Introductory (part 3)

I do not propose to follow further the downfall of the old Roman ideas about the objects of worship, or the neglect and decay of the ius divinum. They do not fall within the scope of my subject—the religious experience of the Roman people. So long as there was any life in these ideas and in the cult which was the practical expression of them, they formed part of that experience. But I think I have sufficiently proved that the life has gone out of the ideas, and that the worship has consequently become meaningless. Ideas about the divine may be discussed by philosophers as the Romans begin to read and in some degree to think; and the outward forms of the cult may be maintained in such particulars as most closely concern the public life of the community; but as a religious system expressing human experience we have done with these things.

Notes to Lecture XV

Lecture XVI

Greek Philosophy and Roman Religion

I said at the end of the last lecture that ideas about the Divine might be discussed at Rome by philosophers, as the Romans began to read and in some degree to think. At the era we have now reached, the latter half of the second century B.C., this process actually began, and I propose in this lecture to deal with it briefly. But my subject is the Roman religious experience, and I can only find room for philosophy so far as the philosophy introduced at Rome had a really religious side. Another reason forbidding me to give much space to it is that it was at Rome entirely exotic, did not spring from an indigenous root in Roman life and thought, and never seriously affected the minds of the lower and less educated population. And I must add that the types of Greek philosophy which concern us at all have been fully and ably dealt with, the one in vol. ii. of Dr. Caird's lectures on this foundation on The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, a work from which I have learnt much, and the other by Dr. Masson in his most instructive work on the great Epicurean poet Lucretius.

We have seen in the two last lectures that in that second century B.C. the Roman was fast becoming religiously destitute—a castaway without consolation, and without the sense that he needed it. He was destitute, first, in regard to his idea of God and of his relation to God; for if we take our old definition of religion, which seems to me to be continually useful, we can hardly say of that age that it showed any effective desire to be in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The old idea of the manifestation of the Power in the various numina had no longer any relation to Roman life; the kind of life in which it germinated and grew, the life of agriculture and warlike self-defence, had passed away with the growth of the great city, the decay of the small farmer, and the extension of the empire; and no new informing and inspiring principle had taken its place. Secondly, he was destitute in regard to his sense of duty, which had been largely dependent on religion, both in the family and in the State. No new force had come in to create and maintain conscience. In public life, indeed, the religious oath was still powerful, and continued to be so, though there are some signs that its binding force was less strong than of yore, especially in the army. But in a society so complex as that of Rome in the last two centuries B.C. much more was wanted than a bond sanctioned by civil and religious law; there was needed a sense of duty to the family, the slave, the provincials, the poor and unfortunate. There was no spring of moral action, no religious consecration of morality, no stimulus to moral endeavour. The individual was rapidly developing, emancipating himself from the State and the group-system of society; but he was developing in a wrong direction. The importance of self, when realised in high and low alike, was becoming self-seeking, indifference to all but self. We have now to see whether philosophy could do anything to relieve this destitution of the Romans in regard both to God and duty.

The first system of philosophy actually to make its appearance at Rome was that of Epicurus; but it speedily disappeared for the time, and only became popular in the last century B.C., and then in its most repulsive form. It was indeed destined to inspire the noblest mind among all Roman thinkers with some of the greatest poetry ever written; but I need say little of it, for it was never really a part of Roman religious experience. Though capable of doing men much good in a turbulent and individualistic age, it did not and could not do this by establishing a religious sanction for conduct. The Epicurean gods were altogether out of reach of the conscience of the individual. They were superfluous even for the atomic theory on which the whole system was pivoted; and what Epicurus himself understood by them, or any of his followers down to Lucretius, is matter of subtle and perplexing disputation. One point is clear, that they had no interest in human beings; and the natural inference would be that human beings had no call to worship them; yet, strange to say, Epicurus himself took part in worship, and in the worship of the national religion of his native city. Philodemus, the contemporary of Lucretius, expressly asserts this, and even insists that Epicurism gave a religious sanction to morality which was absent in Stoicism. Lucretius himself clearly thought that worship was natural and possible. "If you do not clear your mind of false notions," he says, "nec delubra deum placido cum pectore adibis." Man might go on with his ancestral worship, but entirely without fear, and as with "placid mind" he took part in the rites of his fathers, a mysterious divine influence might enter his mind; "the images of a Zeus, a Heracles, an Athene, might pass in and impress on him the aspect and character of each deity, and carry with them suggestions of virtue, of courage, of wise counsel in difficulty." Evidently both Epicurus and his followers had felt the difficulty and the peril of breaking entirely with the religious habits of the mass of the people, and had conscientiously done their best to reconcile their own belief with popular practice—an attempt which has its parallel in the religious speculation of the present day.

But for the Roman follower of Epicurus, wholly unused to such subtle ideas as the passage of divine influence into the mind by means of religious contemplation, this lame attempt to bring apathetic gods into relation with human life must have been quite meaningless. Cicero well expresses the common sense of a Roman at the very beginning of his treatise on the Nature of the Gods. "If they are right who deny that the gods have any interest in human affairs, where is there room for pietas, for sanctitas, for religio?" What, he adds, is the use of worship, of honour, of prayer? If these are simply make-believes, pietas cannot exist, and with it we may almost assume that fides and iustitia, and the social virtues generally, which hold society together, must vanish too. Such criticism is characteristically Roman, and we may take it as representing accurately the feeling of the old-fashioned Roman of Cicero's day, as well as of the Stoic or Academic critic of Epicurism. On the other hand, the believing Epicurean at Rome was not more likely to accept the compromise; he had done with his own gods and their worship, and such a "ficta simulatio" was not likely to attract him. Even Lucretius, whose mind was in a sense really religious, does no more in the passage I quoted just now than allude to actual worship of the gods, and he makes it quite clear that the tranquillity and happiness coming from contemplation, and the punishment that follows misdoing, are both purely subjective; the gods are not active in influencing man's life, but man influences that life himself by opening his mind to the contemplation of the gods. This passage of Lucretius (vi. 68 foll.) is, if I am not mistaken, the nearest approach to real religion that we find in the history of Roman Epicurism; yet so far as we know it bore no fruit. It seems to me to express a genuine feeling, a religio, but the expression is blurred by a consciousness of inconsistency.

The fact is that in the system of Epicurus the Power manifesting itself in the universe is not a divine Power, but a mechanical one; the gods have nothing to do with it, they cannot be active, their perfection is found in repose; they are an adjunct, an after-thought in the system. Thus all attempts to reconcile the Power with the popular religion must inevitably be failures, and more especially so in the Roman world. At best the Epicurean gods could but set an example of quietism which could not possibly be a force for good in that active world of business and government. The real force of Epicurism, for the Roman at least, if I am not mistaken, was analogous to a religious force, though far indeed from being one in reality—I mean the profound and touching belief in the Founder himself as a saviour, which is so familiar to all readers of Lucretius. And the real legacy of Lucretius himself to Roman religion is only indirectly a religious one—I mean the wholesome contempt for "superstitio" and all the baser side of religious belief and practice, old and new. If his devotion to the Master had been rooted more in the love of goodness and less in the admiration for his speculations, and if his contempt for superstitio had been less harshly dogmatic, had he been more sympathetic and generous in his attitude to the Italian ideas of the divine—the power of Lucretius might possibly have been strong and permanent.

Thus for the Roman's destitution in regard to God Epicurism could find no remedy, and as a consequence it could provide no religious sanction for his conduct in life. What power it had upon conduct as a system of ethics is a question outside the range of my subject. No doubt a certain type of mind, naturally pure and good, and apt to retire upon itself, might find in Epicurism not only no harm but even positive help; perhaps the best way to appreciate this fact, too often overlooked, is to read the defence of the Epicurean ethics put into the mouth of Torquatus, in the first book of the de Finibus, by one who was far from being in sympathy with the creed. But for the Roman of that age, when ideas of duty and discipline were losing strength, this enticing faith, with pleasure as its summum bonum, and with quietism as its ideal of human life, could hardly be a real stimulus to active virtue; the Roman needed bracing, and this was not a tonic, but a sedative. Far more valuable in every way, and far better suited to the best instincts of the Roman character, was the rival creed of Stoicism, and I must devote the rest of this lecture to the consideration of its religious aspect.

It was most fortunate for Rome that her best and ablest men in the second century B.C. fell into the hands, not of Epicureans, but of Stoics—into the hands, too, of a single Stoic of high standing, fine character, and good sense. For destitute as the Roman was both in regard to God and to Duty, he found in Stoicism an explanation of man's place in the universe,—an explanation relating him directly to the Power manifesting itself therein, and deriving from that relation a binding principle of conduct and duty. This should make the religious character of Stoicism at once apparent. It is perfectly true, as the late Mr. Lecky said long ago, that "Stoicism, taught by Panaetius of Rhodes, and soon after by the Syrian Posidonius, became the true religion of the educated classes. It furnished the principles of virtue, coloured the noblest literature of the time, and guided all the developments of moral enthusiasm." To this I only need to add that it woke in the mind an entirely new idea of Deity, far transcending that of Roman numina and of Greek polytheism, and yet not incapable of being reconciled with these; so that it might be taken as an inpouring of sudden light upon old conceptions of the Power, glorifying and transfiguring them, rather than, like the Epicurean faith, a bitter and contemptuous negation of man's inherited religious instincts. But before we go on to consider this illumination more closely, let me say a few words about Panaetius the Stoic missionary, and Scipio Aemilianus, his most famous disciple.

Scipio, born 184, was a happy combination of the best Roman aristocratic character and the receptive intelligence which for a Roman was the chief result of a Greek liberal education. He had been educated by his famous father, Aemilius Paulus, in a thoroughly healthy way; he was no mere book-student, but a practical courageous Roman, with a solid mental foundation of moral rectitude (pietas) fixed firmly in the traditions and instincts of his own family. On this foundation, as has been well said, a superstructure of intellectual culture might be built securely without destroying it, and this was exactly what did take place, both for Scipio and for that circle of friends of his which has become so famous in Roman history. In very early life he became the intimate friend of Polybius, whose account of their first unreserved intercourse is one of the most delightful passages in all ancient literature; and from Polybius he doubtless learnt to think. He must have learnt to understand the real nature of the Roman empire, to appreciate the forces which had called it into being, the qualities which had preserved it through the fearful struggle with Hannibal, and the duty of a noble Roman in regard to it. From Polybius, indeed, it is not likely that he gained much light on matters either of religion or morality; but that statesman and historian must inevitably have accustomed him, in the course of their long intercourse, to think more deeply than Roman had ever yet thought, about the world in which he lived and was to act for many years the leading part. Thus he was well prepared for the friendship of a more spiritual guide.

Panaetius, who was probably about the same age as Scipio, had the advantage, as a visitor at Rome, of being a Rhodian, i.e. a citizen of the one Greek State which had been almost continuously on good terms with Rome, and of great value to her. He was also a scion of an old and honoured family in that city, and was thus in every way a fit friend and companion for a great Roman noble. When their friendship began we do not know for certain; but it is a fact that he lived for some two years, together with Polybius, in the house of Scipio, and these years were probably between 144 and 141 B.C., after Scipio's return from the conquest of Carthage. When Scipio in 141 was commissioned by the Senate to go and set things in order in the eastern Mediterranean, he took Panaetius with him, and brought him home to live with him again as a guest, perhaps until he left for the Numantine war in 134, after which it is not likely that they met again before Scipio's sudden death in 129. I am particular about the extent of their intimacy, because I wish to make it clear that this was no ordinary or fleeting friendship between a commonplace Greek philosopher and an average Roman statesman. Both statesman and philosopher were far above the usual level of their kind, and in the course of this long intimacy must have had full opportunity of learning from each other. From Scipio Panaetius would learn the secrets of the Roman temperament, and divine the right methods of dealing with it, and the result of this was a happy modification of the old rigidity of the Stoic principles—an adaptation of them to the Roman character which had far-reaching consequences. From Panaetius Scipio and his friends would learn a new and illuminating conception of man's place in the universe, and of his relation to the Power manifested in it. To understand the power of Stoicism on the mind of these Romans and their intellectual successors, it is necessary to have a clear idea of this illumination.

