Part 42

But what has all this to do with the eschatology which Lucretius attributes to the common people at Rome in his own day? Simply this, that the ideas at the root of the Lemuria may well have provided the raw material for such an eschatology, while those at the root of the Parentalia could not have done this. Dr. Westermarck has recently shown that primitive religions do spontaneously generate the idea of moral retribution after death, e.g. the notion that the souls of bad people may reappear as evil spirits or obnoxious animals. We have no proof whatever of the existence of such notions at Rome; but I contend that the permanence of this type of belief about the dead which is represented by the Lemuria—a permanence which is attested by Ovid's description—raises a presumption that the lower stratum of the Roman population, if the chance were given it, would the more readily understand the pictures of Etruscan artists and the allusions of Greek playwrights, and the more easily become the prey of the eschatological horrors which Lucretius describes as terrifying them. The material was there from the earliest times, and all that was needed was for Greeks and Etruscans to work upon it.

Before leaving this point it may be worth while to remember that though the well-to-do and educated classes cremated their dead, the poor of the crowded city population of the period I am now dealing with enjoyed no such orderly and cleanly funeral rites. The literary evidence is explicit on this point, and has been confirmed by modern excavation on the Esquiline, where we know from Varro and Horace that the poor and the slaves were thrown en masse into puticuli, i.e. holes where it was impossible that any memorial ceremonies could be kept up. Horace's lines are familiar (Sat. 8. 8):

huc prius angustis eiecta cadavera cellis conservus vili portanda locabat in arca. hoc miserae plebi stabat commune sepulcrum, etc.

It is dangerous to be too confident about the effect on the religious imagination of different ways of dealing with the dead; but it is at least not improbable that any inherited tendency to believe in a miserable future for the soul would be confirmed and maintained by so miserable a fate for the body. The mass of the population had little chance of ridding itself of eschatological superstition.

Thus I am inclined to come to Dr. Masson's conclusion, though on somewhat different grounds. I think it quite possible that the uneducated in the age of the poet may have really been inoculated with these ideas of cruel retribution, and that in many cases this may have resulted in despair or at least discomfort. Only we must remember that in a great city like Rome, as in Paris or London to-day, both the miseries and the enjoyments of life would tend to accustom the minds of the lower strata to consider the present rather than the future; the necessities and pleasures of the moment are with them the only material of thought. Neither comfort nor remonstrance could reach them from pulpit or from missioner; neither fear nor hope could largely enter into their lives. In fact I half suspect that most of them were, after all, so long as they were healthy and active, much what Lucretius would have them be—free from all religious scruple; but, alas, utterly destitute of the intellectual support which he claimed from the study of philosophy. We can well understand how it was among the lower population of the great cities that early Christianity found its chance. They had no education or philosophy to stand between them and the gospel of redemption.

I must say one word about another kind of transcendentalism which was pushing its way into favour in Roman society at this time—I mean astrology. One may call it transcendental because it was based, in its original home in the East, on a mystical notion of sympathy between the phenomena of the starry heavens and the phenomena of human life; and that this notion was carefully inculcated by those who taught the "science" at Rome is shown by the long and wearisome poem on astrology written by Manilius in the succeeding age. But it is not likely that this form of mysticism had become really popular before the period of the Empire, and in any case it can hardly be called a part of Roman religious experience. I only mention it here as helping to illustrate the way in which men's minds were now beginning to turn with interest to speculations altogether beyond the range of that practical ethical philosophy which was natural and congenial to the Roman, altogether beyond the horizon of man's daily prospect in this world. The growing interest in Fortuna, both as natural force and deity, which became intense under the Empire, is another indication of the same tendency.

