CHAPTER XII .

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PAGANISM IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

I.

 INTRODUCTION

 

THE interactions of Greek, Macedonian, and Oriental ways and institutions and their consequences for religion have already been described. There was give and take, but for a century and a half Hellenism predominated. Oriental, and above all Egyptian, cults reached Greece in considerable volume, but in hellenized forms, and they were incorporated within the native framework of religious organization. We may call this the first wave of Oriental cults, in contrast with what we shall call the second wave—the wave which came to the Latin-speaking world. The first wave lacks certain striking features of the second. Mithraism seems to have been absent, though indeed the Iranian rites from which it developed were practised here and there within Asia Minor; Zeus of Doliche was not known outside his native Commagene; the must indeed have existed, but was probably no more than a bull-chase followed by a solemn sacrifice; the priests of the Egyptian deities as established in Greek cities were commonly annual functionaries, comparable with the priests of Zeus and Apollo, and not a professional clergy with a distinctive character.

Oriental cults sometimes came to Greece as a result of political considerations, but in a far larger measure they were brought by soldiers, trading groups or individuals, and slaves: then they gained new adherents, not only among the unprivileged but also among citizens of distinction. We can suggest reasons why the ground thus gained was not lost. The traditional gods of the city-state might, like the city-state itself, appear old and weary. The novelty of the Oriental gods could be a virtue, and they might well appear less parochial and more adapted to men’s needs in the new world of dynasts, and in the still larger oikoumene and kosmos ruled by the decrees of Fate. They had also the prestige of the ancient East, and over and above this not only did their cult-dramas impress the eye and ear, but also their mythology echoed natural human emotions. Isis as wife and mother and widow, the mourning Attis, the young Adonis cut off in his prime—they need not avert their eyes, like Artemis, from the dying Hippolytus. The half-Oriental gods were credited with a great readiness to help their worshippers. They were epekooi ‘ready to aid,’ an epithet applied to them far mere frequently than to the Olympians.

New religious forces came into play, and new religious forms were created. Nevertheless, the depth of the new development was not equal to its extension. Various reasons for this may occur to us. First, we have to reckon with the religious education which the average citizen underwent: as boy, as ephebe and as adult, he performed many functions in civic ritual, and they set their mark on him. Secondly, rulers rarely sought to make innovations in religion. Thirdly, the political world in which a man lived was not, as later under Roman rule, a large entity with a widespread social stratification, but an aggregate of civic and regional units. You were not a subject of a Seleucid or Ptolemaic empire; you were a citizen of Alexandria or Antioch, or a member of a Syrian politeuma, or a tribesman of the Trokondenoi. No centre sent forth impulses comparable with those to be exercised by Rome.

A static equilibrium was thus attained, more Hellenic in the older Greek cities, less Hellenic in the new Greek cities of Asia Minor and Syria, still less and sometimes progressively less Hellenic in the towns of the Fayum and of the eastern frontier. The preservation of this equilibrium in the older Hellenic area was further ensured by a decline in the infiltration of new population elements. Till the middle of the second century b.c. the older Greek cities had kept some significance in politics and in trade; then the change was rapid and complete.

Rome was in a large measure isolated from Hellenistic evolution until the time when she came to play an important and soon a predominant part in this Graeco-Oriental world. It was all very sudden. Foreign merchants increased in numbers, as it were overnight; slaves came in masses from successful wars; soldiers spent long years in distant lands and returned to Italy with new beliefs and practices. The privileged position enjoyed everywhere by Roman citizens, and even by non-Roman Italians greatly encouraged migration, and migrants were commonly exposed to new influences. Expansion and growth were in process or in prospect down to the end of the second century of our era. There was no chance of a static equilibrium; even Augustus could not achieve this, when he used his great skill to remedy the disintegration which came from wars and civil strife, from the resulting new wealth and new poverty, and from the new ways and new scepticism which had entered with such sudden violence.

The concentration of power at Rome caused her conquests to have domestic repercussions which had no analogy in Macedon, and the process of change was accelerated by various factors in the framework of Roman life.

Apart from domestic cult, Rome’s worships were the care of the State, and those of importance were controlled by permanent boards composed of citizens of the highest rank. While local parish worships were administered by annual boards of magistri consisting of freedmen and slaves, no one other than the nobiles and a few paid subordinates had any real function in the worship of the great gods of the State. Religio and pietas were in the air, but the Greek schooling of citizens, irrespective of wealth and standing, in civic religious tradition was absent. Secondly, the gods were more abstract. Thirdly, the lower orders were apt, when things were going ill in this world, to think that the community’s relations with the other world must be incorrect, and that something must be done to restore the pax dearum. The governing class met the situation by consulting Apollo, whether at Delphi or more often through the Sibylline Books, and incorporating one foreign cult after another in the worships of the State. Such cults were set under the care of the quindecimviri or commission for foreign worships, and, though fully incorporated in the Roman scheme, retained the Greek rite. Thus hymns to the Mother of the gods were sung in Greek. The hellenization or a worship was cultural; the romanization of a cult was political.

These measures met the needs of the moment, but did not transcend the limitations of official cult, and the urban proletariate was swelled by foreign elements. Its native members had not the Senate’s contempt for unregularized alien worships, and Oriental cults soon had many adherents among the plebs urbana. The ruling class felt otherwise, and interfered repeatedly, often on the pre­text of a fear, genuine or pretended, of immorality arising out of secret rites, sometimes from a feeling that the solidarity of the State was menaced.

 

II.

OFFICIAL RELIGION

 

In a review of the attitude to religion of the Empire, as an institution, the character of official policy, in its varying phases of change and conservatism, requires definition. It is, indeed, governed by the princeps, as pontifex maximus, as member of all the priestly colleges, and as responsible for public morals and well-being. We learn it in the main from temple-foundations, from coin-types, from dedications by the princeps or the Arval Brothers, and from the actions of the quindecimviri sacris faciundis. The rule of Augustus and of the Julio-Claudian dynasty continued and reinforced mos maiorum as understood by the more serious spirits of the last generation of the Republic, but could not change existing trends except by adding the new religious sentiment towards the princeps. Cybele was well established, before her cult was magnified by Claudius: the cult-drama of Osiris was perhaps introduced at Rome under Gaius and Egyptian cults were acceptable not only to the demi-monde of Rome and the men of Pompeii but also to farmers in Italy.

The advent to power of the Flavian dynasty marks a new epoch, for the new ruling class, recruited in a considerable measure from the Italian municipalities, was very different in composition from the Augustan nobiles and marked by a greater simplicity of living and a smaller degree of traditionalism. Sarapis was believed to have confirmed by miracle Vespasian’s claim to the throne, and the precinct of Isis, which he shared, perhaps since the time of Gaius, was placed upon coins. Domitian, although his personal devotion was to Minerva and Juppiter, reconstructed the temple in the Campus Martius after a fire and was a benefactor of the temple of Isis at Beneventum.

In the succeeding period, when the emperors were drawn from the Western provinces, Roman tradition was followed, and the rise to power of some individuals from the Near East had no striking consequences. Hadrian, whose rule marked an epoch in government and art, acted significantly when in building the temple of Venus and Roma he introduced the point of view of the provinces. His personal predilection was for classical Greek ideas; while his favourite Antinous was deified in Egyptian style as Osirantinous, Antinoupolis and the art-type of Antinous were Greek. Nevertheless, this did not change religious policy in Rome, where Hadrian restored many temples, and his successor Antoninus Pius was honoured ‘ob insignem erga caerimonias publicas curam ac religionem.’ At the end of this epoch Commodus shows the weakening of tradition, while the Historia Augusta, for what it is worth, stresses his irresponsibility and cruelty, and not his piety, when mentioning his interest in Mithraic and other Oriental rites, and the most notable feature of his coins is an obsession with Hercules. Nevertheless the coins do show novel concessions to alien religions.

The Severan dynasty brought more drastic changes than had the Flavian. Its members had policies, and, like Augustus, appreciated the support which writers could give. Temples were built in Rome to new gods—the African Bacchus and Hercules (who figure prominently on the coins commemorating the Secular Games of 204), Sarapis (on the Quirinal) and Dea Suria; the temple to the Carthaginian Caelestis, attested in 259, may well be due to Septimius Severus. Caracalla, who built the temple on the Quirinal, was known as ‘lover of Sarapis.’ Nevertheless, Roman feeling was not dead, and Elagabalus went too far when he glorified the fetich of Emesa and sought to mate it to Vesta and to make it the chief deity of the Roman world. He seems to have provoked even the champions of other non-Roman cults.

The Illyrian emperors stood for Rome: a peculiar devotion to Vesta in Roman dedications of their time is one index of the reaction, and the Decian libelli, which for the first time defined pagan loyalty, constitute another. Economic stringency curtailed expenditures on traditional worship, but this was not peculiar to such worship: throughout the Empire, dedications are very rare from the middle of the third century till the time of Diocletian.