Hitherto there had been nothing in the religion of Rome, or of any other city-state, to make it inevitable, reasonable, that man should worship the Power, except tradition and self-interest, involved in the tradition and self-interest of the family and the city. The gods belonged, as we saw, to family or city as divine inhabitants, and if you neglected them they would show their anger against you. Originally it was religio, the feeling of awe for something distinct from man and unknown to him, which forced him to propitiate that which he might fear, but had no reason, except the instinct of self-preservation, to reverence; and later on, as he came to know his numina better, to make them, so to speak, his own, and to formulate the methods of propitiating them, he gradually came also to take them for granted, and to worship them as a matter of traditional duty. The idea of conforming his life to the will of any of these numina would, of course, be absolutely strange to him—the expression would have no meaning whatever for him. The help which he sought from them was not moral help, but material. But now, when the religio has been hypnotised and soothed away, and when the tradition of ceremonial observance was growing dim and weak, when he is left alone with his fellow-men, and without any binding reason for right conduct towards them, he may learn from Stoicism that there is a Power above and beyond all his numina, yet involving and embracing them all, to which, and by the help of which, as a man endowed with reason, he must conform his life.

The theology held and taught by Panaetius, in common with all Stoics at all periods, was based upon two leading thoughts, in the correlation of which lay the kernel of the Stoic ethical system. The first of these thoughts is this: the whole universe, in all its forms and manifestations, shows unmistakably the work of Reason, of Mind; without mind, reason, spiritus, as Cicero calls it, the universe could not exist. I need not go here into the origin and history of this thought; what is important for us is to make clear the theological consequences of it. Obviously it was natural that the Stoic should be led on to the conviction that this universe endowed with Reason—with a Reason far transcending all human capacity—must itself be God. The Stoic arguments in support of this further step are indeed lame, as they inevitably must be; they are well set forth at the beginning of Book ii. of Cicero's work de Natura Deorum (based upon one by Posidonius, the successor and disciple of Panaetius), where they seem to us rather cold and formal. That step is indeed incapable of being made convincing by any syllogism; it is only when we try to think with the minds of those old thinkers, living in a world of unmeaning worship, that we begin to realise the nobility of a conviction which they tried in vain to reduce to a syllogism. Sapiens a principio mundus, et deus habendus est; these words, which sound like an article of a creed, suffice for us without the laborious arguments of Cleanthes and Chrysippus which we may read in the fifth and sixth chapters of Cicero's book. Cicero has added to these a characteristic illustration from city life, which I may quote as more useful for us. "If a man enters a house or a gymnasium or a forum, and sees reason, method, and discipline reigning there, he cannot suppose that these came about without a cause, but perceives that there is someone there who rules and is obeyed: how much more, when he contemplates the motions and revolutions to be seen in the universe (e.g., in the heavenly bodies), must he conclude that they are all governed by a conscious Mind!" And this Mind can be nothing else but God.

This sounds like the Deism of the eighteenth century, and might be described as "natural religion"; but the Stoics took yet another step, and developed their thought into Pantheism. The idea of a personal Deity, distinct from the universe and its Creator, was obnoxious to them; it would have committed them to a dualism of Mind and Matter which, from the very outset of their history, they emphatically repudiated; their conviction was of a Unity in all things, and to this they consistently held in spite of constant and damaging criticism. The theological result of this conviction has lately been well expressed by Dr. Bussell. He is speaking of Seneca in particular, but what he says applies to all Stoics equally well: "Though he yearns to see God in 'the moral order of the Universe,' he is forced in the interests of Unity to identify Him with every other known force. As He is everything, so any name will suit Him. He is the sum of existence: or the secret and abstract law which guides it: He is Nature or Fate. The partial names of special deities are all His, and together they make up the fulness of the divine title; but they disappear in the immense nothingness, rather than colour or qualify it." This is a point of immense importance for the study of Stoicism at Rome; it was fully developed by Posidonius, and copied from him both by Cicero and Varro. "God," says Cicero in the book I have been quoting, "pervading all nature (pertinens per naturam cuiusque rei), can be understood as Ceres on the land, as Neptune on the sea, and so on, and may be and should be worshipped in all these different forms;" not in superstitious fear and grovelling spirit—the mental attitude which Lucretius had condemned years before this treatise was written—but with pure heart and mind, following the one and true God in all his various manifestations. Thus the Stoic Pantheism, in spite of its weak points, could find room for the deities of the city-state, and put new illuminating life into them. To us it may seem, as it seems to Dr. Bussell, that they would disappear in an immense nothingness; but to the Roman mind of Scipio's age, if I am not mistaken, they might, on the contrary, save the great Pantheistic idea from so itself disappearing. I cannot but think that the Roman's idea of divinity, the force or will-power which he called numen, would find here a means of reviving its former hold on the Roman mind, and enabling it to grasp as a concrete fact, and not merely as an abstract idea, the "deus pertinens per naturam cuiusque rei." In particular the Roman conception of the great Jupiter, the father of heaven, might gain new life for the people who had so long been used to call him "the Best and Greatest." Almost from the very beginning of Stoicism the school had seized upon Zeus to convey, under the guise of a personality and a name, some idea of the Reason in the universe; and the same use might just as well, perhaps even better, be made of the great deity of the Capitoline temple, whom his people recognised as the open heaven with all its manifestations, the celestial representative of good faith and righteous dealing, and the special protector of the destinies of Rome and her empire.

The second thought which lies at the base of the religion or theology of Stoicism, is this: that Man himself, alone in all the Universe, shares with God the full possession of Reason. In other words, Man alone, besides God, is strictly individual, self-conscious, capable of realising an end and of working towards it; he is so utterly different from the animals, so far above them (or if we call him an animal, he is, in Cicero's language, animal providum, sagax, multiplex, acutum, memor, plenum rationis et consilii), that he must surely be of the same nature as God. And this is what, in strict conformity with all Stoic teaching, Cicero in this same passage expressly says—man is generatus a deo. So too in the famous hymn of Cleanthes, quoted by St. Paul at Athens ("For we are also his offspring,"):—

Chiefest glory of deathless Gods, Almighty for ever, Sovereign of Nature that rulest by law, what name shall we give thee? Blessed be Thou, for on Thee should call all things that are mortal. For that we are Thy offspring: nay, all that in myriad motion Lives for its day on the earth bears one impress, Thy likeness, upon it; Wherefore my song is of Thee, and I hymn Thy power for ever.

In these splendid lines it is plain that not Man only is thought of, but all living things, animals included with Man; and this is in accordance with the true Stoic Pantheism. But none the less on this account did the Stoics believe Man to be the one living thing in the universe comparable with God, and capable of communion with him by virtue of the possession of Reason. As Cicero says, a few lines farther on in the work I am quoting, "virtus eadem in homine ac deo est, neque ullo alio ingenio praeterea." And since every creature seeks to maintain and augment its own being, to bring it to perfection, to express it fully, by an innate law of its nature, Man being endowed with Reason above all other creatures, strives, or should strive, to bring himself to a perfect expression, by identifying himself with the divine principle which he shares with God. As Dr. Caird puts it, "the ruling power of Reason so dominates his nature that he cannot be described as anything but a self-conscious ego (i.e. in contrast with other animals); and just because of this, all his impulses become concentrated in one great effort after self-realisation." But the self that he tries to realise must be his true self, not his irrational impulses: the self which is a part of the divine principle. He must desire to realise himself as having Reason, and so to come into close communion with God, the Reason of the universe. Those who are at all familiar with the later Roman Stoics, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, if we may include him among them, will recognise in this inspiring thought, vague and impalpable as it may seem, the germ of many beautiful expressions of the relation of Man to God, which seem to bring Stoicism into closer spiritual connection with Christianity than any other doctrine of the ancient world.

The work of Cicero from which I have been quoting, the first book of his treatise on the Laws, i.e. the Roman constitution, is very probably based on one by Panaetius himself, of whom we are expressly told that he used to discuss that constitution together with Polybius and Scipio in the days of their happy intimacy at Rome. In any case we may find it helpful, taken together with the earlier fragmentary work de Republica, in trying to form some idea of the effect of this second leading Stoic thought on the best Roman minds of the last ages of the Republic. We find, as we might expect, that it is not on Man simply as individual that stress is here laid. Man is not thought of as hoping to realise his own Reason in isolation; the Stoics, though, like their rivals, they represent a reaction of the individual against the State, were all along perfectly clear that man in isolation would be helpless, and that his own reason bade him realise himself in association with his fellow-men. It is the position of Man, as associated, 1, with God, 2, with other men, that is here made prominent; and the bond of connection is in each case Law, which is indeed only one name for the Supreme Reason and the highest Good. I must say a word about these two aspects of Man's position in the world, in order to explain what I believe to have been the effect of this teaching on the Roman mind.

1. In explaining the relation of Man to God Cicero uses an expression which some years before he had developed in a fine passage in the Republic: true law, he says, is right reason. In the Laws he takes it up again, and argues that as both God and Man have reason, there must be a direct relation between them. And as Law and right reason are identical, we may say that Law is the binding force of that relation. And again, this means that the universe may be looked on as one great State (civitas), of which both God and Man (or gods and men) are citizens, or in another way as a State of which the constitution is itself the Reason, or God's law, which all reasonable beings must obey. Such obedience is itself the effort by which Man realises his own reason: he is a part of a reasonable universe, and he cannot rebel against its law without violating his own highest instinct. It is not hard to see how this way of expressing the Stoic theological principle would appeal to the Roman mind. That mind was wholly incapable of metaphysical thinking; but it could without effort understand, with the help of its social and political principles and experience, the idea of supreme intelligent rule—a supreme imperium, as it were, to rebel against which would be a moral perduellio, high treason against a supreme Law, unwritten like his own, and resting, as he thought of his own as resting, on the best instincts, tradition, reason, of his community; from his own constitution and laws he could lift his mind without much difficulty to the constitution and law of the communis deorum et hominum civitas. The idea of God in any such sense as this was indeed new to him; but he could grasp it under the expression "universal law of right reason" when he would have utterly failed, for example, to conceive of it as "the Absolute." He can feel himself the citizen of a State whose maker and ruler is God, and whose law is the inevitable force of Reason; he can realise his relationship to God as a part of the same State, gifted with the same power of discerning its legal basis, nay, even helping to administer its law by rational obedience.

2. Reason as thus ruling the universe can also provide a basis for Man's reasonable association with his fellow-men, and a religious basis if conceived as God; for Man's recognition of the divine law, the recta ratio, as binding on him, is followed quite naturally by his recognition of the application of that law to the world he lives in. "Human law comes into existence," says Zeller, explaining this point, "when man becomes aware of the divine law, and recognises its claim on him." Here, again, it is easy to see how illuminating would be this conception of law for the Roman of Scipio's time. So far the Roman idea and study of law (as I have elsewhere expressed it) had been of a crabbed, practical character, wanting in breadth of treatment, destitute of any philosophical conception of the moral principles which lie behind all law and government. The new doctrine called up life in these dry bones, and started Roman lawyers, many of whom were Stoics more or less pronounced, on a career of enlightened legal study which has left one of the most valuable legacies inherited by the modern world from ancient civilisation. In another way too it had, I think, an immediate effect on Scipio himself and his circle, and on their mental descendants, of whom Cicero was the most brilliant: it made them look on the law and constitution of their State as eminently reasonable, and on rebellion against it as unreason, or as the Romans call it, lascivia, wanton disregard of principle. So far as I know, no great Roman lawyer was ever a revolutionary like Catiline or Clodius, nor yet an obstinate conservative like Cato, whose Stoicism was of the older and less Romanised type; the two of whom we know most in the century following the arrival of Panaetius were both wise, just, and moderate men, Mucius Scaevola and Servius Sulpicius, of whom it may be truly said they contributed as much to civilisation as the great military and political leaders of the same period.

