The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 21

This Sibyl became gradually localised in certain Greek cities, and thereby broke up, as it were, into several Sibyls. One of these Sibylline homes was at c.u.mae in Campania, the oldest Greek city in Italy, and this enables us to explain easily how the name and fame of the Sibyl reached Rome. Dim as is all early Roman history, the one clear fact of the sixth century is, as we have seen, the rapid advance of the Etruscans, their occupation of Rome, Praeneste, and other Latin cities, and their conquest of Campania, which is now ascribed to that same age.[541] Legend told in later days how the last Etruscan king had taken refuge at c.u.mae after his expulsion from Rome, and it is just possible that it may here be founding upon some dim recollection of a fact.

However this may be, it is plain that it was through the great Etruscan disturbance of that period that Rome came to make trial of Sibylline utterances. In a moment of distress--the famine of which I spoke just now, and which I take to be historical because the remedy, the temple under the Aventine, was so closely connected with the corn-supply--she sent for or admitted an utterance of the Sibyl of c.u.mae, with whom she had come into some kind of contact through her Etruscan kings.

Let us consider that this foreign dynasty must have brought a new population to the city on the Tiber, the chief strategic point of middle Italy,--a new element of plebs, whatever the old one may have been.[542]

We have seen signs, even in the religious history of this age, that commerce and industry were increasing, and that their increase was due to a movement from without, rather than to the old patrician _gentes_.

When the Etruscan dynasty fell and the old patrician influence was restored, the government must have been face to face with new difficulties, and among them the supply of corn for an increasing population in years of bad harvest. With a fresh source of supply from the south came the cult of the Greek corn-deities at the bidding of a Sibylline utterance; and henceforward that remedy was available for other troubles. But the patrician rulers of Rome were true, it would seem, as far as was possible, to the old ways, and for a long time they used this foreign remedy very sparingly. At what date the utterances were collected in "books" and deposited in the Capitoline temple we do not know, nor have we any certain knowledge of their original nature or form. Tradition said that the collection dated from the last king's reign, and that it was placed in the care of _duoviri sacris faciundis_, as we have seen, who in 367 B.C. gave way to _decemviri_, five of whom might be members of the plebs. I am myself inclined to conjecture that this comparatively late date may be the real date of the origin of a _permanent collection_ and a _permanent college of keepers_, and that the earlier _duoviri_ were only temporary religious officers, _sacris faciundis_, _i.e._ for the carrying out of the directions of Sibylline utterances specially sought for at c.u.mae. They would thus be of the same cla.s.s as other special commissions appointed by the Senate for administrative purposes;[543] while the decemviri, though retaining the old t.i.tle, were permanent religious officers appointed to collect and take charge of a new and important set of regulations for the benefit of the community, and one which concerned the plebs at least as much as the patricians.

But I must turn to the more important question how far, down to the war with Hannibal, when I shall take up the subject afresh, the Roman religion was affected for good or harm by these utterances and their keepers. They took effect in two ways: either by introducing new deities and settling them in new temples, or by ordering and organising new ceremonies such as Rome had never seen before.

The introduction of a new deity now and again was not of great account from the point of view of religion, except in so far as it encouraged the new ceremonies; the Romans had never taken much personal interest in their deities, and the arrival (outside the pomoerium in each case) of Hermes under the name of Mercurius, or Poseidon bearing the name of the old Roman water _numen_ Neptunus, or even of Asclepios with a Romanised name Aesculapius, would not be likely to affect greatly their ideas of the divine. These facts have rather a historical than a religious significance; Hermes Empolaios, for example, suggests trade with Greek cities, perhaps in grain,[544] and belongs therefore to the same cla.s.s as Ceres, Liber, Libera, of whom I have already spoken. The arrival of Poseidon-Neptune may mean, as Dr. Carter has suggested, a kind of "marine insurance" for the vessels carrying the grain from Greek ports.[545] The settling of Aesculapius in the Tiber island in 293, as the result of a terrible pestilence, is interesting as being the first fact known to us in the history of medicine at Rome; the temple became a kind of hospital on the model of Epidaurus, where the G.o.d had been brought in the form of a snake by an emba.s.sy sent for the purpose, and the priests who served it were probably Greeks skilled in the healing art.[546] This last case is a curious example of new Roman religious experience, but it can hardly be said to have any deep significance in the religious history of Rome. Of the obliteration of the old _numen_ Neptunus by the Greek G.o.d who took his name we know nothing for good or ill; we are ignorant of the real meaning of the old _numen_, and cannot tell whether the loss of him was compensated by the usefulness of his name in Roman literature to represent the Greek G.o.d of the sea.

