THE AUGUSTAN EMPIRE (44 B.C.—A.D. 70)

CHAPTER XV.

RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS FROM THE CLOSE OF THE REPUBLIC TO THE REIGN OF NERO

I.

FIN DE SIÈCLE

ROMAN religion is in its essence a matter of cult acts. These acts, whether of the household, or of the gens. or of the State, are thought of in a juristic way as obligations incumbent on an heir or on the people, or as contractual dealings in which the human party, if he fulfils his obligations, may look to the divine party to do its share, in which, moreover, the human party takes legal precautions to prevent the invalidation of what he does. The State or its official representatives can decide without reserve what is necessary or adequate. It stands between the individual and the supernatural, just as the head of a household stands between the gods and those set under him. The State’s official representatives have full powers. It was so in the Greek city, but in Rome the conception is carried out with peculiar consistency.

What results has little to do with the emotion or imagination or speculation of the individual. From time to time there arose in the masses a fear that traditional observances were in some way deficient. The ruling class regarded this as an epidemic to be met by the introduction of some new rite or cult. Two religious emotions and two only were valued, the religio of just scruples against breaking an oath and its positive complement, pietas, a strict and loyal readiness to perform all the obligations of a Roman and a son. Speculation and imagination were not conspicuous. The official system was part of the political framework of life, and the use of its auspices and omens to block an agitator’s actions was not regarded as blasphemous. Yet we must not conclude that the whole thing was a mere convention. When we hear of a man obeying the omens to his personal disadvantage, that may be just conformity to etiquette; but it is clear that down to the fourth century A.D. it was widely held that the prosperity and even the safety of Rome depended on the accurate performance of traditional ceremonies. Men cannot be keeping up appearances all the time, and we have probably to reckon with a psychology of association. On the face of it Rome had practised these worships and had succeeded, and when a disaster happened some ritual omission could often be discovered to account for it.

From the end of the third century B.C. this religion was quickened by Greek anthropomorphism and interpreted by Greek speculation, Polybius in particular helping the ruling class to realize the pragmatic value of their view of religion as an official institution. Apart from this inward transmutation, there were other consequences of Rome’s advance to supremacy in the Mediterranean world. In the first place, Romans and, even more, Italians moved freely in the Hellenistic East as soldiers and merchants, and as merchants often settled there, as for instance at Delos. When so established they clung together, preserving their national individuality and reverencing the old household gods, above all the Lar and the Genius. At the same time, many of them as individuals worshipped local gods, and might on their return bring back their cults1. Secondly, Romans who went to the East in positions of authority found themselves treated with the honours accorded to Hellenistic kings. Flamininus received a cult and a priest at Chalcis, M. Aquilius a priest at Pergamum. Not merely the man but his personified attributes might be worshipped: Cicero wrote to his brother Quintus “You see your virtues consecrated and set in the number of the gods”. So the idea of deification was early introduced to the Roman ruling class. Finally, Rome itself attracted numerous immigrants, bringing their own cults and their own points of view. We can see manifestations of this in the statues set up in 86 B.C. to a popular praetor M. Marius in the quarters of the city and the offering to him of incense and wine, as well as in the cultus of alien gods satirized in the Eumenides of Varro.

Thus there came to Rome both the higher and the lower elements of the Greek East. The Hellenistic religious world contained a curious mixture of different elements, civic conservatism, individual mysticism, and scepticism. New deities, and above all Isis and Serapis, became absorbed (as we see in their annual priesthoods of the Greek type) and obtained full civic recognition, even where there was no such motive as a desire to win Ptolemaic favour. From the cults of Cybele and Isis the Greeks formed initiations of their own type. These acquired importance, but it must not be forgotten that the cult of Isis was not primarily a religion of initiations: they were an ‘extra’ for the devotee who could afford them. Many cult societies were formed, giving to the individual a substitute for family and local associations from which he was separated, many foundations also to secure the upkeep of his grave, which could not depend on relations and descendants. The tone of thoughtful men was marked by a certain weariness, as we see it in the end of Catullus LXIV : when our ancestors were pious, things went well; now the gods are far away and there is nothing in particular that we can do about it; “I a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made”.

We are primarily concerned with the effect of these contacts on the ruling class, which in antiquity set the tone of society in a way in which it does not now. Paradoxical as it may sound, the jejune nature of Roman religion made for its preservation. It was in no sort of rivalry with new ideas but lived on as it were in a separate compartment. In Greece philosophy was not incompatible with conformity with civic tradition, and here that tradition was yet more closely connected with the community’s well-being. When Scaevola distinguished civil, mythological and natural theology he did not for a moment suggest that civil theology was to be abandoned. If you had asked him whether the ceremonies of public cult were in any rapport with the supernatural—which he doubtless conceived in the Stoic way as the fiery life-breath of the universe—he would probably have replied that he was not in a position to deny it. Man makes reservations in his scepticism as well as in his belief, and rationalism did not then rest on the solid mass of sure and digested information which can be invoked in its support today. Again, the Roman temperament inclined towards an attitude which may be characterized by Schweitzer’s phrase ‘Yes, but—.’ So it is that in Cicero’s De natura deorum and De divination, after the inconsistencies and illogicalities not merely of mythology but of the whole system of auspices have been fully revealed, the conclusion is always that tradition must be maintained. Here as in Varro we see a non-rational element of conservative feeling, coloured by the national pride conspicuous in literature and life from the Sullan epoch onwards and also by the turn which Stoicism was then taking in the hands of Posidonius, a turn at once conservative and Platonizing.

Posidonius held the Stoic conception of the immanent life-force with the warmth of religious conviction. He was a traveller and an ethnologist and found, as he thought, in the most diverse peoples traces of a simple primitive belief overlaid by later superstition. Yet he did not, like Panaetius, reject the idea of divination: it held together only too well with his doctrine of the sympathy of all the parts of nature. The fact that his Platonizing tendency made the idea of the essential divinity of the human soul very congenial to him is important, for Posidonius had a great influence on his contemporaries: Cicero gives one the impression of wanting to believe him to be right. This conservative turn was not limited to Stoicism. Antiochus of Ascalon introduced Stoic views in the Academy, and a fragment, which may be his and which certainly reproduces Academic views, says that the building of temples in the most conspicuous places is a primary duty of statesmanship, an instructive contrast with the banning of temples and images from the ideal state of Panaetius1. Again, Philodemus is concerned both to show that Epicurus performed his religious duties as a citizen and to distinguish the true piety of the enlightened Epicurean from the beliefs of the crowd and the complexities of the Stoic.

It has been usual to represent the last decades of the Roman Republic as a period of religious decay. The state of feeling of the masses can hardly be estimated. The impression which we form from Cicero and Varro is that their works set forth an ideal for others, and that those around them were prone either to superstition, emotional personal religion, or to a shallow and subversive scepticism. The path of pietas resembles that of a tight-rope walker. If we turn to the conduct of the ruling class we see disorder in this as in every department of public life. Auspices were shamelessly misused for political ends and the augural discipline was not carefully maintained, except by an enthusiast like Appius. Prodigies, says Livy, were commonly neither announced nor recorded because of that same negligence through which men commonly now believed that the gods did not give signs of the future; the calendar was allowed by the pontifices to sink into hopeless disorder; temples were not repaired when they fell into decay (and ancient buildings needed very frequent restoration, to judge from the inscriptions on aqueducts); the Capitoline temple, burnt in 83 BC, was not fully restored for twenty-one years; the meaning of many ceremonies was forgotten; the office of flamen Dialis, which involved its holder in tedious taboos, was not filled from Sulla’s dictatorship till 11 BC; provincial temples were robbed to satisfy the greed of governors or the needs of war; the disposal of pauper dead on the Esquiline was as shocking as it was in­sanitary.

All this is just disorder, like the disorder in civil life. Roman religion was made up of traditional practice, and animated by patriotic spirit; it was not a matter of belief. Scepticism might lead to carelessness, if men suspected that neither the performance nor the neglect of ritual had any effect on the course of events. Yet the strongest spirits favoured conservatism in observances, and acted in a way which suggests that religious things retained a certain prestige. When Caesar set the calendar in order, he showed scrupulous respect for the traditional sanctity of certain days, and in the lex coloniae Iuliae Genetivae minute provision was made for the organization of public worship. We have, perhaps, some indication of the ideas current in his circle in the account of Romulus given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which may be based on a Caesarian pamphlet and certainly reflects the mood of the time. In this Romulus is represented as the founder of Roman religion, careful not to give State countenance to the extravagance of exotic cults. It cannot be said that Caesar, in the days of his autocracy, pursued a deliberate religious policy, but his insistence on the divine origin of his family, his watchword of Venus Victrix at Pharsalus, his new temple to Venus Genetrix as his patron­goddess, and the planning of a temple to Mars show that an aura of religion was not unacceptable to him. Sulla had claimed to be the favourite of the same goddess and had cared for the restoration of the temple of Juppiter; Pompey had dedicated to Venus Victrix a temple attached to his theatre—a fact which perhaps gave additional point to Caesar’s battle-cry—and the poem of Lucretius attests the emotional response which the forms of religion might evoke. The prestige of the State cults is illustrated by the coins struck by Roman magistrates with repre­sentations of the temples built by their ancestors.

Something like the Augustan restoration would probably have been undertaken by any responsible Roman if he had had absolute power; it would have seemed to him an integral part of any bringing back of public order. Cicero, in the second book of his work On laws, lays down that there are to be no private unrecognized worships: sanction is given only to civic rites in temples or groves and to family rites. Worship is to be directed to the Lares, to the old gods, to those who are recognized as having reached heaven for their merits, and to personified virtues. Emphasis is laid on the maintenance of the priestly colleges and the Vestals, on the augural system (including the observance of the augurium salutis), on the control of prophecies (the number must be limited), on the official nature of worship, and on the use of fetials—-just as by Augustus. Sacrifices by night are prohibited, with one time-honoured exception (that of Bona Dea): so also initiations except those of Ceres, and religious begging except in honour of the Idaean Mother. In the com­mentary which he then gives he speaks of the nature of purity and of the acceptability of a simple rite, he urges that old temples to evil deities such as Febris should be abolished, and he defends divination by the common custom of humanity.

