The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 1

The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire.

by T. R. Glover.

PREFACE

A large part of this book formed the course of Dale Lectures delivered in Mansfield College, Oxford, in the Spring of 1907. For the lecture-room the chapters had to be considerably abridged; they are now restored to their full length, while revision and addition have further changed their character. They are published in accordance with the terms of the Dale foundation.

To see the Founder of the Christian movement and some of his followers as they appeared among their contemporaries; to represent Christian and pagan with equal goodwill and equal honesty, and in one perspective; to recapture something of the colour and movement of life, using imagination to interpret the data, and controlling it by them; to follow the conflict of ideals, not in the abstract, but as they show themselves in character and personality; and in this way to discover where lay the living force that changed the thoughts and lives of men, and what it was; these have been the aims of the writer,--impossible, but worth attempting. So far as they have been achieved, the book is relevant to the reader.

The work of others has made the task lighter. German scholars, such as Bousset, von Dobschutz, Harnack, Pfleiderer and Wernle; Professor F. C.

Burkitt and others nearer home who have written of the beginnings of Christianity; Boissier, Martha and Professor Samuel Dill; Edward Caird, Lecky, and Zeller; with the authors of monographs, Croiset, de Faye, Greard, Koziol, Oakesmith, Volkmann; these and others have been laid under contribution. In another way Dr Wilhelm Herrmann, of Marburg, and Thomas Carlyle have helped the {vi} book. The references to ancient authorities are mostly of the writer's own gathering, and they have been verified.

Lastly, there are friends to thank, at Cambridge and at Woodbrooke, for the services that only friends can render--suggestion, criticism, approval, correction, and all the other kindly forms of encouragement and enlightenment.

ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, _February 1909_.

CHAPTER I

ROMAN RELIGION

On the Ides of March in the year 44 B.C. Julius Caesar lay dead at the foot of Pompey's statue. His body had twenty three wounds. So far the conspirators had done their work thoroughly, and no farther. They had made no preparation for the government of the Roman world. They had not realized that they were removing the great organizing intelligence which stood between the world and chaos, and back into chaos the world swiftly rolled. They had hated personal government; they were to learn that the only alternative was no government at all. "Be your own Senate yourself"[1] wrote Cicero to Plancus in despair. There was war, there were faction fights, ma.s.sacres, confiscations, conscriptions.

The enemies of Rome came over her borders, and brigandage flourished within them.

At the end of his first _Georgic_ Virgil prays for the triumph of the one hope which the world saw--for the preservation and the rule of the young Caesar, and he sums up in a few lines the horror from which mankind seeks to be delivered. "Right and wrong are confounded; so many wars the world over, so many forms of wrong; no worthy honour is left to the plough; the husbandmen are marched away and the fields grow dirty; the hook has its curve straightened into the sword-blade. In the East, Euphrates is stirring up war, in the West, Germany: nay, close-neighbouring cities break their mutual league and draw the sword, and the war-G.o.d's unnatural fury rages over the whole world; even as when in the Circus the chariots burst {2} from their floodgates, they dash into the course, and pulling desperately at the reins the driver lets the horses drive him, and the car is deaf to the curb."[2]

Virgil's hope that Octavian might be spared to give peace to the world was realized. The foreign enemies were driven over their frontiers and thoroughly cowed; brigandage was crushed, and finally, with the fall of Antony and Cleopatra, the government of the whole world was once more, after thirteen years of suffering, disorder and death, safely gathered into the hands of one man. There was peace at last and Rome had leisure to think out the experience through which she had pa.s.sed.

The thirteen years between the murder of Caesar and the battle of Actium were only a part of that experience; for a century there had been continuous disintegration in the State. The empire had been increased, but the imperial people had declined. There had been civil war in Rome over and over again--murder employed as a common resource of politics, reckless disregard of the sacredness of life and property, and thorough carelessness of the State. The impression that England made upon Wordsworth in 1802 was precisely that left upon the mind of the serious Roman when he reflected upon his country. All was "rapine, avarice, expense."

Plain living and high thinking are no more: The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws.