Let us turn to the much more important subject of the new ceremonies ordered by the Sibylline "books." The first authentic case of such innovation occurred in 399 B.C., during the long and troublesome siege of the dangerous neighbour city Veii; I call it authentic because all the best modern authorities so reckon it, though it occurred before the destruction of old records during the capture of the city by the Gauls.

The circ.u.mstances were such as to fix themselves in the memory of the people, and in one way or another they found their way into the earliest annals, probably those of Fabius Pictor, composed during the Second Punic War.[547]

The previous winter, Livy tells us,[548] was one of extraordinary severity; the roads were blocked with snow, and navigation on the Tiber stopped by the ice. This miserable winter was followed too suddenly by a hot season, in which a plague broke out which consumed both man and beast, and continued so persistently that the Senate ordered the Sibylline books to be consulted. This persistence is the first point we should notice; "Cuius insanabili pernicie quando nec causa nec finis inveniebatur,"--so wrote Livy, evidently meaning to express an extremity of trouble which would not give way to ordinary religious remedies. We may compare his account of the next recorded consultation of the books (Livy vii. 2), when neither the old rites nor even the new ones were sufficient to secure the _pax deorum_ and abate another pestilence, and recourse was had to yet another remedy in the form of _ludi scenici_.

The times were out of joint,--the peace of the G.o.ds was broken, and thus the community was no longer in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The result was a revival of _religio_, of the feeling of alarm and anxiety out of which the whole religious system had grown. The old deities might seem to be forsaking their functions, since the old rites had ceased to appeal to them. Mysterious and persistent pestilence is a great tamer of human courage; it is a new experience that man knows not how to meet, and in ancient life it was also a new _religious_ experience.

The remedy was as new as the pestilence, and almost as pernicious.

During eight days Rome saw three pairs of deities reclining in the form of images on couches, before which were spread tables covered with food and drink. Whether in this first case they were taken out of the temples and exposed to view in certain places, _e.g._ the forum, is not clear; later on, in the days of _supplicationes_, of which more will be said presently, they were visited in procession. The three pairs were Apollo and Latona, Diana and Hercules, Mercurius and Neptunus; all of them Greek, or, as in the case of Diana, Mercurius, and Neptunus, Roman deities in their new Greek form. We cannot trace the special applicability of all of them to the trouble they were thus invoked to appease,--another point that suggests a complete revolution in the Roman ways of contemplating divine beings. These are not functional _numina_, but foreigners whose ways were only known to the manipulators of the Sibylline utterances. They seem like quack remedies, of which the action is unknown to the consumer.

New also, but better in its effect, was the publicity of these proceedings, and the part taken in them by the whole population, patrician and plebeian, men, women, and children. If we can trust Livy's further statements, every one left his door open and kept open house, inviting all to come in, whether known or unknown; all old quarrels were made up, and no new ones suffered to begin; prisoners were freed from their chains, and universal good-will prevailed. These eight days were in fact kept as holidays, and doubtless by the novelty of the whole scene the astute authorities hoped to inspire fresh hope and confidence, and to divert attention from the prevailing misery, just as our soldiers in India are induced to forget the presence of cholera in a station by constant games and amus.e.m.e.nts. That this was really one leading object of the whole show is not generally recognised by historians; but it seems fully explained by the fact I mentioned just now, that in the similar trouble of 349 B.C. recourse was had for the first time to _ludi scenici_ in order to amuse the people. In the history of the Hannibalic war we shall have plenty of opportunity of noting this kind of expedient. The Roman people, we must remember, were getting more and more to be inhabitants of a large city, and, as such, to seek for entertainment, like all citizens in all ages. The religious rites of the old calendar were perhaps by this time getting too familiar, losing their original meaning; whether they had ever been very entertaining to a city population may be doubted. Something more showy was needed; processions had always been to the taste of the Roman, and banquets, such as the epulum Iovis, which I have already noticed, often accompanied the processions.

