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 Religion of Numa, and other essays on Ih 
 
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 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029163108 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
THE 
 
 RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS ON 
 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT ROME 
 
 BY 
 
 JESSE BENEDICT CARTER 
 
 JLonlion 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1906 
 
 All rights reserved 
 

 p\ , aoc \ S' 
 
TO 
 
 K. F. C. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This little book tries to tell the story of the religious 
 life of the Romans from the time when their history- 
 begins for us until the close of the reign of Augustus. 
 Each of its five essays deals with a distinct period 
 and is in a sense complete in itself ; but the dramatic 
 development inherent in the whole forbids their 
 separation save as acts or chapters. In spite of 
 modern interest in the study of religion, Roman 
 religion has been in general relegated to specialists 
 in ancient history and classics. This is not surpris- 
 ing for Roman religion is not prepossessing in 
 appearance, but though it is at first sight incom- 
 parably less attractive than Greek religion, it is, if 
 properly understood, fully as interesting, nay, even 
 more so. In Mr. W. Warde Fowler's Roman 
 Festivals however the subject was presented in all 
 
 its attractiveness, and if the present book shall serve 
 
 vii 
 
viii THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 as a simple introduction to his larger work, its 
 purpose will have been fulfilled. 
 
 No one can write of Roman religion without 
 being almost inestimably indebted to Georg Wissowa 
 whose Religion und Cultus der Romer is the best 
 systematic presentation of the subject. It was the 
 author's privilege to be Wissowa's pupil, and much 
 that is in this book is directly owing to him, and 
 even the ideas that are new, if there are any good 
 ones, are only the bread which he cast upon the 
 waters returning to him after many days. 
 
 The careful student of the history of the Romans 
 cannot doubt the psychological reality of their 
 religion, no matter what his personal metaphysics 
 may be. It is the author's hope that these essays 
 may have a human interest because he has tried to 
 emphasise this reality and to present the Romans 
 as men of like passions to ourselves, in spite of all 
 differences of time and race. 
 
 Hearty thanks are due to Mr. W. Warde Fowler 
 and to Mr. Albert W. Van Buren for their great 
 kindness in reading the proofs ; and the dedication 
 of the book is at best a poor return for the help 
 which my wife has given me. 
 
 J. B. C. 
 
 Rome, November, 1905. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 The Religion of Numa 
 
 The Reorganisation of Servius 
 
 The Coming of the Sibyl . 
 
 The Decline of Faith 
 
 The Augustan Renaissance . 
 
 27 
 
 62 
 
 104 
 
 146 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 Rome forms no exception to the general rule that 
 nations, like individuals, grow by contact with the 
 outside world. In the middle of the five centuries 
 of her republic came the Punic wars and the intimate 
 association with Greece which made the last half of 
 her history as a republic so different from the first 
 half; and in the kingdom, which preceded the 
 republic, there was a similar coming of foreign 
 influence, which made the later kingdom with its 
 semi-historical names of the Tarquins and Servius 
 Tullius so different from the earlier kingdom with 
 its altogether legendary Romulus, Numa, Tullus 
 Hostilius and Ancus Martius. We have thus four 
 distinct phases in the history of Roman society, and 
 a corresponding phase of religion in each period ; and 
 if we add to this that new social structure which 
 came into being by the reforms of Augustus at the 
 beginning of the empire, together with the religious 
 changes which accompanied it, we shall have the five 
 periods which these five essays try to describe : the 
 
 B 
 
2 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 period before the Tarquins, that is the " Religion ol 
 Numa '' ; the later kingdom, that is the " Reorganisa- 
 tion of Servius " ; the first three centuries of the 
 republic, that is the " Coming of the Sibyl " 
 the closing centuries of the republic, that i 
 the " Decline of Faith " ; and finally the early 
 empire and the " Augustan Renaissance." Like all 
 attempts to cut history into sections these divisions 
 are more or less arbitrary, but their convenience 
 sufficiently justifies their creation. They must be 
 thought of however not as representing independent 
 blocks, arbitrarily arranged in a certain consecutive 
 order, not as five successive religious consciousnesses, 
 but merely as marking the entrance of certain new 
 ideas into the continuous religious consciousness of 
 the Roman people. The history of each of these 
 periods is simply the record of the change which new 
 social conditions produced in that great barometer 
 of society, the religious consciousness of the com- 
 munity. It is in the period of the old kingdom that 
 our story begins. 
 
 At first sight it may seem a foolish thing to 
 try to draw a picture of the religious condition of 
 a time about the political history of which we 
 know so little, and it is only right therefore that 
 we should inquire what sources of knowledge we 
 possess. 
 
 There was a time, not so very long ago, when 
 under the banner of the new-born science of " Com- 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA 3 
 
 parative Philology " there gathered together a group 
 of men who thought they held the key to prehistoric 
 history, and that words themselves would tell the 
 story where ancient monuments and literature were 
 silent. It was a great and beautiful thought, and 
 the science which encouraged it has taken its place 
 as a useful and reputable member of the community 
 of sciences, but its pretensions to the throne of the 
 revealer of mysteries have been withdrawn by those 
 who are its most ardent followers, and the " Indo- 
 Germanic religion " which is brought into being is 
 a pleasant thought for an idle hour rather than a 
 foundation and starting-point for the study of ancient 
 religion in general. Altogether aside from the fact 
 that although primitive religion and nationality are 
 in the main identical, language and nationality 
 are by no means so — we have the great practical 
 difficulty in the case of Greece and Rome that in 
 the earliest period of which we have knowledge 
 these two religions bear so little resemblance that 
 we must either assert for the time of Indo-Germanic 
 unity a religious development much more primitive 
 than that which comparative philology has sketched, 
 or we must suppose the presence of a strong decadent 
 influence in Rome's case after the separation, which 
 is equally difficult. If we realise that in a primitive 
 religion the name of the god is usually the same as 
 the name of the thing which he represents, the exist- 
 ence of a Greek god and a Roman god with names 
 
4 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 which correspond to the same Indo-Germanic word 
 proves Hnguistically that the thing existed and had 
 a name before the separation, but not at all that the 
 thing was deified or that the name was the name of 
 a god at that time. We must therefore be content 
 to begin our study of religion much more humbly 
 and at a much later period. 
 
 In fact we cannot go back appreciably before 
 the dawn of political history, but there are certain 
 considerations which enable us at least to under- 
 stand the phenomena of the dawn itself, those^ 
 survivals in culture which loom up in the twilight 
 and the understanding of which gives us a fak start 
 in our historical development. For this knowledge 
 we are indebted to the so-called " anthropological " 
 method, which is based on the assumption that 
 mankind is essentially uniform, and that this essential 
 uniformity justifies us in drawing inferences about 
 very ancient thought from the very primitive thought 
 of the barbarous and* savage peoples of our own day. 
 At first sight the weakness of this contention is more 
 apparent than its strength, and it is easy to show 
 that the prehistoric primitive culture of a people 
 destined to civilisation is one thing, and the retarded 
 primitive culture of modern tribes stunted in their 
 growth is quite another thing, so that, as has so 
 often been said, the two bear a relation to each other 
 not unlike that of a healthy young child to a full- 
 grown idiot. And yet there is a decided resemblance 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA 5 
 
 between the child and the idiot, and whether pre- 
 historic or retarded, primitive culture shows every- 
 where strong likeness, and the method is productive 
 of good if we confine our reasoning backwards to 
 those things in savage life which the two kinds of 
 primitive culture, the prehistoric and the retarded, 
 have in common. To do this however we must 
 have some knowledge of the prehistoric, and our 
 modern retarded savage must be used merely to 
 illumine certain things which we see only in half-light ; 
 he must never be employed as a lay-figure in sketching 
 in those features of prehistoric life of which we are 
 totally in ignorance. It is peculiarly useful to the 
 student of Roman religion because he stands on the 
 borderland and looking backwards sees just enough 
 dark shapes looming up behind him to crave more 
 light. For in many phases of early Roman religion 
 there are present characteristics which go back 
 to old manners of thought, and these manners of 
 thought are not peculiar to the Romans but are found 
 in many primitive peoples of our own day. The 
 greatest contribution which anthropology has made 
 to the study of early Roman religion is " animism." 
 
 Not much more than a quarter of a century ago 
 the word " animism " began to be used to describe that 
 particular phase of the psychological condition of 
 primitive peoples by which they believe that a spirit |\ 
 {anima) resides in everything, material and im- 
 material. This spirit is generally closely associated 
 
6 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 with the thing itself, sometimes actually identifie 
 with it. When it is thought of as distinct from tb 
 thing, it is supposed to have the form of the thin 
 to be in a word its "double." These doubles! 
 exercise an influence, often for evil, over the thing 
 and it is expedient and necessary therefore thai 
 they should be prof)itiated so that their evil influenc( 
 may be removed and the thing itself may prosper, 
 These doubles are not as yet gods, they are merely 
 powers, potentialities, but in the course of time they 
 develop into gods. The first step in this direction 
 is the obtaining of a name^ a name the knowledge 
 of which gives a certain control over the power to 
 him who knows it. Finally these powers equipped 
 with a name begin to take on personal characteristics, 
 to be thought of as individuals, and finally represented 
 under the form of men. 
 
 It cannot be shown that all the gods of Rome 
 originated in this way, but certainly many of them 
 did, and it is not impossible that they all did ; and 
 this theory of their origin explains better than any 
 other theory certain habits of thought which the 
 early Romans cherished in regard to their gods. 
 At the time when our knowledge of Roman religion 
 begins, Rome is in possession of a great many gods, 
 but very few of them are much more than names 
 for powers. They are none of them personal enough 
 to be connected together in myths. And this is the 
 very simple reason why there was no such thing as 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA 7 
 
 a native Roman mythology, a blank in Rome's early 
 development which many modern writers have refused 
 to admit, taking upon themselves the unnecessary 
 trouble of positing an original mythology later lost. 
 The gods of early Rome were neither married nor 
 given in marriage ; they had no children or grand- 
 children and there were no divine genealogies. In- 
 stead they were thought of occasionally as more 
 or less individual powers, but usually as masses of 
 potentialities, grouped together for convenience as 
 the " gods of the country," the " gods of the store- 
 room," the "gods of the dead," etc. Even when 
 they were conceived of as somewhat individual, th§y 
 were usually very closely associated with the cor- 
 responding object, for example Vesta was not so 
 much the goddess of the hearth as the goddess 
 " Hearth " itself, Janus not the god of doors so much 
 as the god " Door." 
 
 But by just as much as the human element was 
 absent from the concept of the deity, by just so 
 much the element of formalism in the cult was 
 greater. This formalism must not be interpreted 
 according to our modern ideas ; it was not a 
 formalism which was the result and the successor of 
 a decadent spirituality ; it was not a secondary pro- 
 duct in an age of the decline of faith ; but it was 
 itself the essence ofvreligion in the period of the 
 greatest religious pui%ty. In the careful and con- 
 scientious fulfilment of the form consisted the whole 
 
8 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 duty of man toward his gods. Such a state of affair^ 
 would have been intolerable in any nation* whose 
 instincts were less purely legal. So identical were| 
 the laws concerning the gods and the laws concerning 
 men that though in the earliest period of Romar| 
 jurisprudence the ius divinicm and the ius humanunP 
 are already separated, they are separated merely 
 formally as two separate fields or provinces in which 
 the spirit of the law and often even the letter of its 
 enactment are the same. Such a formalism implies 
 a very firm belief in the existence of the gods. The 
 dealings of a man, with the gods are quite as really 
 reciprocal as his dealings with his fellow citizens. 
 But on the other hand though the existence of the 
 gods is never doubted for a moment, the gods 
 .themselves are an unknown quantity ; hence out of 
 the formal relationship an intimacy never developed, 
 and while it is scarcely just to characterise the early, 
 cult as exclusively a religion of fear, certainly real 
 affection is not present until a much later day. The 
 potentiality of the gods always overshadowed their 
 personality. But this was not all losafcfor the 
 absence of personality prevented the growth of those 
 gross myths which are usually found among primitive 
 peoples, for the purer more inspiring myths of gods 
 are not the primitive product but result from the 
 process of refining which accompanies a people's 
 growth in culture. Thus the theory of animism 
 illumines the religious condition of that borderland 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA , 9 
 
 A 
 
 of history in which Romulus and Numa Fompilius 
 have their dwelling-place. / 
 
 According to that pleasant fiction of /which the 
 ancient world was so extremely fond— 1- the belief 
 that all institutions could be traced back to their 
 establishment by some individual — the religion of 
 Rome was supposed to have been founded by her 
 second king Numa, and it was the custom to refer 
 to all that was most antique in the cult as forming 
 a part of the venerable " religion of Numa." For 
 us this can be merely a name, and even as a name 
 misleading, for a part of the beliefs with which we 
 are dealing go back for centuries; before Romulus 
 and the traditional B.C. 753 as the foundation of 
 Rome. But it is a convenient term if we mean by 
 it merely the old kingdom before foreign influences 
 began to work. The Romans of a later time coined 
 an excellent name not so much for the period as for 
 the kind of religion which existed then, contrasting 
 the original deities of Romei with the new foreign 
 gods, calling the former the; " old indigenous gods " 
 (Z?« Indig^^) and the latter ithe " newly settled gods " 
 {Di Novensides). For our /knowledge of the religion 
 of this period we are not dependent upon a mere 
 theory, no matter how g'bod it may be in itself, but 
 we have the best sort oif contemporary evidence in 
 addition, and it is to th^ie discovery of this evidence 
 that the modern study of Roman religion virtually 
 owes its existence. The records of early political 
 
lo THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 history were largely destroyed in B.C. 390 when the 
 Gauls sacked Rome, but the religious status, with 
 the conservativeness characteristic of religion gener- 
 ally, suffered very few -changes during all these years, 
 and left a record of itself in the annually recurring 
 festivals of the Roman year, festivals which grew 
 into an instinctive function of the life of the common 
 people. Many centuries later when the calendar 
 was engraved on stone, these revered old festivals 
 were inscribed bn these stone calendars in peculiarly 
 large letters as distinguished from all the other items. 
 Thus from the fragments of these stone calendars, 
 which have been , found, and which are themselves 
 nineteen centuriei? old, we can read back another 
 eight or ten centuries further. By the aid of this 
 "calendar of Numa" we are able to assert the 
 presence of certain deities in the Rome of this time, 
 and the equally important absence of others. And 
 from the character of the deities present and of the 
 festivals themselves a correct and more or less de- 
 tailed picture of the religious condition of the time 
 may be drawn. This ' calendar and the list of 
 Indigetes extracted from it form the foundation for' 
 all our study of the history of Roman religion. 
 
 The religious forms of ' a community are always 
 so bound up with its social organisation that a 
 satisfactory knowledge of the one is practically 
 impossible without some krAowledge of the other. 
 Unfortunately there is no fiteld in Roman history 
 
 / 
 / 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA . ii 
 
 where theories are so abundant and facts so rare as 
 in regard to the question of the early social organisa- 
 tion. But without coming into conflict with any of 
 the rival theories we may make at least the following 
 statements. In the main the community was fairly 
 uniform and homogeneous, there were no great 
 social extremes and no conspicuous foreign element, 
 so that each individual, had he stopped to analyse 
 his social position, would have found himself in four 
 distinct relationships : a relationship to himself as 
 an individual ; to his family ; to the group of families 
 which formed his clan {gens) ; and finally to the 
 state. We may go a step further on safe ground 
 and assert that the least important of these relations 
 was that to himself, and the most important that to 
 his family. The unit of early Roman social life 
 was not the individual but the family, and in the 
 most primitive ideas of life after death it is the 
 family which has immortality, not the individual. 
 The state is not a union of individuals but of 
 families. The very psychological idea of the in- 
 dividual seems to have taken centuries to develop, 
 and to have reached its real significance only under 
 the empire. Of the four elements therefore we have 
 established the pre-eminence of the family and the 
 importance of the state as based on the family idea ; 
 the individual may be disregarded in this early 
 period, and there is left only the clan, which how- 
 ever offers a difficult problem. The family and the 
 
12 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 state were destined to hold their own, merely ex- 
 changing places in the course of time, so that the 
 state came first and the family second ; the individual 
 was to grow into ever increasing importance, but 
 the clan is already dying when history begins. It 
 is a pleasant theory and one that has a high degree 
 of probability that there may have been a time 
 when the clan was to the family what the state is 
 when history begins, and that when the state arose 
 out of a union ^ of various clans, the immediate 
 allegiance of each family was gradually alienated 
 from its clan and transferred to the state, so that 
 the clan gave up its life in order that the state, the 
 child of its own creation, might live. If this be so, 
 we can see why the social importance of the clan 
 ceases so early in Roman history. 
 j The centre therefore of early religious life is the 
 family, and the state as a macrocosm of the family ; 
 and the father of each family is its chief priest, and 
 the king as the father of the state is the chief priest 
 of the state. As for the individual the only god 
 which he has for worship is his " double," called in the 
 case of a man his Genius and in that of a woman her 
 Juno, her individualisation of the goddess Juno, quite 
 a distinct deity, peculiar to herself But even here 
 the family instinct shows itself, and though later the 
 Genius and the Juno represent all that is intellectual 
 in the individual, they seem originally to have symbol- 
 ised the procreative power of the individual in rela- 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA ^ 13 
 
 tion to the continuance of the family. The family 
 and the state, however, side by side worshipped a 
 number of deities. 
 
 In the primitive hut, the model of which has 
 come down to us in so many little burial urns of 
 early time (for example those that have recently 
 been dug up in the wonderful cemetery under the 
 Roman Forum), with its one door and no window, 
 there were several elements which needed propitia- 
 tion ; the door itself as the keeper away of evil, the 
 hearth, and the niche for the storage of food. The 
 door-god was the god-door Janus, the ianua itself ; 
 the hearth was in the care of the womenfolk, the 
 wife and daughters, so it was a goddess, Vesta, 
 whom they served ; and the storage-niche, the peniis, 
 was in the keeping of the " store-closet gods " (Z>? 
 Penates). The state itself was modelled after the 
 house. It had its Janus, its sacred door, down in 
 the Forum, and the king himself, the father of the 
 state, was his special priest ; it had its hearth, where 
 the sacred fire burned, and its own Vesta, tended by 
 the vestal virgins, the daughters of the state ; and 
 it had its store-niche with its Penates. At a 
 later date but still very early there was added to 
 the household worship the idea of the general 
 protector of the house, the Lar, which gave rise to 
 the familiar expression " Lares and Penates." The 
 origin of this Lar Familiaris, as he is called, is 
 interesting, because it shows the intimate connection 
 
14 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 between the farming life of the community and its 
 religion. The Lares were originally the group of 
 gods who looked after the various farms ; they were 
 in the plural because they were worshipped where 
 the boundary lines of several farms met, but though 
 several of them were worshipped together, each farm 
 had its one individual Lar. But the care of the 
 farm included also the protection of the house on 
 the farm, so that the Lar of the farm became also 
 the Lar of the house, first of course of houses on 
 farms, and then of every house everywhere even 
 when no farm was connected with it. 
 
 Aside from Vesta, the Genius, the Lar, and the 
 Penates, possibly the most important element in 
 family worship was the cult of the dead ancestors. 
 This cult is, of course, common to almost all religions,, 
 and its presence in Roman religion_ls_in so far not 
 surprising, but the form in which it occurs there is 
 curious and relatively rare. Just as the living man 
 has a " double," the Genius, so the dead man also 
 must have a double, but this double is originally not 
 the Genius, who seems to have been thought of at 
 first as ceasing with the individual. On the contrary 
 as death is the great leveller and the remover of 
 individuality, so the double of the dead was not 
 thought of at first as an individual double but merely 
 as forming a part of an indefinite mass of spirits, the 
 " good gods " \Di Manes) as they were called becausei, 
 they were feared as being anything but good. These 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA , 15 
 
 Di Manes had therefore no specific relation to the 
 individual, and the individual really ceased at death ; 
 the only human relation which the Di Manes seem 
 to have preserved was a connection with the living 
 members of the family to which they had originally 
 belonged. It is therefore very misleading to assert 
 that the Romans had from the beginning a belief 
 in immortality, when we instinctively think of the 
 immortality of the individual. The thing that was 
 immortal was not the individual but the family. .^?if' 
 is thoroughly ip keeping with the practical character 
 of the Roman mind that they did not concern them- 
 selves with the place in which these spirits of the 
 dead were supposed to reside, but merely with the 
 door through which they couW and did return to 
 earth. We have no accounts of the Lower World 
 until Greece lent her mythology to Rome, and 
 imagination never built anything like the Greek 
 palace of Pluto. But while they did not waste energy 
 in furnishing the Lower World with the fittings 
 of fancy, they did keep a careful guard over the door 
 of egress. This door they called the inundus, and 
 represented it crudely by a trench or shallow pit, at 
 the bottom of which there lay a stone. On certain 
 days of the year this stone was removed, and then 
 the spirits came back to earth again, where they 
 were received and entertained by the living members 
 of their family. There were a number of the^e days 
 in the year, three of them scattered through the 
 
i6 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 year : August 24, October 5, November 8 ; and two 
 sets of days: February 13-21 and May 9, 11, I3' 
 The February celebration, the so-called Parentali^-. 
 was calm and dignified and represented all that was 
 least superstitious and fearful in the generally terrify- 
 ing worship of the dead. The Lemuria in May had 
 exactly the opposite character and belongs to the 
 category of the " expulsion of evil spirits," of which 
 Mr. Frazer in his Golden Bough has given so many 
 instances. 
 
 In this connection it is interesting to notice two 
 facts which stand almost as corollaries to these 
 beliefs. One fact is the religious necessity for the 
 continuance of the family, in order that there might 
 always be a living representative of the family to 
 perform the sacrifices to the ancestors. It was the 
 duty of the head of the family not only to perform 
 these sacrifices himself as long as he lived but also 
 to provide a successor. The usual method was by 
 marriage and the rearing of a family, but, in case 
 there was no male child in the family, adoption was 
 recurred to. Here it is peculiarly significant that 
 the sanction of the chief priest was necessary, and he 
 never gave his consent in case the man to be adopted 
 was the only representative of his family, so that his 
 removal from that family into another would leave 
 his original family without a male representative. 
 In cases of inheritance the first lien on the income 
 was for the maintenance of the traditional sacrifices 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA 17 
 
 unless some special arrangement had been made. 
 These exceptional inheritances, without the deduction 
 for sacrifices, were naturally desired above all others 
 and the phrase " an inheritance without sacrifices " 
 {hereditas sine sacris) became by degrees the popular 
 expression for a godsend. The other fact of interest 
 in this connection is that, inasmuch as ancestors were 
 worshipped only en masse and not as individuals, 
 that process could not take place in Roman religion 
 which is so familiar in many other religions, namely 
 that the great gods of the state should some of them 
 have been originally ancestors whose greatness during 
 life had produced a corresponding emphasis in their 
 worship after death, so that ultimately they were 
 promoted from the ranks of the deified dead into the 
 select Olympus of individual gods. This has been 
 a favourite theory of the making of a god from' 
 the time of Euhemerus down to Herbert Spencer. 
 There are religions in which it is true for certain of 
 the major gods, but there are no traces of the pro- 
 cess in Roman religion, and the reason is obvious in 
 view of the peculiar character of ancestor worship in 
 Rome. 
 
 We have now seen the principal elements which 
 went to make up the family religion and that part 
 of the state religion which was an enlargement and 
 an imitation of the family religion. But even in the 
 most primitive times a Roman's life was not bounded 
 by his own hut and the phenomenon of death. There 
 
i8 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 was work to be done in life, a living to be gained,; 
 and here, as everywhere, there were hosts of unseen 
 powers who must be propitiated. His religion was 
 not only coincident with every phase of private life, 
 it was also closely related to the specific occupations 
 and interests of the people, and just as the interests 
 of the community, its means of livelihood, were 
 agriculture and stock-raising, so the gods were those 
 of the crops and the herds. Some years ago the 
 late Professor Mommsen succeeded in extracting 
 from the existing stone calendars a list of the 
 religious festivals of the old Roman year, and also in 
 proving that this list of festivals was complete in its 
 present condition at a time before the city of Rome 
 was surrounded by the wall which Servius Tullius 
 built, and that it therefore goes back to the old 
 kingdom, the time of what has been called the 
 " Religion of Numa." We cannot go through all 
 the festivals in detail, but it is extremely interesting 
 to notice that almost every one of them is connected 
 with the life of the farmer and represents the action 
 of propitiation towards some god or group of gods 
 at every time in the Roman year which was at all 
 critical for agricultural interests. 
 
 It must not be forgotten also that this list is not 
 absolutely complete, because it represents merely the 
 official state festivals, and not even all of them but only 
 those which fell upon the same day or days every 
 year, so that they could be engraved in the stone to 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA 19 
 
 If- 
 
 form a perpetual calendar. All state festivals, of 
 which there were several, which were -iippointed in 
 each particular year according to the backward or 
 forward estate of the harvest, were omitted from 
 the list, though they were celebrated at some time 
 in every year ; and naturally the public calendars 
 contained no reference to the many private and semi- 
 private ceremonies of the year, with which the state 
 had nothing official to do, festivals of the family and 
 the clan, and even local festivals of various districts 
 of the city. 
 
 In this list of peaceful deities of the farm there is 
 one god whose character has been very much mis- 
 understood because of the company which he keeps ; 
 this is the god Mars. It has become the fashion 
 of late to consider him as a god of vegetation, and a 
 great many ingenious arguments have been brought 
 forward to show his agricultural character. But the 
 more primitive a community is, the more intense is 
 its struggle for existence, and the more rife its 
 rivalries with its neighbours. Alongside of the 
 ploughshare there must always have been the sword 
 or its equivalent, and along with Flora and Ceres 
 there must always have been a god of strife and 
 battle. That Mars was this god in early as well as 
 later times is shown above all things by the fact 
 that he was always worshipped outside the city, as a 
 god who must be kept at a distance. Naturally 
 his cult was associated with the dominant interest of 
 
20 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 life, the crops, and he was worshipped in the beautiful 
 ceremony of the purification of the fields, which Mr. 
 Walter Pater has so exquisitely described at the 
 opening of Marius the Epicurean. But he was 
 regarded as the protector of the fields and the 
 warder off of evil influences rather than as a positive 
 factor in the development of the crops. Then too 
 in the early days of the Roman militia, before the 
 regular army had come into existence, the war season 
 was only during the summer after the planting and 
 before the harvest, so that the two festivals which 
 marked the beginning and the end of that season 
 were also readily associated with the state of the 
 crops at that time. 
 
 But the most interesting and curious thing about 
 this old religion is not so much what it does contain 
 as what it does not. It is not so much what we find 
 as what we miss, for more than half the gods whom 
 we instinctively associate with Rome were not there 
 under this old regime. Here is a partial list of those 
 whose names we do not find : Minerva, Diana, Venus, 
 Fortuna, Hercules, Castor, Pollux, Apollo, Mercury, 
 Dis, Proserpina, Aesculapius, the Magna Mater. And 
 yet their absence is not surprising when we realise 
 that almost all of the gods in this list represent phases 
 of life with which Rome in this early period was 
 absolutely unacquainted. She had no appreciable 
 trade or commerce, no manufactures or particular 
 handicrafts, and no political interests except the 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA 21 
 
 simple patriarchal government which sufficed for her 
 present needs. Her gods of water were the gods of 
 rivers and springs ; Neptune was there, but he was 
 not the ocean-god like the Greek Poseidon. Vulcan, 
 the god of fire, who was afterwards associated with 
 the Greek Hephaistos and became the patron of 
 metal-working, was at this time merely the god of 
 destructive and not of constructive fire. Even the 
 great god Juppiter who was destined to become 
 almost identical with the name and fame of Rome 
 was not yet a god of the state and politics, but 
 merely the sky-god, especially the lightning god, 
 Juppiter Feretrius, the " striker," who had a little 
 shrine on the Capitoline where later the great 
 Capitoline temple of Juppiter Optimus Maximus was 
 to stand. Another curious characteristic of this early 
 age, which, I think, has never been commented on, 
 is the extraordinarily limited number of goddesses. 
 Vesta is the only one who seems to stand by herself 
 without a male parallel. Each of the others is 
 merely the contrasted potentiality in a pair of which 
 the male is much more famous, and the only ones in 
 these pairs who ever obtained a pronounced indivi- 
 duality did so because their cult was afterwards rein- 
 forced by being associated with some extra- Rom an 
 cult. The best illustration of this last is Juno. We 
 may go further and say that it seems highly probable 
 that the worship of female deities was in the main 
 confined to the women of the community, while the 
 
22 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 men worshipped the gods. This distinction extended 
 even to the priesthoods where the wife of the priest 
 of a god was the priestess of the corresponding 
 goddess. Such a state of affairs is doubly interesting 
 in view of the pre-eminence of female deities in the 
 early Greek world, which has been so strikingly 
 shown by Miss Jane Harrison in her recent book, 
 Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. 
 
 The most vital question which can be put to 
 almost any religion is that in regard to its expan- 
 sive power and its adaptability to new conditions. 
 Society is bound to undergo changes, and a young 
 social organism, if normal, is continually growing 
 new cells. New conditions are arising and new 
 interests are coming to the front. In addition, if 
 the growth is to be continuous, new material is being 
 constantly absorbed, and the simple homogeneous 
 character of the old society is being entirely changed 
 by the influx of foreign elements. This is what 
 occurred in ancient Rome, and it is because ancient 
 Roman religion was not capable of organic develop- 
 ment from within, that the curious things happened 
 to it which our history has to record. It is these 
 strange external accretions which lend the chief 
 interest to the story, while at the same time they 
 conceal the original form so fully as to render the 
 writing of a history of Roman religion extremely 
 difficult. 
 
 Yet it must not be supposed because Roman 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA , 23 
 
 religion was unable to adapt itself to the new con- 
 stitution of society with its contrasted classes, and 
 to the new commercial and political interests which 
 attracted the attention of the upper classes, that it 
 was absolutely devoid within itself, within its own 
 limitations, of a certain capability of development. 
 For several centuries after outside influences began to 
 affect Rome, her original religion kept on developing 
 alongside of the new forms. The manner in which 
 it developed is thoroughly significant of the original 
 national character of the Romans. 
 
 We have seen that from the very beginning the 
 nature of the gods as powers rather than personalities 
 tended to emphasise the value and importance of 
 the name, which usually indicated the particular 
 function or speciality of each deity and was very 
 often the only thing known about him. In the 
 course of time as the original name of the deity 
 began to be thought of entirely as a proper name 
 without any meaning, rather than as a common 
 noun explaining the nature of the god to which it 
 was attached, it became necessary to add to the 
 original name some adjective which would adequately 
 describe the god and do the work which the name 
 by itself had originally done. And as the nature 
 of the various deities grew more complicated along 
 with the increasing complications of daily life, new 
 adjectives were added, each one expressing some 
 particular phase of the god's activity. Such an 
 
' 24 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 adjective was called a cognomen, and was often of 
 very great importance because it began to be felt 
 that a god with one adjective, i.e. invoked for one 
 purpose, was almost a different god from the same 
 god with a different adjective, i.e. invoked for another 
 purpose. Thus a knowledge of these adjectives was 
 almost as necessary as a knowledge of the name of 
 the god. The next step in the development was 
 one which followed very easily. These important 
 adjectives began to be thought of as having a value 
 and an existence in themselves, apart from the god 
 to which they were attached. The grammatical 
 change which accompanied this psychological move- 
 ment was the transfer osf- the adjective into an 
 abstract noun. Both adjectives and abstract nouns 
 express quality, but the adjective is in a condition 
 of dependence on a noun, while the abstract noun 
 is independent and self-supporting. And thus, just 
 as in certain of the lower organisms a group of cells 
 breaks off and sets up an individual organism of its 
 own, so in old Roman religion some phase of a 
 god's activity, expressed in an adjective, broke off 
 with the adjective from its original stock and set 
 up for itself, turning its name from the dependent 
 adjective form into the independent abstract noun. 
 Thus Juppiter, worshipped as a god of good faith 
 in the dealings of men with one another, the god 
 by whom oaths were sworn under the open sky, 
 was designated as " Juppiter, guarding-good-faith,'! 
 
