The biography of Apollonius of Tyana is, of course, in one sense a romance.(2672) Yet its tales of miracle should hardly be allowed to obscure its value as a picture of the beliefs of that age. We cannot doubt that the Pythagorean apostle of the time of the Flavians went all over the Roman world, preaching his gospel of moral and ritual purity, kindling or satisfying the faith in the world of spirit, striving in a strange fashion to reconcile a mystic monotheism and devotion to a pure life of the soul with a scrupulous reverence for all the mythologies. It may, at first sight, appear strange that a mystic like Apollonius, of the Pythagorean school, should so seldom allude to the subject of immortality. The truth is that Apollonius was not a dogmatic preacher; he dealt little in theories. His chief business, as he conceived it, was with practical morality, and the reform or restoration of ritual where it had fallen into desuetude and decay.(2673) Penetrated as he was with the faith in a spiritual world, he seems to a.s.sume as a postulate the eternity of the soul, and its incarnation for a brief s.p.a.ce on earth. During its sojourn in the flesh, it is visited by visions from on high, and such revelations are vouchsafed in proportion to its ascetic purity.(2674) What conception of the life to come Apollonius entertained we cannot say; but its reality to him was a self-evident truth. We are surrounded by the spirits of the departed, although we know it not. Sailing among the islands of the Aegean, he once gratified his disciples by the tale of his having met the shade of Achilles at his tomb in the Troad.(2675) Men said that the hero was really dead, and in the old home of the Myrmidons, his worship was forgotten. But Apollonius, in a prayer which he had learnt from the sages on the Ganges, called upon the heroic shade to dispel all doubts by appearing at his call. At once an earthquake shook the tomb, and a fair youthful form was by his side of wondrous beauty and superhuman stature, clothed in a Thessalian mantle. His stature grew more majestic, and his beauty more glorious as Apollonius gazed. But the sage had no weak fears in the presence even of so august a spirit, and pressed him with questions which savour far more of antiquarian than spiritual interest. Was Helen really in Troy? Why does not Homer mention Palamedes? The hero resolved his doubts, sent a warning message to the Thessalians to restore his forgotten honours, and in a soft splendour vanished at the first c.o.c.k-crow.(2676)
The biography of Apollonius closes with a tale which throws a strong light on the spiritual cravings of that age. The sage firmly believed in transmigration and immortality, although he discouraged debate on these high themes.(2677) After his death, the youth of Tyana were much occupied with solemn thoughts. But there was a sceptic among them who had vainly besought the departed philosopher to return from spiritland and dispel his doubts as to the future life. At last one day he fell asleep among his companions, and then suddenly started up as one demented, with the cry-"I believe thee." Then he told his friends that he had seen the spirit of the sage, that he had been actually among them, though they knew it not, chanting a marvellous song of life and death. It told of the escape of the soul from the mouldering frame and of its swift flight to ethereal worlds.
"Thou shalt know all when thou art no more; but while thou art yet among the living, why seek to pierce the mystery?"(2678)
The new Platonist school, with Plutarch and Maximus at their head, were, in this age, the great apostles of the hope of immortality. Platonists in their theory of mind and G.o.d, Neo-Pythagorean in their faith in the openness of the human spirit at its best to supernatural influences, they felt the doctrine of the coming life to be axiomatic. It is true that the author of the _Consolation to Apollonius_, seems at times to waver, as Seneca did, between the idea of extinction at death and the hope of eternal beat.i.tude.(2679) This piece is full of pessimist thoughts of life, and embalms many a sad saying of the Greek poets on its shortness and its misery.(2680) Bringing far more sorrow than joy, life may well be regarded as a mysterious punishment. That Thracian tribe which mourned at each birth as others do at death, had a true philosophy of man"s estate. The great consolation is that, in the phrase of Herac.l.i.tus, death and life are one, we are dying every moment from our birth. Death is the great healer, in the words of Aeschylus, the deliverer from the curse of existence, whether it be an eternal sleep or a far journey into an unknown land. The prospect of blank nothingness offers no terrors; for the soul only returns to its original unconsciousness. But this was hardly a congenial mood to the author, and before the close, he falls back on the solace of mystic tradition or poetic vision, that, for the n.o.bler sort, there is a place prepared in the ages to come, after the Great Judgment, when all souls, naked and stripped of all trappings and disguises, shall have to answer for the deeds done in the body.(2681) The same faith is professed by Plutarch to his wife in the Consolation on the death of their little daughter, which took place while Plutarch was from home. The loss of a pure bright young soul, full of love and kindness to all, even to her lifeless toys, was evidently a heavy blow.(2682) But Plutarch praises his wife"s simple restraint and abstinence from the effusive parade of conventional mourning. All such displays seemed to him a rather vulgar intemperance and self-indulgence.(2683) And why grieve for one who is spared all grief? She had her little joys, and, knowing no other, she suffers no pain of loss. Yet Plutarch would not have his wife accept the cold consolation that death brings unconsciousness. He reminds her of the brighter, more cheering vision which they have enjoyed together as communicants in the Dionysiac mysteries. If the soul is undying, if it is of divine parentage and has a divine destiny, then the shortness of its imprisonment and exile is a blessing. The captive bird may come by use and wont actually to love its cage. And the worst misery of old age is not grey hairs and weakness, but a dull absorption in the carnal and forgetfulness of divine things. "Whom the G.o.ds love die young." By calling them back early, they save them from long wanderings.(2684)
Plutarch"s belief in immortality is a religious faith, a practical postulate. He nowhere discusses the bases of the belief in an exhaustive way. It is rather inseparable from his conception of G.o.d and His justice, and the relation of the human soul to G.o.d.(2685) He admits that the prospect of reward or punishment in another world has but little influence on men"s conduct.(2686) Few believe in the tales of tortures of the d.a.m.ned. And those who do can soothe their fears, and purchase a gross immortality, by initiations and indulgences.(2687) Yet it is impossible to doubt that to Plutarch the hope of the eternal life was a precious possession. He a.s.sails with force, and even asperity, the Epicurean school for their attempt to rob humanity of it, on the pretext of relieving men of a load of superst.i.tious fears. They are like men on board a ship who, letting the pa.s.sengers know that they have no pilot, console them with the further information that it does not matter, as they are bound to drive upon the rocks.(2688) The great promise of Epicurus was to free men from the spectral terrors with which poetic fancy had filled the scenery of the under world. But in doing so, he invested death with a new horror infinitely worse than the fabled tortures of the d.a.m.ned. It was a subtle fallacy which taught that, as annihilation involves the extinction of consciousness, the lamented loss of the joys and vivid energy of life was a mere imagination projected on a blank future where no regret could ever disturb the tranquillity of nothingness(2689). Plutarch took his stand on psychology. The pa.s.sion for continued existence is, as a matter of fact, the most imperious in our nature. With the belief in immortality, Epicurus sweeps away the strongest and dearest hopes of the ma.s.s of men. This life is indeed full of pain and sorrow; yet men cling to it pa.s.sionately, merely as life, in the darkest hours. And they are ready to brave the worst horrors of Cerberus and Chimaera for the chance of continued existence.(2690) The privation of a dream of happiness in another world is a real loss, even though, when the grey day of nothingness dawns, the consciousness of loss be gone. Is it a light thing to tell the n.o.bler spirits, the moral athletes, who have battled with evil all life long, that they have been contending for a visionary crown?(2691) Is it nothing to the idealist who, amid all the obstructions of the life in the flesh, has been fostering his n.o.bler powers, in the hope of eternal freedom and the full vision of truth, that that real life to which he fancied death was only the gateway is, after all, a mere illusion? Nor does Plutarch disdain to take account of that vivacity of love which in all ages has sought to soften the bitterness of parting by the hope of reunion and recognition in other worlds.(2692)
The Consolation to Apollonius only refers briefly to the punishment of lawless wealth and power, as the complement to the reward of virtue.(2693) But this aspect of immortality is dwelt on at length in the remarkable treatise on the Delays of the Divine Vengeance. The problem of hereditary guilt, and the punishment of the children for the sins of the fathers in this world, in view of the justice and benevolence of G.o.d, leads on to the thought of another tribunal which may terribly correct the injustices of time.(2694) The doctrine of Divine providence and the doctrine of immortality stand or fall together.(2695) G.o.d could not take so much care for ephemeral souls, blooming for a brief s.p.a.ce and then withering away, as in the women"s soon-fading gardens of Adonis.(2696) Above all, Apollo would be the greatest deceiver, the G.o.d who has so often solemnly from the tripod ordered rites of expiation and posthumous honours to be paid to lofty souls departed.(2697) Yet, like his great master Plato, Plutarch felt that the full a.s.surance of the long dream of humanity lies beyond the veil-that we know not what we shall be. And, like the master, he invoked the apocalyptic power of the religious and poetic imagination to fortify the hesitating conclusions of the reason.