There now remains the question whether this noble Stoic religion, as we may fairly call it, with its ideas of the relation of Man to God and to his fellow-men, had, after all, sufficient definiteness for a Roman to act as a grip on his conscience and his conduct in his daily dealings with others. It could deduce the existence and beauty of the social virtues from its own principles; if Man partakes of the eternal Reason, or, as they otherwise put it, if he is through his Reason a part of God himself in the highest sense, and if God and Reason are in the highest sense good, then in realising his own Reason, in obeying the voice of the God within him, he must be himself good by the natural instinct of his own being. Accordingly, these social virtues, duties, officia, as the Romans called them, were set forth by Panaetius in two books, which in a Latinised form we still fortunately possess,—the first two of Cicero's work de Officiis,—and without the uncompromising rigidity which characterised the original Stoic ethical doctrine inherited from the Cynics. In the first book he treated of the good simply (honestum), in the second of the useful (utile), and in a third, which it was left for Cicero to execute, of the cases of conflict between these two. In this charming work there is much to admire, and even much to learn: the social virtues—benevolence, justice, liberality, self-restraint, and so on, are enlarged upon and illustrated by historical examples in perfect Latin by Cicero; and as we read it we cannot but feel that the influence of Panaetius upon his educated Roman pupils must have been eminently wholesome.

But at the same time we inevitably feel that there is something wanting. What power could such a discussion really have to constrain an ordinary man to right action? The constraint, such as it is, seems purely an intellectual process, and this is indeed noticeable in the Stoic ethics of all periods. No Stoic brought his doctrine nearer to a religious system than Epictetus; yet this is how Epictetus puts the matter: "If a man could be thoroughly penetrated, as he ought to be, with this thought, that we are all in an especial manner sprung from God, and that God is the Father of men as well as gods, full sure he would never conceive aught ignoble or base of himself.... Those few who hold that they are born for fidelity, modesty, and unerring rightness in dealing with the things of sense, never conceive aught base or ignoble of themselves." He means that, for the real Stoic, self-respect is the necessary consequence of his intellectual conception of his place in the universe, and that self-respect must as inevitably result in virtue. Can this intellectual attitude really act as a constraining force on the will of the average man? This is far too complicated a question for me to enter upon here, and I can but suggest the study of it for anyone who would wish to test the actual life-giving moral power of this philosophy. Suffice it to say that their idea of the universe as Reason and God naturally led the Stoics into a kind of Fatalism, a destined order in the world which nothing could effectually oppose; and they were naturally in some difficulty in reconciling this with the freedom of Man's will. That freedom they constantly and consistently asserted; but it comes after all to this, that Man is free to bring his will into conformity, through knowledge, with the Power and the universal Reason; or, as Dr. Caird puts it, Man has the choice whether he will be a willing or an unwilling servant (of the universal Reason): unwilling, if he makes it his aim to satisfy his particular self, an aim which he can only attain so far as the general system of things allows him; willing, if he identifies himself with the divine reason which is manifested in that system." But that identification of himself with the divine Reason is again an intellectual process; it can only be realised by minds highly trained in thinking; it could not have the smallest grip on the conduct of the ordinary ignorant man, or on the minds of women and children.

And here we come upon another weak point in Stoicism as presented to the Roman world in this last century B.C. It was an age in which gentleness, tenderness, pity, and the philanthropic spirit were most sadly needed, and it cannot be said of Stoicism that it had any mission to encourage their growth. The Stoics looked on the mass of men as ignorant and wicked, and it never occurred to them that it was a duty of the Good Man to teach and redeem them,—to sacrifice his life, if need be, in the work of enlightenment. They seem to have thought even of women and children as hardly partaking of Reason; their ideally good man was virtuous in a strictly virile way, and it never occurred to them that training in goodness must begin from the earliest years, and be gradually developed with infinite sympathy and tenderness. If a man is to learn that there is something within him which partakes of God, and which should naturally lead him to right conduct, he must begin to learn this truth in his infancy. But the absence of a place for emotion and sympathy in the Stoic system, resulting from the purely intellectual nature of their central doctrine of Reason, meant also the absence of any spirit of enthusiastic propaganda. Their notion that emotion or passion is "a movement of mind contrary to reason and nature," lamed their whole system as a progressive force in the world of that day. Such religious power as it could exercise worked simply through the radiating influence of a few wise and good men, by nature pure and unselfish, who gradually familiarised the educated part of society with a nobler idea of God than the old religion had ever been able to supply, and with that other inspiring idea of the near relation of Man to God as partaking of His nature. But the active enthusiasm of a real religion—the effective desire to be in right relation with the Power—was strange to Stoicism. In one way or another it had many excellent results; it cleared the ground, for example, for a new and universal religion by putting into the shade, if not altogether out of the way, the old local cults with their narrow and limited civic force: it glorified the idea of law and order in an age when the Roman world seemed to be forgetting what these sacred words meant; but a real active enthusiasm of humanity was wanting in it. Hence there is a certain hopelessness about Stoicism, which increased rather than diminished as the world went on, and such as is seen in a kind of sad grandeur in Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor. Of him it may be said, both as emperor and philosopher, as has been said of the Stoic in general, that "he was essentially a soldier left to hold a fort surrounded by overpowering hosts of the enemy. He could not conquer or drive them away, but he could hold out to the last and die at his post."

Notes to Lecture XVI.

Lecture XVII

Mysticism—Ideas of a Future Life

We have now reached the end of the period of the Republic; but before I go on to the age of Augustus, with which I must bring these lectures to an end, I must ask attention to a movement which can best be described by the somewhat vague term Mysticism, but is generally known to historians of philosophy as Neo-pythagoreanism. The fact is that such tendency as there ever was at Rome towards Mysticism—which was never indeed a strong one till Rome had almost ceased to be Roman—seems to have taken the form of thinking known as Pythagorean. The ideas at the root of the Pythagorean doctrine, the belief in a future life, the conception of this life as only preparatory to another, the conviction of the need of purgation in another life and of the preparatory discipline and asceticism to be practised while we are here,—these are truly religious ideas; and even among Romans the religious instinct, though it might be hypnotised, could never be entirely destroyed. When it awoke from time to time in the minds of thinking men it was apt to express itself in Pythagorean tones. With the ignorant and vulgar it might find a baser expression in superstition pure and simple,—in the finding of portents, in astrology, in Dionysiac orgies; but with these Pythagoreanism must not be reckoned. These, as they appeared on the soil of Italy, were the bastard children of quasi-religious thought. But the movement of which I speak marks a reaction, among men who could both feel and think, against the whole tendency of Roman religious experience as we have been tracing it; against the extreme formalism, now meaningless, of the Roman State religion; against the extreme scepticism and indifference so obvious in the last century and a half of the republican era; against the purely intellectual appeal of the ethical systems of which I have been recently speaking. Stoicism indeed, as we shall see, held out a hand to the new movement, simply because Stoicism had a religious side which was wanting in Epicurism. But the thought that our senses and our reason are not after all the sole fountains of our knowledge, a thought which is the essence of mysticism, was really foreign to Stoicism; and when this thought did find a soil in the mind of a thinking Roman of this age, it was likely to spring up in a transcendental form which we may call Pythagoreanism.

South Italy was indeed the true home of the Pythagorean teaching. There its founder had established it, and there, mixed up with more popular Orphic doctrine and practice, it must have remained latent for centuries. "Tenuit magnam illam Graeciam," says Cicero of Pythagoras, "cum honore disciplinae, tum etiam auctoritate; multaque saecula post sic viguit Pythagoreorum nomen, ut nulli alii docti viderentur." To South Italy Plato is said to have travelled to study this philosophy, and to learn the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and the story is generally accepted as true. But of any missionary attempt of Pythagoreanism on Rome we know nothing—and probably there was nothing to tell—till that mysterious plot to introduce it after the Hannibalic war which I mentioned in a recent lecture. That war brought Rome into close contact with Tarentum and southern Italy, and it is likely enough that the attempt to connect King Numa with the philosopher, both in the familiar legend and in the alleged discovery of the stone coffin with its forged manuscripts, had its origin in this contact. The Senate could not object to the legend, but it promptly stamped out this grotesque attempt at propagandism. Then we hear no more of the doctrine for a century at least; but in the last century B.C. we know that there appeared a number of Pythagorean writings, falsely attributed to the founder himself or his disciples,—a method of propagandism which, like that of the previous century, may perhaps be taken as marking the religious nature of the doctrine, which needed the ipse dixit of the founder or something as near it as possible. But of the immediate influence of these writings we know nothing. The person really responsible for the tendency to this kind of mysticism was undoubtedly the great Posidonius, philosopher, historian, traveller, who more than any other man dominated the Roman world of thought in the first half of the last century B.C., and whose writings, now surviving in a few fragments only, lie at the back of nearly all the serious Roman literature of his own and indeed of the following age. Panaetius, there can be little doubt, had done something to leaven Stoicism with Platonic-Aristotelian psychology, the general tendency of which was towards a dualism of Soul and Body. The Stoics, in the strict sense of the name, "could not be content with any philosophy which divided heaven from earth, the spiritual from the material." "They rebelled against the idea of a transcendent God and a transcendent ideal world, as modern thought has rebelled against the supernaturalism of mediaeval religion and philosophy." In their passion for unity they would not separate soul and body. But when once Panaetius had hinted at a reversion to the older mode of thought, it was natural and easy to follow his lead in a society which had long ago abandoned burial for cremation, and bidden farewell to the primitive notion that the body lived on under the earth: in a society, too, which had always believed in that "other soul," the Genius of a man, as distinct from his bodily self of this earthly life.

Now as soon as this dualism of body and soul was suggested, it was taken up by Posidonius into what we may call his neo-Stoic system, and at once gave mysticism, —or transcendentalism, if we choose so to call it—its chance. For in such a dualistic psychology it is the soul that gains in value, the body that loses. Life becomes an imprisonment of the soul in the body; the soul seeks to escape, death is but the beginning of a new life, and the imagination is set to work to fathom the mysteries of Man's future existence, nay, in some more fanciful minds, those of his pre-existence as well. This kind of speculation, half philosophic, half poetical, is the transcendental side of the Platonic psychology, and in the last age of the Republic was able to connect Platonism and Pythagoreanism without deserting Stoicism. We can see it reflected from Posidonius in the Dream of Scipio, the beautiful myth, imitated from those of Plato, with which Cicero concluded his treatise on the State, written in the year 54 B.C., after his retirement from political life. In this, and again in the first book of his Tusculan Disputations, composed nearly ten years later, Cicero is beyond doubt on the tracks of Posidonius, and therefore also of Pythagoreanism. Listen to the words put into the mouth of the elder Scipio and addressed to his younger namesake: "Tu vero enitere et sic habeto, non esse te mortalem, sed corpus hoc; non enim tu es, quem forma ista declarat; sed mens cuiusque is est quisque, non ea figura quae digito demonstrari potest." Here is the body plainly losing, the soul gaining importance. But he goes still further: "deum igitur te scito esse: si quidem deus est qui viget qui sentit qui meminit: qui providet, qui tam regit et moderatur et movet id corpus cui propositus est, quam hunc mundum ille princeps deus, et ut mundum ex quadam parte mortalem ipse deus aeternus, sic fragile corpus animus sempiternus movet."

With such a view of the soul in relation to the body, we can understand how in this myth it is described as flying upwards, released from corporeal bondage, and ascending through heavenly stations to pure aether, if at least (and here we may note the characteristic Roman touch) its abode on earth has been the body of a good citizen. All that is of earth earthy, all old ideas of burial, all notions of a gloomy abode below the earth, are here fairly left behind. So too in the first book of the Tusculans, written after the death of his beloved daughter, Cicero would persuade himself and others that death cannot be an evil if we once allow the soul to be immortal: for from its very nature it must rise into aethereal realms, cannot sink like the body into the earth. Into its experiences in the aether I do not need to go here. Enough has been said to show that, as it were, the heavens were opened, and with the psychological separation of soul from body the imaginative faculty was released also; not indeed that any Roman, or even Posidonius himself, could revel in cosmological dreams as did Plato, but they found in him all they needed, and it would seem that they made much use of it. Plato's Timaeus was made by Posidonius the subject of a commentary, and by Cicero himself it was in part at least translated, about the time when he was writing the Tusculans, and still deeply moved by his recent loss. Of this translation a fragment survives; and in the introductory sentences he indicates a second stimulus to his Pythagorean tendencies, besides Posidonius. He tells how he had met at Ephesus, when on his way to his province of Cilicia, the famous Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus, and had enjoyed conversation with him. Nigidius was an old friend, who had helped Cicero in his consulship; he was one of those "polyhistores" who are characteristic of the age, like Posidonius and Varro, and wrote works on all kinds of subjects of which but few fragments remain. But his reputation as a Pythagorean survived for centuries; and this mention of him by Cicero is only another proof of the direction the thoughts of the latter were taking in these last two years of his life.

Clearly, then, Cicero in his philosophical writings of these years was affected by the current of mysticism that was then running. But to me it is still more interesting to find it moving him in a practical matter of which he has himself left the truth on record; for Cicero is a real human being for whom all who are familiar with his letters must have something in the nature of affection, and with whom, too, we feel genuine sympathy in the calamity which now fell upon him. It was early in 45 B.C. that he lost his only and dearly loved daughter, and the blow to his sensitive temperament, already hardly tried by political anxiety, was severe. We still have the private letters which he wrote to Atticus after her death from his solitude at Astura on the edge of the melancholy Pomptine marshes; and here, if our minds are sufficiently divested of modern ideas and trained to look on death with Roman eyes, we may be startled to find him thinking of her as still in some sense surviving, and as divine rather than human: as a deity or spirit to whom a fanum could be erected. He makes it clear to Atticus, who is acting as his business agent at Rome, that he does not want a mere tomb (sepulcrum), but a fanum, which as we have seen was the general word for a spot of ground sacred to a deity. "I wish to have a fanum built, and that wish cannot be rooted out of my heart. I am anxious to avoid any likeness to a tomb, not so much on account of the penalty of the law, as in order to attain as nearly as possible to an apotheosis. This I could do if I built it in the villa itself, but ... I dread the changes of owners. Wherever I construct it on the land, I think that I could secure that posterity should respect its sanctity." The word here translated sanctity is religio; we may remember that all burial places were loca religiosa, not consecrated by the State, yet hallowed by the feeling of awe or scruple in approaching them; but Cicero is probably here using the word rather in that wider sense in which it so often expresses the presence of a deity in some particular spot.

Atticus was a man of the world and probably an Epicurean, and his friend in two successive letters half apologises for this strong desire. "I should not like it to be known by any other name but fanum,—unreasonably, you will perhaps say." And again, "you must bear with these silly wishes (ineptiæ) of mine." But this only makes the intensity of his feeling about it the more plain and significant; he really seems to want Tullia to be thought of as having passed into the sphere of divinity, however vaguely he may have conceived of it. Perhaps he remembered his own words in Scipio's dream, "Deum te esse scito." The ashes of Tullia rested in the family tomb, but the godlike thing imprisoned in her mortal body was to be honoured at this fanum, which, strange as it may seem to us, her father wished to erect in a public and frequented place. She does not fade away into the common herd of Manes, but remains, though as a spirit, the same individual Tullia whom her father had loved so dearly.

I long ago explained the old Roman idea of Manes, a vague conception of shades of the dead dwelling below the earth, and hardly, if at all, individualised. But in Tullia's case we meet with a clear conception of an individual spirit; and this alone would lead us to suspect a Pythagorean influence at work, such as that under which Virgil wrote the famous words "Quisque suos patimur Manes," which simply mean "Each individual of us must endure his own individual ghosthood." This process of individualisation must have been gradually coming on, but the steps are lost to us; we only know that the earliest sepulchral inscription which speaks to it, in the vague plural Di Manes so familiar in later times, is dateable somewhere about this very time. My friend Dr. J. B. Carter would explain it, in part at least, by the Roman conception of Genius to which I alluded just now, and doubtless this must be taken into account. For myself I would rather think of it as the natural result of the growth of individualism in the living human being during the last two centuries B.C. Surely it was impossible for personality to grow as it did in that period without a corresponding growth of the idea of individual immortality in the minds of all who believed in a future life of any kind at all. The Epicureans did not so believe; but Roman Stoics instructed by Panaetius and Posidonius might not only believe in immortality but in an immortality of the individual.

Let me take this opportunity of noting that there was, of course, no sort of restriction on a man's belief about this or any other religious question. It was perfectly open to every one to hold what view best pleased him about the state of the dead: all that the State required of him was that he should fulfil his obligations at the tombs of his own kin. No dogma reigned in the necropolis, only duty, pietas,—and that pietas implied no conviction. The Parentalia in February were originally, so far as we can discern, only a yearly renewal of the rite of burial on its anniversary; this implies civilisation and some kind of calendar, but not a creed. Later on, in the Fasti of the City-state, the day was fixed for all citizens without regard of anniversaries; and here the rites become a matter of ius, the ius Manium, to the observance of which the Manes are entitled. Still there is no creed, though Cicero speaks of this ius as based on the idea of a future life. As a fact these rites are a survival from an age in which the dead man was believed to go on living in the grave, but that primitive idea was no longer held by the educated. Each man was free in all periods to believe what he pleased about the dead, and as the Romans began to think, this freedom becomes easy to illustrate. Cicero himself is usually agnostic, as is in keeping with his Academic tendency in philosophy; even in one of these very letters he seems to speak of his own non-existence after death. So, too, the excellent Servius Sulpicius, in the famous letter of condolence written to Cicero at this time from Athens, seems to be uncertain. We all know the words of Caesar (reported by Sallust), which are often quoted with a kind of holy horror, as though a pontifex maximus might not hold any opinion he pleased about death, and as though his doubt were not the common doubt of innumerable thinking men of the age. Catullus wrote of death as "nox perpetua dormienda"; Lucretius, of course, gloried in the thought that there is no life beyond. In the following century the learned Pliny could write of death as the relapsing into the same nothingness as before we were born, and could scoff at the absurdities of the cult of the dead.

But when a man like Cicero was deeply touched by grief, his emotional nature abandoned its neutral attitude, and turned for consolation to mysticism. As I have said, he was persuading himself that Tullia was still living,—a glorified spirit. We can gain just a momentary glimpse of what was in his mind by turning to the fragments of the Consolatio which he was now writing at Astura.

This was a Consolatio of the kind which was a recognised literary form of this and later times, though in this case it was addressed by the writer to himself; to write was for Cicero second nature, and he was sure to take up his pen when he had feelings that needed expression. It is unfortunately lost, all but one fragment, which he quotes himself in the first book of his Tusculans, and one or two more preserved by the Christian writer Lactantius, a great admirer of Cicero, who came near to catching the beauty of his style. The passage quoted by himself is precious. It insists on the spiritual nature of the soul, which can have nothing in common with earth or matter of any kind, seeing that it thinks, remembers, foresees: "ita quicquid est illud, quod sentit, quod sapit, quod vivit, quod viget, caeleste et divinum, ob eamque rem aeternum sit necesse est." And in the concluding words he hints strongly at the divinity of the soul, which is of the same make as God himself,—of the same immaterial nature as the only Deity of whom we mortals can conceive. His daughter, therefore, is not only still living in a spiritual life, but she is in some vague sense divine; that word apotheosis, which he twice uses in the letters, has a real meaning for him at this moment; and in a fragment of the Consolatio quoted by Lactantius he makes this quite plain; "Te omnium optimam doctissimamque, approbantibus dis immortalibus ipsis, in eorum coëtu locatam, ad opinionem omnium mortalium consecrabo."

Undoubtedly Cicero is here under the influence of the Pythagoreans as well as of his own emotion. In another chapter Lactantius seems to make this certain; he begins by combining Stoics and Pythagoreans as both believing the immortality of the soul, goes on to deal with the Pythagorean doctrine (or one form of it) that in this life we are expiating the sins of another, and ends by quoting Cicero's Consolatio to that effect: "Quid Ciceroni faciemus? qui cum in principio Consolationis suae dixit, luendorum scelerum causa nasci homines, iteravit id ipsum postea, quasi obiurgans eum qui vitam poenam non esse putet." Another lost book, the Hortensius, which was written immediately after the Consolatio, March to May 45, shows in one or two surviving fragments exactly the same tendency of thought and reading. Our conclusion then must be that Cicero, always impressionable, and in his way also religious, had in this year 45 a real religious experience. He was brought face to face with one of the mysterious facts of life, and with one of the great mysteries of the universe, and the religious instinct awoke within him. How many others, even in that sordid and materialistic age, may have had the like experience, with or without a mystical philosophy to guide their thoughts? In the last words of the famous Laudatio Turiae, of which I have written at length in my Social Life in the Age of Cicero, we may perhaps catch an echo of a similar religious feeling: "Te di Manes tui ut quietam patiantur atque ita tueantur opto" (I pray that thy divine Manes may keep thee in peace and watch over thee). These words, expressing the hope of a practical man, not of a philosopher, are very difficult to explain, except as the unauthorised utterances of an individual. They hardly find a parallel either in literature or inscriptions. We must not press them, yet they help us to divine that there was in this last half-century B.C. some mystical yearning to realise the condition of the loved ones gone before, and the relation of their life to that of the living. This religious instinct, let us note once for all, is not identical with the old one which we expressed by the formula about the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The religious instinct of the primitive Roman was concerned only with this life and its perils and mysteries; the religious instinct of Cicero's time was not that of simple men struggling with agricultural perils, but that of educated men whose minds could pass in emotional moments far beyond the troubles of this present world, to speculate on the great questions, why we are here, what we are, and what becomes of us after death.

But what of the ordinary Roman of this age—what of the man who was not trained to think, and had no leisure or desire to read? What did he believe about a future life, or did he believe anything? This brings us to a curious question about which I must say a very few words—did this ordinary Roman, as Lucretius seems to insist, believe in Hades and its torments? Not in one passage only does Lucretius insist on this. "That fear of Hell" (so Dr. Masson translates him) "must be driven out headlong, which troubles the life of man from its inmost depth, and overspreads everything with the blackness of death, and permits no pleasure to be pure and unalloyed." I need not multiply quotations; evidently the poet believed what he said, though he may be using the exaggeration of poetical diction. And to a certain extent he is borne out by the literature of his time. In fact Polybius, writing nearly a century earlier of the Romans and their religion, implies that such notions were common, and that they were invented by "the ancients" to frighten the people into submission. Cicero, though he of course thinks of them as merely the fables of poets, seems to suggest that the ordinary man did believe in them; thinking of his own recent loss, he says that our misery would be unbearable when we lose those we love, if we really thought of them as "in iis malis quibus vulgo opinantur." Of course all these fables were Greek, not Roman. There is no reason to believe that the old Romans imagined their own dead experiencing any miseries in Orcus—the old name, as it would seem, for the dimly imagined abode of the Manes, afterwards personified after the manner of Plutus. No doubt they believed that the dead were ghosts, desiring to get back to their old homes, who, in the well-ordered religion of the City-state, were limited in this strong desire to certain days in the civic year. But their first acquaintance with Hades and its tortures may probably be dated early, i.e. when they first became acquainted with Etruscan works of art, themselves the result of a knowledge of Greek art and myth. Early in the second century B.C. Plautus in the Captivi alluded to these paintings as familiar; and we must not forget that the Etruscans habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his work on the Roman religion of the early empire. In the theatre, with women and children present, Cicero says in the first book of his Tusculans, the crowded auditorium is moved as it listens to such a "grande carmen" as that sung by a ghost describing his terrible journey from the realms of Acheron; and in another passage of the same book he mentions both painters and poets as responsible for a delusion which philosophers have to refute. I need not say that the Roman poets too continually use the imagery of Tartarus; but they use it as literary tradition, and in the sixth Aeneid it is used also to enforce the idea of duty to the State which is the real theme of the poem.

As Dr. Masson truly observes, we have the literature but we have not the folklore of the age of Cicero and Virgil; and it must be confessed that without the folklore such scanty literary evidence as I have just mentioned does not come to much. Dr. Masson indeed concludes on this evidence that the fear of future torments played a considerable part in the religious notions both of the common people and possibly of some of the educated. I think it may have been so, but on other grounds, which I must briefly explain.