Now, this love of show and novelty, of which we have abundant evidence later on as a Roman characteristic, taken together with the anxiety and alarm--the new _religio_--arising from the pestilence, will sufficiently explain the _lectisternia_, as these shows were called. We have here in fact the first appearance, constantly recurring in later Roman history, of a tendency to seek not only for novelty, but for a more emotional expression of religious feeling than was afforded by the old forms of sacrifice and prayer, conducted as they were by the priest on behalf of the community without its active partic.i.p.ation. Those old forms might do for the old patrician community of farmers and warriors, but not so well for the new and ever-increasing population of artisans and other workmen, whether of Roman or foreign descent. It would seem, indeed, as if the sensitiveness of the human fibre of a primitive community increases with its increasing complexity, and with the greater variety of experience to which it is exposed; and in the case of Rome, as if the simple ancient methods of dealing with the divine inhabitants of the city were no longer adequate to the needs of a State which was steering its way to empire among so many difficulties and perils. It is not indeed certain that the new rites, or some points in them, may not have had their prototypes in old Italian usage, though the _lectisternia_, the actual display of G.o.ds in human form and in need of food like human beings, are almost certainly Greek in origin.[549] But so far as we can guess, the emotional element was wholly new. True, Livy tells us in two pa.s.sages of his third book of occasions when men, women, and children flocked to all the shrines (_omnia delubra_) seeking for the _pax deorum_ at the invitation of the senate; but the early date, the great improbability of the senate taking any such step, and the absence of any mention of the priesthoods, makes it difficult to believe that these a.s.sertions are based on any genuine record. We must be content to mark the first _lectisternia_ in 399 as the earliest authentic example of the emotional tendency of the Roman plebs.[550]

If we can judge of this period of Roman religious history by the general tendency of the policy of the Roman government, we may see here a deliberate attempt to include the new population in wors.h.i.+p of a kind that would calm its fears, engage its attention, and satisfy its emotion, while leaving uncontaminated the old ritual that had served the State so long. If this conclusion be a right one, then we must allow that the new ceremonial had its use. Dr. Frazer has lately told us in his eloquent and persuasive way, of how much value superst.i.tion has been in building up moral habits and the instinct of submission to civil order. His thesis might be ill.u.s.trated adequately from the history of Rome alone. But from a purely religious point of view the story of the _lectisternia_ is a sad one. The old Roman invisible _numen_, working with force in a particular department of human life and its environment, was a far n.o.bler mental conception, and far more likely to grow into a power for good, than the miserable images of Graeco-Roman full-blown G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses reclining on their couches and appearing to partake of dinner like a human citizen. Such ideas of the divine must have forced men's religious ideas clean away from the Power manifesting itself in the universe, and must have dragged down the Roman _numina_ with them in their corrupting degradation. According to our definition of it, religion was now in a fair way to disappear altogether; what was destined to take its place was not really religion at all. Nor did it in any way a.s.sist the growth of an individual conscience, as perhaps did some of the later religious forms introduced from without. It was of value for the moment to the State, in satisfying a population greatly disturbed by untoward events; and that was all.

Closely connected with the _lectisternia_, and following close upon them in chronological order, were the processional ceremonies called _supplicationes_. The historical relation between the two is by no means clear; but if we conclude, as I am fairly sure we may, that the _lectisternia_ were shows of a joyful character, accompanied, as Livy describes the first one, with private entertainments, and meant to keep up the spirits of the plebeian population, and if we then turn to the early _supplicationes_, in which men, women, and children, _coronati_, and carrying laurel branches, went in procession to the temples, and there prostrated themselves after the Greek fas.h.i.+on, the women "crinibus pa.s.sis aras verrentes," we shall be disposed to look on them as, in origin at least, distinct from each other.[551] We may conjecture that the appearance of the G.o.ds in human form at the doors of their temples suggested to the plebeian women a kind of emotional wors.h.i.+p which was alien to the old Roman feeling, but familiar enough to those (and they must have been many) who knew the life of the Greek cities of Italy. It may be that they had tried it even in earlier times; but anyhow, in the fourth and third centuries B.C. advantage was taken of the _pulvinaria_ to use them as stopping-places in the procession of a _supplicatio_, and the phrase becomes a common one in the annals, "supplicatio ad omnia pulvinaria indicta." The _lectisternia_ were ordered five times in the fourth century;[552] by that time, it would seem likely, the _supplicationes_ had become an authorised inst.i.tution, and had perhaps embodied the practice of _lectisternia_ in the way suggested above. We shall meet with them again when we come to the religious history of the war with Hannibal.