The visionary power and charm of the great master, whose reign was to be prolonged for ages after Plutarch"s time, is seen, perhaps in a faint reflection, in Plutarch"s mythical forecast of the future of the soul.
Plato"s psychology, his sharp opposition of the reason to the lower nature rooted in the flesh, his vision of the Eternal Goodness, his intensely moral conception of the responsibility of life on earth, its boundless possibilities of future unimpeded intuition, its possible eternal degradation through ages of cyclic change, all this, together with kindred elements, perhaps from the Semitic east, had left a profound effect on religious minds. The greatness of S. Augustine is nowhere more apparent than in his frank recognition of the spiritual grandeur of Plato. And that great spirit, so agile in dialectic subtlety, so sublime in its power of rising above the cramping limitations of our mortal life, is also, from its vivid poetic sympathy, most ready to aid weak ordinary souls to climb "the altar stairs." Never was pure detached intelligence wedded so harmoniously to glowing imagination, never was ethereal truth so clothed in the warm colouring and splendour of the world of sense. Where reason has strained its utmost strength to solve the eternal riddle, ecstatic vision and religious myth, transcending the limits of s.p.a.ce and time, must be called in to lend their aid.
Plato and the Platonic Socrates are fully conscious that the conclusions of philosophic reason on a future state can be only tentative. And they often fall back on a divine doctrine, or tradition, or a mythopoeic power by which poetic imagination peoples the dim regions of a world beyond the senses. The visions of Timarchus and Thespesius in Plutarch are, like the Nekuia of the _Phaedo_ and of the _Republic_, an effort of the religious imagination to penetrate the darkness from which reason recoils. Nor is the effort strange in one who, along with the purest conception of an immaterial spirit, still believed in the efficacy of legend and material symbol to reveal the truth which they veiled.(2698)
Thespesius of Soli, a man of evil life, once fell from a height, was taken up for dead, but revived again on the third day, on the eve of his funeral. He came back to the living an altered man, after a marvellous experience. His soul, on escaping from the body, was swept along a sea of light among the stars.(2699) He saw other souls emerging in the form of fiery bubbles, which burst and gave forth a subtle form in the likeness of man.(2700) Three or four he recognised, and would have spoken to them, but they seemed delirious or senseless, and shrank away from him, forming in the end little companies of their own, who swept along in wild disordered movements, uttering strange cries of wailing or terror. The soul of an old acquaintance then hailed him and became his guide, pointing out that the souls of the really dead cast no shadow, being perfectly pellucid, surrounded by light. Yet some of them are marked with scales and weals and blotches. Adrasteia is the inevitable judge of all, and, through three ministers, three great cla.s.ses of criminals receive their proper doom.
Some are punished swiftly on earth, another cla.s.s meet with heavier judgment in the shades. The utterly incurable are ruthlessly pursued by the Erinnys, and finally plunged in a dark abyss, of which the horrors might not be told. The second cla.s.s undergo a fierce purgatorial cleansing, in which some spirits have all their stains wiped out and become clear and l.u.s.trous. But where evil is more obstinate, and pa.s.sion again and again a.s.serts its power, the soul long retains a colour appropriate to its peculiar vice. The mean avaricious soul is dark and squalid; the cruel is blood-red; the envious violet and livid. Short of the worst eternal torture, souls with insatiable craving for fleshly delights, gravitate to a birth into low animal forms.(2701)
Thespesius and his guide are then swept on wings of light to other and less gloomy scenes. Over the chasm of Forgetfulness, clothed in its recesses with flowers and herbs which exhale a fragrant odour, the opening through which Dionysus had pa.s.sed to his place among the G.o.ds, floated a cloud of spirits like birds, drinking in the fragrance with mirth and gladness. On again they pa.s.sed, till they came to a crater which received the flow of many-coloured streams, snow-white or rainbow-hued,(2702) and hard by was the oracle of Night and Selene, from which issue dreams and phantoms to wander among men. Then Thespesius was dazzled with the radiance which shot from the Delphic tripod upwards to the peaks of Parna.s.sus; and, blinded by the radiance, he could only hear the shrill voice of a woman chanting a song which seemed to tell of the hour of his own death. The woman, his guide explained, was the Sibyl who dwells on the face of the moon. The sweep of the moon"s onward course prevented him catching the Sibyl"s words to the full, but he heard a prophecy of the desolation of Campania by the fires of Vesuvius, and the death of the emperor.
Other scenes of punishment follow, among which Thespesius saw his own father rising from the abyss, covered with weals and marks of torture which had been inflicted for a long-buried crime. Finally, the friendly guide vanished, and Thespesius was forced onwards by dread spectral forms to witness fresh scenes of torment. The hypocrite who had hidden his vices under a veil of decorum was forced, with infinite pain of contortion, to turn out his inmost soul. The avaricious were plunged by daemons by turns in three lakes, one of boiling gold, one of freezing lead, and one of hardest iron. But the worst fate of all was reserved for those whose sins had been visited on their innocent descendants upon earth, who pursued them with curses, or clung around them in clouds like bees or bats, keeping ever poignant the memory of transmitted guilt and suffering.(2703)
The vision of Timarchus, in the piece on the Genius of Socrates, has a rather different motive from that which inspired the vision of Thespesius.