From all that I have said in these lectures about the religious ideas represented in the earliest calendar, i.e. those of the governing Romans of the earliest City-state, it will be plain that a gruesome eschatology was an impossibility for them. Just the same may be said of the Greek ideas represented in the Homeric poems; for with the exception of the Nekuia of the Odyssey, which almost all scholars agree in attributing to a later age than the bulk of the two Homeric epics, in this poetry il se fait grand jour. This is not the first time that I have compared the religion of the Roman patricians to that of Homer; and there is a growing conviction among experts that we have in each case the ideas of a comparatively civilised immigrant population, whose religion, though it has developed in very different ways, has the common characteristic of cleanness and brightness. In Italy it is practical, in Homer imaginative; but in both it is free from the brutal and the grotesque. Even the eschatology of the eleventh Odyssey is not cruel, it is comparatively colourless; and, as I said just now, this also may be said of the Roman ideas of Orcus and the Manes.

In each case it is life, not death, that is of interest to the living; death is rather a negation than anything distinctly realised. The state of the dead in Homer is shadowy and triste, a state not to be desired, as Achilles so painfully expresses it in a famous passage; but the life of the Achaean in the poems is vivid—nay, such a vivid realisation of life can alone account for the production of such poems. So, too, the immigrant population at Rome, to whom is due the regulation of the religion as we know it, and the inspiring force that made for ordered government and warlike enterprise, was too full of practical if not of imaginative vitality to be apt to dwell upon the possibilities of existence after death, to conceive of such existence as either happy or miserable, the reward or the punishment for things done in this world.

But in each peninsula this immigrant race was living in the midst of a far more primitive population; and it is perhaps to this population that we must look for the origin of the more detailed and imaginative notions of the life of the dead. Of the Greeks in this matter I have not space here to speak, nor am I competent to do so. But the conviction is steadily gaining ground that in early Rome we have to recognise the existence of two races; whether the older of these was Ligurian, as Prof. Ridgeway thinks, or primitive Latin, i.e. old Italic, as Binder believes, does not matter for our present purpose; nor are the arguments drawn from religion which these writers have used at all convincing to my intelligence. But they have not noticed what is to me a really valid argument, viz. the double festival of the dead in the calendar of Numa. In February we find the cheerful and orderly festival of the Parentalia, the yearly renewal of the seemly rite of burial; in May, on the other hand, the student of the calendar is astonished to find three several days called Lemuria, the rites belonging to which are never mentioned, except where Ovid treats us to a grotesque account of the driving out of ancestral spirits from the house. No one doubts, I think, that the Lemuria represents an older stratum of thought about the dead than the other festival, but no one, so far as I know, has ventured to claim the Lemures and their three days as belonging to the religion of the more primitive race. If I make this suggestion now, it must be taken as a hypothesis only, but as a hypothesis it can at least do no harm. If I am asked why Lemuria should have been admitted into the patrician calendar, I answer that I have long held that a few of the non-patrician religious customs were absorbed into the religion of the city of the four regions, the Lupercalia, for example; and nothing could be more likely than that the old barbarous ideas about the dead should win this amount of respect, seeing that by the limitation to three days in the year order and decency might be brought into their service. I may repeat, with a slight addition, what I wrote ten years ago about these two Roman festivals of the dead: "If we compare Ovid's account of the grotesque domestic rites of the Lemuria with those of February, which were of a systematic, cheerful, and even beautiful character, we may feel fairly sure that the latter represent the organised life of a City-state, the former the ideas of an age when life was wilder and less secure, and the fear of the dead, of ghosts and demons, was a powerful factor in the minds of the people. If we may argue from Ovid's account, it is not impossible that the Lemuria may have been one of those periodical expulsions of demons of which we hear so much in the Golden Bough, and which are performed on behalf of the community as well as in the domestic circle among savage peoples. It is noticeable that the offering of food to the demons is a feature common to these practices, and that it also appears in those described by Ovid." To this I should now add the suggestion above made, that the Lemuria represents the ideas of the older race that occupied the site of Rome, while the Parentalia is originally the festival of the patrician immigrants.

But what has all this to do with the eschatology which Lucretius attributes to the common people at Rome in his own day? Simply this, that the ideas at the root of the Lemuria may well have provided the raw material for such an eschatology, while those at the root of the Parentalia could not have done this. Dr. Westermarck has recently shown that primitive religions do spontaneously generate the idea of moral retribution after death, e.g. the notion that the souls of bad people may reappear as evil spirits or obnoxious animals. We have no proof whatever of the existence of such notions at Rome; but I contend that the permanence of this type of belief about the dead which is represented by the Lemuria—a permanence which is attested by Ovid's description—raises a presumption that the lower stratum of the Roman population, if the chance were given it, would the more readily understand the pictures of Etruscan artists and the allusions of Greek playwrights, and the more easily become the prey of the eschatological horrors which Lucretius describes as terrifying them. The material was there from the earliest times, and all that was needed was for Greeks and Etruscans to work upon it.

Before leaving this point it may be worth while to remember that though the well-to-do and educated classes cremated their dead, the poor of the crowded city population of the period I am now dealing with enjoyed no such orderly and cleanly funeral rites. The literary evidence is explicit on this point, and has been confirmed by modern excavation on the Esquiline, where we know from Varro and Horace that the poor and the slaves were thrown en masse into puticuli, i.e. holes where it was impossible that any memorial ceremonies could be kept up. Horace's lines are familiar (Sat. 8. 8):

huc prius angustis eiecta cadavera cellis conservus vili portanda locabat in arca. hoc miserae plebi stabat commune sepulcrum, etc.

It is dangerous to be too confident about the effect on the religious imagination of different ways of dealing with the dead; but it is at least not improbable that any inherited tendency to believe in a miserable future for the soul would be confirmed and maintained by so miserable a fate for the body. The mass of the population had little chance of ridding itself of eschatological superstition.

Thus I am inclined to come to Dr. Masson's conclusion, though on somewhat different grounds. I think it quite possible that the uneducated in the age of the poet may have really been inoculated with these ideas of cruel retribution, and that in many cases this may have resulted in despair or at least discomfort. Only we must remember that in a great city like Rome, as in Paris or London to-day, both the miseries and the enjoyments of life would tend to accustom the minds of the lower strata to consider the present rather than the future; the necessities and pleasures of the moment are with them the only material of thought. Neither comfort nor remonstrance could reach them from pulpit or from missioner; neither fear nor hope could largely enter into their lives. In fact I half suspect that most of them were, after all, so long as they were healthy and active, much what Lucretius would have them be—free from all religious scruple; but, alas, utterly destitute of the intellectual support which he claimed from the study of philosophy. We can well understand how it was among the lower population of the great cities that early Christianity found its chance. They had no education or philosophy to stand between them and the gospel of redemption.

I must say one word about another kind of transcendentalism which was pushing its way into favour in Roman society at this time—I mean astrology. One may call it transcendental because it was based, in its original home in the East, on a mystical notion of sympathy between the phenomena of the starry heavens and the phenomena of human life; and that this notion was carefully inculcated by those who taught the "science" at Rome is shown by the long and wearisome poem on astrology written by Manilius in the succeeding age. But it is not likely that this form of mysticism had become really popular before the period of the Empire, and in any case it can hardly be called a part of Roman religious experience. I only mention it here as helping to illustrate the way in which men's minds were now beginning to turn with interest to speculations altogether beyond the range of that practical ethical philosophy which was natural and congenial to the Roman, altogether beyond the horizon of man's daily prospect in this world. The growing interest in Fortuna, both as natural force and deity, which became intense under the Empire, is another indication of the same tendency.

As soon as Rome had come into close contact with Greece, which had long before been overrun by the eastern astrology—by the Chaldaeans or mathematici, as they are so often called—these experts began to appear also in Italy. We first hear of them from old Cato, who advises that the steward of an estate should be strictly forbidden to consult Chaldaei, harioli, haruspices, and such gentry. In 139 B.C.—a year in which there happened to be in Rome an embassy from Simon Maccabaeus—Chaldaeans were ordered to leave Rome and Italy within ten days; but I think there is some evidence that these were really Jews who were trying to propagate their own religion. For some time we hear nothing more of these intruders; but they probably gained ground again in the course of the Mithridatic wars, which were responsible for the introduction of much Oriental religion into Italy. They are mentioned in 87, together with θῦται and Sibyllistae, as persuading the ill-fated Octavius to remain in Rome to meet his death, as it turned out, at the hands of the Marians. But no Roman seems to have taken up astrology as a quasi-scientific study till that Nigidius, of whom I have already said a word, was persuaded thus to waste his time and brains. He is said to have foretold the greatness of Augustus at his birth in 63 B.C.; and from this time forward the taking of horoscopes or genethliaca became a favourite pursuit at Rome—unfortunately for the people of Europe, who caught the infection and kept it endemic for at least fifteen centuries.

Astrology is in no sense religion, and I must leave it with these few remarks. It represents the individual and his personal interests, not even the advantage of the community, and it was for this reason that the Chaldaei were disliked by the Roman government. The individual is not satisfied with legitimate Roman means of divination; he is employing illegitimate ways when he entrusts himself to these Orientals, who, most of them doubtless, well deserved the scathing contempt which Tacitus has contrived to put into six words: "Genus hominum potentibus infidum, sperantibus fallax," adding, with no less contempt for the Roman authorities who had to deal with them, that they will always be forbidden, and always will be found at Rome.

Notes to Lecture XVII

Lecture XVIII

Religious Feeling in the Poems of Virgil

My justification for devoting a whole lecture to Virgil must be that this great poet, more warmly and sympathetically than any other Latin author, gives expression to the best religious feeling of the Roman mind. And this is so not only in regard to the tendencies of religion in his own day; he stands apart from all his literary contemporaries in that he sums up the past of Roman religious experience, reflects that of his own time, and also looks forward into the future. No other poet, no historian, not even Livy, who sprang from the same region and in his tone and spirit in some ways resembles Virgil, has the same broad outlook, the same tender interest in religious antiquity, the same all-embracing sympathy for the Roman world he knew, and the same confident and cheerful hope for its future. Each of the Augustan poets—Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus—has his own peculiar gift and charm; but those who know Virgil through and through will at once acknowledge the difference between these and the man possessed of spiritual insight. They are helpful in various ways to the student of Roman religion, and Tibullus especially has a simple reverence for the old religion which has inspired a few exquisite descriptions of this aspect of Italian life. But, if I may use the word, they had no mission; they were true poets, yet not poets of the prophetic order; they had not thought deeply and reached conviction, like Lucretius and Virgil. A few words from the conclusion of an Edinburgh professor's admirable work on Virgil will sufficiently express what I mean. "His religious belief," says Sellar, "like his other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it embraced what was purest and most vital in the religions of antiquity, and in its deepest intuitions it seems to look forward to the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later." In fact, Virgil gathers up what was valuable in the past of Rome and adds to it a new element, a new source of life and hope. It was this that made it possible for a great French critic to assert that for those who have read Virgil there is nothing astonishing in Christianity. Let us try and realise what these writers mean. The Scotsman is sober and earnest, the Frenchman epigrammatically exaggerating; but the feeling that underlies both utterances is a true one.

We have traced the gradual paralysis of the secularised State religion. We have glanced at the two types of philosophical thought which took the place of that religion in the minds of the cultivated section of Roman society, neither of which could adequately supply the Roman and Italian mind with an expression of its own natural feeling, never wholly extinct, of its relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. Stoicism came near to doing what was needed, by rehabilitating itself on Italian soil and indulging Roman preconceptions of the divine; but it could not greatly affect the mass of men, and its appeal was not to feeling, but to reason. Epicurism, though perhaps more popular, was in reality more in conflict with what was best in the Italian nature, and the passionate appeal of Lucretius to look for comfort to a scientific knowledge of the rerum natura had no enduring power to cheer. Lastly, we have examined the tendency of the same age towards mysticism and Cicero's doubting and embarrassed expression of it, and we found that this tendency rather illustrates a sense of something wanting than hopefully satisfies it. We may well feel ourselves, now we have arrived at the close of the Republican era, just as the best men of that day felt, that there is something wanting. In their minds this feeling almost amounted to despair; in ours, as we read the story of the troublous time after the death of Caesar, it is pity and wonder. There was, in fact, more than a sense of weariness and discomfort, moral and material, in the Roman mind of that generation—there was also what we may almost call a sense of sin, such a feeling, though doubtless less real and intense, as that which their prophets, from time to time, awoke in the Jewish people, and one not unknown in the history of Hellas. It was essentially a feeling of neglected duty—of neglected duty to the Power and of goodwill wanting towards men. Lucretius had been unconsciously a powerful witness to this feeling, but had not found the remedy. In the early Augustan age it is again expressed by Horace, by Sallust, and more deeply and truly in the beautiful preface to Livy's History. Livy there says that he devoted himself to the early annals of Rome that he might shut his eyes to the evils of his own time—"tempora quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus."

This something wanting was then a feeling, a religio, if we can venture to use the old word once more in the sense which I have so often attributed to it. Not an unreasonable or ungovernable feeling, not a superstitio, but a feeling of happy dependence on a higher Power, and a desire to conform to His will in all the relations of human life. This is the kind of feeling that had always lain at the root of the Roman pietas, the sense of duty to family and State, and to the deities who protected them. In the jarring of factions, the cruelty and bloodshed of tyrants, and the luxurious self-indulgence of the last two generations, the voice of pietas had been silenced, the better instincts of humanity had gone down. We have to see what was done by our poet to awake that voice again and to put fresh life into those instincts. Only let us remember that more permanent good is done in this world by a beautiful nature giving itself its natural expression, than by precept or denunciation; and beware of attributing to Virgil more direct consciousness of his mission than he really felt. It is the nature of the man that is of value to us in our studies, as it was to the Romans in their despair, a nature ruled by sweet, calm feeling, full of sympathy and full of hope.

The something wanting in others which we find in Virgil only, or in him more convincingly felt and more resonantly expressed, is a kindly and hopeful outlook on the world, with a deep and real sympathy for all sorrow and pain. It is not the result of any definite religious conviction; it is in the nature of the man, and is of the very fibre of his being; but it made him a better religious teacher than the rest, just because real religion is not a matter of reason only, or of convention, or of art, but of feeling. This was the true antidote to despair or depression—a sympathy with man in all he does or suffers, not an indignant cry of remonstrance like that of Lucretius. Virgil's sympathetic outlook includes not only Man, but the animal world, and there can be no better proof that his feeling was genuine. The nightingale robbed of her young,

quem durus arator observans nido implumes detraxit: at illa flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen integrat et maestis late loca questibus implet;

the cattle smitten by the plague, the migrating birds coming in from the sea, and many another tender touch, all show us the feeling of which I am speaking; for he who could so feel towards animals must needs have a soul of pity for man. So, too, with the inanimate nature of Italy; the land in which Virgil's shepherds and husbandmen live and work is one full of such detailed loveliness as might suggest a beneficent Power presiding over it all, inviting man to lift up his heart in gratitude or prayer. As Sellar has well remarked, the sense of natural beauty is in the Georgics intertwined with the toil of man, raising, as it were, the toiler to a higher level of humanity as he lifts his eyes from his work. And this natural beauty is made real for the reader by the life and force that everywhere pervades it; all nature is alive and full of feeling; the fruit trees, for example, in the second Georgic seem instinct with an almost human life. The moment this comes home to us we see how it harmonises with all we have learnt of the old Italian conception of the divine, of the forceful numina working for man's benefit if properly propitiated. And even when Virgil is using the language of the Stoics to explain the life of nature, we feel that behind the philosophical theory there lies this feeling of the Italian:

deum namque ire per omnes terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum: hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum.

This is the religious spirit of the Georgics; the divine forces are everywhere, and a man must submit himself to them and seek their aid. He finds his true resource rather in prayer than in philosophy, his part in the world is "laborare et orare." The hard lot of the Hesiodic labourer is not that of the agricola of the Georgics, who carries on his campaign of toil with a cheerful heart and a clear conscience, for he is in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the life around him.

This, then, so far as I can describe it without going too far into detail, is the feeling, the religio, which was needed in the Italy of that day. We may, perhaps, venture to compare its revival in the work of Virgil with the return to nature in the English poetry of a century ago, which also brought with it a revival of religious fervency. Though Virgil and Wordsworth are in many ways as unlike as two poets can be, they are alike in the possession of that gentle and trustful outlook on the world of nature which stimulates the mind to think of itself in its relation to the Power. We do not need to analyse the process or to put it into any logical shape; we may rest content with it as a fact in the history of Roman religious experience.

In Virgil's case, as in Wordsworth's, this feeling had the effect of reconciling the poet's mind to the old forms of religious worship. Reconcile is, perhaps, hardly the right word; we may doubt whether he had ever quarrelled with them. As he believed in the Power and its manifestations, so too he believed in the traditional modes of propitiating it, not asking himself the raison d'être of this or that ceremony, still less looking on them with pity and contempt, like Lucretius, but accepting them in his broad humanity as part of the life and thought of man in Italy.

fortunatus et ille Deos qui novit agrestes.

Let us mark the word novit. The husbandman has come to recognise these emanations of the Power and to know them as friends; the word could not have been used of malignant spirits. As I said in an early lecture, man advances in his knowledge of the Power as he advances in civilisation. So the rural rites have a claim on his sympathy no less than the men who performed them; he knew them in their detail, and he knew them in the spirit which animated them. He must have studied them in detail, and not only the rural cults, but those of the city too; every gesture in worship has an interest for him, and so great is our respect for his accuracy that we accept what he tells us even if we cannot explain it. His careful learning in all these details has been the means of preserving for us large sources of knowledge; for Servius, Macrobius, and other commentators accumulated stores of it in endeavouring to interpret him.

Now, this is not mere antiquarianism in Virgil, any more than is the detail of old life which abounds in Scott's poems and novels. These two men had the same wide, sympathetic outlook on the world. Scott was interested in everything and everybody, whether living or dead long ago, and in all they did; and I think we may say the same of Virgil, though he is said to have been rather reserved and shy than genial and talkative like Scott. Virgil's mind was not so much "curious," I think, as sympathetic, and his delight in these religious details arises from his love of Italy and all that man did in it. He caught the spirit of the old Italian worship, which, as we saw, demanded that each act should be performed accurately according to rules laid down. He recognises the necessity, and with true Italian instinct he acts upon it as he writes. He knows that these acts of cult are one outward expression of that quality which had made Rome great—pietas, the sense of duty to family, State, and Deity.

So far I have been considering what I may call the psychological basis of Virgil's religion—the man's sympathetic nature and wide outlook, which included in its love of Italy even the old practical worship of Italians. I have now to go on to the poet's greatest work, in which the idea of duty was not merely recognised in religious acts but exemplified in an ideal Roman. It is mainly in the Aeneid that we see him looking forward as well as backward, for it is there that we have the chart of the Roman's duty drawn to the scale of his past history, and meant to guide him in the future in still more glorious travel.

There are two ways in which we may contemplate the Aeneid as a whole and the teaching it offered the Roman of that day. We may think of it (if I may for a moment use musical language) as a great fugue, of which the leading subject is the mission of Rome in the world. Providence, Divine will, the Reason of the Stoics, or, in the poetical setting of the poem, Jupiter, the great protecting Roman deity, with the Fates behind him somewhat vaguely conceived, had guided the State to greatness and empire from its infancy onwards, and the citizens of that State must be worthy of that destiny if they were to carry out the great work. This mighty theme pervades the whole poem and, like the subject of a fugue, enters and re-enters from time to time in thrilling tones. It is given out in the prophecy put into the mouth of Jupiter himself at the beginning of the first book; it is heard in still more magnificent music from the shade of old Anchises in the last moments of the hero's visit to Hades in the sixth book, and again in the description of the shield which Venus gives her son. Though the poem is unequal and some parts of it are left without the final touches, yet whenever the poet comes upon this great theme the tone is that of a full organ. This is, I think, apart from those exquisite beauties of detail which are for those only who have been initiated in the Virgilian mysteries, what chiefly moves the modern reader of Virgil. There are drawbacks which, for us moderns at least, detract from the general effect: the intervention of gods and goddesses after the Homeric manner, but without the charm of Homer; the seeming want of warm human blood in the hero; the stern decrees of Fate overruling human passions and interests; but he who keeps the great theme ever in mind, watching for it as he reads, as one watches for the new entry of a great fugue-subject, will never fail to see in the Aeneid one of the noblest efforts of human art—to understand what makes it the world's second great epic.

But this great destiny of Rome has been accomplished by the service of man; by his loyalty, self-sacrifice, and sense of duty; by that quality known to the Romans as pietas; and the second lesson or reminder of the Aeneid lies in the exemplification of this truth in the person and character of the hero. We moderns find it hard to interest ourselves in the character of Aeneas. But as Prof. Nettleship remarked long ago, a Roman reader would not have thought him dull or uninteresting; if that had been so, the poem could hardly have become popular from the moment of its publication. I am inclined to think that the development of the character of Aeneas under stress of perils, moral and material, was much more obvious to the Roman than it is to us, and much more keenly appreciated. For him it was the chief lesson of the poem, which makes it as it were a "whole duty of the Roman"; and as this lesson is really a part of Roman religious experience I am going to occupy the rest of this lecture with it.

The development of the character of Aeneas, under the influence of perils and temptations through which he is guided by Jupiter and the Fates, is not a subject which has received much attention from modern criticism. Yet to me, at least, it would be surprising if the leading character of the poem were, so to speak, a statue once and for all conceived and executed by the artist, instead of a human being subjected to various experiences which work upon his character as well as his career. There were circumstances in Virgil's time which made it natural that a poet of a serious and philosophical turn of mind should be interested in the development of character and make it part of his great subject. We have more than once had occasion to notice the growth of individualism in the last two centuries B.C. Beyond doubt personal character had a great interest at this time for thinking men, apart from its development; the world was ruled by individuals, and at no time has so much depended on the disposition of individuals. Men had long begun to take themselves very seriously, and to write their own biographies. So entirely had the individual emancipated himself from the State, that he had almost forgotten that the State existed and claimed his pietas; he worked and played for his own ends. Even the armies of that melancholy age were known and thought of, not as the servants of the State, but as Sullani, Pompeiani, and so on. This almost arrogant self-assertion of the individual was a fact of the time, and could not be suppressed entirely; it was henceforward impossible to return to the old times when the State was all in all and the individual counted for little.

But in the Aeneid, if I am not mistaken, there is an almost perfect balance between the two conflicting interests. The State is the pivot on which turns all that is best in individual human character; in other words, Aeneas is not playing his own game, but fulfilling the order of destiny which was to bring the world under Roman dominion. Individualism of the wrong type, that of Dido, Turnus, Mezentius, has to be escaped or overcome by the hero, for whom the call of duty is that of the State to be; but, all the same, the hero is an individual, and one conceived not merely as a type or a force. True, he is typical of Roman pietas, and bears his constant epithet accordingly; but if we look at him carefully we shall see that his pietas is at first imperfect, and that his individualism has to be tamed and brought into the service of the State with the help of the State's deities. This is what makes the Aeneid a religious poem; the character of Aeneas is pivoted on religion; religion is the one sanction of his conduct. There is no appeal in the Aeneid to knowledge, or reason, or pleasure,—always to the will of God. Pietas is Virgil's word for religion, as it had been Cicero's in his more exalted moments. In the Dream of Scipio we read that "piis omnibus retinendus est animus in custodia corporis: nec iniussu eius a quo ille est vobis datus, ex hominum vita migrandum est, ne munus humanum adsignatum a deo defugisse videamini." In these words, as is shown by those that follow, the munus hominum is exactly what it is in the Aeneid, duty to Man and the State, and as it is laid down for man by God, it is also duty to Him. The State finds its perfection in the individual so long as he thus fulfills the will of God.

Let us now go on to watch Aeneas as he gradually develops this perfect balance of motive.

Aeneas is marked at the very outset of the poem as "insignem pietate virum"; the key-note of his character is sounded here at once with skill, and the key thus suggested (to use musical metaphor once more) is maintained steadily throughout it. The quality demanded by the gods from every true Roman who would take his part in carrying out the divine mission of Rome must be emphasised in the ideal Roman. Yet, as we read on, we soon discover that Aeneas was by no means as yet a perfect character. It can hardly be by accident that the poet has described him as yielding to despair and bewailing his fate on the first approach of danger—forgetting the mission before him and the destiny driving him on, and wishing that he were lying dead with Hector under the walls of Troy (i. 92 foll.). It would have been easy enough for Virgil to have taken up at once the heroic vein in the man, as it was left him by Homer, and to have made him urge his men to bestir themselves or to yield bravely to fate. And this is precisely what Aeneas does when the storm is over and the danger past (198 foll.); yet even then he is not whole-hearted about it:

talia voce refert, curisque ingentibus aeger spem voltu simulat, premit alto corde dolorem.

