CHAPTER VIII.

THE RELIGION OF ROME.

§ 1. Origin and essential Character of the Religion of Rome. § 2. The Gods of Rome. § 3. Worship and Ritual. § 4. The Decay of the Roman Religion. § 5. Relation of the Roman Religion to Christianity.

§ 1. Origin and essential Character of the Religion of Rome.

N the Roman state nothing grew, everything was

IN

I made. The practical understanding was the despotic

faculty in the genius of this people. Fancy, imagination, humor, seem to have been omitted in the character of the Latin race. The only form of wit which appeared among them was satire, that is, wit used for a serious purpose, to punish crimes not amenable to other laws, to remove abuses not to be reached by the ordinary police. The gay, lighthearted Greek must have felt in Rome very much as a Frenchman feels in England. The Romans did not know how to amuse themselves; they pursued their recreations with ferocious earnestness, making always a labor of their pleasure. They said, indeed, that it was well sometimes to unbend, Dulce est desipere in locis; but a Roman when unbent was like an unbent bow, almost as stiff as before.

In other words, all spontaneity was absent from the Roman mind. Everything done was done on purpose, with a deliberate intention. This also appears in their religion. Their religion was not an inspiration, but an intention. It was all regular, precise, exact. The Roman cultus, like the Roman state, was a compact mass, in which all varieties were merged into a stern unity. All forms of religion might come to Rome and take their places in its pantheon, but they must come as servants

and soldiers of the state. Rome opened a hospitable asylum to them, just as Rome had established a refuge on the Capitoline Hill to which all outlaws might come and be safe, on the condition of serving the community.

As everything in Rome must serve the state, so the religion of Rome was a state institution, an established church. But as the state can only command and forbid outward actions, and has no control over the heart, so the religion of Rome was essentially external. It was a system of worship, a ritual, a ceremony. If the externals were properly attended to, it took no notice of opinions or of sentiments. Thus we find in Cicero ("De Natura Deorum ") the chief pontiff arguing against the existence of the gods and the use of divination. He claims to believe in religion as a pontifex, while he argues against it as a philosopher. The toleration of Rome consisted in this, that as long as there was outward conformity to prescribed observances, it troubled itself very little about opinions. It said to all religions what Gallio said to the Jews: "If it be a question of words and names and of your law, look ye to it; for I will be no judge of such matters." Gallio was a genuine representative of Roman sentiment. With religion, as long as it remained within the limits of opinion or feeling, the magistrate had nothing to do; only when it became an act of disobedience to the public law it was to be punished. Indeed, the very respect for national law in the Roman mind caused it to legalize in Rome the worship of national gods. They considered it the duty of the Jews, in Rome, to worship the Jewish God; of Egyptians, in Rome, to worship the gods of Egypt. "Men of a thousand nations," says Dionysius of Halicarnassus, "come to the city, and must worship the gods of their country, according to their laws at home." As long as the Christians in Rome were regarded as a Jewish sect, their faith was a religio licita, when it was understood to be a departure from Judaism, it was then a criminal rebellion against a national faith.* The Roman religion has often been considered as a * See Neander, Church History, Vol I. p. 88, American edition.

mere copy of that of Greece, and has therefore been confounded with it, as very nearly the same system. No doubt the Romans were imitators; they had no creative imagination. They borrowed and begged their stories about the gods, from Greece or elsewhere. But Hegel has long ago remarked that the resemblance between the two religions is superficial. The gods of Rome, he says, are practical gods, not theoretic; prosaic, not poetic. The religion of Rome is serious and earnest, while that of Greece is gay. Dionysius of Halicarnassus thinks the Roman religion the better of the two, because it rejected the blasphemous myths concerning the loves and quarrels of the heavenly powers. But, on the other hand, the deities of Greece were more living and real persons, with characters of their own. The deities of Rome were working gods, who had each a task assigned to him. They all had some official duty to perform; while the gods of Olympus could amuse themselves as they pleased. While the Zeus of Greece spent his time in adventures, many of which were disreputable, the Jupiter Capitolinus remained at home, attending to his sole business, which was to make Rome the mistress of the world. The gods of Rome, says Hegel, are not human beings, like those of Greece, but soulless machines, gods made by the understanding, even when borrowed from Greek story. They were worshipped also in the interest of the practical understanding, as givers of earthly fortune. The Romans had no real reverence for their gods; they worshipped them in no spirit of adoring love, but always for some useful object. It was a utilitarian worship. Accordingly the practical faculties, engaged in useful arts, were deified. There was a Jupiter Pistor, presiding over bakers. There was a goddess of ovens; and a Juno Moneta, who took care of the coin. There was a goddess who presided over doing nothing, Tranquillitas Vacuna; and even the plague had an altar erected to it. But, after all, no deities were so great, in the opinion of the Romans, as Rome itself. The chief distinction of these deities was that they belonged to the Roman state.