Nevertheless, this period is marked by one innovation of the greatest importance—Rome had a Republican cult of Sol, but it had faded, and the importance of Sol in the City is due to Aurelian, who on his return from Syria built the great temple of Sol Invictus, introduced the celebration of his birthday (natalis Invicti) on December 25, and established the college of pontifices Solis. Liberal as Aurelian was to other cults in the City, he thus incorporated in Roman constitutional form emotions and ideas which had been constantly gaining in strength. It was a creative act, like the Ptolemaic creation of the cult of Sarapis: it made what was potentially a 'cosmopolitan religion, and it gave a new concentration and emphasis to official piety. Thereafter Sol was very prominent.

Diocletian’s main policy was Roman. While the Jovii and Herculii restored a temple at Carnuntum, probably in 307, d(eo) s(oli) i(nwicto) m(ithrae) favtori imperii svi, Diocletian and Maximian made a dedication at Aquileia deo soli and Diocletian built an Iseum and a Sarapeum in Rome; nevertheless the very titles Jovii and Herculii for the rulers, Jovia and Herculia for legions, show the Roman emphasis of dynastic policy. Of course paganism as a whole was strengthened and deliberately given shape (as above all by Maximinus Daia): the revival of private dedications may be ascribed partly to this, and partly (since it starts before the persecution) to improved economic conditions.

Let us now turn to the evidence of coins and medallions for alien cults. They cannot tell us the whole of official policy: we must not forget that, apart from the issue which shows the sisters of Gaius personified as Virtues, they give no sign of the eccentricities of that emperor. The Roman temple of Isis appears on coins of Vespasian, that of Sarapis and that of Cybele on those of Domitian. Attis is used by Hadrian, but only as a type for Phrygia: Isis and Sarapis are represented as welcoming Hadrian and Sabina, which is simply a record of their visit to Alexandria. Hadrian was interested in provinces and regions as entities, with their own traditions, as we see in his so-called ‘province’ series. Medallions of Hadrian, on the other hand, and of both Faustinas represent Isis, and medallions of Hadrian and of his wife Sabina show Cybele. So do medallions of Antoninus, the two Faustinas, and Lucilla; and Cybele assumes special importance in connection with the apotheosis of the elder Faustina, who is herself shown as riding, like the goddess, in a chariot drawn by lions. On some issues of this period Attis is associated with Cybele. These facts assume importance in view of the contemporary rise of the taurobolium. At the same time, while matri devm salvtari occurs on a consecration-coin of Faustina I and matri magnae on coins of Faustina II and Lucilla, legends naming the deities represented are otherwise lacking.

This fact adds significance to certain issues of Commodus. Not only is he, in 192, represented as faced by Sarapis and Isis and again as clasping hands with them over an altar, but, at about the same time, coins with a type of Cybele bear the legend matri dev(m) conserv. avg., and others showing Sarapis have serapidi conserv. avg. These have no parallel under any earlier princess. Contrast them with the conventional ivppiter conservator of 181 and 182. Even other legends of the end of Commodus’ principate, 1. o. m. sponsor, sec. avg. and iovi defens, salvtis avg., imply a new directness of concentration upon his person. Previous rulers had their divine protectors, but they would have shrunk from the explicit hero, commodiano, which appears in 190, and from the contemporary hero, com(iti), which is the forerunner of similar types on which Sol is the Imperial comrade. Again, iovi exsvp(erantissimo) in 186/7 and 188/9 implies the official recognition of a popular tendency to astral thought; other evi­dence records that Commodus named a month Exsuperatorius.

The coinage of Commodus, like his lite, may seem to betray an eccentric megalomania comparable with that of Gaius, and yet he prefigures the future. When we pass to the sturdy realism of Septimius Severus, his coins show a strong consciousness of his African origin. While the type of Dea Caelestis on his coins in 203/4 and Caracalla’s in 203 to 210 or thereabouts is associated with the legend indvlgentia avgg. in carth. and may be rightly regarded as no more than a religious symbol for Carthage, the appearance of Bacchus and Hercules with dis avspicibvs is significant, for they are clearly the African equivalents of those familiar gods. Their representation on coins commemorating the Secular Games of 204 means that the gods of the princeps ranked as gods of the Empire. Again, Septimius Severus, like Clodius Albinus (also an African), set saecvlvm frvgifervm on coins, and, though he never used the native type once employed by Albinus, this is no doubt the African god, a special interest of Albinus’ home, Hadrumetum. Caracalla has also a type of Ammon, widely worshipped in Africa, with the legend iovi victori : but, since the god had appeared on some small bronze coins struck by Marcus Aurelius at Caesarea in Cappadocia, the reason for his emergence here may be not Caracalla’s interest in Africa but his interest in Alexander the Great: other indications show that the Macedonian conqueror was again dominating men’s imaginations.

Sol without a legend was a Republican coin-type occasionally revived during the earlier Principate: sometimes he has the legend oriens and stands for the Eastern interests of a particular time, for instance Trajan’s. On the coins of Septimius he appears, and between 202 and 210 has the striking legend pacator orbis on issues of both Septimius and Caracalla: some of the latter’s, between 201 and 210, call him rector orbis: one of Geta’s appears to show him as in a special relationship to Sol. Such ideas were not wholly new, but their numismatic formulation anticipates the attitudes of Aurelian and of Constantine—the men with a mission and authority. This Imperial self-consciousness, in stronger men, was a major fact of history.

Cybele appears on Julia Domna’s coins from 193-6 with matri devm and matri magnae and Julia while still living was represented as Cybele. Cybele comes again on Caracalla’s coins of 213 (matri devm), and thereafter nearly drops out of the repertory of Roman types into which influential empresses had brought her. Isis is represented on coins of Julia Domna with the legend saecvli felicitas and on Caracalla’s coins of 215, where she is shown welcoming him—a transparent allusion to his visit to Alexandria. Sarapis (without name) is frequent on Caracalla’s probably contemporary issues, confirming the other evidence for his predilection.

In spite of Julia Domna’s connections with Emesa, nothing Syrian appears on the coinage till we come to Elagabalus. Elagabalus not only shows the sacred stone of Emesa on coins and medallions, but also uses the legends invictvs sacerdos avg., SACERD. DEI SOLIS ELAGAB., SANCT. DEO SOLI ELAGABAL., SOLI propvgnatori, svmmvs sacerdos avg. The literature has not exaggerated. In sharp contrast, Severus Alexander, while con­tinuing normal solar types, has otherwise a neutral coinage. The succeeding years offer us nothing for our present purpose save the combination of a solar type with aeternitas avg., aeternitati avg. under Gordian III, with aeternitas avg. and aetern. imper. under Philip; the (unnamed) appearance of Sarapison coins of Gordian III and Gallienus, one of whose medallions is inscribed serapidi comiti avg.; issues of Claudius Gothicus showing Sarapis, both alone and with Isis, and having in each case conser. avg.; issues of Claudius Gothicus showing Isis Faria with salvs avg. (a legend coupled also with an Apollo type), and a Cabirus with deo cabiro, which has been thought to refer to the repulse of the Gothic attack on Thessalonica, a seat of Cabiric cult.

Under Aurelian the pre-eminence of Sol, as the fountain-head of Imperial power, is strikingly illustrated by the coins and he is of course very often named. Sarapis, with the legend serapi (also sarapi, sarapidi) comiti avg., makes an appearance under Postumus; thereafter, except for two types of Maximinus Daia, one with genio avgvsti and the Genius holding a hand of Sarapis, the other with soli invicto and the sun holding a hand of Sarapis, Sarapis is absent till the time of Julian. The coinage of Diocletian and his associates is primarily interested in Juppiter, Hercules, Mars and Sol, and their medallions show a notable narrowing of the range of gods represented. Thereafter few gods survive save Sol, the god of transition, whom Constantine would couple with a Greek cross.

That is what the coins tell us; we never see on them Attis by himself or named, and never Juppiter Dolichenus, Dea Suria, Adonis, Mithras, Osiris, or any of the Syrian Baalim. So if we look at the names of the ships in the Roman navy, we find Isis Pharia twice, but no Dea Suria or other Oriental deities.

 

III.

THE EASTERN PROVINCES

 

The various cultural areas of the Greek-speaking half of the Empire were tenacious of tradition. During the Hellenistic age Egyptian and Syrian cults had established themselves in numerous cities outside their lands of origin. Isis and Sarapis became civic deities, not only at many points in Greece and the Greek islands and the old Greek fringe in Asia Minor, but also in as much of Phoenicia as the Ptolemies had controlled: their worship, and that of Cybele, in Crete date from this period. So again Syrian and Thracian cults reached Egypt. On the other hand, in the Roman period there does not seem to have been much interchange in the Near East of cults Oriental in origin. Developed Mithraism is attested in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece, but not on any large scale. The first Mithraeum at Doura was due to archers from Palmyra, the second to Roman legionaries; in the same way, the sacred cave of Mithras on Andros was built by a veteran and three soldiers of the Praetorian Guard (a.d. 202—9). Attis, for whom the native Greek generally felt a certain repugnance, has left few traces in Egypt and apparently none in Syria. The taurobolium was not celebrated at Athens till the fourth century; a taurobolium wis mentioned as part of a celebration, apparently of the Traianeia, at Pergamum in a.d. 105, but we may doubt whether it included the bath of blood.