As soon as Rome had come into close contact with Greece, which had long before been overrun by the eastern astrology—by the Chaldaeans or mathematici, as they are so often called—these experts began to appear also in Italy. We first hear of them from old Cato, who advises that the steward of an estate should be strictly forbidden to consult Chaldaei, harioli, haruspices, and such gentry. In 139 B.C.—a year in which there happened to be in Rome an embassy from Simon Maccabaeus—Chaldaeans were ordered to leave Rome and Italy within ten days; but I think there is some evidence that these were really Jews who were trying to propagate their own religion. For some time we hear nothing more of these intruders; but they probably gained ground again in the course of the Mithridatic wars, which were responsible for the introduction of much Oriental religion into Italy. They are mentioned in 87, together with [Greek: thytai] and Sibyllistae, as persuading the ill-fated Octavius to remain in Rome to meet his death, as it turned out, at the hands of the Marians. But no Roman seems to have taken up astrology as a quasi-scientific study till that Nigidius, of whom I have already said a word, was persuaded thus to waste his time and brains. He is said to have foretold the greatness of Augustus at his birth in 63 B.C.; and from this time forward the taking of horoscopes or genethliaca became a favourite pursuit at Rome—unfortunately for the people of Europe, who caught the infection and kept it endemic for at least fifteen centuries.

Astrology is in no sense religion, and I must leave it with these few remarks. It represents the individual and his personal interests, not even the advantage of the community, and it was for this reason that the Chaldaei were disliked by the Roman government. The individual is not satisfied with legitimate Roman means of divination; he is employing illegitimate ways when he entrusts himself to these Orientals, who, most of them doubtless, well deserved the scathing contempt which Tacitus has contrived to put into six words: "Genus hominum potentibus infidum, sperantibus fallax," adding, with no less contempt for the Roman authorities who had to deal with them, that they will always be forbidden, and always will be found at Rome.

NOTES TO LECTURE XVII

For the Pythagoreanism of the Neo-platonic movement in the third century A.D. consult Bussell, Marcus Aurelius and the Later Stoics (Edin. 1910), p. 30 foll., who explains the reaction from Stoicism to Neo-Platonism. See also Caird, Gifford Lectures, ii. 162 foll.

Schmekel, Die mittlere Stoa, p. 403, says that it had ceased to exist for centuries as a philosophy, but cautiously adds in a note that the knowledge of it was not extinct. The famous Orphic tablets from South Italy are taken as dating from the third and fourth centuries B.C., and if not actually Pythagorean, they are next door to being so. See Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 660.

Tusc. Disp. i. 38.

See, e.g., Prof. Taylor's little book on Plato (Constable), p. 11.

See above, p. 349.

Sextus Empiricus, adv. Physicos, ii. 281 foll.

For the devotion of the believers to the founder and his ipse dixit, see Cicero, Nat. Deor. i. 5. 10.

The relation of Posidonius to Roman literature has been much discussed of late. See, e.g., Norden, Virgil, Aen. vi., index, s.v. "Stoa"; Schmekel, Die mittlere Stoa, 85 foll., 238 foll.

For Panaetius' enthusiasm for Plato and his teaching, see Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 32. 79; the whole passage indicates, though it does not exactly prove, an approach to the Platonic psychology.

Caird, Gifford Lectures, vol. ii. p. 85.

See above, p. 75. The idea that the practice of cremation influenced the ideas of the Roman about the soul was first, I think, suggested by Boissier, Religion romaine, i. 310. Cicero himself hints at this conclusion in Tusc. Disp. i. 16. 36: "In terram enim cadentibus corporibus, hisque humo tectis, e quo dictum est humari, sub terra censebant reliquam vitam agi mortuorum. Quam eorum opinionem magni errores consecuti sunt; quos auxerunt poetae."

This point is well put by Dill, p. 493 of Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. See also Dieterich, Eine Mithras-Liturgie, p. 200 fol.; Stewart, Myths of Plato, 352-53.

Schmekel, Die mittlere Stoa, p. 400 foll.

De Rep. vi. 26.

Ib. The word providet reminds us that this transcendental philosophy supplied the later Stoics with an explanation of divination. See Bouche-Leclercq, Hist. de divination, i. 68; Dill, op. cit. p. 439; Seneca, Nat. Quaest. ii. 52, fully accepted divination. Cp. Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 37. 66, where he quotes his own Consolatio; see above, p. 388. Panaetius, however, had courageously denied divination: Cic. Div. i. 3. 6; Zeller, Stoics, etc., p. 352.