THE RELIGION OF NUMA 25 
 
 Juppiter Fidius. There were however many other 
 phases of Juppiter's work, and hence the adjective 
 fidius became very important as the means of 
 distinguishing this activity from all the others. 
 Eventually it broke off from Juppiter and formed 
 the abstract noun Fides, the goddess of good faith, 
 where the sex of the deity as a goddess was entirely 
 determined by the grammatical gender of abstract 
 nouns as feminine. 
 
 This is all strange enough but there is one more 
 step in the development even more curious yet. 
 This abstract goddess Fides did not stay long in the 
 purely abstract sphere ; she began very soon to be 
 made concrete again, asj;he Fides of this particular 
 person or of that particular group and as this Fides 
 or that, until she became almost as concrete as 
 Juppiter himself had been, and hence we have a 
 great many different Fides in seeming contradiction 
 to the old grammatical rule that abstract nouns had 
 no plural. Now all this development in the field 
 of religion throws light upon the character of the 
 Roman mind and its instinctive methods of thought, 
 and we see why it is that the Romans were very 
 great lawyers and very mediocre philosophers. 
 Both law and philosophy require the ability for 
 abstract thought ; in both cases the essential qualities 
 of a thing must be separated from the thing itself 
 But in the case of philosophic thought this abstrac- 
 tion, these qualities, do not immediately seek rein- 
 
26 THE RELIGION OF NUMA 
 
 carnation. They continue as abstractions and do 
 not immediately descend to earth again, whereas for 
 law such a descent is absolutely necessary because 
 jurisprudence is interested not so much in the 
 abstraction by itself, but rather in the abstract as 
 presented in concrete cases. Hence a type of mind 
 which found it equally easy to make the concrete 
 into the abstract and then to turn the abstract so 
 made into a kind of concrete again, is par excellena 
 the legal mind, and no better proof of the instinctive 
 tendency to law-making on the part of the Romans 
 can be found than in the fact that the same habits 
 of mind which make laws also governed the develop- 
 ment of their religion. 
 
 Unfortunately however it was not these abstract 
 deities who could save old Roman religion. They 
 were merely the logical outcome of the deities 
 already existing, merely new offspring of the old 
 breed. They did not represent any new interests, 
 but were merely the individualisation of certain 
 phases of the old deities, phases which had always 
 been present and were now at most merely em- 
 phasised by being worshipped separately. 
 
THE REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 Like a lofty peak rising above the mists which 
 cover the tops of the lower-lying mountains, the figure 
 of Servius TuUius towers above the semi-legendary 
 Tarquins on either side of him. We feel that we 
 have to do with a veritable character in history, and 
 we find ourselves wondering what sort of a man he 
 was personally — a feeling that never occurs to us 
 with Romulus and the older kings, and comes to 
 us only faintly with the elder Tarquin, while the 
 younger Tarquin has all the marks of a wooden man, 
 who was put up only to be thrown down, whose 
 whole raison d'etre is to explain the transition from 
 the kingdom to the republic on the theory of a 
 revolution. Eliminate the revolution, suppose the 
 change to have been a gradual and a constitutional 
 one, and you may discard the proud Tarquin with- 
 out losing anything but a lay-figure with its more 
 or less gaudy trappings of later myths. But it is 
 not so with Servius ; his wall and his constitution 
 are very real and defy all attempts to turn their 
 maker into a legend. Yet on the other hand we 
 
 27 
 
28 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 must be on our guard, for much of the definiteness 
 which seems to attach to him is rather the definite- 
 ness of a certain stage in Rome's development, a 
 certain well-bounded chronological and sociological 
 tract. It is dangerous to try to limit too strictly 
 Servius's personal part in this development ; and 
 far safer, though perhaps less fascinating, to use his 
 name as a general term for the changes which Rome 
 underwent from the time when foreign influences 
 began to tell upon her until the beginning of the 
 republic. He forms a convenient title therefore for 
 certain phases of Rome's growth. And yet even 
 this is not strictly correct, for Servius stands not so 
 much for the coming into existence of certain facts, 
 as for the recognition of the existence of these facts. 
 The facts themselves were of slow growth, covering 
 probably centuries, but the actions resulting from 
 them, and the outward changes in society, came 
 thick and fast and may well have taken place, all 
 of them, within the limits of one man's life. The 
 foundation fact upon which all these changes were 
 based is the influence of the outside world on the 
 Roman community. Until this time there had been 
 little to differentiate Rome from any other of the 
 hill-communities of Italy, of which there were scores 
 in her immediate neighbourhood ; nor was she the 
 only one to come into contact with the outside 
 world. It was the effect which that influence had 
 upon her as contrasted with her neighbours which 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS^ 29 
 
 made the difference. When we ask why this in- 
 fluence affected her differently we find no satisfactory 
 answer, and are in the presence of a mystery — the 
 world-old insoluble mystery of the superiority of one 
 tribe or one individual over others apparently of the 
 same class. Political history is wont to tell this 
 chapter of Rome's story under the title of the " Rise 
 of the Plebeians," but the presence of the Plebeians 
 was only the outward symbol of an inward change. 
 This change was the breaking up of the monotonous 
 one-class society of the primitive community with 
 its one — agricultural — interest, and the formation 
 of a variegated many-class 'society with manifold 
 interests, such as trade, handicraft, and politics. It 
 was the awakening of Rome into a world-life out of 
 her century-long undisturbed bucolic slumber. 
 
 There were at this time two peoples in Italy, who 
 by reason of their older culture were able to be 
 Rome's teachers. One lay to the north of her, the 
 mysterious Etruscans, whose culture fortunately for 
 Rome had only a very moderate influence, because 
 the Etruscan culture had already lost much of its 
 virility, possibly also because it was distinctly felt to 
 be foreign, and hence could effect no insidious entry, 
 and probably because Rome was at this time too 
 strong and young and clean to take anything but 
 the best from Etruria. The other lay to the south, 
 the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, separated from 
 Rome for the present by many miles of forest and 
 
30 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 by hostile tribes. Around her in Latium were her 
 own next of kin, the Latins, becoming rapidly 
 inferior to her, but enabled to do her at least this 
 service, that of absorbing the foreign influences which 
 came, and in certain cases latinising them, and 
 thus transmitting them to Rome in a more or less 
 assimilated condition. 
 
 The three great facts in the life of Rome during 
 this period are the coming of Greek merchants and 
 Greek trade from the south, the coming of Etruscan 
 artisans and handicraft from the north, and the 
 beginnings of her political rivalry and gradual 
 prominence in the league of Latin cities around her. 
 Each one of these movements is reflected in the 
 religious changes of the period. In regard to the 
 first two this is not surprising, for the ancient 
 traveller, like his mythical prototype Aeneas, carried 
 his gods with him. Thus there were worshipped in 
 private in Rome the gods of all the peoples who 
 settled within her walls, and the presence of these 
 gods was destined to make its influence felt. Your 
 primitive polytheist is very catholic in his religious 
 tastes ; for, when one is already in possession of 
 many gods, the addition of a few more is a minor 
 matter, especially when, as was now the case in 
 Rome, these deities are the patrons of occupations 
 and interests hitherto entirely unknown to the Roman, 
 and hence not provided for in bis scheme of gods. 
 It was therefore in no spirit of disloyalty to the 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS, 31 
 
 already existing gods, and with no desire to introduce 
 rival deities, that the new cults began to'spread until 
 they became so important as to call for state recogni- 
 tion. 
 
 Possibly the most interesting cases are those of 
 the two gods who came from the south, Hercules 
 and Castor, interesting because they were the fore- 
 runners of that great multitude of Greek gods who 
 later came in proudly by special invitation, and even 
 more interesting yet because, though they were 
 Greek as Greek could be, they came into Rome, as 
 it were, incognito, and were so far from being known 
 as Greek, that, when the same gods came in after- 
 wards more directly, these new-comers were felt to 
 be quite a different thing, and their worship was 
 carried on in another part of the city away from the 
 old-established cults. 
 
 In the Greek world Herakles and Hermes were 
 the especial patrons of travellers, and as travelling 
 was never done for pleasure but always for business, 
 they became the patrons of the travelling merchant. 
 It was also natural that they should go with the 
 settlers away from the mother-city into the new 
 colony. Thus it was that they came from the 
 mother-land into the colonies of Magna Graecia in 
 Southern Italy, and once being established there 
 made their way slowly but inevitably northwards. 
 The story of Hermes, under the name of Mercury, 
 belongs to a later chapter, but that of Herakles = 
 
32 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 Hercules must be recounted here. It is only within 
 the last few years that the scholarly world has been 
 persuaded that there was no such thing as an original 
 Italic Hercules ; at first sight it was very difficult to 
 believe, because there seemed to be so many appa- 
 rently very old Italic legends centering in Hercules. 
 But it has been shown, either that these legends 
 never existed and rest solely upon false interpreta- 
 tion of monuments, or that, though they did exist 
 at an early date, they were introduced under Greek 
 influence. It was the trading merchant therefore 
 who brought Herakles northward. And as the god 
 went, his name was softened into Hercules, and with 
 the assimilation of the name to the tongue of the 
 Italic people, there went hand in hand an adaptation 
 of his nature to their needs, so that by degrees 
 he became thoroughly italicised both in form and 
 content. It is probable that the cult came into 
 Rome as well as into the other cities of Latium, but 
 in Rome it was confined to a few individuals, and 
 at first obtained no public recognition. On the 
 contrary, for reasons that we are at a loss to find, 
 this Greek cult seems to have reached very large 
 proportions in the little town of Tibur (Tivoli), 
 fourteen miles north-east of Rome. There it 
 dominated all other worship and lost so much of 
 its foreign atmosphere that it became thoroughly 
 latinised. In the course of time the Roman state 
 acknowledged this Tivoli cult of Hercules and 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS , 33 
 
 accepted a branch of it as its own. But the extra- 
 ordinary thing about this acknowledgment is that 
 the Romans felt it to be a Latin and not a foreign 
 cult. They showed this intimate and friendly feel- 
 ing by permitting an altar to Hercules to be erected 
 within the city proper, in the Forum Boarium. But 
 in order to understand the significance of this act 
 a word of digression is necessary. 
 
 Under the old Roman regime every act of life 
 was performed under the supervision of the gods, 
 and this godly patronage was especially emphasised 
 in acts which affected the life of the community- 
 No act was of greater importance for the community 
 than the choice of a home, the location of a settle- 
 ment. Thus the founding of an ancient city was 
 accompanied by sacred rites, chief among which was 
 the ploughing of a furrow around the space which was 
 ultimately to be enclosed by the wall. This furrow 
 formed a symbolic wall on very much the same 
 principle as that on which the witch draws her circle. 
 The furrow was called the pomerium and was to the 
 world of the gods what the city wall was to the world 
 of men. It did not however always coincide with 
 the actual city wall, and th& space it embraced was 
 sometimes less, sometimes more, than that embraced 
 by the city wall ; and just as new walls covering 
 larger territory could be built for the city, so a new 
 pomerium line could be drawn. As was becoming 
 for a spiritual barrier there was nothing to mark it 
 i D 
 
34 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 except the boundary stones through which the 
 
 imaginary line passed. The wall, which Servius 
 
 built and which continued to be the outer wall of 
 
 Rome for a period of eight or nine hundred years 
 
 until the third Christian century, was at the time of 
 
 its building coincident in the main with the line of 
 
 the pomerium, with one very important exception : 
 
 namely that all the region of the Aventine, which 
 
 was inside the limits of the political city and 
 
 embraced by the Servian wall, lay outside thg 
 
 pomerium line and was in other words outside the 
 
 religious city. It continued thus all through the 
 
 republic and into the empire until the reign of 
 
 Claudius. Originally the pomerium line played an 
 
 important, part in the religious world and it continued 
 
 to do so until the middle of the republic, during the 
 
 Second Punic War, when its sanctity was destroyed 
 
 and it lost its real religious significance, though 
 
 it remained as a formal institution. As a divine 
 
 barrier it served originally in the world of the gods 
 
 very much the same purpose as the material wall 
 
 of stone did in the world of men. Before the 
 
 problem of foreign gods had begun to exist for the 
 
 Romans, in the good old days when they knew only 
 
 the gods of their own religion, the pomerium served 
 
 to keep within the bounds of Rome all the beneficent 
 
 kindly gods whose presence was not needed outside 
 
 in the fields, and it served fully as important a 
 
 purpose in keeping outside of Rome the gods who 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS ^ 35 
 
 were feared rather than loved, for example the dread 
 war-god Mars. When foreign gods began to be 
 introduced into Rome they might, of course, be 
 worshipped inside the pomerium by private indi- 
 viduals, but when the state acknowledged them 
 it was more prudent that her worship should be 
 outside the sacred wall. Thus it came to pass that 
 the foreign gods, who were taken into the cult of the 
 Roman state, were given temples in the Campus 
 Martins or over on the Aventine, and the two or 
 three cases where they were publicly worshipped 
 inside the pomerium form no real exception to this 
 rule — such an exception would be, in fact, quite 
 unthinkable in the strictly logical system of Roman 
 worship — but these gods were allowed inside because 
 they came to Rome from her kinsfolk, the Latins, 
 and were not felt to be foreign. 
 
 Hercules is one of the cases in this last category. 
 Though originally, as we have seen, a Greek god, his 
 long residence in Tibur (Tivoli) had made him, as it 
 were, -a naturalised citizen of Latium, and hence Rome 
 felt it no impropriety to take him inside her pomerium. 
 At first his worship seems to have been carried on 
 by two clans, the Potitii and the Pinarii, but later, 
 during the republic, the state assumed control. 
 But though it was really the Greek Herakles who 
 had come in as the latinised Hercules, the god had 
 paid a certain price for his admission, for he came 
 stripped of all the various attributes which he had had 
 
36 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 in Greece and retaining merely his function as patron 
 of trade and travel. It was this practical side of his 
 nature alone which appealed to the Romans ; it 
 found its expression in the offering of "the tenth" 
 at the great altar in the Forum Boarium. This altar 
 always remained in a certain sense the centre of 
 Hercules-worship in Rome. It was reinforced at an 
 early date by no less than three temples of Hercules 
 in the more or less immediate neighbourhood, all 
 of which were characterised by the same relative 
 simplicity of ritual. Centuries later Herakles be- 
 came known to the Romans through direct Greek 
 channels, and it was recognised that this new 
 Herakles was akin to the old Hercules, so that 
 he too was called Hercules. There was nothing 
 surprising in this to the Romans, because they 
 considered it a matter of course that there should be 
 found a parallel among their own gods for each 
 Greek deity. They never understood the true state 
 of affairs ; it is doubtful whether they could have 
 unders|pod it : namely, that in almost all their other 
 identifitations of R.oman and Greek deities, they 
 were really doing violence to their own native gods 
 by superimposing upon them the attributes of a deity 
 with whom they had really nothing in common, 
 whereas, in identifying the new Herakles with their 
 old Hercules, they were doing a perfectly legitimate 
 thing. For one who knows the true state of affairs 
 there is something pathetically amusing in the fact 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS- 37 
 
 that they really showed more delicacy in making 
 their old (really originally Greek) Hercules into the 
 new Greek Herakles- Hercules, than they did in 
 throwing together Neptune and Poseidon, Mars and 
 Ares, Diana and Artemis. As a matter of fact they 
 always reverenced the old cult of the great altar, 
 and never allowed the more sensational phases of 
 Greek worship to be practised there, and put off into 
 another quarter the temples which were built to 
 Hercules under the various new attributes which the 
 new Greek cult brought with it. These temples 
 were placed, as was proper, outside the pomerium, 
 in the southern part of the Campus Martius. 
 
 But to return to the simple Hercules and the 
 Servian regime, the Roman state had now obtained 
 a deity, of which, by the contagion of commerce, 
 they already felt a need, a god of great power from 
 whom came success in the practical undertakings of 
 life. Hence he had a strong hold on the Romans 
 whose practical side was undergoing a rapid develop- 
 ment. The idea of trade was now represer'ed in 
 the religious world, it had received its divine sanction. 
 
 The other god, who came up from Magna Graecia 
 and whose formal acceptance into the state-cult 
 formed one of the earliest incidents in the breakdown 
 of the old agricultural religion, was Castor, with his 
 twin-brother Pollux, although brother Pollux was 
 always an insignificant partner, so much so that the 
 temple which was subsequently built to them both 
 
38 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 was referred to either as the temple of " Castor " 
 alone or as the temple of " the Castors." At various 
 points in the old Greek world we meet with a pair 
 of brothers, at first not designated by individual 
 names but merely named as a pair. Even these 
 pair-names do not agree, but they represent all of 
 them the same idea. Later when individual names 
 are substituted for the general pair -name, these 
 individual names also differ. They are gods of 
 protection, and on the sea-coast — and most of 
 Greece is sea-coast — they are especially helpful as 
 rescuers from the dangers of the sea, and they are 
 also very early and almost everywhere connected 
 with horses. But in spite of their usefulness they 
 are not very prominent, and it is doubtful whether 
 they would ever have become famous, except for 
 one of those little accidents which make the fortunes 
 of gods as well as of men. It so happened that 
 horses began to be used in warfare more than for 
 the mere drawing of chariots ; a primitive sort of 
 cavalry came into being, produced by mounting 
 heavy-armed foot-soldiers on horseback. With this 
 cavalry the " Twin-Brothers " {Dios-kouroi = " Sons of 
 Zeus"), especially Castor, became prominent. Just 
 as the Greek merchants had taken Herakles with 
 them when they set qjit to plant colonies in Southern 
 Italy, so the heavy-mounted horsemen carried their 
 god Castor with them wherever they went. The 
 Italic tribes in their turn were quick to seize upon 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 39 
 
 this idea of cavalry, and with it as an essential part 
 went its divine patron, Castor. Thus the Castor- 
 cult moved steadily northward, carried, as it were, 
 on horseback. At last it reached Latium, and there 
 the little town of Tusculum, afterwards so famous as 
 the residence of Cicero, became in some unaccount- 
 able way an important cult-centre, and did for 
 Castor what Tibur had done for Flercules, i.e. 
 latinised him, so that Rome received him not as an 
 alien but as one of her kin. There can be little 
 doubt that the Roman cult actually did come from 
 Tusculum, and that in its introduction into Rome, 
 as in every other step on its march, it was connected 
 with the reorganisation of the cavalry. This would 
 seem to imply that Tusculum was famous for its 
 cavalry and that Rome took the idea of it from her 
 — statements for which we have unfortunately no 
 other confirmation, though we have abundant proof 
 of the cult at Tusculum and of Rome's close associa- 
 tion with it. 
 
 Castor was thus the patron of the " horsemen " 
 {equites) and his great day was July 15, when the 
 horsemen's parade took place. Possibly this had 
 been the date of the festival at Tusculum, a day 
 especially appropriate because it was the Ides of the 
 month, and the Ides were sacred to Juppiter, whose 
 sons Castor and Pollux [Dios-kouroi) were supposed 
 to be. It is extremely interesting in the light of 
 this knowledge of the true state of affairs to see how 
 
40 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 legend later explained the coming of Castor and 
 Pollux. It was an incident in the mythical war 
 which was supposed to have taken place after the 
 last Tarquin had been driven out, and the republic 
 had been started. The adversaries of Rome, allied 
 with Tarquin, notably Octavius Mamilius of Tusculum, 
 fought against the Romans in the battle of Lake 
 Regillus on July 15, B.C. 499. The Romans won, 
 and the first news of victory was brought to Rome 
 by the miraculous appearance of Castor and Pollux 
 who were seen watering their horses in the Forum 
 at the spring of Juturna. A temple on this spot 
 was then vowed and fifteen years later, B.C. 484, it 
 was completed and dedicated. Tusculum, July 15, 
 and the dedication of the temple in B.C. 484 are 
 seemingly the only historical facts in this legend; 
 and long before B.C. 499 Castor was worshipped 
 in Rome, especially on July 15. The site of his 
 original worship was without doubt the same locality 
 in the Forum where his temple was subsequently 
 built, for it is an almost invariable rule that the 
 earliest temples are built on the actual site of, or 
 close to, the old altar or shrine which preceded the 
 formal temple. Like Hercules therefore he was 
 received inside the pomerimn, and probably for a 
 similar reason, because it was felt that he was a god 
 of Tusculum, and hence a god of Rome's kinsfolk. 
 We have an additional confirmation of this feeling 
 in the way in which the later direct cult of Castor 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS. 41 
 
 was treated. This cult, connecting Castor with 
 healing and the interpretation of dreams, and 
 emphasising his function as a rescuer from the 
 dangers of the sea, would have been without meaning 
 for the old Romans who worshipped him merely as 
 a patron of horsemen and horsemanship. The new 
 ideas seem to have had as their centre a later temple 
 in the Circus Flaminius and thus Hercules and 
 Castor may again be paralleled, since they have, 
 each of them, an old cult-centre inside the pomerium, 
 Hercules in the Forum Boarium, Castor in the 
 Forum, and a later cult-centre, for more advanced 
 ideas, in each case in the Circus Flaminius. 
 
 Although it was Greek influence which ultimately 
 caused the destruction of Roman religion, and 
 although the cults of Hercules and of Castor are 
 the first definite effects of this influence, it cannot 
 be said that the destruction had in any sense begun, 
 because in their slow journey northward, and in 
 their long residence at Tibur and Tusculum re- 
 spectively, the two cults had lost all that was 
 pernicious. The Roman instinct, which felt them 
 to be akin to itself, did not go amiss ; they were 
 indeed akin to the new Rome with its new interest 
 in trade and its increased interest in warfare, for the 
 trader and the warrior have gone side by side in all 
 ages of the world's history, whether it be a primitive 
 instinct to grasp territory for commercial purposes 
 or a more civilised endeavour to obtain an open port. 
 
42 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 The beginnings of Greek influence have thus 
 been exhibited in the case of Hercules and of 
 Castor, and it remains to inquire what Etruria did. 
 There is no race about which we know so much and 
 yet so Httle as about the Etruscans. They have 
 always been and still are a riddle, and as our 
 knowledge of them increases we seem further than 
 ever from a solution, and what we gain in positive 
 knowledge is more than counterbalanced by the 
 increased sense of our ignorance. Altogether aside 
 from the problem of the origin of the Etruscans, and 
 the race to which they belonged, is the other problem 
 of their disappearance. In a certain sense Etruria 
 steps out of history quite as mysteriously as she 
 entered into it, nay even more mysteriously, for we 
 are always willing to allow a certain percentage of 
 mystery as the legitimate accompaniment of pre- 
 historic history, but when in the light of more or 
 less historic times a nation steps off the stage of the 
 world's history, and leaves practically no heritage 
 behind her, we have a right to be amazed. Of all 
 the peoples in Italy Rome ought in the order of 
 events to have been her successor, and yet when we 
 contrast the influence of Etruria on Rome with the 
 influence of the Greek colonies of Southern Italy 
 we see an amazing difference. The influence of 
 these Greek colonies on Rome prepared the way for 
 the direct influence of the Greek motherland, so that 
 one passed over into the other by imperceptible 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS. 43 
 
 gradations, but the influence of Etruria on Rome not 
 only led to nothing but was in itself of a most super- 
 ficial sort. Etruria must have had some literature, 
 yet we search the history of Roman literature in vain 
 for any traces of the influence of that literature on 
 Rome, with the one exception of books on divina- 
 tion and the interpretation of lightning. We know 
 too little of her manners and customs to be able to 
 tell exactly how much they may have influenced 
 Rome, and yet it is worth noting that the things 
 which Roman writers actually refer to Etruria, are 
 all of them most superficial : a few of the insignia 
 of political office ; a few of the trappings of one or 
 two ritualistic acts ; a branch of divination, by the 
 consultation of the entrails (Jiaruspicind), which was 
 of secondary importance compared to augury ; and 
 the most depraved form of Roman public sport, the 
 gladiatorial games. The only fundamental institu- 
 tion of Rome which it is the habit to ascribe to 
 Etruria, the idea of the so-called templum or division 
 of the sky into regions as an axiom of augury, seems 
 to have been quite as much a general Italic idea 
 as a specifically Etruscan one. Even in art her 
 influence was relatively slight, and though her 
 architects seem to have built the earliest formal 
 temples for Rome, they were soon succeeded in this 
 work by the Greeks. We seek in vain for a com- 
 plete and satisfactory explanation of this limitation 
 of her influence, but certain thoughts suggest them- 
 
44 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 selves, which, as far as they go, are probably correct. 
 All that we know of Etruria impresses us with the 
 fact that hers was an outward civilisation unaccom- 
 panied by an inward culture, that it was a formal 
 rather than a spiritual growth, an artificial acquisition 
 from without rather than a development from within 
 outwards. It was strong but with its strength went 
 brutality, it was interested in art but for its sensual 
 rather than its spiritual aspects. Now the idealism 
 of youth is present in nations just as in individuals, 
 though probably a nation is less conscious of it than 
 an individual. It is with the nation one of the 
 effects of the instinct of self-preservation, and for a 
 youthful nation to absorb the vices of an old decadent 
 one would be self-destruction. Thus the youthful 
 Rome rejected most of the Etruscan poison, and 
 thus nature purified herself, and Etruria was buried 
 in the pit of her own nastiness. 
 
 There was however one town which acted as an 
 interpreter between Rome and Etruria, and was the 
 original cult-centre for a very great goddess, spread- 
 ing her cult in both directions, into Rome and 
 into Etruria. The town was Falerii and the goddess 
 was Minerva, who in a certain sense entered Rome 
 three times, once direct from Falerii to Rome, and 
 once from Falerii to Rome by way of Etruria, and 
 finally, when Falerii was captured by the Romans, 
 again direct to Rome. In the earliest period there 
 are scarcely any traces of the worship of Minerva in 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS - 45 
 
 Latium or Southern Italy, and we are absolutely 
 certain that she was not known in Rome. In the 
 country north of Rome, however, the situation is 
 different. There she is found quite frequently, 
 especially in Etruria under the name of MENERVA 
 or MENRVA. Yet she cannot have been an Etruscan 
 goddess, because the name itself is Italic and not 
 Etruscan. She is therefore neither Roman, nor 
 Etruscan, nor Latin, at least so far as we know 
 Latin in Latium. If we can find a place however 
 where a Latin people is under strong Etruscan 
 influence, we shall be near the solution. Such a 
 place is Falerii, in the country of the Faliscans. 
 To the ancients it appeared so thoroughly Etruscan 
 that they go out of their way to explain that it was 
 not. As a matter of fact it was the only Latin town 
 on the right bank of the Tiber, and because of its 
 locality it was early brought into vital connection 
 with the Etruscans, so vital that while it never lost 
 all of its original Latin character, it lost enough of 
 it to exercise a very considerable direct influence 
 over Etruria, and to be to a very large extent 
 influenced by her in turn. We cannot of course 
 positively prove that Minerva was originally wor- 
 shipped only at Falerii, and that her cult spread 
 entirely from this one point, but we have at least 
 strong negative evidence, and so far as the general 
 history of ancient religion is concerned there is 
 nothing impossible in such a spread. Religious history 
 
46 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 shows many parallels to this ; for example the classic 
 case of the god Eros of Thespiae, in Boeotia, who 
 would have lived and died merely a little insig- 
 nificant local god, if it had not been for the Boeotian 
 poet Hesiod who adopted Eros into his poetry and 
 thus gave him a start in life by which he ultimately 
 succeeded in going all over the Greek world, and 
 then passing into Rome as Cupid ; and so into all 
 later times. 
 
 We are accustomed to think of Minerva as the 
 Latin name for Athena, the daughter of Zeus, and 
 unconsciously we clothe Minerva with all the glory 
 of Athena and endow her with Athena's many-sided- 
 ness. In reality the little peasant goddess of Falerii 
 had originally nothing in common with Athena 
 except the fact that both of them were interested in 
 handicraft and the handicraftsman, but Athena had a 
 hundred other interests besides, while this one thing 
 seems to have filled the whole of Minerva's horizon. 
 When Minerva went on her travels into Etruria, 
 she came among a people who eventually learned 
 from the representations of Greek art a very con- 
 siderable amount of Greek mythology, and who, 
 when they heard of Athena, saw her resemblance to 
 Minerva and began thus to associate the two. But 
 even in this association Minerva was still pre- 
 eminently the goddess of the artisan and the labour- 
 ing man, she was the patroness of the works of 
 man's hands rather than of the works of his mind, 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 47 
 
 and as such she was brought into Rome by Etruscan 
 and Faliscan workmen. At first she was worshipped 
 merely by these workmen in their own houses, but 
 by degrees as the number of these workmen increased 
 and as a knowledge of their handicraft spread to 
 native Romans, Minerva became so prominent that 
 the state was compelled to acknowledge her, and 
 to accept her among the gods of the state. But it 
 was a very different acknowledgment from that of 
 Hercules or Castor ; these gods had been received 
 inside the pomerium, but Minerva was given a 
 temple outside, over on the Aventine. None the 
 less her cult throve, and her power was soon shown 
 both religiously and socially. Her great festival was 
 on the 19th of March, a day which had been 
 originally sacred to Mars, but the presence of 
 Minerva's celebrations on that day soon caused the 
 associations with Mars to be almost entirely forgotten. 
 Socially her temple became the meeting-place of all 
 the artisans of Rome, it was at once their religious 
 centre and their business headquarters. There they 
 met in their primitive guilds [collegia) and arranged 
 their affairs, and thus it continued to be as long as 
 pagan Rome lasted. The respect shown to these 
 guilds of Minerva is nowhere more clearly exhibited 
 than in an incident which happened in the time 
 of the Second Punic War, several centuries after 
 the introduction of the cult. Terrified by adverse 
 portents the Roman Senate instructed the old poet 
 
48 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 Livius Andronicus to write a hymn in honour of 
 Juno and to train a chorus of youths and maidens to 
 sing it. The hymn was sung, and was such a great 
 success that the gratitude of the Senate took the 
 form of granting permission to the poets of the city 
 to have a guild of their own, and a meeting-place 
 along with the older guilds in the temple of Minerva 
 on the Aventine. This was the Roman state's first 
 expression of literary appreciation ; from her stand- 
 point it was flattery indeed, for were not poets 
 by this decree made equal to butchers, bakers, and 
 cloth-makers, and was not poetry acknowledged to 
 be of some practical use and adjudged a legitimate 
 occupation ? 
 
 The history of the cult of Minerva is much more 
 complicated than that of Hercules or Castor. Like 
 them she was subjected to strong Greek influence, 
 and, as we shall see later, not very long after her 
 introduction she was taken into the company of 
 Juppiter and Juno, thus forming the famous 
 Capitoline triad. Also temples were built to her 
 individually under various aspects of the worship of 
 Athena with whom she gradually became identified, 
 but in the old Aventine temple the original idea 
 of Minerva, the working man's friend, continued 
 practically unchanged. Doubtless the society of 
 Servius's day, who witnessed the coming of Minerva, 
 did not realise what this introduction meant, and how 
 absolutely necessary it was for Rome's future develop- 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS , 49 
 
 ment that the artisan class should be among her 
 people, and that this class should be represented in 
 the world of the gods. They little knew that in the 
 temple on the Aventine was being brought to ex- 
 pression the trade-union idea, which was to pass over 
 into the mediaeval guild of both workmen and 
 masters, still under religious auspices,, and to find a 
 latter-day parody in the modern libear-union, with 
 its spirit of hostility to employers, and its indifference, 
 at least as an organisation, to things religious. 
 