One word more before I leave this subject for the present. In all this innovation we must not forget to note the growth of individual feeling as distinguished from the old wors.h.i.+p of civic grouping, in which the individual, as such, was of little or no account. I pointed out the first signs of this individualism when speaking of the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter, and we shall have reason to mark its rapid growth further. We are now, in fact, and must realise that we are, in a period in which, throughout the Graeco-Roman world, the need was beginning to be felt of some new rule of individualistic morality. The Roman population, now recruited from many sources, was but reflecting this need unconsciously when it insisted on new emotional rites and expiations. The Roman authorities were forced to satisfy the demand; but in doing so they made no real contribution to the history of Roman religious experience. It was impossible that they should do so; they represented the old civic form of religion, "bound up with the life of a society, and unable to contemplate the individual except as a member of it."[553] The new forms of wors.h.i.+p, the _supplicatio_ and _lectisternium_, could not be, as the old forms had in some sense been, the consecration of civic and national life. They were to the Romans as the wors.h.i.+p of Baal to the Jews of the time of the Kings; and, unlike that poisonous cult, they could never be rooted out.[554][555]

NOTES TO LECTURE XI

[510] This is the expression of Sall.u.s.t, _Catil._ 12. 3.

[511] See my paper on the Latin history of the word _religio_, in _Transactions of the Congress for the History of Religions_, 1909, vol. ii. p. 172. W. Otto in _Archiv_, 1909, p. 533 foll.

[512] Cic. _de Nat. Deorum_, ii. 8.

[513] Cic. _Harusp. resp._ 19.

[514] Livy xliv. 1. 11; Sall.u.s.t, _l.c._; Gellius, _Noct.

Att._ ii. 28. 2.

[515] Polyb. vi. 56.

[516] Posidonius ap. Athenaeum vi. 274 A; Dion.

Hal. ii. 27. 3.

[517] Gell. ii. 28.

[518] Marquardt, iii. 126.

[519] Cato, _R.R._ 142.

[520] Calpurnius, _Eclogue_, v. 24. I have described a similar scene in the Alps in _A Year with the Birds_, ed. 2, p. 126.

[521] Petronius, _Sat._ 117: "His ita ordinatis, quod bene feliciterque eveniret precati deos, viam ingredimur." I owe this reference, as others in this context, to Appel's treatise _de Romanorum precationibus_, p. 56 foll.

[522] Varro, _R.R._ i. 1.

[523] _e.g._ Virg. _Aen._ v. 685 (Aeneas during the burning of the fleet); _Aen._ xii. 776 (Turnus in extremity). Cp. Tibull. iii. 5. 6 (in sickness).

[524] A good example is _Captivi_, 922: "Iovi disque ago gratias merito magnas quom te redducem tuo patri reddiderunt," etc.

[525] For grat.i.tude to human beings see Valerius Maximus v. 2. A good example of grat.i.tude to a deity is in Gell.

_N.A._ iv. 18; but it is told of Scipio the elder, who was eccentric for a Roman. When accused by a tribune of peculation in Asia he said, "Non igitur simus adversum deos ingrati et, censeo, relinquamus nebulonem hunc, eamus hinc protinus Iovi Optimo Maximo gratulatum."

Public grat.i.tude to the G.o.ds is frequent in later _supplicationes_, _e.g._ Livy x.x.x. 17. 6.

[526] Gellius, _N.A._ xiv. 7. 9.

[527] Servius ad _Aen._ xi. 301 ("praefatus divos solio rex infit ab alto").

[528] This was in a _contio_: "c.u.m Gracchus deos inciperet precari." See above, Lecture VII. note 13.

[529] See _R.F._ p. 74 foll.; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 243.

For the relation of the pomoerium to the wall, see above, p. 94.

[530] The process is amusingly explained by Carter in _The Religion of Numa_, p. 72 foll.

[531] _R.F._ p. 75.

[532] See Aust, _De aedibus sacris P.R._, pa.s.sim.

[533] Lately this has been denied by Pais, _Storia di Roma_, i. 339.

[534] Pliny, _N.H._ 35, 154.

[535] I owe the information to my friend Prof. Percy Gardner.

[536] See Carter, _op. cit._ p. 66; but I am not sure that his reasons are conclusive.

[537] Diels, _Sibyllinische Blatter_, p. 6 foll., and cp. 79.

[538] It should be noted that the cult of Apollo in Rome was older than the introduction of Sibylline influence; so at least it is generally a.s.sumed. Wissowa, however (_R.K._ p. 239), puts it as "gleichzeitig." The date of the Apollinar in pratis Flaminiis, the oldest Apolline fanum in Rome (outside pomoerium), is unknown; that of the temple on the same site was 431 (Livy iv. 25 and 29). There is little doubt that the Apollo-cult spread from c.u.mae northwards, and was by this time well established in Italy. (The foundation of the temple of 431, consisting of opus quadratum, still in part survives: Hulsen-Jordan, _Rom. Topographie_, iii. 535).

[539] Heracleitus, _fragm._ xii., ed. Bywater.

[540] _Phaedrus_, p. 244.