Such complaints, real or conventional, are familiar to the readers of the literature of the last century before Christ. Everyone felt that a profound change had come over Rome. Attempts had been made in various ways to remedy this change; laws had been pa.s.sed; citizens had been banished and murdered; armies had been called in to restore ancient principles; and all had resulted in failure. Finally a gleam of restoration was seen when Julius began to set things in order, when he "corrected the year by the Sun" and gave promise of as true and deep-going a correction of everything else. His murder put an end to all this at the time, and it took thirteen years to regain the lost opportunity--and the years were not {3} altogether loss for they proved conclusively that there was now no alternative to the rule of the "Prince."

[Sidenote: The cause of Rome's decline]

Accordingly the Prince set himself to discover what was to be done to heal the hurt of his people, and to heal it thoroughly. What was the real disease? was the question that men asked; where was the root of all the evil? why was it that in old days men were honest, governed themselves firmly, knew how to obey, and served the State? A famous line of Ennius, written two centuries before, said that the Roman Commonwealth stood on ancient character, and on men.--

_Moribus antiquis stat res Romano, virisque._

Both these bases of the national life seemed to be lost--were they beyond recall? could they be restored? What was it that had made the "ancient character"? What was the ultimate difference between the old Roman and the Roman of the days of Antony and Octavian? Ovid congratulated himself on the perfect congruity of the age and his personal character--

_haec aetas moribus apta meis--_

and he was quite right. And precisely in the measure that Ovid was right in finding the age and his character in agreement, the age and national character were demonstrably degenerate. It was the great question before the nation, its statesmen, patriots and poets, to find why two hundred years had wrought such a change.

It was not long before an answer was suggested. A reason was found, which had a history of its own. The decline had been foreseen. We are fortunately in possession of a forecast by a Greek thinker of the second century B.C., who knew Rome well--Polybius, the intimate of the younger Scipio. In the course of his great summary of the Rome he knew, when he is explaining her actual and future greatness to the Greek world, he says:--"The most important difference for the better, which the Roman Commonwealth appears to me to display, is in their religious beliefs, for I conceive that what in other nations is looked upon as a reproach, I mean a scrupulous fear of the G.o.ds, is the very thing which keeps the Roman Commonwealth together; (_synechein ta rhomaion praumata_). To such an extraordinary height is this carried among them (_ektetragoetai {4} ka pareisektai_) both in private and public business, that nothing could exceed it. Many people might think this unaccountable, but in my opinion their object is to use it as a check upon the common people. If it were possible to form a state wholly of philosophers, such a custom would perhaps be unnecessary.

But seeing that every mult.i.tude is fickle and full of lawless desires, unreasoning anger and violent pa.s.sion, the only resource is to keep them in check by mysterious terrors and scenic effects of this sort (_tois adelois phobois kai te toiaute traG.o.dia_). Wherefore, to my mind, the ancients were not acting without purpose or at random, when they brought in among the vulgar those opinions about the G.o.ds and the belief in the punishments in Hades: much rather do I think that men nowadays are acting rashly and foolishly in rejecting them. This is the reason why, apart from anything else, Greek statesmen, if entrusted with a single talent, though protected by ten checking-clerks, as many seals and twice as many witnesses, yet cannot be induced to keep faith; whereas among the Romans, in their magistracies and emba.s.sies, men have the handling of a great amount of money, and yet from pure respect to their oath keep their faith intact."[3] Later on Polybius limits his a.s.sertion of Roman honesty to "the majority"--the habits and principles of Rome were beginning to be contaminated.[4]

[Sidenote: The political value of religion]

This view of the value of religion is an old one among the Greeks.

Critias, the friend of Socrates, embodied it in verses, which are preserved for us by s.e.xtus Empiricus. In summary he holds that there was a time when men's life knew no order, but at last laws were ordained to punish; and the laws kept men from open misdeeds, "but they did many things in secret; and then, I think, some shrewd and wise man invented a terror for the evil in case secretly they should do or say or think aught. So he introduced the divine, alleging that there is a divinity (_daimon_), blest with eternal life, who with his mind sees and hears, thinks, and marks these things, and bears a divine nature, who will hear all that is said among men and can see all that is done, and though in silence thou plan some evil, yet this shall not escape the G.o.ds." This was a most pleasant {5} lesson which he introduced, "with a false reason covering truth"; and he said the G.o.ds abode in that region whence thunder and lightning and rain come, and so "he quenched lawlessness with laws."[5]

This was a shallow judgement upon religion. That "it utterly abolished religion altogether" was the criticism of Cicero's Academic.[6] But most of the contemporary views of the origin of religion were shallow.

