CHAPTER III, MAIN FEATURES OF THE RELIGION OF NUMA
1. 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. Thus among the divinities
of the household we shall see later that the Genius and even the Lar
Familiaris, though they attained great dignity of conception, and were
the centre of the family life, and to some extent of the family
morality, never quite rose to the position of full-grown gods; while
among the spirits of the field the wildness and impishness of
character associated with Faunus and his companion Inuus—almost the
cobolds or hobgoblins of the flocks—reflects clearly the old
'animistic' belief in the natural evilness of the spirits and their
hostility to men. The notion of the numen is always vague and
indefinite: even its sex may be uncertain. 'Be thou god or goddess' is
the form of address in the farmer's prayer already quoted from Cato:
'be it male or female' is the constant formula in liturgies and even
dedicatory inscriptions of a much later period.
These spirits are, as we have seen, indwellers in the objects of
nature and controllers of the phenomena of nature: but to the Roman
they were more. Not merely did they inhabit places and things, but
they presided over each phase of natural development, each state or
action in the life of man. Varro, for instance, gives us a list of the
deities concerned in the early life of the child, which, though it
bears the marks of priestly elaboration, may yet be taken as typical
of the feeling of the normal Roman family. There is Vaticanus, who
opens the child's mouth to cry, Cunina, who guards his cradle, Edulia
and Potina, who teach him to eat and drink, Statilinus, who helps him
to stand up, Adeona and Abeona, who watch over his first footstep, and
many others each with his special province of protection or
assistance. The farmer similarly is in the hands of a whole host of
divinities who assist him at each stage of ploughing, hoeing, sowing,
reaping, and so forth. If the numen then lacks personal
individuality, he has a very distinct specialisation of function, and
if man's appeal to the divinity is to be successful, he must be very
careful to make it in the right quarter: it was a stock joke in Roman
comedy to make a character 'ask for water from Liber, or wine from the
nymphs.' Hence we find in the prayer formulæ in Cato and elsewhere the
most careful precautions to prevent the accidental omission of the
deity concerned: usually the worshipper will go through the whole list
of the gods who may be thought to have power in the special
circumstances; sometimes he will conclude his prayer with the formula
'whosoever thou art,' or 'and any other name by which thou mayest
desire to be called.' The numen is thus vague in his conception but
specialised in his function, and so later on, when certain deities
have acquired definite names and become prominent above the rest, the
worshipper in appealing to them will add a cult-title, to indicate the
special character in which he wishes the deity to hear: the woman in
childbirth will appeal to Iuno Lucina, the general praying for victory
to Iuppiter Victor, the man who is taking an oath to Iuppiter as the
deus Fidius. As a still later development the cult-title will, as it
were, break off and set up for itself, usually in the form of an
abstract personification: Iuppiter, in the two special capacities just
noted, gives birth to Victoria and Fides.
The conception of the numen being so formless and indefinite, it is
not surprising that in the genuine Roman religion there should have
been no anthropomorphic representations of the divinity at all. 'For
170 years,' Varro tells us, taking his date from the traditional
foundation of the city in 754 B.C., 'the Romans worshipped
their gods without images,' and he adds the characteristic comment,
'those who introduced representations among the nations, took away
fear and brought in falsehood.' Symbols of a few deities were no doubt
recognised: we have noticed already the silex of Iuppiter and the
boundary-stone of Terminus, which were probably at an earlier period
themselves objects of worship, and to these we may add the sacred
spears of Mars, and the sigilla of the State-Penates. But for the
most part the numina were without even such symbolic representation,
nor till about the end of the regal period was any form of temple
built for them to dwell in. The sacred fire of Vesta near the Forum
was, it is true, from the earliest times enclosed in a building; this,
however, was no temple, but merely an erection with the essentially
practical purpose of preventing the extinction of the fire by rain.