De Rep. vi. 15, 26, and 29.

Tusc. Disp. i. 16. 36 foll. On the whole subject of the rise of the soul after death see Dieterich, Eine Mithras-Liturgie, p. 179 foll.

Schmekel, op. cit. p. 438; Stewart, Myths of Plato, p. 300.

For Nigidius, see Schanz, Gesch. der roem. Literatur (ed. 2), vol. ii. p. 419 foll.

"Nigidius Figulus Pythagoreus et magus in exilio moritur" is the notice of him in St. Jerome's Chronicle for the year 45 B.C.

These letters are in the 12th book of those to Atticus, Nos. 12-40.

Ad Att. xii. 36. The translation is Shuckburgh's.

A good example is Virg. Aen. viii. 349, but it is needless to multiply instances of the religio loci. Serv. ad Aen. i. 314 defines lucus as "arborum multitudo cum religione."

Ad Att. xii. 36; cp. 35. He uses the Greek word [Greek: apotheosis] in 35. 1, which seems to have come into use in his own time; see Liddell & Scott, s.v.

See above, p. 58.

Aen. vi. 743. The meaning of these words seems to be quite plain, though commentators have worried themselves over them from Servius downwards. The mistake has been in not sufficiently considering the force of quisque, and puzzling too much over the vague word Manes. Henry discerned the true meaning in our own time. See his Aeneidea, vol. iii. p. 397. Cp. the words quoted above from Somn. Scip.: "mens cuiusque is est quisque." M. S. Reinach (Cultes, etc. ii. 135 foll.) is not far out: "Nous souffrons chacun suivant le degre de souillure de nos ames."

C.I.L. i. 639, with Mommsen's note.

See R.F. p. 308.

Tusc. Disp. i. 12. 27. For the "ius Manium," de Legibus, ii. 22 and 54 foll.

Ad Att. xii. 18: "Longum illud tempus cum non ero magis me movet quam hoc exiguum," etc. Cp. Tusc. i. ad fin.

Ad Fam. iv. 5. 6: "Quod si quis apud inferos sensus est, qui illius in te amor fuit pietasque in omnes suos, hoc certe illa te facere nonvult."

Sall. Cat. ch. 51: "Mortem cuncta mortalium dissolvere, ultra neque curae neque gaudio locum esse." This is the Epicurean doctrine, which Caesar was said to hold.

Catull. 5. 6; Pliny, N.H. vii. 188. The whole passage is worth quoting: "Post sepulturam vanae Manium ambages. Omnibus a supremo die eadem quae ante primum, nec magis a morte sensus ullus aut corpori aut animae quam ante natalem. Eadem enim vanitas in futurum etiam se propagat et in mortis quoque tempora sibi vitam mentitur, alias immortalitatem animae, alias transfigurationem, alias sensum inferis dando et Manes colendo deumque faciendo qui iam etiam homo esse desierit, ceu vero ullo modo spirandi ratio ceteris animalibus praestet, aut non diuturniora in vita multa reperiantur quibus nemo similem divinat immortalitatem," etc.

There is an essay on this form of literature in the Etudes morales sur l'antiquite of Constant Martha, p. 135 foll.

Tusc. Disp. i. 27. 66.

Lact. Inst. i. 15. 20.

Lact. iii. 18.

See Schanz, Gesch. der roem. Literatur, vol. ii. p. 376.

Fragments 54 and 55.

P. 158 foll.

Lucr. vi. 764 foll. Cp. iii. 966 foll.; Masson, Lucretius, i. p. 402. Mr. Cyril Bailey also reminds me of Lucr. iii. 31-93, and 1053 to end; and adds a decided opinion that the poet is not here thinking of the common Roman, but of the educated Roman brought up on Greek and Graeco-Roman poetry and philosophy.

Polyb. vi. 56.

Tusc. i. 46. 111.

See Roscher's Myth. Lex. s.v. "Orcus"; Wissowa, R.K. p. 192.

See above, p. 107.

