Cyril Bailey

“ The visitor to the Roman Forum at the present day, if he wishes to reconstruct in imagination the Forum of the early Republic, must not merely 'think away' many strata of later buildings, but, we are told, must picture to himself a totally different orientation of the whole: the upper layer of remains, which he sees before him, is for his purpose in most cases not merely useless, but positively misleading. In the same way, if we wish to form a picture of the genuine Roman religion, we cannot find it immediately in classical literature ”

“ Many points of detail might be noticed, such as that in the urban counterpart of the festival, which Ovid carefully distinguishes from the country celebrations, the fire was sprinkled with the ashes from the calves of the Fordicidia and the blood of Mars' October horse—another link between Mars and agriculture. But it is most interesting to note the double character of the ceremony—as a purification of man and beast on the one hand, and on the other a prayer for the prosperity of the season to come. ”

“ Iuno.—Iuppiter carries with him into the state-worship his female counterpart, Iuno, with his own characteristics, in a certain degree, and his own privileges. She is Lucina and Fulgura as he is Lucetius and Fulgur: white cows are her offerings as white steers are his: as the Ides are sacred to Iuppiter, so—though they are not a festival—are the Calends to Iuno. But from the first she shows a certain independence and develops on lines of her own. ”

“ Directness of Relation—Functions of Priests.—In contrast to all this precision of ritual, which tends almost to alienate humanity from deity, we may turn to another hardly less prominent feature of the Roman religion—the immediateness of relation between the god and his worshippers. Not only may the individual at any time approach the altar of the god with his prayer or thank-offering, but in every community of persons its religious representative is its natural head. ”

“ Such a view might seem to find an apt illustration in the religion of Rome: the ceremonial pietas towards the gods appears to have little to do with the making of man or nation. But in the history of the world the test of religions must be their effect on the character of those who believed in them: religion is no doubt itself an outcome of character, but it reacts upon it, and must either strengthen or weaken. ”

“ Organisation.—It might perhaps be thought that the organisation of religion is a matter remote from its spirit, and is not therefore a suitable subject for discussion, where the object is rather to bring out underlying motives and ideas: but in dealing with the Roman religion, where ceremonial and legal precision were so prominent, it would be even misleading to omit some reference to the very characteristic manner in which the state, taking over the rather chaotic elements of the agricultural worship, organised them into something like a consistent whole. ”

“ But, as I have hinted in the course of this sketch more than once, the answer to this problem, as well as the key to the general understanding of the Roman religion, is to be found in the worship of the household. If we knew more of it, we should see more clearly where religion and morality joined hands, but we know enough to give us a clue. There not only are the principal events of life, birth, adolescence, marriage, attended by their religious sanction, but in the ordinary course of the daily round the divine presence and the dependence of man are continually emphasised. ”

“ From the earliest times the Roman looked upon his dead relations as in some sense living, lying beneath the earth, but capable alike of returning to the world above and of influencing in some vague way the fortunes of the living, especially in relation to the crops which sprung from the ground in which they lay. At first, when his religion was one of fear, he regarded the dead as normally hostile, and their presence as something to be averted; this is the stage which gave birth to the Lemuria. ”

“ From his ancestors had been inherited the tradition, which told him the when, [113] where, and how, and in the preservation of that tradition and its due performance consisted at once Rome's duty and her glory. 'If we wish,' says Cicero, 'to compare ourselves with other nations, we may be found in other respects equal or even inferior; in religion, that is in the worship of the gods, we are far superior.' The religion of Rome may not have advanced the theology or the ethics of the world, but it made and held together a nation. ”

“ In the first place there may be a danger that we underrate the value of formalism itself. It spells routine, but routine is not without value in the strengthening of character. The private citizen, who conscientiously day by day had carried out the worship of his household gods and month by month observed the sacred abstinence from work on the days of festival, was certainly not less fitted to take his place as a member of a strenuous and well-organised community, or to serve obediently and quietly in the army on campaign. ”

“ Relation of the Living and the Dead.—The worship of the spirits of dead ancestors is so common a feature in most primitive religions that it may seem strange even to doubt whether it existed among the Romans, but, although the question is one of extreme difficulty, and the evidence very insufficient, I am inclined to believe that, though the living were always conscious of their continued relation to the dead, and sensitive of the influence of the powers of the underworld, yet there was not, strictly speaking, any cult of the dead. ”

“ The spirit-gods then of the door and the hearth, the specially chosen deities of the store-cupboard, the particular field-power presiding over the household, and the spirit of the master's personality were the gods of the early home, and round their worship centred the domestic religion. ”

“ Theology.—The characteristic appellation of a divine spirit in the oldest stratum of the Roman religion is not deus, a god, but rather numen, a power: he becomes deus when he obtains a name, and so is on the way to acquiring a definite personality, but in origin he is simply the 'spirit' of the 'animistic' period, and retains something of the spirit's characteristics. ”

“ And so it comes about that in all the records we have left of the old religion the salient feature which catches and retains our attention is exactness of ritual. All must be performed not merely 'decently and in order,' but with the most scrupulous care alike for every detail of the ceremonial itself, and for the surrounding circumstances. ”

