Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

agan cult which S. Augustine, and many of the Fathers before him, assail with such indignant contempt as hers.2811 And indeed it was long regarded with s

e for the Phrygian goddess in his théodicée.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 h

s 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 goddess 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 goddess 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 [pg 549]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 Ea

and penitential self-mutilation under the pine-tree; the passionate mourning for lost love, and then the restoration of the self-made victim, attended by a choir of priests for ever, who had made [pg 550]the same cruel sacrifice2837-all this, so alien to old Roman religious sentiment, triumphed over it in the end by novelty and tragic interest. The legend was developed into a drama, which, at the vernal festival of the goddess, was produced with striking, if not artistic, effect. On the first day the Dendrophori bore the sacred tree, wreathed with violets, to the temple. There was then a pause for a day, and, on the third, the priests, with frantic gestures and dishevelled hair, abandoned themselves to the wildest mou

se of Augustus to the great nobles of the reign of Theodosius and Honorius.2842 The priesthood was sometimes held for life, or for a long term of years. [pg 551]A priest at Salonae in Dalmatia had punctually performed the sacred offices for seventeen years.2843 Women were naturally admitted to the priesthood of a cult whose central interest was a woman's love and grief. Sometimes they are lowly freedwomen with Greek names, sometimes they bear the proudest names in the Roman aristocracy.2844 The Dendrophori, who on festive days bore the sacred tree, formed a religious college, and their record appears on many monuments of Italian and provincial towns-Como, Ostia, and Cumae, Caesarea (Afr.), Valentia, and Lyons.2845 Other

, but that they are in the main true pictures of country life in the Antonine age may be proved from other authorities. Apuleius was too careful an artist to sever himself [pg 552]altogether from the actual life of his time. And what a picture it is! The air positively thrills with daemonic terror and power. Witches and lewd sorceresses abound; the solitary inn has its weird seductions; the lonely country cottage has its tragedy of lawless love or of chaste devotion to the dead. Brigands in mountain fastnesses divide their far-gathered spoil, and hold debate on plans of future lawless adventure. Mountain solitudes, and lonely villages or castles among the woods, are aroused by the y

n. But they combine a shrewd eye to business with this wild licence. They know all the arts to catch the fancy of the mob of clowns, whose grey dull lives and inbred superstition make them eager for any display which will intoxicate them with the novelty of a violent sensation. These [pg 553]people are on that level where lust and the passion for blood and suffering readily league themselves with religious excitement. After a night of moral horrors, the foul brotherhood go forth in various costume to win the largesses of the countryside. With painted cheeks and robes of white or yellow, crossed with purple stripes, their arms bared to the shoulder, and carrying swords or axes, they dance along wildly to the sound of the flute.2851 With obscene gesticulation and discordant shrieks they madly bite their arms or lacerate them with knives. One of the band, a

a grave mistake who should treat the Isis and Osiris, the Mater Deum or the Attis, of the reign of Augustus as representing the same ideals in the reign of Gratian. But these Eastern cults contained a germ, even in their earliest days, of their great future development and power. The old religion of Latium, along with much that was sound and grave and fortifying to character, was also hard and cold and ceremonial. It could mould and consecrate a militant and conquering state; it did little to satisfy the craving for moral regeneration or communion with a Higher Power. It could not appease the sense of error and frailty by ghostly comfort and sacramental absolution. It was, moreover, wanting in that warmth of interest and sympathy, linking the human and Divine, which has helped to make Christianity the religion of Western civilisation, and which in a feeble adumbration made the paganism of the East a momentary rival of the Church. These Eastern cults, often originating in gross symbolism of the alternations and recurring processes of nature,2856 often arousing a dangerous excitability and an unregulated emotion, yet contained the germ of a religious spirit far more akin to ours than the old austere Latin creed. A divine death and restoration, the alternation of joy and sorrow at a divine event, instinct with human interest, calming expiation and cleansing from the sins which burdened the conscience,-above all, the hope of a coming life, stamped on the imagination by symbol and spectacle,-these were the [pg 555]elements which, operating on imperious religio

adocia to the worship of Magna Mater, and gave the Great Mother a new hold upon the religious consciousness. In the earlier votive tablets the name of the rite is tauropolium. Anaitis had been identified with the Artemis Tauropolus of Brauron, whose legend, by popular etymology, came to be identified, as Milesian exploration spread in the Euxine, with the cult of the cruel goddess of the Tauric Chersonese.2859 And by another etymological freak and the change of a letter, we arrive at the bull-slaughtering rite of the later Empire. Whether the taurobolium ever became part of the service of Mithra is a disputed point.2860 Certainly the syncretistic tendency of the age, the fact that the most popular Mithraist symbol was the slaying of the mystic bull, and the record of the taurobolium on so many inscriptions dedicated to Mithra, would prepare us for the conclusion that the rite was in the end common to the Persian and the Phrygian deities. Whatever may be the truth on this point, the two worships, in the last ages of heathenism in the West, were close allies. Attis tended more and more to become a solar deity in the age which culminated in the sun-worship of Julian.2861 Heliolatry, the last refuge of monothei

s a costly rite, and the expense was sometimes borne by the community, who made an offertory for the purpose.2868 The ceremony was superintended by the xvviri, and attended by a great concourse of the people, with the magistrates at their [pg 558]head. It is needless to describe again the scene, so well known from the verses of Prudentius, in which the consecrated bull is with solemn forms slaughtered on a high-raised platform, and bathes with the streams of his blood the votary placed in a trench below.2869 The rite was believed to impart some sort of strength and purification, the effect of which lasted for twenty years, when the sacrament was often renewed. It was, as we have seen, some

d between them. The fierce goddess of Cappadocia, who had visited Sulla in a dream, was probably first introduced to Roman devotion in his time. Her dark-robed priests and priestesses were familiar figures in the Augustan age, gashing themselves like the Galli of Magna Mater, catching the blood in shields, and dashing it over their train of followers who believed in its powers of expiation. But Magna Mater, as her name promises, assumed a milder character, and was identified sometimes with Maia, [pg 559]Ops, and Minerva; sometimes with Demeter, Bona Dea, and Fauna, as Attis wa

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