The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

How crowded the whole of life was with cult and ritual and usage, how full of divinities, petty, pleasing or terrible, but generally vague and ill-defined, no one will readily realize without special study, but some idea of the complexity of the Roman's divine environment can be gained from even a cursory survey of Ovid's Fasti, for example, or Tertullian's Apology, or some of the chapters of the fourth book of Augustine's City of God. "When," asks Augustine, "can I ever mention in one passage of this book all the names of gods and goddesses, which they have scarcely been able to compass in great volumes, seeing that they allot to every individual thing the special function of some divinity?" He names a few of the gods of agriculture – Segetia, Tutilina, Proserpina, Nodutus, Volutina, Patelana, Lacturnus, Matuta, etc. "I do not mention all."[30] "Satan and his angels have filled the whole world," said Tertullian.[31]

Fauns, trees, and wells

Gods of this type naturally make little figure in literature though Proserpina, in consequence of her identification with the Greek Persephone, achieved a great place and is indeed the subject of the last great poem written under the Roman Empire. But there were other gods of countryside and woodland, whom we know better in art and poetry. "Faunus lover of fugitive Nymphs" is charming enough in Horace's ode, and Fauns, Pans and Satyrs lend themselves readily to grotesque treatment in statue and gem and picture. But the country people took them seriously. Lucretius, speaking of echoes among the hills, says: – "These spots the people round about fancy that goat-footed Satyrs and nymphs inhabit; they say that they are the Fauns, whose noise and sportive play breaks the still silence of the night as they move from place to place… They tell us that the country people far and wide full oft hear Pan, when, nodding the pine-cap on his half-bestial head, he runs over the gaping reeds with curved lip… And of other like monsters and marvels they tell us, that they may not be thought to inhabit lonely places, abandoned even by the gods."[32] Cicero makes his Stoic say their voices are often to be heard.[33] Pliny, in his Natural History, says that certain dogs can actually see Fauns; he quotes a prescription, concocted of a dragon's tongue, eyes and gall, which the Magi recommend for those who are "harassed by gods of the night and by Fauns";[34] for they did not confine themselves to running after nymphs, but would chase human women in the dark.

Plutarch has a story of King Numa drugging a spring from which "two dæmons, Picus and Faunus," drank – "creatures who must be compared to Satyrs or Pans in some respects and in others to the Idæan Dactyli," beings of great miraculous power.[35] A countryside haunted by inhabitants of more or less than human nature, part beasts and part fairies or devils, is one thing to an unbeliever who is interested in art or folk-lore, but quite another thing to the uneducated man or woman who has heard their mysterious voices in the night solitude and has suffered in crop, or house, or herd from their ill-will.[36] What the Greek called "Panic" fears were attributed in Italy to Fauns.[37]

"Trees," says Pliny, "were temples of divinities, and in the old way the simple country folk to this day dedicate any remarkable tree to a god. Nor have we more worship for images glittering with gold and ivory than for groves and the very silence that is in them."[38] The country people hung rags and other offerings on holy trees – the hedge round the sacred grove at Aricia is specially mentioned by Ovid as thus honoured.[39] The river-god of the Tiber had his sacred oak hung with spoils of fallen foes.[40]

Holy wells too were common, which were honoured with models of the limbs their waters healed, and other curious gifts, thrown into them – as they are still in every part of the Old World. Horace's fount of Bandusia is the most famous of these in literature.[41] It was an old usage to throw garlands into springs and to crown wells on October 13th.[42] Streams and wells alike were haunted by mysterious powers, too often malevolent.[43]

Ovid describes old charms to keep off vampires, striges, from the cradles of children.[44]

In fact the whole of Nature teemed with beings whom we find it hard to name. They were not pleasant enough, and did not appeal enough to the fancy, to merit the name "fairies" – at least since The Midsummer Night's Dream was written. Perhaps they are nearer "The little People" – the nameless "thim ones."[45] They were neither gods nor demons in our sense of the words, though Greek thinkers used the old Homeric word daimôn to describe them or the diminutive of it, which allowed them to suppose that Socrates' daimónion was something of the kind.