At the very moment, that is, when he expresses his belief in his destiny and the duty of making for Italy, he still has misgivings, though he dare not express them.

Heinze has remarked that before this, at the sack of Troy, he had shown a want of self-control, and yielded to a mad passion of desperate fighting that is not to be found in the Aeneas of the last six books (ii. 314 foll.):

arma amens capio nec sat rationis in armis.

Furor and ira drive him headlong; we are reminded of the mad fury of Mezentius or Turnus.

Again, after the death of Priam Venus has to remind him of his duty to his father, wife, and son (ii. 594 foll.), reproaching him for his loss of sanity and self-control:

nate, quis indomitas tantus dolor excitat iras? quid furis, aut quonam nostri tibi cura recessit? non prius aspicies ubi fessum aetate parentem liqueris Anchisen, superet coniunxne Creusa Ascaniusque puer?

During the wanderings narrated in the third book it is Anchises who leads, and who receives and interprets the divine warnings; he seems to be the guardian and guide of his son: to that son he is "omnis curae casusque levamen" (iii. 709), and he is "felix nati pietate" (iii. 480). He is, in fact, the typical Roman father, who, unlike Homer's Laertes, maintains his activity and authority to the end of his life, and to whom even the grown-up son, himself a father, owes reverence and obedience. As Boissier has pointed out, the death of Anchises is postponed in the story as long as possible, and it is only after his death that Aeneas is exposed to a really dangerous temptation; it is immediately after this event that, as we saw, he loses heart at the first storm, and then, on landing in Africa, falls a victim for the moment to the queenly charms of Dido. We may notice that up to this point his pietas has been a limited one, hardly called upon for exercise beyond the bounds of family life and duty; when he is himself at the head, not only of the family, but, so to speak, of the State, it has to take a wider range, and to be put to a severe test.

To all that has at different times been written about Virgil's treatment of the Dido legend I must venture here to add another word. Heinze has shown that no certain origin can be discovered for the form of the story as Virgil tells it; it may have been Naevius who first took Aeneas to Sicily, but we do not know whether he or any successor of his invented the essential point of Virgil's story,—the suicide of Dido as a consequence of her desertion by Aeneas. In any case the question arises, why our poet should have deliberately abandoned the current and popular version, and exposed his hero to such imminent danger of deserting the path which Jupiter and the Fates had marked out for him,—of sacrificing his great mission to the passion of a magnificent woman, and to the prospect of illicit ease and unsanctioned dominion. Heinze is of opinion that Virgil's motive was here a purely artistic one; he wanted an opportunity to introduce the pathetic element into his epic. "There was no lack of models; the latest bloom of Greek poetry had been in nothing more inventive than in dealing with all the phenomena of the passion of love,—its agony, shame, and despair, and the self-immolation of its victims." He enforces this view with great learning, and all he writes about it is of value; but I must confess that he has not convinced me that this was Virgil's chief motive. He seems to me to leave out of account two important considerations: first, that though the poet drew freely on every available source, Greek and Roman, for the enrichment of his subject and its treatment, yet the whole design and purpose of the Aeneid is Roman and not Greek, and the introduction of a love-story as such would have been foreign to that design, and also to the aims and hopes of Augustus and the best men of the age. Secondly, Heinze seems to forget, like so many others who have written about the Dido episode, that Virgil had before his very eyes facts sufficiently striking, a romance quite sufficiently appalling, to suggest the adoption of the form of the story as we have it in the fourth book. Twice in his own lifetime did a single formidable woman work a baleful spell upon the destinies of the Roman empire. In neither case did the spell take fatal effect; Julius escaped in time from the wiles and the splendour of Cleopatra; Antony failed indeed to escape, but brought himself and her to fortunate ruin. It is to me inexplicable, considering how all Virgil's poems abound with allusions to the events of his time, and with side-glances at the chief agents in them, that neither Heinze nor Norden should have even touched on the possibility that Cleopatra was in the poet's mind when he wrote the fourth book. It is perhaps difficult for one who puts the poem on the dissecting-board, and whose attention is continually absorbed in the investigation of minute points in the fibre of it, to bear in mind the extraordinary events of the poet's lifetime,—the civil war, the murder of Julius, the division of the Roman world, the distraction of Italy, the attempt of Antony, or rather, indeed, of his enslaver, to set up a rival Oriental dominion, and the rescue of Romanism and civilisation by Augustus. Had Lucretius himself lived in that generation, he could hardly have escaped the influence of these appalling facts. Whoever will turn to the late Prof. Nettleship's essay on the poetry of Virgil, appended to his Ancient Roman Lives of Virgil, can hardly fail to be convinced that on the later poet's mind they had produced a profound impression, the effects of which are traceable throughout the whole mass of his work. His Roman readers, whose state and empire had been brought to the verge of ruin by the exaltation of individual passions and ambitions, would look for these constant allusions and understand them far better than we can.

I maintain, then, that the poet adopted his version of the story of Dido not simply as an affecting and pathetic episode, but (in keeping with his whole design) to emphasise the great lesson of the poem by showing that the growth and glory of the Roman dominion are due, under providence, to Roman virtus and pietas—that sense of duty to family, State, and gods, which rises, in spite of trial and danger, superior to the enticements of individual passion and selfish ease. Aeneas is sorely tried, but he escapes from Dido to perform the will of the gods; it is Jupiter, ruler of the Fates and the Roman destinies, who rescues him, and thus the divine care for Rome, an idea of which Augustus wished to make the most, is carefully preserved in the tale. If for us the character of Aeneas suffers by his desertion of Dido, that is simply because the poet, seized with intense pity for the injured queen, seems for once, like his own hero, to have forgotten his mission in the poem, and at the very moment when he means to show Aeneas performing the noblest act of self-sacrifice, renouncing his individual passion and listening to the stern call of duty, human nature gets the better of him, and what he meant to paint as a noble act has come out on his canvas as a mean one.

In Virgil's story, then, we have in contrast and conflict the opposing principles of duty and pleasure, of patriotism and selfishness, and the victory of the latter in the person of Aeneas by the help of the great god who was the guardian of the destinies of Rome, and of the goddess who was the mother of the hero and the reputed progenitor of the Julian family. When once this great trial is over, the way is clear for the accomplishment of Aeneas' mission, though he still has trials to face, and as yet is not fully equipped for meeting them.

Whoever, after reading the stormy scenes of the fourth book, will go straight on to the fifth, cannot but be struck with a change of tone which would have been doubly welcome to a man of that true Roman feeling which Virgil was counting on as well as inculcating throughout his work—doubly welcome, because he would find it not only in the incidents, but in the character of Aeneas. We here leave self and passion behind, and are introduced to scenes where the careful performance of religious and family duties seems to produce ease of mind and the tranquillity that comes of a soothed conscience. For the first time in the poem we meet with a characteristic of that best Roman life which was dear to the heart of Augustus, and with which we may be quite certain that the poet himself was entirely in sympathy. Strange, indeed, it is that this should be the case in a book so wholly based for its externals on Greek poetical traditions; but it is none the less true, and it is a striking example of Virgil's wonderful genius for transforming old things with new light and meaning.

It is not only then, or even mainly, the traditional necessity of describing games in an epic poem, that is the raison d'être of the fifth book; the object was rather, as I understand it, to gain the needful contrast to the stormy passion of the fourth, and a relief for the mind of the Roman reader before he approached the awful scenery and experiences of the sixth, while at the same time there could be indicated—and for a Roman reader more than indicated—the first beginning of a change in the character of the hero. All this is effected with wonderful skill by making Aeneas perform with detailed carefulness the Roman ritual of the Parentalia as it was known to the Romans of the Augustan age. The Parentalia, as I have said elsewhere, were not days of terror or ill-omen, but rather days on which the performance of duty was the leading idea in men's minds; that duty was a pleasant and cheerful one, for the dead were still members of the family, and there was nothing to fear from them so long as the living performed their duties towards them under the due regulations of the ius divinum. The ritual indicates the idea of the yearly renewal of the rite of burial, with the propitiation of the departed which was necessary for the welfare of the family; and when the liturgical nine days were over, the living members met together in the Caristia, a kind of love feast of the family, at which all quarrels were to be forgotten, and from which all guilty members were excluded. In families of wealth and distinction in Virgil's time the days of mourning might be followed by games in honour of the departed. Thus a Roman would at once recognise the fact that Aeneas is here presented to us for the first time as a Roman father of a family, discharging the duties essential to the continuance and prosperity of that family with cheerfulness as well as with gravitas; and that his pietas here takes a definite, practical, and truly Roman form, though it is not as yet extended to its full connotation as the performance of duty towards the State and its gods.

All this is quite in keeping with the little touches of characterisation which we can also notice in this book. In the second line Aeneas pursues his way certus, even while he gazes at the flames of Dido's funeral pyre, not knowing what they meant. He presides at the games with the dignity of a Roman magistrate, and reproachingly consoles the beaten Dares with words which seem to reflect his late experience at Carthage (v. 465):

infelix, quae tanta animum dementia cepit? non vires alias conversaque numina sentis? cede deo.

When the ships are burnt he does not give way to despair, as in the storm of the first book, but prays for help to the omnipotent Jupiter, in whose hand were the destinies of his descendants (v. 687 foll.). But he is not yet perfect in his sense of duty; he feels the blow severely, and for a moment wavers (v. 700 foll.):

... casu concussus acerbo nunc huc ingentis, nunc illuc pectore curas mutabat versans, Siculisne resideret arvis oblitus fatorum, Italasne capesseret oras.

It needs the cheering advice of old Nautes (quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est), and the appearance of the shade of Anchises, to confirm his wavering will with renewed sense of his mission. This appearance of his father, "omnis curae casusque levamen," with the summons to meet him in Hades, is, as Heinze has seen, a turning-point in the fortunes and the character of Aeneas, and prepares us for the final ordeal and initiation which he undergoes in the following book.

I here use the word initiation because I have no doubt that Virgil had in his mind when writing it the Greek idea of initiation into mysteries preparatory to a new life. An actual initiation was, of course, out of the question; on the other hand a catabasis, a descent into Hades, was part of the epic inheritance he derived from Homer, and this, like the funeral games in the fifth book, he might use with an earnestness of purpose wanting in Homer, to work in with the great theme of his poem, not merely as an artistic effort. The purpose here was to make of Aeneas a new man, to regenerate him; to prepare him by mystic enlightenment for the toil, peril, and triumph that await him in the accomplishment of his divine mission. We must not look too closely into the process; it is a strange mélange of popular and philosophic ideas and scenery, made at once intelligible and magnificent by the wonderful resources of the poet; but we may be sure that it has the same general meaning as the visions of Dante long afterwards. As Mr. Tozer has said, Dante's conversion and ultimate salvation were the primary object of his journey through the three realms of the spiritual world. In this sense it can be called an initiation, an ordeal, a sacrament.

So much has been written about this wonderful book that I do not need to dwell upon it here. I will content myself with pointing out very briefly a fact which struck me when I last read it. The ordeal of preparation is not complete till the very end of the book, when the shade of Anchises has shown his son all the great things to come, the due accomplishment of which depends on his sense of duty, his pietas. Up to that moment Aeneas is always thinking and speaking of the past, while in the last six books he is always looking ahead, absorbed in the work each hour placed before him, and in the prospect of the glory of Rome and Italy. The poet had contrived that his hero should himself narrate the story of the sack of Troy and his subsequent wanderings, and narrate them to the very person who would have made it impossible for him ever again to look forward on the path of duty. Surely this is significant of a moral as well as an artistic purpose; the passionate love of the queen urges her to keep his mind fixed on the past, to engage him in the story of events that concerned himself and not his mission (i. 748):

necnon et vario noctem sermone trahebat infelix Dido, longumque bibebat amorem multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa, etc.

