The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 29

[718] See below, p. 386.

[719] Marquardt, 332, and Mommsen, _Staatsrecht_, i. ed.

2, p. 463 foll.

[720] Livy, _Epit._ xix.

[721] Livy x.x.xvii. 51: "Religio ad postremum vicit, ut dicto audiens esset flamen pontifici." Here _religio_ is used in the sense of obligation to the _ius divinum_.

[722] Livy xxvii. 6; cp. 36.

[723] This story is told in Livy xl. 42.

[724] Livy xxvii. 8. For the compelling power (_capere_) of the Pont. Max., see Marq. 314. The story may have come from the annals of the Valerii Flacci, and also from those of the pontifices; it was apparently well known, as Valerius Maximus knew it (vi. 9. 2).

[725] Velleius ii. 43.

[726] Livy x.x.xi. 50.

[727] For the oath see "Lex incerta reperta Bantiae,"

lines 16 and 17, in Bruns, _Fontes Iuris Romani_. The oath taboo is mentioned by Gellius 10. 15. 3.; Festus 104, and Plutarch, _Quaest. Rom._ 113.

[728] Livy x.x.xii. 7; x.x.xix. 39.

[729] Tac. _Ann._ iv. 16.

[730] See above, p. 255.

[731] Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. v. p.

85 foll. Very interesting is the modern survival of Dionysiac rites recently discovered in Thrace by Mr.

Dawkins (_h.e.l.lenic Journal_, 1906, p. 191).

[732] Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. v. p. 150.

[733] Quoted by Farnell, p. 151, from Rohde's _Psyche_.

[734] It is possible that _superst.i.tio_ may originally have had some such meaning; see W. Otto in _Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft_, 1909, p. 548 foll.; Mayor's edition of Cic. _de Nat. Deorum_, note on ii. 72 foll.

[735] Ovid, _Fasti_, iii. 523 foll. See also _Roman Society in the Age of Cicero_, p. 289.

[736] See Mr. Heitland's _History of the Roman Republic_, vol. ii. p. 229 note, and cp. Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._ _s.v._ "Baccha.n.a.lia."

[737] Livy x.x.xix. 8 foll.

[738] Plato, _de Rep._ 364 B; cp. _Laws_, 933 D.

[739] "Quaestio de clandestinis coniurationibus decreta est," Livy x.x.xix. 8; so also in chs. 14 and 17. Cp.

_Sctm. de Baccha.n.a.libus_, line 13, "conioura (se)." This doc.u.ment is, strictly speaking, a letter to the magistrates "in agro Teurano" in Bruttium embodying the orders of the Senatus consultum. It will be found in Bruns, _Fontes Iuris Romani_, or in Wordsworth, _Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin_.

[740] Livy x.x.xix. 16: "Omnia, dis propitiis volentibusque, faciemus, qui quia suum numen sceleribus libidinibusque contaminari indigne ferebant," etc.

[741] Mommsen, _Strafrecht_, p. 567 foll.

[742] Livy x.x.xix. 18 _ad fin._ _Sctm. de Bacch._ lines 3 foll.

[743] _Religion der Romer_, p. 78.

[744] Livy xl. 29 seems to have put his account together from Ca.s.sius Hemina and other annalists, so far as we can judge from the reference to them in Pliny, _N.H._ xiii. 84; Valerius Antias, who simply stated that the writings were Pythagorean as well as Numan, Livy rejects as ignorant of the chronological impossibility of making the king contemporary with the philosopher.

The fragment of Ca.s.sius Hemina is quoted in Pliny, sec.

86; Val. Max. i. 1, and Plutarch, _Numa_ 22, add nothing to our knowledge of the incident.

[745] See Schanz, _Gesch. der rom. Literatur_, i. 268; Pliny, _loc. cit._, calls him "vetustissimus auctor annalium," but his work was later than the _Annals_ or _Origines_ of Cato.

[746] Ennius came from South Italy (Rudiae in Messapia), the home of Pythagoreanism. For traces of it in his works, see Reid on Cicero, _Academica priora_, ii. 51.

[747] This is the view taken by Colin, _Rome et la Grece, 200-146 B.C._, p. 269 foll. This reaction was probably only a part of the general reversion to conservatism which we have been noticing in the action of the government in religious matters.

[748] See above, p. 149 foll.

[749] Quoted by Aust, _Religion der Romer_, p. 64. The pa.s.sage is in Zeller's _Religion und Philosophie bei den Romern_, a short treatise reprinted in his _Vortrage und Abhandlungen_, ii. 93 foll.

[750] Ribbeck, _Fragmenta Tragicorum Latinorum_, p. 54.

[751] _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p.

334.

[752] _Cistellaria_, ii. 1. 45 foll.

[753] Aust, _op. cit._ p. 66.

[754] See Schanz, _Gesch. der rom. Literatur_, vol. i.

p. 75.

LECTURE XVI

GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND ROMAN RELIGION

I said at the end of the last lecture that ideas about the Divine might be discussed at Rome by philosophers, as the Romans began to read and in some degree to think. At the era we have now reached, the latter half of the second century B.C., this process actually began, and I propose in this lecture to deal with it briefly. But my subject is the Roman religious experience, and I can only find room for philosophy so far as the philosophy introduced at Rome had a really religious side. Another reason forbidding me to give much s.p.a.ce to it is that it was at Rome entirely exotic, did not spring from an indigenous root in Roman life and thought, and never seriously affected the minds of the lower and less educated population. And I must add that the types of Greek philosophy which concern us at all have been fully and ably dealt with, the one in vol. ii. of Dr. Caird's lectures on this foundation on _The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_, a work from which I have learnt much, and the other by Dr. Ma.s.son in his most instructive work on the great Epicurean poet Lucretius.

We have seen in the two last lectures that in that second century B.C.

the Roman was fast becoming religiously dest.i.tute--a castaway without consolation, and without the sense that he needed it. He was dest.i.tute, first, in regard to his idea of G.o.d and of his relation to G.o.d; for if we take our old definition of religion, which seems to me to be continually useful, we can hardly say of that age that it showed any effective desire to be in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The old idea of the manifestation of the Power in the various _numina_ had no longer any relation to Roman life; the kind of life in which it germinated and grew, the life of agriculture and warlike self-defence, had pa.s.sed away with the growth of the great city, the decay of the small farmer, and the extension of the empire; and no new informing and inspiring principle had taken its place.

Secondly, he was dest.i.tute in regard to his sense of duty, which had been largely dependent on religion, both in the family and in the State.

No new force had come in to create and maintain conscience. In public life, indeed, the religious oath was still powerful, and continued to be so, though there are some signs that its binding force was less strong than of yore, especially in the army.[755] But in a society so complex as that of Rome in the last two centuries B.C. much more was wanted than a bond sanctioned by civil and religious law; there was needed a sense of duty to the family, the slave, the provincials, the poor and unfortunate. There was no spring of moral action, no religious consecration of morality, no stimulus to moral endeavour. The individual was rapidly developing, emanc.i.p.ating himself from the State and the group-system of society; but he was developing in a wrong direction. The importance of self, when realised in high and low alike, was becoming self-seeking, indifference to all but self. We have now to see whether philosophy could do anything to relieve this dest.i.tution of the Romans in regard both to G.o.d and duty.

The first system of philosophy actually to make its appearance at Rome was that of Epicurus[756]; but it speedily disappeared for the time, and only became popular in the last century B.C., and then in its most repulsive form. It was indeed destined to inspire the n.o.blest mind among all Roman thinkers with some of the greatest poetry ever written; but I need say little of it, for it was never really a part of Roman religious experience. Though capable of doing men much good in a turbulent and individualistic age, it did not and could not do this by establis.h.i.+ng a religious sanction for conduct. The Epicurean G.o.ds were altogether out of reach of the conscience of the individual. They were superfluous even for the atomic theory on which the whole system was pivoted;[757] and what Epicurus himself understood by them, or any of his followers down to Lucretius, is matter of subtle and perplexing disputation.[758] One point is clear, that they had no interest in human beings;[759] and the natural inference would be that human beings had no call to wors.h.i.+p them; yet, strange to say, Epicurus himself took part in wors.h.i.+p, and in the wors.h.i.+p of the national religion of his native city. Philodemus, the contemporary of Lucretius, expressly a.s.serts this,[760] and even insists that Epicurism gave a religious sanction to morality which was absent in Stoicism.[761] Lucretius himself clearly thought that wors.h.i.+p was natural and possible. "If you do not clear your mind of false notions,"