The most illuminating commentary on the time is provided by the fragments of Varro’s Antiquitates divinae. This work was a sequel to his Antiquitates humanae and was deliberately so placed from the conviction that religious institutions are man-made or rather State-made, Varro remarking that he wrote so because he wrote for Rome and not from an absolute point of view. In the same spirit discussion of the personnel and paraphernalia of religion precedes that of the gods. Varro adopts Scaevola’s classification of the three kinds of theology. His own belief is that there is one god, the soul of the universe, who may be identified with Juppiter Capitolinus or with the god of the Jews; the other gods are his parts or virtues. If Varro were founding a new State he would have consecrated the gods and their names in accordance with the scheme of nature: but as it was, the State being long established, he wrote with the purpose that the masses might be willing to worship the gods rather than despise them. He regrets image-worship. For over one hundred and seventy years Rome did without it, and if those conditions had continued the gods would be worshipped with greater purity. Sacrifice is not wanted by the real gods. Yet there are many things which the masses should not know, many delusions which are useful: that is why the Greeks walled off the mysteries in silence. Again, though the eternal gods are to be distinguished from deified men, for States it is useful, even if it is false, that brave men should think themselves to be descended from gods. He endorses the Polybian axiom that Roman power is due to Roman piety; religious observance and fasts can save us from peril. He is indignant at the worship of the Alexandrine gods in Rome. Religion means respect of the gods as of parents, superstition fear of them as of enemies.

Throughout he writes with patriotic emotion, avowing that he is afraid lest the gods should perish, not from the attack of enemies, but through the neglect of citizens: from this destruction he is freeing them and storing them in the minds of the loyal with a care more praiseworthy than that of Metellus for the sacra of Vesta, or of Aeneas for the Penates. He emphasizes the duty of maintaining family rites as well as civic rites. Like Virgil he has a genuine sentimental attachment to the old Italian deities, as we see in the invocation opening his De re rustica, and in the setting of the first book in the temple of Tellus on the occasion of the Feriae Sementivae.

We are told of Varro that he wished to be buried in the Pythagorean way. Here we touch another element in the religious life of the time. Pythagoreanism had not been much in evidence after the end of the fourth century, but it had no doubt continued in a subterranean way, and about the beginning of the first century BC it enjoyed a revival, represented in Rome by Nigidius Figulus. Nigidius, a friend of Cicero, was a man of wide learning and astrological and religious inclinations. Cicero’s speech against Vatinius indicates that the movement was regarded as of the nature of a sect, with magical interests. In Varro there converge the interests which are of most importance for the Augustan age, the wish for revival and restoration in religion, the value set on Italian tradition and legend—which bulks large in him—and the importance attached to a doctrine of the soul1. Virgil owed more to him than we can now realize.

II.

THE TIME OF THE TRIUMVIRATE

The death of Julius evoked much popular emotion. The comet which appeared during the games given by Octavian in his honour was thought to be his soul now received in heaven, and in 42 BC Senate and People voted that he should be included among the gods of the State. This came, says Suetonius (Div. Iul. 88), not only from the lips of those who passed the measure but also from the conviction of the masses. Though his temple was not dedicated till 29 BC, the celebration of his festival began at once, and the fact that he was to be reckoned as a god and not a man was signalized by the prohibition against the carrying of his imago in funerals of his gens. He was divus, a word earlier used as a synonym of deus and appropriate because of its adjectival nature. This step was made easier by the dissemination of Euhemeristic ideas and above all by the notion that the old god Quirinus was in fact the deified Romulus. Another significant event, dated in 43, was the decision of the triumvirs to build

The time between 43 and 31 was one of disquiet and disorder. This evoked panic and portents and prophecies. Some of the moods of the time are preserved by Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue and Horace’s Sixteenth Epode. The first is written under the emotions aroused by the Peace of Brundisium. An end had been made to the Perusine war, and the marriage of Antony and Octavia set the seal on the new hope of enduring concord. The poem heralds the birth of a child of human parents and yet of divine origin, whose coming marks the beginning of a new period of the world’s life: as he grows up, the evil habits of humanity will gradually disappear. As in Isaiah VII, his growth is contemporary with deliverance, but he is not a Messiah who by his action brings that deliverance. The common assumption among Virgil’s contemporary readers was probably that this child was the son to be expected from Antony and Octavia: but if this assumption was correct the point was not expressly stated, and the application was in any case a particular use of an earlier prophecy associated with the name of a Sibyl. What is foretold rests upon one of the many schemes of the Ages of the World; but it differs from current philosophic theory in that between one cycle and the next there is no cosmic disaster, and in that the Ages return upon themselves. From the degradation of the present we pass to an improved Heroic Age, and from that to the Golden Age. Coins show that the ideas involved were in the air at the time. How serious the Eclogue is we do not know. Virgil is at this time an Epicurean: he cannot consistently look for divine interference in human affairs. Yet in his own life Octavian’s intervention has been miraculous. When all seemed lost, his farm was restored to him, and he can in the transparent allegory of the First Eclogue say of his deliverer namque erit ille mihi semper deus. Perhaps this is really the beginning of a new era; perhaps something like this supposedly old prophecy will really come to pass. Here is the dream—from the gate of ivory or the gate of horn.

The Sixteenth Epode is closely related to the Fourth Eclogue. The question of priority is disputed, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the Epode was written before, not after, the Peace of Brundisium. Horace speaks the language of despair. No foe from outside could shake Rome’s power, but we by our civil strife leave the city an easy prey to the barbarian. The only help is for us to depart and seek the Islands of the Blest. When the Golden Age gave place to the Bronze, Juppiter set aside those shores for the righteous. The poem reduced to this summary sounds like a mythological commonplace, but it is anything but that. The geographical knowledge of antiquity always left the chance of some happy haven just beyond the edge of the map.

In 40 Virgil might look to Octavian as the saviour of Italy, but the view cannot have been common. His success against Sextus Pompeius in 36 did, however, make him something of a national hero. Appian says “the cities set him up with their gods”, an ambiguous phrase which should mean that images or statues of him (as earlier of Julius) were set in the chief temples of Italian municipalities, but might mean only, “gave divine honours to Octavian”, or “included his name in prayer formulas”. Further, we see Octavian in this period foreshadowing the religious policy of his principate by his refusal to depose Lepidus from the office of pontifex maximus, his encouragement of temple restoration, and his celebration of the Troia. Early in the Second Triumvirate Livineius Regulus struck coins with a head of Octavian and Aeneas bearing Anchises; of the same period is a coin struck by P. Clodius with the head of Octavian and Venus Genetrix, doves, and Cupid. In the year 36 Octavian’s house on the Palatine was struck by lightning: he at once dedicated the site to Apollo, a god perhaps chosen because of the old Roman tradition of turning to the Sibylline books of his prophetess or to his shrine at Delphi in times of need. Apollo was a god of purifications and of healing: such was Octavian’s mission. The temple was dedicated 9 October 28, when the fact of Actium having been fought, as it were under the eyes of Apollo, had given to him a new prestige. Further, in 33 Octavian’s lieutenant Agrippa expelled from the city magicians and astrologers.

The campaign of Actium was preceded by a brisk exchange of calumny between Antony and Octavian. Octavian taunted Antony, justly indeed, with posing as a new Dionysus. Antony retaliated with the allegation that Octavian had dined with eleven others, taking himself the part of Apollo and leaving to the rest the characters of the other gods, a parody of a lectisternium. That this is invented is clear. Octavian would hardly have suffered another to play Jupiter to his Apollo. But it is significant that such stories were regarded as discrediting their object. In actual conduct Octavian took every care to pass as the champion of Roman ways and Roman gods: he declared war on Cleopatra with the old fetial ceremony, and the court poets represented the struggle as one between the gods of Rome and those of Egypt. Was the sistrum of Isis to sound upon the Capitol?

Once more Virgil helps us to realize something of the mood of the hour. His Georgies occupied him from 37 till 29 BC. The prayer at the end of the first Book—whenever it was written—registers a state of mind belonging to the time before or soon after Actium. Virgil has spoken of the ravages of civil war and turns to passionate supplication: “O ancestral native gods, and Romulus, and mother Vesta that guardest the Tuscan Tiber and Roman Palatia, at least do not prevent this warrior with life before him (he has not been named) from coming to the help of our shattered generation. We have long paid to the full in our blood for the perjuries of Laomedon’s Troy. The palace of heaven has long grudged thee to us, O Caesar”. With these words he picks up the other prayer with which the book opens—a prayer to twelve gods and “thou too Caesar—whichsoever part thou choosest, sea, sky or underworld”. Laomedon’s Troy! It sounds like the most frigid mythological commonplace. But it is not: it is to be taken quite seriously in the light of ancient ideas about the guilt which a city, as a living organism, retains through the succession of human generations. Horace had voiced the sentiment earlier in Erodes VII, 16, “Harsh fates drive on the Romans, and the guilt of brother’s murder, ever since the blood of innocent Remus flowed on the ground bringing a curse on those yet unborn”.’Later comes the reconciliation: cana Fides et Vesta, Remo cum fratre Quirinus (Aen. 1, 292).

III.

THE AUGUSTAN RESTORATION

After Actium Octavian had the task of rebuilding national faith and faith in the nation. In 30 he was given the privilege of creating new patricians, which was not only a way of honouring his supporters but also a necessity for the filling of certain priestly positions. In 29 he, like Julius, was empowered to create—theoretically, no doubt, to recommend—priests beyond the number traditional for the priestly colleges. The dignity of their office was enhanced. The priesthoods of greater eminence were open only to senators, the position of Lupercus and other minor places to knights, and in general priestly honours, though separated from magistracies in the cursus honorum, were among the greatest distinctions and were used to mark out possible successors to the principate. The princeps was himself a member of the four great colleges. Two old organizations, that of the sodales Titii, of whom we know little, and that of the fratres Arvales, concerned with ceremonial performed in spring to promote the crops, were revived by him, the latter between 36 and 21. They were now a very dignified corporation of which the Emperor was a member but not necessarily magister. Their ceremonies included vows in January to Jupiter, Juno Regina, Minerva, Salus publica p(opuli) R(omani), Dea Dia (later omitted), and (after his death) to Divus Augustus on behalf of the princeps and the payment of the vows made in the previous January. The exhaustive records of their proceedings inscribed on stone show a careful archaism of language and ritual.

In this institution we see a characteristic combination of conservatism with innovation, calculated to confer on the new regime the prestige of old religious sentiment. The same spirit appears in the taking of the augurium salutis in 29 BC, in the closing of the temple of Janus in 29 and 25 and on a later occasion, and in a reform of the Lupercalia. In 28 the Senate entrusted to Octavian the restoration of all temples in the city which needed it, and he claims to have rebuilt eighty-two.

So the past was once more set upon its throne. At the same time, the new order received religious expression in new founda­tions which outshone the old. We have spoken of the temple of Divus Julius and of that of Palatine Apollo. To these should be added the temple of Juppiter Tonans on the Capitol commemorating the deliverance of Augustus from peril in Spain, the Pantheon, consecrated to Mars and Venus, the divinities of the Julian house, the temple of Mars Ultor dedicated on Imperial property in the new Forum Augustum in 2 BC (a small round temple on the Capitol had been erected for him in 20 BC), and the new temple of Vesta on the Palatine (dedicated 28 April, 12 BC). The temple of Mars Ultor was given special prominence: triumphal insignia and captured standards were here deposited, discussions on war and triumphs by the Senate were conducted here, magistrates going to their provinces made this their starting-point, censors drove into its wall the commemorative nail at the end of a lustrum. The temple thus received what had been privileges of the Capitol and, while members of the Imperial house and the young of the senatorial and equestrian classes when enrolled as iuvenes still put on the garb of manhood at the older shrine, they proceeded thence to the new. Again, the Sibylline oracles, hitherto kept in the Capitol, were transferred to the temple of Apollo on the Palatine after their revision and recopying by the quindecimviri in 18 BC; and in 4 BC. Augustus received Jewish envoys in that temple.

Julius Caesar had acted without greatly troubling himself about popular feeling. For the success of the Augustan purpose it was of the first importance that sympathy should be enlisted and the appropriate spirit created. The buildings contributed to this, and the men of letters did perhaps even more. The Princeps himself and his loyal friends Agrippa and Maecenas managed with great skill to convey to the writers of the time the not unwelcome conviction that their support was of real value. So one and all they glorify Actium as a victory of Roman culture, of the Roman spirit; one and all they extol plain living and patriotic thinking, the Trojan origins of Rome and the Julian gens, Apollo and Mars, the gods of the new order. In Propertius and Ovid we may suspect this of being a cliché—not that cliches are without influence—but in Virgil and Horace and Livy it is serious. The ‘Roman odes ’ of Horace’s Third Book, included in the collection published by him in 23 BC, insist on the ideals of simplicity and the military virtues, on the rejection of Eastern ideas, on purity of home life, on the need of rebuilding temples. The Aeneid is an apotheosis of the Augustan system which is not the less effective for being indirect. Its theme is Roman history viewed as a process culminating in the world-power of the Eternal City, a process willed by heaven and secured by pietas, its story is one of the sacrifice of personal inclination to duty, of the defeating of arrogant self-assertiveness, of reconciliation after conflict. Apollo and Actium, the Augustan peace, the mission of Rome are with us in this ancient setting. Varro’s enthusiasm for Italy and Italian tradition and the mysticism of Posidonius here find an expression which could stir the common man: inscriptions show how well the masses knew their Virgil. The same lessons were conveyed by the statues in the Forum Augustum, by the sculptures in the temple of Mars Ultor, and by the other art of the period.

The most effective outward and visible sign of the new regime was the Secular Games of 17 BC, which marked the close of an epoch. The saeculum was Etruscan but not only Etruscan, and though in 249 BC ludi saeculares were an innovation prescribed by the Sibylline Books in time of stress, they were a Greek shoot grafted on a native stock.

We are fortunately able to reconstruct the order of ceremonies, culminating with the words—"When the sacrifice was completed those thereunto appointed, twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls who had lost neither father nor mother, sang a hymn, and so likewise on the Capitol. The hymn was written by Q. Horatius Flaccus”. The ideas behind the Augustan celebration are clear and important. The nocturnal ceremonies, performed at full moon to be more impressive, correspond to the old festival and maintain a cathartic character, though even here the offering to Terra Mater looks to the birth of a new and better age, and the victims and deities are different: they are deities who excite reverence and not dread. The rites done by day are directed to the old Capitoline protectors of the State and to the new Imperial deities. Mars is absent, for he is not appropriate to this context; we are not now thinking of war or of vengeance for Julius. That is over and done: and, as the children sang, “Now the Median fears the Alban axes supreme on land and sea: now the proud Scyths, yes, and in these last days the Indians, beg for an answer (to their embassies)”. Divus Julius likewise can have no express mention. In this con­text the nocturnal ceremonial takes a new sense. It is the burial of the bad past. And though Augustus is no king, though he is the first citizen, and not yet pontifex maximus, though the quindecimviri administer all the proceedings just as the college from which they grew did in 249, none the less he stands as spokes­man between his people and their gods.

Horace’s ode was written to be sung, both on the Palatine and on the Capitol, and is a liturgical text but like some ancient and many modern prayers it is addressed to the public as much as to the gods. It gives pregnant expression to the contemporary ideal fully stated in the Aeneid. Sol, Ilithyia, the Parcae, Apollo and Luna are asked to hear the prayers now uttered:

“If Rome is your handiwork and Ilian squadrons reached the Etruscan shore, being those of the folk who were bidden to change their homes and city on a blessed voyage, those for whom pure Aeneas, surviving his country’s fall, made a clear path through Troy that blazed from no treachery: (he was to give them more than they had left behind)—grant, oh ye gods, to the young a spirit to learn and righteous conduct, grant to the old peace and calm, grant to the race of Romulus wealth and offspring and all glory. And may there be full answer to the prayers offered with white oxen by the splendid scion of Anchises and Venus triumphant over foes who war, kindly to the prostrate”.

Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. There is peace, continues the poet, and the old lost qualities are returning. May Phoebus prolong the Roman State and Latium in blessedness to another cycle and ever improving ages; may Diana hear the quindecimviri and the children: I carry home a sure hope that Juppiter and all the gods have this purpose. The vision of the future is a vision of what may be accomplished by co-operation with Augustan social and religious policy. It is a conscientious if laboured attempt to produce the right atmosphere, like Horace’s earlier poem (Odes, IV, 6) addressed to the choir which was to sing the ode.

Both the legends and the types of the coinage of 17 BC and the following year emphasize the ceremonial. We see the young laureate head with a star (the rejuvenated Divus Julius and the sidus Julium), Augustus distributing to the people the means of purification; Apollo on a platform ornamented with prows and anchors, the description of the princeps as quindecimvir, the dedication to Juppiter Optimus Maximus by the Senate and People of Rome for the safety of Augustus because he had given tranquillity to the State.

In this way Augustus gave visible expression to his ideals and surrounded his rule with a religious nimbus. It is in a peculiarly Roman way an alliance of the throne and the altar, and such an alliance means that the altar is not at the time in question a political creation devoid of significance. The idea was given further expression by the Senate’s dedication c. 9 BC of the Ara Pacis Augustae in the Campus Martius to celebrate Augustus’ return from Spain and Gaul four years earlier. The reliefs on it are perhaps the best surviving artistic expression of the spirit of the moment, linking once more the piety of the present to the tradition of the past.

After the death of Lepidus, Augustus succeeded him as pontifex maximus on 6 March, 12 BC. The way in which he magnified this office is shown by two things: it became a regular part of Imperial titulature, and the day of his assumption of it was one of the feriae publicae. Augustus now ceded part of his house to become public property. He did not live in the old house of the pontifex maximus: he had made the Palatine his own, and the new temple of Vesta on it was ready by 28 April, 12 BC. Then follow further reforms. Senators were ordered to offer incense at the beginning of each meeting. Again, the office of flamen Dialis had been vacant since the dictatorship of Sulla. This was partly due to the burdensome taboos which weighed upon its holder. Augustus made some modifications in these—once more we see in use the Roman State’s absolute authority to make such changes—and in 11 BC secured a new holder. Again, he increased the dignity and privileges of the Vestals, making over to them the old house of the pontifex maximus. Later, when there was a shortage of candidates for the position, he strongly urged the people to offer their daughters, saying that if any of his granddaughters were of the right age he would have offered them. He was, however, compelled in AD 5 to admit the daughters of freedmen to their ranks. Throughout the Principate their prestige was main­ained, and in AD 24 it was voted that whenever Livia went to the theatre she should sit among the Vestals.

In 7 BC the redivision of the city into districts was complete. With these districts had been associated the only Roman cult which belonged to the poor, the worship of the Lares compitales at the cross-roads under the supervision of magistri vicorum. Augustus with consummate skill turned this into a support for his rule by enlisting in his service the instinct of self-importance in humble folk. The cult was now made official: the magistri vicorum were elected by the vid, four by each annually, and the cult was directed to the Lares compitales and the Genius of Augustus. Augustus showed his support of the system by dedicating to the Lares publici images of other deities from the money ceremonially given to him in January. The organization was not complete till 7 BC Horace indicates that the general idea was in the air well before that time; the magistri of one vicus describe themselves in AD 109 as magistri anni CXXI—but  CXXI may be an error for CXVI, which would agree with our other evidence . The magistri entered on office on August 1, and the institution may well be a sequel to the official renaming of the month Sextilis. The significance of this for ruler­cult and its effect on the domestic Lar cult will be discussed later for the moment the point to emphasize is this giving of a suitable religious interest to a new social class. The worship of the Lares Augusti spread through Italy and the Empire. The popularity of the Lares in Rome is indicated by several reliefs, one of which shows the apotheosis of Julius, the portent of the Alban sow, and sacrifice to a Lar, another (the altar of Manlius) figures of Lares and a sacrifice, perhaps to the Genius Augusti and to Concordia Augusta.

Augustus thus won the poor to his ideas. Further, by creating or (as is more likely) revitalizing the associations of iuvenes, free born young men, in Rome and Italy he attracted a higher class. We find these associations closely related to municipal cults. The interest now taken in traditional Roman religion is shown by the multiplication of copies of the fasti showing the festivals in Rome and in Italian municipalities: this we find from the middle of the principate of Augustus down to AD 51.

With other religious interests of this class Augustus was less in sympathy. We have seen the banishing of astrologers and magicians in 33 BC. The Egyptian rites, which interested above all the lower orders and the demi-monde, had time after time been repressed by the Optimate rule of the later Republic. These rites were further discredited as a result of the campaign against Cleopatra, in which Augustus had rallied in his support national sentiment and the old feeling against “the beastly devices of the heathen”, dog-headed gods, and the like. So in 28 he “did not receive the Egyptian rites within the pomerium” and in 21 Agrippa “curtailed the Egyptian rites which were again invading the city, forbidding their performance even in the suburbs within a mile of the city”. It is clear both that these prohibitions were not thoroughly and continuously enforced, and that they were what Varro or Cicero would have done1. To the official attitude on such questions we shall return later.

IV.

THE INSTITUTION OF RULER-WORSHIP

How it came to be that Hellenistic kings received the honours appropriate to divinity has been set forth in a previous volume. Such honours were an expression of gratitude which did not involve any theological implications. This may sound a paradox. To the Greeks there was often a shading off of the distinction between man and god, and in addition to this general tendency of thought we have to reckon with two widespread ideas, the one that the gods of popular worship were men deified by grateful humanity, the other that the soul of a man or at least the soul of an outstanding man was in a sense divine. All the same a difference remains, for the old cults were there as an established part of life and no inferences or additions unsanctified by oracular or other revelation could hope to obtain the same standing. Countless as are dedications and acts of devotion to deified rulers, it is yet clear that they are all of the nature of homage and not of worship in the full sense, for worship implies the expectation of blessing to be mediated in a supernatural way. The touchstone of piety in antiquity is the votive offering, made in recognition of supposed deliverance in some invisible manner from sickness or other peril. This we do not find directed to rulers dead or living. Since ruler-cult was the expression of gratitude or the acknowledgment of power, the initiative normally lay with the subjects and not with the ruler. There are exceptions—as for instance the demand made by Alexander to the Greek cities—but there the question is one of status and not of worship. In general, a ruler had no interest in the cult of himself except as a factor in the cohesion and organization of the State or as an element in his own standing in relation to a dependent city, or in competition with other dynasties. Between him and his subjects the issue was one of loyalty: he desired to be assured of it, to receive what soon became the standard form of homage, and they to express it. Hence on their side also the amount of emotion involved was slight except towards individuals who excited a deep-felt gratitude, the memory of which sometimes lasted for centuries. This was directed above all to those who, like the earlier founders of colonies, had established or re­established a city. The attitude in this instance was akin to that traditional towards the heroes.

Such a development was originally foreign to Rome. Rome had no native hero-cult and the Roman view of deities was far less sharply anthropomorphic than the Greek, so that such a shading off between the human and the divine was not likely to arise. Nevertheless, by the time of Augustus Rome had come very much nearer to this world of thought. The idea of heroization or deification for merit had come in with Ennius: many Romans had received divine honours in the East, which perhaps meant more to them by reason of their novelty than to the Hellenistic rulers whom they had superseded: and the mixed population of the city now included many to whom such forms of compliment appeared natural and almost automatic.

Whatever had been done and thought about Julius in his life, after his death he was ‘Divus Julius’, and from 40 at latest Octavian was ‘Divi filius’, a title in itself unique for a Roman and liable to lead to more. In 36 BC the gratitude of Italian municipalities had given to him a place in their temples. After Actium his standing called for some recognition in this as in other ways. So in 30 began the celebration of his birthday as a public holiday, which gained in solemnity, and the pouring of libations in his honour at public and private banquets, and in 29 it was voted that in hymns his name should be coupled with those of the gods and that the day on which he entered the city should be honoured with sacrifices and kept holy for ever. In 28 quinquennial vows were established for his welfare. In 27 he was given the title of Augustus. It had been earlier used of mysteries and of things belonging to the gods and it had an auspicious sound, for it was thought to be connected with augere and augurium, the latter in its turn suggesting to a Roman the characteristic attribute of auctoritas. Between man and god it represents just such a compromise as does princeps between citizen and king. How appropriate it was felt to be we see from its application to the month Sextilis and from its use by all successors.

This compromise represents official policy. One apparent exception demands our attention. Augustan policy turned very much on the finding of a special function for each class of society. One body within the State stood in a peculiar relation to the princeps; it was the army. If to civilians Augustus was princeps, to soldiers he was imperator, and he had on their loyalty a claim which was different and charged with a distinctive emotion, expressed in the direct and personal oath of loyalty taken to him as to his Republican predecessors in the field. The army occupied a peculiar position in the framework of Roman religion; essentially it was the Roman People acting in a military capacity and not an organization within the State. Its commander had the right and the duty to consult the gods by taking auspices before action; this was an inseparable concomitant of imperium. But the Roman army was not, like a Catholic or Mohammedan army, concerned with the carrying on of a regular scheme of religious observance; it did not observe the celebrations of the civil calendar. They were the concern of the appropriate authorities at Rome. But any Roman army or military unit, at least from the early second century BC onwards, was highly conscious of itself as a permanent entity. Given the ancient interpenetration of what we regard as the secular and the religious spheres of life, and the ancient tendency for any group within the community to find a religious centre, it is natural that military units also developed a focal point of this type. For them it could not but be the standards, and the place in which they were kept came to be a sacellum. To these was now added a representation of the reigning princeps, and his image was carried with standards both of the legion and of other units, and seems to have been used as the standard of cohorts of the legion. It thus received the homage of the troops and was presented for the veneration of submissive barbarian rulers. A military unit worshipped also a group of gods of war, though it must be said that the precise form which this took is not clear.

We must not over-emphasize the importance of all this. The Praetorian guards and the marine detachments were the only soldiers normally stationed in Italy, and there was no feeling against the participation of citizens in Emperor-worship outside Italy. Further, the association of these imagines with the eagles put them on a special footing; the civilian worshipped neither the one nor the other. The soldier gave to both adoration, but he did not expect supernatural aid from either, and many military dedications, both of individuals and of units, are addressed directly to the Emperor in his human capacity, as marks of honour, and do not use the form Genio or Numini.

We must now study the further ramifications of the official policy that has been described above. In Rome it did not go far. It was perhaps in 12 BC that the Genius of Augustus was in official oaths included between Juppiter Optimus Maximus and the Di Penates, and after the re-organization of the cult of the Lares publici this same Genius was worshipped together with them in their public shrines. It was not deification, for the Genius of a private person, being the life-spirit of his family, received sacrifice on his birthday. The cult was therefore not new in principle and did not emphasize the individual. In 7 BC Tiberius vowed a temple to Concordia Augusta, a deified attribute of the new order: this was dedicated in AD 1 o or 13, and in the latter year, probably, Tiberius dedicated an altar, also in Rome, Numini Augusti, at which the four great priestly colleges were to do annual sacrifice. This looks very like deification and yet it is not, for after death Augustus still had to be voted caelestes honores. Numen had been predicated both of the Senate and of the People by Cicero: it is the more than normal will perceived in Augustus. In Italy out­side Rome there is one institution which must be mentioned here as probably owing its origin to official inspiration: the various positions concerned with the worship of Augustus which were open to freedmen. There are several titles, magistri Augustales, seviri, seviri Augustales, and Augustales, The first emerges in 13— 12 BC when the princeps was associated with the cult of the Lares, and it too gave a function to citizens outside the governing class. It is therefore likely that its beginnings are to be sought in some action of the central authority, although the diversity of its forms indicates a free and uncontrolled development in detail.

In Rome and Italy care had to be taken neither to institute nor encourage anything savouring of monarchy. In the provinces, on the other hand, some sort of cult and organization were needed for reasons of state. The Eastern provinces had vigorous city life, and sometimes Koina or associations of cities sending delegates to common assemblies, and they had been accustomed to worship their rulers. There was nothing to gain by breaking with these traditions. In 29 BC permission was given to the Romans in Asia and Bithynia to dedicate temples at Ephesus and Nicaea to Roma and Divus Julius jointly and to the Greeks to do as much at Pergamum and Nicomedia for Roma and Augustus. Roma had been worshipped by non-Romans since 195, sometimes in conjunction with local deities. This combination of the princeps with her could wound no susceptibilities. The other Eastern provinces followed suit. Roma was not always included: certainly not in Cyprus and Pontus. The provincial cult thus set up was generally administered by the Koinon and the presiding high priest held what was for natives the chief post of dignity in local society. In this as in so much else Egypt formed an exception. There was a cult in Alexandria and in various local temples, and certain honours were paid to the Emperor throughout the land but there was no provincial cult for the reason that Egypt was not allowed to have any self-consciousness as a unit and there was moreover no enthusiasm to regulate. Asia had been delivered from bondage but Egypt had merely passed into the hands of absentee landlords who kept strict bailiffs.

The function of Rome in the matter of ruler-cult in the East was to permit and to regulate. In the West, Rome created the institution de novo as an instrument for the spreading of her culture. In 12 BC Drusus dedicated at Lugdunum the altar of Roma and Augustus built by sixty tribes from the three Gauls. Its cult was administered by the concilium Galliarum composed of delegates sent annually by the tribes to elect the sacerdos. It should be noted that there is here no distinction of citizens and non­citizens. A similar altar was built at Oppidum Ubiorum between 9 BC and AD 4 for the intended province of Germany. In Gaul and in the Germany of Rome’s dreams the central authority took action. Elsewhere in the West development was gradual and spontaneous. Thus in Tarraconensis cult by local conventus or associations of cities preceded provincial cult. The main development followed on Tiberius’ permission to that province in AD 23 to erect a temple to Divus Augustus. Between that date and 64 provincial cult was organized in Lusitania and probably Baetica, Alpes Cottiae, Alpes Maritimae, Mauretania Caesariensis and Tingitana, and perhaps Sardinia: in the Flavian period probably by Gallia Narbonensis. Africa, Dacia and the Danube provinces followed later

What should be done in Rome or by the provinces acting as units called for official sanction. On the other hand such sanction was not called for in the matter of worships established by muni­cipalities unless a ruler had strong personal feelings and even these were not always obeyed. Such civic cults began in the East, as at Mitylene about 27 BC, and spread through the Empire. They were directed sometimes to Augustus alone, sometimes to Augustus and Roma. The combination with Roma is not found for the names of later Emperors and only a few of them have flamines reserved to themselves by name. Flamen Aug. refers in general to the worship of the ruler of the time whoever he was. It is a remarkable fact that the development of such cults in Italy occurs mainly from 2 BC onwards. It is not the product of a wave of popular emotion after Actium. Its origin at this time may be explained from the dedication of the temple of Mars Ultor and of the Forum Augustum and perhaps above all from the fact that the growing up of Gaius and Lucius appeared to secure the dynasty. Municipal cult was addressed also to Livia and to other members of the Imperial house in spite of the fact that Augustus did not give any special honours to those of his kinsfolk who died. There were, again, other ways in which a town could express its devotion. It sometimes took the name Caesarea or Sebaste or altered the names of its months to honour Augustus. On the other hand the assumption that in Asia Minor the Emperor was commonly associated in worship or identified with local deities is unjustified: there are only exceptional instances of this1.

If a municipality was free to show its loyalty in forms not always sanctioned for larger political units, so was of course an individual. Any one could erect on his estate what shrines he would, as Cicero did for his dead daughter. We know temples at Pompeii and at Beneventum and another for the gens Augusta at Carthage. Again, at Alexandria there was a cult society called the Augustan synod of the god Imperator Caesar, with a priest and other officials.

There were wide possibilities in worship. There were even wider possibilities for the language of literature and art. In these the comparison or identification of persons honoured with particular deities was old and natural, for the deities supplied the traditional types of beauty and power and benevolence. It was sometimes held that the ruler was a god come down on earth; so Horace suggests that Augustus may be Mercury. The other poets of the time are full of phrases which seem to us exaggerated and artificial. Yet we must remember that there was a deep and genuine sentiment in many hearts, an enthusiasm of gratitude which had to use the warmest ways of expression which it could find. It is revealed to us in the halo of legend which grew up around Augustus in and shortly after his life and again in the impulsive act of veneration made towards him by some sailors at Puteoli in AD 14.