All this is in striking contrast with the vitality of local cults, more or less hellenized, and of Greek cults. Dionysus was worshipped widely in Asia Minor and Syria and, it seems, at many points in Egypt; in Syria he appears well into the hinterland, as in the Druse country; he merges with the Arab god Dusares, and the god of some antipathetic Arab tribe was identified with his old enemy Lycurgus. The actors’ guild (the holy synod of the crafts­men of Dionysus) was everywhere, and may have counted for something in this; but it is far from being the whole story. The only religious epics written under the Empire were concerned with the conquests of Dionysus, whose cult flourished strongly in the Western provinces also, and was closely linked to men’s hopes of immortality. Heracles was found wherever there were Greeks and was identified with native gods at Tarsus, in Phoenicia, in Egypt, in Parthia; he, Aphrodite and Nike are the only Greek religious types in the art of Doura. The goddess between the two riders (Helen and the Dioscuri, or an equivalent) is found all over the Near East, appearing even at Palmyra; she had local affinities in Anatolia. Artemis Ephesia was worshipped at places widely distributed over Asia Minor and Syria, as well as in Crete.

In fact the static equilibrium described earlier was very generally maintained: local cults, whether purely Greek in origin or native with more or less Greek lacquer, were predominant, and the only universal phenomena were certain Greek worships, the cult of the emperor, Judaism, Christianity, and a moderate infiltration of philosophy. But the Near East, though retentive of tradition, was not stationary; intellectually and artistically it was the creative half of the Empire. It accepted but little from the imperio or lex regia marked the transference of full sovereignty to the emperor. Even Ulpian in his day declares that what the princeps has decided has the force of law, because, by the lex (regia) concerning the imperial powers, the People has transferred to him all its own power and competence. And such a champion of unlimited absolutism as Justinian I could still recognize in this law the foundation of the imperial sovereignty, when he declared that by the old law, described as the lex regia, all the rights and powers of the Roman People had been transferred to the emperor. If we turn back to Cassius Dio, even for him the position of the first princeps is already a complete monarchy, just because People and Senate have made over all power to him. The systematic description of the imperial power which he gives in this connection contains in a different form a similar statement of the unlimited power of the monarch. When we take the words which Dio uses to express the significance for his own day of the Senate’s decree in favour of Augustus, we find that for him the emperor is ‘truly absolute’ and ‘not subject even to his own decrees or the laws’. For Dio, the emperor’s supremacy is no longer founded on the outstanding personality of the ruling princeps; the institution of monarchy had long been taken for granted as indispensable, so that any and every occupant of the throne is regarded as representative of this form of government.

The auctoritas of the first princeps was not merely founded on his political supremacy, but was supported by the attribution to him of innate supernatural and superhuman capabilities and characteristics, which made him seem god-sent and his actions divinely inspired. His authority had a religious as well as a political sanction, already apparent in the very name Augustus. It has been called ‘charismatic auctoritas. With the inheritance of the political form created by the authority of the first princeps, with the name of Augustus, borne by his successors to mark their exceptional position, with the imperial cult, the outcome of the ‘charismatic’ auctoritas of the first Augustus, remained inseparably bound up the idea of the ruler’s ‘charismatic’ from their own littleness and they used magic for this, as also to secure the satisfaction of their loves and hates. Native Egyptian religion had always involved the assumption that there was an infallible procedure for getting what you wanted. So in the hinterland of Asia Minor and Syria men looked to the local gods for protection; that was sufficient; there was this difference from Egypt that the Semitic and Anatolian gods were more capricious, more to be feared, less completely to be controlled, and that the Semite was capable also of a strong sentiment of dependence on a hereditary god and of a passionate dogmatism best known in Judaism but occasionally approached at Palmyra. Christianity encountered this vigour and this inertia; the inertia lasted longer.

The spirit of these manifestations was strong. Against it we must set other factors in religious life—the philosophical trend to henotheism, powerful in East and West alike, the name of Zeus, the popular tendency to think of the gods as simply power, the importance of such figures as Nemesis and Tyche, and the disposition, old in the East, to invest the gods with celestial attributes and functions. As being behind phenomena in general and the stars in particular, they could give escape from the iron bondage of Fate’s decrees. Fate and magic were part of a world picture which was nearly universal. Furthermore, many gods were treated as solar. The philosophic theory which supported this has already been treated of; further, in Asia Minor and the Near East as a whole, the Sun was widely regarded as the all-seeing god of justice, bringing light and avenging hidden deeds of darkness; in a hymn found at Susa, at latest of the first century b.c., he is identified with Dionysus and is the universal lord.

This mood was not confined to the educated, but it did not overshadow localism, and learned pagan polemic against Christianity, while allowing the unity of the divine nature, commonly stressed the inherent natural rights of national tradition. Such tradition increasingly asserted itself even against the old supremacy of Greek culture. The East took its revenge for the conquests of Alexander. We see the rise of Syriac, which had become a literary language by the addition of Greek words to the vocabulary of Aramaic, the similar emergence of Coptic from Demotic, the use of Neophrygian as a language for inscriptions, and the birth, or at least the epigraphic self-expression, of that strange brotherhood known as the Xenoi Tekmoreioi. Meanwhile Philo of Byblus, the writer of Corpus Hermeticum XVI, and the gnostics whom Plotinus attacked, professed to be in cultural rebellion against Hellas. We can hardly devise a formula to cover these various phenomena without becoming fanciful: but it remains true that a certain shift of balance had long been happening. From about 200 b.c. the native was asserting himself against the Hellene in Egypt; in the next century Rome’s cynical laissez-faire in breaking the Seleucids and ignoring the Euphrates allowed Parthia to become an apparent counterweight; and then with Mithridates (and perhaps again with Cleopatra) the East was born as a cause if not as an entity. In the third century the Empire found a rival in the Sassanian kingdom, militant in politics and in religion. Mani’s disciples carried his words westwards, but his face was set to the East. The end of all this was Islam.

 

IV.

THE WESTERN PROVINCES

 

We may now consider the spread of Oriental cults in the Latin­speaking half of the Roman Empire. Rome was from of old a borrower in religion, as in art and letters; and the Roman West remained a borrower, for all its power of setting its own stamp on what it borrowed. Rome drew men by the opportunities which it presented; so did the Western provinces, with the new wealth and markets which they offered to traders. It is no accident that Mithraism was so strongly represented in the Danube region, which offered a rich field for exploitation; while the third Mithraeum at Poetovio was built by soldiers, the first and the second were built by slaves and freedmen in the tax-farming service. The trader followed very close on the soldier’s heels even in war, ready to buy slaves and other booty and to sell wine and oil. The introduction of cults by individuals and foreign groups was a different thing from the civic establishment of Egyptian and Syrian cults in the Hellenistic age, and from the quindecimviral establishment of Cybele at Rome. There the community fixed the form in which a new worship should be celebrated. Here the worship came as it was, and could retain peculiar features. Another factor differentiating Roman from Greek culture was that in Roman practice a manumitted slave became a citizen of his town.

Account may now be taken of certain specific worships. The worship of Cybele spread apace in Gaul; it made headway also in Africa, in the frontier provinces, in ports, and along the great roads, and gained many adherents among provincial and municipal dignitaries (including not a few of Gallic and Spanish descent): at the same time, it did not prove equally attractive to men in the army and in the Imperial service.

Cybele’s acceptance at Rome makes her dissemination in a measure a part of the spread of Roman culture, and this is the only Oriental cult for which municipalities constructed temples. At the same time, her worship at Rome was not confined to the official cult, but was conducted also by confraternities, and, though it was controlled, it was not imposed by authority but carried abroad by devotees. Further, it did not lose one alien feature the galli or men who had castrated themselves and thereafter, often as wandering mendicants, practised penances and mortifications. No Roman citizen had the legal right to enter their ranks, but the mood of devotion and submission was not confined to these eunuchs, and was fostered by the splendid ceremonies of March 15—27, which corresponded to Holy Week and Easter. Fasting and sorrow and the dies Sanguinis turned into the joy of the Hilaria, which commemorated the re-animation of Attis. At the end the Great Mother passed with silent blessing through the flower-strewn streets to her Lavatio. The drama of nature’s death and life has nowhere found a more moving expression in ritual.

The initiations which existed in this worship were private. On the other hand, the taurobolium and criobolium could be seen by all. The taurobolium was a ritual act originating in Asia Minor—bathing in the blood of a bull, which, as the name indicates, must originally have been captured after a solemn chase. The criobolium, which also had Hellenistic precedent at Pergamum, involved the use of a ram. In either rite the vires or testicles of the animal were preserved in a vessel called a kernos. The use and significance of this bath are so far known to us only from the Western half of the Roman Empire. At first it may well have been a rite regarded as effective in itself, and not attached to a particular deity. The earliest certain known instance in the West, dated in a.d. 134 and found at Puteoli, is associated with the Semitic Venus Caelestis: here it is a private ceremony. In later years numerous commemorative altars dedicated to the great Idaean Mother of the gods and Attis describe the ceremony as having been performed on behalf of the Empire or the Emperor or both ex vaticinatione archigalli and indicate that it was under the authority of the quindecimvir. The special connotation of the act as done for the public well-being was perhaps due to a specific act of the quindecimviri, romanizing the practice just as Cybele’s public ceremonies had been earlier adapted. There is no doubt of the official endorsement of the practice, for the legal provision is ‘qui in portu pro salute imperatoris sacrum facit ex vaticinatione archigalli a tutelis excusatur.’ Its frequent use may have been due to anxiety for the Empire and consequent religio.