Euhemerism with its deified men, and inspiration with its distraught votaries were perhaps n.o.bler, a little n.o.bler, but in reality there was little respect for religion among the philosophic. But the practical people of the day accepted the view of Critias as wise enough. "The myths that are told of affairs in Hades, though pure invention at bottom, contribute to make men pious and upright," wrote the Sicilian Diodorus at this very time.[7] Varro[8] divided religion into three varieties, mythical, physical (on which the less said in public, he owned, the better) and "civil," and he p.r.o.nounced the last the best adapted for national purposes, as it consisted in knowing what G.o.ds state and citizen should wors.h.i.+p and with what rites. "It is the interest," he said, "of states to be deceived in religion."

So the great question narrowed itself to this:--Was it possible for another shrewd and wise man to do again for Rome what the original inventor of religion had done for mankind? once more to establish effective G.o.ds to do the work of police? Augustus endeavoured to show that it was still possible.

On the famous monument of Ancyra, which preserves for us the Emperor's official autobiography, he enumerates the temples he built--temples in honour of Apollo, of Julius, of Quirinus, of Juppiter Feretrius, of Jove the Thunderer, of Minerva, of the Queen Juno, of Juppiter Liberalis, of the Lares, of the Penates, of Youth, of the Great Mother, and the shrine known as the Lupercal; he tells how he dedicated vast sums from his spoils, how he restored to the temples of Asia the ornaments of which they had been robbed, and how he {6} became Pontifex Maximus, after patiently waiting for Lepidus to vacate the office by a natural death. His biographer Suetonius tells of his care for the Sibylline books, of his increasing the numbers, dignities and allowances of the priests, and his especial regard for the Vestal Virgins, of his restoration of ancient ceremonies, of his celebration of festivals and holy days, and of his discrimination among foreign religions, his regard for the Athenian mysteries and his contempt for Egyptian Apis.[9] His private feelings and instincts had a tinge of superst.i.tion. He used a sealskin as a protection against thunder; he carefully studied his dreams, was "much moved by portents," and "observed days."[10]

[Sidenote: Rome's debt to the G.o.ds]

The most lasting monument (_aere perennius_) of the restoration of religion by Augustus consists of the odes which Horace wrote to forward the plans of the Emperor. They were very different men, but it is not unreasonable to hold that Horace felt no less than Augustus that there was something wrong with the state. His personal att.i.tude to religion was his own affair, and to it we shall have to return, but in grave and dignified odes, which he gave to the world, he lent himself to the cause of reformation. He deplored the reckless luxury of the day with much appearance of earnestness, and, though in his published collections, these poems of lament are interleaved with others whose burden is _sparge rosas_, he was serious in some degree; for his own taste, at least when he came within sight of middle life, was all for moderation. He spoke gravely of the effect upon the race of its disregard of all the virtues necessary for the continuance of a society. Like other poets of the day, he found Utopias in distant ages and remote lands. His idealized picture of the blessedness of savage life is not unlike Rousseau's, and in both cases the inspiration was the same--discontent with an environment complicated, extravagant and corrupt.

Better with nomad Scythians roam, Whose travelling cart is all their home, Or where the ruder Getae spread From steppes unmeasured raise their bread.

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There with a single year content The tiller s.h.i.+fts his tenement; Another, when that labour ends, To the self-same condition bends.

The simple step-dame there will bless With care the children motherless: No wife by wealth command procures, None heeds the sleek adulterer's lures.[11]

Other poets also imagined Golden Ages of quiet ease and idleness, but the conclusion which Horace drew was more robust. He appealed to the Emperor for laws, and effective laws, to correct the "unreined license"

of the day, and though his poem declines into declamation of a very idle kind about "useless gold," as his poems are apt to decline on the first hint of rhetoric, the practical suggestion was not rhetorical--it was perhaps the purpose of the piece. In another famous poem, the last of a sequence of six, all dedicated to the higher life of Rome and all reaching an elevation not often attained by his odes, he points more clearly to the decline of religion as the cause of Rome's misfortunes.[12]

The idea that Rome's Empire was the outcome of her piety was not first struck out by Horace. Cicero uses it in one of his public speeches with effect and puts it into the mouth of his Stoic in the work on the Nature of the G.o.ds.[13] Later on, one after another of the Latin Apologists for Christianity, from Tertullian[14] to Prudentius, has to combat the same idea. It was evidently popular, and the appeal to the ruined shrine and the neglected image touched--or was supposed to touch--the popular imagination.

