Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

about the religious condition of any age must he taken with some reserve. They are often unsafe about a contemporary society; they must be sti

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 superstition, was not contending against an imaginary foe. The sombre enthusiasm which he throws into the con

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, al

n human affairs, and regarded Roman religion as the device of statesmen to control the masses 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 institutions 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 attitude to [pg

, 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 superstition. He had an infinite faith in dreams and omens. He would begin no serious business on the Nones.2723 When he had to pronounce 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 [pg 533]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

on of Latium. He burnt two thousand books of spurious augury, retaining only the Sibylline oracles.2729 He restored the ancient [pg 534]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 Ap

urial, 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 title 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 Titus and Domitian were co-opted to the pontificate and all the pri

ion 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 [pg 537]made the passing 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 t

here. The Lord of the thunder and the tempest has shrines on the high passes of the Apennines or the Alps,2763 and soldiers or travellers leave the memorials of their gratitude 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 goddess 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 classes 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 god 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-[pg 539]wide conquest, and was associated 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 Silvanus, too, the god of the primeval forest, and, when the forest had receded, the god 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

cret 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 goddess, and all the rites were performed with many changes o

nts 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 members

ted 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 d

e 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 abasement of the Roman aristocracy, and

he 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

hapter we have shown that the masses were probably never so superstitious 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 gods. 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 gods or all the gods,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,

ne 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 God and the

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 [pg 545]humanity, unable to comprehend the Infinite God, 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 gods of heathendom, as ministering or mediating spirits in the vast abyss which separates us from the unapproa

otee 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, [pg 546]or accept with gratitude 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 nobles still discussed nice questions of ritual in the reign of Honorius. At the end of the fifth century the Lupercalia were still celebrated with coarse, 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 passion expressed with such moving eloquence by Symmachus, to feel himself in touch with a distant past2810 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 nobles who were its last champions-Flavianus, Praetextatus, or Volusianus-there was a spiritual craving

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