The genius

But these Nature-spirits, whatever we may call them, were far from being the only superhuman beings that encompassed man. Every house had its Lares in a little shrine (lararium) on the hearth, little twin guardian gods with a dog at their feet, who watched over the family, and to whom something was given at every meal, and garlands on great days. Legend said that Servius Tullius was the son of the family Lar.[46] The Lares may have been spirits of ancestors. The Emperor Alexander Severus set images of Apollonius, Christ, Abraham and Orpheus, "and others of that sort" in his lararium.[47] Not only houses but streets and cross-roads had Lares; the city had a thousand, Ovid said, besides the genius of the Prince who gave them;[48] for Augustus restored two yearly festivals in their honour in Spring and Autumn. There were also the Penates in every home, whom it would perhaps be hard to distinguish very clearly from the Lares. Horace has a graceful ode to "Phidyle" on the sufficiency of the simplest sacrifices to these little gods of home and hearth.[49] The worship of these family gods was almost the only part of Roman religion that was not flooded and obscured by the inrush of Oriental cults.

"The Ancients," said Servius, "used the name Genius for the natural god of each individual place or thing or man,"[50] and another antiquary thought that the genius and the Lar might be the same thing. For some reason men of letters laid hold upon the genius, and we find it everywhere. Why there should be such difference even between twin brothers,

He only knows whose influence at our birthO'errules each mortal's planet upon earth,The attendant genius, temper-moulding pow'r,That stamps the colour of man's natal hour.[51]

The idea of this spiritual counterpart pervades the ancient world. It appears in Persia as the fravashi.[52] It is in the Syrian Gnostic's Hymn of the Soul, as a robe in the form and likeness of a man. —

It was myself that I saw before me as in a mirror;Two in number we stood, but only one in appearance.[53]

It is also probable that the "Angel" of Peter and the "Angels of the little children" in the New Testament represent the same idea. The reader of Horace hardly needs to be reminded of the birthday feast in honour of the genius, —indulge genio. December, as the month of Larentalia and Saturnalia, is the month welcome to every genius, Ovid says.[54]

The worship of all or most of these spirits of the country and of the home was joyful, an affair of meat and drink. The primitive sacrifice brought man and god near one another in the blood and flesh of the victim, which was of one race with them both.[55] It was on some such ground that the Jews would not "eat with blood," lest the soul of the beast should pass into the man. There were feasts in honour of the dead, too, which the church found so dear to the people that it only got rid of them by turning them into festivals of the Martyrs. It was not idly that St Paul spoke of "meat offered to idols" and said that the Kingdom of God was not eating or drinking.

In addition to all these spirits of living beings, of actions and of places, we have to reckon the dead. There were Manes– a name supposed to mean "the kindly ones," a caressing name given with a purpose and betraying a real fear. There were also ghosts, larvæ and lemures.[56] It was the thought of these that made burial so serious a thing, and all the ritual for averting the displeasure of the dead. The Parentalia were celebrated on the 13th of February in their honour,[57] and in May the Lemuria. It is, we are told, for this reason that none will marry in May.[58] Closely connected with this fear of ghosts and of the dead is that terror of death which Lucretius spends so much labour in trying to dissipate.

"I see no race of men," wrote Cicero, "however polished and educated, however brutal and barbarous, which does not believe that warnings of future events are given and may be understood and announced by certain persons,"[59] and he goes on to remark that Xenophanes and Epicurus were alone among philosophers in believing in no kind of Divination.[60] "Are we to wait till beasts speak? Are we not content with the unanimous authority of mankind?"[61] The Stoics, he says, summed up the matter as follows: —

"If there are gods and they do not declare the future to men; then either they do not love men; or they are ignorant of what is to happen; or they think it of no importance to men to know it; or they do not think it consistent with their majesty to tell men; or the gods themselves are unable to indicate it. But neither do they not love men, for they are benefactors and friends to mankind; nor are they ignorant of what they themselves appoint and ordain; nor is it of no importance to us to know the future – for we shall be more careful if we do; nor do they count it alien to their majesty, for there is nothing nobler than kindness; nor are they unable to foreknow. Therefore no gods, no foretelling; but there are gods; therefore they foretell. Nor, if they foretell, do they fail to give us ways to learn what they foretell; nor, if they give us such ways, is there no divination; therefore, there is divination."[62]