The taurobolium was celebrated also for the benefit of individuals, who thereby acquired the status of tauroboliati, the rite was sometimes repeated after twenty years, but in one of the latest texts, dating from the Julianic revival, a recipient appears as reborn for eternity: yet an elaborate inscription of the late period in which the rite was much used at Rome does in fact suggest that the taurobolium and criobolium were even then thought of primarily as a ‘thing done’, as a dromenon rather than a way of securing blessings for the individual. This is illustrated by the earlier phrase taurobolium movit, and by the performance of taurobolium or taurobolium and criobolium by pairs or groups of people and even by a city or a province. In any case, this rite, which became notably popular in Gaul, reached Rome without leaving a trace in Greece proper: an inscription at Athens, probably of the fourth century, speaks of the taurobolium as having been celebrated for the first time.

Taurobolic inscriptions show that Rome was thought of as the centre of the cult. One records the transference of the rite from Rome to Lyons; others indicate that local authority belonged to the archigallus, who in the romanized cult need not be a eunuch or a Phrygian by race: he might be consulted by a neighbouringtown which had no such dignitary, and had high standing as an inspired person. There were also priests (one or more) elected by the decuriones: we have a record of the quindecimviral permission to one at Cumae in 289 to wear his priestly insignia within the territory of the town. Further, there were priestesses, sometimes called ministrae, and confraternities, the cannophori and dendrophori

Attis receives not a few other dedications, in some of which he is identified with Men, another god from Asia Minor, in the form Attidi Menotyranno. Asia Minor gave also the war goddess Ma, identified with Bellona, an old Roman goddess of whom we know little. Her cult is said to have been brought back by Sulla’s soldiers. It was distinguished by the alien ministrations of her priests, called fanatici, who cut themselves with knives and worked themselves into frenzies, in which they prophesied. As a rule, apparently they attracted alms rather than devout attention, but we find at Mainz a cult-society devoted to the honour of the Goddess. In general Cybele and Attis were the predominant divinities from Asia Minor.

We have seen how Isis and Sarapis gradually won official sanction. From Flavian times onwards they were, in spite of occasional expressions of contempt, safely entrenched in the exotic dignity of their temples. These, like the other temples of the Near East itself, were elaborate complexes of buildings fitted for the permanent habitation of a professional clergy and the temporary lodging of devotees and initiates. They had a daily service, the opening of the shrines and awakening and clothing of the statues; they had the ceremonial holding up of a vessel containing the sacred Nile water for adoration; they had congregational singing and acclamations; they had sacred dances and processions, and the great public rite of Ploiaphesia or Navigium Isidis, intercessions for the Roman State and libation into the sea at the opening of the sailing season on March 5 (and we may recall that Isis and Sarapis had a special interest for sailors as their protectors); they had the mystery-drama of Osiris; they had, for the chosen few (and not necessarily in all temples), initiations. Our evidence suggests that the priesthood did not possess the civic tone of the worships of the Egyptian gods established in Greece during the earlier part of the Hellenistic period, but that it was professional and probably copied from Alexandria and, whatever the racial origin of its members, valued Egyptian appearances.

Inscriptions show that the dissemination of the cult was greatest in parts which had relations with Egypt or which had foreign and, in particular, military elements: there is no evidence of a Western provincial city giving public homage: the known worshippers were men from Rome, officials, high or low, freed­men and slaves; unromanized provincials are hardly found. Tacitus, it is true, says that part of the Suebi, who dwelt beyond the range of Roman power, sacrificed to Isis, but this may be due to a misunderstanding of the ship’s symbol associated with their goddess.

So much for the quantitative aspect of this cult. The qualitative aspect is even more remarkable. A peculiar degree of devotion is manifested towards Isis and Sarapis; liberality to the shrines (attested notably by the jewelry presented by a woman to Isis) penitence (shown by sitting before the temple and telling of the divine punishment for sins, or by such acts of reparation as breaking the ice on the Tiber and crawling round the Campus Martius); strange acts of piety (getting Nile water from Meroe at the command of Isis); contemplation of the ineffable beauty of the sacred face of Isis; preservation of the garment of initiation for one’s burial; meditation on the meaning of initiation. Devotion to Isis made men call themselves Isiaci. The service of Isis was a sacred war, entered with a soldier’s undertaking of allegiance. Isis predominated; Osiris, Anubis, Horus were a divine setting for her achievements, and Osirian mummification did not travel with the cult; Sarapis was important, as a god of miracles; and from Flavian times he was commonly identified with the Sun.

One other borrowing from Egypt may be mentioned—the festival of the Pelusia on March 20, which was taken from the celebration at Pelusium, and included ritual bathing, like the Maioumas, which was carried from Antioch to Ostia.

The official acceptance of Syrian worships has been discussed earlier. What of the infiltration of Syrian cults in a private way? The Syrian slave came early to the West; the Syrian trader followed. We have remarked earlier on the particular attachment of the Semite to his ancestral worships; the Tyrian group at Puteoliretained its cults and its devotion to them and to Tyre in 174. It is not surprising to find at Corduba an altar dedicated in the second century to Syrian deities by people of Syrian names; a record of a Salambo procession at Seville; a temple to the hereditary god of the men of Gaza (apparently Marnas) at Ostia; Juppiter Damascenus and Dusares worshipped at Puteoli; Zeus Kasios at times in the West; a dedication at Rome to Hypsiste Astarte; successive temples to Syrian deities on the Janiculum, with an inscription perhaps rightly explained as referring to sacred communal meals; a small area in Rome called Adonaea on a third-century plan; numerous dedications to Juppiter Dolichenus, including the description of the members of a guild of his as fratres carissim, chosen by him to serve him, and the existence of a cenatorium of his at Bononia.

Dedications to the last-mentioned god are widespread and include many by soldiers; they may be regarded as in the main a result of the Flavian garrisoning of the Eastern frontier. Formal cults of the Syrian deities in the Wes tern provinces are in fact mainly confined to military regions, and their worshippers, when not of the army, are for the most part Oriental in origin. Of course, the eunuch priests who begged for the Syrian goddess circulated widely, and men gave to them fearing the power of their curse, perhaps hoping for a blessing; but this did not establish cultus or religious habits, and this goddess does not seem often to have received from non-Syrians a devotion such as was paid willingly to Isis by non-Egyptians. Dacia has one inscription to Dea Suria, Germany none. An exception is the dedication to the Syrian goddess found by the Roman Wall in Britain, identifying her with Justice and speaking of the revelation by which the soldier responsible for the record had learned her might; but the wording makes it clear that Julia Domna’s prestige had opened the channel of grace.

We pass to Mithraism. Mithras, the Persian god of light, appears as the object of a special cult at Gurob in the Fayum in the third century b.c. (doubtless at some shrine maintained by a group of Persians who had remained in Egypt after the end of their rule); the nature of this worship is unknown. Plutarch tells how the pirates, against whom Pompey warred, celebrated certain secret sacrifices to Mithras on the Cilician mountains. The cult, as we know it, certainly took its rise in parts of Asia Minor where Iranian elements had remained strong in the population, as in Cappadocia.

We learn something from allegorical explanations of Mithraism, as in Porphyry, and from Christian attacks on it, but our knowledge is in the main derived from the material remains of the worship; from the temples at Doura, at Rome, Ostia and other sites in Italy, in Britain, and along the Rhine and Danube frontiers. They are built in a shape intended to give the likeness of a cave, with a bas-relief on a pedestal in a niche at the end, benches for the worshippers to recline, sculptured and sometimes pictorial decorations, and a water-supply for purifications. The iconography has local variations but is on the whole curiously constant. The bas-relief shows Mithras slaying the bull, from which comes the life of the earth’s crops. The formal model is the earlier type of Nike sacrificing a bull, but the scene has a cosmic significance and its place in the centre of the shrine emphasizes that Mithraism had a mythical cosmogony of its own and a content of ideas on which it was easy to graft further interpretation. On either side stand Cantesand Cautopates, attendant spirits of light, and the whole is framed in a series of panels giving the god’s Vita, his birth from the rock, his shooting at a rock and production of rain, his chase and capture of the bull, his reception of the Sun-god’s homage, his sacred meal with the Sun-god

These impressive candle-lit shrines witnessed ceremonies of initiation and ritual meals. Jerome describes seven grades of initiation, the believer becoming successively corax nymph(i)us, miles, leo. Persa, heliodromus and   pater. A statement in Porphyry suggests some local variation of terminology. We know a little of the ceremonies, some of which are represented in drawings on the walls of a Mithraeum at S. Maria di Capua. There was at some point a simulated death; at another the miles was offered a wreath on a sword and refused it saying ‘Mithras is my wreath,’ and thereafter refusing to wear wreaths at banquets. Furthermore, the initiates shared in their sacred meals a continuing religious life; and there was no professional priesthood, leadership being vested in members who had reached the highest grade as patres. Men alone were admitted; a possible exception, if it proves valid, will represent one of the varieties of Mithraism.