 Trade and handicraft were thus added to the 
 Roman world, of men on earth, and of the gods 
 above the earth, and it remains for us to consider 
 the awakening of the political spirit and its cor- 
 responding religious phenomenon ; but before we do 
 this, we must clear the way by casting aside one 
 ancient hypothesis connected with Servius's religious 
 reforms, which is not correct, at least in the way in 
 which the ancients meant it. 
 
 The writing of the earlier period of Rome's history 
 is sometimes complicated rather than helped by the 
 statements of the generally well-meaning but often 
 misguided historians of later times. Their real 
 knowledge of the facts was in many cases no greater 
 than ours, while they lacked what modern histo- 
 rians possess : a breadth of view and a knowledge 
 of the phenomena of history in many periods and 
 among many nations. The study of the social and 
 religious movements under Servius presents us with 
 
 E 
 
so REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 an interesting illustration of this. It was customary 
 namely to ascribe to Servius TuUius the introduction 
 of the cult of Fortuna, and Plutarch takes occasion 
 twice in his Moralia to describe the interest of 
 Servius in this cult and to recount the extraordinary 
 number of temples which he built to the great 
 goddess of chance under her various attributes, 
 The Romans of Plutarch's day thought of Fortuna 
 in very much the way in which their poets, especially 
 Horace, described her, as a great and powerful 
 goddess of chance, the personification of the element 
 of apparent caprice which seems to be present in 
 the running of the universe. It is very much our 
 way of thinking of her, and of course both our own 
 concept and the later Roman concept go back to 
 Greece. But Greece had not always had this idea 
 of the goddess of luck. The older purer age of 
 Greek thought was permeated with the idea of the 
 absolute immutable character of the divine will, a 
 belief which precluded the possibility of chance or 
 caprice. The earliest Greek Tyche (Fortuna) was 
 the daughter of Zeus who fulfilled his will ; and 
 that his will through her was often a beneficent will 
 is shown in the tendency to think of her as a goddess 
 of plenty. It was only the growth of scepticism, 
 the failure of faith to bear up under the apparently 
 contradictory lessons of experience, which brought 
 into being in the Alexandrian age Tyche, the 
 goddess of chance, the winged capricious deity 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS- 51 
 
 poised on the ball. It was this habit of thought 
 which eventually gave the Romans that idea of 
 Fortuna which has became our idea because it is 
 the prevalent one in Roman literature and life in 
 the periods with which we are most familiar. Now 
 if Fortuna be thought of in this latter way, it is a 
 very easy matter to connect her with Servius Tullius, 
 for the legendary accounts of Servius's career picture 
 him as a very child of " fortune," raised from the 
 lowest estate to the highest power, the little slave 
 boy who became king. What goddess would he 
 delight to honour, if not the goddess of the happy 
 chance which had made him what he was ? 
 
 All this is very pretty, but it is unfortunately 
 quite impossible, because whatever the time may 
 have been when Fortuna began to be worshipped in 
 Rome, it is certain that the idea of chance did not 
 enter into the concept of her until long after Servius's 
 day. Instead the early Fortuna was a goddess of 
 plenty and fertility, among mankind as a protectress 
 of women and of childbirth, among the crops and 
 the herds as a goddess of fertility and fecundity. 
 Her full name was probably Fors Fortuna, a name 
 which survived in two old temples across the river 
 from Rome proper, in Trastevere, where she was 
 worshipped in the country by the farmers in behalf 
 of the crops. Fortuna is thus merely the cult-name 
 added to the old goddess Fors to intensify her 
 meaning, which finally broke off from her and 
 
52 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 became independent, expressing the same idea of a 
 goddess of plenty. Later under Greek influence the 
 concept of luck, especially good-luck, slowly displaced 
 the older idea. The possibility of such a transition 
 from fertility to good-luck is shown us in the phrase 
 " arbor felix," which originally meant a fruitful tree 
 and later a tree of good omen. As regards Fortuna 
 and Servius therefore there is no inherent reason why 
 they should have been connected, and whenever it 
 was that Fortuna began to exist, be it before or after 
 Servius, she came into the world as a goddess of 
 plenty and did not turn into a goddess of luck till 
 centuries after her birth. 
 
 It must not be supposed that Rome in this sixth 
 century before Christ could take into herself all these 
 traders and artisans, and become thus interested also 
 among her own citizens in these new employments, 
 without receiving a corresponding impulse toward 
 a larger political life. Thus there began that ever- 
 increasing participation in the affairs of the Latin 
 league, which was her first step toward acquiring a 
 world dominion. It is probable that Rome had 
 always belonged to this league, but at first as a very 
 insignificant member. Those were the days in which 
 Alba Longa stood out as leader, a leadership which 
 she afterwards lost, but of which the recollection 
 was retained because the Alban Mount behind Alba 
 Longa remained the cult-centre, connected with the 
 worship of the god of the league, the Juppiter of the 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS ^s> 
 
 Latins (Juppiter Latiaris), not only until B.C. 338 
 when the league ceased to exist, but even later when 
 Rome kept up a sentimental celebration of the old 
 festival. In the course of time, for reasons which 
 we do not know. Alba Longa's power declined and 
 the mantle of her supremacy fell upon Aricia, a 
 little town still in existence not far from Albano. 
 The coming of Aricia to the presidency of the league 
 started a religious movement which is one of the 
 most extraordinary in the checkered history of 
 Roman religion. The ultimate result of this move- 
 ment was the introduction of the goddess Diana into 
 the state-cult of Rome, where she was subsequently 
 identified with Apollo's sister Artemis. But this is 
 a long story, and to understand it we must go back 
 some distance to make our beginning. 
 
 Among the more savage tribes and in the wilder 
 mountain regions of both Greece and Italy there was 
 worshipped a goddess who had a different name in 
 each country, Artemis in Greece, Diana in Italy, but 
 who was in nature very much the same. This does 
 not imply that it was the same goddess orginally or 
 that the early Artemis of Greece had any influence 
 on the Diana of Italy. Their similarity was probably 
 caused merely by the similarity of the conditions from 
 which they sprang, the similar needs of the two 
 peoples. She was a goddess of the woods, and of 
 nature, and especially of wild animals, a patroness of 
 the hunt and the huntsman, but also a goddess of all 
 
54 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 small animals, of all helpless little ones, and a helper 
 too of those that bore them, hence a goddess of birth, 
 and in the sphere of mankind a goddess of women 
 and of childbirth. Later in Greece Artemis was 
 absorbed into the sea-cult of Apollo on the island of 
 Delos, where she became Apollo's sister, like him the 
 child of Latona ; but naturally Diana experienced no 
 similar change until in Rome, centuries later, she was 
 artificially identified with Artemis. In the earliest 
 times there were two places in Italy where the cult 
 of Diana was especially prominent, both, as we 
 should expect, in wooded mountainous regions : one 
 on Mount Tifata (near Capua), the modern St. Angelo 
 in Formis ; the other in Latium, in a grove near 
 Aricia. It is with this latter cult-centre that we 
 have here to do. The grove near Aricia became so 
 famous that the goddess worshipped there was known 
 as " Diana of the Grove " (Diana Nemorensis), and 
 the place where she was worshipped was called the 
 " Grove " {nemus), a name which is still retained in the 
 modern " Nemi." She was a goddess of the woods, 
 of the animal kingdom, of birth, and so of women ; 
 and almost all the dedicatory inscriptions which have 
 been found near her shrine were put up by women. 
 She was worshipped above all by the people of 
 Aricia, and she seems to have been the patron deity 
 of the town. When it fell to Aricia's lot to become 
 the head of the league, her goddess Diana promptly 
 assumed an important position in the league, not 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 55 
 
 because she had by nature any political bearing 
 whatsoever, but merely because she was wedded to 
 Aricia, and experienced all the vicissitudes of her 
 career. Thus there came into the league, alongside 
 of the old Juppiter Latiaris of the Alban Mount, the 
 new Diana Nemorensis of Aricia, and sacrifices to 
 her formed a part of the solemn ritual of the united 
 towns of Latium. It does not take actually a great 
 many years for a religious custom to acquire sanctity, 
 and before many generations had passed, Diana was 
 felt to be quite as original and essential a part of the 
 worship of the league as Juppiter himself During 
 these same centuries Rome was growing in importance 
 and influence in the league, until, instead of being 
 one of its insignificant towns, she was in a fair 
 way to become its president. Here her diplomacy 
 stepped in to help her. The league was of course 
 essentially a political institution, but in a primitive 
 society political institutions are still in tutelage to 
 religious ones, and the direct road to strong political 
 influence lies through religious zeal. The way to 
 leadership in the Latin league lay through excessive 
 devotion to Juppiter and Diana. It is therefore no 
 accidental coincidence that we find Rome in the period 
 of Servius building a temple to Juppiter Latiaris on 
 the top of the Alban Mount, and introducing the 
 worship of Diana into Rome, building her a temple 
 on the Aventine, hence outside the pomerium. Yet 
 it was not the introduction of her worship as an 
 
S6 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 ordinary state-cult, for then she would have been 
 taken inside the pomerium with far greater right 
 than Hercules and Castor were. It was, on the 
 contrary, the building of a sanctuary of the league 
 outside the pomerium, yet inside the civil wall ; not 
 the adoption of Diana as a Roman goddess, but the 
 close association of the Diana of the Latin league 
 with Rome. It was the attempt to put Rome 
 religiously as well as politically in^^ the position 
 which Aricia held ; and it was successful. Diana 
 was still the league-goddess ; tradition has it that 
 the league helped to build the temple ; and the 
 dedication day of the temple, August 13, was the 
 same as that of the temple at Nemi. The Roman 
 temple was outside the pomerium therefore, not 
 because she was a foreign goddess like Minerva, but 
 because as a league-goddess she must be outside, not 
 inside, the sacred wall of Rome. 
 
 Diana had been introduced for a specific purpose 
 as part of a diplomatic game, not because Rome felt 
 any real religious need of her ; it is hardly to be 
 expected therefore that her subsequent career in 
 Rome would be of any great importance. Naturally 
 when once the state had taken the responsibility of 
 the cult upon itself, that cult was assured as long as 
 pagan Rome lasted, for the state was always faithful, 
 at least in the mechanical performance of a ritual 
 act ; but popular interest could not be counted on, 
 especially as many of the things which Diana stood 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 57 
 
 for, for example her relation to women, were ably 
 represented by Juno. It is not likely that Diana 
 would ever have been of importance in the religion of 
 subsequent time, had it not been for another accident 
 which served to keep alive the interest in Diana, 
 just as the accident of Diana's connection with the 
 Latin league had aroused that interest in the begin- 
 ning. This was the coming of Apollo and his sister 
 Artemis. Apollo came first, probably during the 
 time of Servius, but Artemis seems to have come 
 much later, not before B.C. 431. Her identification 
 with Diana was inevitable, and from that time onward 
 Diana begins a new life with all the attributes and 
 myths of Artemis, but this new Artemis-Diana was 
 quite as different a goddess from the old Aventine 
 Diana as the new Athena-Minerva was from the old 
 Aventine Minerva. 
 
 The political interest of the Romans had been 
 aroused, they had found their life-work, their career 
 was opening before them, and it must not be 
 supposed that the reflex action of this new political 
 spirit on the religious world was confined to the 
 building of two league temples, one to Juppiter 
 Latiaris on the Alban Mount, miles away from 
 Rome, and one to Diana outside the pomerium 
 over in the woods of the Aventine. This political 
 interest was no artificial acquisition, but the inevit- 
 able expression of an instinct. It must therefore 
 find its representation inside the city, in connexion 
 
S8 REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 with a deity who was already deep in the hearts o 
 the people. This deity could be none other thar 
 the sky-father Juppiter, who had stood by them ir 
 the old days of their exclusively farming life, sending 
 them sunshine and rain in due season. Up on the 
 Capitoline he was worshipped as Feretrius, "the 
 striker," in his most fearful attribute as the god of 
 the lightning. To him the richest spoils of war 
 {spolia opimd) were due, and to him the conqueror 
 gave thanks on his return from battle. It was this 
 Juppiter of the Capitoline who was chosen to be the 
 divine representative of Rome's political ambition ; 
 and her confidence in the future, and the omen of 
 her inevitable success lay in the cult-names, the 
 cognomina, with which this Juppiter was henceforth 
 and forever adorned, Juppiter Optimus Maximus. 
 These adjectives are no mere idle ornament, no 
 purely pleasant phraseology; they express not merely 
 the excellence of Rome's Juppiter but his absolute 
 superiority to all other Juppiters, including Juppiter 
 Latiaris. And so while Rome with one hand was 
 building a temple for the league on the Alban 
 Mount, merely as a member of the league, with the 
 other hand she was building a temple in the heart 
 of her city to a god who was to bring into subjection 
 to himself all other gods who dared to challenge his 
 supremacy, just as the city which paid him honour 
 was to overcome all other cities which refused to 
 acknowledge her. From henceforth Juppiter Optimus 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 59 
 
 Maximus represents all that is most truly Roman in 
 Rome. It was under his banner that her battles 
 were fought, it was to him in all time to come that 
 returning generals gave thanks. 
 
 Tradition sets the completion of the Capitoline 
 temple in the first year of the republic, but the idea 
 and the actual beginning of the work belong to the 
 later kingdom and hence to our present period, and 
 the contemplation of it forms a fitting close to the 
 development which we have tried to sketch. And 
 now that this part of our work is over it may be 
 well to ask ourselves what we have seen, for there 
 have been so many bypaths which we have of 
 necessity explored, that the main road we have 
 travelled may not be entirely distinct in our mind. 
 In the period which corresponds to the later king- 
 dom, and roughly to the sixth century before Christ, 
 and which we have called " Servian " for convenience, 
 we have watched a primitive pastoral community, 
 isolated from the world's life, turning into a small 
 city-state with political interests, the beginnings of 
 trade and handicraft, and various rival social classes ; 
 and we have seen how along with the coming of 
 these outside interests there came various new cults 
 connected with them, most of them implying entirely 
 new deities, and only one or two of them new sides 
 of old deities. The body of old Roman religion had 
 received its first blows ; what Tacitus {Hist. i. 4) 
 says of the downfall of the empire — " Then was that 
 
6o REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS 
 
 secret of the empire disclosed, that it was possible 
 for a ruler to be appointed elsewhere than at Rome " 
 — is true of Roman religion in this period when it 
 was discovered that the state might take into itself 
 deities from outside Rome. And yet while the 
 principle itself was fatal, the practice of it, so far, 
 had been without much harm. Rome's growth was 
 inevitable, it was quite as inevitable that these new 
 interests should be represented in the world of the 
 gods ; her old gods did not suffice, hence new ones 
 were introduced. But the actual gods brought in thus 
 far were harmless ; Hercules, Castor, Minerva, Diana 
 never did Rome any injury in themselves, never 
 injured her national morale, never lowered the tone 
 of earnest sobriety which had been characteristic of 
 the old regime. 
 
 So far it was good, and well had it been for 
 Rome if she could have shut the gate of her 
 Olympus now. What the old religion had not 
 provided was now present. Politics, trade, and art 
 were now represented. With these she was abun- 
 dantly supplied for all her future career. But that 
 was not to be, the gate was still open, and the 
 destructive influence of Greece was soon to send in a 
 host of new deities, who were destined not only to 
 overwhelm the old Roman gods — which in itself we 
 might forgive — but to sap away the old Roman 
 virtues, to the maintenance of which the atmosphere 
 of these old gods was essential. The forerunner of 
 
REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS , 6i 
 
 this influence was in himself innocent enough, it 
 was Apollo, and it is to his coming and the sub- 
 sequent developments which set him in distinct 
 opposition to Juppiter Optimus Maximus that we 
 now turn. 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 The Rome of the first consuls was a very different 
 Rome from that of the earHer kings. Not only was 
 the population larger but it was divided socially 
 into different classes. The simple patriarchal one- 
 class community had been transformed into the 
 complex structure of a society which had in it 
 virtually all those elements and interests, except 
 the more strictly intellectual ones, which go to 
 make up what we call society in the modern 
 sense. The world of the gods also had in- 
 creased in population, and there too there was 
 present a slight social distinction between the old 
 gods {Indigetes) and the new-comers {Novenstdes), 
 though it is open to question how strongly this 
 distinction was felt. The new gods thus far were 
 not incommensurable with the old ones. They 
 formed a tolerably harmonious circle, and there was 
 not felt to be any need of new priesthoods ; the old 
 priests were sufficient to look after them all. There 
 were a few new names, and a few new temples or 
 altars, but everything was in the old spirit, and there 
 
 62 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL ,63 
 
 was no rivalry between the old and the new. None 
 of the old gods was crowded into the background 
 by the new-comers. This was on the face of it 
 impossible as yet, because the new gods all repre- 
 sented new ideas which had not been provided for 
 under the old scheme. Even Diana, who afterwards 
 usurped somewhat the functions of Juno, stood at 
 present pre-eminently for the political idea pure and 
 simple, so far as Rome was concerned. This period 
 of equipoise did not continue very long, but while 
 it lasted it was beyond doubt the best and strongest 
 period in the whole history of Roman religion. 
 There was no violent religious enthusiasm, but then 
 there was no corresponding depression offsetting it. 
 It was the cold but conscientious formalism which 
 was best adapted to the Roman character, because 
 so long as it held sway the excesses of superstition 
 were avoided. 
 
 , But this element of superstition was already on 
 ipie way, it came in within a few years of the open- 
 ing of the republic, and it exercised its insidious 
 influence ever more and more powerfully until it 
 celebrated its wildest orgies in the time of the Second 
 Punic War. It is in this period of the first three 
 centuries of the republic, roughly from B.C. 500 to 
 B.C. 200, that this change was produced. Outwardly 
 it resembled a steady growth in religious feeling and 
 enthusiasm, and it might well have seemed so to 
 contemporaries. It was a period of many new gods 
 
64 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 and many new temples, but this in itself was no 
 harm. It was the principle behind it which did the 
 damage. It was the essential contradiction to what 
 true Roman religion and Roman character demanded ; 
 and the last half of the republic paid the price for 
 what the first half had done, in a decline of faith 
 which has scarcely been exceeded in the world's 
 history. 
 
 It has been customary for writers on the history 
 of Roman morals to attribute these changes to the 
 coming of Greek influence ; and of course in the 
 main this is correct, but these writers have in general 
 neglected to analyse this Greek influence more 
 closely, and to distinguish the various aspects of it 
 in different periods, and to ask and answer the 
 question why this influence should be so par- 
 ticularly harmful to the Romans. It is generally 
 spoken of as the influence of Greek literature and 
 philosophy, but for our present period this is 
 entirely incorrect, for we all know that Greek 
 literature did not begin to influence Rome until the 
 time of the Punic wars, and yet the Greek influence 
 of which we speak here began to exert its effects 
 two hundred and fifty years before the Punic wars. 
 The real cause of the unnatural stimulation of 
 religion during these three centuries is nothing, 
 more nor less than the books of the Sibylline oracles. 
 It is therefore a very definite and interesting problem 
 which we have before us. It is to examine the 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL ' 65 
 
 workings of these oracles and to explain why they 
 had such an extraordinary effect on religion and 
 society, that in three centuries they could entirely 
 change both the form and the content of Roman 
 religion, and under the guise of increasing its zeal, 
 so sap its vitality that it required almost two 
 hundred years of human experience and suffering 
 before true religion was in some sense at least 
 restored to its own place. 
 
 Like the origin of almost all the great religious 
 movements in the world's history, the beginnings of 
 the Sibylline books are shrouded in mystery. A 
 later age, for whom history had no secrets, with a 
 cheap would-be omniscience told of the old woman 
 who visited Tarquin and offered him nine books 
 for a certain price, and when he refused to pay it, 
 went away, burned three, and then returning offered 
 him at the original price the six that were left ; on 
 his again refusing she went away, burned three more 
 and finally offered at the same old price the three 
 that remained, which he accepted. Except as a 
 sidelight on the .character of the early Greek trader 
 the story is worthless. It is doubtful even if the 
 presence of the Sibylline books in Rome goes back 
 beyond the republic. The first dateable use of 
 them was in the year B.C. 496, and there is one 
 little fact connected with them which makes it 
 probable that they did not come in until the republic 
 had begun. This is the circumstance that in view 
 
 F 
 
66 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 of the great secrecy of the books it is unthinkable 
 that they should ever have been in Rome without 
 especial guardians, and yet the earliest guardians 
 that we know of were a newly made priesthood con- 
 sisting originally of two men, the so-called "two 
 men in charge of the sacrifices " {Ilviri sums 
 faciundis). Now the form of this title is peculiar ; 
 it is not a proper name like the titles of all the 
 other priesthoods. Instead it is built on the plan 
 of the titles of the special committees appointed by 
 the Senate for administrative purposes ; it bears every 
 mark therefore of having arisen under the republic, 
 rather than under the kingdom, at a time when the 
 Senate had the supreme control. So much may 
 be said regarding the time when they were intro- 
 duced into Rome ; as for the place from which they 
 came, this was without doubt the Greek colonies 
 of Southern Italy, probably the oldest and most 
 important of them, Cumae, so famous for its Sibyl. 
 This was not the first association that Rome had 
 had with Cumae, for in all probability the worship 
 of Apollo had spread from there into Rome toward 
 the close of the kingdom. Apollo and the books 
 were connected at Cumae, for it was Apollo who 
 inspired the Sibyl, and the oracles were his commands, 
 but it is almost certain that Apollo came to Rome 
 in advance of the oracles. He came there as a god 
 of healing and was given a sacred place outside the 
 pomerium in the Campus Martius, on the spot 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 67 
 
 where later (B.C. 431) a temple was built for him 
 with his si.ster Artemis -Diana and their mother 
 Latona. This was the only state temple that Apollo 
 ever had, until Augustus built the famous one on 
 the Palatine. It was in the wake of Apollo that 
 the Sibylline books came. As for the books them- 
 selves, they were kept so secret that we cannot 
 expect to know much about them, but in rare cases 
 where the seriousness of the exigency warranted it, 
 the Senate permitted the actual publication of the 
 oracle upon which its action was based, and of 
 the oracles thus published one or two have been 
 preserved to us. They were of course written in 
 Greek and were phrased in the ambiguous style 
 which for obvious reasons was the most advantageous 
 style for oracles. They commanded the worship of 
 certain specific deities, naturally all of them Greek, 
 and the performance of certain more or less com- 
 plicated ritual acts. When they were received in 
 Rome, they were placed in the temple of Juppiter 
 Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline in the keeping 
 of their guardians, the new priesthood of the " two 
 men in charge of the sacrifices." This committee 
 of two was enlarged to ten in B.C. 367 when the 
 great compromise between the Patricians and the 
 Plebeians was made, and the Plebeians were 
 admitted into this one priesthood, with five repre- 
 sentatives. Subsequently Sulla made the number 
 fifteen, which continued as the official number from 
 
68 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 that time on, so that the priesthood is ordinarily 
 called the Quindecenwiri, even when one of the older 
 periods is referred to. The real control of the books 
 however lay in the hands of the Senate. When the 
 Senate saw fit, the priests were ordered to consult 
 the books, but without this special command even 
 their guardians dared not approach them. The 
 priests reported to the Senate what they had found, 
 and the Senate then decreed whatever actions the 
 oracles commanded. The carrying out of these 
 actions was again in the charge of the Sibylline 
 priests, who performed the ceremonies demanded and 
 were for all time to come responsible for the mainten- 
 ance of any new cults which might be introduced. 
 
 When we see how carefully these oracles were 
 guarded and how circumspectly their use was hedged 
 about by senatorial control, and when we think how 
 relatively little harm the use of oracles had wrought 
 in Greece in all the centuries of her history, it may 
 well seem as if the statements made in the beginning 
 of this chapter about the havoc caused by these 
 oracles were grossly exaggerated. But the efforts of 
 the Senate to safeguard these oracles only prove 
 that the older and wiser men in the community 
 realised how dangerous they were, and the com- 
 parison with Greece leads to a consideration of 
 certain essential differences between the Greek and 
 the Roman temperament which made that which 
 was meat for one into poison for the other. 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 69 
 
 In the older purer age of Greece the gods were 
 never far away from men, they lived almost side by 
 side with them ; there were to be sure many gods 
 of whom they were afraid and from whom they 
 desired to keep as far away as possible, but there 
 were a great many other gods of whom they liked 
 to think. In constructing the records of their 
 history they did not work backwards from the light 
 of the present into an ever darkening past, but they 
 began from the beginning in the full light of the 
 gods from whom all things sprang, and mythology 
 passed into history by imperceptible gradations. 
 They knew more about the beginning when all 
 things were completely in the hands of the gods 
 than they did about their immediate past. Art 
 began very early to make them familiar with the 
 appearance of the gods, so that there was little that 
 was mysterious about their religion, so little that the 
 element of mystery had later to be almost artificially 
 cultivated in the " mysteries.'' They respected the 
 gods rather than feared them, and they felt that the 
 gods would do them no harm unless they themselves 
 first sinned against them or their own fellow-men, 
 and the oracles of Delphi were no more terrifying to 
 them than the coming of the word of God was to 
 the prophets of Israel. They were accustomed to 
 these messages, which were almost every-day affairs. 
 It was all a part of that marvellous poise of nature 
 which made the every-day mortal Greek almost as 
 
70 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 calm as the unperturbed imperturbable faces of their 
 gods as their great sculptors saw them. 
 
 In Rome all was very different. The superstitious 
 element in the Italian character, which amazes us so 
 much to-day when cultured twentieth century men 
 and women in good society persecute their fellows 
 because of the evil eye, is a heritage of many 
 thousand years. Sometimes it seems as if it were 
 the Italian birthright, the blight of Etruria which 
 came into their nature in spite of themselves. It 
 required centuries to educate the Roman into the 
 concept of personal individual gods. He had 
 begun his theological career by terror of unknown 
 powers all about him, and by regarding religion as 
 the science of propitiating the right power on the 
 right occasion. One could not know these powers, 
 one did not desire to. Their gods were at once 
 their masters and their servants, but never their 
 companions. The early Roman knew no such thing 
 as an oracle, the only messages from the gods were 
 the expressions of their wrath, in the sending of 
 prodigies and portents. They did indeed consult 
 the gods by watching the flight of birds or studying 
 the entrails of the sacrifice, but it was merely to 
 obtain a " yes or no " answer to a categorical question 
 as to whether a certain act was pleasing to the gods. 
 Otherwise all about them lay mystery, and at the 
 point where sight failed, since neither imagination 
 nor faith carried them any further, superstition 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 71 
 
 stepped in, and the more they thought of the gods 
 the more terrified they became. Now if you present 
 to a people thus constituted a divine book of infal- 
 lible oracles, you increase their terror in greater 
 measure than the book itself can assuage it, and 
 with the use of the book the simpler forms of their 
 old belief will grow less and less effective in the face 
 of this new " witchcraft,'' which can work wonders. 
 And no matter how you may hedge the use of the 
 book about, it will be used more and more as the 
 craving for magic is increasingly aroused. 
 
 The study of the outward and the inward effects 
 of the Sibylline books is therefore the real history of 
 religion in the first half of the republic. The out- 
 ward effects are. seen in the introduction of a series 
 of Greek gods, who were in themselves in the main 
 eminently respectable, and whose presence was in 
 itself no offence to good morals, and if we stop there 
 we fail to understand why the religious interest of 
 the Second Punic War should change so quickly to 
 the scepticism of the following century. The inward 
 effects however, which, though they are hard to 
 see, may yet be discovered between the lines of 
 the chronicle, will explain all the undermining of 
 foundation, until we wonder not why the structure 
 collapsed so suddenly but how it managed to last so 
 long. 
 
 The history of the activity of the books begins 
 peaceably enough. In the year B.C. 496 Rome was 
 
72 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 in a bad way ; her crops had failed and the importa- 
 tion of grain from Latium was rendered very difficult 
 because of the war with the Latins in which she was 
 engaged. In her distress she turned to the Sibylline 
 books, and on the occasion of this their first recorded 
 use, the oracles ordered the introduction into Rome 
 of the cult of three Greek deities, Demeter, Dionysos, 
 and Kore. It was a most appropriate and character- 
 istic choice. In the first place the deities in question 
 were worshipped at Cumae, the home of the books, 
 whence Rome could, and probably did, borrow the 
 cult ; and in the second place Demeter was the 
 goddess of grain, and it was from Cumae that 
 Rome was already beginning to obtain her imported 
 grain supply. Thus the coming of the Cumaean 
 Demeter into the religious world of Rome is but the 
 sacred parallel to the coming of Cumaean grain into 
 the material world of Rome. The Greek goddess of 
 grain came with the grain, just as Castor had come 
 with the Greek cavalry, with this essential distinction 
 however that Demeter came by the incantation of 
 the books and the enactment of the Senate, whereas 
 Castor's coming was a slow and normal development. 
 It is important to notice closely exactly what 
 happened when these deities were introduced, partly 
 because they form the first recorded instance, and 
 hence may well have acted as a model for subsequent 
 repetitions of the act, but also because we have a 
 more definite knowledge of the phenomena in this 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL - 73 
 
 case than in many others. In the first place it is 
 clear that the deities were felt to be foreign : not 
 only was their temple built out the Aventine way, 
 in the valley of the Circus Maximus, outside the 
 pomerium, but — a much more significant fact — their 
 Greek names were dropped, and they were given 
 Roman names instead, to make them seem less out 
 of place. Then too these Roman names were not 
 new names, translations of their Greek titles, but 
 were the names of already existing Roman deities 
 with whom they were easily identified, so that we 
 see at once that their coming was no real enrichment 
 of the Roman Olympus ; what they stood for was 
 already represented there, and their coming was 
 simply a reduplication, with the consequent result 
 that as these parvenus increased in prominence and 
 influence, they robbed of all their vitality the sober 
 old Roman deities to whom they had attached them- 
 selves. What were these original deities who were 
 thus doomed to death in B.C. 496 ? Demeter took 
 the name of the old Roman goddess Ceres, a goddess 
 of fertility, about whom we know just enough to 
 assert that she belonged to the old religion of Numa 
 and that she was at heart quite a different person 
 from Demeter. All the rest is lost, submerged 
 under the new Demeter-Ceres with her temple built 
 by Greek architects and her April games. It is this 
 new Ceres who soon develops an extraordinary 
 political importance because her temple is to the 
 
74 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 Plebeians as a class what the temple of Minerva is 
 to the unions of organised labour. It is there that 
 they have their meeting-place, and the temple itself 
 is always their treasury as contrasted with the Saturn 
 temple, the treasury of the state as a whole. The 
 very officers of the Plebeians, the famous Plebeian 
 aediles, get their name from association with this 
 temple {aedes). This political side of her activity 
 is the only real advantage, except the grain itself, 
 connected with her importation ; the two form at 
 best a poor economic compensation for the ever 
 increasing immoral effects of the public games of 
 Ceres. 
 