*

* Hegel's Philosophie in Wörtlichen Ausüzgen. Berlin, 1843.

Cicero considers the Romans to be the most religious of all nations, because they carried their religion into all the details of life. This is true; but one might as well consider himself a devout worshipper of iron or of wood, because he is always using these materials, in doors and out, in his parlor, kitchen, and stable.

As the religion of Rome had no doctrinal system, its truths were communicated mostly by spectacles and ceremonies, which chiefly consisted in the wholesale slaughter of men and animals. There was something frightful in the extent to which this was carried; for when cruelty proceeds from a principle and purpose, it is far worse than when arising from brutal passion. An angry man may beat his wife; but the deliberate, repeated, and ingenious torments of the Inquisition, the massacre of thousands of gladiators in a Roman amphitheatre, or the torture of prisoners by the North American Indians, are all parts of a system, and reinforced by considerations of propriety, duty, and religious reverence.

Mommsen remarks,* that the Roman religion in all its details was a reflection of the Roman state. When the constitution and institutions of Rome changed, their religion changed with them. One illustration of this correspondence he finds in the fact that when the Romans admitted the people of a conquered state to become citizens of Rome, their gods were admitted with them; but in both cases the new citizens (novensides) occupied a subordinate position to the old settlers (indigites).†

That the races of Italy, among whom the Latin language originated, were of the same great Asiatic stock as the Greeks, Germans, Kelts, and Slavic tribes, is sufficiently proved by the unimpeachable evidence of language. The old Latin roots and grammatic forms all retain the analogies of the Aryan families. Their gods and their religion bear marks of the same origin, yet with a special and marked development. For the Roman nation was derived from at least three secondary sources, the

* Römische Geschichte, von Theodor Mommsen, Kap. XII. + Janus, Picus, Faunus, Romulus, were indigites. Funke, Real Lexi

con.

Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans. To these may be added the Pelasgian settlers on the western coast (unless these are included in the Etruscan element), and the very ancient race of Siculi or Sikels, whose name suggests, by its phonetic analogy, a branch of that widely wandering race, the Kelts. But the obscure and confused traditions of these Italian races help us very little in our present inquiry. That some of the oldest Roman deities were Latin, others Sabine, and others Etruscan, is, however, well ascertained. From the Latin towns Alba and Lavinium came the worship of Vesta, Jupiter, Juno, Saturn and Tellus, Diana and Mars. Niebuhr thinks that the Sabine ritual was adopted by the Romans, and that Varro found the real remains of Sabine chapels on the Quirinal. From Etruria came the system of divination. Some of the oldest portions of the Roman religion were derived from agriculture. The god Saturn took his name from sowing. Picus and Faunus were agricultural gods. Pales, the goddess of herbage, had offerings of milk on her festivals. The Romans, says Döllinger, had no cosmogony of their own; a practical people, they took the world as they found it, and did not trouble themselves about its origin. Nor had they any favorite deities; they worshipped according to what was proper, every one in turn at the right time. Though the most polytheistic of religions, there ran through their system an obscure conception of one supreme being, Jupiter Optimus-Maximus, of whom all the other deities were but qualities and attri

* See Niebuhr's Lectures on the History of Rome, for facts concerning the Siculi. The sound el appears in Keltic, Gael, Welsch, Welsh, Belgians, Gauls, Galatians, etc. M. Grotefend (as quoted by Guigniaut, in his notes to Creuzer) accepts this Keltic origin of the Siculi, believing that they entered Italy from the northwest, and were gradually driven farther south till they reached Sicily. Those who expelled them were the Pelasgic races, who passed from Asia, south of the Caspian and Black Seas, through Asia Minor and Greece, preceding the Hellenic races. This accounts for the statement of Herodotus that the Pelasgi came from Lydia in Asia Minor, without our being obliged to assume that they cảme by sea, a fact highly improbable. They were called Tyrrheanians, not from any city or king of Lydia, but, as M. Lepsius believes, from the Greek Túppis (Latin, turris), a tower, because of their Cyclopean masonry. The Roman state, on this supposition, may have owed its origin to the union of the two great Aryan races, the Kelts and Pelasgi.