The first temple in the full sense of the word was according to
tradition built by Servius Tullius to Diana on the Aventine: the
tradition is significant, for Diana was not one of the di indigetes,
the old deities of the 'Religion of Numa,' but was introduced from the
neighbouring town of Aricia, and the attribution to Servius Tullius
nearly always denotes an Etruscan[3] or at any rate a non-Roman
origin. There were, however, altars in special places to particular
deities, built sometimes of stone, sometimes in a more homely manner
of earth or sods. We hear for instance of the altar of Mars in the
Campus Martius, of Quirinus on the Quirinal, of Saturnus at the foot
of the Capitol, and notably of the curious underground altar of Consus
on what was later the site of the Circus Maximus. But more
characteristic than the erection of altars is the connection of
deities with special localities. Naturally enough in the worship of
the household Vesta had her seat at the hearth, Ianus at the door,
and the 'gods of the storehouse' (Penates) at the cupboard by the
hearth, but the same idea appears too in the state-cult. Hilltops,
groves, and especially clearings in groves (luci) are the most usual
sacred localities. Thus Quirinus has his own sacred hill, Iuppiter is
worshipped on the Capitol, Vesta and Iuno Lucina have their sacred
groves within the boundaries of the city, and Dea Dia, Robigus, and
Furrina similar groves at the limits of Roman territory. The record of
almost every Roman cult reveals the importance of locality in
connection with the di indigetes, and the localities are usually
such as would be naturally chosen by a pastoral and agricultural
people.
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; becoming gradually more and more specialised in function, yet
gaining thereby no more real protective care for their worshippers—a
cold and heartless hierarchy, ready to exact their due, but incapable
of inspiring devotion or enthusiasm. Let us ask next how the Romans
conceived of their own relations towards them.
2. The Relation of Gods and Men.—The character of the Roman was
essentially practical and his natural mental attitude that of the
lawyer. And so in his relation towards the divine beings whom he
worshipped there was little of sentiment or affection: all must be
regulated by clearly understood principles and carried out with formal
exactness. Hence the ius sacrum, the body of rights and duties in
the matter of religion, is regarded as a department of the ius
publicum, the fundamental constitution of the state, and it is
significant, as Marquardt has observed, that it was Numa, a king and
lawgiver, and not a prophet or a poet, who was looked upon as the
founder of the Roman religion. Starting from the simple general
feeling of a dependence on a higher power (religio), which is common
to all religions, the Roman gives it his own characteristic colour
when he conceives of that dependence as analogous to a civil contract
between man and god. Both sides are under obligation to fulfil their
part: if a god answers a man's prayer, he must be repaid by a
thank-offering: if the man has fulfilled 'his bounden duty and
service,' the god must make his return: if he does not, either the
cause lies in an unconscious failure on the human side to carry out
the exact letter of the law, or else, if the god has really broken his
contract, he has, as it were, put himself out of court and the man may
seek aid elsewhere. In this notion we have the secret of Rome's
readiness under stress of circumstances, when all appeals to the old
gods have failed, to adopt foreign deities and cults in the hope of a
greater measure of success.
The contract-notion may perhaps appear more clearly if we consider one
or two of the normal religious acts of the Roman individual or state.
Take first of all the performance of the regular sacrifices or acts of
worship ordained by the state-calendar or the celebration of the
household sacra. The pietas of man consists in their due
fulfilment, but he may through negligence omit them or make a mistake
in the ritual to be employed. In that case the gods, as it were, have
the upper hand in the contract and are not obliged to fulfil their
share, but the man can set himself right again by the offering of a
piaculum, which may take the form either of an additional sacrifice
or a repetition of the original rite. So, for instance, when Cato is
giving his farmer directions for the lustration of his fields, he
supplies him at the end with two significant formulæ: 'if,' he says,
'you have failed in any respect with regard to all your offerings, use
this formula: "Father Mars, if thou hast not found satisfaction in my
former offering of pig, sheep, and ox (the most solemn combination in
rustic sacrifices), then let this offering of pig and sheep and ox
appease thee": but if you have made a mistake in one or two only of
your offerings, then say, "Father Mars, because thou hast not found
satisfaction in that pig (or whatever it may be), let this pig appease
thee."' On the other hand, for intentional neglect, there was no
remedy: the man was impius and it rested with the gods to punish him
as they liked (deorum iniuriae dis curae).
