Part 9 (2/2)

The Sibylline books were constantly consulted, and _lectisternia, supplicationes, ludi_, in which Greek deities were prominent, were ordered and carried out. Finally, in 204 B.C., there was brought to Rome the sacred stone of the Magna Mater Idaea, the great deity of Pessinus in Phrygia, and a festival was established in her honour, called by the Greek name Megalesia. All this means, as can be seen clearly from Livy's language,[549] that the governing cla.s.ses were trying to quiet the minds of the people by convincing them that no effort was being spared to set right their relations with the unseen powers; they had invoked in vain their own local and native deities, and had been compelled to seek help elsewhere; they had found their own narrow system of religion quite inadequate to express their religious experience of the last twenty years. And indeed that old system of religion never really recovered from the discredit thus cast on it. The temper of the people is well shown by the rapidity with which the orgiastic wors.h.i.+p of the Greek Dionysus spread over Italy a few years later; and the fact that it was allowed to remain, though under strict supervision, shows that the State religion no longer had the power to satisfy the cravings of the ma.s.ses. And the educated cla.s.s too was rapidly coming under the influence of Greek thought, which could hardly act otherwise than as a solvent of the old religious ideas. Ennius, the great literary figure of this period, was the first to strike a direct blow at the popular belief in the efficacy of prayer and sacrifice, by openly declaring that the G.o.ds did not interest themselves in mankind,[550]--the same Epicurean doctrine preached afterwards by Lucretius. It may indeed be doubted whether this doctrine became popular, or acceptable even to the cultured cla.s.ses; but the fact remains that the same man who did more than any one before Virgil to glorify the Roman character and dominion, was the first to impugn the belief that Rome owed her greatness to her divine inhabitants.

But in the next generation there arrived in Rome a man whose teaching had so great an influence on the best type of educated Roman that, as we have already said, he may almost be regarded as a missionary.[551]

We do not know for certain whether Panaetius wrote or taught about the nature or existence of the G.o.ds; but we do know that he discussed the question of divination[552] in a work [Greek: Peri p.r.o.noias], where he could hardly have avoided the subject. In any case the Stoic doctrines which he held, themselves ultimately derived from Plato and the Old Academy, were found capable in the hands of his great successor Posidonius of Rhodes of supplying a philosophical basis for the activity as well as the existence of the G.o.ds. These men, it must be repeated, were not merely professed philosophers, but men of the world, travellers, writing on a great variety of subjects; they were profoundly interested, like Polybius, in the Roman character and government; they became intimate with the finer Roman minds, from Scipio the younger to Cicero and Varro, and seem to have seen clearly that the old rigid Stoicism must be widened and humanised, and its ethical and theological aspects modified, if it were to gain a real hold on the practical Roman understanding. We have already seen[553]

how their modified Stoic ethics acted for good on the best Romans of our period. In theology also they left a permanent mark on Roman thought; Posidonius wrote a work on the G.o.ds, which formed the basis of the speculative part of Varro's _Antiquitates divinae_, and almost certainly also of the second book of Cicero's de _Natura Deorum_[554].

Other philosophers of the period, even if not professed Stoics, may have discussed the same subjects in their lectures and writings, arriving at conclusions of the same kind.

It is chiefly from the fragments of Varro's work that we learn something of the Stoic attempt to harmonise the old religious beliefs with philosophic theories of the universe[555]. Varro, following his teacher, held the Stoic doctrine of the _animus mundi_ the Divine principle permeating all material things which, in combination with them, const.i.tutes the universe, and is Nature, Reason, G.o.d, Destiny, or whatever name the philosopher might choose to give it. The universe is divine, the various parts of it are, therefore, also divine, in virtue of this informing principle. Now in the sixteenth book of his great work Varro co-ordinated this Stoic theory with the Graeco-Roman religion of the State as it existed in his time. The chief G.o.ds represented the _partes mundi_ in various ways; even the difference of s.e.x among the deities was explained by regarding male G.o.ds as emanating from the heaven and female ones from the earth, according to a familiar ancient idea of the active and pa.s.sive principle in generation. The Stoic doctrine of [Greek: daimones] was also utilised to find an explanation for semi-deities, lares, genii, etc., and thus another character of the old Italian religious mind was to be saved from contempt and oblivion. The old Italian tendency to see the supernatural manifesting itself in many different ways expressed by adjectival t.i.tles, e.g. Mars Silva.n.u.s, Jupiter Elicius, Juno Lucina, etc., also found an explanation in Varro's doctrine; for the divine element existing in sky, earth, sea, or other parts of the _mundus_, and manifesting itself in many different forms of activity, might be thus made obvious to the ordinary human intellect without the interposition of philosophical terms.

At the head of the whole system was Jupiter, the greatest of Roman G.o.ds, whose t.i.tle of Optimus Maximus might well have suggested that no other deity could occupy this place. Without him it would have been practically impossible for Varro to carry out his difficult and perilous task. Every Roman recognised in Jupiter the G.o.d who condescended to dwell on the Capitol in a temple made with hands, and who, beyond all other G.o.ds, watched over the destinies of the Roman State; every Roman also knew that Jupiter was the great G.o.d of the heaven above him, for in many expressions of his ordinary speech he used the G.o.d's name as a synonym for the open sky.[556] The position now accorded to the heaven-G.o.d in the new Stoic system is so curious and interesting that we must dwell on it for a moment.

Varro held, or at any rate taught, that Jupiter was himself that soul of the world (animus mundi) which fills and moves the whole material universe.[557] He is the one universal causal agent,[558] from whom all the forces of nature are derived;[559] or he may be called, in language which would be intelligible to the ordinary Roman, the universal Genius.[560] Further, he is himself all the other G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, who may be described as parts, or powers, or virtues, existing in him.[561] And Varro makes it plain that he wishes to identify this great G.o.d of G.o.ds with the Jupiter at Rome, whose temple was on the Capitol; St. Augustine quotes him as holding that the Romans had dedicated the Capitol to Jupiter, who by his spirit breathes life into everything in the universe:[562] or in less philosophical language, ”The Romans wish to recognise Jupiter as king of G.o.ds and men, and this is shown by his sceptre and his seat on the Capitol.” Thus the G.o.d who dwelt on the Capitol, and in the temple which was the centre-point of the Roman Empire, was also the life-giving ruler and centre of the whole universe. Nay, he goes one step further, and identifies him with the one G.o.d of the monotheistic peoples of the East, and in particular with the G.o.d of the Jews.[563]

Thus Varro had arrived, with the help of Posidonius and the Stoics, at a monotheistic view of the Deity, which is at the same time a kind of pantheism, and yet, strange to say, is able to accommodate itself to the polytheism of the Graeco-Roman world. But without Jupiter, G.o.d of the heaven both for Greeks and Romans, and now too in the eyes of both peoples the G.o.d who watched over the destiny of the Roman Empire, this wonderful feat could not have been performed. The identification of the heaven-G.o.d with the animus mundi of the Stoics was not indeed a new idea; it may be traced up Stoic channels even to Plato. What is really new and astonis.h.i.+ng is that it should have been possible for a conservative Roman like Varro, in that age of carelessness and doubt, to bring the heaven-G.o.d, so to speak, down to the Roman Capitol, where his statue was to be seen sitting between Juno and Minerva, and yet to teach the doctrine that he was the same deity as the Jewish Jehovah, and that both were identical with the Stoic animus mundi.

But did Varro also conceive of this Jupiter as a deity ”making for righteousness,” or acting as a sanction for morality? It would not have been impossible or unnatural for a Roman so to think of him, for of all the Roman deities Jupiter is the one whose name from the most ancient times had been used in oaths and treaties, and whose _numen_ was felt to be violated by any public or private breach of faith.[564]

We cannot tell how far Varro himself followed out this line of thought, for the fragments of his great work are few and far between.

But we know that the Roman Stoics saw in that same universal Power or Mind which Varro identified with Jupiter the source and strength of law, and therefore of morality; here it is usually called reason, _ratio_, the working of the eternal and immutable Mind of the universe. ”True law is right reason,” says Cicero in a n.o.ble pa.s.sage;[565] and goes on to teach that this law transcends all human codes of law, embracing and sanctioning them all; and that the spirit inherent in it, which gives it its universal force, is G.o.d Himself. In another pa.s.sage, written towards the end of his life, and certainly later than the publication of Varro's work, he goes further and identifies this G.o.d with Jupiter.[566] ”This law,” he says, ”came into being simultaneously with the Divine Mind” (i.e. the Stoic Reason): ”wherefore that true and paramount law, commanding and forbidding, is the right reason of almighty Jupiter” (summi Iovis). Once more, in the first book of his treatise on the G.o.ds, he quotes the Stoic Chrysippus as teaching that the eternal Power, which is as it were a guide in the duties of life, is Jupiter himself.[567] It is characteristic of the Roman that he should think, in speculations like these, rather of the law of his State than of the morality of the individual, as emanating from that Right Reason to which he might give the name of Jupiter: I have been unable to find a pa.s.sage in which Cicero attributes to this deity the sanction for individual goodness, though there are many that a.s.sert the belief that justice and the whole system of social life depend on the G.o.ds and our belief in them.[568] But the Roman had never been conscious of individual duty, except in relation to his State, or to the family, which was a living cell in the organism of the State. In his eyes law was rather the source of morality than morality the cause and the reason of law; and as his religion was a part of the law of his State, and thus had but an indirect connection with morality, it would not naturally occur to him that even the great Jupiter himself, thus glorified as the Reason in the universe, could really help him in the conduct of his life _qua_ individual. It is only as the source of legalised morality that we can think of Varro's Jupiter as ”making for righteousness.”

Less than twenty-five years after Cicero's death, in the imagination of the greatest of Roman poets, Jupiter was once more brought before the Roman world, and now in a form comprehensible by all educated men, whether or no they had dabbled in philosophy. What are we to say of the Jupiter of the _Aeneid_? We do not need to read far in the first book of the poem to find him spoken of in terms which remind us of Varro: ”O qui res hominumque deumque Aeternis regis imperiis,” are the opening words of the address of Venus; and when she has finished,

Olli subridens hominum sator atque deorum Vultu, quo caelum tempestatesque serenat, Oscula libavit natae, dehine talia fatur; ”Parce metu, Cytherea, manent immota tuorum Fata tibi.”

Jupiter is here, as in Varro's system, the prime cause and ruler of all things, and he also holds in his hand the destiny of Rome and the fortunes of the hero who was to lay the first foundation of Rome's dominion. It is in the knowledge of his will that Aeneas walks, with hesitating steps, in the earlier books, in the later ones with a.s.sured confidence, towards the goal that is set before him. But the lines just quoted serve well to show how different is the Jupiter of Virgil from the universal deity of the Roman Stoic. Beyond doubt Virgil had felt the power of the Stoic creed; but he was essaying an epic poem, and he could not possibly dispense with the divine machinery as it stood in his great Homeric model. His Jupiter is indeed, as has been lately said,[569] ”a great and wise G.o.d, free from the tyrannical and sensuous characteristics of the Homeric Zeus,” in other words, he is a Roman deity, and sometimes acts and speaks like a grave Roman consul of the olden time. But still he is an anthropomorphic deity, a purely human conception of a personal G.o.d-king; in these lines he smiles on his daughter Venus and kisses her. This is the reason why Virgil has throughout his poem placed the Fates, or Destiny, in close relation to him, without definitely explaining that relation. Fate, as it appears in the Aeneid, is the Stoic [Greek: eimarmenae] applied to the idea of Rome and her Empire; that Stoic conception could not take the form of Jupiter, as in Varro's hands, for the G.o.d had to be modelled on the Homeric pattern, not on the Stoic. It is perhaps not going too far to say that the G.o.d, as a theological conception, never recovered from this treatment; any chance he ever had of becoming the centre of a real religious system was destroyed by the Aeneid, the _pietas_ of whose hero is indeed nominally due to him, but in reality to the decrees of Fate.[570]

While philosophers and poets were thus performing intellectual and imaginative feats with the G.o.ds of the State, the strong tendency to superst.i.tion, untutored fear of the supernatural, which had always been characteristic of the Italian peoples, so far from losing power, was actually gaining it, and that not only among the lower cla.s.ses. As Lucretius mockingly said, even those who think and speak with contempt of the G.o.ds will in moments of trouble slay black sheep and sacrifice them to the Manes. This feeling of fear or nervousness, which lies at the root of the meaning of the word _religio_,[571] had been quieted in the old days by the prescriptions of the pontifices and their jus divinum, but it was always ready to break out again; as we have seen, in the long and awful struggle of the Hannibalic war, it was necessary to go far beyond the ordinary pharmacopoeia within reach of the priesthoods in order to convince the people that all possible means were being taken for their salvation. Again, in this last age of the Republic, there are obvious signs that both ignorant and educated were affected by the gloom and uncertainty of the times. Increasing uncertainty in the political world, increasing doubt in the world of thought, very naturally combined to produce an emotional tendency which took different forms in men of different temperament. We can trace this (1) in the importance attached to omens, portents, dreams; (2) in a certain vague thought of a future life, which takes a positive shape in the deification of human beings; (3) at the close of the period, in something approaching to a sense of sin, of neglected duty, bringing down upon State and individual the anger of the G.o.ds.

1. If we glance over the latter part of the book of prodigies, compiled by the otherwise unknown writer Julius Obsequens from the records of the pontifices quoted in Livy's history, we can get a fair idea of the kind of portent that was troubling the popular mind.

They are much the same as they always had been in Roman history,--earthquakes, monstrous births, temples struck by lightning, statues overthrown, wolves entering the city, and so on; they are extremely abundant in the terrible years of the Social and Civil Wars, become less frequent after the death of Sulla, and break out again in full force with the murder of Caesar. They were reported to the pontifices from the places where they were supposed to have occurred, and if thought worthy of expiation were entered in the pontifical books. We may suppose that they were sent in chiefly by the uneducated. But among men of education we have many examples of this same nervousness, of which two or three must suffice. Sulla, as we know from his own Memoirs, which were used directly or indirectly by Plutarch, had a strong vein of superst.i.tion in his nature, and made no attempt to control it. In dedicating his Memoirs to Lucullus he advised him ”to think no course so safe as that which is enjoined by the [Greek: daimon] (perhaps his genius) in the night”;[572]

and Plutarch tells us several tales of portents on which he acted, evidently drawn from this same autobiography. We are told of him that he always carried a small image of Apollo, which he kissed from time to time, and to which he prayed silently in moments of danger.[573]

Again, Cicero tells us a curious story of himself, Varro, and Cato, which shows that those three men of philosophical learning were quite liable to be frightened by a prophecy which to us would not seem to have much claim to respect.[574] He tells how when the three were at Dyrrachium, after Caesar's defeat there and the departure of the armies into Thessaly, news was brought them by the commander of the Rhodian fleet that a certain rower had foretold that within thirty days Greece would be weltering in blood; how all three were terribly frightened, and how a few days later the news of the battle at Pharsalia reached them. Lastly, we all remember the vision which appeared to Brutus on the eve of the battle of Philippi, of a huge and fearsome figure standing by him in silence, which Shakespeare has made into the ghost of Caesar and used to unify his play. According to Plutarch, the Epicurean Ca.s.sius, as Lucretius would have done, attempted to convince his friend on rational grounds that the vision need not alarm him, but apparently in vain.[575]

2. Lucretius had denied the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, as the cause of so much of the misery which he believed it to be his mission to avert. Caesar, in the speech put into his mouth by Sall.u.s.t, in the debate on the execution of the conspirators on December 5, 63, seems to be of the same opinion, and as Cicero alludes to his words in the speech with which he followed Caesar, we may suppose that Sall.u.s.t was reporting him rightly.[576] The poet and the statesman were not unlike in the way in which they looked at facts; both were of clear strong vision, without a trace of mysticism. But such men were the exception rather than the rule; Cicero probably represents better the average thinking man of his time. Cicero was indeed too full of life, too deeply interested in the living world around him, to think much of such questions as the immortality of the soul; and as a professed follower of the Academic school, he a.s.suredly did not hold any dogmatic opinion on it. He was at no time really affected by Pythagoreanism, like his friend Nigidius Figulus, whose works, now lost, had a great vogue in the later years of Cicero's life, and much influence on the age that followed. In the first book of his Tusculan Disputations Cicero discusses the question from the Academic point of view, coming to no definite conclusion, except that whether we are immortal or not we must be grateful to death for releasing us from the bondage of the body. This book was written in the last year of his life; but ten years earlier, in the beautiful myth, imitated from the myths of Plato, which he appended to his treatise _de Republica_, he had emphatically a.s.serted the doctrine. There the spirit of the elder Scipio appears to his great namesake, Cicero's ideal Roman, and a.s.sures him that the road to heaven (caelum) lies open to those who do their duty in this life, and especially their duty to the State. ”Know thyself to be a G.o.d; as the G.o.d of G.o.ds rules the universe, so the G.o.d within us rules the body, and as that great G.o.d is eternal, so does an eternal soul govern this frail body.”[577]

The _Somnium Scipionis_ was an inspiration, written under the influence of Plato at one of those emotional moments of Cicero's life which make it possible to say of him that there was a religious element in his mind.[578] Some years later the poignancy of his grief at the death of his daughter Tullia had the effect of putting him again in a strong emotional mood. For many weeks he lived alone at Astura, on the edge of the Pomptine marshes, out of reach of all friends, forbidding even his young wife and her mother to come near him; brooding, as it would seem, on the survival of the G.o.dlike element in his daughter. These sad meditations took a practical form which at first astonishes us, but is not hard to understand when we have to come to know Cicero well, and to follow the tendencies of thought in these years. He might erect a tomb to her memory,--but that would not satisfy him; it would not express his feeling that the immortal G.o.dlike spark within her survived. He earnestly entreats Atticus to find and buy him a piece of ground where he can build a _fanum_, i.e. a shrine, to her spirit. ”I wish to have a shrine built, and that wish cannot be rooted out of my heart. I am anxious to avoid any likeness to a tomb ... in order to attain as nearly as possible to an apotheosis.”[579] A little further on he calls these foolish ideas; but this is doubtless only because he is writing to Atticus, a man of the world, not given to emotion or mysticism. Cicero is really speaking the language of the Italian mind, for the moment free from philosophical speculation; he believes that his beloved dead lived on, though he could not have proved it in argument. So firmly does he believe it that he wishes others to know that he believes it, and insists that the shrine shall be erected in a frequented place![580]

Though the great Dictator did not believe in another world, he consented at the end of his life to become Jupiter Julius, and after his death was duly canonised as Divus, and had a temple erected to him. But the many-sided question of the deification of the Caesars cannot be discussed here; it is only mentioned as showing in another way the trend of thought in this dark age of Roman history. Whatever some philosophers may have thought, there cannot be a doubt that the ordinary Roman believed in the G.o.dhead of Julius.[581]

3. We saw in an earlier chapter with what gay and heedless frivolity young men like Caelius were amusing themselves even on the very eve of civil war. In strange contrast with this is the gloom that overspread all cla.s.ses during the war itself, and more especially after the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Dictator. Caesar seemed irresistible and G.o.dlike, and men were probably beginning to hope for some new and more stable order of things, when he was suddenly struck down, and the world plunged again into confusion and doubt; and it was not till after the final victory of Octavian at Actium, and the destruction of the elements of disunion with the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, that men really began to hope for better times. The literature of those melancholy years shows distinct signs of the general depression, which was perhaps something more than weariness and material discomfort; there was almost what we may call a dim sense of sin, or at least of moral evil, such a feeling, though far less real and intense, as that which their prophets aroused from time to time in the Jewish people, and one not unknown in the history of h.e.l.las.

The most touching expression of this feeling is to be found in the preface which Livy prefixed to his history--a wonderful example of the truth that when a great prose writer is greatly moved, his language reflects his emotion in its beauty and earnestness. Every student knows the sentence in which he describes the gradual decay of all that was good in the Roman character: ”donec ad haec tempora, quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus, perventum est”; but it is not every student who can recognise in it a real sigh of despair, an unmistakable token of the sadness of the age.[582] In the introductory chapters which serve the purpose of prefaces to the _Jugurtha_ and _Catiline_ of Sall.u.s.t, we find something of the same sad tone, but it does not ring true like Livy's exordium; Sall.u.s.t was a man of altogether coa.r.s.er fibre, and seems to be rather a.s.suming than expressing the genuine feeling of a saddened onlooker. In one of his earliest poems, written perhaps after the Perusian war of 41 B.C.[583]

even the lively Horace was moved to voice the prevailing depression, fancifully urging that the Italian people should migrate, like the Phocaeans of old, to the far west, where, as Sertorius had been told in Spain, lay the islands of the blest, where the earth, as in the golden age, yields all her produce untilled:

Iuppiter ilia piae secrevit litora genti Ut inquinavit aere tempus aureum; Aere, dehinc ferro duravit saecula, quorum Piis secunda vate me datur fuga.

It may be, as has recently been suggested, that the famous fourth Eclogue of Virgil, ”the Messianic Eclogue,” was in some sense meant as an answer to this poem of Horace. ”There is no need,” he seems to say in that poem, written in the year 39, ”to seek the better age in a fabled island of the west. It is here and now with us. The period upon which Italy is now entering more than fulfils in real life the dream of a Golden Age. A marvellous child is even now coming into the world who will see and inaugurate an era of peace and prosperity: darkness and despair will after a while pa.s.s entirely away, and a regenerate Italy,--regenerate in religion and morals as in fertility and wealth,--will lead the world in a new era of happiness and good government.”[584]

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