: Omens

All this reasoning comes after the fact. The whole world believed in divination, and the Stoics found a reason for it.[63] The flight of birds, the entrails of beasts, rain, thunder, lightning, dreams, everything was a means of Divination. Another passage from the same Dialogue of Cicero will suffice. Superstition, says the speaker, "follows you up, is hard upon you, pursues you wherever you turn. If you hear a prophet, or an omen; if you sacrifice; if you catch sight of a bird; if you see a Chaldæan or a haruspex; if it lightens, if it thunders, if anything is struck by lightning; if anything like a portent is born or occurs in any way – something or other of the kind is bound to happen, so that you can never be at ease and have a quiet mind. The refuge from all our toils and anxieties would seem to be sleep. Yet from sleep itself the most of our cares and terrors come."[64] How true all this is will be seen by a moment's reflexion on the abundance of signs, omens and dreams that historians so different as Livy and Plutarch record. Horace uses them pleasantly enough in his Odes – like much else such things are charming, if one does not believe in them.[65] But it is abundantly clear that it took an effort to be rid of such belief. A speaker in Cicero's Tusculans remarks on the effrontery of philosophers, who boast that by Epicurus' aid "they are freed from those most cruel of tyrants, eternal terror and fear by day and by night."[66] When a man boasts of moral progress, of his freedom from avarice, what, asks Horace, of other like matters?

You're not a miser. Good – but prithee say,Is every vice with avarice flown away? …Does Superstition ne'er your heart assailNor bid your soul with fancied horrors quail?Or can you smile at magic's strange alarms,Dreams, witchcraft, ghosts, Thessalian spells and charms?[67]

Horace's "conversion" is recorded in one of his odes, but it may be taken too seriously.

That superstition so gross was accompanied by paralysing belief in magic, enchantment, miracle, astrology[68] and witchcraft generally, is not surprising. The historians of the Early Empire have plenty to say on this. It should be remembered that the step between magic and poisoning is a very short one. Magic, says Pliny, embraces the three arts that most rule the human mind, medicine, religion and mathematics – a triple chain which enslaves mankind.[69]

We have thus in Roman society a political life of a highly developed type, which has run through a long course of evolution and is now degenerating; we have a literature based upon that of Greece and implying a good deal of philosophy and of intellectual freedom; and, side by side with all this, a religious atmosphere in which the grossest and most primitive of savage conceptions and usages thrive in the neighbourhood of a scepticism as cool and detached as that of Horace. It is hard to realize that a people's experience can be so uneven, that development and retardation can exist at once in so remarkable a degree in the mind of a nation. The explanation is that we judge peoples and ages too much by their literature, and by their literature only after it has survived the test of centuries. In all immortal literature there is a common note; it deals with the deathless and the vital; and superstition, though long enough and tenacious enough of life, is outlived and outgrown by "man's unconquerable mind." But the period before us is one in which, under a rule that robbed men of every liberating interest in life, and left society politically, intellectually and morally sterile and empty, literature declined, and as it declined, it sank below the level of that flood of vulgar superstition, which rose higher and higher, as in each generation men were less wishful to think and less capable of thought.

Universal religions

But our theme is religion, and so far we have discussed nothing but what we may call superstition – and even Plutarch would hardly quarrel with the name. That to people possessed by such beliefs in non-human powers, in beings which beset human life with malignity, the restoration of ancient cult and ritual would commend itself, is only natural. To such minds the purpose of all worship is to induce the superhuman being to go peaceably away, and sacrifice implies not human sin, but divine irritation, which may be irrational. To the religious temperament, the essential thing is some kind of union, some communion, with the Divine; and sacrifice becomes the means to effect the relation of life to a higher will, – to a holier will, we might say, if we allow to the word "holy" a width of significance more congenial to ancient than to modern thought. And this higher will implies a divinity of wider reach than the little gods of primitive superstition, a power which may even be less personal if only it is great. Religion asks for the simplification of man's relations with his divine environment, for escape from the thousand and one petty marauders of the spirit-world into the empire of some strong and central authority, harsh, perhaps, or even cruel, but at least a controlling force in man's experience. If this power is moral, religion is at once fused with morality; if it is merely physical, religion remains non-moral, and has a constant tendency to decline into superstition, or at least to make terms with it.