Demonstrations of loyalty were not confined to those who were citizens or subjects of Rome. The client-princes also showed their loyalty in religious forms: Herod named Samaria Sebaste and set on its highest point a temple of Augustus, built Caesarea and erected in it a temple for Roma and Augustus with quinquennial games; Juba dedicated to Augustus a grove with an altar and temple in his new Caesarea1. We hear also that the client- kings consulted together about completing the Olympieum at Athens and dedicating it to Augustus.

When Augustus died, his funeral, carried out in accordance with his directions, was just like that which he had ordered for Agrippa. The one novelty is the eagle released from the pyre and thought to be carrying his soul to heaven: this symbol of apotheosis was probably borrowed from Syria and perhaps Babylonian in origin, but not unfamiliar in the Graeco-Roman world. Further, Numerius Atticus swore that he had seen Augustus ascending to heaven just as Proculus had seen Romulus. Even as sidus Julium showed that the real self of Julius was with the gods, so this was the tangible proof for Augustus. It corresponds to the miracles which justify a saint’s canonization. But whereas the saint’s earthly remains are venerated in his shrine, like the relics of a Greek hero, the Emperor’s ashes remained in his mausoleum and were not taken to his temple.

On 17 September AD 14 the Senate decreed that Augustus should as Divus Augustus be accepted among the gods of the State. A golden image of him was set on a couch in the temple of Mars and received the honours later to be paid to his cult image. The house at Nola in which he had died was consecrated to him: the celebration of his birthday passed to the consuls; the college of Sodales Augustales was founded: and Livia became first priestess, Germanicus a flamen. A precedent was thus set for the inclusion of other good Emperors after their death among the gods of the State. This inclusion was the culmination of a series of honours given in return for services rendered. It was not an automatic culmination. It was warranted by miracle and approved by the authority which was necessary for any addition to the official circle of worships. Further, it depended on the quality shown by the man and not on the fact of his having held the supreme position. Divinity hedged a princess around but was not inherent in him, however much it might and did so appear to provincials and even to individual citizens. From the constitutional point of view he stood between the mass of citizens and the gods, on the godward side but without any loss of his humanity or of his ultimate responsibility before the bar of public opinion. The celebrations during his life of his birthday and of his accession were among the most prominent features of public life and at every possible turn secular and religious foundations were made in his honour or for his welfare, but it remains certain that these things did not cause to the ancients that confusion of thought which they have often caused to modern students, and that Augustus would have smiled in a puzzled way if he had been informed that he had introduced Pharaonic divine monarchy at Rome.

V.

OFFICIAL RELIGIOUS POLICY

We have discussed earlier the measures taken by Augustus to restore order in public worship and to give to the new order the consecration of religion, and we have noted the steps taken against the intrusion of alien cults within the old area of the city. We have now seen how the instinct making for ruler­worship was used and regulated. Our next task is to consider a matter of permanent importance in the religious history of the Empire, the obligations and freedom of Roman citizens in their relations to the gods of the State and to other gods. So far as we can see, no obligation whatever rested on the private individual. In 42 all citizens were compelled to celebrate the birthday of the deified Julius, wearing laurel and showing joy; but that was a political demonstration. Later, acts of disrespect to Imperial statues could fall under the charge of maiestas and this category of indictable acts was capable of extension by prosecutors who had a desire to obtain a share of their victim’s goods: a wise Emperor like Tiberius restrained this tendency. On the other hand, an official position imposed certain obligations. A Roman magistrate had religious duties to perform. We have no indication of what would have happened had he refused, and the case no doubt did not arise: we hear of a prosecution of Aemilius Scaurus in 104 BC “because by his neglect many sacra of the Roman people had suffered”, but the prosecution took the form of an indictment by a tribune before the people and it is clear that there was no regular procedure provided for the contingency. Any dignitary who belonged to the Emperor’s entourage would be obliged to attend religious functions. Again, a decuria in a municipality had religious duties, such as filling the office of flamen, hence Jews were exempt from the obligation of holding the office. But in private life the occasions for any sort of issue of irreligion being raised were very few; a husband might be moved to take steps if his wife became a Jewish proselyte, or the former owner of a slave if his freedman refused to take his part in family rites. Again, an inheritance often carried with it the obligation of maintaining certain sacra traditional in a gens, and they were in effect a charge upon the estate. Neglect of them was a breach of fas. It involved social disapprobation and the risk of degradation by the censors, but could not apparently lead to a prosecution, at least not in the period which we know. Even perjury was regarded as a matter which it lay with the gods to avenge, except in cases where the oath was taken by the Emperor’s genius and could be construed as maiestas.

Criminal law had no wide category of laesa religio or sacrilegium. Apart from proceedings against Christians as described by their own writers, sacrilegium is applied only to overt acts of sacrilege in the modern sense, laesa religio and its synonyms to similar acts or again to the profanation of the ceremony of the Bona Dea by Clodius (and there a special quaestio had to be constituted on the motion of a tribune); Augustus regarded adultery by members of his own family as falling under the rubric of laesae religiones. If Horace had carried to its logical conclusion his policy of being partus deorum cultor et infrequens no action could have been taken against him, and Tertullian’s statement, sed apud vos quodvis colere ius est praeter deum verum, represents a general rule to which there are only certain specific exceptions.

These exceptions rest either on enactments of the Senate or People or on the exercise by magistrates of their general police jurisdiction or coercitio: they are not initiated by the Pontifex Maximus. A magistrate had in virtue of his imperium an extensive power of giving orders to citizens and an even more extensive power of giving orders to non-citizens. Disobedience was commonly punishable even though the action which had been commanded was in no sense a normal obligation. Again, measures might be taken against any who appeared by their action to be exciting the popular mind or in danger of disturbing public order. The classic example is the suppression of the Bacchanalia in 186 BC Livy represents the consul as referring on this occasion to the frequency with which the magistrates had been charged to prohibit foreign rites, to ban sacrificers and soothsayers from the forum, to gather together and to burn books of prophecy, to abolish every mode of sacrificing other than the Roman3. Again, in 139 BC the Jews in Rome were banished for “attempting to corrupt Roman morals by the cult of Juppiter Sabazius”. It is the proselytizers not the proselytes who are the object of attack. In general, religious professionals, like magicians and astrologers, and occasionally philosophers, were liable to be attacked in this way. It must be remembered that the lay character of most official priesthoods left a wide range of emotional needs to be satisfied by unofficial professionals. The great majority of these professionals would be non-citizens, and the legal rights of aliens who were not men of substance were somewhat tenuous in practice. There was of course nothing to prevent a man from having an image of Isis in his lararium, or frequenting a temple outside the mile limit, and we know that the temples were frequented. It is as in Spain under the old regime, when synagogues and Protestant churches might not be built in the main streets. The Romans indeed gave privileges to synagogues, but that was a measure necessitated in the main by the anti-Semitism of Alexandria and of other Greek cities and by the desirability of avoiding the disorders which might arise if it was not officially restrained, partly also by the State’s insistence on its control over the formation of associations, partly by the need of protecting Jews against capricious interference by governors of provinces.

With the beliefs of subject races Augustus interfered very little. If he forbade Roman citizens to take part in Druidical worship, his purpose was political: to withdraw Gauls who had received the citizenship from a strongly nationalist influence. True, among foreign worships he had his preferences; he was initiated at Eleusis, refused to visit the Apis calf which appeared in Egypt during his presence there, and praised Gaius Caesar for not going to the Temple at Jerusalem. But he left, for example, Jewish privileges untouched. Their places of worship were protected from robbery, their sacred books or moneys from theft, and they were given free right to send offerings to Jerusalem. Where Rome interfered, it was in matters of mundane consequence. The right of temples in Egypt to afford sanctuary to criminals and runaway slaves was controlled but not abolished. Finance came very largely into the hands of the civil administration, for what may be called a national church had political significance, and the financial official in charge of the treasury department called the Idios Logos acquired perhaps as early as Augustus a considerable measure of control. This authority showed itself in the supervision of the personnel, even in such details as the fining of a priest who wore woollen clothing or allowed his hair to grow. The princess was to the clergy Pharaoh and is represented as completing or restoring temples1, whether he really did or is so shown in obedience to convention, but in Egypt he was the stepfather of his people. The Pharaonic equivalent of ‘Caesaropapism’ may have meant little enough to the Ptolemies but it was a theory for their kingdom; to the Roman rulers any such shows were no more than survivals.

But, in this as in other matters, Egypt remained a country apart, and in general religion was left to itself. At the same time the Empire was bound to make a difference. To the religious life of the East Rome brought nothing new but the substitution of the cult of the Emperor for that of earlier kings and the introduction of the Capitoline cultus of the Roman military colonies. The claims of the older culture were not challenged. But the West took the culture which the Empire brought as a superior thing and hastened to assimilate its gods to those of Rome. Though such names as Epona persisted, native gods in countless instances appeared as Mars or Mercury. This was a spontaneous development, promoted above all by the imposing temples and monuments built by the conquerors and by the influence of Latin literature. Thus in later times Latin was the only language of Christian liturgy in the West, while the East came to use its several vernaculars.

Augustan policy was followed or even exaggerated by Tiberius. This we see above all in the matter of ruler-worship, which was naturally the matter most in question under the early Principate. Suetonius says of Tiberius (Tib. 26):

“He forbade the decreeing to himself of temples, flamines and priests, and even of statues and representations without his permission, and he permitted them only on the condition that they should be set, not among the images of the gods, but among the decorations of the temple. He forbade men from swearing allegiance to his acta and from naming the month September Tiberius and October Livius”.

This represents the Emperor’s personal preferences. In AD 23 he allowed the province of Asia to build a temple, erected in due course at Smyrna, to himself, Livia and the Senate. There the tradition was old, and it was hardly worthwhile to oppose it. But in 25 when the Spanish province of Baetica proposed to build a temple to Livia and himself he refused. We find municipal priests of Tiberius in many places and Dio says of the time at which Sejanus was powerful that men sacrificed to his images just as to those of Tiberius. What Suetonius records represents the wishes of the princeps, as expressed when a community asked his permission to establish a particular form of cult, the intention being no doubt the advertisement of their loyalty. How he answered on such occasions we know from an inscription of AD 15 or 16, parts of which are found on two stones at Gythium in Laconia. The first stone prescribes that the ephors are to provide eikones—probably representations on painted panels for the wall of the stage or the orchestra—of Augustus, Tiberius, and Livia which the agoranomoi are to place in the theatre. Incense is to be offered in the theatre and a bull sacrificed in the Caesareum for the welfare of the rulers and there are to be six days of theatrical celebrations, one for each of the Imperial personages named, a fourth for the Victory of Germanicus, a fifth for the Aphrodite of Drusus, a sixth for Titus Quinctius Flamininus. The second stone begins by naming penalties for any one who proposes the violation of a cult, pre­sumably Imperial, and then gives a letter of Tiberius.

“The envoy Decimus Varius Nicanor, who was sent by you to me and my mother, gave me your letter, to which were appended the provisions made by you for the worship of my father and for our honour. I applaud your intentions and think that all men in general and your city in particular ought to reserve special honours suited to the greatness of my father’s services to the whole universe; for myself I am contented with more modest and human honours. However my mother will give you an answer when she knows your decision about the honours to be paid to her.”

Since the texts appear thus on two stones, it is impossible to prove that the town of Gythium did not first pass a lex sacra which instituted direct worship of Tiberius and Livia and ended with the sanctions, and then, on receipt of the Emperor’s letter, pass a second law, the one which is preserved. But if the town was making the validity of the law depend on Tiberius’ approval we should expect it to end with provisions for the sending of the ambassador. It seems safe, therefore, to suppose that one law only was passed and a copy of it sent to Rome as a demonstration of loyalty. In that case it is the very modest provisions of the extant lex sacra which the princeps courteously deprecates. The attitude of Livia to the proposals, if not also that of Tiberius to Livia, remains enigmatic.

A striking illustration of the spontaneity of this attitude and of the official reaction to it is afforded by an edict issued by Germanicus to the Alexandrians during his stay early in AD 191. He thanks them for their goodwill but says:

“I altogether deprecate those acclamations of yours which are invidious to me and put me on a level with deity, for they are appropriate only to him who is really the saviour and benefactor of the whole human race—my father, and to his mother, who is my grandmother. All that is mine is but a reflection of their divinity. Wherefore, if you do not obey me, you will compel me not to appear before you often”.

The natural inference from the phrasing is that the acclamations were simply saviour and benefactor, which, little as Germanicus may have known it, were readily given even to less exalted personages.

In other respects the policy of Tiberius conformed to that of Augustus. The rights of some Hellenic temples to grant asylum were examined and curtailed by senatorial decrees. In Egypt he, like Augustus and like his successors, is represented in temple relief (as for instance at Dendera and Philae) as making offerings to local deities: this again may either correspond to fact or purely to a convention. Oriental cults at Rome were sometimes visited with his displeasure. In AD 19 an eques Decius Mundus gained his way with one Paulina, a devotee of Isis, priests of the goddess being bribed to inform her that Anubis wished for her company. The woman’s credulity, not wholly shared by her friends, was later undeceived, and the princeps, being informed, crucified the priests, destroyed the temple, and had the image of Isis thrown into the river. In the same year a Roman matron Fulvia was persuaded to send a purple robe and gold to the temple of Jerusalem. The four Jews who persuaded her, appropriated the offerings, and, on the information of her husband, the Emperor expelled the race of Jews from Rome. Four thousand of them were enlisted for military service in Sardinia and recalcitrants were executed. Early in his reign there were decrees for the expulsion of ‘ Chaldaeans,’ astrologers, diviners and the like, an act of State by an Emperor who was himself a devoted student of the art, since the days when he was convinced of the powers of its notable professor Thrasyllus, so much so that he is believed to have been logical enough to be careless about the gods and religious exercises.

In contrast to Tiberius, Gaius abandoned the Augustan wariness towards Oriental cults. It was in his reign that the Isiac festival was established in Rome and, if we may trust Josephus, the princeps himself donned female garb and took part in mysteries which he instituted.

This conduct belongs to the period in which Gaius had broken with tradition. He started conventionally by proposing that Tiberius should be deified. The resentment of the senatorial class caused this to fall through, but Gaius as master of the Arvai Brothers sacrificed in his memory on 25 May 38. Earlier in 37 he had dedicated the shrine of Augustus built by Tiberius. As for personal worship he started by forbidding images of himself and requesting the annulment of a decree ordering sacrifices to his Fortune. But honours were heaped on him because of his popularity: the day of his accession, March 18, was called the Parilia and treated as a refounding of Rome. When his sister Drusilla died in 38 she was consecrated by the Senate and given a priesthood and two images, one in the temple of Venus Genetrix, equal in size to that of Venus, another in the Curia; her birthday was made a public holiday on a par with the Megalesia and she was made the deity for women’s oaths. Here, also, apotheosis was justified by the statement of a senator that he had seen her ascending to heaven. Drusilla was given the name Panthea and was declared a worthy recipient of divine honours in all cities.

Presently Gaius began to seek the most manifest worship. It was perhaps in June 40 that being provoked by the fact that the Jews of Jamnia had destroyed an altar erected to him by the Gentile inhabitants of the city, he ordered a statue of Zeus with his own features to be placed in the Temple at Jerusalem. An embassy of Jews from Alexandria coming by reason of the troubles which started with the pogrom in 38 obtained a hearing, and were greeted with the words, “You are the wretches who do not believe that I am a god, although I am recognized as such among all the rest of mankind”. This formidable allocution was, however, followed by indulgence to such invincible ignorance. The order about Jerusalem was withdrawn and then again issued. Nor was it only Jewish susceptibilities that were shocked. Gaius is said to have appeared in the dress and with the insignia now of the Dioscuri, now of Dionysus, or again of Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Neptune, and even Juno, Diana, and Venus. Paeans were sung to him in his various divine characters. He gave orders—not put into effect—that the statue of Zeus at Olympia should be brought to Rome and have his head substituted for the original. He prolonged his palace to the Forum, turning the temple of Castor and Pollux into his vestibule: he appeared between the images of the twin gods to receive adoration; he uttered oracles from a lofty platform in the dress of Juppiter; he was hailed as Juppiter Latiaris. He instituted for his own godhead a special temple—Dio says two, one at the public expense, one on the Palatine at his own—and a priesthood and carefully thought out sacrifices. He invited the moon to his embraces; he spoke to Capitoline Juppiter as one god to another, and threw a bridge over from the palace to the Capitol and commenced the building of a new house on the Capitol; he sought to appropriate Apollo’s temple at Didyma (the truth being that he extended its asylum privileges by two miles and that a temple was built in his honour at Miletus by an association of Lovers of Augustus from the province as a whole); he set his daughter Drusilla on the knees of Capitoline Juppiter and gave her to Minerva to suckle.

Such is the tradition, which shows clear signs of exaggeration and sensationalism; but there is no doubt that Gaius received direct worship in Rome and it is possible that irritation with the Jews inspired him with the idea of this policy. Of the honours paid to Drusilla we have spoken. Livilla was honoured at Pergamum as a new Nikephoros, enthroned with Athena Polias and sharing a priest with her and Athena Nikephoros, but this is spontaneous and normal1. Even in this sphere the princeps showed his impulsive individuality. In 39, when he deported his surviving sisters to the Pontian islands, he forbade the awarding of honours to any of his relations.

The Jewish question and the question of ruler-worship were both raised before Claudius at the beginning of his reign. In 41 embassies from Alexandria evoked a letter addressed to that city. In his rescript he permits the keeping of his birthday as an Augustan day, and the setting, in the places specified, of statues of himself and of his family. He accepts a gold statue to Pax Augusta on condition that it shall be dedicated in Rome, but accepts the other statue offered, unfortunately without mentioning what it is (perhaps a statue of Messallina, perhaps one of himself), and certain other honours. A high priest and temple for himself he will not have, “For I do not wish to seem vulgar to my contemporaries and I hold that temples and the like have by all ages been attributed to the gods alone”. After handling certain Alexandrian questions, he comes to the question of responsibility for the trouble between the Jews and Greeks of that city and speaks in the tone of a magistrate who binds over both parties to keep the peace. It is plain that Claudius was not an anti-Semitist; the Imperial interest lay solely in the maintenance of order.

His reserve in the matter of ruler-worship is a reversion to tradition. It is no breach of it that he consecrated Livia in 41, a fact to which the dedication of an altar to Pietas Augusta perhaps alludes, or that a temple was erected to him at Camulodunum: it was a necessary means of romanization in a new province. Naturally the usual language of courtly flattery continued. The very governor who published the letter to the Alexandrians says in his preamble “that you may marvel at the greatness of our god Caesar”.  Scribonius Largus refers to him three times as deus noster Caesar, Seneca speaks of his divinae manus (similar phraseology had been applied to Tiberius and had excited his irony), Phaedrus of divina domus, and Seneca in his Consolatio ad Polybium refers to him as a saviour.

In other matters of religion Claudius returned to tradition and we see in what he did the work not only of the follower of Augustus, but also of the student of Roman and Etruscan history. His censorship of 47 was marked by special activity. In it he celebrated secular games in a year resting on calculations other than those of Augustus; he raised certain families to the patriciate in order to fill priestly offices; he also took steps to revive the Etruscan haruspices, always consulted in Republican times, denouncing in his speech thereon the encroachment of foreign rites. In 49 he celebrated the augurium Salutis and extended the pomerium. In his triumph over Britain in 44 he ascended the steps of the Capitol on his knees. He ordered an expiatory rite for the supposed incest of Silanus, he caused the praetor to announce public holidays on the occasion of earthquakes, and as pontifex maximus conducted an obsecratio when a bird of ill-omen was seen on the Capitol. He made treaties with the old fetial ceremony and always took an oath before co-opting priests. Motives of public convenience caused him in 43 to abolish many sacrifices and holidays, but that is fully in accordance with the Roman theory of the State’s powers, just as much as his addition to the Saturnalia in 45 of the fifth day designated by Gaius and then dropped. He put down Druidism because of its political danger, and urged that the ruined temple of Venus at Eryx be restored at the cost of the Aerarium.

It is not inconsistent with this policy that he thought of transferring the Eleusinian mysteries to Rome, for, as we have seen, Augustus like many other conservative Romans had been initiated at Eleusis, and the identification of Demeter with Ceres might make the action appear to be no more than the addition of a foreign ceremony to this old cult. Nor is there any inconsistency in his introduction of the festival of Attis, a naturalized and romanized Attis, to be sure, for the position of archigallus now became a dignified priesthood held by a citizen and not a eunuch, not only in Rome but perhaps also in Pessinus. The motives are not hard to find. In the Augustan age the emphasis laid on the Trojan origins of Rome in general and the Julian family in particular led to an emphasis on Cybele, and among the temples which Augustus restored was that of the Magna Mater on the Palatine: Claudius had perhaps a personal interest in the cult because of the legend of the part played by Claudia Quinta in the arrival of the goddess at Rome. It is in no sense a surrender to the East. It is notable that, in the Apocolocyntosis of Seneca, Claudius is introduced to Olympus not by Attis, who could have been made the subject of much wit (the servant of Agrippina introduced by the servant of Cybele), but by the archaic Diespiter.