Thespesius came back with a message as to the endless consequences of sin in worlds beyond the senses, and the far-reaching responsibilities of the life on earth. The experiences of Timarchus in the cave of Trophonius were intended to teach the doctrine of the existence, apart from the lower powers akin to fleshly nature, of the pure intelligence or daemon, which, coming from the Divine world, can catch its voices and transmit them to the mortal life here below. Timarchus made the descent into the cave of Trophonius and spent in its weird darkness two nights and a day, during which he saw a wondrous revelation of the spirit-world.(2704) His higher part, escaping from the sutures of the head, emerged in pellucid ether.
There was no trace of earthly scenery, but countless islands swept around him, gleaming with the shifting colours of lambent fire, amid tones coming from ethereal distances.(2705) From a yawning abyss of surging darkness arose endless wailings and moans. An unseen guide explained to him the fourfold division of the universe and the boundaries of its provinces.
High above all is the sphere of the One and the Invisible. Next in order is the region of pure mind, of which the Sun is lord. The third is the debatable land between pure intelligence and the sensible and mortal-the region of soul, whose mistress is the moon. Styx is the boundary between this lunar kingdom and the low world of matter, sin, and death. The three realms beneath the highest correspond to the three elements of our composite nature,-mind, soul, and body.(2706) This mortal life is a temporary and unequal partnership of the Divine reason with the lower appet.i.tes, which have their roots in the flesh. It is an exile, an imprisonment; it is also a probation of the higher part of human nature, and its escape comes to it by a twofold death. The first, imperfect and incomplete, is the severance of soul from body in what men call death, the falling away of the gross wrappings of matter. This death is under the sway of Demeter. The second, under the care of Persephone, is a slower process, in which the ethereal reason, the true eternal personality of man, is finally released from a.s.sociation with the pa.s.sionate and sensitive nature, which is akin to the bodily organism. After the first corporeal death, all souls wander for a time in the s.p.a.ce between the moon and earth. In the vision of Timarchus, he saw over the chasm of darkness a host of stars with a curious variety of motion. Some shot up from the gulf with a straight decided impetus. Others wavered in deflexions to right or left, or, after an upward movement, plunged again into the abyss. These motions, as the invisible guide expounded, represent the various tendencies of souls, corresponding to the strength or weakness of the spiritual force within them. All souls have an element of the Divine reason, but it is variously blended with the baser elements in different natures. In some it becomes completely sunk and absorbed in the life of the senses. In others, the rational part holds itself above the lower bodily life, and maintains an almost separate existence. And yet there are natures in which the rational and irrational elements wage a long and indecisive conflict until, slowly, at last, the pa.s.sions recognise their rightful master, and become obedient to the heavenly voice within. The debased and hopeless souls, rising for a moment after death, are repelled with fierce angry flashes by the moon, and fall back again to the world of sense and corruption, to undergo a second birth. The purer souls are received by her for a loftier destiny. In some, the pure spiritual part is finally released by the love of the Sun from the lower powers of the soul, which wither and fade away as the body does on earth. Others, still retaining the composite nature, though no longer tainted by the flesh, dwell in the moon as daemons, but often revisit the earth on various missions, to furnish inspiration to oracles and mysteries, to save men from crime or to punish, to help the struggling by land or sea. But even the daemons may fall from their high estate. If, in their duties of providence and succour, they show anger or favour or envy, they may be thrust down once more into the purgatory of material form.(2707)
It may well be that the unsympathetic critic will regard such an imaginative invasion of the unseen as a freak of lawless fancy, hardly worth chronicling. And like all similar attempts, the apocalypse of Plutarch may easily be treated with an airy ridicule. To a more serious criticism, it seems vitiated by a radical inconsistency. Starting with the principle of the absolutely immaterial nature of the immortal part of man, it yet depicts its future existence in the warmest colours of the world of sense. Its struggles, its tortures, its beat.i.tude are described in terms which might seem fitting only to a corporeal nature. All this is true; and yet the answer which Plutarch would probably have made to any such cavils is very simple. How can you speak of pure disembodied spirit at all, how can you imagine it, save in the symbolism of ordinary speech? Refine and subtilise your language to the very uttermost, and it will still retain a.s.sociations and reminiscences, however faint and distant, of the material world. Myth and symbol are necessary to any expression of human thought alike about G.o.d and the future of the soul. The Infinite Spirit and the future destiny of the finite, which is His child, are equally beyond the range of human sense and speech. When the human spirit has exhausted all its efforts of imagination to pierce the darkness of the world beyond the grave, it takes refuge in some religious system which claims to have a divine message and speaks in the tones of another world. The voice from eternity came to troubled heathendom from Egypt and the East.
CHAPTER III
THE OLD ROMAN RELIGION
It is well known that, from the second Punic War to the revival of Augustus, old Roman religion was falling into decay. Yet sweeping a.s.sertions about the religious condition of any age must he taken with some reserve. They are often unsafe about a contemporary society; they must be still more so with regard to a society which is known to us almost entirely through the literary remains of a comparatively small cultivated cla.s.s. Even among that limited circle, we can know only the opinions of a few, and hardly anything of its silent members, still less of the feelings of its women and dependents. A deep shadow rests on those remote granges and quiet country towns in Samnium or Lombardy where character remained untainted in the days of Nero or Domitian, and where the religion of Numa long defied the penal edicts of Theodosius and Honorius. Lucretius, whose mission it was to liberate men from the terrors of old Latin and Etrurian superst.i.tion, was not contending against an imaginary foe. The sombre enthusiasm which he throws into the conflict reveals the strength of the enemy. The grandmother of Atticus and Terentia, the wife of Cicero, were timorous devotees. Among the aristocratic augurs of Cicero"s day there were firm believers in the sacred birds; and Lentulus, a confederate of Catiline, trusted implicitly in the oracles of the Sibyl.(2708)
Still there can be no doubt that in the governing and thinking cla.s.s of the last century of the Republic, scepticism and even open contempt for the old religion were rampant. Many causes were at work to produce this decadence of old Roman faith. It was hardly possible for the cultivated Roman of the days of Scipio Aemilia.n.u.s, or of Cicero and Caesar, who had fought and travelled in many lands, and studied their mythologies and philosophies, to acquiesce in the faith of the simple farmers of Latium, who founded the Ambarvalia and Lupercalia, who offered the entrails of a dog to Robigus(2709) and milk to Pales and Silva.n.u.s, who worshipped Jupiter Feretrius under the mountain oak.(2710) Since those far-off days, Latium had come under many influences, and added many new deities to her pantheon. The G.o.ds of h.e.l.las had come to be identified with the G.o.ds of Rome, or to share their honours. Syncretism had been at work in Italy centuries before the days of Plutarch and Aristides. And the old Italian deities, who had only a shadowy personality, with no poetry of legend to invest them with human interest, melted into one another or into forms of alien mythology. Greek literature became familiar to the educated from the Hannibalic war, and a writer like Euripides, who had a great popularity, must have influenced many by the audacious skill with which he lowered the dignity and dimmed the radiance of the great figures of Greek legend. The comic stage improved upon the lesson. Early in the second century Ennius translated the Sacred Histories of Euhemerus, and familiarised his countrymen with a theory which reduced Jupiter and Saturn, Faunus and Hercules, to the stature of earthly kings and warriors. But Greek philosophy was the great solvent of faith. The systems of the New Academy and Epicurus were openly or insidiously hostile to religious belief. But they had not so long and powerful a reign over the Roman mind as Stoicism, and, although the earlier Stoicism extended a philosophic patronage to popular religion, it may be doubted whether it stimulated faith. There was indeed a certain affinity between Stoical doctrine and old Roman religion, as there was between Stoic morals and old Roman character. In resolving the G.o.ds by allegory and pseudo-scientific theory into various potencies of the great World-Soul, the follower of Zeno did not seem to do much violence to the vaguely personified abstractions of the old Latin creed.