“ This is reflected generally in the Roman priesthood, but especially in the ceremonial surrounding the flamen Dialis, the priest of Iuppiter. He must appear always in festival garb, fire may never be taken from his hearth but for sacred purposes, no other person may ever sleep in his bed, the cuttings of his hair and nails must be preserved and buried beneath an arbor felix—no doubt a magic charm for fertility—he must not eat or even mention a goat or a bean, or other objects of an unlucky character. ”

“ This notion growing somewhat wider, the Genius comes to denote all the full powers, almost the personality, of developed manhood, and especially those powers which make for pleasure and happiness: this is the origin of such common phrases as genium curare, genio indulgere, meaning practically to 'look after oneself,' 'to indulge oneself.' Every man, then, has this 'spirit of his manhood' in his Genius, and correspondingly every woman her Iuno, or spirit of womanhood, which are worshipped on the birthdays of their owners. ”

“ In every early religion there will of course be found, apart from external influence, traces of its own internal development, of stages by which it must have advanced from a mass of vague and primitive belief and custom to the organised worship of a civilised community. The religion of Rome is no exception to this rule ”

“ The Deities.—The worship of the household seems to have originated, as has been suggested, in the sense of the sacredness of certain objects closely bound up with the family life—the door, the protection against the external world, by which the household went out to work in the morning and returned at evening, the hearth, the giver of warmth and nourishment, and the store-cupboard, where was preserved the food for future use. ”

“ Vesta.—The history of Vesta is perhaps less romantic, but it affords a more exact parallel between household and state. In the primitive community the king's hearth is not merely of symbolical importance, but of great practical utility, in that it is kept continually burning as the source of fire on which the individual householder may draw: hence it is the duty of the king's daughters to care for it and keep the flame perpetually alight. In Rome the temple of Vesta is the king's hearth, situated, as one would expect, in close proximity to the regia. ”

“ In the household the use of auspices was in origin at any rate very general indeed: 'Nothing,' Cicero tells us, 'of importance used to be undertaken unless with the sanction of the auspices' (auspicato) . The right of interrogating the will of the gods, rested, as one might expect, with the master of the house, assisted no doubt by the private augur as the repository of lore and the interpreter of what the master saw. But of the details of domestic augury we know but little. ”

“ In the writings of the savants of the late Republic and of the Empire, and in the Augustan poets, biassed though they are in their interpretations by Greek tendencies, there is embodied a great wealth of ancient custom and ritual, which becomes significant when we have once got the clue to its meaning. More direct evidence is afforded by a large body of inscriptions and monuments, and above all by the surviving Calendars of the Roman festival year, which give us the true outline of the ceremonial observances of the early religion. ”

“ Here then in household, fields, and state, we have a second type of relation to the gods, running parallel to the ordinary practice of sacrifice and prayer, distinct yet not [102] fundamentally different. As it is man's function to propitiate the higher spirits and prevent, if possible, the wrecking of his plans by their opposition, so it is his business, if he can, to find out their intentions before he engages on any serious undertaking. ”

“ As civilisation increased, and the sense of the unity of household and community developed, fear, proving ungrounded, gave place to a kindlier feeling of the continued existence of the dead as members of household and state, and even in some sense as an additional bond between the living: this is the period which produced the sacra privata and the Parentalia. ”

“ Magic.—Anthropology has taught us that in many primitive societies religion—a sense of man's dependence on a power higher than himself—is preceded by a stage of magic—a belief in man's own power to influence by occult means the action of the world around him. That the [5] ancestors of the Roman community passed through this stage seems clear, and in surviving religious practice we may discover evidence of such magic in various forms. ”

“ Animism.—Such are some of the survivals of very early stages of religious custom which still kept their place in the developed religion of Rome, but by far the most important element in it, which might indeed be described as its 'immediate antecedent,' is the state of religious feeling to which anthropologists have given the name of 'Animism.' As far as we can follow the development of early religions, this attitude of mind seems to be the direct outcome of the failure of magic. ”

“ Such were roughly the main outlines of the genuine Roman 'theology.' It has no gods of human form with human relations to one another, interested in the life of men and capable of the deepest passions of hatred and affection towards them, such as we meet, for instance, in the mythology of Greece, but only these impersonal individualities, if we may so call them, capable of no relation to one another, but able to bring good or ill to men, localised usually in their habitations, but requiring no artificial dwelling or elaborate adornment of their abode ”

“ When societies (sodalitates) are formed for religious purposes they elect their own magistri to be their religious representatives, as we see in the case of the Salii and the Luperci. Finally, in the great community of the state the king is priest, and with that exactness of parallelism of which the Roman was so fond, he—like the pater familias—leaves the worship of Vesta in the hands of his 'daughters,' the Vestal virgins. ”

“ Cicero's dialogues on the subject of religion, where in discussion the fundamental sense of the dependence of man on the help of the gods comes clearly into view: in the domestic worship of the family too cult was always to some extent 'tinged with emotion,' and sanctified by a belief which made it a more living and in the end a more permanent reality than the religion of the state. ”