 But though Ceres is the most important of the 
 three deities economically and politically, we must 
 not forget the other two, both of whom are inter- 
 esting, though one of them more for what she is not 
 than for what she is. Along with Demeter came 
 Dlonysos and Demeter's daughter Kore : the three 
 were associated in the solemn mysteries of Eleusis, 
 but none of the beauty of these ideas went over into 
 the Roman cult. Demeter was merely the deified 
 grain-traffic, and Dionysos was little else than the 
 god of wine, while poor Kore fell out without any 
 particular content for a curious reason that we shall 
 see in a moment. The only old Roman deity with 
 whom Dionysos could be identified was the god 
 Liber, who had had a rather interesting history, and 
 who had done enough along the line of self-develop- 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 75 
 
 ment to deserve a better fate than to be crushed 
 to insignificance under the prominence of his new 
 namesake. Liber was at this time a flourishing god 
 of fertility and, since the introduction of the grape 
 into Italy, especially the patron of the fruit of the 
 vine, but he had made his own career, and there was 
 a time when he had no individuality of his own but 
 was merely a cult-adjective of the great god Juppiter, 
 the giver of all fertility in every phase of life. Thus 
 out of the original Juppiter-Liber there had grown 
 the independent god Liber ; and now this Liber lost 
 his individuality by identification with Dionysos. 
 Finally comes Kore, Demeter's daughter. Here 
 the Romans were hard put to it to find a goddess 
 who represented any similar content, and after all 
 this was no light task because Kore has little 
 meaning unless she is taken also as Persephone, 
 Pluto's bride— a process which required a mytho- 
 logical knowledge and appreciation in which the 
 Romans of the early republic were totally lacking. 
 But there was an old goddess Libera, a shadowy 
 potentiality contrasted and paired with the masculine 
 Liber, and they chose her and gave Kore her name. 
 We have a curious proof of how little the Romans 
 knew of Kore-Libera, and of how purely mechanical 
 both the introduction of Kore and her identification 
 with Libera were, in the fact that about two hundred 
 and fifty years later, as we shall see, Persephone, 
 the real Kore, was introduced into Rome as an 
 
76 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 altogether new deity, and existed there side by side 
 with Libera for at least a century before people 
 began to realise that Proserpina and Libera stood 
 for the same Greek goddess. 
 
 It was necessary to go into these details in order 
 that we might understand as much as possible of 
 the process by which the gods of the Sibylline books 
 were assimilated into the body of Roman religion. 
 We see how in the main they were superfluous and 
 therefore unnecessary and even undesirable because 
 by their presence they robbed old Roman deities of 
 their existence, and how those elements in them 
 which were least in accord with the old Roman 
 spirit were most apt to develop, and how in general 
 their adoption was a purely mechanical process, like 
 any act in witchcraft, where the form is all important 
 because the meaning cannot be understood, and how 
 totally different therefore the estate of these gods 
 was in Rome from what it had been in Greece, 
 because in Rome they were introduced, stripped 
 of all their mythology, worshipped only for their 
 practical bearings, and compelled therefore to work 
 for their living. 
 
 The importation of grain from Cumae meant 
 more to Rome than the mere satisfaction of her 
 hysical needs ; it meant much more than the 
 addition of three deities to her state-cult, for the 
 grain thus imported was carried from Cumae to 
 Ostia by sea and so up the Tiber to Rome, and the 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL yj 
 
 whole matter therefore marks one of the important 
 steps in Rome's interest in commerce generally but 
 especially in ocean commerce. As yet she did not 
 do the actual carrying herself, but she began to be 
 interested in it, and the sea began to mean some- 
 thing to this inland town. This increased interest 
 in trade in general and this inceptive interest in 
 those who " go dowij, t9 the sea in ships " have both 
 of them left their reflexion in the religious life of the 
 time ; two new deities are introduced, both of them 
 almost certainly by means of the Sibylline oracles, 
 though some accidental blanks in our historical 
 tradition have deprived us of details. 
 jXThe chronicle of the year B.C. 495 tells us that 
 there was a dispute in that year as to who should 
 dedicate the temple of Mercury. This is Mercury's 
 first appearance in our sources. The circumstances 
 of the vowing of the temple have been omitted 
 through some oversight, but in spite of this the con- 
 nexion of his introduction with the Sibylline books 
 is beyond all reasonable doubt, for the simple reason 
 that the guardians of the oracles always looked after 
 his cult in all subsequent time. Notwithstanding the 
 suddenness of his appearance and the silence of the 
 chronicle, his story is quite clear and his past history 
 easy to restore, at least in outline. 
 
 The versatile Hermes, who as messenger of the 
 gods plays a part in so many Greek myths, became 
 in the course of time among other things associated 
 
78 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 with travelling, as god of roads, and also with trade, 
 partly because trading necessitates travelling, and 
 partly because Hermes was also the protector of the 
 market-place in which the trading was done. Thus 
 he was called " Hermes Protector of the Merchant " 
 [Empolaios) and in this capacity went into the colonies 
 of Greece, including those of Southern Italy. Thus 
 Hermes travelled with the grain merchant from 
 Cumae and became known to the Romans. They 
 however knew him merely as the god of trade, and 
 their name for him is nothing but the translation into 
 Latin of his Greek cult-title : Empolaios = Mercurius. 
 For a long time it was thought that there had existed a 
 Mercurius among the original gods of Rome, but the 
 traces of this old god are apparent rather than real 
 and suggest one phase of that pastime of which the 
 later Romans were so fond, that of writing history 
 backwards and putting an artificial halo of antiquity 
 about the gods whom they borrowed from Greece. 
 Thus Mercury was received into the state-cult at 
 about the time when the grain trade began, and was, 
 as it were, the divine representative of the interest 
 which the Roman state took in the whole trans- 
 action. His temple was outside the pomerium on 
 the Aventine side of the Circus Maximus. It was 
 in this temple of the merchant god that the primitive 
 Chamber of Commerce {collegium mercatoriini) had 
 its beginning, an association, partly sacral, partly 
 commercial, whose members, the mermriales, are 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL ' 79 
 
 frequently met with in literature and also in inscrip- 
 tions, one of which has been found as far away as 
 the island of Delos. In the actual cult of the 
 Romans Mercury never regained the many-sidedness 
 which he had lost in coming to them merely as a 
 god of trade. In this capacity he appears on the 
 sextans of the old copper coinage, and under the 
 empire he went into the provinces as the companion 
 of Mars, since the merchant went side by side with 
 the soldier. On the contrary when in the third 
 century before Christ Greek literature came to Rome, 
 this simple idea of Mercury was reinforced by many 
 new Greek ideas and he entered into Roman poetry 
 with all the attributes and functions of Hermes ; but 
 this had little or no effect on the cult and there were 
 no great rivals to the old temple near the Circus 
 Maximus, no cult-centre with advanced Greek ideas, 
 as we have seen spring up in the case of Hercules, 
 Castor, Minerva, and Diana. 
 
 We have already seen how the rise of the grain 
 trade brought four new deities to Rome, but there 
 is one more chapter to our story. The grain itself 
 and the trade itself had now obtained their divine 
 complements, but the sea had not yet received its 
 due ; it too must have its parallel among the gods of 
 Rome. And so it came to pass that again under 
 the influence of the fateful books, though exactly 
 when or how we cannot say, the Greek Poseidon 
 came into Rome. The sea had always meant much 
 
8o THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 to the Greeks, and the joyful shout of Xenophon's 
 troops "The sea ! the sea ! " finds an echo all through 
 the centuries of Greek history before and after the 
 Anabasis. But the multitude of islands and harbours 
 in Greece is in marked contrast to the dearth of 
 them in Italy, where even to-day there is no good 
 port of call on the west coast between Naples and 
 Civitavecchia — and the latter would be useless, were 
 it not for Trajan's mole. In Italy accordingly the 
 sea-god Poseidon was worshipped only in the Greek 
 colonies, where however he had two famous cults, 
 one at Tarentum, later called Colonia Neptunia, and 
 one at Paestum, whose old name was Poseidonia. 
 The Romans had worshipped deities of water in 
 abundance, as became an agricultural people, for 
 water meant life, and drought, death ; but their 
 deities were those of the sweet waters of springs and 
 rivers, they knew no god of the sea. But when the 
 oracles brought Poseidon to Rome he was identified 
 with an old Roman water-god Neptune, whose cult 
 henceforward included the sea. We do not know 
 where the shrine of the old sweet-water Neptune had 
 been, but his old festival had occurred on July 23. 
 The new Poseidon-Neptune was given a temple 
 outside the pomerium in the Campus Martius, but 
 the new was connected with the old in so far at least 
 that the dedication day of the new temple was July 
 23, the day of the old Neptune festival, 
 
 With the introduction of Neptune, the sea-god, 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL ' 8i 
 
 the state had accomplished, as it were, a sort of 
 divine marine insurance ; the transport of the grain 
 was now watched over by a Roman god ; but it 
 was not to be expected that the cult of a sea- 
 god would ever mean very much to the Romans. 
 The maritime commerce of the Eternal City was 
 very slow in developing, and it grew to its sub- 
 sequent proportions, not because the Romans of 
 Italy engaged in it, but because those foreigners who 
 took to the sea by nature later became Romans. 
 Nor did naval warfare fall to her lot until the First 
 Punic War, and even then her victories were gained 
 by the tactics of land fighting transferred to the decks 
 of two ships, her own and the enemy's, fastened 
 together by landing-bridges, and the glory of victory 
 was due not to Neptune but to Mars. It was not 
 until the civil wars at the close of the republic that 
 real naval battles occurred, and that Neptune received 
 his share of glory for the victory at Actium in B.C. 
 31, and later over Sextus Pompeius, in a temple 
 erected by Agrippa in the Campus Martius, behind 
 the beautiful columns of which the Roman Stock- 
 Exchange transacts its business to-day. 
 ^/ In the first decade of the republic therefore, as 
 we have seen, a group of Greek gods was introduced 
 by the Sibylline oracles, no one of whom can be 
 said to have been really needed, no one of whom 
 except the sea-element in Neptune represented any 
 new and vital principles not already present in the 
 
 G 
 
82 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 religious world, if not of Numa, at least of Servius. 
 The best that can be said of these gods is that 
 one or two of them, notably Mercury and Nep- 
 tune, exerted no positively detrimental influences on 
 later generations. For the next two centuries our 
 chronicles are silent, so far as the actual introduction 
 of new deities by the aid of the books is concerned, 
 and it is not until B.C. 293 that the narrative of new 
 gods begins again. But in other ways the oracles 
 were not idle during these two hundred years. We 
 must rid ourselves of the idea that it was necessary 
 that their consultation should always result in the 
 importation of some new Greek deity. The oracles 
 might order the carrying out of some new religious 
 rite regarding the deities already present, and these 
 religious rites, especially the public processions so 
 frequently performed, feed the ever-growing super- 
 stition of the populace. It is essential to a charm 
 or incantation that it should contain something 
 strange or foreign, it is above all things help from 
 without ; and when the gods send prodigies and 
 portents, when their statues weep and sweat blood, 
 when cattle speak, and meteors fall from the sky, 
 something strange and unusual must be done to 
 counteract these things. Among the foreign acts 
 thus ordered the sacred procession occurs frequently. 
 It started from the temple of Apollo in the Campus 
 Martius and passed into the city through the Porta 
 Carmentalis, went across the Forum and then outside 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 83 
 
 the pomeriuin again to the temple of Ceres, and 
 then to the temple of Juno Regina on the Aventine. 
 It was therefore a power from without which came 
 into their city to purify them and to carry away out 
 of the city again the impurities of which it had rid 
 the community. 
 
 It is also characteristic of such semi-magical 
 things that they lose their effects after a few applica- 
 tions, and other things must be sought always more 
 complicated and more strange. Thus from the 
 beginning of the republic down through the Second 
 Punic War we have a series of extraordinary measures, 
 growing more and more complicated until in the 
 religious frenzy of the years after Cannae even 
 human sacrifices are performed at the command of 
 the books. In this the third century before Christ 
 deities begin again to be introduced, and it is to 
 this century that we now turn. 
 ^ It is probable that the Romans had always 
 worshipped certain powers of healing, but what their 
 names were under the old regime we do not know, 
 except that possibly they were connected with the 
 gods of water. At the close of the kingdom they 
 received, as we have seen, Apollo the divine healer, 
 Apollo Medicus, and this was originally the only 
 side of his activity which he exercised at Rome. 
 At various seasons of plague during the early 
 centuries of the republic they called on him for help, 
 and on one such occasion (B.C. 431) they built him 
 
84 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 a temple. But in the course of time men began tc 
 think lightly of the old family physician who hac; 
 stood by the Romans during more than two centuries 
 his methods were too conservative, they were fell 
 not to be thoroughly up to date. A new god oi 
 healing had appeared in Rome, the Greek god 
 Asklepios, whom myth called Apollo's son, though 
 originally he had had no connection with Apollo 
 His great sanctuary was at Epidauros, and from 
 there his cult spread over all the Greek world. At 
 first he was known at Rome only in the worship oj 
 private individuals, who had brought him up from 
 the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, probably 
 Tarentum or Metapontum ; but his cult was con- 
 tagious, and the stories of his miraculous cures 
 were eagerly heard. It is no wonder then that in 
 the presence of a great pestilence in B.C. 293, wher 
 the Sibylline books were consulted, " it was found 
 in the books," as Livy says, " that Aesculapius must 
 be brought to Rome from Epidauros." The wai 
 with Pyrrhus however was on, and nothing could 
 be done that year except the setting apart of a 
 solemn day of prayer and supplication to Aesculapius 
 It is interesting to observe how much the Romany 
 have changed since the time exactly two centuries 
 before (B.C. 493), when Ceres and her companions 
 the first gods introduced by the books, received 
 their temple. That was the acknowledgment o; 
 gods well known at Rome, and even then they were 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL ' 85 
 
 immediately identified with already existing Roman 
 gods ; now they actually send an expedition not only 
 outside of Rome but of Italy itself to bring in the 
 cult of a god whom they accept by his Greek name. 
 In the following year (B.C. 292) the expedition started 
 for Epidauros to bring back the god, that is the 
 sacred snake which was both his symbol and his 
 visible presence. Such an importation of a sacred 
 snake from Epidauros is not unique in the case of 
 Rome, but was the normal method of establishing a 
 branch cult. Snakes were kept at Epidauros for 
 just this purpose, and many branches were thus 
 established. It is an extremely interesting question 
 as to the practical medical value of the methods 
 of healing practised at Epidauros and its branches. 
 For a long time those best fitted to express a 
 technical opinion, modern physicians who examined 
 the matter, found nothing good in them, and their 
 opinion seems to receive confirmation from some of 
 the inscriptions recently discovered at Epidauros, 
 which tell the most extraordinary tales of miraculous 
 cures. And yet many of these tales are not intended 
 as actual facts, but rather as pious legends, proclaimed 
 for the edification of the devout, in order that their 
 faith might be quickened. Before we condemn the 
 whole affair, we must realise two facts ; one is that 
 some of the most able minds of Greece, men who 
 were otherwise by no means remarkable for their 
 religious faith, believed implicitly in Epidauros and 
 
86 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 went there to be cured ; and the other is that tl 
 miraculous action of the god was always suppli 
 mented by medicines, in which there may well ha^ 
 been some real value. 
 
 We are told too much rather than too litt 
 about this embassy to Epidauros, for the atmosphei 
 of this third century is different from that of th 
 early republic. Greek literature was beginning t 
 influence Rome, and those generations were bein 
 born who were to be the pioneers in Roman liten 
 ture. Thus Roman mythology was commencin 
 along Greek lines and with Greek models, and or 
 of the points where legend grew thickest and fastei 
 is in this coming of Aesculapius. The plain fad 
 are evidently that the committee went to Epidauro 
 obtained the snake, brought it back safely to Rom 
 and established the sanctuary on the island in th 
 Tiber, where a temple was built and dedicate 
 January i, B.C. 291. Probably this was the fir; 
 use to which the island had ever been put, and froi 
 this time dates the first bridge connecting it wit 
 the city ; the other bridge, to the right bank, Wc 
 much later. The Romans had always considere 
 the island a disadvantage rather than an advantag 
 Even in legend it was cursed, for it sprang from th 
 wheat of the Tarquins. They had always desire 
 to be cut off from it, and had always feared lest 
 might act as a means of approach for the enem 
 from the opposite bank. The few real facts ( 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL , 87 
 
 Aesculapius's coming grew into a romantic account 
 of how, to the great surprise and terror of the sailors, 
 the snake went of its own accord into the Roman 
 ship ; and how it stayed aboard until they reached 
 Antium, and then suddenly swam ashore and coiled 
 itself up in a sacred palm tree in the enclosure of 
 the temple of Apollo there ; and how, when they 
 were in despair of ever getting it back again, it 
 returned peaceably to them at the end of three days, 
 and all went well on the journey to Ostia and up 
 the Tiber until they were passing the island, when 
 the snake went ashore to make its permanent home 
 there. 
 
 It was a pretty fancy which at a later date 
 formed the island into the likeness of a boat by 
 building a prow and stem of travertine at either end, 
 the traces of which may still be seen ; and it is a 
 curious instance of the many survivals of ancient 
 Rome in the modern city, that the Hospital of 
 S. Bartolommeo stands on the site of the old 
 Aesculapius sanctuary, and so far as we can tell, 
 twenty-two centuries of suffering humanity have 
 had the burden of their pain lightened there, in 
 uninterrupted succession since that new year's day, 
 above three hundred years before Christ, when the 
 hospital of Aesculapius of Epidauros was formally 
 opened. 
 
 The coming of the god of healing in the opening 
 years of the third century may well be regarded as 
 
88 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 an omen of the great suffering which that century 
 was to bring to Rome. It was a century of almost 
 uninterrupted warfare : first the Samnite war ; then 
 the war with Pyrrhus and Rome's conquest of 
 Southern Italy ; then after a breathing spell of about 
 a decade the first war with Carthage, and Rome's 
 bitter apprenticeship in fighting at sea ; then cam- 
 paigns in Cisalpine Gaul ; and finally the war 
 with Hannibal roughly filling the last two decades, 
 the most fearful contest in all Rome's history, with 
 her most terrible enemy in her own land of Italy. 
 It is little to be wondered at therefore that this was 
 in the main a century of religious depression, a time 
 when the fear of the gods filled every man's heart 
 and when every trifling apparent irregularity in the 
 course of nature was exaggerated into a portent 
 declaring the wrath of the gods and needing some 
 immediate and extraordinary propitiation. It is in 
 just such a moment as this in the middle of the 
 century (B.C. 249) that the next recorded instance 
 of new gods occurs. The first war with Carthage 
 was in progress, Rome had just suffered a terrible 
 defeat off the north-western point of Sicily, at 
 Drepana, a defeat all the more hideous because it 
 was supposed to have been caused by the impiety of 
 the Consul Clodius, who, hearing that the sacred 
 chickens would not eat, perpetrated his grim jest by 
 saying " let them drink then instead," and drowning 
 them all. But to cap it all the wall of Rome was 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL^ 89 
 
 struck by lightning. Then action was necessary 
 and the books were consulted. They ordered that 
 sacrifice should be made to Dis and Proserpina, a 
 black steer to Dis, and a black cow to Proserpina, 
 three successive nights, out on the Campus Martins, 
 at an altar which was called the Tarentum, and that 
 the ceremony should be repeated at the end of a 
 hundred years. Here the myth -makers of later 
 times have been even more busily at work than they 
 were in the case of Aesculapius. The Aesculapius 
 story was fitted out by them merely with a few 
 miraculous details, a few legendary ornaments, but 
 the story of Dis and Proserpina was so covered with 
 their fabrications that it has only recently been freed 
 from them and seen in its true light, and certain 
 phases were so absolutely perverted that there are 
 still a number of very difificult points. To get a 
 clear understanding of the situation we must begin 
 quite a distance back. 
 
 Taken as a whole, religious beliefs are among the 
 most conservative things in the world ; the individual 
 may grow as radical as you please, but his effect on 
 the general religious consciousness of his time is ex- 
 tremely slight. Occasionally the number of radical 
 individuals grows larger and certain classes of society 
 are affected by their views, but even, in the periods 
 of religious development which we are apt to think 
 of as most iconoclastic, society taken in the large, 
 and on the average of all classes, is not much more 
 
I 
 
 90 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 radical than in apparently normal times. And while 
 religion as a whole is conservative, there is one 
 section of it more conservative than all the rest, a 
 section from which change is almost excluded, that 
 is the beliefs concerning the dead. In our discussion 
 of the religion of Numa we saw the very primitive 
 character of Roman beliefs in this field, the firm 
 retention of the old animistic idea of the dead, tb 
 tendency to class the dead together as a mass an^ 
 to believe in a collective rather than an individual 
 immortality, and above all the abhorrence of the 
 dead and the disinclination to dwell on their con- 
 dition and to paint imaginary pictures of life beyond 
 the grave. In view of these feelings it is not strange 
 that we have great difficulty in finding any old 
 Roman gods of the dead, aside from the dead who 
 are themselves all gods. These dead as gods {Di 
 Manes) and possibly Mother Earth {Terra Mater) 
 are the only rulers in the Lower World. In Greece 
 on the contrary death was almost as natural as 
 life, and though the conditions in early times were 
 not unlike those in Rome, as Rohde in his Psydie 
 has so wonderfully described them, the Greek soon 
 grew beyond this, and the world of the dead became 
 almost as well known to him as the world of the 
 living. There was a kingdom of the dead, and a 
 king and queen ruled over them. These rulers were 
 called by different names in different parts of Greece, 
 but the names which they had in certain parts of 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL- 91 
 
 the Peloponnesus, Hades the king of the dead and 
 Persephone his bride, were destined to survive the 
 rest. The cult of this royal pair travelled far and 
 wide, but its most notable development occurred in 
 Attica, where Persephone became Kore the daughter 
 of Demeter, stolen by Hades to become his bride, 
 while Hades himself under the sunny skies of Athens 
 ^M. some of his terrors and became Pluto, the god 
 M riches, especially the rich blessings of the earth. 
 But all this was very foreign to Rome, and while 
 the Greeks were thinking these thoughts, the Romans 
 were going quietly along, content with their simple 
 Di Manes. No better proof of this can be desired 
 than the one accidentally given us in the introduction 
 of Demeter and her daughter Kore into Rome as 
 Ceres and Libera in B.C. 493, and the absolute 
 colourlessness and pointlessness of Libera, in a word 
 the entire lack of connexion in the religious con- 
 sciousness of Rome between Libera and Persephone. 
 But in B.C. 249, almost two and a half centuries 
 later, matters were on a different basis ; Rome had 
 been learning a great deal that was foreign to her 
 old beliefs, and there was no longer anything im- 
 possible to her in the idea of individual rulers of the 
 dead. Thus at the command of the books Pluto 
 and Persephone were received into the state-cult, 
 though the strangeness of the situation was acknow- 
 ledged, at least in so far that they translated Pluto 
 into the Latin Dis ; Persephone to be sure was left 
 
92 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 alone, or more strictly speaking was accommodated 
 to the Latin tongue by being changed to Proserpina. 
 It is of course impossible that the Romans of B.C. 
 249 were entirely ignorant of Pluto and Persephone 
 until the Sibylline books bade them be brought in. 
 Here again the traders from Southern Italy had 
 been their teachers ; and the name Tarentuni of 
 the altar where the sacrifice was to be made may 
 possibly indicate the town of Tarentum as the source 
 of the cult. The Romans knew Tarentum only too 
 well since the eventful war with Pyrrhus, which lay 
 only a generation back in their history. 
 
 And so the Romans adopted the Greek gods of 
 the dead, and thus, at least theoretically^ put their 
 dead ancestors into subjection to the Greeks just 
 as they themselves, the descendants, were sitting 
 at the feet of the Greeks in "this life. But though 
 the enactment of the Senate gave these gods 
 Roman citizenship, and the priests of the Sibylline 
 books were in duty bound to perform the ritual of 
 the cult, be it said to the credit of the Romans, 
 the gods themselves never took a very deep hold of 
 the religious life of the people in general. Their 
 names, to be sure, crept into a few of the old 
 formulae and stood side by side with the older 
 deities, and Proserpina was made much of by the 
 Roman poets ; but the real tests of devotion, 
 dedicatory inscriptions, are almost entirely absent. 
 Strangely enough the only thing which seems to 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 93 
 
 have caught their fancy was the weird ritual of the 
 nightly sacrifice at the Tarentum, and especially its 
 repetition after one hundred years. This idea of 
 the hundred years is Roman rather than Greek, and 
 it is at least open to question whether it may. not 
 have been added to the instructions in the oracle to 
 give the whole matter an added Roman colour. 
 Thus in B.C. 249 were instituted the Secular 
 Games, which were repeated with approximate 
 accuracy in B.C. 146, and would doubtless have 
 been again between B.C. 49 and 46, had not the 
 Civil War completely filled men's minds and made 
 human sacrifices to the dead, in battle, an almost 
 daily occurrence. Meantime the Roman annalists 
 were working backwards in their own peculiar 
 fashion, and building out into the past a series 
 of fictitious celebrations preceding B.C. 249, one 
 hundred years apart, back into the time of the 
 kingdom. On the other hand we shall have occa- 
 sion later to speak of the restoration of the games 
 and their reorganisation by Augustus. 
 
 Under the test of adversity nations are very 
 much like individuals, and a national weakness, 
 which is often entirely concealed in normal con- 
 ditions, comes prominently and disastrously to the 
 surface in the hour when strength is most needed. 
 The war with Hannibal was just such a crisis in 
 Rome's history, and under its influence Rome's 
 dependence upon the Sibylline books was more 
 
94 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 pronounced than ever. The seeds of superstition 
 sown during the earlier centuries burst now into 
 full blossom, destined to produce the fruit, the 
 gathering of which was to be the bitter task of 
 the closing centuries of the republic. The story of 
 the Second Punic War, regarded merely from the 
 military standpoint, reads for Rome almost like a 
 nightmare, with its long succession of apparently 
 easy victories turning one by one into defeats ; but 
 when we add to this that other chronicle, of which 
 Livy is equally fond, the long lists of portents and 
 prodigies sent by the angered gods, and when we 
 realise that to the masses of the people the wrath 
 of the gods was more terrible and just as real as 
 the hostility of Hannibal, then we have not the 
 heart to reproach them for their religious frenzy. 
 Seen by themselves, the jumping of a cow out of 
 a second -story window, or the images of the gods 
 shedding tears, do not seem very serious matters, 
 but endow us with three hundred years of hereditary 
 dread of these things, give us the instinctive inter- 
 pretation of them as the turning away from us of 
 the powers upon which we rely for help, nay their 
 positive opposition to us and our hopes — and our 
 condition in the presence of these phenomena would 
 be very different. 
 
 Thus almost every year between B.C. 218 and 
 201 had its share of religious ceremonial, and the 
 Sibylline books, which had hitherto been, in theory 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 95 
 
 at least, merely an alternative method of religious 
 procedure permitted to exist alongside of the older 
 and more conservative forms, became now the order 
 of the day. Like a Homeric picture in which the 
 quarrels of the gods in Olympus run parallel to 
 the battles of Greeks and Trojans on the plains 
 of Troy, so every victory which Rome won over 
 Hannibal on the field of battle was bought at the 
 price of a victory of Greek gods over Roman gods 
 in the field of religion ; and further, although Rome 
 succeeded in keeping Hannibal outside of her own 
 walls, her gods did not succeed in defending the 
 pomerium against the Greek gods, and it is during 
 this Second Punic War that this, the greatest safe- 
 guard of old Roman religion and customs, was 
 broken down, and the new gods gained entire 
 possession of the city, placing their temples on the 
 spots hitherto held most sacred. From now on 
 all distinction ceases, and it is scarcely possible to 
 speak of a Roman in contrast to a Graeco-Roman 
 cult. It is important however to observe that this 
 breakdown occurred because of excess of religious 
 zeal rather than through neglect and indifference, 
 and though we may indeed notice a gradual de- 
 terioration of the deities introduced by the books, 
 all the way down from the busy working gods like 
 Ceres and Mercury and Neptune to the more 
 miraculous Aesculapius, and the cult of Dis or 
 Proserpina with its possibilities of weird fantastic 
 
96 THE COMING OF THE SI'BYL 
 
 worship, there have been however as yet only scanty 
 traces of the orgiastic element. But this was the 
 next step, and it was not long in coming. The 
 rapid campaigns of the earlier years of the war 
 with Hannibal had passed, Cannae (B.C. 216) had 
 been somewhat retrieved by Metaurus (B.C. 207), 
 where the reinforcements for Hannibal, led by 
 Hasdrubal, had been cut to pieces, but the result 
 was not what had been hoped for, and Hannibal 
 had not left Italy, but entrenched in the mountains 
 of the south he seemed to be preparing to pass the 
 rest of his life there. It was in this the year B.C. 
 205 that the help of the books was again sought, 
 if peradventure they might show the way to drive 
 Hannibal out of the country. The reply came 
 that, when a foreign-born enemy should wage war 
 upon the land, he could be conquered and driven 
 from Italy, if the Great Mother of the gods should 
 be brought to Rome from Phrygia. The rest of 
 the story is so quaintly and withal so truthfully 
 told by Livy (Bk. xxix.) that it will not be amiss to 
 quote his words : — " The oracle discovered by the 
 Decemviri affected the Senate the more on this 
 account because the ambassadors who had brought 
 the gifts [vowed at the battle of Metaurus] to 
 Delphi reported that when they were sacrificing to 
 the Pythian Apollo the omens were all favourable, 
 and that the oracle had given response that a 
 greater victory was at hand for the Roman people 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 97 
 
 than that one from whose spoils they were then 
 bringing gifts. And as a finishing touch to this 
 same hope they dwelt upon the prophetic opinion 
 of Publius Scipio regarding the end of the war, 
 because he had asked for Africa as his province. 
 And so in order that they might the more quickly 
 obtain that victory which promised itself to 
 them by the omens and oracles of fate, they be- 
 gan to consider what means there was of bring- 
 ing the goddess to Rome. As yet the Roman 
 people had no states in alliance with them in Asia 
 Minor ; however they remembered that formerly 
 Aesculapius had been brought from Greece for the 
 sake of the health of the people, though they had 
 no alliance with Greece. They realised too that a 
 friendship had been begun with King Attalus [of 
 Pergamon] . . . and that Attalus would do what 
 he could in behalf of the Roman people ; and so 
 they decided to send ambassadors to him, .... 
 and they allotted them five ships-of-war in order 
 that they might approach in a fitting manner the 
 countries which they desired to interest in their 
 favour. Now when the ambassadors were on their 
 way to Asia they disembarked at Delphi, and 
 approaching the oracle asked what prospect it 
 offered them and the Roman people of accomplish- 
 ing the things which they had been sent to do. It 
 is said that the reply was that through King Attalus 
 they would obtain what they sought, but that when 
 
 H 
 
98 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 they brought the goddess to Rome they should see 
 to it that the best man in Rome should be at hand 
 to receive her. Then they came to Pergamon to 
 the king [Attalus], and he received them graciously 
 and led them to Pessinus in Phrygia, and he gave 
 over to them the sacred stone which, .the natives 
 said, was the Mother of the gods, and bade them 
 carry it to Rome. And Marcus Valerius Falto was 
 sent ahead by the ambassadors and he announced 
 that the goddess was coming, and that the best 
 man in the state must be sought out to receive her 
 with due ceremony." In the next year (B.C. 204) 
 after recounting new prodigies Livy continues : — 
 "Then too the matter of the Idaean Mother must 
 be attended to, for aside from the fact that Marcus 
 Valerius, one of the ambassadors who had been 
 sent ahead, had announced that she would soon be 
 in Italy, there was also a fresh message that she 
 was already at Tarracina. The Senate had to 
 decide a very important matter, namely who was 
 the best man in the state, for every man in the 
 state preferred a victory in such a contest as this 
 to any commands or offices which the vote of 
 the Senate or the people might give him. They 
 decided that of all the good men in the state the 
 best was Publius Scipio. . . . He then with all 
 the matrons was ordered to go to Ostia to 
 meet the goddess and to receive her from the 
 ship, to carry her to land and to give her over to 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 99 
 
 the women to carry. After the ship came to the 
 mouth of the Tiber, Scipio, going out in a small 
 boat, as he had been commanded, received the 
 goddess from the priests and carried her to land. 
 And the noblest women of the land . . . received 
 her . . . and they carried the goddess in their 
 arms, taking turn about while all Rome poured out 
 to meet her, and incense-burners were placed before 
 the doors where she was carried by, and incense 
 was burned in her honour. And thus praying that 
 she might enter willingly and propitiously into the 
 city, they carried her into the temple of Victory, 
 which is on the Palatine, on the day before the 
 Nones of April [April 4]. And this was a festal 
 day and the people in great numbers gave gifts 
 to the goddess, and a banquet for the gods was 
 held, and games were performed which were called 
 Megalesia." This extraordinary picture is probably 
 in the main historically correct. The most striking 
 part of it, the enthusiasm of the Roman populace, 
 is certainly not overdrawn. Thus was introduced 
 into Rome the last deity ever summoned by means 
 of the books, the one whose cult was destined to 
 outlast that of all the others, and to do more harm 
 and produce more demoralisation than all the other 
 cults together. To understand why this was so, we 
 must go back for a moment. 
 