Among the points in which Mithraism differed from the other ‘mystery religions,’ there is one of the greatest importance. For the Egyptian, Syrian, and Anatolian cults of this type which travelled westwards the primary ceremony was the cult-drama, re­enacting what had happened and what in a sense annually happened to the god. This was open to all worshippers and not only to initiates; initiations were something additional, not available at all times, in all shrines or to any who could not pay enough. In Mithraism the initiatory ceremonies were in the foreground from the earliest phase of which we have knowledge, and there was no annual rite of a dramatic kind. Mithras was not born annually and did not die and he had a complete Vita. There wasno ceremony which could be made into a public rite, and Mithras never became a civic god. Mithraea might, as at Augusta Treverorum and Poetovio, be built near other shrines; they might be the object of devotion of a domestic or military unit; but the cult and the temples were always private. This worship, by its own vitality, retained its forms over a wide range of space and time, without hierarchy or quindecimviral control.

Mithras was the god who, beyond all others, mattered most to the believer. He was a principal actor in the making of the world, and would be in its eventual re-making (an idea present in Mithraism though perhaps less prominent than in early Zoroastrianism), and, what was more, he was the protector here and now, and would be after death, of the man who received his rites and lived worthily of them: moral demands were stressed. Occasionally he was identified with Zeus and must therefore have been considered as the Supreme Being. In native Persian ideas, which appear to have predominated, he was neither the supreme nor the only god. Above him stood Ahura Mazda, who could be translated as Juppiter Caelus, a god too high for our common prayers, and now remote from the battle—not (as for Zoroaster) commander of the faithful. Behind Mithras stood Zervan akarana, infinite time, who may well be the subject of the representations (following an Orphic type) which we sometimes find in Mithraea; for a Greek he was probably Kronos. Ahura Mazda had his opposite Ahriman, and this god—as god of death rather than of evil in any abstract sense—receives dedications in some Mithraea, just as earlier the Magi had made special sacrifices to him.

The worship of Mithras did not exclude other worships. A powerful impetus, such as that which manifests itself in the expansion of Mithraism, could not fail to make it for some adherents a focal point round which their other religious practices were grouped; and there was nothing to prevent individuals from indulging the deep-seated instinct for a diversification of forms. We see this instinct in Christianity; it had freer scope in Mithraism.

Mithraism had ideas, power and qualities which differentiated it from the other Oriental cults which were at the same time actively followed. It is small wonder if Justin Martyr and Tertullian regarded it as a diabolic copy of Christianity. Where it was powerful—as at Ostia, Heddernheim and Poetovio—it was very powerful. But it made its appeal only along certain lines; it omitted vast areas of the Empire: above all, it was weak in those very regions in which Christianity spread with particular strength. The absence of women deprived it of the support of what was in antiquity, as it is today, the sex more interested in religious practices of any and every kind. It lived on its ideas and its emotional force; it had not, like Egyptian and Syrian cults, local nuclei of men to whom it was a national religion.

 

V.

TENDENCIES IN POPULAR PIETY

 

We have considered the two halves of the Empire in so far as they differed. Some things were common to both—the existence of private guilds, serving religious, funerary, and social purposes, the cult of the emperor, the astrological picture of the universe, the practice of magic, and philosophy. The cult of the emperor was in the East built upon earlier institutions, in the West it was deliberately introduced. Yet in spite of this and in spite of local and temporal variation, it remained a universal fact; everywhere men looked towards him who stood between humanity and the gods, everywhere he was at one and the same time the subject of innumerable vows and the object of an unmeasured homage which took the forms of divine adoration because there were none higher; everywhere the emperor’s name was used in solemn oaths. The ruler of the world was associated with the gods; he was also chosen by the gods, or by the Sun in particular: they went with him on his ways. The intensity of this emotion deepened and found new expressions.

         mox crescit in illos

imperium superis.

Everywhere, above the emperor, there was Fate and its decrees, written in or by the stars in their courses. Everywhere there were similar attempts to break these decrees by magic—the same formulas in Syria and Egypt and Moesia and the Rhineland and Italy. Everywhere those who sought an interpretation of life looked to philosophy.

These things, and the local components in the piety of each place, made a constant background. In the provinces of Latin speech this was modified by the second wave of Oriental cults. Certain worships of Near Eastern origin proved able to bear a generalized significance and made a powerful impact. They spread above all among the mobile elements of the population and in cities and regions where mobile elements were strong. Cybele and Isis apart, they made little impression outside those elements and cities and regions. The Western provinces had received ancient culture, as they received the worship of the emperor, ready-made. Accordingly, they combined Rome’s worships, which came like Rome’s language, with their native cults. The ignorant probably pursued their old practices, as is shown by later survivals: those of more wealth and cultivation, who could make dedications, gave to their ancestral gods Roman names, often made specific by the addition of local epithets (as for instance Mars Cocidius), and Graeco-Roman art-types suitably modified.

Some deities preserved their native entity. In Gaul and Britain the organization of Celtic religion by Druidism disappeared, but Epona and Rosmerta and the goddesses called Matres or Matronae were distinct in name as in art-type from the usual pantheon. In Africa  the Punic deities retained very considerable power, which corresponded to the age, tenacity, and development of the civilization to which they belonged. Saturnus was a native deity; Caelestis, whose native name was Tanit, was in fact the Carthaginian equivalent of the Dea Suria: the worship of Liber in this province appears to have been the romanization of a native god: the Cereres were perhaps also native. Here as in Thrace native piety remained very strong in spite of the incoming of alien religious elements; Thracian piety, which had a notable power of fusion with alien elements, appears in Dacia and occasionally in Pannonia. For Spain our evidence is scanty, but some indigenous cults are attested, although romanization was much older here than in Gaul outside Narbonensis. Otherwise Roman names and Roman forms seem to have been of the nature of a superimposed thing and primarily a cultural phenomenon. Mercurius in Gaul is essentially Celtic rather than Roman.

The vitality of native worships in the West is clear and did not wholly disappear when Christianity became the official religion. Roman soldiers, and even dignitaries did not hesitate to make dedications to Matres and Matronae or Noreia, but neither in Gaul nor in Spain nor in Africa do such dedications bulk large numerically, and there is in general a marked divergence between the religious interests of provincials and of administrators. Celtic and Germanic deities did not travel like those of the Near East. Even the Celtic Epona, who had a foothold in the Celtic element in North Italy and whose guardianship of horses gave her a function of general utility, though worshipped by men who had no Gallic blood, did not develop into anything new and cosmopolitan. Once more, that is the difference between romanization and hellenization. Slaves, traders, officials, and soldiers brought influences from their original homes, and also from the capital. The halo around the Eternal City grew brighter in the years of stress; in religion, as in the Forma Orbis, all roads start in Rome.

No cultural factor was of more importance than the army. Something has been said of its religion in an earlier volume. We have there seen the difference between its fundamental institutions and those of city life. A Roman camp had its military sacra, its auspices, its observance of the Saturnalia. Nevertheless, it was originally no more than the place where an army halted. The situation changed when the system of frontier defences caused legions to be immobilized in castra stativa with dependent civilian settlements. The troops, recruited on the spot, had a local colour; they lacked the conservative factor of domestic cult, for they were officially celibate till the time of Septimius Severus, and it was natural that they should welcome religious groupings around new powerful divinities. Further, they received new impulses from the movements of vexillationes, from the transference of centurions on their promotion, and from the fashions of the Imperial house. Their habits, and the influence of their habits were perpetuated by the frequency with which, after serving their time, they settled near the camps in which they had been stationed. Military culture and military religion thus assumed a permanent condition.

Nevertheless, we must not exaggerate the extent to which the religion of the army and of other foci of mobile life diverged from native Roman practice. The Feriale Duranum mentions no festivals save those of old Roman deities and commemorations of the Imperial house. In Mogontiacum, Heddernheim, Colonia Agrippinensis, and Vetera, dedications to Oriental deities amount to slightly more than 14 per cent, of all dedications—and that in spite of the fact that new cults were more apt than old cults to inspire permanent records of piety. Furthermore, while temples to the Capitoline triad were very common in the Latin-speaking provinces, private dedications to it come in the main from the military and from Imperial functionaries, and dedications to Juppiter Optimus Maximus are most frequent in the frontier provinces; among the dedicators soldiers predominate. As for Rome itself, dedications to Hercules and Silvanus, the latter of whom perhaps indicates by his popularity the rise of Italian countryside elements, considerably exceed in number those to any Oriental deities. Both were notably popular with the army, and, in the West, with provincials. We must not forget the frequency of dedications by non-Romans to Roman deities or to fully romanized deities of Greek extraction. Thus inscriptions from the Syrian shrine on the Janiculum couple the Zeus Keraunios (here a Baal) with the Nymphae Forrinae (i.e. Furrinae). Receptivity was not on one side only.

Let us pass from the quantitative aspect of the spread of Oriental cults to its qualitative aspe cts. To many men to whom such practice was not hereditary and indigenous these worships may well have meant the satisfaction of their desires for immortality, for a more dignified status in the universe, for an escape from Fate, for the opening of windows in heaven; to some they meant vocation and divine guidance and militia sacra; to Lucius they meant a new life, with purpose and meaning. But to most men ’who used them they were probably no more than an interesting extra, another and perhaps a more effective way of access to the supernatural; exacting penances, speaking with authority and differing from traditional worships in that they involved a chosen personal relationship with the deities concerned.

The cults had their myths, the appeal and significance of which must not be underestimated, as well as their rites, both subject to moderate change, and both were capable of interpretation in accordance with the philosophies of the time. Mithraism, indeed, had its cosmogony and its eschatology, but the cults in general had no theology in our sense of the word save what was read into them by educated devotees; Stoic physics and Orphic? and Pythagorean ideas of the soul and of its destiny as reworked by Plato, were of particular influence; so was the notion that the level of the stars was the true homeland of man’s spirit. Plutarch’s Job and Osiris records interpretations of Egyptian myths as expressing intellectual and psychological experience. These have special interest because of their closeness to some of Philo’s allegories; but they were not canonical interpretations, universally accepted, and ‘physical interpretations also existed. Again, henotheistic tendencies in thought found expression in piety. A modicum of philosophic ideas was a very common possession, and the cults, philosophically interpreted, could give supernatural authority to widespread notions, for the gods were ‘guardians of the soul and mind.’

The priest’s address to Lucius in Apuleius, with its severe condemnation of the hero’s youthful self-indulgence and its call to self-dedication, shows that the cult of Isis could thus reinforce morality: self-denial was exacted by other cults. Mithras is usually thought to have set the highest standards and could be an example of vigorous combative action as well as of  purity.

In general, the Oriental cults were symptomatic of change rather than productive of it. They have been supposed to have served the ends of autocracy: more significant, however, is the observed fact that some of their expressions of devotion appear to reflect the linguistic and artistic idioms of a loyalism already aroused on other grounds. Solar theology did very possibly make a contribution to the complex of ideas and emotions tending to exalt the princeps; but solar theology had its roots in philosophy and, while reinforced by the piety of various cults, did not depend only on them. Again, the spread of the Oriental cults was probably a result rather than a cause, even a contributory cause, of intermixture and racial levelling; the most striking instance of this in the religious sphere is, after all, the second-century Dionysiac association at Tusculum, in the members’ list of which freemen and slaves alike are described by their bare cognomina. The sarcophagi of the period are a warning against exaggerations of the power of the Oriental cults: although in representations of the seasons Attis sometimes stands for winter, there are hardly any other traces of the Eastern deities. The mourning Attis is common on other funerary monuments: he could typify the fate awaiting all, even the young and lovely: perhaps there was also some hope that, like Attis, the dead man might not remain in the power of death. Otherwise, the appearance of the Oriental deities in art in general is all but confined to terracotta and bronze figurines and monuments definitely associated with their worship or presumably dedicated to the memory of their ministrants.

Novelty was not lacking, but it was in the main a matter of a change of atmosphere  or individual innovations or changes of emphasis, until we come to the latter part of the third century and the first part of the fourth, when we find certain attempts to strengthen paganism in the face of what had become a tremendous opposition. Thus a pious individual at Acmoneia in Phrygia founded a cult of the ‘immortal gods’. Nevertheless, the whole development of Imperial paganism has only one feature as striking and significant as the spread of Dionysiac religion or of Orphism—and that is the rise of solar theology.

What then of the syncretism or theokrasia which has been so often discussed? Some have suggested that the various deities of paganism fused into a few figures or melted into a general nimbus of orientalized godhead. In this suggestion there is both truth and falsehood. Greek thinkers had from early times supposed that the pantheons of all nations consisted of gods performing like functions and that these divine persons corresponded to one another, that Ammon was Zeus, and so forth. This theory did not in the popular mind destroy differences of identity; Alexander paid a visit to Ammon as Ammon and not as Zeus. Further, there had been even earlier much give and take between kindred divine figures in Syria and Anatolia, to an extent which makes it im­possible for us, and probably made it impossible for ancient worshippers, to draw clear distinctions; such exchange sometimes involved purely stylistic features, but could go deeper. Again, the depth of emotion excited by Isis, una quae es omnia, caused far-reaching identification and this was not peculiar to her; even Hermes or Priapus could be treated as a universal cosmic god. In such identifications it was assumed that the native name, whether Isis or Dea Suria, was the Terum nomen, the other divine titles being what we might call dialect variations. Add to these factors the widespread generalizing trend noted earlier, and the common tendency to invest any prominent god with solar attributes, and you have enough to account for a considerable blurring of the edge of divine personalities.

On the other hand, local pride and local devotion acted as limiting factors, and the continued existence of the old names and of individualized types meant the continued existence of distinct entities. Isis and Magna Mater shared a temple at Lacus Benacus, a priestess at Aeclanum, a priest at Ostia; but they were distinct, and the result was not a composite product such as Hermanubis. Juppiter summus exsuperantissimus was highest, but that would for many imply gods, as well as men and things, below him. There are dedications (from the second century b.c. onwards) and art-types of a pantheistic kind; some of these imply a concept of divine unity, but others involve no more than the old desire to ensure safety’ by neglecting no god; in a certain number we may suspect an element of jeu d'esprit. The habit of grouping and identifying deities may have contributed to a decline in attention to the minutiae of the custom which assigned one victim to one god and one to another. Nevertheless, subordination and identification did not destroy the gods; sometimes in the last struggle with Christianity it supplied an apologia for their worship. The development at issue seems to have come from above; and such dedications in the Western provinces as are its expressions are predominantly from soldiers of the higher ranks or from their military dependents, and from Imperial slaves and freedmen.

 

VI.

PAGANISM IN THOUGHT

 

When we look at literature after a.d. 69, we find in Pliny the Elder a hard rationalism with a deep-felt wonder at the universe, in Epictetus a naked morality invested with a warmth of theistic emotion in the Neopythagorean Apollonius of Tyana asceticism and piety, in Dio of Prusa deep moral earnestness and contemplative piety, in Statius and Martial awareness of Oriental cult. Juvenal, as a satirist, handles the traditional topic of women’s superstition with special reference to these alien worships.

This is all fairly conventional. Nevertheless, a change of mood was taking place. Tacitus occupied a middle ground, interested in fate and freewill, ready to speak of a Parthian cult, concerned even with the past of the Judaism which he hated. Plutarch stands on one side of this middle ground, Mesomedes further on the same side, Lucian thereafter on the other. Plutarch in his youthful essay On superstition, speaks of the two errors, atheism and superstition, with an inclination to regard the former as the less insulting to divinity; he mentions sabbath observance, but without any marked discrimination between it and some Greek practices. The main body of his work is inspired by a lofty piety, a faith in divine providence and justice as shown in reward and punishment; a dislike of crude and barbarous deeds, whether done in the name of religion or otherwise; a devotion to ancestral rites; an interest in the soul’s destiny; and a questioning spirit which continually asks why—why are oracles silent? why do the Jews abstain from pork? is the god of the Jews identical with Dionysus? Plutarch shows throughout a profound belief in the brotherhood of man and the unity of the divine; all men seeking the divine, all using symbols of various kinds. Thus in his work On Isis and Osiris, dedicated to a friend Clea who had been initiated in these mysteries as well as in those of Dionysus, he studies the names and myths and public ceremonies of these and other Egyptian gods, finding in them the same meanings as in Greek cults. He speaks of the believer as searching out after­wards by reason the meaning of that which he has received in mystery. Meanwhile Mesomedes showed his ingenuity in glorifying various deities including Isis for whom ‘all things are danced.’

To Plutarch most Greek, Roman and Oriental rites were good, created in the mythical past by wise men whose insights included all the best that posterity later came to learn; and the science of god was the crown of philosophy. To Lucian Greek and Oriental rites were alike worthless survivals. Much of his writing is light­hearted fooling at the expense of myth and rite (including the scene of supposed Magian necromancy by the Euphrates); but in the Philopseudes, the Alexander, and the Concerning the death of Peregrines, he speaks from the heart. There is no gaiety, but the bitter seriousness of the Syrian who has found that nearly all his Greek contemporaries have forsaken reason. Although he represents the gods as complaining of the new barbarian invaders of Olympus, he does not suggest that a particular credulity was connected with the cult of certain gods; apart from his Herodotean parody, Concerning the Syrian goddess, he had not much to say about the Oriental cults to which this chapter is devoted. His attitude is like that of Celsus, who in his True Word compares the Christians with worshippers of the Great Mother, Mithras, and Sabazios.