Mueller-Deecke, Etrusker, ii. 108 foll. Illustrations can be seen in Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, ed. 2.

Captivi, v. 4. 1.

La Religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins, vol. i. p. 310.

Cic. Tusc. i. 16. 37. For the eschatology of the sixth Aeneid, a curious melange of religion, philosophy, and folklore, see Norden's work on Virgil, Aeneid, vi. (index, p. 468). Norden believes, I may note, that the philosophical and religious elements in it are mainly derived from Posidonius. Cp. also Glover, Studies in Virgil, ch. x. (Hades). For popular beliefs in Hades, etc., under the Empire, see Friedlaender's Sittengeschichte, vol. iii. last chapter.

Weil, Etudes sur l'antiquite grecque, p. 12, quoted by Glover, p. 218.

See above, p. 105.

Since this lecture was written a most interesting discussion of Greek ideas, Achaean and Pelasgic, about the relation of soul and body after death, has appeared in Mr. Lawson's Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, especially in chapters v. and vi., confirming me, to some extent at least, in the conjecture I had here hazarded. The working of the imagination in regard to a future state is in Greece, in his view, peculiar to the older or Pelasgic population; and if the Etruscans were of Pelasgic stock, as is now believed by many, their imaginative grotesqueness, a degraded form perhaps of the original characteristic, acting on the ideas of a still more primitive population of which the Lemuria is a survival, might explain the later prevalence of a gruesome eschatology at Rome. But whoever studies Mr. Lawson's chapters closely will find serious difficulties in the way even of such a hypothesis as this.

Ovid, Fasti, v. 430 foll.; R.F. p. 109. Wissowa, R.K. p. 192, attributes the ideas of larvae (ghosts) and of Orcus, not to religion, but to popular superstition. If he here means by religion the State religion and the Parentalia in particular, I can agree with him.

Dr. Carter allows this in Hastings' Dict. of Religion and Ethics, vol. i. (Roman section of article "Ancestor Worship.")

See R.F. p. 334.

R.F. p. 107.

Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, ii. 693 foll.

Varro, L.L. v. 25; Paulus p. 216; Huelsen-Jordan, Roem. Topogr. iii. p. 268 foll. The remains of these puticuli were unluckily very imperfectly reported, and have been lost in the building of the Rome of to-day. On the question of the religious aspect of the two ways of disposing of the dead, burial and cremation, it is as well to remember Dieterich's warning in Mutter Erde, p. 66, note: "den Versuch, aus der Verbreitung und dem Wechsel der Sitte des Verbrennens und Begrabens fuer meine Untersuchung Schluesse zu gewinnen, habe ich voellig aufgegeben, als ich angesichts der ungeheueren Materialen meines Kollegen von Duhn die Unmoeglicheit solcher Schluesse einsehen musste." In Mr. Lawson's book quoted above it seems to me to be proved that the object of both methods is the same, viz. to destroy the body as quickly as possible in order to prevent the soul from re-entering it and annoying the survivors.

This is well explained by Cumont in his Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, p. 196 foll., following Bouche-Leclercq's work on astrology in Greece. Cumont thinks that astrology took over the business of the augurs and haruspices, which was now dropped, and this is true in the main as regards the individual, but not as regards the State; see above, p. 308 foll.

For Fortuna in the writings of Caesar, etc., see Classical Review, vol. xvii. p. 153. The locus classicus for Fortuna as a deity under the early empire is Pliny, N.H. ii. 22.

Cato, R.R. ch. v. 4.

Val. Max. i. 3. 2, who no doubt was following Livy; for in the Epitomes of some lost books of Livy discovered at Oxyrrhyncus by Grenfell and Hunt (Oxyrrh. Papyri, vol. iv. p. 101), the same fact is alluded to. For the embassy, Maccab. i. 14. 24; xv. 15-24. Two extracts from the text of Valerius, which is here lost, both state that proselytising Jews were at this time driven from Rome; the Jupiter Sabazius, whose cult they were propagating, can hardly be other than that of Jehovah; see Schuerer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ, pt. ii. vol. ii. p. 233 of the English translation. The expulsion of Chaldaei may, however, have been a separate measure of the praetor Hispalus.