In his speech on the revival of haruspices Claudius had deplored the strength of foreign superstition, and in 52 a decree of the Senate was passed to expel astrologers from Italy: it arose out of the prosecution of Furius Scribonianus for having enquired into the time at which the Emperor would die. In 53, when Statilius Taurus was put on his trial before the Senate, the charges of extortion were aggravated by an allegation of magic superstitions. This statement would normally relate to something of the sort (just as in 66, when Soranus was accused of treason, his daughter was put on trial for having spent money on magicians: she had sought by their aid to find how her house would fare and whether Nero would be appeased). It has however been connected with the discovery of an underground place of worship near the Porta Maggiore in Rome on ground which has been thought to fall within the gardens of the Statilii. The symbolism of the remarkable stuccoes with which it is decorated appears to point to the idea of the liberation of the soul from the body and it is likely that the sect which used this chapel was Neopythagorean. Those who were devoted to its teachings were particularly liable to be suspected of magic.

Claudius on his accession at once restored the Jewish immunities withdrawn by Gaius but in the same year, in view of their increase in numbers in Rome, he forbade them to hold meetings, disbanding also the active associations which Caligula had allowed to form anew. In 49 he banished from Rome the Jews who “at the instigation of Chrestus continually raised tumults”. It is possible that the tumults in question arose from the presence among the Roman Jews of some who maintained not only that a Messiah had appeared and would shortly return to inaugurate the New Age but probably—what was far worse—that Gentiles might be admitted to table-fellowship without submitting to circumcision.

The death of Claudius was promptly followed by his deification. A clever skit by Seneca parodies the procedure (the witness of the ascent to heaven and the senatorial decision on the merits of the case), but is no more to be taken as an attack on the institution than are mediaeval parodies like the Evangelium secundum marcas on the New Testament. We hear now of Sodales Augustales Glaudiales, of a flamen and flaminica. The honours to Claudius were later neglected by Nero and revived by Vespasian: a temple was commenced by Agrippina on the Caelian but “almost completely destroyed by Nero”, probably in connection with the construction of the distributing section of the Aqua Claudia which Nero extended to the Caelian. The new régime was in general normal and the new Emperor concerned to honour the memory of Augustus. In 54 the Senate, in order to compliment the young Emperor on the measures taken to meet the Eastern situation, voted that a representation of him should be set in the temple of Mars Ultor and should be as large as the cult image of the god. There is no statement that worship should be paid to it, and as late as 65, when Nero’s megalomania had fully developed, he refused the proposal that a temple should be built at public expense to Divus Nero; the omen was unpropitious. He called April Neroneus, but for this he had precedents, as also for the consecration of his dead child by Poppaea and of Poppaea herself. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that, as the reign proceeded, a tendency towards the deification of the Emperor as ruler of the world became more and more marked, even when allowance is made for the traditional element in the writings of poets and the decrees of the Greek communities. Nero ended by going beyond precedent in the erection of a colossus of the Sun with his own features in front of the Golden House, in his representation with a radiate crown on coins, and in the depicting of himself driving a chariot among the stars on the hangings over the theatre in 66.

Suetonius says of Nero that he disregarded all religious sanctities save that of the Dea Syria and even her he subsequently despised, cleaving only to his devotion to the image of a girl given him by a plebeian as a talisman against conspiracies just after receiving it he discovered one and sacrificed to the image three times a day. There is, however, an interesting record of the impression made on him and on society in general by the visit of Tiridates in 66. He was strictly religious and had brought Magi with him, and he even initiated Nero in their ritual forms. This should mean that Tiridates allowed Nero to be present at a Persian communion—such as we know not only in Persia but also in South Russia. Pliny further suggests that Nero made experiments in necromancy. It appears that he was possessed by the religious inquisitiveness common in the age. Like Tiberius he had an astrological confidant, Ti. Claudius Balbillus, perhaps the man whom we know as prefect of Egypt.

Under Claudius the phenomenon of Christianity was hardly known as a thing apart from Judaism. About the beginning of Nero’s reign a Roman citizen named Paul, who had become involved in a riot at Jerusalem, insisted on his right of being heard by the Emperor. The charge against him was probably sedition, lying in the cause of a riot by the introduction of Gentiles into the Temple and perhaps aggravated by an insult to the high priest in the Sanhedrin: in the interests of peace the Romans were willing to sacrifice individuals to Jewish susceptibilities. The case was not heard for two years. The result may have been an acquittal or a collapse of proceedings owing to the failure of the accusers to appear. The value of the tradition that Paul lived to visit Spain and was executed in the troubles arising out of the fire of Rome in 64 cannot be determined with certainty. The persecution that followed the great fire shows Christianity as a known mass movement in Rome. After the fire supplications of the traditional type were held to the gods. Whatever be the precise interpretation of the narrative of Tacitus, it must imply that the existence of Christians in Rome was well known, as was indeed natural, for inasmuch as the ancients read less than we do, they talked even more, and oral information spread rapidly, and we know from the Epistle to the Philippians (IV, 22) that adherents of the new movement were to be found in the service of the Emperor in Rome. However little credence we may attach to the sug­gestion of Nero’s responsibility for the fire, it is clear that public opinion would demand scapegoats. Here as on previous occasions we see that special charges were needed to inspire action against the members of a particular sect. There is an apparent exception in 57 when Pomponia Graecina was accused of externa superstitio and left to her husband’s judgment, who acquitted her. The gravamen of the charge may really have been adultery (we could have imagined such a charge against Paulina). It is hard to see why she was accused (Paulina or Fulvia had not been), unless perhaps the senatus consultum passed under Tiberius could still be invoked1. It is notable that Paul when in libera custodia at Rome was not prevented from teaching those who came to him. Certainty is not attainable, but it is likely that under Nero the name of Christian became punishable though the matter remained legally indefinite: so much may be deduced from Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan (Book X, Epp. 96—7), and from Tertullian’s statements.

VI.

PERSONAL RELIGION

In considering personal religion we must begin with Rome, for Rome was now not merely the capital of the world of the time but also the centre in which intellectual religious and artistic movements converged. We know its atmosphere well from Augustan art and literature. We have seen their glorification of the new order: we may now remark on their strong emotional attachment to the rustic worships of Italian country life. Behind this last there lies an Alexandrian tradition partly due to the new life in great cities. But the worships were in fact alive, as we see in later dedications by soldiers, and they were the worships of the milieu from which the poets themselves came. It is something more than a convention which prompts Virgil’s passionate outburst, “Blessed is he who has won to the heart of the universe: he is beyond good and evil. But that is too much for ordinary humanity to attain: it is a very good second best to know the gods of the country, to live the life of the country”. The same spirit appears in Horace’s praise of the simple piety of Phidyle, in the prayers of Tibullus to the gods of his home, in Propertius’ picture of the old rite at Lanuvium, in passages of the Fasti.

The poets know the new Oriental cults, above all that of Isis, as the favourite devotion of their mistresses from the demi-monde. Ovid betrays a certain fascination for the exotic; he prays to Isis, not to Lucina, to help Corinna in her travail, and he attaches to Isis and tells as a miracle of hers the story of Telethusa. But these things, like the more influential phenomenon of astrology and like magic, are foreign to the educated as a class. In the Campana reliefs, belonging to this period, and in the stuccos of the Casa Farnesina there are numerous representations of scenes relating to the old-established Dionysiac and Eleusinian rites, but only very rare representations of Egyptian priestly figures, and they need not mean more than the commoner scenes of Nile life, which had then something of the interest which China possessed for Europeans of the eighteenth century. Again, Egyptian subjects are not common on the popular Arretine pottery.

Religious tendencies lay in the sphere of feeling, not of thought. The Augustan age in Rome is not one of creative religious thought, not one of creative thought in any sphere, but one of action and of feeling. The ideas with which men operate are inherited—Stoic, Epicurean, Neopythagorean. Both Horace and Virgil start from Epicureanism. Virgil’s old self breaks out in Dido’s cry, scilicet is superis labor est, ea cura quietos sollicitat; but it is mastered by the emotional values of Stoic-Platonic mysticism and by a conviction in Providential over-ruling, a conviction caused by the Augustan bringing of order out of chaos, which seemed to supply a reason which Cicero lacked for belief in a supernatural system—for it is that and not the mythology, always lightly held or allegorically interpreted, which is at stake. Some such change of mood is in­dicated by the ode of Horace which describes his conversion by a thunderclap out of a clear sky. We have seen earlier how he gave expression to the religious and moral ideas of the Augustan order in his Odes but even in them he sounds like a man who is repeating a lesson which he is trying to make himself believe, and his self-revelation in the Epistles shows him as one who thinks that in face of the uncharted there is nothing to do except to concentrate on the preservation of a calm and dignified attitude. This point of view looks purely intellectual, but it also contains a strong element of emotion—on the one hand, the feeling that certain practices and attitudes are Roman and worthy, certain others are un-Roman and contemptible, on the other hand, the distinction of religio and superstitio. This was philosophic in origin (in fact Academic), but had come to be a matter of class feeling, found outside speculative circles; in the beautiful eulogy on Turia we read that she was religious without superstition.

The feeling for rustic piety and for the past, as we see it in the sceptical Livy, was not confined to court circles. If we look at the mural paintings which in Pompeii correspond to our wall papers we find as the commonest scene of all a rustic shrine with a sacred tree in an enclosure. Cult was around you at every point; the possibility of its abandonment did not occur to you. Every city had its temples, every house its lararium. Horace’s concept of eternity is

                   dum Capitolium

scandit cum tacita virgine pontifex.

And around cult there was now for many this emotional atmosphere which prepared the way for the piety of the Antonine age just as Gothic romanticism prepared the way for the Catholic revival of De Maistre and Montalembert. In any case rationalism was something superimposed, something a little on its defence. Religion, or we should rather say cult—which is what it was—was a fact of life, philosophy was an interpretation.

In society outside the ruling classes—the society from which the ruling classes of the Flavian and later ages came—there were fewer intellectual and aristocratic inhibitions on belief. The Egyptian cults made a more direct appeal to human emotion and won many adherents, though it would be a mistake to suppose that they bulked as large as older worships even in these circles. Again, astrology revolutionized the world in which lived men with no tincture of philosophy by bringing them for the first time in touch with universals. The declamations of philosophers and satirists against superstitio bring home to us the fact that they and their class felt themselves to be, as indeed they were, a very small minority surrounded by multitudes believing in strange miracles, in unreasonable vows and penances, in a supernatural with which you could strike amoral bargains. In his self-examination Horace asks, “Do you laugh at dreams, at terrors inspired by magic, at wonders, at witches, at bogies by night, at Thessalian portents?”, and the question is put on a par with questions on fundamental human values.