 The influence of Greece on Rome was progressive, 
 and we are able to indicate at least three distinct 
 
loo THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 periods and phases of it, so far as religion is con- 
 cerned : first, the informal coming of a few Greek 
 gods who adapted themselves more or less com- 
 pletely to the old Roman character ; such are 
 Hercules and Castor and even Apollo, though 
 Apollo was indirectly responsible for the second 
 period, because he was the cause of the coming of 
 the Sibylline books. The influence of these books 
 produced the second period, with its characteristics 
 of ever-growing superstition, and greater pomp in 
 cult acts, but though the sobriety of the old days 
 had changed into a restless activity, the new gods 
 who came in and the new cult acts introduced were 
 still of such a character that Romans could take 
 part in the worship without shame. But just as the 
 staid Apollo had produced the books, so now as 
 their last bequest the books brought in the Great 
 Mother, and the third period had begun, the period 
 of orgiastic Oriental worship, which prevailed, at 
 least among certain classes, until the establishment 
 of Christianity. We may well ask who this Great 
 Mother was, and why this one Greek cult should 
 be so different from all the rest. 
 
 At different points in Asia Minor and in Crete a 
 goddess was worshipped, originally without proper 
 name, as the great source of all fertility, the mother 
 of all things, even of the gods. Mount Dindymos 
 in Phrygia was one of the chief centres of the cult, 
 and there the Great Mother was known also as 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL loi 
 
 Cybele. From these various centres the cult spread 
 over all the Greek world, but wherever it went, it 
 always gave evidence of its birthplace by certain 
 strange Oriental elements both in its myths and in 
 its rites. Its devotees were a noisy orgiastic band, 
 who filled the streets with their dances, and the air 
 with their singing and the clashing of their symbols, 
 to the accompaniment of the rattling of coin in the 
 money box — for the collection of money from the 
 bystanders was always a part of the performance. 
 
 This then was what the " best man in the state " 
 and the grave Roman matrons went forth from 
 Rome to receive — a sacred stone representing the 
 goddess, and a band of noisy emasculated priests ; 
 and this was what they opened their gates to, and 
 took up into their holy of holies, the Palatine hill, 
 the birthplace of Rome. The Greeks had again 
 come bearing gifts, and like the Trojans who 
 broke down their walls and took the wooden horse 
 up into their citadel, Romans, the reputed descen- 
 dents of these Trojans, were carrying up to their 
 most sacred hill another gift of Greece which was 
 to capture their city. They put the image in the 
 temple of Victoria on the Palatine until such time 
 as its own temple was ready to receive it, and the 
 goddess of Victory seemed to respond to its presence, 
 for did not Hannibal leave Italy the very next year ? 
 And who would be so impious as to suggest that to 
 Scipio and not Cybele belonged the glory, and that 
 
I02 THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 
 
 a strong Roman army in Africa affected Hannibal 
 more than a sacred stone on the Palatine ? 
 
 It may well be doubted whether anything but 
 such a great exigency would ever have induced 
 Rome to accept such an utterly foreign cult ; and 
 when the nightmare of the war was past, the Senate 
 awoke to the realisation that a very serious act had 
 been committed. To their credit be it said that 
 they did what they could to minimise the evil. The 
 goddess had brought her own priests with her, the 
 cult was in their hands, and there the law decreed 
 it must stay, and no Roman citizen could become a 
 priest. That this law was really enforced is shown 
 by several cases where punishment, even transporta- 
 tion across the sea, was meted out to transgressors. 
 Then too the worship must be in the main confined 
 to the precincts of the temple on the Palatine, and 
 only on certain days of the year were the priests 
 allowed to perform in the streets of the city. It is 
 significant of the strength of Roman law that these 
 enactments held good for three and a half centuries, 
 and were not changed until the reign of Antoninus 
 Pius. 
 
 In the introduction of the Great Mother the 
 Sibylline books performed their last and most notable 
 achievement. Hereafter they introduced no new 
 deities, and were consulted only occasionally, chiefly 
 for political purposes, for example in B.C. 87 against 
 the followers of Sulla, and in B.C. 56 in connexion 
 
THE COMING OF THE SIBYL 103 
 
 with a scheme of purely poh'tical import. Their work 
 was done, and we have seen in what it consisted. 
 For three hundred years they had been encouraging 
 the growth of superstition. From their vantage 
 ground of the temple of Juppiter Optimus Maximus, 
 the essence of all that was most patriotically Roman 
 in Rome, they had been giving forth these infallible 
 oracles which seemed so much superior to the simple 
 '' yes and no " answers with which the old Romans 
 had been content in their dealings with the gods. 
 In times of peril by pestilence and by battle they 
 had given advice, and the pestilence had ceased and 
 the battle had turned to victory. It seemed indeed 
 that the Sibyl deserved the gratitude of Rome. 
 Time alone could teach them what the books had 
 really given them. It was only in the coming 
 generations that it became evident that the abuse of 
 faith, the substitution of incantation for devotion, was 
 destructive of true religion. It is the effect of this 
 substitution on the various classes of society under 
 the new and trying social conditions of the last two 
 centuries of the republic that forms the theme of 
 our next chapter. 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 It is the fashion of our day to think no evil of Greece. 
 In art we are experiencing another Renaissance, 
 not like that of the fourteenth and fifteenth 
 centuries in a revival of ancient Rome, but in a 
 movement leading behind Rome to the classic and 
 even the pre-classic models of Greece. In itself it 
 is a healthful tendency, a needed corrective to the 
 sensational search for novelty which characterised 
 the closing years of the nineteenth century. But in 
 our admiration for the Greek spirit we ought not to 
 forget that after Alexander that spirit lost much of 
 its beauty, and aged very rapidly. We may indeed 
 regret the fact that Rome, like certain persons 
 of our acquaintance, seemed at times to possess 
 a strong faculty for assimilating the worst of her 
 surroundings, while occasionally curiously unrespon- 
 sive to the better things ; and yet we ought in justice 
 to strive to realise the fact that not only is the Greek 
 spirit at its best an unteachable thing, but that at 
 the historical moment when Rome came under that 
 influence the Greek world was very old and weary. 
 
 104 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH 105 
 
 It was Rome's misfortune and not her fault that when 
 she was old enough to go to school, Alexandrianism 
 with its pedantic detail was the order of the day in 
 mythology, and the timorous post-Socratic schools 
 were the teachers of philosophy. Naturally if Rome 
 had been another Greece she would have worked 
 back from these later forms to the truer, purer spirit, 
 but Rome was not Greece, and no thoughtful man 
 ever pretended that she was. In the third century 
 before Christ Greece began actively to influence 
 Rome ; before that time Hellenic influence had been 
 confined largely to the effects on religion produced 
 by the Sibylline books, and to the effects on 
 society caused by the presence of Greek traders. 
 But now Greek thought as embodied in the literature 
 began to affect Roman thought, and to bring into 
 being a literature based on Greek models. Three 
 centuries of Sibylline oracles had produced for Rome 
 the pathological religious condition of the Second 
 Punic War, when she did not think twice before 
 breaking down the religious barrier which had 
 hitherto separated the national from the adopted 
 elements in her religion, and at the same time 
 unhesitatingly reached out to Asia Minor for an 
 Oriental cult, masquerading in Greek colours, and 
 placed on the Palatine the Great Mother of 
 Pessinus. From this time on two influences were 
 steadily at work which shaped the history of Roman 
 religion in the two remaining centuries till the close 
 
io6 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 of the republic : one, mythology, directly affecting 
 the forms of the cult and the beliefs concerning the 
 individual gods ; the other, philosophy, attacking 
 the whole foundation of religious belief in general. 
 
 Greece gave her gods to Rome when she herself 
 was weary of them, she gave her the tired gods, 
 exhausted by centuries of handling, long ago dragged 
 down from Olympus, and weary with serving as 
 lay -figures for poets and artists, and being for ever 
 rigged out in new mythological garments, or jaded 
 with the laboratory experiments of philosophers who 
 tried to interpret them in every conceivable fashion 
 or else to do away with them entirely. It is no 
 wonder that it did not take the Romans more than 
 a century to come to the end of these gods, to find 
 that the only one among them who could satisfy 
 their religious desires was the least Greek of them 
 all, the Magna Mater, and having found this to go 
 forth to take to themselves more like unto her, in a 
 word, to crave the sensational cults of the Orient. 
 And the philosophy which Greece gave Rome was 
 no better than the mythology. It is not strange 
 that human thought experienced a reaction after a 
 century which contained both Plato and Aristotle, 
 but it is a pity that Rome should have learned her 
 philosophy from a period of doubt and scepticism 
 an age in which the lesser masters, who had known 
 the greater ones, had gone, leaving nothing but 
 pupils' pupils. 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH * 107 
 
 The history of religion in Rome during the last 
 two centuries of the republic is the story of the 
 action and reaction of these two tendencies — the 
 one toward the novel and sensational in worship, 
 which we may call superstition, the other the 
 philosophy of doubt, which we may call scepticism 
 — in the presence of the established religion of 
 the state. This much the two centuries have in 
 common, but here their resemblance ends. In the 
 first of these centuries (B.C. 200-100) the state 
 religion was able to hold her own, at least in out- 
 ward appearance, and to wage war against both 
 tendencies. In the other century (B.C. 100 to 
 Augustus) politics gained control of the state religion 
 and so robbed her of her strength that she was 
 crushed between the opposing forces of superstition 
 and scepticism. It is to the story of the earlier of 
 these two centuries, the second before Christ, that 
 we now turn. 
 
 With the close of the Second Punic War there 
 began for Rome a period of very great material 
 prosperity. This prosperity was, to be sure, not 
 exactly distributed, and it is not without its re- 
 semblance to some of our modern instances of 
 commercial prosperity, in that it was not so much a 
 general bettering of economic conditions as the 
 very rapid increase of the wealth of a relatively 
 small number, an increase gained at the expense of 
 positive detriment to a large element in the popula- 
 
io8 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 tion. Thus it was that a century of which the first 
 seventy years provide an almost unparalleled spectacle 
 of the increase of national territory, accompanied, 
 according to the ancient methods of taxation, by a 
 vast increase in national wealth, should close with 
 the tragedies of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and 
 the legacy of class hatred which produced the civil 
 wars. This growth in wealth and territory was not 
 without its effects on the outward appearance of the 
 state religion. The territory was gained by a series 
 of minor wars in the course of which many temples 
 were vowed ; and the spoils of the war provided the 
 means for the fulfilment of the vows. Thus to the 
 outward observer it might well have seemed that 
 the religion of the state was enjoying a time of 
 great prosperity. Between the close of the Punic 
 War (B.C. 201) and the year of Tiberius Gracchus 
 (B.C. 133) we have accurate knowledge of the 
 dedication of no less than nineteen state temples, 
 and there were undoubtedly many others of which 
 we have no record. Another apparently good sign 
 is the fact that the Sibylline books are silent, so 
 far as the introduction of new deities is concerned. 
 Yet these surface indications are deceptive. As for 
 the Sibylline books, now that the pomerium line 
 had been broken down, and the temples of Greek 
 gods might be placed anywhere in the city, it was a 
 very simple matter for the state to bring in any 
 Greek god that it pleased, and likening him to a 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH 109 
 
 more or less similar Roman god and calling him by 
 the Roman name, to put up a temple to him any- 
 where. It was also true that, as Roman theology 
 was now based on the principle that every Roman 
 god had his Greek parallel and vice versa, there 
 were no gods left, whose names would have occurred 
 at all in the Sibylline books, who could not be 
 brought in now without them. And as for the 
 vowing of new temples, this represented at best 
 merely the habit formed during more devout days ; 
 religion was moving by the momentum acquired 
 during the Second Punic War, and the gods to 
 whom these temples were erected were really Greek 
 gods under Roman names. In a word, not only 
 was the state religion becoming more and more 
 of a form day by day, but the form was that of 
 Greece and not of Rome. It is extremely interesting 
 to trace this movement in detail, to look behind the 
 outward appearance and see the remarkable changes 
 that were really taking place. 
 
 If we look at the temples which were built in the 
 years following the Second Punic War, we shall have 
 no difficulty in finding examples of the introduction 
 of Greek gods under Roman names. During the 
 war itself in the year B.C. 207 a Roman general had 
 vowed a temple to Juventas on the occasion of a 
 battle near Siena. Juventas was an old Roman 
 goddess, one of those abstract deities which had 
 been produced by the breaking off and becoming 
 
no THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 independent of a cult -title. She was intimately 
 associated with Juppiter, and had a special shrine in 
 the Capitoline temple. Juventas was the divine 
 representative of the putting away of childish things 
 and the assumption of the responsibilities and 
 privileges of young manhood. This act was sym- 
 bolised by the Romans in the beautiful ceremony of 
 putting on the toga of manhood {toga virilis), when 
 the lad was led by his father to the Capitoline 
 temple to make sacrifices to Juppiter, and at the 
 same time a contribution was made to the treasury 
 of Juventas. But this was not the goddess in 
 whose honour the temple vowed at Siena was built 
 at the Circus Maximus and dedicated B.C. 191. 
 This Juventas was nothing more or less than the 
 Greek Hebe, the female counterpart of Ganymedes, 
 as cupbearer to the gods. Similarly in B.C. 179 
 a temple was dedicated to Diana at the Circus 
 Flaminius, but this was not the old goddess of 
 Aricia, whose cult Rome had adopted for the sake 
 of increasing her influence in the Latin league. It 
 was the Greek Artemis, who at her first coming into 
 Rome had been associated with Apollo in the 
 temple built in B.C. 431, and was now given a temple 
 of her own. Perhaps the strangest of allp is the 
 temple which was erected to Mars in the Campus 
 Martius in B.C. 138. It might well be supposed 
 that the Romans would keep holy the reputed father 
 of their race, the god to whom, under Juppiter, their 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH iii 
 
 success was due. On the contary in B.C. 217, when 
 they were carrying out a Greek ceremony of offering 
 a banquet to a set of gods, arranged in pairs, they 
 showed no hesitation in grouping together Mars 
 and Venus to represent the Greek pair Ares and 
 Aphrodite, thus doing violence to Mars by bringing 
 him into a relationship with Venus which was en- 
 tirely foreign to old Roman thought, and identifying 
 him with Ares, with whom he had nothing to do. 
 Now in B.C. 138 a temple is built to Ares under the 
 name of Mars, close beside the venerable old altar 
 of Mars, one of the oldest and most sacred of Roman 
 shrines. 
 
 But this passion for identifying Greek gods with 
 Roman ones did not confine itself to finding a 
 parallel for the greater gods of Greece ; and less 
 known deities were introduced into Rome in the same 
 way. The old Roman god, Faunus, in whose 
 honour the ancient festival of the Lupercalia was 
 yearly celebrated, had as his associate a goddess. 
 Fauna, who was better known as the " good goddess '' 
 (Bona Dea). Eventually this new title Bona Dea 
 crowded out the old title Fauna, so that it was almost 
 entirely forgotten. Bona Dea was a goddess of 
 women, and the most characteristic feature of her 
 worship was the exclusion of men from taking part 
 in it. Now there was a Greek goddess, called 
 Damia, also a goddess of women, from whose cult 
 also men were excluded, and her cult spread from 
 
112 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 Greece to the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, 
 especially Tarentum, and so eventually to Rome. 
 But by the time she arrived in Rome the connexion 
 of Fauna and Bona Dea had been entirely forgotten. 
 Damia was surely a Bona Dea, yes she was the 
 Bona Dea, for was not the proof at hand in the fact 
 that men were excluded from both cults 1 So a 
 temple was built for her, probably shortly after the 
 Second Punic War, and from the time no one ever 
 thought of poor Fauna again, except scholars and 
 poets, who amused themselves, as was their wont, by 
 putting her in various genealogical relationships to 
 Faunus, as sister, wife, or daughter, while Damia 
 lived and prospered under the stolen title of the 
 Bona Dea. 
 
 We see from this on what a small resemblance 
 such identifications were based, in this case merely 
 on the presence of a similar minor injunction in the 
 laws of each cult. But we have here at least a 
 genuine cult which had arrived and was asking for 
 admission, and in so far we are better off than in 
 most instances, where nothing substantial was gained 
 by the identification. Two forces were now at work 
 assisting in this fusion of Greek and Roman gods, 
 namely art and literature. The capture of Syracuse 
 marked an epoch in Rome's artistic career; for 
 several centuries she had employed Greek architects 
 and had also become acquainted with the artistic 
 types of certain Greek gods, but now all at once a 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH * 113 
 
 wealth of Greek sculpture was disclosed to her, and 
 she could not rest content until all her gods were 
 represented in the fashion of man. The adoption of 
 the Greek type, in those cases where an identification 
 had already been effected, was not difficult and was 
 in the main successful, though there followed almost 
 inevitably an enrichment of the Greek element in 
 the Roman god because of the presence of some 
 attribute in the statue, which brought its own myth 
 with it. But there were certain Roman gods for 
 whom Greek parallels could not be found, and in these 
 cases a compromise, usually rather an awkward one, 
 had to be effected, as for example when the Roman 
 gods of the storeroom, the Di Penates, were repre- 
 sented by statues of the Greek Castor and Pollux. 
 In such cases confusion was sure to follow, and 
 subsequent antiquarians would be tempted to write 
 treatises proving the original connexion of Castor or 
 Pollux with the Penates, as gods of protection in 
 general, etc. Literature too in its own way was fully 
 as misleading, and Roman scholars became fasci- 
 nated with the labyrinths of Alexandrian mythology, 
 and straightway began to build Roman myths as 
 rapidly as possible, establishing lists of old Latin 
 kings and all sorts of genealogies, and weaving as 
 many Greek mythological figures as possible into 
 the legends of the foundation of Italic towns. 
 
 It was the ceremonial of the cult however which 
 most often offered the best means of identification, 
 
 I 
 
114 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 as we have seen above in the case of Bona Dea- 
 Damia, where the exclusion of men from the rites 
 was the main point of similarity. In a similar way 
 the old Roman god of the harvest, Consus, was 
 identified with the Greek ocean-god Poseidon because 
 horse-races were a characteristic feature of the fes- 
 tivals of each ; and the old Roman goddess of 
 women and of childbirth was given as her Greek 
 parallel the Greek goddess Leukothea, the helper of 
 those in peril at sea, because in both cases slaves 
 were forbidden to take part in the cult. 
 
 But the effect of the capture of Rome by these 
 Greek gods and Greek ceremonials was not con- 
 fined to the mere addition of new ideas, and the 
 transformation of certain old Roman deities. This 
 would have been comparatively harmless, but there 
 was inevitably another result : the consequent neglect 
 of all Roman deities for whom no Greek parallels 
 were forthcoming, and the forgetting of all the 
 original Roman ideas which were crowded into the 
 background by the novel and more brilliant Greek 
 ideas. Even the festivals of the old Roman year 
 were treated in the same cavalier manner. The 
 interest of the people continued only with those 
 ceremonies which frightened them or pleased them. 
 There were certain festivals, for example the Luper- 
 calia, the old ceremony of purification on February 
 15, for which a reverence was still felt ; and others 
 like the Parilia, the birthday of Rome, on April 21, 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH * 115 
 
 or the Anna Perenna festival on March 15, which 
 involved open-air celebrations and picnics. These 
 and others like them were always kept up, while 
 many others were totally neglected. Naturally for 
 the present the forms were continued by the state ; 
 the festivals were celebrated at least by the priests ; 
 and every temple received sacrifice on its birthday. 
 The wheels of the state religion were still running, 
 but the power behind them had stopped, and it was 
 only momentum which kept them in motion. 
 
 It is only when we realise these things that we 
 can understand how it was possible that the most 
 learned scholars at the close of the republic were so 
 desperately ignorant concerning old Roman religion. 
 In regard to many of the old Roman gods they 
 know absolutely nothing, and try to disguise their 
 ignorance behind a show of learning based on 
 etymological sleight-of-hand ; in regard to the rest 
 their information is so tangled with Greek ideas 
 that it is often almost impossible to unravel the 
 mass and separate the old from the new. This 
 unravelling has been the tedious occupation of the 
 last half century in the study of Roman religion ; 
 and so patiently and successfully has it been ac- 
 complished that, although we would give almost 
 anything for a few books of Varro's Divine Anti- 
 quities, it is tolerably certain that the possession 
 of these books would not change in the least the 
 fundamental concepts underlying the modern re- 
 
ii6 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 construction of ancient Roman religion ; though it is 
 equally certain that these books would emphasise 
 just so much more strongly, what we already realise, 
 that this modern reconstruction is in distinct con- 
 tradiction to many of Varro's favourite theories. It 
 is an accomplishment of which History may well be 
 modestly -proud, that modern scholars have been 
 able to eliminate, to a large degree, the personal 
 equation and the myopic effects of his own time 
 from the statements of the greatest scholar of 
 Roman antiquity, and thus though handicapped by 
 the possession of merely a small percentage of the 
 facts which Varro knew, to arrive at a concept of 
 the whole matter infinitely more correct than that 
 which his books contained. 
 
 During this second century before Christ, therefore, 
 the state religion was apparently unchanged so far 
 as the outward form was concerned. The terminology 
 and the ceremonies were much the same as before, 
 but the content was quite different : Greek gods and 
 Greek ideas had displaced Roman gods and Roman 
 ideas, and the official representatives of religion, the 
 state priests, were carrying the whole burden of 
 worship on their own shoulders, because popular 
 interest had been in the main deflected and was 
 working along other lines. These lines of rival 
 interest were superstition and scepticism, phenomena 
 which at first sight appear as distinct opposites, but 
 which are on the contrary very closely akin, so that 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH • 117 
 
 they usually occur together not only in the same 
 age, but frequently even in the same individual. 
 They are purely relative terms, and the essence of 
 superstition consists in its surplus element, just as 
 the essence of scepticism lies in its deficiency. No 
 religion judged from the standpoint of the worshipper 
 can properly be called a superstition, but if once we 
 can establish the essential things in a religion, then 
 any large addition to those essential things savours 
 of superstition. Speaking with historical sympathy 
 we have no right therefore to designate early Roman 
 religion as a superstition — it may of course be 
 relatively so in comparison with other religious 
 forms — but once we have established the essential 
 elements in that early religion, we may consider the 
 introduction of new and entirely different elements 
 as superstition. The old religion of Rome consisted 
 in the exact and scrupulous fulfilment of a large 
 number of minute ceremonials. The result of this 
 careful fulfilment of ritual was that the powers 
 around man did him no harm but rather good, and 
 that was the end of the whole matter. Religion did 
 not command or even permit special inquiries into 
 these powers ; it was not only not man's duty to try 
 to know the gods, it was his positive duty to try 
 not to. Through the influence of Greece there 
 had now come into Rome an altogether new idea, 
 nourished largely by the Sibylline books, and repre- 
 sented most fully in the Magna Mater, the idea 
 
ii8 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 of the perpetual service of a god, a consecration to 
 him, to the exclusion of all other things, and a life 
 given over to the orgiastic performance of cult acts, 
 which produced a state of ecstasy and consequently 
 a communion with the deity. Along with this there 
 went a belief in the possibility, by means of certain 
 books and certain men, of obtaining from the gods 
 a knowledge of the future. It is these surplus 
 beliefs, quite contrary to the spirit of old Roman 
 religion, which may justly be called superstition. 
 
 The Sibylline books had aroused these feelings, 
 a knowledge of the oracle at Delphi had increased 
 them, the rites of Aesculapius had carried them 
 farther, but it was not until the Magna Mater came 
 that they seem to have burst forth in any large 
 degree. But aside from the rapid growth of the 
 Magna Mater cult itself we have in this second 
 century two instances of this tendency. The first 
 was connected with the god Dionysos-Liber, innocent 
 enough at his first reception in B.C. 493, in the 
 company of Demeter-Ceres and Kore- Libera. To be 
 sure the state had introduced him merely as the god 
 of wine, but the mystery element in Dionysos took 
 firm hold on private worship, and the Bacchanalian 
 clubs or societies began to spread over Italy. In 
 the course of about three centuries they had become 
 a formidable menace to the morals and even the 
 physical security of the inhabitants of Rome. Their 
 meetings instead of occurring three times a year 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH. 119 
 
 took place five times a month, and finally in B.C. 
 186 the famous Bacchanalian trial took place, of 
 which Livy (Bk. xxxix.) gives such a graphic 
 account, and to which a copy of the inscription of the 
 decree of the Senate, preserved to our day, gives 
 such eloquent testimony, providing as it does severe 
 penalties for subsequent offenders, and recognising 
 on the other hand large liberty of conscience. 
 
 The same love of mystery and longing for 
 knowledge which produced the Bacchanalian clubs 
 accorded a warm reception to astrology and made 
 men listen with eagerness to those who could tell 
 their fortunes or guide their lives by means of the 
 stars. We do not know when the bearers of this 
 knowledge first arrived in Rome, but Cato, in his 
 Farm Almanac, our earliest piece of prose literature, 
 in giving rules for the behaviour of the farm bailiff 
 especially enjoins the intending landowner that his 
 bailiff should not be given to the consultation of 
 Chaldaean astrologers. Within half a century the 
 problem of the Chaldaeans grew so serious that 
 state interference was necessary, and in B.C. 139 
 the praetor Cn. Cornelius Hispalus issued an edict 
 ordering the Chaldaeans to leave Rome and Italy 
 within ten days. 
 
 The same age which produced this growth of 
 superstition brought also the antidote for it in 
 the shape of a sceptical philosophy, but the only 
 trouble was that this philosophy not only cured 
 
I20 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 superstition but in doing so killed the genuine 
 religious spirit underlying it. It cast out, to be 
 sure, the seven devils of superstition, but when men 
 returned to themselves again, they found their whole 
 spiritual house swept and garnished. With the 
 death of the direct pupils of Aristotle, the Greek 
 mind had thought out all the problems of philosophy 
 of which man at that time was able to conceive. 
 The following generations of philosophers devoted 
 themselves either to the elaboration of detail or to 
 a renewed examination of the foundations of belief, 
 with the result that their smaller minds came to 
 smaller conclusions, and the end of their investiga- 
 tions was one increased scepticism. The schools 
 of the day showed many slight variations and bore 
 many different names, but they all agreed in being 
 more or less pervaded by a sceptical spirit, and 
 by accenting ethics as against metaphysics, though 
 they defined ethics very differently according to 
 their starting point. 
 
 One of the earliest philosophical influences which 
 reached Rome was however that of a pre-Socratic 
 school, the school of Pythagoras. This was natural 
 enough in itself, as the headquarters of the school 
 was in Southern Italy, but it is curious and signifi- 
 cant that the first pronounced instance of its influence 
 occurred shortly after the Second Punic War, and in 
 connexion with a clever fraud which was perpetrated 
 with a view to influencing religion. In the year 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH' 121 
 
 B.C. 1 8 1 a certain man reported that when he was 
 ploughing his field, which lay on the other side of 
 the Tiber, at the foot of the Janiculum, the plough 
 had laid bare two stone sarcophagi, stoutly sealed 
 with lead, and bearing inscriptions in Greek and 
 Latin according to which they purported to contain, 
 one of them the body of King Numa, the other, his 
 writings. When they were opened the one which 
 ought to have contained the body was empty, in 
 the other lay two rolls, each roll consisting of seven 
 books ; the one set of seven was written in Latin 
 and treated of pontifical law, the other consisted of 
 philosophical writings. They were examined, found 
 to be heretical and subversive to true religion, and 
 were accordingly burned in the Comitium. The 
 connexion of Numa and Pythagoras, historically 
 impossible but believed in at this time, makes it 
 practically certain that this was a clever attempt to 
 introduce the philosophy of Pythagoras into Rome 
 under the holy sanction of the name of Numa. 
 Fortunately the zeal of the city praetor frustrated 
 the scheme. But the doctrines of philosophy, which 
 thus failed to enter by the door of religion, found 
 the door of literature wide open for them. As the 
 irony of fate would have it, Cato, the stalwart enemy 
 of Greek influence, had brought back from Sardinia 
 with him the poet Ennius, and at about the time 
 when the false books of Numa were burning in the 
 Comitium Ennius was giving to the world a Latin 
 
122 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 translation of the Sacred History of the Greek 
 Euhemerus. This Euhemerus, a Sicilian who had 
 lived about a century before this time, earned his 
 title to fame by writing a novel of adventure and 
 travel, in which he described a trip which he had 
 taken in the Red Sea along the coast of Arabia 
 to the wonderful island of Panchaia, where he found 
 a column with an inscription on it telling the life 
 history of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus, who were 
 thus shown to have been historical characters after- 
 wards elevated into deities. It was this theologi- 
 cal element in his book which made him famous. 
 This theory of the historical origin of the gods 
 is even to-day called Euhemerism, and has exerted 
 a baleful influence over writers on mythology from 
 its author's day down to our own. These then 
 were the doctrines which Ennius presented to the 
 Romans in their own tongue, and it is pathetic 
 to realise that his Sacred History formed the 
 first formal treatise on theology which Rome ever 
 possessed. Born under such an evil star, it is 
 small wonder that her theological speculations never 
 reached great metaphysical heights. 
 
 In these days it seemed to the Senate that the 
 question of philosophy was beginning to be so 
 serious that it might be considered as a public 
 danger, and that it was therefore their duty to try 
 to cope with it. They chose, of course, the typical 
 Roman method of dealing with such matters, and 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH. 123 
 
 the philosophers were expelled from Rome. At 
 first in B.C. 173 it was only the Epicureans who 
 were sent out, but in B.C. 161 the edict was 
 broadened to include philosophers in general. 
 However six years later, in B.C. 155, there came 
 to Rome an embassy of philosophers whose mission 
 was avowedly political and not philosophical, and 
 who thus could not be excluded, while at the same 
 time they took occasion to preach their philosophical 
 doctrines. It was fortunate for Rome that Stoicism, 
 the best among all these philosophies, appealed to 
 her most strongly and became thus the national 
 philosophy of Rome. Stoicism was in many re- 
 spects quite as sceptical as the others, but it had 
 at least this great advantage that it laid a strong 
 emphasis on ethics, and was in so far capable of 
 becoming a guide of life. It might be well enough 
 for Greeks, whose aggressive work in the world had 
 been done, to settle down to an idle old age with 
 a theory of life which practically excluded the 
 possibility of strong decisive action, but Rome was 
 still young, and most of her work was still before 
 her. She might think herself very old and pretend 
 to take peculiar delight in many of the more 
 decadent forms of Greek thought, but in reality 
 her leaders instinctively turned to Stoicism, as 
 affording a compromise between the mere thought- 
 less activity of youth, which acts for the love of 
 acting, and the jaded philosophy of the vanity of 
 
124 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 all effort. About the middle of the century {circa 
 B.C. 150) there existed in Rome a centre of culture 
 and intellectual influence, a little group of men 
 peculiarly interesting, because they form practically 
 the first instance of an intellectual coterie in the 
 history of Rome. Their leader was the younger 
 Scipio, who had as his associates his friend Laelius, 
 the poet Lucilius, whose brilliant writings, sub- 
 merged by the more brilliant satires of Horace, form 
 one of the most deplorable losses in Roman litera- 
 ture, and the Stoic philosopher Panaitios of Rhodes. 
 Terence had also belonged to the circle, but he was 
 now dead. Stoicism was the avowed philosophy 
 of these men, and their influence, especially that of 
 Panaitios and Lucilius, did much to popularise their 
 chosen philosophical creed. 
 