Above all, with the exception of Panaetius, the Stoic doctors did not throw doubt on the powers of divination and augury, so essential an element in the religion of Rome. The power to read the future was a natural corollary to the providence and benevolence of the G.o.ds.(2711) Yet, although the Stoic might strive to discover the germ of truth, he did not conceal his contempt for the husk of mythology in which it was hidden, and for many of the practices of worship.(2712)
Quintus Scaevola and Varro applied all the forces of subtle antiquarianism and reverence to sustain the ancestral faith. But they also drew the line sharply between the religion of philosophy and the religion of the State.
And Varro went so far as to say that the popular religion was the creation of early statesmen,(2713) and that if the work had to be done again, it might be done better in the light of philosophy. The Stoic in Cicero, as Seneca did after him, treated the tales of the G.o.ds as mere anile superst.i.tion.(2714) It is probable that such was the tone, in their retired debates, of the remarkable circle which surrounded Scipio and Laelius. Panaetius, their philosophic guide, had less sympathy than any great Stoic with popular theology.(2715) Polybius gave small place to Providence in human affairs, and regarded Roman religion as the device of statesmen to control the ma.s.ses by mystery and terror.(2716) Yet these men were enthusiastic champions of a system which they regarded as irrational, but which was consecrated by immemorial antiquity. Laelius defended the inst.i.tutions of Numa in a speech of golden eloquence which moved the admiration of Cicero, just as Symmachus defended them five centuries later before the council of Valentinian.(2717) The divorce between esoteric belief and official profession must have insidiously lowered the moral tone of those who were at once thinkers and statesmen. Such a false position struck some of the speakers in Cicero"s theological dialogues, and it makes his own opinions an enigma.(2718) The external and utilitarian att.i.tude to the State religion hardly secured even punctual or reverent conformity in the last age of the Republic. Divination and augury had become mere engines of political intrigue, and the aristocratic magistrate could hardly take the omens without a smile. Varro could not repress the fear that the old religion, on which he expended such a wealth of learning, might perish from mere negligence.(2719) The knowledge of liturgical usage began to fade, and Varro had to recall the very names of forgotten G.o.ds. An ancient priesthood of the highest rank remained unfilled for seventy years.(2720) Scores of the most venerable temples were allowed to fall into ruin,(2721) and ancient brotherhoods like the t.i.tii and Fratres Arvales are hardly heard of for generations before the reforms of the Augustan age.
It is not within the scope of this work to enter minutely into the subject of that great effort of reform or reaction. It is commonly said that the cool imperial statesman had chiefly political ends in view, and especially the aggrandis.e.m.e.nt and security of the princ.i.p.ate. And certainly Ovid, who strove to interest his countrymen in the revival of their religion, does not display much seriousness in religion or morals. He treats as lightly the amours of Olympus as the intrigues of the Campus Martius and the Circus. Yet it may well have been that after the terrible orgies of civil strife through which the Roman world had pa.s.sed, Augustus was the convinced representative of a repentant wish to return to the old paths.
The Roman character, through all wild aberrations of a trying destiny, was an enduring type. And Augustus, if he may have indulged in impious revels in his youth, which recall the wanton freaks of Alcibiades,(2722) had two great characteristics of the old Roman mind, formalism and superst.i.tion.
He had an infinite faith in dreams and omens. He would begin no serious business on the Nones.(2723) When he had to p.r.o.nounce a funeral oration over his sister, Octavia, he had a curtain drawn before the corpse, lest the eyes of the pontiff might be polluted by the sight of death.(2724) We may think that his religious revival was not inspired by real religious sentiment. Yet it is well to remind ourselves that old Roman religion, while it consecrated and solemnised the scenes and acts of human life, was essentially a formal religion; the _opus operatum_ was the important thing. Its business was to avert the anger or win the favour of dim unearthly powers; it was not primarily to purify or elevate the soul.
Above all, it was interwoven from the beginning with the whole fabric of society and the State. Four centuries after Augustus was in his grave, it was only by a violent wrench, which inflicted infinite torture even on pagan mystics of the Neoplatonist school, that Rome was severed from the G.o.ds who had been the guardians and partners of her career for twelve hundred years. The altar of Victory which Augustus had placed in the Senate-house, and before which twelve generations of senators after him offered their prayers for the chief of the State, the most sacred symbol of the pagan Empire, was only removed after a fierce, obstinate struggle.