In the hereditary religion of Rome, the only power that could possibly have been invested with any such character was Jupiter Capitolinus, but he had too great a likeness to the other gods of Italy – the gods with names, that is, for some of the more significant had none – Bona Dea and Dea Dia for example. Jupiter had his functions, but on the whole they were local, and there was very little or nothing in him to quicken thought or imagination. It was not till the Stoics made him more or less the embodiment of monotheism, that he had a chance of becoming the centre of a religion in the higher sense of the word, and even then it was impossible; for first, he was at best little more than an impersonal dogma, and, secondly, the place was filled by foreign goddesses of far greater warmth and colour and activity. Stat magni nominis umbra.

Cybele and her priests

It was during the second Punic War that Cybele was brought from Asia Minor to Rome and definitely established as one of the divinities of the City.[70] The Great Mother of the gods, she represented the principle of life and its reproduction, and her worship appealed to every male and female being in the world. It inspired awe, and it prompted to joy and merriment; it was imposing and it was mysterious. Lucretius has a famous description of her pageant: —

"Adorned with this emblem (the mural crown), the image of the divine Mother is carried nowadays through wide lands in awe-inspiring state. Different nations after old-established ritual name her Idæan Mother, and give for escort Phrygian bands… Tight-stretched tambourines and hollow cymbals thunder all round to the stroke of their open hands, and horns menace with hoarse-sounding music, and the hollow pipe stirs their minds with its Phrygian strain. They carry weapons before them, emblems of furious rage, meet to fill the thankless souls and godless breasts of the rabble with terror for the Divinity of the Goddess. So, when first she rides in procession through great cities and mutely enriches mortals with a blessing not expressed in words, they straw all her path with brass and silver, presenting her with bounteous alms, and scatter over her a snow-shower of roses, over-shadowing the mother and her troops of attendants. Here an armed band, to which the Greeks give the names of Phrygian Curetes, join in the game of arms and leap in measure, all dripping with blood, and the awful crests upon their heads quiver and shake."[71]

The invariable features of the worship of Cybele are mentioned here, the eunuch priests, the tambourines, the shouting and leaping and cutting with knives, and the collection of money.[72] There is no indication of any control being exercised over these priests of Cybele by a central authority, and little bands of them strolled through the Mediterranean lands, making their living by exhibiting themselves and their goddess and gathering petty offerings. They had a bad name and they seem to have deserved it. In the book called The Ass, once ascribed to Lucian, is a short account of such a band. The ass, who is really a man transformed, is the speaker. "The next day they packed up the goddess and set her on my back. Then we drove out of the city and went round the country. When we entered any village, I, the god-bearer (a famous word, theophóretos[73]) stood still, and the crowd of flutists blew like mad, and the others threw off their caps and rolled their heads about, and cut their arms with the swords and each stuck his tongue out beyond his teeth and cut it too, so that in a moment everything was full of fresh blood. And, I, when I saw this for the first time, stood trembling in case the goddess might need an ass' blood too. When they had cut themselves about in this way, they collected from the bystanders obols and drachmas; and one or another would give them figs and cheeses and a jar of wine, and a medimnus of wheat and barley for the ass. So they lived upon these and did service to the goddess who rode on my back."[74]

The Attis of Catullus gives a vivid picture of the frenzy which this worship could excite. Juvenal complains of the bad influence which the priests of Cybele, among others, had upon the minds of Roman ladies. St Augustine long afterwards says that "till yesterday" they were to be seen in the streets of Carthage "with wet hair, whitened face and mincing walk." It is interesting to note in passing that the land which introduced the Mother of the Gods to the Roman world, also gave the name Theotokos (Mother of God) to the church.

Egypt also contributed gods to Rome, who forced themselves upon the state. The Senate forbade them the Capitol and had their statues thrown down, but the people set them up again with violence.[75] Gabinius, the Consul of 58 B.C., stopped the erection of altars to them, but eight years later the Senate had to pass a decree for the destruction of their shrines. No workman dared lay hand to the work, so the consul Paullus stripped off his consular toga, took an axe and dealt the first blow at the doors.[76] Another eight years passed, and the Triumvirs, after the death of Cæsar, built a temple to Isis and Serapis to win the goodwill of the masses.[77] The large foreign and Eastern element in the city populace must be remembered. When Octavian captured Alexandria, he forgave the guilty city "in honour of Serapis," but on his return to Rome he destroyed all the shrines of the god within the city walls. In time Isis laid hold of the month of November, which had otherwise no festivals of importance.

Isis and Serapis

Isis seems to have appealed to women. Tibullus complains of Delia's devotion to her, and her ritual. There were baths and purifications; the worshippers wore linen garments and slept alone. Whole nights were spent sitting in the temple amid the rattling of the sistrum. Morning and evening the votary with flowing hair recited the praises of the goddess.[78] Isis could make her voice heard on occasion, or her snake of silver would be seen to move its head, and penance was required to avert her anger. She might bid her worshippers to stand in the Tiber in the winter, or to crawl, naked and trembling, with blood-stained knees, round the Campus Martius – the Iseum stood in the Campus as it was forbidden within the City Walls; or to fetch water from Egypt to sprinkle in the Roman shrine. They were high honours indeed that Anubis claimed, as, surrounded by shaven priests in linen garments, he scoured the city and laughed at the people who beat their breasts as he passed.[79] The "barking" Anubis might be despised by Virgil and others, but the vulgar feared him as the attendant of Isis and Serapis.[80] Isis began to usurp the functions of Juno Lucina, and women in childbed called upon her to deliver them.[81] She gave oracles, which were familiar perhaps even so early as Ennius' day,[82] and men and women slept in the temples of Isis and Serapis, as they did in those of Æsculapius, to obtain in dreams the knowledge they needed to appease the god, or to recover their health, or what not.[83] It is not surprising that the shrines of Isis are mentioned by Ovid and Juvenal as the resorts of loose women.[84]

The devotion of the women is proved by the inscriptions which are found recording their offerings to Isis. One woman, a Spaniard, may be taken as an illustration. In honour of her daughter she dedicated a silver statue to Isis, and she set forth how the goddess wore a diadem composed of one big pearl, six little pearls, emeralds, rubies, and jacinths; earrings of emeralds and pearls; a necklace of thirty-six pearls and eighteen emeralds (with two for clasps); bracelets on her arms and legs; rings on her fingers; and emeralds on her sandals.[85] There is evidence to show that the Madonna in Southern Italy is really Isis re-named. Isis, like the Madonna, was painted and sculptured with a child in her arms (Horus, Harpocrates). Their functions coincide as closely as this inscription proves that their offerings do.[86]

Die Mutter Gottes zu Kevlaar    Trägt heut' ihr bestes Kleid.

At first, it is possible that Egyptian religion, as it spread all over the world, was little better than Phrygian, but it had a better future. With Plutarch's work upon it we shall have to deal later on. Apuleius, at the end of the second century worshipped an Isis, who identified all the Divinities with herself and was approached through the most imposing sacraments. She was the power underlying all nature, but there was a spiritual side to her worship. Two centuries or so later, Julian "the Apostate" looks upon Serapis as Catholics have done upon St Peter – he is "the kindly and gentle god, who set souls utterly free from becoming or birth (genéseos) and does not, when once they are free, nail them down to other bodies in punishment, but conveys them upward and brings them into the ideal world."[87] It is possible that some hint of this lurked in the religion from the first, and, if it did, we need not be surprised that it escaped Juvenal's notice.