But apart from the regularly constituted ceremonies of religion, there
might be special occasions on which new relations would be entered
into between god and man. Sometimes the initiative would come from
man: desiring to obtain from the gods some blessings on which he had
set his heart, he would enter into a votum, a special contract by
which he undertook to perform certain acts or make certain sacrifices,
in case of the fulfilment of his desire. The whole proceeding is
strictly legal: from the moment when he makes his vow the man is voti
reus, in the same position, that is, as the defendant in a case whose
decision is still pending; as soon as the gods have accomplished their
side of the contract he is voti damnatus, condemned, as it were, to
damages, having lost his suit; nor does he recover his independence
until he has paid what he undertook: votum reddidi lubens merito ('I
have paid my vow gladly as it was due') is the characteristic wording
of votive inscriptions. If the gods did not accomplish the wish, the
man was of course free, and sometimes the contract would be carried so
far that a time-limit for their action would be fixed by the maker of
the vow: legal exactness can hardly go further.
Or again, the initiative might come from the gods. Some marked
misfortune, an earthquake, lightning, a great famine, a portentous
birth, or some such occurrence would be recognised as a prodigium,
or sign of the god's displeasure. Somehow or other the contract must
have been broken on the human side and it was the duty of the state
to see to the restoration of the pax deum, the equilibrium of the
normal relation of god and man. The right proceeding in such a case
was a lustratio, a solemn cleansing of the people—or the portion of
the people involved in the god's displeasure—with the double object
of removing the original reason of misfortune and averting future
causes of the divine anger. The commercial notion is not perhaps quite
so distinct here, but the underlying legal relationship is
sufficiently marked.
If then the question be asked whether the relation between the Roman
and his gods was friendly or unfriendly, the correct answer would
probably be that it was neither. It was rather what Aristotle in
speaking of human relations describes as 'a friendship for profit': it
is entered into because both sides hope for some advantage—it is
maintained as long as both sides fulfil their obligations.
3. Ceremonial.—It has been said sometimes that the old Roman
religion was one of cult and ritual without dogma or belief. As we
have seen this is not in origin strictly true, and it would be fairer
to say that belief was latent rather than non-existent: this we may
see, for instance, from 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. But it is no doubt true that as the community advanced,
belief tended to sink into the background: development took place in
cult and not in theology, so that by the end of the Republic, to take
an example, though the festival of the Furrinalia was duly observed
every year on the 25th of July, the nature or function of the goddess
Furrina was, as we learn from Cicero, a pure matter of conjecture, and
Varro tells us that her name was known only to a few persons. Nor was
it mere lapse of time which tended to obscure theology and exalt
ceremonial: their relative position was the immediate and natural
outcome of the underlying idea of the relation of god and man.
Devotion, piety—in our sense of the term—and a feeling of the divine
presence could not be enjoined or even encouraged by the strictly
legal conception on which religion was based: the 'contract-notion'
required not a 'right spirit' but right performance. 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. The omission
or misplacement of a single word in the formulæ, the slightest sign of
resistance on the part of the victim, any disorder among the
bystanders, even the accidental squeak of a mouse, are sufficient to
vitiate the whole ritual and necessitate its repetition from the very
beginning. One of the main functions of the Roman priesthood was to
preserve intact the tradition of formulæ and ritual, and, when the
magistrate offered sacrifice for the state, the pontifex stood at
his side and dictated (praeire) the formulæ which he must use.
Almost the oldest specimen of Latin which we now possess is the song
of the Salii, the priests of Mars, handed on from generation to
generation and repeated with scrupulous care, even though the priests
themselves, as Quintilian assures us, had not the least notion what it
meant. Nor was it merely the words of ceremonial which were of vital
importance: other details must be attended to with equal exactness.
Place, as we have seen, was an essential feature even in the
conception of deity, and it must have required all the personal
influence of Augustus and his entourage to reconcile the people of
Rome, with the ancient home of the goddess still before their eyes, to
the second shrine of Vesta within the limits of his palace on the
Palatine. The choice of the appropriate offering again was a matter of
the greatest moment and was dictated by a large number of
considerations. The sex of the victim must correspond to the sex of
the deity to whom it is offered, white beasts must be given to the
gods of the upper world, black victims to the deities below. Mars at
his October festival must have his horse, Iuno Caprotina her goat, and
Robigus his dog, while in the more rustic festivals such as the
Parilia, the offering would be the simpler gift of millet-cakes and
bowls of milk: in the case of the Bona Dea we have the curious
provision that if wine were used in the ceremonial, it must, as she
was in origin a pastoral deity, always be spoken of as 'milk.' The
persons who might be present in the various festivals were also
rigidly determined: men were excluded from the Matronalia on March 1,
from the Vestalia on the 9th of June, and from the night festival of
the Bona Dea: the notorious escapade of Clodius in 62 B.C.
shows the scandal raised by a breach of this rule even at the period
when religious enthusiasm was at its lowest ebb. Slaves were
specifically admitted to a share in certain festivals such as the
Saturnalia and the Compitalia (the festival of the Lares), whereas at
the Matralia (the festival of the matrons) a female slave was brought
in with the express purpose of being significantly driven away.
The general notion of the exactness of ritual will perhaps become
clearer when we come to examine some of the festivals in detail, but
it is of extreme importance for the understanding of the Roman
religious attitude, to think of it from the first as an essential part
in the expression of the relation of man to god.
4. 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.
In the family the head of the household (pater familias) is also
the priest and he is responsible for conducting the religious worship
of the whole house, free and slave alike: to his wife and daughters he
leaves the ceremonial connected with the hearth (Vesta) and the
deities of the store-cupboard (Penates), and to his bailiff the
sacrifice to the powers who protect his fields (Lares), but the
other acts of worship at home and in the fields he conducts himself,
and his sons act as his acolytes. Once a year he meets with his
neighbours at the boundaries of their properties and celebrates the
common worship over the boundary-stones. So in[4] the larger outgrowth
of the family, the gens, which consisted of all persons with the
same surname (nomen, not cognomen), the gentile sacra are in the
hands of the more wealthy members who are regarded as its heads; we
have the curious instance of Clodius even after his adoption into
another family, providing for the worship of the gens Clodia in his
own house, and we may remember Virgil's picture of the founders of the
gentes of the Potitii and the Pinarii performing the sacrifice to
Hercules at the ara maxima, which was the traditional privilege of
their houses. 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. And so, when the
Republic is instituted, a special official, the rex sacrorum,
inherits the king's ritual duties, while the superintendence of the
Vestals passes to his representative in the matter of religious law,
the pontifex maximus, whose official residence is always the
regia, Numa's palace. The state is but the enlarged household and
the head of the state is its religious representative.
If then the approach to the gods is so direct, where, it may be asked,
in the organisation of Roman religion is there room for the priest?
Two points about the Roman priesthood are of paramount importance. In
the first place, they are not a caste apart: though there were
restrictions as to the holding of secular magistracies in combination
with the priesthood—always observed strictly in the case of the rex
sacrorum and with few exceptions in the case of the greater
flamines—yet the pontifices might always take their part in
public life, and no kind of barrier existed between them and the rest
of the community: Iulius Cæsar himself was pontifex maximus. In the
second place they are not regarded as representatives of the gods or
as mediators between god and man, but simply as administrative
officials appointed for the performance of the acts of state-worship,
just as the magistrates were for its civil and military government. In
origin they were chosen to assist the king in the multifarious duties
of the state-cult—the flamines were to act as special priests of
particular deities, the most prominent among them being the three
great priests of Iuppiter (flamen Dialis), Mars, and Quirinus; the
pontifices were sometimes delegates of the king on special
occasions, but more particularly formed his religious consilium, a
consulting body, to give him advice as to ritual and act as the
repositories of tradition. In later times the flamines still retain
their original character, the pontifices and especially the
pontifex maximus are responsible for the whole organisation of the
state-religion and are the guardians and interpreters of religious
lore. In the state-cult then the priests play a very important part,
but their relation to the worship of the individual was very small
indeed. They had a general superintendence over private worship and
their leave would be required for the introduction of any new domestic
cult; in cases too where the private person was in doubt as to ritual
or the legitimacy of any religious practice, he could appeal to the
pontifices for decision. Otherwise the priest could never intervene
in the worship of the family, except in the case of the most solemn
form of marriage (confarreatio), which, as it conferred on the
children the right to hold certain of the priesthoods, was regarded
itself as a ceremony of the state-religion.
In his private worship then the individual had immediate access to the
deity, and it was no doubt this absence of priestly mediation and the
consequent sense of personal responsibility, no less than its
emotional significance, which caused the greater reality and
permanence of the domestic worship as compared with the organised and
official cults of the state.
FOOTNOTES:
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