The religious revival of Augustus may not have aroused any deep religious sentiment; that, as we shall see, was to come from a different source. But it gave a fresh life to the formal religion of the State, which maintained itself till within a few years before the invasion of Alaric. The t.i.tle Augustus which the new emperor a.s.sumed was one which, to the Roman mind, a.s.sociated him with the majesty of Jupiter and the sanct.i.ty of all holy places and solemn rites.(2725) It was the beginning of that theocratic theory of monarchy which was to culminate, under the influence of Sun-worship, in the third century, and to propagate itself into ages far removed from the worship of Jupiter or the Sun. Although the counsels of Maecenas, recorded by Dion Ca.s.sius, may be apocryphal, Augustus acted in their spirit.(2726) As triumvir he had raised a shrine to Isis,(2727) as emperor he frowned on alien worships.(2728) His mission was to restore the ancient religion of Latium. He burnt two thousand books of spurious augury, retaining only the Sibylline oracles.(2729) He restored the ancient temples, some of them, like those of Jupiter Feretrius and Juno Sospita, coeval with the Roman State, and encouraged his friends to do the same for other venerable monuments of devotion. The most lavish gifts of gold and jewels were dedicated in the Capitoline temples. The precision of ancient augury was restored. Ancient priesthoods which had been long vacant were filled up, and the sacred colleges were raised in dignity and wealth.(2730) Special care was taken to recall the vestals to the chaste dignity from which they had fallen for a hundred years. Before taking his seat, each senator was required to make a prayer, with an offering of incense and wine before the altar. Three worships, specially connected with the fortunes of Augustus or his race,-those of Venus Genetrix, Mars Ultor, and the Palatine Apollo,-were revived with added splendour.(2731) The emperor paid special attention to the ancient sacred colleges, such as the Salii and Arvales, which went back to days far earlier than the Republic. Amid all the cares of State, he attended their meetings punctually. The dangerous right of co-optation was quietly withdrawn, till the members in the end owed their appointment to the sacerdotal chief of the State.(2732) The colleges became the most courtly and deferential supports of the prince"s power. Prayers for his safety soon found a place in their antique litanies. It has been said with some truth that the Salii and Arvales seem to be thinking more of the emperors than of the G.o.ds. The colleges had a courtly memory for all anniversaries in the imperial family. The Arval brothers achieved the infamy of complimenting Nero on his return after the murder of Agrippina,(2733) and made vows of equal fervour for all the emperors of the year 69.(2734)
But it was through the chief pontificate that the emperors did most at once to fortify and dignify their secular power, and to prolong the reign of the old Latin religion. It was the highest religious dignity of ancient Rome. The college of which the emperor, as Pontifex Maximus, was head exercised a supreme and comprehensive control over the whole field of religion.(2735) It was charged with the duty of maintaining the ancestral purity and exactness of the national worship, and of repressing tendencies to innovation and the adoption of alien rites. It selected the virgins who guarded the eternal fire, and sat in judgment on erring vestals and their betrayers. It had special jurisdiction in questions of adoption, burial, and sacred sites.(2736) From Augustus every emperor was also chief pontiff;(2737) even the Christian princes from Constantine to Valentinian and Valens bear the honoured t.i.tle in the inscriptions, and accepted the pontifical robes.(2738) Thus the emperors strove in their religious attributes to connect themselves with the sacred tradition of Numa and the Roman kings. And, as time went on, the imperial house claimed a growing share in the pontifical honours. Nero, indeed, had been a member of all the sacred colleges as well as chief pontiff.(2739) But down to the reign of Vespasian only one of the "Caesares" could belong to the sacred college. But his sons t.i.tus and Domitian were co-opted to the pontificate and all the priestly colleges before his death.(2740) From Hadrian the pontificate and all the highest sacerdotal honours were held by all designated successors of the emperor.(2741) Antoninus Pius has the insignia of four priestly colleges on his coins.(2742) M. Aurelius was one of the Salian brotherhood in his eighth year,(2743) and was received into all the colleges at nineteen.(2744) Commodus had reached the same sacred honours before he a.s.sumed the toga,(2745) and in five years more was Pontifex Maximus. Thus deeply had the policy of Augustus sunk into the minds of his successors. It is little wonder that never in the great days of the Republic were the forms of ancient religion more scrupulously observed than in the reign of M. Aurelius.(2746)
Private opinion after the Augustan revival greatly varied as to matters of faith. Men like the elder Pliny and Seneca scoffed at anthropomorphic religion. Men like Juvenal and Tacitus maintained a wavering att.i.tude, with probably a receding faith. Others like Suetonius were rapacious collectors of every sc.r.a.p of the miraculous. The emperors who succeeded Augustus were, with the exception of Nero, loyal supporters and protectors of the religion of the State. Tiberius, although personally careless of religion, displayed a scrupulous respect for ancient usage in filling up the ancient priesthoods, and in guarding the Sibylline verses from interpolations.(2747) He also frowned on the imported rites of Egypt.(2748) Claudius, at once pedantic and superst.i.tious, revived venerable rites of the days of Tullus Hostilius, and, when an ill-omened bird alighted on the temple of Jupiter, as supreme pontiff, the emperor p.r.o.nounced the solemn form of expiation before the a.s.sembled people.(2749) Nero, and the Neronian compet.i.tors for the Empire, in the fierce conflict which followed his death, were, indeed, often, though not always, careless of ancient rite, but they were all the slaves of superst.i.tion.(2750) The Flavians and Antonines were religious conservatives of the spirit of Augustus. There is a monument to Vespasian of the year 78 A.D. as "the restorer of temples and public ceremonies."(2751) The restoration of the Capitol, which had been burned down in the civil war, was one of the first tasks of his reign. And the ceremony made such an impression on the imagination of the youthful Tacitus, that he has recorded with studied care the stately and accurate ritual of olden time which was observed by the emperor.(2752) Domitian carried on the restoration on even a more splendid scale; he was a devotee of Minerva, and a rigorous vindicator of old ascetic religious law.(2753) The emperor Hadrian, whose character is an enigma of contrasts, to judge by his last famous _jeu d"esprit_ on his death-bed, probably died a sceptic. Yet his biographer tells us that he was a careful guardian of the ancient ritual.(2754) The archaistic fashion in literary taste, which had begun in the first century, and which culminated in Hadrian"s reign, favoured and harmonised with a scrupulous observance of ancient forms in religion.(2755) The genius of one too early taken away has done more than a legion of historic critics to picture for us the sad, dutiful piety of a spirit of the Antonine age, steeped in philosophies which made the pa.s.sing moment of vivid artistic perception the great end of life, yet still instinct with the old Roman love of immemorial forms at the harvest gathering or the yearly offering to the dead members of the household.(2756) The cheerless negation of Epicurus, and the equally withering theology of the Stoics, could not weaken in Roman hearts the spell of ancestral pieties which cl.u.s.tered round the vault near the grey old country house of the race, looking down on the Tyrrhene sea, or the awe of ancient grove or spring sacred to Silva.n.u.s and the Nymphs, or the calm, chastened joy in a ritual in which every act was dictated by a love of ceremonial cleanness and exactness, and redolent of an immemorial past. In such a household, and in such an atmosphere, the two great Antonines were reared. The first, who was before all else an honest country gentleman, fond of hunting, fishing, and the gladness of the vintage at Lorium, never failed to perform all due sacrifices unless he was ill. His coins bear the pictured legends of the infancy of Rome.(2757) M. Aurelius was famous as a boy for his knowledge of Roman ritual. Enrolled in the college of the Salii in his eighth year, he performed all its sacred offices with perfect composure, reciting from memory, with no one to dictate the form, every word of the ancient liturgy which had in his generation become almost unintelligible.(2758) In the terror of the Marcomannic invasion he delayed his departure for the seat of war to summon around him all the priests; he had the city purified in solemn, decorous fashion, not excluding even the rites of alien lands; and for seven days the images of the G.o.ds were feasted on their couches along all the streets.(2759)
The emperors from Augustus found religion a potent ally of sovereignty, and the example of the master of the world was a great force. Yet it may well be doubted whether, in the matter of religious conservatism, the emperors were not rather following than leading public opinion. G.o.ds were in those times being created by the score; apotheosis was in the air from the days of Nero to the days of the Severi. Petronius, with an exaggeration which has a certain foundation in fact, affirms that in Croton you could more readily light upon a G.o.d than on a man.(2760) The elder Pliny uses almost the same strength of language. The grumbler in Lucian indignantly complains of the fashion in which the ancient G.o.ds of Olympus are being overshadowed by the divine _parvenus_ of every clime.