The same division into an intellectual aristocracy and the masses we find in the Greek world of the time. On the one hand, there are philosophers carrying on the traditions of their schools, adapting them in a measure to the needs of the time by an em­phasis on ethics rather than on metaphysics. Polemic has waned with the waning of the hope of new truth. Between Posidonius and Neoplatonism there is no fresh impulse and little if any experimental investigation, but in their place a consciousness of

Dipping buckets into empty wells

And growing old with drawing nothing up.

The result is commonly a detached theism with an interest in faits divers—such as we find in Strabo. The only strong desire in philosophy at this time is the desire to supply men with a reasoned way of life. Stoicism gave this with its concept of life in accordance with nature, with its idealization of the acceptance of Fate, with its doctrine of duties. Epicureanism gave it with its ideal of the joy of a great simplification of life. The Cynics who preached to all and sundry offered the ideal of freedom, of the breaking of those undue attachments to rank or possessions which make men weak and afraid. The Neopythagoreans held up the possibility of life in a brotherhood with an other-worldly theology, and the hope that by discipline and prayer and sacrifice the soul might here in part and hereafter wholly be freed from the trammels of the body. All of them made their adherents, but all of them preached to a tired world.

The masses went on in the old way, using Greek or Oriental cults which promised security, going to civic temples, and also joining private associations which saved them from their dread of loneliness. There was here the possibility of new development, when the speculative and ethical interests of philosophy fused with popular religion. Of the incoming of ethical interests, perhaps coloured by Neopythagoreanism, we have a striking example in the ordinances of a private shrine of the Phrygian goddess Agdistis (with altars of other deities) at Philadelphia in Lydia, probably founded not later than the beginning of the first century before our era:

“Let men and women, slave and free, when coming into this shrine swear by all the gods that they will not deliberately plan any evil guile or baneful poison against any man or woman: that they will neither know nor use harmful spells: that they will neither turn to nor recommend to others nor have a hand in love-charms, abortives, contraceptives, or doing robbery or murder.... Let not woman or man who does the aforementioned acts come into this shrine: for in it are enthroned mighty deities, and they take notice of such offences, and will not tolerate those who transgress their commands... These commands were set beside Agdistis, the most holy guardian and mistress of this shrine. May she put good intentions in men and women, free and slave alike, that they may abide by what is here inscribed; and may all men and women who are confident of their uprightness touch this writing, which gives the commandments of the god, at the, monthly and at the annual(?) sacrifices in order that it may be clear who abides by them and who does not O Saviour Zeus, hear our words, and give us a good requital, health, deliverance, peace, safety on land and sea”.

For the fusion of philosophy with religion we may point further to the Neopythagorean movement in general. It seems to have absorbed what survived of Orphism and to have made Orphic literature its own and to have produced more of it. A doctrine of hidden affinities led easily to an interest in magic, and the opponents of the school charged it with necromancy. When we look at the collections of magical processes which survive in papyri of the third and fourth centuries AD, we find in them large elements which bear the marks of ultimate provenance from circles culturally far higher than the. classes then mainly served by the practitioners who owned these manuals. There are hymns very much like the Orphic hymns in style and thought, directions for bloodless sacrifice, and rites originally intended to secure direct communion with the Sun god. The first extant ancient author who is familiar with these processes, as distinct from the older Greek magic, is Lucan. It is likely that Neopythagoreans are, in fact, responsible for some at least of the adaptation of Egyptian practice (e.g. threats to the gods) and Jewish exorcism. Certainly we know that the famous Neopythagorean Nigidius had some acquaintance with Persian eschatological speculation1. The full development of this process of fusion falls later in the first century and in the second century AD, but we cannot deny the possibility of development within our period.

The new growth is due to certain psychological needs. The men of the Graeco-Roman world of this time were not oppressed by a sense of sin or a fear of demons. These are in general the product of the ‘theologies’ which offer an antidote. The majority of men were probably in an unreflective way content with traditional practice and unquestioning. Those whose needs were responsible for new creations were harassed, not by these troubles, but by a feeling of resentful helplessness in face of the order of Fate, written in or established by the stars, by an uncertainty as to the hereafter, and by a general inquisitiveness as to the supernatural. Hence arose a desire for security here and hereafter and a desire for some sort of revelation. These desires were met by a rise in the importance of initiatory sacraments, which gave a revelation and a new status to the initiate by some rebirth or reconstitution, also by the growth of small private mysteries, such as those of Hecate associated with the so-called Chaldaic oracles, and by the production of revelation literature claiming to come from Orpheus or Zoroaster or Thrice Greatest Hermes, the Egyptian god Thoth. Here we see the root-idea of gnosis, special revelation, special knowledge of the nature of man’s soul and of the hereafter. The psychological factors which produced it led many to Judaism, which had a clear-cut theistic scheme of the universe and which in its synagogue worship had—what was then in religion unique—the sermon. Not a few Gentiles, some men and more women (who had not to face circumcision), became proselytes, that is to say naturalized Jews, others became Sebomenoi, that is to say that they worshipped in the synagogue and observed the commands which were held by Judaism to be binding on all humanity alike, others again became Hypsistarioi, that is to say that they practised, perhaps by themselves, a sort of Judaizing monotheism which was not wholly exclusive of Gentile elements.

Those who followed any of these paths had a definite belief as to the hereafter. Others, in general, vacillated between a conviction that the grave was the end and vague ideas derived from that Orphic picture of heaven and hell which had become common property. The most confident hope of bliss existed among Dionysiac initiates, and the symbolism of the hereafter on funerary monuments is largely Dionysiac in character, as earlier in Etruscan tomb paintings. For the educated in general the prospect was pulvis et umbra sumus, with a mental reservation that Plato’s myths might be true.

For the moods of the latter part of the period, again, we have excellent literary evidence. Petronius depicts for us the freedman life of an Italian coast town, its bourgeois feeling for the good old days of piety—the Augustan attitude has had time to work down through the social scale—its belief and superstition and disillusion; he parodies also the private mysteries of the time in his allusion to certain rites of Priapus: “the secrets of so many years, which barely a thousand men know”. Seneca is a man whose youthful acquaintance with the philosopher Sotion and the Sextii had the emotional character of a religious experience. In the years of his exile and of his subsequent power he was a literary man with an ideal standard which was not the less real if it was at times inevitably compromised. On his retirement from public life he again turned to vie interieure: he read busily, he heard the lectures of Metronax, and he sought to communicate to his friend Lucilius those teachings thanks to which he felt himself to be passing through a transformation. Philosophy is, he says, the great rite of initiation, giving admission to the great temple of the universe. With an evangelical fervour like Epicurus, whom he had at this time read closely, and to whom letters I-XXIX are greatly indebted in form as well as in substance, he holds that the liberal arts, grammar and geography and the interpretation of poetry and even the abstrusities of metaphysics are a snare. Man’s business is with the art of living: non in dialectica Deo comflacuit salwtm facere populum suum, he could say as well as St Ambrose. The good life means an avoidance of luxury and vice and superstition, and a whole-hearted acceptance of that which the world order has provided for us to do and to suffer; ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt. To the attainment of this good life one must devote all one’s energies, abandoning if it must be public duties, however important, that the soul may receive individual attention. This attitude rests on an ethical theism with a deep feeling of the opposition of the body to the soul; there is the possibility of a happy immortality for the virtuous, but it is only an accidental possibility, and popular religion is rejected as unworthy.

The contemporary antithesis of Seneca is M. Annaeus Cornutus, a Stoic active in Rome under Claudius and Nero. Cornutus wrote on the categories, on rhetoric, on spelling, on the exegesis of Virgil; he was devoted to those very liberal arts which Seneca condemned. We learn from a fragment that he taught the annihilation of the soul at death. We know him best from a treatise which professes to be an abridgement of the treatment of Greek theology by older philosophers, and handles the various deities, explaining their names in the way of ancient etymology which regarded a name rightly interpreted as containing the essential nature of a person or thing: myths and attributes also are allegorically explained as referring to physical phenomena. This jejune proceeding is animated by an excursus with a comparative point of view, maintaining that there lies behind all mythology a primitive wisdom which has been covered over by fiction, a view carefully to be distinguished from the theory that the whole is veiled wisdom. We see at the end how serious this is to Cornutus. He writes, he says, in order that the young may be taught to worship aright in piety and not in superstition. The divergence of his point of view from Seneca’s is clear, and we are told that his pupil Persius was long before he made the acquaintance of Seneca and was not captivated by his intellect.

Yet Persius shows us how moving even the teaching of so seemingly arid a philosopher could be. The satires of Persius, while preserving the form of Lucilius and Horace, are heavily weighted with morality: several of them are Stoic sermons—the second, for instance, against superstition, a topic common in satire but particularly congenial to the pupil of Cornutus. The fifth depicts in the most moving terms what the writer’s discipleship had meant to him. At the critical time of the first liberty of manhood, says Persius, I put myself under your direction and you straightened out my knotted soul. The resultant product is, after all, what Seneca would have desired.

One more figure of the period may be named in conclusion—Lucan. He died young, and in the poem which he has left we find a monotonous if powerful Stoicism which sounds like a clique but does at times fascinate him as it were against his will. He has a host of references to religious ideas and practices regarded as faits divers, and incidentally a remarkable knowledge of magic: his attitude like that of Tacitus later is one of interested pessimism. The quality common to all these men—except Petronius, who is a good detached onlooker—is a certain emphasis on the signifi­cance of the individual’s conduct1. Whether this conduct is viewed from the standpoint of the beau geste or of the Stoic idea of duty makes little difference. In either case there is the same feeling of tension, the same theatricality. The Stoic suicides in Tacitus, like the death of Vulteius in Lucan, are vigorous demonstrations on the stage of the universe. They are pieces of acting which serve no purpose except the vindication of a principle or an attitude, the giving of examples to others who will be in like case, and the escaping of that oblivion which to the men of this time seemed so terrible. Their thinkers seek to justify two non-rational convictions, that “let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die” is an inadequate formula, and that man matters in the universe and even to the universe; they seek to do this without at the same time surrendering to popular religion. The conviction remains and the refusal to surrender remains for a time and in certain circles, till social changes and the pressure of external phenomena reduce and ultimately destroy the division between the intellectuals and the masses. Whether Time is or is not, as Sophocles says, a kindly god, he is not wholly unjust; the intellectualism which was thus superseded was in a measure arid, in a measure a thing of class feeling, “a small soul carrying a dead body”.

CHAPTER XVI

THE LITERATURE OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE