus was devout. It was his endeavour, he said, not to undermine but to fortify. The G.o.ds he described as philanthropists whom a grateful world had deified. Zeus had waged a sacrilegious war against his father. Aphrodite was a harlot and a procuress. The others were equally commendable. Once they had all lived. Since then all had died. Evemerus had seen their tombs.

One should not believe him. Their parapets are dimmer, perhaps, but from them still they lean and laugh. They are immortal as the hexameters in which their loves unfold. Yet, oddly enough, presently the oracle of Delphi strangled. In his cavern Trophonios was gagged.

The voice of Mopsos withered.

That is nothing. On the Ionian, the captain of a s.h.i.+p heard some one calling loudly at him from the sea. The pa.s.sengers, who were at table, looked out astounded. Again the loud voice called: ”Captain, when you reach sh.o.r.e announce that the great G.o.d Pan is dead.”[40]

[Footnote 40: Plutarch: de Oracul. defect. 14.]

It may be that it was true. It may be that after Pan the others departed. When Paul reached Athens he found a denuded Pantheon, a vacant Olympos, skies more empty still.

VII

JUPITER

The name of the national deity of Israel is unp.r.o.nounceable. The name of the national divinity of Rome is unknown. To all but the hierophants it was a secret. For uttering it a senator was put to death. But Tullius Hostilius erected temples to Fear and to Pallor. It may have been Fright. The conjecture is supported by the fact that, as was usual, Rome had any number of deified epithets, as she had also a quant.i.ty of little bits of G.o.ds. These latter greatly amused the Christian Fathers. Among them was Alemona, who, in homely English, was Wet-nurse.

Tertullian, perhaps navely, remarked: ”Superst.i.tion has invented these deities for whom we have subst.i.tuted angels.” In addition to the diva mater Alemona was the divus pater Vatica.n.u.s, the holy father Vatican, who a.s.sisted at a child's first cry. There was the equally holy father Fabulin, who attended him in his earliest efforts at speech. Neither of them had anything else to do.

Pavor had. At thunder, at lightning, at a meteor, at moisture on a wall, at no matter what, at silence even, the descendants of a she-wolf's nursling quailed. They lived in a panic. In panic the G.o.ds were born. It is but natural, perhaps, that Fright should have been held supreme. The other G.o.ds, mainly divinities of prey and of havoc, were l.u.s.treless as the imaginations that conceived them. Prosaic, unimaged, without poetry or myth, they dully persisted until pedlars appeared with h.e.l.lenic legends and wares. To their tales Rome listened. Then eidolons of the Olympians became naturalized there.

Zeus was transformed into Jupiter, Aphrodite into Venus, Pallas into Minerva, Demeter into Ceres, and all of them--and with them all the others--into an irritable police. The Greek G.o.ds enchanted, those of Rome alarmed. Plutarch said that they were indignant if one presumed to so much as sneeze.

Wors.h.i.+p, consequently, was a necessary precaution, an insurance against divine risks, a matter of business in which the devout bargained with the divine. Ovid represented Numa trying to elude the exigencies of Jove. The latter had demanded the sacrifice of a head.

”You shall have a cabbage,” said the king. ”I mean something human.”

”Some hairs then.” ”No, I want something alive.” ”We will give you a pretty little fish.” Jupiter laughed and yielded. That was much later, after Lucretius, in putting Epicurus into verse, had declared religion to be the mother of sin. By that time Fear and Pallor had struck terror into the very marrow of barbarian bones. Fright was a G.o.d more serviceable than Zeus. With him Rome conquered the world. Yet in the conquest Fright became Might and the latter an effulgence of Jove's.

Jove was magnificent. In the Capitol he throned so augustly that we swear by him still. Like Rome he is immortal. But Pavor, that had faded into him, was never invoked. The reason was not sacerdotal, it was political. Rome never imposed her G.o.ds on the quelled. With superior tact she lured their G.o.ds from them. At any siege, that was her first device. To it she believed her victories were due. It was to avoid possible reprisals and to remain invincible, that her own national divinity she so carefully concealed that the name still is a secret. With the G.o.ds, Rome gathered the creeds of the world, set them like fountains among her hills, and drank of their sacred waters. Her early deity is unknown. But the secret of her eternity is in the religions that she absorbed. It was these that made her immortal.

To that immortality the obscure G.o.d of an obscure people contributed largely, perhaps, but perhaps, too, not uniquely. Jahveh might have remained unperceived behind the veil of the sanctuary had not his altar been illuminated by lights from other shrines. In the early days of the empire, Rome was fully aware of the glamour of Amon, of the star of Ormuzd, Brahm's cerulean lotos and the rainbow heights of Bel-Marduk. But in the splendour of Jove all these were opaque.

Jupiter, always imposing, was grandiose then. His thoughts were vast as the sky. In a direct revelation to Vergil he said of his chosen people: ”I have set no limits to their conquest or its duration. The empire I have given them shall be without end.”[41] Hebrew prophets had spoken similarly. Vergil must have been more truly inspired. The Roman empire, nominally holy, figuratively still exists. Yet fulfilment of the prophecy is due perhaps less to the G.o.d of the Gentiles than to the G.o.d of the Jews. Though perhaps also it may be permissible to discern in the latter a transfiguration of Jove, who originally Zeus, and primarily not h.e.l.lenic but Hindu, ultimately became supreme. After the terrific struggle which resulted in that final metamorphosis, Jerusalem, disinherited, saw Rome the spiritual capital of the globe.

[Footnote 41: aeneid i. 278.]

Jerusalem was not a home of logic. Rome was the city of law. That law, cold, inflexible, pa.s.sionless as a sword and quite as effective, Rome brandished at philosophy. It is said that the intellectual gymnastics of Greece were displeasing to her traditions. It is more probable that augurs had foreseen or oracles had foretold that philosophy would divest her of the sword, and with it of her sceptre and her might.

Ideas cannot be decapitated. Only ridicule can demolish them.

Philosophy, mistress of irony, resisted while nations fell. It was philosophy that first undermined established creeds and then led to the pursuit of new ones. Yet it may be that a contributing cause was a curious theory that the world was to end. Foretold in the _Brahmanas_, in the _Avesta_ and in the _Eddas_, probably it was in the _Sibylline Books_. If not, the subsequent Church may have so a.s.sumed.

Dies irae, dies illa, Solvet saeclum in favilla, Teste David c.u.m Sibylla.

Not alone David and the Sibyl but Etruscan seers had seen in the skies that the tenth and last astronomical cycle had begun.[42] Plutarch, in his life of Sylla, testified to the general belief in an approaching cataclysm. Lucretius announced that at any moment it might occur.[43]

That was in the latter days of the republic. In the early days of the empire the theory persisting may have induced the hope of a saviour.

Suetonius said that nature in her parturitions was elaborating a king.[44] Afterward he added that such was Asia's archaic belief.[45]

Recent discoveries have verified the a.s.sertion. In the Akkadian Epic of Dibbara a messiah was foretold.[46] That epic, anterior to a cognate Egyptian prophecy,[47] anterior also to the _Sibylline Books_, was anterior too to the Hebrew prophets and necessarily to those of Rome.

[Footnote 42: Censorinus: De die nat. 17.]