And, as we shall presently see, the inscriptions reveal an immense propaganda of worships in tone and spirit apparently hostile to the old religion of the Latin race. Yet the inscriptions also show that the old G.o.ds had really little to fear from the new. A survey of the index to almost any volume of the Corpus will convince the student that the Trinity of the Capitol,-Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva,-that Hercules and Silva.n.u.s, the Nymphs, Semo Sancus and Dea Dia, Mars and Fortuna, so far from being neglected, were apparently more popular than ever.(2761) In an age of growing monotheism the King of the G.o.ds was, of course, still supreme in his old ascendency. Jupiter is worshipped under many t.i.tles; he is often coupled or identified with some provincial deity of ancient fame.(2762) But Jupiter is everywhere. The Lord of the thunder and the tempest has shrines on the high pa.s.ses of the Apennines or the Alps,(2763) and soldiers or travellers leave the memorials of their grat.i.tude for his protection on perilous journeys.(2764) The women of Campanian towns go in procession to implore him to send rain.(2765) Antoninus Pius built a temple to Juno Sospita of Lanuvium, where the G.o.ddess had a sacred grove, and a worship of great antiquity.(2766) The Quinquatria of Minerva were not only celebrated with special honour by Domitian, but by large and powerful cla.s.ses who owned her divine patronage, physicians and artists, orators and poets.(2767) Some of the old Latin deities seem to have even grown in popularity under the early Empire. Hercules, the G.o.d of plenty, strong truth, and good faith, whose legend is intertwined with the most venerable names in Roman story, has his altars and monuments everywhere.(2768) Combining with his own native Latin character the poetic prestige of his brother of Greek legend, he became the symbol of world-wide conquest, and was a.s.sociated in the end with the triumph of the "unconquered" Mithra. His image is stamped upon the coins of some of the emperors. Septimius Severus, Caracalla, and Diocletian took him for their great divine patron and ensample.(2769) Silva.n.u.s, too, the G.o.d of the primeval forest, and, when the forest had receded, the G.o.d of the shepherd and the farmer, the guardian of boundaries, acquired a strange vogue in what was eminently an age of cities. One is apt, however, to forget sometimes that it was an age which had also a charming country life. A Roman cavalry officer in Britain has left a memorial of his grat.i.tude to Silva.n.u.s for the capture of a wild boar of surpa.s.sing size and strength,(2770) which had long defied the hunter. In one of the forest cantons of the Alps a procurator of the imperial estates inscribed his grat.i.tude in a pretty set of verses to the G.o.d of the wilds, whose image was enshrined in the fork of a sacred ash.(2771) It is the record of many a day pa.s.sed in lonely forest tracks, coupled with a prayer to be restored safely to Italian fields and the gardens of Rome. The nymphs and river G.o.ds had all their old honours. Chapels and hostelries, in the days of Pliny, rose on the banks of the c.l.i.tumnus, where the votaries easily combined pleasure with religious duty. The nymphs receive votive thanks for the discovery of hidden springs, or for the reappearance of some fountain long dried up.(2772) Aesculapius, who had been naturalised in Italy since the beginning of the third century B.C., sprang to a foremost place in the age of the Antonines. Whether it was "an age of valetudinarians," as has been said, may be doubtful; but it was an age eagerly in quest of the health which so often comes from the quiet mind.
Whatever we may think of the powers of the old Olympians, there can be no doubt about the beneficent influence of the G.o.d of Epidaurus. He was summoned to Rome 300 years before Christ, and obtained a home in the island in the Tiber, where for ages he gave his succour in dreams. His worship spread far and wide, and was one of the last to succ.u.mb to the advance of the Church.(2773)
The una.s.sailable permanence of the old religion may perhaps be still more vividly realised in the long unbroken life of sacred colleges, such as the Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The Arval brotherhood was probably the oldest sacred corporation of Latium, as its liturgy, preserved in the Acta from the reign of Augustus to that of Gordian, is the oldest specimen of the Latin language.(2774) According to the legend, the first members were the twelve sons of Acca Larentia, the foster-mother of Romulus, and Romulus himself first held the dignity of master of the brotherhood.(2775) Its patron G.o.ddess, Dea Dia,(2776) was, as her very name suggests, one of those dim shadowy conceptions dear to old Roman awe, who was worshipped in the still solitude of ancient groves, on whose trunks no axe of iron might ever ring,(2777) a power as elusive and multiform to picturing fancy as the secret forces which shot up the corn ear from the furrow. The whole tone of the antique ritual savours of a time when the Latin race was a tribe of farmers, believing with a simple faith that the yearly increase of their fields depended on the favour of secret unearthly powers. The meetings of the college took place on three days in May, the precise dates being fixed and solemnly announced by their master on the 3rd of January.(2778) The festival began and ended in the master"s house at Rome, the intermediate day being spent in a sacred grove on the right bank of the Tiber, about four miles from the city. There was much feasting, at which the brethren were attended by the Camilli, four sons of high-born senators. Corn of the new and the preceding year was touched and blessed; libations and incense were offered to the G.o.ddess, and all the rites were performed with many changes of costume, which were rigidly observed.(2779) In the ceremonies which took place in the grove, an expiatory sacrifice of two porkers and a white cow was always offered, to atone for the use of any iron implement, or other infringement of the ancient rubric.(2780) Fat lambs were offered in sacrifice to Dea Dia, and ancient earthen vessels of rude make, resembling those of the age of Numa, were adored upon the altar.(2781) Ears of corn, plucked in some neighbouring field, were blessed and pa.s.sed from the hand of one member to another, and back again in reverse order, and, at last, in the closed temple, along with solemn dancing, the famous chant was intoned from ancient scrolls, the words of which had long become strange even to the antiquary. After another meal in the hall of the brotherhood, the members pa.s.sed on to the circus and gave the signal for the races to begin.(2782)
This ritual, so little heard of before the time of Augustus, is chiefly known to us from the Acta which have been recovered from the site of the ancient grove. The monuments of it extend from the reign of Augustus to the year 241 A.D.(2783) Members of the highest aristocracy and princes of the imperial house appear on its lists. Its membership was a high distinction, and was sometimes conferred by the potent recommendation of the emperor.(2784) The college evidently became a great support of the imperial power.