 While Stoicism claimed superiority to religion 
 and showed the impossibility of attaching any value 
 to religious knowledge, it recognised the necessity 
 of religion for the common people on grounds of 
 expediency, and effected a reconciliation between 
 this denial of religion on the one hand, and the 
 recognition of it on the other, by asserting that 
 the religion of the state was justified not only by 
 expediency but much more by the fact that it was 
 after all only the presentation of the truths of 
 Stoicism in a form which was intelligible to the 
 lower classes. Had this group of Scipio and his 
 associates made an effort to emphasise these 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH' 125 
 
 particular doctrines of Stoicism in relation to religion, 
 the downfall of the state religion, which occurred in 
 the following century, might have been hindered. 
 But for reasons, which we shall see in a moment, 
 this downfall could not have been prevented, and it 
 is doubtful whether the influence of any philosophical 
 system, even when supported by such prominent 
 men, could have perceptibly postponed the catas- 
 trophe. Meantime the only visible contribution of 
 Stoicism to the problem of religion was the growth 
 under her influence of the idea of a '' double truth," 
 one truth for the intellectual classes and one for the 
 common people, reaching its climax in the phrase 
 " It is expedient for the state to be deceived in 
 matters of religion " {expedit igitur falli in religione 
 civitatem). This was the attitude toward religion of 
 the most intellectual men in the community at the 
 beginning of what was in many ways the most 
 terrible period in Rome's history. 
 
 The last century before Christ (more exactly 
 B.C. 133-B.C. 27) is the story of how Rome became 
 an empire because she was no longer able to be a 
 republic ; it is the history of the growth of one-man 
 power because many-men power had become im- 
 possible. This growth was caused not only, nor at 
 first even chiefly, by the grasping character of 
 Rome's statesmen, but by the increase of the rabble 
 and the consequent unmanageable character of her 
 population, except under the firm hand of a single 
 
126 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 master. And the reason why it took one hundred 
 years of civil war to change the republic into the 
 empire was not because the spirit of the republic 
 was so slow in dying that its death struggles filled a 
 century, but merely because the republic died too 
 easily and the way to one-man power was so simple 
 that there were too many candidates for the position, 
 and hence the civil wars between them. These 
 civil wars were bound to continue until the bitter 
 lessons of experience had taught men not only how 
 to gain the supreme control, which was relatively 
 easy, but how to keep it and exclude rivals, 
 which was m.uch more difficult. The ambitious 
 leaders of this century did not have to create a 
 throne ; that was ready to their hand. Their task 
 was only to put defences around it. Even these 
 defences of it were not directly against the people, 
 for the people had no desire to overthrow the throne, 
 but merely against the rival candidates. Step by 
 step from Tiberius Gracchus to Gaius Gracchus, and 
 on to Marius, to Sulla, to Pompey, to Julius Caesar, 
 possession became more and more permanent ; 
 until from being a mere momentary position, it 
 became nine points of the law, and Octavian made 
 the tenure perfect by adding an almost religious 
 reverence to his person in the title Augustus. 
 
 In the main the foreign wars of the second 
 century before Christ gave place to the Civil War at 
 home, but there was one exception to this, the war 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH • 127 
 
 with Mithradates, king of Pontus, which on various 
 occasions during the early part of the century took 
 large bodies of Romans to the Orient. And as 
 though to supplement this knowledge of the East, 
 in the closing half of the century the field of the 
 civil struggle was enlarged so that it too included 
 the East and South-East. We have already seen 
 so many instances of the effects of political events 
 on the course of Roman religion that it is a matter 
 of no surprise to us to see that both of" these 
 struggles, the Civil War and the Oriental wars, left 
 their marks on religion. It would be much more 
 surprising if they had not done so. In the struggle of 
 the rivals at home every possible weapon was employed, 
 and it was soon discovered that the priests and the 
 paraphernalia of religion were excellent means of 
 political power and influence. The religion of the 
 state therefore became enslaved to politics. On the 
 other hand the campaigns in the East made the 
 soldiers, and eventually on their return the whole 
 populace, acquainted with various Oriental deities, 
 which helped to satisfy their craving for the sensa- 
 tional and the superstitious. Thus while "the state 
 religion in its debauched condition was losinginfluence, 
 the orgiastic element in worship was gaining power 
 through these newly acquired Oriental cults. The 
 story of the religion of the last century of the republic 
 is accordingly the history of the control of state 
 religion by politics and its consequent destruction, 
 
128 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 and the growth of superstition because of the coming 
 of new Oriental worships ; and we may add to 
 these two topics a third : the pathetic attempts of 
 philosophy to breathe new life into the dead religion 
 of the state. 
 
 When it comes to the question of the human 
 characters whose names are writ large on this page 
 of religious history, the Dictator Lucius Cornelius 
 Sulla towers above all others. To his political 
 insight is largely owing the harnessing of the state 
 religion to the chariot of the politician, now and 
 hereafter ; and it was he who was the foremost 
 leader of Roman armies to the Orient, and the 
 man who, because of his peculiarly superstitious 
 character, encouraged the worship of the strange 
 deities which were found there. In both these 
 directions he was ably seconded by Pompey, half a 
 generation later. On the other hand the futile 
 efforts of philosophy to improve the situation were 
 inspired during the earlier period by the chief priest 
 Scaevola, a contemporary of Sulla, and during 
 Pompey's and Caesar's time by Varro, the greatest 
 scholar that Rome ever produced. 
 
 Let us follow first the fortunes of the religion 
 of the state at the hands of the politicians. The 
 upper and influential classes of Roman society were 
 now thoroughly imbued with Stoic philosophy and 
 accordingly with the doctrine of the " double truth " 
 in the field of religion — the real philosophical truth 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH 129 
 
 which was their own pecuHar property and which 
 showed them clearly that all the forms of religion 
 were vain, and its doctrines at best a clumsy 
 statement in roundabout parables of a truth which 
 they saw face to face ; and that lower " truth " 
 intended for the masses and dictated by the 
 pressure of necessity, the concrete state religion in 
 all its details, which must be preserved among the 
 lower classes in the interest of the state and of 
 society. The state religion was thus a matter of 
 expediency and of usefulness. But once this idea 
 of its usefulness was put into the foreground, it was 
 natural that the question should immediately be 
 asked : Was this state religion as useful after all as 
 it might be ? Could it not be put to greater uses ? 
 If religion existed in general for its political effects, 
 why should it not be used by the individual, like 
 any other political apparatus, for his own individual 
 advancement ? The man to whom this idea seems 
 to have come first in all its fullness was Sulla, and 
 he proceeded immediately to act upon it. The 
 control of religion could, of course, be obtained best 
 through the priesthoods, and those priesthoods were 
 naturally most worth gaining which possessed the 
 greatest right of interference in affairs of state. 
 These priesthoods were : first the Augurs, with 
 their traditional right to break up assemblies and to 
 declare legislative action null and void ; then the 
 Pontiffs, with their general control of all vexed 
 
 K 
 
I30 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 questions concerning the intersection of divine and 
 human law ; and lastly the XVviri, or the keepers 
 of the Sibylline books, in charge also of the cults 
 to which the oracles had given birth. Accordingly 
 he increased the numbers of these three priesthoods, 
 raising each to fifteen ; and inasmuch as the old 
 right of the colleges of the priests to fill vacancies 
 in their own bodies themselves had been taken away 
 from them in B.C. 103, and such vacancies were now 
 filled by popular vote, it was an easy thing for him 
 to fill the new positions with his own men. 
 
 The result of accentuating the political import- 
 ance of these three colleges was that the whole 
 body of the state religion became actuated with a 
 political spirit, and the whole structure was re- 
 modelled along the lines of this new valuation. 
 The immediate effect of this was that the priests 
 themselves became entirely absorbed in politics. 
 To be sure Sulla was not responsible for all of this, 
 because the tendency had been in this direction 
 ever since the time of the Punic wars. In the good 
 old days of Roman religion the office of priest had 
 been in the main its own reward, and though the 
 priests formed by no means a separate class, and 
 the individual priest had many secular interests 
 and occasionally some political ones, he was not 
 supposed to hold political ofifice. In the time of 
 the Punic wars, however, the tide began to turn. 
 The earliest recorded instance of a priest holding a 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH 131 
 
 high political office is in the year B.C. 242 when 
 the Flamen Martialis or special priest of Mars was 
 chosen Consul ; but when the gentleman in question 
 started to go to the war, he was forbidden by the 
 Pontifex Maximus. In B.C. 200 the Flamen Dialis, 
 or special priest of Juppiter, was allowed to be 
 made aedile, but his brother had to be especially 
 authorised to take the oath of office in his stead, 
 since the priest of Juppiter, the god of oaths, was 
 himself not allowed to take an oath. In the course 
 of the next century such cases became more 
 common, and where the thing was not allowed, 
 the priesthood became unpopular, and was some- 
 times left entirely vacant. This last thing happened, 
 for instance, in the case of the Flaminium Diale, a 
 position which was unfilled from B.C. 87 till B.C. 11. 
 But the evil effects of politics were not confined 
 to the emptying of certain priesthoods, which after 
 all were of no very great importance, except as 
 their presence tended to sustain the morale of the 
 old religious ritual. Its effects were much more 
 disastrous in the very important priesthoods which 
 had now become essentially political offices. The 
 exclusively political interests of the incumbents, 
 combined with the fact that each man was elected 
 by general vote of the people and without any 
 special fitness for the position, as had been the case 
 in the old days, tended to break down all the 
 traditions of the college, and thus to destroy much 
 
132 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 of the knowledge which was being handed down 
 largely by oral tradition. There arose therefore an 
 ignorance of the ritual of the cult which was great 
 j-ust in proportion as the knowledge originally 
 present had been accurate and intricate. But even 
 this was not all ; the arranging of the yearly 
 calendar, with its complicated intercalation of days 
 to bring into harmony the solar and the lunar 
 years, was still in the hands of the priests, and 
 here the results of their growing ignorance were 
 most appalling. The calendar became terribly dis- 
 ordered ; and this again had its reaction on religion, 
 for the calendar month occasionally fell so out of 
 gear with the natural seasons that it was impossible 
 to celebrate some of the old Roman festivals, which 
 had a distinct bearing on certain seasons of the year. 
 
 Thus the greatest enemies of the religion of the 
 state were those of its own household, the priests, 
 who turned the reverent formalism of the old days 
 into a mockery, and made their priesthood merely 
 a means of political influence. 
 
 Now that the old Roman gods had been changed 
 into new-fangled Greek gods, and the old Roman 
 priesthoods into modern political clubs, it is little 
 wonder that the religion of the fathers ceased to 
 satisfy their descendents. But while history shows 
 that specific religious creeds have often proved 
 mortal and subject to change and decay, the same 
 history makes clear that the religious instinct is a 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH 133 
 
 constant factor in humanity ; and we must not 
 suppose for a moment that the religious need of 
 the Roman community had ceased to exist, simply 
 because the religion of the state had ceased to 
 satisfy it. From the day when the Sibyl gave her 
 first oracles to Rome on down to the time of Sulla, 
 the desire for the sensational and the extraordinary 
 in religion had been steadily growing. It had its 
 birth in the idea that there was such a thing as 
 a direct communion with the deity, and that the 
 oracles were an immediate command from him. 
 It was nourished by the sense of foreignness in the 
 Greek ceremonies gradually introduced into the cult. 
 It fed on the more sensational aspects of certain of 
 the gods brought in : on the enthusiastic rites of 
 Bacchus, on the miracle-working of Aesculapius, 
 on the Stygian mystery of Dis and Proserpina. 
 But its fulfilment was to come from the East, that 
 inexhaustible fountain of religious energy. In the 
 Magna Mater it recognised its own. This was the 
 first undiluted Orientalism which came to Rome. 
 But the state itself had received it, and had 
 managed in some unaccountable way to put upon 
 this outlandish Eastern cult the stamp of Rome's 
 nationality, that stamp which no nation ever 
 successfully and permanently resisted ; and thus 
 the reception of the cult on the part of the state 
 was not only a disgraceful thing, tending to degrade 
 true religion and spread the contagion of Orientalism, 
 
134 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 but it also made those whose appetite had been 
 aroused eager for other deities, whose cult would 
 have the great additional charm of being unlicensed 
 by the state, and hence savouring of unlawfulness. 
 
 Such a cult, long half-consciously desired, was at 
 length found, when in B.C. 92 the Roman soldiery 
 commanded by Sulla penetrated into the valley of 
 Comana in Cappadocia. There was a whole com- 
 munity, a miniature state, devoted to the service of a 
 goddess not unlike the Great Mother of Pessinus, 
 but whose cult was more ecstatic, more orgiastic, 
 than that of the Magna Mater, at least as 
 Rome knew her. The king was the chief priest, 
 and the citizens were priests and priestesses. The 
 war with Mithradates brought the Roman army 
 there again and also to another Comana in Pontus, 
 where there was a branch of the Cappadocian cult. 
 It was not the ignorant soldiery alone who were 
 impressed by what they saw'; their leader, Sulla, 
 was fully as much affected, and on his return to Italy 
 when the great crisis in his career, his march on 
 Rome and his storming of the Eternal City, lay 
 before him, it was the goddess of Comana who 
 appeared to him in a dream and gave him courage. 
 Thus her cult entered Rome, and the capture of the 
 city by Sulla has its parallel in the capture of the 
 hearts of the people by his companion, the goddess 
 of Comana. The original name of this goddess 
 seems to have been Ma, but the Greeks, who also 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH , 135 
 
 knew her, had likened her to Enyo, their goddess of 
 strife and warfare ; hence in these days of facile 
 identification the Romans' course was clear, and she 
 became straightway Bellona, called by the name of 
 their old goddess of war. Of all the chapters of the 
 history of such identifications none is more curious 
 than this. The old Bellona had borne to Mars the 
 same relation that Fides, the goddess of good faith, 
 had borne to Juppiter. She was the result of the 
 separate deification of one of the qualities of Mars, 
 the breaking off of an adjective and the turning of 
 it into a noun ; but from now on, though the old 
 goddess still existed and had her own temple and 
 her own worship, the name was also applied to this 
 strange Oriental goddess who came in the train of 
 the debauched Roman army on its return from the 
 East. But though men might call this new-comer by 
 the name of a sacred old national goddess and 
 worship her in private as they pleased, the religion of 
 the state, even in its sunken condition, refused to 
 admit her among its deities, and the priests, the 
 Fanatici, with their wild dances, to the music of 
 cymbals and trumpets, slashing themselves with their 
 double axes until their arms streamed with blood, 
 were not, at least as yet, the official representatives 
 of the state, the companions of the reverend old Salii 
 with their dignified " three-step." Even the sanctu- 
 aries of the private cult must be kept outside the 
 city, and the violation of this law in B.C. 48 resulted 
 
136 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 in the raiding and destruction of one of these private 
 chapels. Her cult does not seem to have become 
 a state affair until the beginning of the third century 
 A.D.,when Caracalla.who had extended Roman citizen- 
 ship to all the inhabitants of the provinces, gave a 
 similar citizenship to all the foreign deities resident 
 in Rome. It is a curious coincidence that this action 
 of Caracalla's occurred just about the same year A.D. 
 in which the breakdown of the pomeriuin for state 
 cults had occurred B.C. For the present, however, 
 that is to say in the first century B.C., the state re- 
 tained her dignity, though the resultant unorthodox 
 character of the cult increased its power and 
 influence, and made it more subversive to morals 
 than the Magna Mater was. 
 
 An even more interesting instance, both of the 
 popularity of sensational foreign cults and of the 
 struggle of the state religion against them, is found 
 in the case of the Egyptian goddess Isis. The 
 spread of Isis worship into the Greek, and conse- 
 quently also into the Roman world, began relatively 
 early. In the third century Isis and her companion 
 Serapis were well established on the island of Delos ; 
 and in the second century we find traces of 
 their worship in Campania, especially at Pompeii 
 and Puteoli. This last-named place, the seaport 
 Puteoli, the modern Pozzuoli, outside of Naples, 
 was probably the door through which Isis and her 
 train came into Italy. Puteoli was the chief port 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH ' 137 
 
 for Oriental ships, including Egypt, and it also had 
 commercial relations with Delos. At this later 
 date it supplied Rome with gods in somewhat the 
 same way that Cumae, in the same neighbourhood, 
 had done centuries before. So far as the city of 
 Rome itself is concerned, an apparently trustworthy 
 tradition traces the private cult back to the time of 
 Sulla ; and it certainly cannot have been introduced 
 much later than this time, because in B.C. 58 it 
 had became so prominent and so offensive to the 
 authorities of the state that they destroyed an altar 
 of Isis on the Capitoline. Apparently Isis was no 
 exception to the general law of growth by perse- 
 cution, because in the course of the next decade the 
 state found it necessary to interfere no less than 
 three times, i.e. in B.C. 53, 50, and 48. Finally the 
 policy of suppression proved so ineffectual that it 
 was decided to try the opposite extreme, and to see 
 what could be done by state acknowledgment and 
 state control, and so the Triumvirs, Octavian, Antony, 
 and Lepidus, in B.C. 43 decreed the building of 
 a state temple for Isis. But although they had 
 decreed the erection of a temple, they were too 
 much engaged in their own affairs to build it im- 
 mediately, and until the temple was built Isis could 
 not properly be considered among the state gods. 
 As events turned out this temple was never built, 
 for in the course of the next few years the trouble 
 with Antony and Cleopatra began, and thus the gods 
 
138 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 of Egypt became the gods of Rome's enemies, and so 
 far as the state was concerned an acknowledgment 
 of these gods was impossible. Instead Augustus 
 forbade even private chapels inside the ponierium. 
 The subsequent history of Isis does not directly 
 concern us ; suffice it to say that after various 
 vicissitudes she was admitted to the state cult by 
 Caracalla along with all the other foreign deities. 
 
 But it was not only Asia Minor and Egypt which 
 gave their cults to Rome ; the deities of Syria came 
 too. Prominent among them was Atargatis, whose 
 cult seems to have touched the Italian mainland first 
 at Puteoli. In B.C. 54 the army of Crassus on its 
 Eastern expedition, which was destined to come to 
 such a tragic end in the terrible defeat at Carrhae, 
 visited and plundered the sanctuary of the goddess 
 in Syria. Thus she became known at Rome, where 
 she was called simply the " Syrian goddess " idea 
 Syi'ia) and was worshipped in a way very similar to 
 the Magna Mater and Bellona. 
 
 Lastly when Pompey swept the Mediterranean 
 clean of Cilician pirates, the sailors became ac- 
 quainted with a Persian deity, Mithras, whose cult 
 in Rome began during our period and subsequently 
 crowded all the other orgiastic cults into insignifi- 
 cance. 
 
 We have now seen how the politicians were turn- 
 ing the state religion into a tool for the accomplish- 
 ment of their own selfish ends, and how the masses 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH • 139 
 
 of the people were seeking satisfaction for their 
 religious needs in sensational foreign worships, in- 
 troduced from Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, and Persia. 
 We must now see whether any efforts were being 
 made by any members of the community in behalf 
 of the old religion, and whether there were still 
 in existence any traces of the pure old Roman 
 worship. 
 
 The latter-day philosophies of Greece had dealt 
 a severe blow at Roman religion by convincing the 
 intellectual classes in the community that in the 
 nature of things there could be no such knowledge 
 as that upon which religion was based, and hence 
 that religion was an idle thing unworthy of a true 
 man's interest. Yet all the philosophy in the world 
 could not take away from a Roman his sense of duty 
 to the state. Now the state in its experience had 
 found religion so necessary that she had built up a 
 formal system of it and made it a part of herself 
 As it was the duty of the citizen to support the 
 state in every part of her activity, it was clearly his 
 duty to support the state religion. Hence there 
 arose that crass contradiction, which existed in Rome 
 to a large degree as long as these particular systems 
 of philosophy prevailed, between the duty which a 
 man, as a thinking man, owed to himself, and the 
 duty wljich he, as a good citizen, owed to the state. 
 We have seen how during the second century before 
 Christ no attempt was made to reconcile these two 
 
I40 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 views and how they existed side by side in such a 
 man, for example, as Ennius, who wrote certain 
 treatises embodying the most extraordinary sceptical 
 doctrines, and certain patriotic poems in which the 
 whole apparatus of the Roman gods is prominently 
 exhibited and most reverently treated. We have 
 also seen how this " double truth " could not but 
 have disastrous results on the state religion in spite 
 of all efforts to the contrary. The first effort which 
 was made to improve the situation was not so much 
 an attempt at reconciliation as a frank statement of 
 the difficulties of the case. The problem had ad- 
 vanced considerably toward solution when once it 
 had been clearly stated. The man who had the 
 courage to make the statement was Quintus MuciUs 
 Scaevola, a famous lawyer as well as the head of the 
 college of Pontiffs (Pontifex Maximus). He was a 
 contemporary of Sulla, and was admirably fitted for 
 his task because he not only represented religion in 
 his position as Pontifex Maximus, but could speak 
 also in behalf of the state both theoretically as a 
 lawyer, and practically because he had filled almost 
 all the important political offices (consul, B.C. 95). 
 The treatise in which he made his statements has 
 been lost to us, but we may obtain a fair idea of 
 what he said from a quotation by the Christian 
 writer Augustine in his wonderful book The City 
 of God (iv. 27). For Scaevola the double truth of 
 Ennius has grown into a triple truth, and there 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH . 141 
 
 are no less than three distinct religions : the 
 religion of poets, of philosophers, and of statesmen. 
 The religion of the poets, by which he means 
 the mythological treatment of the gods, he con- 
 demns as worthless because it tells a great many 
 things about the gods which are not true and which 
 are entirely unworthy of them. The religion of 
 philosophers he does not consider suitable to the 
 state, because it contains many things which are 
 superfluous, and some which are injurious. The 
 superfluous things may be allowed to pass, but the 
 injurious things, by which he evidently means the 
 doctrines of Euhemeros, are a very serious matter, 
 not because they are untrue but because the know- 
 ledge of them is inexpedient for the masses. The 
 religion of the statesman can have no part in these 
 things, even if they are true ; and a man as a citizen 
 of the state must believe in many things, or profess 
 belief in them, which the same man, as an indivi- 
 dual and a philosopher, knows are false. Scaevola's 
 honest well-intentioned effort to support the religion 
 of the state was naturally a failure. The very 
 " masses '' in whose behalf Scaevola was calling on his 
 fellow-citizens to undergo these casuistical gymnastics 
 soon cared more for Bellona and Isis than for all 
 the gods of Numa together. But we cannot help 
 admiring Scaevola for his patriotism, though we may 
 not envy him his ethics. The state religion could 
 never be supported on the arguments of expediency ; 
 
142 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 every one granted its expediency, and still it fell ; its 
 worst enemies, the politicians, granted it most of all, 
 and they were the only ones who put the doctrine 
 to any practical use. It was precisely this discovery 
 of its expediency and its great practical value which 
 caused its downfall. From the practical standpoint 
 the problem was settled once and for all, but as a 
 matter of theory it remained for the next generation, 
 in the person of Varro, to provide a more satisfactory 
 solution, and to effect something of a compromise 
 between the truth of philosophy and the truth of 
 religion. 
 
 Marcus Terentius Varro came to the work 
 equipped with all the learning of his time and 
 possessed of a greater knowledge of facts than any 
 other Roman of his or any other day. So far as 
 the problem of religion was concerned, he embodied 
 this learning in the sixteen books of Divine Anti- 
 quities, which he very appropriately dedicated to 
 Julius Caesar in his capacity as Pontifex Maximus. 
 If Ennius's Sacra Historia be left out of account, his 
 book was the first treatise on systematic theology 
 which Rome ever had. In this work he desired to 
 accomplish three things : first, by a review of the 
 history of Rome to show how essential the state 
 religion was ; second, by an examination of Greek 
 mythology to purify the state religion from its 
 immoral influences ; third, to show that the state 
 religion so purified was fully in accord with Stoic 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH . 143 
 
 philosophy. In regard to the " three religions," 
 therefore, he agreed with Scaevola in casting out 
 entirely the religion of the poets, and in accepting 
 both the others, but he differed from Scaevola in 
 that he denied the contradiction between them and 
 asserted that they were not two truths but two 
 forms of the same truth. We are not able to go into 
 the details of his attempt, because unfortunately the 
 books in which he wrote it have been lost to us, and 
 we have again merely the quotation in Augustine's 
 City of God. But we know that in general he 
 tried to show that the formal doctrines of the state 
 religion were merely a popular presentation of the 
 truths of the Stoic philosophy, and that the whole 
 system of Roman gods could be reduced in theory 
 to the great philosophical contrast between the sky 
 and the earth, the procreative and the conceptive 
 elements. A man might therefore hold fast to both 
 religions as to a simpler creed and a more abstruse 
 one. Hence a man's belief as a good citizen and 
 his belief as an intelligent individual were not in con- 
 trast so far as the truth was concerned, but merely 
 in the matter of form, in the manner of presentation. 
 Varro's heroic effort, supported as it was by all 
 the learning of his day and all the influence that 
 his fame lent to his words, was nevertheless a 
 failure. The religion of the state was dead ; 
 politics had killed it. It was a political power 
 alone which could restore life to it, but that was 
 
144 THE DECLINE OF FAITH 
 
 the work of an emperor, Augustus, and not of a 
 scholar, Varro. 
 
 While Varro, with the weapon of philosophy, 
 was attempting to defend the religion of the state 
 against its enemies, the poets and the philosophers, a 
 poet, also armed with philosophy, was trying to 
 defend the Roman people against its worst enemy, 
 superstition. It may not seem as though Lucretius 
 belonged among the friends of old Roman religion, 
 and as though the De Rermn Natura were exactly 
 a religious poem, and yet his work was in so far 
 helpful to old Roman religion in that it attacked 
 the excesses of a latter-day superstition which had 
 alienated the hearts of the people from their old 
 beliefs. Superstition is a parasite which lives on 
 scepticism, and with the killing of the parasite 
 scepticism sometimes dies as well ; and it is open 
 to question whether Lucretius's book was not of 
 considerable service in the cause of religion. For 
 religion still lived at Rome, though it is the fashion 
 of the writers on the ethics of the close of the republic 
 to emphasise almost entirely the scepticism of the 
 day, dwelling on the attitude of a Cicero or a 
 Caesar, and forgetting the infinite number of " little 
 people," especially outside of Rome in the country, 
 who still believed in the old religion of the fathers, 
 and who still performed the old festivals of Numa, 
 people who knew no more about Isis than they did 
 about Stoic philosophy. Their presence is disclosed 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH • 145 
 
 to us in a few republican inscriptions, but better yet 
 in the continuance of the rites of family worship 
 down into the latest days of Rome, rites which did 
 not form a part of the restoration of Augustus, and 
 which therefore, had they died now, would never 
 have come to life again. It is by just so much 
 more our duty to remember these people, as they 
 have been forgotten by history, if we ever expect to 
 obtain a picture of Roman religion in its true pro- 
 portions. They were besides the people upon whom 
 Augustus built in the restoration, to which we now 
 turn. 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 Politics had caused the downfall of the state 
 religion. Weakened by the attacks of a sceptical 
 philosophy, driven from the hearts of the common 
 people by the rival cults of the Orient, the state 
 religion had finally lost all its influence by the 
 abuse of it as a political tool. Its priesthoods 
 were deserted, its temples were falling into ruins 
 with the grass carpeting their mosaic pavements 
 and the spiders weaving new altar cloths. To us 
 with our modern ideas it would have seemed im- 
 possible that this state religion could ever rise again ; 
 and probably no other state religion that the world 
 has ever seen could have been brought to life again, 
 because no other state religion has ever been so 
 absolutely a part of the state, unless the state itself 
 were a theocracy ; and possibly no lesser genius than 
 Augustus could have accomplished the task even 
 under the slightly more favourable conditions which 
 the state religion of Rome offered. Whether Julius 
 Caesar would have attempted the restoration is 
 one of the many questions which his death left 
 
 146 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE* 147 
 
 unanswered. Certainly thoughtful men of his day 
 hoped that he would, and it was in this hope that 
 Varro dedicated his Divine Antiquities to him ; 
 and another contemporary, Granius Flaccus, his 
 book On the Invocation of the Gods. But except 
 for one law which he caused to be enacted " con- 
 cerning the priesthoods," we have no knowledge 
 either of his accomplishment or of his intentions, 
 and the great task was left practically untouched 
 for the master-hand of Augustus. 
 
 In order that we may understand what Augustus 
 did and how he managed to succeed in relation to 
 the state religion we must obtain some idea of the 
 whole scheme of Augustus in relation to the state 
 at large, of which his religious reorganisation was 
 merely a part. One of the cleverest characterisa- 
 tions of the Emperor Augustus which has ever been 
 written was that by the late Professor Mommsen, 
 but its relatively secluded position in the Latin 
 preface to an edition of Augustus's great autobio- 
 graphy, the Res Gestae, has prevented it from being 
 generally known. Mommsen describes Augustus 
 as " a man who wore most skilfully the mask 
 of a great man, though himself not great.'' This 
 epigrammatic statenrent is undoubtedly clever but 
 it is not just, although it is the opinion concerning 
 Augustus which we would expect a man to hold 
 who, like Mommsen, had an almost unbounded 
 admiration for Julius Caesar. There have been 
 
148 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 scattered through the pages of history even down 
 to our own day men of whom we say that they 
 were not great men, though they did a great work. 
 In certain cases doubtless we can separate the man 
 from his work and justifiy the assertion, but in other 
 cases we are deceived by the man himself just as 
 his contemporaries were and as he wished them to 
 be. For it occasionally happens that a man who is 
 called to rule over men and to reorganise a dis- 
 ordered government is able best to accomplish his 
 end by a gentle diplomacy, a conciliatory manner, 
 which is often misunderstood by those who surround 
 him and who interpret gentleness of spirit as small- 
 ness of spirit and self-restraint as weakness. It 
 would be truer to describe Augustus as a man who 
 wore most skilfully the mask of an ordinary man 
 though himself an extraordinary man. The more 
 we study the chaotic condition of Rome under the 
 Second Triumvirate and the more fully we realise 
 not only the total disorganisation of the forms 
 of government but also the absolute demoralisation 
 of the individual citizen, the more we appreciate the 
 almost impossible task which was set for Augustus 
 and which he successfully accomplished. For one 
 hundred years (B.C. 133-31), from Tiberius Gracchus 
 to Actium, hardly a decade had passed which had 
 not brought forth some terrible revolution for Rome. 
 Even the great Caesar had failed, had not divined 
 aright the only treatment to which the disease of the 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE. 149 
 
 age would yield, for although the blows which actually 
 killed Caesar may have been merely an accident in 
 history, the deed of irresponsible men, his fall was no 
 accident but was the inevitable logical outcome of 
 his imperial policy. But Augustus succeeded in 
 establishing a form of government which enabled 
 himself and his connexion to occupy the throne for 
 almost a hundred years, and even then though 
 revolutions came, his constitution was the main bul- 
 wark of government in succeeding centuries. It 
 would take us too far from our present subject to 
 answer in any completeness the question of how he 
 succeeded, but a word or two may be said in general, 
 and the rest will become clearer when we examine 
 his reorganisation of religion. 
 