The almost contemporary rhetorician Aelius Aristides is conspicuous for his attachment to the deities who delivered him from persistent ill-health, as also for a strong philosophic trend towards monotheism. He wrote a prose hymn to Sarapis, concerned with the god’s miracles, but he shows no interest in the hereafter and does not mention other Oriental deities. Nor does Maximus of Tyre, whose reflective piety shows what his audience liked.

Lucian in his Philopseudes introduces a superstitious philosopher, and this may remind us that Apuleius thought of himself as philosophus Platonicus and is so described in a dedication by the men of his town. His novel, the Metamorphoses, reveals the depth of devotion which could be excited by the goddess of many names: an ending in miracle and piety replaces the ironic humour of the Greek original. Its undeniable autobiographic note fits what we learn from the Apologia. There Apuleius defends himself against a charge of magic: he is obviously not too anxious to rebut the suggestion of occult interests, and happy to speak of how he had been initiated in a whole series of mysteries, studio veri. He refers to a lost speech devoted to these initiations. His philosophic side appears in his other works, and pre­sumably he was not conscious of any marked inconsistency.

Philosophy became more and more linked to piety and revelations, and less averse from magic. Neopythagoreanism was the pioneer both in its asceticism and in this development which at times brought the atmosphere of a séance into the philosopher’s room, and Neopythagoreanism was succeeded by the revival of Platonism in the second century. This revival, commonly called Middle Platonism, regarded Plato’s work in general and some treatises in particular (above all the Timaeus) as a storehouse of inspired truth. Special emphasis was laid on his doctrine of the One, on his dualism of soul and body, on his myths of the after-life (taken as dogma), on his theory of daimones as beings intermediate between god and man, on his ideas of divine transcendence and inspiration, on his statement that man’s goal is to become like god, on his doctrine of Ideas as involving the supposition of a whole world of objects above the world of the senses, on the contrast which he, like other philosophers, made between the few and the many.  

Hard thinking and dialectics had a place in this philosophy, but much of its appeal was to the heart and to the soul rather than to the head. In influential circles an in turned piety which offered to the Supreme Being the ‘sacrifice of reason,’ and an ascetic salvationism overshadowed Greek self-sufficiency. The inspired teacher and the divine revelation were in the foreground. As teachers we have Pythagoras, of whom various lives were written, and Plato and Apollonius as portrayed by Philostratus, largely in the image of Pythagoras. As revelations we have the Hermetic writings, which may be dated from about a.d. 100 onwards, the ‘Chaldaic Oracles,’ probably of the time of Marcus Aurelius, which introduced theurgia or philosophical occultism, and the Mosaic cosmogony, as used not only by Numenius of Apamea but also up and down the Hermetica, the theological oracles ascribed to Claros, the kindred oracles used by Porphyry, of whom we are about to speak, and the supposed revelations of Protesilaus to a vine-tender in the Troad, as described by Philostratus in his Heroicus.

Practical men, like Cassius Dio, clung to the gospel of action, and not all philosophers turned their gaze from the world. But creativeness, apart from the development of pagan henotheism, lay in this direction and produced in early Neoplatonism something which had an enduring influence. A young philosopher, Porphyry of Ascalon, who had been a Christian but returned to paganism, wrote a treatise Philosophy from the Oracles in which various utterances, notably from shrines of Hecate, were set forth and interpreted. Later he met a man of very different temper who was to be his master—Plotinus, an Egyptian by birth but in the purest Greek tradition, a mystic with a hard analytic mind. Plotinus was interested in Oriental things; he accompanied Gordian’s expedition in the hope of learning Persian and Indian wisdom at first hand. Nevertheless, his system is derived from Platonic thought and it is on this basis that he attacked a school of gnostics: he could not allow of absolute and positive evil, in the universe or in the human body, although the relative valuation which he allowed to both makes the antithesis between the two views seem to us much less sharp than it seemed to him; he resented dogma, but he was above all the disciple of Plato and, after the flesh, of Ammonius Saccas. In particular, his hostility was aroused by attacks, which to him looked partly insincere, on Plato and by morbid animosity against the Greek tradition. Plotinus, like the Hermetists, counted piety among the greatest of virtues; but this piety was not, for either, the piety of the populace. Plotinus drew analogies and metaphors from worship, and clearly knew the structure of an Egyptian temple; but he did not haunt the sanctuary. ‘The gods must come to me, not I to them.’

Under his influence Porphyry changed: like his master he remained interested in Oriental religious traditions and his demonology seems to show an Iranian element, but he rejected animal sacrifice, wrote polemics in defence of asceticism, developed a simple and touching religious ethic which, as we see it in the Letter to Marcella (his wife), reveals the influence of the New Testament, and in his Letter to Anebo (an Egyptian priest) criticized severely ritual of the type which we call magical. Since both he and the Neoplatonist Hierocles wrote against Christianity, and Julian and Sallustius used Neoplatonism to interpret paganism for the educated, and Neoplatonist pagans continued to exist till the beginning of the sixth century, it has been inferred that Neoplatonism and Christianity were opposing forces. This seems ill-founded. From Plotinus—or from Amelias—the opposition of Neoplatonism and gnosticism was clear: and many of the arguments used would be applicable to Catholic Christianity. Further, in a time of stress the ablest writers of paganism rallied to its defence, and these writers included outstanding Neoplatonists; when the defence had broken, the last pagans numbered in their ranks those who cared for classical culture, and these naturally included Neoplatonists. That is all; Porphyry’s arguments in his Against the Christians, so far as it is known to us, do not turn on Neoplatonist doctrine, and, although any idea of divine incarnation presented difficulties, Neoplatonism was not only for Augustine the bridge from Manichaeism to Christianity but proved to others capable of combination with Christian doctrines. In any case, it did not and could not produce a mass movement.

Porphyry’s defence of his standpoint against simple faith in cultus died with him, although the tendency to deprecate animal sacrifice, which we have noted earlier, did not, and Ammianus Marcellinus regarded the hecatombs of Julian as wasteful and foolish. Porphyry’s influence was countered by Iamblichus, who wrote an elaborate answer to the Letter to Anebo, under the title On the mysteries, supplying in it an apologetic and rationale for the various methods of constraining the gods, of securing communion with them, of causing epiphanies and the like. His disciples, such as Maximus of Ephesus, busied themselves with techniques of this kind which were known as theurgy; they found an apt disciple in Julian. We must not think hardly of these men. Some (as for instance Iamblichus himself) combined these interests with a sustained power of hard thought in other fields; all had an unquestionable devotion to something which is for us hard to seize but which was for them very precious; the high moral fervour of Julian was probably not peculiar to him. Quiet reasonableness is possible in times when there is quiet, and when reason seems to justify faith in itself.

 

VII.

ORIENTAL CULTS AND CHRISTIANITY

 

It has long been asked, and with reason: how did Christianity as a sacramental religion develop out of legal and non-sacramental Judaism? Justin Martyr and others were struck by the existence of baptismal and communion ceremonies in various pagan cults, argued that the Devil had in advance counterfeited Christianity. Many modern students have preferred to suppose that Christianity borrowed its sacramentalism from the Oriental mystery-religions; —either directly and deliberately or (as is easier to suppose) as result of the unrealized but irresistible influence of an environment saturated with such ideas.

The teachings of Jesus involved no radical break with Palestinian Judaism, and the gradual separation of the growing Church was a matter of excommunication rather than of apostasy. The Christians outside Jerusalem, to whom Paul wrote, included many of Jewish antecedents or Judaizing affinities. Their Judaism had been that of the Dispersion and not that of Jerusalem, and they spoke Greek and thought Greek. Nevertheless, they were and had been in a very sharp antithesis to surrounding paganism; that was the legacy of Antiochus Epiphanes and of the Maccabees. Further, the early converts from a purely Gentile background severed themselves from their religious past when they joined the tertius populus.

What changed the character of the new movement, and gave to Christian sacramentalism its special features, was the discovery that Jesus would not after all return almost at once and bring in the Sovereignty of God. The Church ceased to be a band of travellers along a short and narrow isthmus and became a normal continuing society within the world. Accordingly, the ceremony of admission and the common meal of fellowship were related to the society as a society and assumed a position comparable with the rites of ancient religious groupings and mysteries. This being so, they came to be described in similar language.

There was a special reason for this. Hellenistic Judaism had not shrunk from the metaphorical use of mystery-terminology to describe religious experiences in which the individual, as member of the Jewish circle within the world and of a narrower concentric circle within Judaism, felt himself to be the passive recipient of a transforming grace. In this, as in so much, Hellenistic Judaism followed the precedent of Greek philosophy. So did Christianity, but with a significant difference. This Judaism wove its web of metaphor and imagery around individual emotions and around facts in national tradition as viewed in the light of those emotions. Christianity followed this usage, and Paul’s ‘mysteries’ are, like Philo’s, secrets of God progressively manifested. But Christianity also applied this idiom to its communal ceremonies. The sect of Therapeutae, as described by Philo, evolved a subtle allegorization of the crossing of the Red Sea; Paul utilized something of the sort to explain the implications of baptism (I Cor. x). Philo explained the Manna given to the Israelites as the Divine Logos bestowed on man for his sustenance; Paul and the Fourth Gospel applied similar exegesis to the Christian sharing of bread and cup.