The emperors were elected _magistri_ of the College, and we can read that Caligula, Nero, Vespasian, and t.i.tus were present at its meetings. In the opening days of January the most solemn vows are made in old Roman fashion for the emperor"s safety, to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, to Salus and Dea Dia, and they are duly paid by offerings of oxen with gilded horns.(2785) So servile or so devoted to the throne was the brotherhood, that their prayers were offered with equal fervour for three emperors in the awful year 69 A.D.(2786) The vows made for Galba in the first week of January were alertly transferred to the cause of Otho the day after Galba"s murder.(2787) The college met to sacrifice in honour of Otho"s pontificate on the day (March 14) on which he set out to meet his doom in the battle on the Po. Thirteen days after his death, while the spring air was still tainted with the rotting heaps on the plain of Bedriac.u.m, vows as fervent or as politic were registered for Vitellius. In the summer of the following year, the arrival of Vespasian in the capital was celebrated by the Arval brothers with sacrifices to Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Fortuna Redux.(2788)
The college, as a matter of course, paid due honour to the emperor"s birthday and all important anniversaries in his family. It is interesting to see how for years the Neronian circle, the Othos and Vitellii, along with Valerii and Cornelii, appear in all the records of the college.(2789) It was apparently devoted to Nero. The brothers celebrate his birthday and all the civic and sacerdotal honours heaped upon him.(2790) They make vows for his wife Octavia, and soon after, for the safety of Poppaea in childbirth. The matricide dreaded to return from Campania after his unnatural crime, but his admirers knew well the abas.e.m.e.nt of the Roman aristocracy, and promised him an enthusiastic reception. The Arval brotherhood, which then included a Regulus and a Memmius, redeemed the promise, and voted costly sacrifices for his safe restoration to the capital.(2791) They execrate the secret plots against his sacred person, and offer thanksgiving for the detection of the Pisonian conspiracy.(2792)
The extant prayers and congratulations for the safety of Vespasian are much more quiet and restrained than those for his cruel son Domitian.(2793) The public joy at Domitian"s safe return from ambiguous victories in Germany or Dacia is faithfully re-echoed, and effusive supplications are recorded for his safety from all peril and for the eternity of the Empire whose bounds he has enlarged. There is a sincerer tone in the prayers, in the spring of 101, for the safe return of Trajan, when he was setting out for his first campaign on the Danube, and on his home-coming four years later.(2794) The Arval records of Hadrian"s reign are chiefly noteworthy for his letters to the college, recommending his friends for election.(2795) In the reign of Antoninus Pius the Acta register those perfervid acclamations which meet us in the later Augustan histories:(2796)-"O nos felices qui te Imperatorem videmus; Di te servent in perpetuo; juvenis triumphis, senex Imperator!" The young M. Aurelius is first mentioned in 155 A.D. Probably the sincerest utterance in the Arval liturgies is the pet.i.tion for his safety, and that of L. Verus, from peril in the years when the Quadi and Marcomanni swept down through Rhaetia and the Julian Alps to the sh.o.r.es of the Adriatic.(2797)
It was thus that the antique ritual of a rustic brotherhood was converted into a potent support of the imperial power. No part of the Augustan revival was perhaps so successful. Probably few of the emperors, or of the aristocratic brothers who intoned the litany for the safety of the imperial house, had much faith in its efficacy. But the ceremony linked the princ.i.p.ate with the most venerable traditions of Latium, and with Romulus the first master of the college. When we read the minute and formal record of these coa.r.s.e sacrifices and rude, fantastic rites, with the chanting of prayers no longer understood, we are amazed at the prolongation for so many ages of religious ideas which the Roman mind might appear to have outgrown. Yet in such inquiries there is often a danger of treating society as a uniform ma.s.s, moving together along the same lines, and permeated through all its strata by the same influences.
In another chapter we have shown that the ma.s.ses were probably never so superst.i.tious as in the second century. And the singular thing is that the influx of foreign religions, due to the wide conquests of Rome, never to the end seems to have shaken the supreme attachment of the people to their ancient G.o.ds. It is true that the drift towards monotheism was felt even among the crowd. But while the educated might find expression for that tendency in the adoration of Isis or the Sun, the dim monotheism of the people turned to the glorification of Jupiter. Dedications to him are the most numerous in all lands. He is often linked with other G.o.ds or all the G.o.ds,(2798) but he is always supreme. And, while he is the lord of tempest and thunder,(2799) he is also addressed by epithets which show that he is becoming a moral and spiritual power. On many a stone he appears as the governor and preserver of all things, monitor, guardian, and heavenly patron, highest and best of the heavenly hierarchy.(2800) Yet it is equally clear that other G.o.ds are worshipped in the same spirit as of old.
Roman religion was essentially practical. Prayer and vow were the means to win temporal blessings. The G.o.ds were expected, in return for worship, to be of use to the devotee. It is evident from the inscriptions that this conception of religion was as prevalent in the age of the Antonines, or of the oriental princes, as it was under the Republic. The sailor still offers thanks for his preservation to Neptune and the G.o.ds of the sea.(2801) The successful merchant still honours Mercury.(2802) Minerva Memor receives thanks for succour in sickness. A lady of Placentia even pays her vows for the recovery of her hair.(2803) The reappearance of a hidden spring is still attributed to the grace of the Nymphs.(2804) And in many a temple the healing power of Aesculapius is acknowledged by grateful devotees.(2805)
A more difficult problem is presented by the att.i.tude of the cultivated cla.s.s to the old mythologies. Since the days of Xenophanes and of Plato, philosophy had revolted against the degradation of the Divine character by ancient legend. It had taught for ages the unity of the mysterious Power or Goodness which lies behind the shifting scene of sense. Moreover, philosophy for generations had deserted the heights of speculative inquiry, and addressed itself to the task of applying the spiritual truth which the schools had won to the problems of practical religion and human life. Alike in Cicero, in Seneca, in Plutarch, and M. Aurelius, there are conceptions of G.o.d and the worship due to Him, of prayer, of the relation of conduct to religion, which seem irreconcilable with conformity to the old religion of Rome. How could a man, nourished on such spiritual ideas and refined by a thousand years of growing culture, take part in a gross materialistic worship, and even gallantly defend it against all a.s.sailants?
The conformity of highly instructed minds to ancient systems which their reason has outgrown is not always to be explained by the easy imputation of dishonesty. And that explanation is even less admissible in ancient than in modern times. Roman religion did not demand any profession of faith in any theory of the unseen; all it required was ceremonial purity and exactness. And the Roman world was never scandalised by the spectacle of a notorious sceptic or libertine holding the office of chief pontiff.