 The secret of Augustus's success was the infinite 
 tact and diplomacy by which he managed to 
 strengthen the throne and his own position on it 
 while apparently restoring the form of the republic 
 and the manners of the old days. It is open to 
 question whether he was actuated by a consideration 
 of the good of the state, or by a regard for his own 
 selfish ends, but it is beyond question that he gave 
 to Rome the only form of government which could 
 eradicate the habit of revolution, and thus saved the 
 state. He succeeded because he did not under- 
 estimate the difficulty of the task, and accordingly 
 brought to - bear on it every possible influence, 
 emphasising especially the psychological element 
 
ISO THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 and being willing to go a long way around in order 
 to arrive at his goal. He was not content with a 
 mere temporary makeshift, which might carry him 
 to the end of his own life ; he was laying founda- 
 tions for the future. Nowhere is this more clearly 
 stated than in one of his edicts, where he says : — 
 " May it fall to my lot to establish the state firm 
 and strong and to obtain the wished-for fruit of my 
 labours, that I may be called the author of it and 
 that when I die 1 may carry with me the hope 
 that the foundations which I have laid may abide." 
 These abiding foundations must be laid deep in 
 the national psychology, and it was his grasp of the 
 psychological problem which explains his reorganisa- 
 tion of religion. A century of civil war had totally 
 destroyed the spirit of unity and created an infinite 
 number of petty hatreds between man and man. 
 Men had looked so long at their individual interests 
 that they had almost forgotten the existence of the 
 state. But if the spirit of patriotism could be 
 quickened into a new life, then men would think 
 of the state and forget themselves, and united in 
 their love of this one universal object of devotion 
 they would learn a lesson of union which might 
 gradually be extended to their whole life. But the 
 state must be presented not as it was in all its 
 wretchedness, lacerated by civil struggle ; the sight 
 of the present would serve only to start the quarrel 
 over again ; instead it must be the ideal state, a 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 151 
 
 state so far away, so distant from all the citizens, 
 that they all seemed equally near. If this state 
 were to be something more than a mere abstraction, 
 it could be clothed only in the reverential garments 
 of the past, it must be the Rome of the good old 
 days. Yet if they were not for ever to mourn a 
 " Golden Age " in the past and a paradise that was 
 lost, there must also be a hope for the future, a 
 paradise to be regained. In a word the belief in 
 the eternity of Rome must be instilled into men's 
 hearts. Thus was the idea of the " eternal city " 
 born, and it is no mere coincidence that the first 
 instance of this phrase in literature occurs in 
 Tibullus, a poet of the Augustan age. Once con- 
 vinced of the eternity of Rome men could look at 
 the past for inspiration in full confidence that the 
 beauties which had been could be obtained again. 
 But Augustus was more than a sentimental en- 
 thusiast, and he saw that it was not enough for 
 men to drop their swords at the epiphany of 
 " Roma Aeterna," that their eyes would grow weary 
 and looking to earth would behold the swords 
 again. These swords must be beaten into plough- 
 shares and pruning hooks ; the deserted farms of 
 Italy must be filled again, and the stability of the 
 state must be increased by an enlargement of the 
 agricultural community. But for the accomplish- 
 ment of these reforms something was needed which 
 was at once gentler and stronger than legal 
 
152 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 enactments. The poet must make smooth the 
 way of the law. It was the poet who could best 
 interest men in the past ; and thus Augustan 
 poetry was encouraged and directed by the emperor, 
 that by pointing out the glories of old Rome it 
 might inspire men to make a new Rome more 
 glorious than the old. Practically every poet of 
 the age was directly or indirectly under the 
 influence of the ruler. It was the emperor's 
 counsellor, Maecenas, who encouraged Virgil to 
 write his Georgics, and these glowing pictures of 
 farm life did quite as much to carry out the 
 emperor's plans as the Aeneid later. And Virgil 
 was not alone in writing of country life ; Tibullus, 
 even more gentle than the gentle bard of Mantua, 
 was telling the same story in another form. 
 
 By this time the myths which Greece had given 
 to Rome or which Rome had made for herself on 
 Greek models were absolutely a part of the national 
 past. These too entered into Augustus's scheme. 
 Thus another proteg^ of Maecenas, the poet Pro- 
 pertius, was gradually weaned from love poetry 
 and filled instead with a hunger for the myths of 
 Roman temples and of old ■ Roman customs, so 
 that Cynthia slowly gives way to Tarpeia and 
 Vertumnus, and the Rome of Augustus to the 
 Rome of Romulus. Even the irrepressible Ovid 
 tried in his exuberant fashion to assist in this work 
 and started in his Fasti to write a history of the 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 153 
 
 religious festivals of the Roman year. But above 
 all these, and infinitely more important in its in- 
 fluence, towers the Aeneid of Virgil. All through 
 the varied incidents of the twelve books there runs 
 the scarlet thread of a great purpose, the glorifica- 
 tion of Rome and of Augustus. From the sack of 
 Troy, through the long wanderings and the fierce 
 wars in Latium, down to the final conquest of the 
 enemy, we see Aeneas led by the hand of the 
 gods whose will it was that Rome should be. The 
 lesson is very evident. The providence which 
 guided us in the past still protects us ; we have no 
 right to be discouraged, and our future is assured 
 us under the same gods who brought our fathers 
 out of the land of the Trojans, through the midst 
 of the Greeks. But there is concealed in the 
 Aeneid another lesson, much more directly useful 
 to Augustus. Its hero, the immaculate pious 
 Aeneas, is the direct ancestor of the Julian house 
 to which Augustus belongs, and the founding of 
 Rome shows not only the good will of the gods 
 toward the city, but in no less degree their special 
 appointment and protection of the leader. The 
 descendants of the house of Aeneas are therefore 
 the divinely appointed rulers of Rome. 
 
 There can be no question but that this poetry 
 had an effect none the less far reaching because its 
 influence was difficult to estimate and analyse. It 
 was not necessary for the psychological result that 
 
154 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 men should actually believe in these myths ; much 
 was gained if they allowed their thoughts to dwell 
 on the ideas presented in them. It was the 
 sedimentary deposit thus formed which was to 
 fertilise the soil of patriotism which had grown so 
 barren in the civil wars. But while Augustus was 
 broad-minded enough to realise the value of the 
 influence of literature, he did not fail to recognise 
 that men could not live by myths alone, that they 
 must be surrounded by visible cult acts and tangible 
 temples of the gods in order that their faith might 
 be aided by sight and their life filled with action. 
 Literature was to encourage patriotism, and patriotism 
 was the foundation for the spiritual restoration of the 
 state religion, but the state itself must by legal 
 enactment prepare the outward form which the 
 religious activity was to take. The question of the 
 sincerity of Augustus in these religious reforms is a 
 very difficult one to answer. If the essence of 
 religion consisted in acts and not in belief, in works 
 and not in faith, Augustus was a devoutly religious 
 man. Beyond that we cannot go, for our judgment 
 is hampered not only by ignorance of the facts but 
 by our inability to free ourselves from the modern 
 standpoint in the interpretation of the few facts 
 that we do know. There can be no question of 
 the emperor's fitness for the task so far as priestly 
 learning went, for he was from a very early age a 
 member of three priesthoods : a pontiff, an augur, 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 155 
 
 and a guardian of the Sibylline books. With 
 characteristic modesty however he refrained from 
 becoming Chief Pontiff until in B.C. 1 2 the death of 
 Lepidus, the discarded member of the Second 
 Triumvirate, left the position vacant. 
 
 One who understands the political reforms of 
 Augustus will have no difficulty in understanding 
 his reorganisation of religion, for they were both 
 undertaken with the same general underlying prin- 
 ciples and along similar lines. In both cases in- 
 novations and novelties were strenuously avoided, 
 except of course those of a merely administrative 
 character. In each case a successful effort was 
 made to have it appear as if the old institutions of 
 the republic were being reinstated, whereas as a 
 matter of fact the form alone was old with its age 
 artificially emphasised occasionally by an archaistic 
 touch, while the content was quite new. The real 
 result in each case was the strengthening of the 
 monarchy and the emphasising of the divine right 
 of the Julian house. In our study of Augustus's 
 restoration of religion we must not be content 
 therefore with chronicling the old forms which were 
 re-established, but we must examine in each case the 
 new content which was put into them, even though 
 the evidence of that content consists oftentimes of a 
 mere tendency. The fondness of Augustus for the 
 archaic is nowhere more clearly exhibited than in 
 one of his earliest religious acts : the formal declaration 
 
156 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 of war against Antony and Cleopatra, in B.C. 32, by 
 means of the Fetiales. The Fetiales were a very 
 ancient priestly college which acted, under the 
 direction of the Senate, as the representatives of 
 international law. It was through them that all 
 treaties and all declarations of war had been made, 
 but it seems probable that this custom had fallen 
 into desuetude after the Punic wars, and that ac- 
 cordingly the college had lapsed into insignificance, 
 if it had not died out altogether. But now as 
 the first step in the rebuilding of the priesthoods 
 Octavian restored the college to its old rank and 
 gained also the additional advantage that the people 
 were impressed with the moral righteousness of their 
 cause against Antony and Cleopatra, and also with 
 the fact that it was a foreign, i.e. an international 
 war, and not a civil one, in which they were about 
 to engage. The effect of Octavian's restoration was 
 a lasting one, for from this time on this priesthood 
 was held in high honour during the whole of the 
 empire, and the emperors themselves were members 
 of it. 
 
 This was a very characteristic beginning to 
 Augustus's activity. It was primarily the human 
 element to which he was appealing in his religious 
 changes, and hence the priesthoods needed especial 
 attention. It was not long after the battle of 
 Actium that he restored another very ancient priest- 
 hood, that of the Arval brothers. This was a very 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE- 157 
 
 old priesthood consisting of twelve men who took 
 part in the purification of the land, the A mbarvalia, 
 so called because the ceremony consisted of a solemn 
 procession around the boundaries of the fields. But 
 as the Roman territory grew and such a ceremony 
 in the old fashion became impossible and was 
 carried out merely symbolically by sacrifices at 
 various boundary points, the Arval brothers lost all 
 their importance, so that even in these symbolic 
 sacrifices their place was taken by the pontiffs. 
 Augustus however recognised in this priesthood 
 an effectual means of emphasising the agricultural 
 side of Roman life, and of connecting the imperial 
 -family with the farming population. The centre of 
 this new worship was the sanctuary in the sacred 
 grove at the fifth milestone of the Via Campana, 
 and it is there that the wonderful discoveries have 
 been made of the inscriptions giving the " minutes " 
 of the meetings of this curious corporation, begin- 
 ning with Augustus. But the pastoral side of their 
 worship was an insignificant matter, even in the age 
 of Augustus, compared with their prayers and sup- 
 plications in behalf of the imperial house, so that 
 the records of this supposedly agricultural priesthood 
 form one of our best sources for the study of emperor- 
 worship. 
 
 Three other priesthoods, the pontiffs, the augurs, 
 and the guardians of the Sibylline books {XVviri) 
 did not need actual restoration, for their ability 
 
1 58 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 to interfere in politics had kept them alive during 
 the closing centuries of the republic, when political 
 usefulness was the surest means of surviving in the 
 struggle for existence. But the fact that they had 
 been politically powerful made the control of them 
 all the more necessary for an emperor who wished 
 to have in his hands all the possibilities of political 
 influence. It was contrary to Augustus's policy 
 openly to crush any of the institutions which had 
 really been or, what was from his standpoint very 
 much the same thing, had been thought to be a 
 bulwark of republicanism. As a matter of fact 
 however these priesthoods had been one of the 
 chief means of bringing the republic into the 
 control of one man. Hence for Augustus the 
 problem was easy to solve ; it was only necessary 
 to appear to honour these priesthoods by raising 
 their dignity still higher and by making only men 
 of senatorial rank eligible, and then to take the 
 chief position in them himself and to fill them with 
 his own supporters. Thus the republic was appa- 
 rently saved and the empire was really strengthened. 
 But the priesthood to which Augustus devoted 
 his most especial attention was the priesthood of 
 Vesta, the Vestal virgins. Here he was guided not 
 only by his desire to improve the condition of the 
 priesthoods in general but also by his especial interest 
 in the cult of Vesta. The reasons for this interest 
 in Vesta will be explained in a moment when we 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 159 
 
 discuss the emperor's favourite cults ; but a word 
 about its effects on the priestesses of Vesta may be 
 said here. The Vestal virgins had been relatively 
 little contaminated by politics, but the priesthood 
 had suffered along with all the rest of the religion 
 of the state because of the general indifferentism 
 and neglect of religious things which characterised 
 the closing centuries of the republic. The best 
 families in the state were not as ready as in the 
 earlier days to devote their daughters to the service, 
 and thus the rank and consequently the influence 
 of the Vestals had to some extent declined. But 
 now all this was immediately changed, the outward 
 honour and the insignia of the Vestals were increased 
 until they were allowed such privileges as not even 
 the emperors possessed. When they went through 
 the street, they were attended by a lictor as the 
 higher officers of the state were, and they were given 
 special seats at the theatre. But the most character- 
 istic thing which Augustus did for them and that 
 which helped their cause the most was the emperor's 
 declaration, made to be repeated in public gossip, 
 that if he had a grand-daughter of the proper age 
 he would unhesitatingly make her a Vestal virgin. 
 
 Toward the close of his life Augustus prepared 
 a statement of what he had accomplished during 
 his reign, a sort of compte rendu of his steward- 
 ship. In a roundabout way almost all of this has 
 been preserved to us and it naturally forms the 
 
i6o THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 greatest source of oir knowledge of his activity. 
 After reciting a large number of his religious reforms 
 he adds : — " The spoils of war I have consecrated to 
 the gods in the Capitoline temple, in the temple of 
 the god Julius, in the temple of Apollo, in the 
 temple of Vesta, in the temple of Mars the Avenger." 
 These words give us a clue to the more especial 
 religious interests of Augustus, a clue which is all 
 the more needed because of his apparently catholic 
 spirit, and his seemingly general interest in all 
 the forms o/ old Roman religion. No man who 
 restored and in some cases entirely rebuilt eighty- 
 two temples to various deities could be accused of 
 undue pa;7tiality in emphasising certain phases of 
 religion to the total exclusion of others. But as a 
 matter otfact underneath this general interest there 
 were present certain very specific interests, and 
 this passage in his own writing adds great strength 
 to the other evidence as to what these gods were. 
 Naturally in every list of pre-eminent deities Juppiter 
 must be present, hence the mention of the Capitoline 
 temple first ; as a matter of fact however Augustus's 
 worship of Juppiter was much more a matter of 
 form than of real interest. His attitude was one 
 of graceful acceptance of the inevitable rather than 
 of enthusiastic homage. Juppiter was not adapted 
 to his purpose, because it was almost impossible to 
 connect Juppiter with a specific form of government 
 other than the republic, much less with a particular 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE ,i6i 
 
 royal family like the Julian house, pjppiter had 
 come to mean republicanism. The Capitoline 
 temple had ushered in the republic in B.C. 509 and 
 there was a halo of republicanism about it which 
 was too genuine to be used as a mask for con- 
 cealing imperial features. With the four other 
 deities matters stood very differently. The god 
 Julius, Apollo, Vesta, and Mars the Avenger were 
 either already identical with the imperial family or 
 could easily be connected with it. 
 
 The central feature of the religion of the ^mpire 
 was a thing altogether unique and unknown/ in the 
 republic : the worship of the emperors as gods. 
 From Augustus on this was the chief characteristic 
 of the state religion ; its beginnings must be sought 
 therefore undeY hi'S reign and he is largely, account- 
 able for it. According to our modern ideas it seems 
 a very strange thing to worship a living man as 
 a god ; it seems also strange to worship a dead 
 man as a god, but there we have at least the 
 analogy of the worship of the saints, and the 
 inherent instinct of the race toward ancestor-wor- 
 ship which unexpectedly crops out in all of us at 
 ^iiitei'vals. But we must rid ourselves of modern 
 .lideas and try to appreciate the historical evolution 
 'of emperor -worship. This evolution is perfectly 
 clear and \*re can trace every step of it, though in 
 doing so We must remember that the various pro- 
 cesses which we aiC compelled to take up one after 
 
 M 
 
1 62 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 another in sur explanation went on in nature side 
 by side, and exercised a sympathetic influence-one 
 up'i. Lbe other, which-js^e— have to— eKrainate from 
 our explanation but make allowance for in our 
 finished concept. 
 
 We have seen that from the very beginning of 
 religious life in Rome the idea was present that 
 everything, each individual and each family, had its 
 divine double, the individual in the shape of his 
 Genius, the family in the shape of protecting spirits, 
 Vesta, the Penates, and later the Lar. In addition 
 to this, under the influence of the Greek myths 
 which various families adopted, certain gods originally 
 independent became especially associated with these 
 families. Each family was naturally interested in 
 the worship of its own gods, but this particular 
 worship was quite as naturally confined to the 
 particular family or its dependents. Now the first 
 preliminary step toward emperor-worship was taken 
 when the gods of the imperial family began to be 
 worshipped by other families, then by all other' 
 families, and officially by the state. But from the 
 very beginning the gods of each family had included' 
 also the deified ancestors, the Di Manes, at first 
 thought of en masse and not as individuals, but 
 toward the close of the republic they began to be 
 •individualised, so that the next step in emperor- 
 worship was when the dead Julius, a. particular 
 ancestor therefore of Augustus,- began to be wor- 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 163 
 
 shipped -by the \^hole people and officially by the 
 
 state. But also from the beginning there had been 
 
 still another element in family worship, the cult paid 
 
 to the Genius or divine double of the living master 
 
 of the house. There followed then correspondingly 
 
 ^s another step toward emperor-worship, the homage 
 
 paid by the whole state to the Genius of the living 
 
 emperor. These three steps : the worship by the 
 
 whole state of the gods of the emperor's family, in 
 
 its three forms, the gods of the family in general, 
 
 and in particular the deified ancestor, and the Genius 
 
 of the living representative, were all encouraged and 
 
 , officially established by Augustus. Lastly there 
 
 dame from the Orient a habit of thought in distinct 
 
 contradiction to Roman ideas whereby not the 
 
 Genius of the living emperor but the very man 
 
 himself was divine in life and in death. Augustus 
 
 fought against this concept but had to yield to it 
 
 and allow himself to be worshipped directly as a 
 
 >god in the Orient itself and in certain coast towns 
 
 of Italy which were under strong Oriental influence, 
 
 but he forbade it in Rome, and thus established a 
 
 precedent which was followed by all the bette;r ones 
 
 among the emperors who came after him,'^'" \^ 
 
 This digression was necessary in order that we 
 might appreciate the reasons for Augustus's prefer- 
 ences in emphasising certain cults. Unquestionably 
 he did not foresee or plan for an emperor-worship 
 such as eventually grew up out of his arrangements ; 
 
i64 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 he was however deeply interested in emphasising 
 the worship of the special deities of his own family. 
 The four gods therefore whose names he couples 
 with that of Juppiter in the summary of his religious 
 activity — Apollo, Vesta, Mars the, Avenger, and the 
 god Julius^ — are all intimately connected with his 
 family ; and if we add to this the worship of his 
 own Genius, the Genius Augusti, we shall have the 
 real kernel of his religious restoration. It remains 
 for us to see in what way these deities are connected 
 With his family, and how he managed to emphasise 
 iheir cult and at the same time to bring them into 
 close relationship to himself. 
 
 \ From the time of his first introduction into Rome 
 Apollo had stood in a relation of contrast to Juppiter. 
 Apollo's oracles, the Sibylline books, had brought in 
 a host of Greek gods whose presence tended in- 
 evitably to lessen the unique position and ther-un- 
 paralleled prestige of Juppiter Optimus Maximus, 
 the great representative of nationalism in RomarT_ 
 religion. At first this contrast was scarcely marked, 
 and the very oracles of Apollo which were des^ified 
 to undermine Juppiter's omnipotence were stored iri; 
 Juppiter's temple and under his protection. 'th&\ 
 difference was felt more strongly as the priesthood 
 of the Sibylline books began to grow in influence 
 alongside of the pontiffs, the priests of the Juj^piter 
 cults. This opposition was emphasised in B.C. 367, 
 when the priesthood of the oracles was opened to 
 
■ ^ THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 165 
 
 the plebeians, while the pontiffs were still patricians. 
 At first unquestionably the object of the patricians 
 was to keep for themselves the more sacred and the 
 then more important college and to open the lesser 
 priesthood to the plebeians. But in the struggle of 
 the two orders those things which were opened to 
 the plebeians grew in importance -ai»d' entirely over- 
 
 .^shadowed those which were so scrupul6usly. hedged 
 E^bout, and the elements which strove- to resist pro- 
 gress were crushed beneath it ; and just as the old 
 cissembly, the Comitia Curiata, which the patricians 
 had kept for themselves, was later of no account com- 
 pared with the Comitia Centuriata, which belonged 
 to both orders, so the college of pontiffs lost signifi- 
 cance while the keepers of the oracles gained steadily 
 in power and influence.. But it was not merely 
 because Apollo was the great leader of the Greek 
 movement in Roman religion that Augustus chose 
 to honour him. A far more important consideration 
 , guided him, for Apollo was especially attached to 
 the Julian house in all its mythical and historical 
 fortunes. The first great public evidence of Apollo's 
 favour in Augustus's career was at the battle of 
 
 ■' Act-ium ; but while this led to the first proclamation 
 of the emperor's devotion to Apollo, it was not 
 Actium which made him a worshipper of the god, 
 but it was because he was a tvorshipper of Apollo 
 from the beginning that Actium and all subsequent 
 tokens of the god's favour were emphasised by him. 
 
1 66 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 However much or little the people of the day may 
 have known about Apollo's previous relations to the 
 Julian family, the legend of his assistance at Actium, 
 and the immortalisation of that legend in the great 
 temple on the Palatine were proofs enough. The 
 moral effect of the Palatine temple cannot be over- 
 estimated, especially when-we realise one fact, which 
 is often neglected,- that this temple gained infinitely 
 in significance because it was on private ground, 
 attached to the emperor's own private house, for 
 we must .no± ibr-get- —t-hat the Palatine was only 
 in process of transition into the imperial resi- 
 dence, and though the house of Augustus, when he 
 left it, was the palace, during his lifetime it was 
 merely his private residence. The temple of Apollo 
 was therefore in its origin theoretically the private 
 chapel of a Roman family rather than the seat of 
 a state cult. It was the Apollo of the Julian house 
 who was being worshipped there. And yet it was 
 far more than a private worship, for it began very 
 soon to be a cult centre in distinct rivalry to 
 Jup^iter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline. The 
 oracles of the Sibyl, even though they were the 
 words of Apollo, had never been preserved in the 
 old temple of Apollo on the Flaminian meadow, 
 but instead they had always been in the custody of | 
 Juppiter on the Capitoline. But now the^ oracles; ' 
 after being carefully revised by the emperor, were- 
 deposited in the new Palatine temple, and by this 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 167 
 
 act the centre of all the Greek cults in Rome 
 was tramierred from Juppiter to Apollo, from the 
 Capit'jline to the Palatine, and the rivalry between 
 the two was publicly declared. The temple was 
 dedicated in B.C. 28 and Augustus allowed its 
 influence to permeate the Roman people for more 
 than a decade before he took the next step, a step 
 which was virtually to parallel Apollo and his sister 
 Artemis-Diana with Juppiter and Juno. 
 ■■' Among the Greek .gods who came into Rome we 
 saw the entrance in the middle of the third century 
 before Christ of a pair of deities of the Lower 
 World, Dis and Proserpina, and in connexion with 
 the introduction the establishment of certain games 
 Called " secular " because they were to be repeated 
 at the expiration of a century {saeculuvi). The 
 initial celebration was in B.C. 249, one hundred 
 years later with a slight delay they were celebrated 
 again in B.C. 146, the next anniversary was omitted 
 because it fell in the midst of the civil war between 
 Caesar and Pompey, but now Augustus wished to 
 celebrate them. There were chronological difficulties, 
 but they did not prove insurmountable. An oracle 
 ,was set in circulation, or one actually in circulation 
 was made use of, wherein it was declared that a 
 great cycle of four times one hundred and ten yearsfe^ 
 had passed and that a new age was now beginning. 
 The emperor, if not responsible for this oracle, was 
 very willing to accept it. It was an essential part 
 
i68 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 of his plan that all things should become new, and 
 that with the new age should come a ri<;w spirit. 
 This new saeculum must be ushered in by james 
 which should be at once like and unlike thos"; of 
 past centuries. They were to be celebrated at least 
 in part on the hallowed spot, the Tarentum in the 
 Campus Martius, they were to extend through three 
 nights like the old games, but the three days were 
 to be added as well, and the deities worshipped in 
 the night, while they were no longer the old gods 
 of the Lower World, Dis and Proserpina, were at 
 least mysterious deities of fate and fortune, while 
 the gods of the day, Apollo and Artemis, Juppiter 
 and Juno, were as new to the games as the day 
 celebrations themselves were. But the equality of 
 Apollo and Juppiter was expressed not merely in 
 the parallelisation of Juppiter-Juno with Apollo- 
 Diana. It was still more in evidence on the third 
 and greatest day of the festival, when the procession 
 of three times nine youths and three times nine 
 maidens sang the song in honour of Apollo and', 
 Diana, which Horace wrote and which has been ~ 
 preserved to us among his writings, the - Carmen' 
 Saeculare, and to which in addition the redently. 
 found inscription giving an account of the games 
 bears witness in the words carmen co7nposuit ■ Q. ■■ 
 Horatius Flaccus {C.I.L. vi. 32323). On this day,' 
 the procession started from the Apollo temple on 
 the Palatine, and went over to the Juppiter templ^e 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 169 
 
 on the Capitoline, and then back again to Apollo 
 on the Palatine, thus indicating not only the equality 
 of Apollo and Juppiter but even the superiority of 
 the former. A new age had indeed begun, an age 
 in which the new associations of the Palatine and 
 the glamour of imperialism were to overcome the 
 more democratic associations of the Capitoline with 
 its incorrigibly republican Juppiter. Greek gods 
 which had hitherto in theory at least been sub- 
 ordinated to the gods of old Rome were now 
 granted not only equality but superiority. The 
 specific cult of Apollo, to be sure, did not always 
 retain the exalted position to which Augustus 
 had raised it, but even it never entirely lost its 
 prominence, whereas the general idea of the su- 
 premacy of the imperial cult was now established 
 for all time to come. But this secular celebration 
 of Augustus is interesting aside from the relation 
 of Juppiter and Apollo, for it affords another 
 'illustration of the skilful combination of new and 
 old in the ^ugustan reorganisation. In form the 
 ■■festival is avowedly the old one, but in two respects 
 at least it introduces a new element. In the first 
 .place' participation in the old festival, as in all the 
 old festivals, had been confined to Roman citizens. 
 Others might look on, but they could not take part, 
 nor were they the recipients of any of the blessings 
 which -were to follow. But now every free member 
 of the community, with wife and child, might join 
 
I70 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 in the celebration, and thus the note was struck 
 which was to be the keynote of all that was best 
 in the changes introduced by the empire whose 
 " highest and most beautiful task," as Professor 
 Mommsen puts it, " and the one which she fulfilled 
 most perfectly, was gradually to reconcile and thus 
 to put an end to the contrast between the ruling 
 city and the subordinate communities, and thus to 
 change the old Roman law of city-citizenship into 
 a community of the state which embraced all the 
 members of the empire." But even this was not 
 all ; under the guise of this restoration of an old 
 republican institution a blow was struck at the very 
 foundation of all republican institutions, namely 
 the power of the Senate. It was par excellence 
 Augustus's festival, arranged by him or by those 
 to whom he had committed the details. The 
 Senate had little or nothing to say about it and 
 yet the control of such religious celebrations had 
 hitherto formed an inalienable part of the Senate's 
 power. Even in the procession itself the republican 
 magistrates do not seem to have been officially 
 present. It was thus no longer the Senate inviting 
 the magistrates and the citizens in good and regular 
 standing to perform a certain divine function, but 
 it was the emperor inviting all the members of the 
 community, citizens and non-citizens alike, to join 
 with him in worshipping the gods of the new st;ate. 
 A great part of Augustus's success was un- 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 171 
 
 questionably due to a certain form of moral courage. 
 For all his diplomacy and his desire to feel the pulse 
 of the people he was never lacking in the courage 
 of his own convictions. This can be seen nowhere 
 better than in his attitude toward his adoptive father 
 Julius Caesar. From the very beginning when he 
 took upon himself, even at the cost of temporary 
 impoverishment, the payment §f- Caesar's legacy, he 
 was supremely true to the man whose successor he 
 was, and this faithfulness is especially apparent in 
 the field of religion. Here there are two cults, both 
 relating to Julius Caesar, for which Augustus was 
 largely responsible, that of the god Julius himself, 
 and that of Mars the Avenger. 
 
 In consideration of what Caesar had already done 
 for the reorganisation of the state, and in view of 
 what he was planning to carry out, his death was a 
 national calamity, but his influence might still be 
 rescued and preserved by elevating him into the 
 rank of the gods. For the accomplishment of this 
 it was necessary that the Senate should act, for in the 
 hands of the Senate alone lay the power to receive 
 new gods into the state. Thus the god Julius was 
 created and the word divus received a new meaning. 
 With that logic which was characteristic of Roman 
 religion from the very beginning, the elevation of 
 Julius into the ranks of the greater and more 
 -individual gods went side by side with his exclusion 
 from the ranks of the ordinary deified ancestors, so 
 
172 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 that thereafter at the funeral processions of the Julian 
 family his wax mask was absent from the processions, 
 of ancestors to which he no longer Belonged, but in 
 the parade of the circus he was present, drawn in a 
 waggon among the greater gods. Nothing was left 
 undone to render his cult both conspicuous and per- 
 manent. A special priest {flameii) was appointed to 
 look after it, and as the irony -of ^ate would have it 
 one of the first incumbents of this position was Marc 
 Antony after his reconciliation with Augustus in 
 B.C. 40. Then too a special festival day was given 
 him among the religious holidays of the year. It 
 was intended that this day should be July 13, his 
 birthday, but as that day happened to be already de- 
 voted to an important celebration in connexion with 
 the games of Apollo, the day preceding it, July 1 2, 
 was chosen. But more was needed than a priest and 
 a holiday, there must be a cult centre as well, a 
 temple of the Divus Julius. The site of this temple 
 _3Cas already given in the associations connected with 
 Caesar's death. There could be but one place for it, 
 and that was in the Forum near the Regia where his 
 body had" been carried to be burned. There the 
 temple was built and dedicated August 18, B.C. 29. 
 An altar had been erected on the spot where Caesar's 
 body had been burned, and the new temple was so 
 placed that the altar was included in its boundaries, 
 occupying a niche in the centre of the front line of 
 the substructure. The temple had the usual history 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 173 
 
 of destruction and rebuilding in antiquity until in early 
 pDhristian times it was used for secular purposes, and 
 the eyesore of the pagan altar was removed by 
 building a wall across the front, the diameter of the 
 semicircular niche, and by roofing the altar over on 
 a level with the existing platform. Thus the altar 
 with its historical and religious associations was 
 entirely lost sight of, and though the temple in its 
 main outlines had long been excavated, the altar was 
 not discovered until 1898, when the wall was broken 
 through and the whole thing laid bare. Thus by the 
 vote of the Senate, the appointment of a priest, the 
 setting apart of a holy day in the year, and the 
 building of a temple, the worship of the god Julius 
 was established ; but it was the general irresistible 
 tendency toward emperor -worship which kept it 
 alive and made it the model for a tremendous sub- 
 sequent development. Augustus had accomplished 
 his desire. Men were looking on Caesar as a success 
 after all and not as a failure. The Di Manes of a 
 murdered emperor had been profitably exchanged 
 for the Divus Julius, and just as the gods had 
 founded the old Rome of Romulus, so again it was 
 a god who had laid the foundations of the empire 
 over which his successor was ruling. 
 