Mankind are apt to look twice at the piety of a ruler, and the old question of Satan comes easily, "Doth Job serve G.o.d for naught?" Why does an Emperor wish to be called "the eldest son of the church?" We may be fairly sure in the case of Augustus that, if popular sentiment had been strongly against {8} the restoration of religion, he would have said less about it. We have to go behind the Emperor and Horace to discover how the matter really stood between religion and the Roman people.

We may first of all remark that, just as the French Revolution was in some sense the parent of the Romantic movement, the disintegration of the old Roman life was accompanied by the rise of antiquarianism.

Cicero's was the last generation that learnt the Twelve Tables by heart at school _ut carmen necessarium_; and Varro, Cicero's contemporary, was the first and perhaps the greatest of all Roman antiquaries. So at least St Augustine held. Sixteen of his forty-one books of Antiquities Varro gave to the G.o.ds, for "he says he was afraid they would perish, not by any hostile invasion, but by the neglect of the Roman citizens, and from this he says they were rescued by himself, as from a fallen house, and safely stored and preserved in the memory of good men by books like his; and that his care for this was of more service than that which Metellus is said to have shown in rescuing the sacred emblems of Vesta from the fire or aeneas in saving the penates from the Fall of Troy."[15] He rescued a good deal more than a later and more pious age was grateful for; Augustine found him invaluable, but Servius, the great commentator on Virgil, called him "everywhere the foe of religion."[16] The poets, too, felt to the full the charm of antiquity. Propertius[17] and Ovid both undertook to write of olden days--of sacred things ("rooted out of ancient annals"[18]), and of the names of long ago. Virgil himself was looked upon as a great antiquary. Livy wrote of Rome's early history and told how Numa "put the fear of the G.o.ds" upon his people "as the most effective thing for an ignorant and rough mult.i.tude";[19] his history abounds in portents and omens, but he is not altogether a believer. As early as a generation before Rome was burnt by the Gauls it was remarked, he says, that foreign religion had invaded the city, brought by prophets who made money out of the superst.i.tions they roused and the alien and unusual means they employed to procure the peace of the G.o.ds.[20]

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[Sidenote: Primitive Roman ritual]

Nowhere perhaps is antiquarianism more fascinating than in the sphere of religion. The _Lupercalia_ had once a real meaning. The sacrifice of goats and young dogs, and of sacred cakes that the Vestals made of the first ears of the last year's harvest; the _Luperci_, with blood on their brows, naked but for the skins of the slaughtered goats; the _februa_ of goatskin, the touch of which would take sterility from a woman--all this is intelligible to the student of primitive religion; but when Mark Antony, Consul though he was, was one of the runners at the Lupercalia, it was not in the spirit of the ancient Latin. It was an antiquarian revival of an old festival of the countryside, which had perhaps never died out. At all events it was celebrated as late as the fifth century A.D., and it was only then abolished by the subst.i.tution of a Christian feast by Pope Gelasius.[21] Augustus took pains to revive such ceremonies. Suetonius mentions the "augury of safety," the "flaminate of Juppiter," the "Lupercal rite," and various sacred games.[22] Varro in one of his books, speaks of the Arval Brothers; and Archaeology and the spade have recovered for us the _acta_ of ninety-six of the annual meetings which this curious old college held at the end of May in the grove of Dea Dia. It is significant that the oldest of these _acta_ refer to the meeting in 14 A.D., the year of Augustus' death. The hymn which they sang runs as follows:--

_Enos Lases iuvate Neve lue rue Marmar sins incurrere in pleores Satur fu fere Mars limen sali sta berber Semunis Alternis advocapit conctos Enos Marmor iuvato Triumpe._

The first five lines were repeated thrice, and _Triumpe_ five times.[23] Quintilian tells us that "the hymns of the Salii were hardly intelligible to the priests themselves,"[24] yet they found admirers who amused Horace with their zeal for mere age and obscurity.[25]