If a man were more scrupulous himself, philosophy, whether of the Porch or the Academy, came to his aid. It would tell him that frail humanity, unable to comprehend the Infinite G.o.d, had parcelled out and detached his various powers and virtues, which it adored under material forms according to its varying needs.(2806) Or it found a place for all the G.o.ds of heathendom, as ministering or mediating spirits in the vast abyss which separates us from the unapproachable and Infinite Spirit.(2807) If the legends which had gathered around the popular G.o.ds offended a tender moral sense, men were taught that the apparent grossness was an allegorical husk, or a freak of poetic fancy which concealed a wholesome truth. Thus a pantheist or monotheist, who would never have created such a religious system for himself, was trained to cultivate a double self in matters of religion, to worship reverently with the crowd, and to believe with Zeno or with Plato.
The heathen champion in the dialogue of Minucius Felix maintains that, in the dimness and uncertainty of things, the safest course is to hold fast to the G.o.ds of our fathers.(2808) The inclination of the sceptic was fortified by the conservative instinct of the Latin race and its love of precedent and precision of form. Moreover the religion of Numa was probably more than any other involved and intertwined with the whole life of the people. It penetrated the whole fabric of society; it consecrated and dignified every public function, and every act or incident of private life. To desert the ancient G.o.ds was to cut oneself off from Roman society, as the Christians were sternly made to feel. No established Church in modern Christendom has probably ever so succeeded in identifying itself with the national life in all its aspects. Alike under the Republic and under the Empire, religion was inseparable from patriotism. The imperial pontiff was bound to watch over the purity and continuity of the Latin rites. He might be a scoffer like Nero, or a spiritually-minded Stoic like M. Aurelius, an Isiac devotee like Commodus, or devoted to the Syrian worships like the Oriental princes of the third century. But he took his duties seriously. He would dance with the Salii, or accept with grat.i.tude the mastership of the Arval brotherhood, or order a _lectisternium_ to ward off a pestilence or a menacing invasion. The imperial colleges still held their meetings on the eve of the revolution of Theodosius. Antiquarian n.o.bles still discussed nice questions of ritual in the reign of Honorius. At the end of the fifth century the Lupercalia were still celebrated with coa.r.s.e, half-savage rites which went back to the prehistoric times.(2809) The imperial policy, founded by Augustus, no doubt inspired much of this conformity. But old Roman sentiment, the pa.s.sion expressed with such moving eloquence by Symmachus, to feel himself in touch with a distant past(2810) through a chain of unbroken continuity, was the great support of the State religion in the fourth century as in the first. Yet, among the great n.o.bles who were its last champions-Flavia.n.u.s, Praetextatus, or Volusia.n.u.s-there was a spiritual craving for which the religion provided little satisfaction. They sought it in the rites and mysteries of Eastern lands which had little in common with the old Roman religious sentiment. In these alien rites they found a new religious atmosphere. The priest, set apart from the world, with his life-long obligations and the daily offices in the shrine, becomes in some way a minister to the spiritual life of his flock. Instead of cold ceremonial observance, ecstatic emotion is aroused, often to a degree which was perilous to character. Through a series of sacraments, with ascetic preparation for them, the votary rose under priestly guidance to some vision of the eternal world, with a new conception of sin; this life and the next were linked in a moral sequence, with tremendous issues of endless beat.i.tude or endless degradation. In a temple of Magna Mater, Isis, or Mithra in the reign of Julian, we are far away from the worship of the Lares and the offering of a heifer to Dea Dia in the grove on the Tiber. We are travelling towards the spiritual mystery and sacramental consolations of the mediaeval Church.
CHAPTER IV
MAGNA MATER
The earliest invader from the East of the sober decorum of old Roman religion, and almost the last to succ.u.mb, was Magna Mater of Pessinus.
There is no pagan cult which S. Augustine, and many of the Fathers before him, a.s.sail with such indignant contempt as hers.(2811) And indeed it was long regarded with suspicion by old Romans of the cultivated cla.s.s. For generations after her reception on the Palatine, no Roman was permitted to enter her official service. But there was something in that noisy and b.l.o.o.d.y ritual, and in the cruel, ascetic sacrifice of its devotees, which exercised an irresistible power over the imagination of the vulgar; and even Lucretius felt a certain imaginative awe of the tower-crowned figure drawn by lions and adored by the cities of many lands.(2812) Varro, who probably had no great love for the un-Roman ritual, found a place for the Phrygian G.o.ddess in his theodicee.(2813) Her baptism of blood in the taurobolium was a rite of such strange enthralling influence that it needed all the force of the Christian Empire to abolish it. And on many of the last inscriptions of the fourth century the greatest names in the Roman aristocracy leave the record of their cleansing in the curious phrase _renatus in aeternum_.(2814) In his youth S. Augustine had seen processions of effeminate figures with dripping locks, painted faces, and soft womanish bearing, pa.s.sing along the streets of Carthage, and begging alms of the crowd. His horror at the memory of the scene probably springs almost as much from the manly instincts of the Roman as from the detestation of the Christian moralist for a debasing superst.i.tion.(2815)
But S. Augustine knew well the power of the superst.i.tion. For more than 600 years the Great Mother had been enthroned on the Palatine; for more than 300 years she had captivated the remotest provinces of the West.(2816) In the terror of the Second Punic War, 204 B.C., she had been summoned by solemn emba.s.sy from her original home at Pessinus in Galatia.
In obedience to a sibylline command, the Roman youth with purest hands, together with the Roman matrons, had welcomed her at Ostia.(2817) The ship which bore her up the Tiber,(2818) when it grounded on a shoal, had been sent forward on its way, to vindicate her calumniated virtue, by the touch of a virgin of the Claudian house.(2819) A decree of the Senate in 191 B.C. had given the strange G.o.ddess a home on the Palatine, hard by the shrine of Apollo; and the great Megalesian festival in April was founded.(2820) But the foreign character of the cult was long maintained.
It was a time when the pa.s.sion for religious excitement was in the air, and when its excesses had to be restrained by all the forces of the State.
No Roman was permitted to accept the Phrygian priesthood for a century after the coming of the Great Mother.(2821) But towards the end of the Republic, the G.o.ddess had captured all imaginations, and her priests and symbols meet us in all the poets of the great age.(2822) Augustus restored her temple; some of his freedmen were among her priests;(2823) Livia is pictured with the crown of towers upon her brow.(2824) Then came a long interval, till the death of Nero, during which the Phrygian G.o.ddess is hardly heard of.(2825) With the accession of the Flavians the eastern cults finally entered on a long and unchallenged reign. Vespasian restored the temple of the Great Mother at Herculaneum, which had been thrown down by an earthquake.(2826) In the reign of Trajan her worship had penetrated to the Spanish peninsula,(2827) and she is found, along with other Eastern deities, in the towns of the new province of Dacia.(2828) The first glimpses of the taurobolium appear before the middle of the second century, and the G.o.ddess figures on the coins of Antoninus Pius.(2829) A taurobolium for that emperor was offered "with intention" at Lyons in 160 A.D.,(2830) and there are several dedications to Magna Mater in the same reign made by colleges of the _Dendrophori_ at Ostia.(2831) Tertullian tells how a high priest of Cybele va