 But Augustus was not content with this ; it was 
 all very well for men to look upon the god Caesar 
 as an illustration of justification after death, as an 
 example of how heaven could right the wrongs of 
 
174 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE ' 
 
 earthly existence, but that was not sufficient ; the! 
 punishment of those who caused his earthly downfall 
 must be emphasised, it must be shown that the gods 
 were quite as much interested in punishing the sinner 
 as in rewarding the righteous man who was sinned 
 against. It was one thing to transfer one's ancestors 
 to the gods, it was quite another thing to take 
 measures to keep oneself from following in their foot- 
 steps, even though their last estate was theoretically 
 desirable. Hence side by side with the cult of the 
 Divus Julius went that of Mars Ultor, Mars the 
 Avenger. The circumstances of the beginning of the 
 cult show that it was no mere poetical title but a 
 genuine cult-name born in an earnest moment : for 
 the great temple subsequently built to Mars under 
 this cognomen was vowed by Augustus " in behalf 
 of vengeance for his father," in the war against 
 the slayers of Caesar, Brutus and Cassius. This 
 temple, vowed at Philippi in B.C. 42, was so slow in 
 building that in the meantime Augustus erected a 
 small round temple to Mars Ultor on the Capitoline. 
 This was dedicated May 1 2, B.C. 20. In the years 
 which followed Augustus proceeded with the diffi- 
 cult and extremely expensive task of purchasing 
 property for his own Forum, and here was built 
 and dedicated, August i, B.C. 2, the great temple of 
 Mars Ultor. But aside from being a very present 
 reminder of the vengeance which the gods had in store 
 for those who killed a Caesar, it stood also for the Julian 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 175 
 
 house, for Mars was not alone in the temple but with 
 him was Venus, the ancestral mother of the family 
 of Julius and Augustus ; and thus was once more 
 emphasised the connexion between the ancestors of 
 the ruling house and the great ancestor Mars, from 
 whom all Romans were sprung. 
 
 A temple possessed of such strong associations with 
 the imperial family became instantly a centre of their 
 family worship, and in this respect produced another 
 rival to the cult of Juppiter on the Capitoline. In 
 connexion namely with the putting on of the toga 
 virilis the members of the imperial family went to 
 the temple of Mars Ultor instead of following the 
 immemorial custom of ascending the Capitol to the 
 shrine of Juppiter Optimus Maximus. More im- 
 portant yet the insignia of the triumph, which had 
 always been in the keeping of the Capitoline Juppiter 
 even before he was Optimus Maximus and while he 
 was only the " Striker," Feretrius, were now preserved 
 in the temple of Mars Ultor. 
 
 With all the state worshipping Apollo, the god of 
 the emperor's own family, on the Palatine, celebrating 
 the divinity of his ancestor the god Julius in the 
 Roman Forum, and acknowledging Mars as the 
 avenger of all those who did the emperor harm, in 
 the emperor's own new Forum, it might have seemed 
 to a less far-seeing man that religion had been suffi- 
 ciently pressed into the service of the royal family. 
 But so it did not seem to Augustus. These cults were 
 
176 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 all three of them essentially new, and new cults may, 
 to be sure, easily become prominent ; they usually do, 
 but the test comes with time whether there is external 
 pressure sufficiently continuous to give permanency to 
 this prominence. As a matter of fact not one of these 
 three cults continued later to hold the rank in im- 
 portance which it had under Augustus. On the other 
 hand if one went low enough and looked sufficiently 
 deep down certain elements in the religious life of 
 the community could be found which continued 
 almost unchanged from century to century. These 
 were the simple elements which were involved in 
 family worship, the sacrifices at the hearth of Vesta, 
 and those to the Genius of the master of the house. 
 Here simple beliefs and elementary cult acts had 
 continued virtually, unchanged from the very earliest 
 period down to the present. These cults did not 
 need any formal restoration on the part of the 
 emperor, for they had not experienced the decline 
 which the other cults had suffered, but by just so 
 much more they would afford a firm foundation for 
 his empire and his own rule if he could in some way 
 succeed in connecting them with himself In the 
 case of Vesta this was comparatively easy. The 
 Pontifex Maximus was the guardian of the Vestal 
 virgins, and thus on March 6, B.C. 1 2, when Augustus 
 became Pontifex Maximus, it was quite natural that 
 there should be a festival to Vesta and that the day 
 should continue as a public holiday. The Pontifex 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 177 
 
 Maximus however was supposed to live in the 
 Regia down in the Forum, where JuHus Caesar as 
 Pontifex Maximus had actually lived. This Augustus 
 did not desire to do, hence he gracefully gave up the 
 Regia to the Vestal virgins and made his official 
 residence in his own house on the Palatine, fulfilling 
 the religious requirements by consecrating a part of 
 that house. On a portion of the section thus con- 
 secrated a temple of Vesta was built and dedicated 
 April 28, B.C. 12. This was strictly speaking his 
 own " Vesta," the hearth of his own house, but the 
 prominence of the temple of Vesta there had an effect 
 similar to the prominence of the temple of Apollo 
 on the Palatine, and the whole state began thus to 
 worship at the hearth of the emperor, and in time the 
 emperor was worshipped at each individual hearth. 
 • K But the crowning touch of Augustus's religious 
 • policy was yet to come ; this was the establishment 
 of the worship of the Genius of the emperor. After 
 Actium and in the earlier years of his reign it is 
 certain that Augustus would not have thought of 
 putting himself, even in the spiritualised form of his 
 Genius, before the people as an object of worship. 
 But the tendency to emperor-worship which Oriental 
 influence had brought with it was not without its 
 effects on the emperor himself, and perhaps these 
 effects were all the stronger because of his valiant 
 struggle against it. Then too the state was already 
 ijrorshipping the gods of his family, even Vesta 
 
178 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 Augusta, the goddess of his own hearth. He had 
 become in substance, even if not yet in name, the 
 father of his country. It had been an immemorial 
 custom that the members of the household should 
 worship the Genius of the master of the house. In 
 every household in Rome that custom still existed. 
 It was a very logical step, and one therefore which a 
 Roman could easily take, to carry out the analogy 
 of the family and to allow the whole state to worship 
 the Genius of the emperor, who was the head of the 
 family of the state. The idea therefore was not at 
 all incongruous, nor was the way in which it was 
 carried out, though the latter was so ingenious as to 
 deserve special consideration. 
 
 In the old days when Rome was a farming com- 
 munity, the guardianship of the gods over the fields 
 was one of the most important elements in religious 
 life. The gods were above all the protectors of the 
 boundary lines, and thus it came to pass that where 
 two roads crossed and thus the corners of four farms 
 came together the deities protecting these farms were 
 worshipped together as the Lares Compitales, the Lares 
 of the compita or cross-roads. Curiously enough this 
 worship was later extended to the crossing of city 
 streets, and as was natural it became more highly 
 organised in the city than it had been in the country. 
 Regular associations, collegia, were formed to look 
 after the details of the worship, headed by the magis- 
 tri vicoriim, who were however not public officials 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 179 
 
 but merely the elected heads of these colleges, 
 men mainly from the lower ranks of society. The 
 contagion of civil and political strife affected these 
 college^ as well as their more aristocratic parallels, 
 higher up in the social scale, and turned them into 
 local political clubs. The part played by these clubs 
 in the civil struggles which occupied the last century 
 of the republic was such that the Senate in B.C. 64 
 was compelled to dissolve them, though they were 
 
 . restored again six years later and existed until Caesar 
 destroyed them entirely. But now Augustus was 
 
 •■creating a new organisation for the city, dividing it 
 into fourteen regions, each region containing a certain 
 number of subdivisions called vici. The old "colleges 
 of the cross-roads" afforded him just the sort of 
 opportunity which he never failed to seize, that of 
 seeming to restore a neglected republican institution, 
 and at the same time of making it into a support of 
 the monarchy. The colleges had antiquity in their 
 favour, and their repeated suppression was clear proot 
 of their power. They must be recognised and taken 
 over by the state, their officials must be made into 
 officials of the state, but, most important, their worship 
 must be permeated with the imperial idea. This was 
 where Augustus's skill showed itself. At every shrine 
 of the cross-roads where of old the two Lares had 
 been worshipped alone, a third image now took its 
 place between them. This was the Genius Augusti, 
 who thus formed henceforth an integral part of the 
 
i8o THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 local worship of every part of the city. Under 
 the presiding Genius Augusti the Lares themselves 
 began to be known as the Lares Augusti and the 
 cult grew in popularity so that it began to extend 
 through all of Italy and even through the provinces 
 of the empire, and wherever the Lares went, along 
 with them went the worship of the Genius of the 
 emperor. 
 
 Now that we have seen what Augustus did, 
 the question arises irresistibly as to the measure 
 of his success. There can be no question but that 
 he was successful in obtaining the immediate object 
 which he was seeking after. A formal religious life 
 was unquestionably brought into being, and such ' 
 strength as that life had was exerted in behalf of the 
 empire. This is only in part true of the city but it 
 is absolutely true of the provinces, where after all in 
 the long run the balance of power was bound to lie.- 
 In every case the religious reform, begun in the city, 
 spread rapidly through the rest of Italy and out into 
 the provinces. There the negative elements, which 
 hindered its growth in Rome itself, were absent. For 
 the provinces the empire was all gain, and even a bad 
 emperor was far better than none at all. 
 
 The politics of Augustus had recreated the 
 religion which the politics of the last century of the 
 republic had destroyed, had recreated it in as far 
 as political considerations could. But the spirit of 
 scepticism which had made possible the political 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE i8i' 
 
 abuse of religion could not be driven out by any 
 further application of politics. A form might be 
 created, both the paraphernalia of temples and the 
 hierarchy of priests whose business it was to perform 
 certain cult acts, but there the power of enactment 
 ceased. In the main the religious life of the people 
 went on for good or for ill entirely independent of 
 these things. All that was alive and real in the 
 simple domestic cult went on down into the empire, 
 and those who were faithful were faithful still. The 
 cults of the Orient, against which Augustus had done 
 all that he dared, still captured the minds of the vast 
 majority of the people, and a Mithras or an Isis 
 ; meant infinitely more than a Mars or a Vesta, even 
 if Mars were the avenger of a Caesar, and Vesta the 
 Igoddess of the living emperor's own hearth. Among 
 the more intellectual classes the folly of the one set 
 of gods, the darlings of the common people, was felt 
 "as keenly as the folly of the others, those who^ 
 had been worshipped by the men of former days. 
 Philosophy, whith had had its share in the break- 
 down of faith, beginning in the days of the Punic wars, 
 was now offering out of itself a substitute for the 
 faith which it had taken away. It no longer con- 
 tented itself with a destructive criticism which resulted 
 in a negative view of life, but in Stoicism at least it 
 strove to provide something sufficiently constructive 
 to afford not only a rule of living but also an 
 inspiration to live. 
 
1 82 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 With the death of Augustus the last chapter in the 
 history of old Roman religion- was closed. His was 
 the last attempt to fill the spiritual need of the people 
 with the old forms and the old ideas ; for what he 
 offered was in the main old though certain new ideas 
 were mixed with it. From now on the lifeless 
 platitudes of philosophy and the orgiastic excesses 
 of the Oriental cults divided the field between them, 
 and it was with them rather than with the gods of 
 Numa or even with the deities of the Sibylline 
 books that Christianity fought its battles. That 
 too is a fascinating study, but it is quite another 
 story and with the death of Augustus our present 
 tale is told. And when we look back over the whole 
 of it the main outlines become perhaps even clearer 
 because of the details into which we have been 
 compelled to go. 
 
 We see at the start the simple religion of an agri- 
 cultural people still strongly tinged with animism 
 and inheriting from an animistic past a certain 
 formalism which is so great that it almost becomes a 
 content. Toward the close of the kingdom we see 
 this religion developing through Italic influences so 
 that it takes into itself a certain number of elements 
 which were absent from the older religion because 
 they had no concomitants in daily life, but whose 
 presence is now rendered necessary. These elements 
 are especially the ideas of politics, trade, commerce, 
 and the liberal arts. Then for a moment under 
 
THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 183- 
 
 Servius an equilibrium seems to have been reached, 
 and a religion to have been brought into being which 
 was simple enough for the old lovers of simplicity 
 and varied enough to satisfy the new demands of 
 the community. But this was not for long, for the 
 spiritual conquest of Rome by Greece began then, 
 three centuries before the physical conquest of Greece 
 by Rome. The hosts of Greek deities invaded 
 and captured Rome under the leadership of the 
 Sibylline books, and though at first they had been 
 kept outside the pomerium, even this iron barrier was 
 melted in the heat of the Second Punic War, and the 
 new Greek gods swarmed into the city proper. At 
 the same time as a last heritage from the baleful 
 books an Oriental goddess, the Magna Mater, was 
 taken into the cult and into the hearts of the people, 
 and the elements of decay were thus all present. 
 These elements were threefold : the natural spiritual 
 reaction resulting from the excesses of the period of 
 the Second Punic War ; the fascination of the Orient, 
 exhibited to Rome in the cult of the Magna Mater ; 
 and the new gift which Greece now made to Rome, 
 the knowledge of her literature, especially of her 
 philosophy. In the last two centuries of the republic 
 then these forces alone would have been sufficient to 
 ; cause the downfall of religion, but they were, aided by 
 politics, which fastened itself upon the formalism of 
 the state religion and sucked the little life-blood that 
 was left. Rome's scholars and wise men could deplore 
 
1 84 THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE 
 
 the result and point out the causes, but they could 
 not cure the state of affairs. What politics had done, 
 politics alone could undo, hence only the reforms 
 of an autocrat could restore something of the out- 
 ward structure of the old state religion. But beyond 
 this politics and the autocrat were alike powerless. 
 Against philosophy and Oriental ecstasy they were 
 of no avail. Hence the spirit had left the religion 
 which Augustus had restored even before the marble 
 temples which he had built in its honour had fallen 
 into decay. 
 
 The age of formalism had passed, the religious 
 demands of the individual could no longer be satisfied 
 by a mere ritual. For good or for evil something 
 more personal, more subjective, was needed. Men 
 sought for it in various ways and with varying success, 
 but except in the simple forms of family worship old 
 Roman religion was dead. 
 
INDEX 
 
 References to the more recent literature on the subject of Roman 
 rehgion have been given in connection with the appropriate ^topics 
 in this index. 
 
 The following abbreviations have been employed : — R.F. = Warde 
 Fowler, Roman Festivals, London, 1899 ; R.R. = Wissowa, 
 Religion und C id ties der Roemer, Muenchen, 1902 ; P.W. = 
 Pauly- Wissowa, Encyclopaedie der Altertumswissenschaft, Stuttgart, 
 1894 — ; /^f.r. = Roscher, Lexikon der Griechischen und Roemischen 
 Mythologie, Leipzig, 1884 — . 
 
 Actium, 81, 165 
 
 Aeneid, as a political treatise, 153 
 
 Aesculapius, 84. Cp. R.R. 253 ff. ; 
 
 R.F. 278 ; Thraemer, P.W. s.v. ; 
 
 Asklepios 
 Agricultural character of early Roman 
 
 religion, 18. Cp, R.F. 335 ; R.R. 
 
 20 ff. ; Mommsen, C.I.L. i, ed. 
 
 2, p. 298. 
 Agrippa, erects Temple of Neptune, 
 
 81 ; Richter, Topographie der 
 
 Stadt Rom. 242 ; Plainer, 
 
 Ancient Rome, 357 
 Alba Longa and the Latin League, 
 
 52. Cp. Beloch, Italische Bund, 
 
 177 ; Huelsen, in P.W. s.v. 
 Altar of Caesar, 173. Cp. Huelsen, 
 
 Forum Romanum, ed. 2, p. 139 ; 
 
 Platner, Ancient Rome, 180 
 Animism, 5. Cp. Tylor, Primitive 
 
 Culture, i. 377 ff- , "• 1-327 ; 
 
 Frazer, Golden Bough, i. 170 ff. 
 AnnaPerenna, 115. Cp, R.F. 50-54 ; 
 
 R.R. x<)ii, ; Wissowa, in P.W. s.v. ; 
 
 Usener, Rlieinisches Museum, .\xx. 
 
 206 ; Meltzer, Lex. s.v. 
 
 Anthropological method, criticism 
 
 of, 4. 5 
 Antony and the cult of Isis, 137. 
 
 Cp. R.R. 293 
 Apollo, 57, 66. Cp. R.F. 180 ; 
 
 R.R. 239 ; Wernicke, P.W. s.v. ; 
 
 Apollo and Augustus, 164. Cp. 
 
 Gardthausen, Augustus, 873, 961 ; 
 
 R.R. 67 ; Apollo Medicus, 83. 
 
 Cp. R.F. 180 ; R.R. 240 
 Aricia, 53. Cp. Beloch, Italische 
 
 Bund, 187 ; Huelsen, P.W. 
 
 s.v. 
 Artemis, 53 ff. Cp. Wernicke, 
 
 P.W. s.v. 
 Arval Brotherhood, restored by 
 
 Augustus, 156. Cp. R.R. 485 ; 
 
 Wissowa, P.W. s.v. ; Henzen, 
 
 Acta Fratrum Arvalium, Berlin, 
 
 1874; C.I.L. vi. 2023-2119, 
 
 32338-32398 
 Asklepios, 84. Cp. Aesculapius 
 Atargatis, 138. Cp. R.R. 300 ff. ; 
 
 Cumont, in P.W. s.v. 
 Athena, contrasted with Minerva, 46 
 Attains of Pergamon, 97 
 
 18s 
 
i86 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Augustus : his character and motives, 
 147-152 
 
 Bacchanalian scandal, 118, 119. 
 
 Cp. Livy, 39, 8 ff. ; C.I.L. 196, 
 
 X. 104 ; R.R, 58, 248 
 Bellona, 134. Cp. Aust, in P.W. 
 
 s.v. ; R.R. ■2.'i<) ff. 
 Bona Dea-Damia, ui. Cp. R.F. 
 
 105-106; R.R. 177 flf. ; Wissowa, 
 
 in P.W. s.v. ; Kern, in P.W. s.v.\ 
 
 Damia 
 
 Caesar, altar of, 173 ; religious re- 
 forms of, 146, 147 
 
 Calendars, as sources for early Roman 
 religion, 10. Cp. Mommsen, 
 C.I.L. I, ed. 2 ; R.F. 336 ; R.R. 
 IS ff. ; disorder of, omng to 
 ignorance of priests, 132 
 
 Cannae, 96 
 
 Carmen Saeculare, 168. Cp. Wis- 
 sowa, Die Saccular -feier des 
 August-US., Marburg, 1894 ; 
 Mommsen, Ephem. Epigraph. 
 viii. 225 ff. 
 
 Carmentalis Porta, 82. Cp. Richter, 
 Topographic der Stadt Rom. 44 ; 
 Platner, Ancierit Rom£, 48 
 
 Castor, 37 ff. Cp. Helbig, Hermes, 
 xl. 1905, loi ff. ; R.F. 296-297 ; 
 R.R. 216 ff. ; Albert, Le Culte 
 de Castor et Pollux en Italic 
 
 Ceres-Demeter, 72. Cp. R.F. 72- 
 79, 105 ; R.R. 242 ff. ; Wissowa, 
 in P.W. s.v. 
 
 Chaldaeans, 119. Cp. R.R. 58 ; 
 Baumstark, in P.W. s.v. 
 
 Circus Flaminius, 41 
 
 Clodius, 88 
 
 Cognomina, 24. Cp. Carter, De 
 deorum Romanorum cognomini- 
 bus, Leipzig, 1898 
 
 Collegia, 47. Cp. Waltzing, Les 
 Corporations ekes les Romains, 
 Louvain, 1895-1900 
 
 Collegium mercatorum, 78 
 
 Colonia Neptunia, 80 
 
 Comitia Centuriata, 165 
 
 Comitia Curiata, 165 
 Commercial spirit in Rome, 107 
 Comparative philology, 2 
 Census, 114. Cp. R.F. 206-209, 
 
 212-213, 267-268; R.R. 166 ff. ; 
 
 Aust, P.W. s.v. 
 Cumae, source of Sibylline books, 
 
 66 
 
 Damia, iii, 112. Cp. Ceres 
 
 Dead, worship of, 14-15. Cp. 
 R.R., 187 ; R.F. 300, 306 ff. 
 
 Demeter, 72. Cp. Ceres 
 
 Diana, 53 ff. Cp. R.F. 198 ff. ; 
 R.R. 198 ff.; Wissowa, in P.W. 
 s.v. 
 
 Di Indigetes, 9. Cp. R.R. 15 ff. ; 
 R.F. 192; Wissowa, De dis 
 Romanorum indigetibus, Mar- 
 burg, 1892 
 
 Di Manes, 14, 90. Cp. R.R. 192; 
 R.F. 108; Peter, Lex. s.v, 
 
 Di Novensides, 9. Cp. R.R. 15 ff. 
 
 Dionysos, 72. Cp. Liber 
 
 Dios-kouroi, 38, 39. Cp. Castor 
 
 Di Penates, 13, 113. Cp. R.R. 
 14s ff. ; R.F. 337; De Marchi, 
 Culto Privato, i. 55 ff. ; Wissowa, 
 in Lex. s.v. 
 
 Divus Julius, 171. Cp. R.R. 284 ff. 
 
 Drepana, 88 
 
 Emperor -worship, 161, 162, 163. 
 
 Cp. R.R. 284; Boissier, La re- 
 ligion rom.aine 
 Ennius, 121, 122. Cp. Mommsen, 
 
 Roman History (Engl, transl. ), 
 
 3, 112-113; Teuffel, Roem. Lit. 
 
 100-104; Skutsch, in P.W. 
 
 s.v. 
 Epidauros, 84 
 Eros of Thespiae, 46. Cp. Preller- 
 
 Robert, Griech. Myth. 501 ff. 
 Etruscans, problem of, 42 ff. 
 Euhemerism, 122. Cp. Mommsen, 
 
 Roman History (Engl, transl.), 4, 
 
 200 
 Euhenierus, 17. Cp. Rohde, Griech. 
 
 Roman.^ 220 ff. 
 
INDEX 
 
 187 
 
 Falerii, 44, Cp. C.I.L. xi. p. 464 
 
 ff. ; Deecke, Die Falisker, Strass- 
 
 burg, i888, p. 89 ff. 
 Family as original social unit, 11 
 Fanatici, 135. Cp. R.R. 291 
 Fauna, iii. Cp. Bona Dea 
 Faunus, iii. Cp. R.F. 256-265; 
 
 R.R. 172 ff. 
 Female deities, absence of, in early 
 
 Roman religion, 21 
 Fetiales, 156. Cp. R.F. 230, 231; 
 
 R.R. 475 ff. 
 Fides, 25. Cp. R.F. 237; R.R. 
 
 103 
 Flaccus, Granius, 147 
 Formalism in Roman religion, 7. 
 
 Cp. R.F. 348 
 Fors Fortuna, 51. Cp. R.F. 161- 
 
 172; R.R. 206 ff. 
 Fortuna, 50 ff. Cp. R.F. 161-172, 
 
 223-225; R.R. 206 ff. 
 Forum Boarium, 33, 36 
 Frazer, Golden Bough, 16 
 
 Genius, 12. Cp. R.R. 154 ff. 
 Genius Augusti, 179. Cp. R.R. 
 
 72, 73, 179 
 Great Mother of the gods, 96. Cp. 
 
 R.F. 69-70; R.R. 263 
 Greek influence in Rome, 99, 100, 
 
 104 
 Guilds in relation to Minerva, 47 
 
 Hannibal, 93, 94 
 
 Harrison : Pivlegomena to the Study 
 
 of Greek Religion, 22 
 Haruspicina, 43. Cp. R.R. 469 ff. 
 Hasdrubal, 96 
 
 Hebe-Juventas, no. Cp. Juventas 
 Hercules, 32. Cp. R.R. 219 ff. 
 Hereditas sine sacris, 17 
 Hermes Empolaios, 77. Cp. Preller- 
 
 Robert, Griech. Myth, 414 
 Hesiod, 46 
 Horace, 168 
 
 Indo-Germanic religion, 3 
 Isis, 136. Cp. R.R. 292 ff. ; Drex- 
 ler, Lex. s.v. 
 
 Janus, 13. Cp. R.F. 282 ff. ; R.R. 
 
 91 flf. 
 Juno, 12. C^. R.F. passim; R.R. 
 
 113 ff- 
 Juppiter as symbol of republic, 160 
 Juppiter Feretrius, 21, 58. Cp. 
 
 R.F. 229, 230 : R.R, 103 
 Juppiter Fidius, 25. Cp. R.F, 138; 
 
 R.R. 120 
 Juppiter Latiaris, 55. Cp. R.F. 
 
 95 ff. ; R.R, 34 ff- 
 
 Juppiter Optimus Maximus, 21, 58. 
 
 Cp. R.R. no ff. 
 Jus divinum, 8 
 Jus humanum, 8 
 Juventas, 109. Cp. R.R. 125 ff. 
 
 Kore, 72. Cp. Libera 
 
 Lar Familiaris, 13. Cp. R.R. 149 
 
 ff. ; Wissowa, in i«;\r. J. K. ; Rohde, 
 
 Psyche, ed. 2, 254 ; De Marchi, 
 
 i. 38 ff. 
 Latin League, 52 ff. Cp. Alba 
 
 Longa 
 Lemuria, 16. Cp. R.F. 106-110 ; 
 
 De Marchi, 36, 37, 39 ; R.R. 
 
 189 
 Lepidus, 137 
 Liber, 74, 75. Cp. R.F, 54, 55 ; 
 
 R. R. 126 ff. , 243 ff. 
 Libera, 75. Cp. R.F. 74; R.R. 
 
 243 ff. 
 Livius Andronicus, 48 
 Lucretius, 144 
 Ludi Saeculares, 93. Cp. R.R. 
 
 364 ff. ; Mommsen, in Ephem. 
 
 Epigraph, viii. 225 ff. 
 Lupercalia, in, 114. Cp. R.F. 
 
 298, 299, 310-321 ; R.R. 172 ff. 
 
 Ma-Bellona, 134. Cp. Bellona 
 
 Maecenas, 152 
 
 Magna Mater. Cp. Great Mother 
 
 of the gods 
 Marius the Epicurean, 20 
 Mars, 19. Cp. R.F. 34 ff. ; R.R. 
 
 129 ff. 
 Mars- Ares, no, in 
 
i: 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Mars Ultor, 174. Cp. R.R. 70, 
 
 133 
 Megalesia, 99 
 Mercury, 77. Cp. R.F. 121, 186 ; 
 
 R.R. 248 ff. 
 Metaurus, 96 
 Minerva, 44 ff. Cp. Wissowa, in 
 
 P.W. s.v. ; R.R. 203 ff. 
 Mithradates, 127 
 Mithras, 138. Cp. R.R. 307 ff. ; 
 
 Cumont, Testes et monuments, 
 
 etc. {2 vols.), Brussels, 1896 
 Mommsen, 18 
 Mundus, 15. Cp. R.F. 211 ; De 
 
 Marchi, i. 184 ; R.R. 18B 
 Mythology, absence of, in Rome, 8. 
 
 Cp. R.R. 20 ff. 
 
 Name, importance of, 6. Cp. 
 
 Frazer, Golden Bovgh, i. 403 ff. 
 Nemi, 54 
 Neptune, 80. Cp. R.F. 185-187 ; 
 
 R.R. 250 ff; Wissowa, in Lex. 
 
 s.v. 
 Numa, apocryphal books of, 120, 
 
 121. Cp. Schwegler, Roem. 
 Gesch. i. 564 ff. ; R.R. 62 
 
 Ocean commerce, beginnings of, 77 
 Octavian, 137 
 Octavius Mamilius, 40 
 
 Paestura — Poseidonia, 80 
 ParentaUa, i6. Cp. R.R. 187 ff. ; 
 
 R.F. 306-310 ; De Marchi, i. 199 
 Parilia, 114. Cp. R.F. 79-85 ; 
 
 R.R. 165 ff. 
 Pater, Walter, 20 
 Persephone, 75. Cp. Proserpina 
 Philosophers expelled from Rome, 
 
 122, 123. Cp. Athen. xii, 547a ; 
 Aul. Gell. 15, II, I ; Sueton. 
 Grammat. 25 
 
 Pinarii, 35 
 
 Plebeian aediles, 74. Cp. R.R. 245; 
 
 Mommsen, Staatsrecht, ii. 471 
 Plutarch, Moralia, 50 
 Pollux, 37. Cp. Castor 
 Pomerium, 33, 34, 35 
 Poseidon, 79. Cp. Neptune 
 
 Poseidonia-Paestum, 80 
 
 Potitii, 35 
 
 Priesthood of Sibylline books, 66. 
 
 Cp. Quindecemviri 
 Priesthoods, political value of, 129. 
 
 Cp. R.R. 64 ; unpopularity of, 
 
 in last century of republic, 131. 
 
 Cp. Marquardt, Staatsverw. iii. 
 
 64 ff. 
 Propertius, 152 
 Proserpina, 76. Cp. R.F. 212 ; 
 
 R.R. 255 ff. ; Carter, in Lex. s.v. 
 Puteoli, 136 
 Pythagorianism, 120 
 
 Quindecemviri, 68. 
 461 ff. 
 
 Cp. R.R. 
 
 Regillus, 40 
 
 Republic, character of the last cen- 
 tury of, 125, 126 
 
 Res Gestae of Augustus, 147. Cp. 
 Mommsen's edition, Berlin, 1883 
 
 Roma Aeterna, 151 
 
 S. Bartolommeo, 87 
 
 Scaevola, theology of, 1 40. Cp. R.R. 
 
 62: Mommsen, Roman History 
 
 (Engl, transl. ), iv. 205 
 Scipio Aemilianus and his circle, 124 
 Secular games, 93, 167. Cp. Ludi 
 
 Saeculares 
 Servius TuUius, 27, 50 
 Sextus Pompeius, 81 
 Sibyl, coming of, 62 ff. Cp. Diels, 
 
 Sibyllinische Blaetter, Berlin, 1890 
 Sibylline oracles, 64 ff. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 17. Cp. Pi'iJi- 
 
 ciples of Sociology 
 Stoicism, the official state philosophy 
 
 of Rome, 123. Cp. Mommsen, 
 
 Roman History (Engl, transl.), 
 
 iv. 201 ff. 
 Sulla increases the priesthood of the 
 
 Sibylline books, 67 ; his influence 
 
 on religion, 128 
 Sj'ria dea, 138. Cp. R.R. 300 
 
 Tarentum-Colonia Neptunia, 80 
 Tarentum in Campus Martins, 89. 
 Cp. Richter, 224 ff. ; Platner, 322 
 
INDEX 
 
 189 
 
 Tarquin and the old woman, 65 
 Tarracina, 98 
 
 Templum, 43. Cp. R,R. 403 ff. 
 Terra Mater, 90. Cp. R.F., 294- 
 
 296 : R.R. 162 
 Tiber, island in, 85 
 Tibullus, 152 
 Tibur (Tivoli), 35 
 Tifata, 54 
 Tusculum, 39, 40 
 Tyche, 50. Cp. Preller- Robert, 
 
 Griech. Myth. 50 
 
 Varro, theology of, 142. Cp. R.R. 
 
 62 
 Vesta, 13. Cp. R.R. 141 ff.; De 
 
 Marchi, Culto Private, i. 64 ff. ; 
 
 R.F. 146 ff. 
 Vesta and Augustus, 176, 177. Cp. 
 
 Gardthausen, Augustus, 868 
 Vestal Virgins, 158 
 Victoria, temple of, on Palatine, loi 
 Virgil, 152 
 Vulcan, 21. Cp. R.F. 209-211 ; 
 
 R.R. 184 ff. 
 
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