The Christian sacraments had notable differences from their pagan analogues. In Greek mysteries ceremonial and moral purity was demanded as a prerequisite, and righteous conduct after initiation was expected, but in the Christian mysteries a greater emphasis was laid on the moral purpose of the recipient; it was in fact a sine qua non, and the Eucharist unworthily received was unto damnation. Further, in Christianity initiates were not, as in the Oriental mystery-religions other than Mithraism, an inner circle. Nor must we forget that, although the Church early gained great strength in Rome and Africa, its chief dissemination before Constantine was in Asia Minor and Syria that is to say, in regions characterized by local cults far more than by the mystery-religions of the ‘second wave?

On the other hand, the spread of the Oriental cults and the spread of Christianity in spite of their differences (among which we must specially stress the contrast between the worldwide hierarchical organization of Christianity and the local and congregational basis of paganism) were conditioned by common emotional needs and by a common Weltdbild. The desire for membership of a group affording mutual aid and support, which gave to ancient cult-associations much of their attractiveness, the anxiety for insurance against an uncomfortable or shadowy hereafter, the wish to secure a powerful supernatural protector who could bend for your benefit the decrees of fate, the craving for some sort of plus-value, the eager curiosity for revelation—all these were operative in both advances. So was the desire for some sort of effective rite, for some denial by act of man’s helplessness. The men who used the Christian way were not so different from those who used the pagan, and approximation can be detected in the third century.

Christianity might have come much nearer to the course of the Oriental religions in Roman paganism. But for the establishment and acceptance of the principle of authority and a binding code of conduct, largely taken from the Old Testament, the way would have been open for every kind of compromise and for independent divergent development such as we see in the Dionysiac cult­ societies. But for the acceptance of the Old Testament and its interpretation as the spiritual heritage of Christianity, the new religion would have found itself curiously impoverished. These bulwarks were not built in a day or without a struggle. The various movements which we group under the name of gnosticism were attempts of freer spirits to build Christianity into schemes comparable in a measure with those which Plutarch described for Egyptian religion and Numenius for Platonism blended with Judaism; they satisfied a similar desire for abstraction and instinct for innovation. The Naassenes, who flourished near Hierapolis in Phrygia in the second century of our era, took a hymn to Attis, probably Hadrianic in date, sung in theatres in which Attis was identified with Adonis, Osiris, Men, and read into it their theology—a sort of religion of all educated men. A letter ascribed (doubtless wrongly) to Hadrian speaks of men at Alexandria who worshipped Sarapis and Christ alike. People of education, Greeks and liberal Jews, came into Christianity or grew up within it. Their culture involved the philosophical interpretation of sacred story and also a deep dislike of intellectual isolation. If, they argued, intelligent men agreed that the various names and cults of deities must be regarded as appropriate to the masses and sanctified by antiquity and civic or national tradition, yet in reality enshrining truth in allegory, did not the Christians mean the same things, and why should men quarrel over terms. The enemy of orthodoxy was not paganism but sophistication. What is significant is not that this tendency appears, but that it was arrested. The Jewish strain in Christianity, with its abomination of Gentile worships and its assumption that they connoted immorality; the links of community to community, which prevented unfettered development; the hierarchic system; the principle of Apostolic authority and Apostolic tradition; the numerical preponderance of folk with the Joi du charbonnier prevented what would in effect have been the absorption of Christianity in Graeco-Roman culture.

Christianity grew steadily. Paganism went its way, but economic pressure caused a diminution in sacrificial expenditure and perhaps helped the trend towards ‘the sacrifice of reason’. The litany of Licinius’ army before the defeat of Maximin shows how near solar henotheism could come to Christian monotheism. Revivals and survivals of paganism after Constantine’s death fall outside the scope of this volume, but certain features of them are instructive for our present purpose. The aristocratic group at Rome which clung to paganism as a thing inseparable from the classical culture to which they were devoted showed enthusiasm for Mithraism and the taurobolium, reviving them not only under Julian but also under Eugenius. These were in a sense the most emotional, extreme and exciting forms of the old religion: to Christians they were objectionable in a corresponding degree. Nevertheless, when we turn £0 the edicts of Christian emperors for the suppression of paganism, we find no mention of these things, but prohibition of divination, sacrifices—specially nocturnal (and therefore ex hypothesi magical)—magic, and finally all temple cultus. Further, while Julian was himself devoted to Mithras, to solar worship in general, to Cybele, and to theurgy, and not inattentive to the Egyptian deities, his religious policy was directed to the restoration of Greek traditional practice coupled with borrowed elements of ethical order, philanthropy, and organization, as effective weapons of Christianity. His friend Sallustius, in his treatise Concerning the gods and the universe, concerns himself with the gods as a whole: he refers to the (prehistoric) founders of the mysteries, but just as a Hellenistic writer might have done, and, while he speaks of the myth of Cybele and its expression in rite, he confines himself to the dramatic ceremonial which Claudius had brought to Rome. Neo­paganism was to Julian hellenismos. The local gods, as for instance Marnas of Gaza, lasted longest.

VIII.

 CONCLUSION

 

We have considered the early wave which carried Egyptian and Syrian and Anatolian worships to regions outside their homes, and the later wave which carried similar worships (though in a somewhat different form) and Mithraism through the Latin part of the world. We have also sought to estimate the diffusion and intensiveness of these cults, and our observations have led us to reject any idea of a substantial concomitant orientalization of life. Two objections might be raised; first, is this likely in view of the Oriental influence which has been so often assumed in art, law, and political forms? Second, what of the enormous change in intellectual outlook and spiritual atmosphere between Augustus and Constantine? Is not the result something much more Oriental than Greek or Roman in type and temper ? And could not a shift in religious ideas be at least a contributory cause for such a transformation ?

As regards the first point, legal orientalization and political orientalization within the period down to Constantine are, in fact, at best highly doubtful. The precise extent of Oriental influence in art is disputable, but that there was material influence is not open to question. Nevertheless, there is this crucial difference. In art we are dealing either with imported works or with works produced by artists who had left the Near East and settled in the West or with copies of these works. In cults it is not so. When a foreign group brought a strange cult, the ministrant or ministrants of that cult belonged to its racial background; the cult of Sarapis on Delos remained in one family for generations. Control would, however, often pass to citizens: thus after Claudius, the archigallus at Rome was a citizen, Rome became Cybele’s holy city, so far as the West was concerned, and the cult was, so to speak, de-Anatolized. Mithraism had no professional alien priests. Under these conditions, however carefully forms were preserved, there was not a personnel with genuinely alien instincts, and this must have contributed powerfully to the absorption of the cults. The suggestion which is here examined involves a modern notion of religion as mainly a matter of a specific type of ideas, distinct from those of everyday life, and such that a change of these ideas will alter men’s attitudes. Alteration is effected by conversion to the prophetic religions; but, even there, it is not as a rule thorough-going and here, it can seldom have resulted from adhesion to one of these cults.

As for the second point, the crucial issue was again not cults or race but men. The Syrian Orontes did, as Juvenal says, flow into the Tiber, and even non-Oriental elements, as they entered the ruling class, did not show as sensitive a repugnance to Oriental cults as their predecessors had done. But race is not everything; Lucian of Samosata was probably a pure Semite—as much so as Elagabalus—and as a boy he did not talk Greek, and yet he clung to the old order at a time when many pure Hellenes had followed after other things. Intellectual and literary activity are largely determined by conventions and by a man’s choice; Frederick the Great was as Prussian as his father, but he preferred to try to think and write in French.

The change in spiritual atmosphere between Augustus and Constantine is part of a long gradual transformation. Our fathers could quote Swinburne’s

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean;

the world has grown grey from thy breath

and could think in terms of an antithesis between a free untram­melled Greek mind and a dogmatic medievalism, or between clean-limbed models for Pheidias and unwashed hermits. That is all past; we know now that paganism had of itself gone far in the direction of grayness and dogmatism and asceticism. Athens had known great days, when a brilliant minority had enjoyed the stimulus of an intelligent and well-integrated society, and when for minority and majority alike men’s feet seemed surely set on paths which led to unlimited horizons. Humanity looked at the world, and found it good; and the Orphic insistence on a sense of sin, a hatred of the body, and a yearning for salvation was left to a hypochondriac few. Nevertheless, even before the end of the Periclean age, new forms of individualism and new external conditions threatened the old harmony. Great achievements and glittering prizes were still in store, but no new satisfying adjustment. The cosmopolitan minority of intellectuals were driven in on themselves. Philosophy could no more build a city; she did but strive to give man shelter under a wall, ‘as in a storm.’ The brilliant success of the Roman Principate in its first two centuries gave a new hope but did not kill a sense of futility and disintegration. After Marcus Aurelius the days were darkened; coarser natures and cruder ways had to serve the needs of harder times. Meanwhile a new order was coming to birth.