Plutarch, Marius, 42.

Suet. Aug. 1. I have seen a learned work about a century old, now entirely forgotten, in which it is maintained that Virgil's fourth Eclogue is simply a genethliacon of Augustus; the arguments, which are ingenious but futile, are drawn from the poem of Manilius.

Tacitus, Hist. i. 22.

LECTURE XVIII

RELIGIOUS FEELING IN THE POEMS OF VIRGIL

My justification for devoting a whole lecture to Virgil must be that this great poet, more warmly and sympathetically than any other Latin author, gives expression to the best religious feeling of the Roman mind. And this is so not only in regard to the tendencies of religion in his own day; he stands apart from all his literary contemporaries in that he sums up the past of Roman religious experience, reflects that of his own time, and also looks forward into the future. No other poet, no historian, not even Livy, who sprang from the same region and in his tone and spirit in some ways resembles Virgil, has the same broad outlook, the same tender interest in religious antiquity, the same all-embracing sympathy for the Roman world he knew, and the same confident and cheerful hope for its future. Each of the Augustan poets—Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus—has his own peculiar gift and charm; but those who know Virgil through and through will at once acknowledge the difference between these and the man possessed of spiritual insight. They are helpful in various ways to the student of Roman religion, and Tibullus especially has a simple reverence for the old religion which has inspired a few exquisite descriptions of this aspect of Italian life. But, if I may use the word, they had no mission; they were true poets, yet not poets of the prophetic order; they had not thought deeply and reached conviction, like Lucretius and Virgil. A few words from the conclusion of an Edinburgh professor's admirable work on Virgil will sufficiently express what I mean. "His religious belief," says Sellar, "like his other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it embraced what was purest and most vital in the religions of antiquity, and in its deepest intuitions it seems to look forward to the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later." In fact, Virgil gathers up what was valuable in the past of Rome and adds to it a new element, a new source of life and hope. It was this that made it possible for a great French critic to assert that for those who have read Virgil there is nothing astonishing in Christianity. Let us try and realise what these writers mean. The Scotsman is sober and earnest, the Frenchman epigrammatically exaggerating; but the feeling that underlies both utterances is a true one.

We have traced the gradual paralysis of the secularised State religion. We have glanced at the two types of philosophical thought which took the place of that religion in the minds of the cultivated section of Roman society, neither of which could adequately supply the Roman and Italian mind with an expression of its own natural feeling, never wholly extinct, of its relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. Stoicism came near to doing what was needed, by rehabilitating itself on Italian soil and indulging Roman preconceptions of the divine; but it could not greatly affect the mass of men, and its appeal was not to feeling, but to reason. Epicurism, though perhaps more popular, was in reality more in conflict with what was best in the Italian nature, and the passionate appeal of Lucretius to look for comfort to a scientific knowledge of the rerum natura had no enduring power to cheer. Lastly, we have examined the tendency of the same age towards mysticism and Cicero's doubting and embarrassed expression of it, and we found that this tendency rather illustrates a sense of something wanting than hopefully satisfies it. We may well feel ourselves, now we have arrived at the close of the Republican era, just as the best men of that day felt, that there is something wanting. In their minds this feeling almost amounted to despair; in ours, as we read the story of the troublous time after the death of Caesar, it is pity and wonder. There was, in fact, more than a sense of weariness and discomfort, moral and material, in the Roman mind of that generation—there was also what we may almost call a sense of sin, such a feeling, though doubtless less real and intense, as that which their prophets, from time to time, awoke in the Jewish people, and one not unknown in the history of Hellas. It was essentially a feeling of neglected duty—of neglected duty to the Power and of goodwill wanting towards men. Lucretius had been unconsciously a powerful witness to this feeling, but had not found the remedy. In the early Augustan age it is again expressed by Horace, by Sallust, and more deeply and truly in the beautiful preface to Livy's History. Livy there says that he devoted himself to the early annals of Rome that he might shut his eyes to the evils of his own time—"tempora quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus."