Part 38

Livy xxxii. 9, cp. 28. In connection with these prodigia it may be worth noting that in xxxii. 30 we are told that a consul vowed a temple to Juno Sospita, who had in her famous seat at Lanuvium been a constant centre of marvel-mongering. Livy xxxiv. 53 places the building of this temple in foro olitorio three years later, if we may read there Sospitae instead of the Matutae of the MSS. with Sigonius: (cp. Aust, de Aedibus, p. 21, and Wissowa, R.K. 117). This interesting deity had been taken into the Roman worship in 338 B.C., but not moved from Lanuvium, which had peculiar religious relations with Rome. See Myth. Lex. vol. ii. p. 608, where the attributes of this Juno in art are described by Vogel. The date of the temple at Rome was 194. Whether the object of it was to diminish the portents at Lanuvium it is impossible to say, but judging from the records of prodigia in Julius Obsequens it had that effect. I find only four prodigia reported from Lanuvium after this date.

See the passage in Frontinus, de Aqueductibus, i. 7 (C. Herschel's edition gives the reading of the best MS.), and the mutilated passage in the new epitomes of Livy found by Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt (Oxyrrhyncus Papyri, vol. iv. pp. 101 and 113). The general bearing of the two passages taken together seems to me to be that given in the text.

Cic. ad Fam. i. 1 and 2. A somewhat similar case in 190 B.C. will be found in Livy xxxviii. 45, where the oracle forbade a Roman army to cross the Taurus range.

Livy xxxiv. 55.

Livy xxxviii. 56, mentions statues which were believed to be those of Scipio the elder, his brother Lucius, and Ennius, "in Scipionum monumento" outside the Porta Capena, and another of Scipio at Liternum, where he had a villa; this one Livy says that he saw himself blown down by a storm. On statues and busts at Rome, see Pliny xxxiv. 28 foll.; Mrs. Strong, Roman Sculpture, p. 28 foll.; Cambridge Companion to Latin Studies, p. 550 foll.; and for coins, p. 456.

See above, p. 240, for the remarkable exception in the case of the elder Scipio, whose practice when in Rome was to go up to the Capitoline temple before daybreak and contemplate the statue of Jupiter; the dogs never barked at him, and the aedituus opened the cella Iovis at his summons. I see no good ground for rejecting this story, which is not likely to have been invented. It can be traced back to two writers, Oppius, the friend of Caesar, and Julius Hyginus, the librarian of Augustus (Gell. vi. 1. 1), and was probably based on tradition. Livy mentions it in xxvi. 19, and suggests that this and other ways of Scipio were assumed to impress the multitude. The Roman mind was naturally averse from such individualism in religion; but Scipio was beyond doubt more familiar than his contemporaries with Greek ideas. In a chapter on Idealism in his little book on Religion and Art in Ancient Greece, Professor Ernest Gardner writes: "The statue (of Athene) by Phidias within the Parthenon offered not merely that form in which she would choose to appear if she showed herself to mortal eyes, but actually showed her form as if she had revealed it to the sculptor. To look upon such an image helped the worshipper as much as—perhaps more than—any service or ritual, to bring himself into communion with the goddess, and to fit himself, as a citizen of her chosen city, to carry out her will in contributing his best efforts to its supremacy in politics, in literature, and in art." That Scipio had some feeling of this kind need not be doubted, though the statue was not a great work of art like that of Phidias. Cp. Lucretius, vi. 75 foll.

See below, p. 386.

Marquardt, 332, and Mommsen, Staatsrecht, i. ed. 2, p. 463 foll.

Livy, Epit. xix.

Livy xxxvii. 51: "Religio ad postremum vicit, ut dicto audiens esset flamen pontifici." Here religio is used in the sense of obligation to the ius divinum.

Livy xxvii. 6; cp. 36.

This story is told in Livy xl. 42.

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).

Velleius ii. 43.

Livy xxxi. 50.

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.

Livy xxxii. 7; xxxix. 39.

Tac. Ann. iv. 16.

See above, p. 255.

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 (Hellenic Journal, 1906, p. 191).

Farnell, op. cit. vol. v. p. 150.

Quoted by Farnell, p. 151, from Rohde's Psyche.

It is possible that superstitio may originally have had some such meaning; see W. Otto in Archiv fuer Religionswissenschaft, 1909, p. 548 foll.; Mayor's edition of Cic. de Nat. Deorum, note on ii. 72 foll.

Ovid, Fasti, iii. 523 foll. See also Roman Society in the Age of Cicero, p. 289.

See Mr. Heitland's History of the Roman Republic, vol. ii. p. 229 note, and cp. Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. s.v. "Bacchanalia."

Livy xxxix. 8 foll.

Plato, de Rep. 364 B; cp. Laws, 933 D.

"Quaestio de clandestinis coniurationibus decreta est," Livy xxxix. 8; so also in chs. 14 and 17. Cp. Sctm. de Bacchanalibus, line 13, "conioura (se)." This document 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.

Livy xxxix. 16: "Omnia, dis propitiis volentibusque, faciemus, qui quia suum numen sceleribus libidinibusque contaminari indigne ferebant," etc.

Mommsen, Strafrecht, p. 567 foll.

Livy xxxix. 18 ad fin. Sctm. de Bacch. lines 3 foll.

Religion der Roemer, p. 78.

Livy xl. 29 seems to have put his account together from Cassius 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 Cassius Hemina is quoted in Pliny, sec. 86; Val. Max. i. 1, and Plutarch, Numa 22, add nothing to our knowledge of the incident.

See Schanz, Gesch. der roem. Literatur, i. 268; Pliny, loc. cit., calls him "vetustissimus auctor annalium," but his work was later than the Annals or Origines of Cato.

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.

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.

See above, p. 149 foll.

Quoted by Aust, Religion der Roemer, p. 64. The passage is in Zeller's Religion und Philosophie bei den Roemern, a short treatise reprinted in his Vortraege und Abhandlungen, ii. 93 foll.

Ribbeck, Fragmenta Tragicorum Latinorum, p. 54.

Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 334.

Cistellaria, ii. 1. 45 foll.

Aust, op. cit. p. 66.

See Schanz, Gesch. der roem. 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 space 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. Masson 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 destitute—a castaway without consolation, and without the sense that he needed it. He was destitute, first, in regard to his idea of God and of his relation to God; 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 passed 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 destitute 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. 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, emancipating 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 destitution of the Romans in regard both to God and duty.

The first system of philosophy actually to make its appearance at Rome was that of Epicurus; 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 noblest 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 establishing a religious sanction for conduct. The Epicurean gods 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; and what Epicurus himself understood by them, or any of his followers down to Lucretius, is matter of subtle and perplexing disputation. One point is clear, that they had no interest in human beings; and the natural inference would be that human beings had no call to worship them; yet, strange to say, Epicurus himself took part in worship, and in the worship of the national religion of his native city. Philodemus, the contemporary of Lucretius, expressly asserts this, and even insists that Epicurism gave a religious sanction to morality which was absent in Stoicism. Lucretius himself clearly thought that worship was natural and possible. "If you do not clear your mind of false notions," he says, "nec delubra deum placido cum pectore adibis." Man might go on with his ancestral worship, but entirely without fear, and as with "placid mind" he took part in the rites of his fathers, a mysterious divine influence might enter his mind; "the images of a Zeus, a Heracles, an Athene, might pass in and impress on him the aspect and character of each deity, and carry with them suggestions of virtue, of courage, of wise counsel in difficulty." Evidently both Epicurus and his followers had felt the difficulty and the peril of breaking entirely with the religious habits of the mass of the people, and had conscientiously done their best to reconcile their own belief with popular practice—an attempt which has its parallel in the religious speculation of the present day.

But for the Roman follower of Epicurus, wholly unused to such subtle ideas as the passage of divine influence into the mind by means of religious contemplation, this lame attempt to bring apathetic gods into relation with human life must have been quite meaningless. Cicero well expresses the common sense of a Roman at the very beginning of his treatise on the Nature of the Gods. "If they are right who deny that the gods have any interest in human affairs, where is there room for pietas, for sanctitas, for religio?" What, he adds, is the use of worship, of honour, of prayer? If these are simply make-believes, pietas cannot exist, and with it we may almost assume that fides and iustitia, and the social virtues generally, which hold society together, must vanish too. Such criticism is characteristically Roman, and we may take it as representing accurately the feeling of the old-fashioned Roman of Cicero's day, as well as of the Stoic or Academic critic of Epicurism. On the other hand, the believing Epicurean at Rome was not more likely to accept the compromise; he had done with his own gods and their worship, and such a "ficta simulatio" was not likely to attract him. Even Lucretius, whose mind was in a sense really religious, does no more in the passage I quoted just now than allude to actual worship of the gods, and he makes it quite clear that the tranquillity and happiness coming from contemplation, and the punishment that follows misdoing, are both purely subjective; the gods are not active in influencing man's life, but man influences that life himself by opening his mind to the contemplation of the gods. This passage of Lucretius (vi. 68 foll.) is, if I am not mistaken, the nearest approach to real religion that we find in the history of Roman Epicurism; yet so far as we know it bore no fruit. It seems to me to express a genuine feeling, a religio, but the expression is blurred by a consciousness of inconsistency.

The fact is that in the system of Epicurus the Power manifesting itself in the universe is not a divine Power, but a mechanical one; the gods have nothing to do with it, they cannot be active, their perfection is found in repose; they are an adjunct, an after-thought in the system. Thus all attempts to reconcile the Power with the popular religion must inevitably be failures, and more especially so in the Roman world. At best the Epicurean gods could but set an example of quietism which could not possibly be a force for good in that active world of business and government. The real force of Epicurism, for the Roman at least, if I am not mistaken, was analogous to a religious force, though far indeed from being one in reality—I mean the profound and touching belief in the Founder himself as a saviour, which is so familiar to all readers of Lucretius. And the real legacy of Lucretius himself to Roman religion is only indirectly a religious one—I mean the wholesome contempt for "superstitio" and all the baser side of religious belief and practice, old and new. If his devotion to the Master had been rooted more in the love of goodness and less in the admiration for his speculations, and if his contempt for superstitio had been less harshly dogmatic, had he been more sympathetic and generous in his attitude to the Italian ideas of the divine—the power of Lucretius might possibly have been strong and permanent.

Thus for the Roman's destitution in regard to God Epicurism could find no remedy, and as a consequence it could provide no religious sanction for his conduct in life. What power it had upon conduct as a system of ethics is a question outside the range of my subject. No doubt a certain type of mind, naturally pure and good, and apt to retire upon itself, might find in Epicurism not only no harm but even positive help; perhaps the best way to appreciate this fact, too often overlooked, is to read the defence of the Epicurean ethics put into the mouth of Torquatus, in the first book of the de Finibus, by one who was far from being in sympathy with the creed. But for the Roman of that age, when ideas of duty and discipline were losing strength, this enticing faith, with pleasure as its summum bonum, and with quietism as its ideal of human life, could hardly be a real stimulus to active virtue; the Roman needed bracing, and this was not a tonic, but a sedative. Far more valuable in every way, and far better suited to the best instincts of the Roman character, was the rival creed of Stoicism, and I must devote the rest of this lecture to the consideration of its religious aspect.

It was most fortunate for Rome that her best and ablest men in the second century B.C. fell into the hands, not of Epicureans, but of Stoics—into the hands, too, of a single Stoic of high standing, fine character, and good sense. For destitute as the Roman was both in regard to God and to Duty, he found in Stoicism an explanation of man's place in the universe,—an explanation relating him directly to the Power manifesting itself therein, and deriving from that relation a binding principle of conduct and duty. This should make the religious character of Stoicism at once apparent. It is perfectly true, as the late Mr. Lecky said long ago, that "Stoicism, taught by Panaetius of Rhodes, and soon after by the Syrian Posidonius, became the true religion of the educated classes. It furnished the principles of virtue, coloured the noblest literature of the time, and guided all the developments of moral enthusiasm." To this I only need to add that it woke in the mind an entirely new idea of Deity, far transcending that of Roman numina and of Greek polytheism, and yet not incapable of being reconciled with these; so that it might be taken as an inpouring of sudden light upon old conceptions of the Power, glorifying and transfiguring them, rather than, like the Epicurean faith, a bitter and contemptuous negation of man's inherited religious instincts. But before we go on to consider this illumination more closely, let me say a few words about Panaetius the Stoic missionary, and Scipio Aemilianus, his most famous disciple.

Scipio, born 184, was a happy combination of the best Roman aristocratic character and the receptive intelligence which for a Roman was the chief result of a Greek liberal education. He had been educated by his famous father, Aemilius Paulus, in a thoroughly healthy way; he was no mere book-student, but a practical courageous Roman, with a solid mental foundation of moral rectitude (pietas) fixed firmly in the traditions and instincts of his own family. On this foundation, as has been well said, a superstructure of intellectual culture might be built securely without destroying it, and this was exactly what did take place, both for Scipio and for that circle of friends of his which has become so famous in Roman history. In very early life he became the intimate friend of Polybius, whose account of their first unreserved intercourse is one of the most delightful passages in all ancient literature; and from Polybius he doubtless learnt to think. He must have learnt to understand the real nature of the Roman empire, to appreciate the forces which had called it into being, the qualities which had preserved it through the fearful struggle with Hannibal, and the duty of a noble Roman in regard to it. From Polybius, indeed, it is not likely that he gained much light on matters either of religion or morality; but that statesman and historian must inevitably have accustomed him, in the course of their long intercourse, to think more deeply than Roman had ever yet thought, about the world in which he lived and was to act for many years the leading part. Thus he was well prepared for the friendship of a more spiritual guide.