After the shade of Creusa had told him of his destiny, which she was not to share, the past was still in his mind, and he seems to have forgotten the warning; he calls himself an exile (iii. 10):

litora cum patriae lacrimans portusque relinquo et campos ubi Troia fuit. Feror exsul in altum—

I find an exception after the meeting with Andromache, when he thinks of the future for a moment, but even then half-heartedly as it seems to me, with a very distinct reluctance to face the dangers to come, and with a touching envy of those who could "stay at home at ease" (iii. 493 foll.). His want of faith in the future is again shown in Book v., in the passage quoted just now; and even in Book vi. he is at first purposely depicted as "slack," as having his attention caught by what is for the moment before him, or with the figures of old friends and enemies whom he meets, until the last awakening revelation of Anchises. Thus no sooner has he landed in Italy than he is attracted by the pictures in the temple of Apollo and incurs a rebuke from the priestess (vi. 37 foll.):

non hoc ista sibi tempus spectacula poscit; nunc grege de intacto septem mactare iuvencos praestiterit, etc.;

so also a little farther on she has to warn him again (50 foll.) at the entrance to the cave:

"cessas in vota precesque, Tros" ait "Aenea, cessas?"

It may be fancy in me to see even in his prayer which follows a leaning to think of Troy and his past troubles (56 foll.). But I cannot but believe that in this book he is meant to take a last farewell of all who have shared his past fortunes, have helped him or injured him; he meets Palinurus, Dido, Tydeus, Deiphobus, and the rest, and while meditating over these he has once more to be hurried by his guide (538):

sed comes admonuit breviterque adfata Sibylla est: nox ruit, Aenea, nos flendo ducimus horas.

When Anchises appears the whole tone changes, and his famous words seem to me to show conclusively that hesitation and want of fixed, undeviating purpose had been so far his son's chief failing (806):

et dubitamus adhuc virtutem extendere factis, aut metus Ausonia prohibet consistere terra?

The father's vision and prophecy are of the future and the great deeds of men to come, and henceforward Aeneas makes no allusion to the past and the figures that peopled it, abandons talk and lamentations, "virtutem extendit factis." At the outset of Book vii. we feel the ship moving at once; three lines suffice for the fresh start; Circe is passed unheeded. "Maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo," says the poet in line 43; "maius opus moveo;" for the real subject of the poem is at last reached, and a heroic character by heroic deeds is to lay the foundation of the eternal dominion of Rome.

A very few words shall suffice about the Aeneas of the later books. Let us freely allow that he is not strongly characterised; that for us moderns the interest centres rather in Turnus, who is heroic as an individual, but not as a pioneer of civilisation divinely led; that there is no real heroine, for feminine passion would be here out of place and un-Roman, and the courtship of Lavinia is undertaken, so to speak, for political reasons. The rôle of Aeneas, as the agent of Jupiter in conquest and civilisation, would appeal to a Roman rather than to a modern, and it was reserved for the modern critic to complain of a lack of individual interest in him. So, too, it is in Jewish history; we feel with Esau more than with Jacob, and with David more than with Moses, who is none the less the grandest typical Israelite in the Old Testament. And, indeed, Virgil's theme here is less the development of a character or the portraiture of a hero than the idealisation of the people of the Italy which he loved so well, who needed only a divinely guided leader and civiliser to enter upon the glorious career that was in store for them.

I cannot escape the belief, as I read again through these books, that Virgil did intend to depict in Aeneas his ideal of that Roman character to which the leading writers of his day ascribed the greatness of their race. His pietas is now confirmed and enlarged, it has become a sense of duty to the will of the gods as well as to his father, his son, and his people, and this sense of duty never leaves him, either in his general course of action or in the detail of sacrifice and propitiation. His courage and steadfastness never fail him; he looks ever forward, confident in divine protection; the shield he carries is adorned —a wonderful stroke of poetic genius—with scenes of the future, and not of the past (viii. 729 foll.):

talia per clipeum Volcani, dona parentis, miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum.

He is never in these books to be found wanting in swiftness and vigilance; when he cheers his comrades it is no longer in a half-hearted way, but as at the beginning of the eleventh book, with the utmost vigour and confidence, "Arma parate, animis et spe praesumite bellum" (xi. 18).

His humanitas again is here more obvious than in his earlier career, and it is plainly meant to be contrasted with the heroic savagery of Mezentius and Turnus. So keenly did the poet feel this development in his hero's character, that in his descriptions of the death of Lausus and the burial of Pallas—noble and beautiful youths whom he loved in imagination as he loved in reality all young things—his tenderness is so touching that even now we can hardly read them without tears. And not only is the hero heroic and humane, but he is a just man and keeps faith; when, in the twelfth book, the Rutulians break the treaty, and his own men have joined in the unjust combat (xii. 311):

at pius Aeneas dextram tendebat inermem nudato capite atque suos clamore vocabat: "quo ruitis? quove ista repens discordia surgit? o cohibete iras; ictum iam foedus et omnes compositae leges: mihi ius concurrere soli."

He claims for himself alone, under the guiding hand of providence, the right to deal with Turnus, the enemy of humanity and righteousness. And we may note that when it came to that last struggle, though conquering by divine aid, he was ready to spare the life of the conquered till he saw the spoils of the young Pallas upon him.

The character of Aeneas, then, though not painted in such strong light as we moderns might expect or desire, is intentionally developed into a heroic type in the course of the story—a type which every Roman would recognise as his own natural ideal. And this growth is the direct result of religious influence. It is partly the result of the hero's own natural pietas, innate within him from the first, as it was in the breast of every noble Roman; partly the result of a gradually enlarged recognition of the will of God, and partly of the strengthening and almost sacramental process of the journey to Hades, of the revelation there made of the mysteries of life and death, and of the great future which Jupiter and the Fates have reserved for the Roman people. In these three influences Virgil has summed up all the best religious factors of his day: the instinct of the Roman for religious observance, with all its natural effect on conduct; the elevating Stoic doctrine which brought man into immediate relation with the universal; and, lastly, the tendency to mysticism, Orphic or Pythagorean, which tells of a yearning in the soul of man to hope for a life beyond this, and to make of this life a meet preparation for that other.

Only one word more. We can hardly doubt the truth of the story that the poet died earnestly entreating that this greatest work of his life should perish with him, and this may aptly remind us that though I have been treating the Aeneid as a poem of religion and morals, yet, after all, Virgil was a poet rather than a preacher, and thought of his Aeneid, not as a sermon, but as a work of art. Had he thought of it as a sermon he could hardly have wished to deprive the Roman world of it. The true poet is never a preacher except in so far as he is a poet. If the Greeks thought of their poets as teachers, says the late Prof. Jebb, "this was simply a recognition of poetry as the highest influence, intellectual and spiritual, that they knew." "It was not merely a recreation of their leisure, but a power pervading and moulding their whole existence." Surely this is also true of Virgil, and of the best at least of his Roman readers. No one can read the sixth Aeneid, the greatest effort of his genius, without feeling that poetry was all in all to him; that learning, legend, philosophy, religion, whatever in the whole range of human thought and fancy entered his mind, emerged from it as poetry and poetry only.

Notes to Lecture XVIII

Lecture XIX

The Augustan Revival

It is a long descent from the inspiring idealism of Virgil to the cool, tactical attempt of Augustus to revive the outward forms of the old religion. It seems strange that two men so different in character and upbringing should have been working in the same years in the same direction, yet on planes so far apart. How far the two were directly connected in their work we cannot know for certain. It is said that the subject of the Aeneid was suggested to Virgil by Augustus, and it is quite possible that this may be true; but it by no means follows from this that the inspiration of the poem came from any other source but Virgil's own thought and feeling. We also know that Augustus from the first appreciated the Aeneid, and that he saved it for all time; but it is by no means clear that it inspired him in his efforts towards moral and religious regeneration. Perhaps the truth is that both were moved by the wave of mingled depression and hope that swept over Italy for some years after the death of Julius, and that each used his experience in his own way and according to his opportunities. They had at least this in common, that they utilised the past to encourage the present age, and that by filling old forms and names with new meaning they set men's minds upon thinking of the future.

Yet the revival of the State religion by Augustus is at once the most remarkable event in the history of the Roman religion, and one almost unique in religious history. I have repeatedly spoken of that State religion as hypnotised or paralysed, meaning that the belief in the efficacy of the old cults had passed away among the educated classes, that the mongrel city populace had long been accustomed to scoff at the old deities, and that the outward practice of religion had been allowed to decay. To us, then, it may seem almost impossible that the practice, and to some extent also the belief, should be capable of resuscitation at the will of a single individual, even if that individual represented the best interests and the collective wisdom of the State. For it is impossible to deny that this resuscitation was real; that both pax deorum and ius divinum became once more terms of force and meaning. Beset as it was by at least three formidable enemies, which tended to destroy it even while they fed on it, like parasites in the animal or vegetable world feeding on their hosts,—the rationalising philosophy of syncretism, the worship of the Caesars, and the new Oriental cults,—the old religion continued to exist for at least three centuries in outward form, and to some extent in popular belief.

We must remember the tenacious conservatism of the Roman mind: the emotional stimulus of the age of depression and despair which preceded this revival: and the conscientious care with which the successors of Augustus, Tiberius in particular, carried out his religious policy. Then as we become more familiar with the Corpus of inscriptions and the writings of the early Christian fathers, we begin to appreciate the fact that the natural and inherited religion of a people cannot altogether die, and that to describe this old Roman religion as dead is to use too strong a word. The votive inscriptions of the Empire show us overwhelming proof of surviving belief in the great deities of the olden time, and of the care taken of their temples. Antoninus Pius is honoured "ob insignem erga caerimonias publicas curam et religionem." Marcus Aurelius himself did not hesitate in times of public distress to put in action the whole apparatus of the old religion. Constantius in A.D. 329 was shown round the temples when he visited Rome for the first time, and in spite of his Christianity took a curious interest in them. That the private worship, too, went on into the fourth century we know from the Theodosian code, where in the interest of Christianity the worship of Lares Penates and Genius is strictly forbidden. Again, the constant ridicule with which the Christian writers speak of the minutiae of the heathen worship makes it quite plain that they knew it as actually existing, and not merely from books like those of Varro. They do not so much attack the Oriental religions of their time as the genuine old Roman cults; more especially is this the case with St. Augustine, from whose de Civitate Dei we have learnt so much about the latter. The very necessity under which the leaders of Christianity found themselves of suiting their own religious character, and in some ways even their own ceremonies, to the habits and prejudices of the pagans, tells the same story. But the question how far Latin Christianity was indebted to the religion of the Romans must be postponed to my last lecture; I have said enough to indicate in which direction we must go for evidence that the work of Augustus was not in vain, that it gave fresh stimulus to a plant that still had some life in it.

If, then, the Augustan revival was not a mere sham, but had its measure of real success, how are we to account for this? I think the explanation is not really difficult, if we bring to bear upon the problem what we have learnt from the beginning about the religious experience of the Romans. Let us note that Augustus troubled himself little about the later political developments of religion, which we have lately been examining,—about pontifices, augurs, and Sibylline books; these institutions, which had been so much used in the republican period for political and party purposes, it was rather his interest to keep in the background. But in one way or another he must have grasped the fundamental idea of the old Roman worship, that the prosperity and the fertility of man, and of his flocks and herds and crops on the farm, and the prosperity and fertility of the citizen within the city itself, equally depended on the dutiful attention (pietas) paid to the divine beings who had taken up their abode in farm or city. The best expression of this idea in words is pax deorum,—the right relation between man and the various manifestations of the Power,—and the machinery by which it was secured was the ius divinum. We shall not be far wrong if we say that it was Augustus' aim to re-establish the pax by means of the ius; but if we wished to explain the matter to some one who has not been trained in these technical terms, it would be better to say that he appealed to a deeply-rooted idea in the popular mind,—the idea that unless the divine inhabitants were properly and continually propitiated, they would not do their part in supporting the human inhabitants in all their doings and interests. This popular conviction he deliberately determined to use as his chief political lever.

This has, I think, been insufficiently emphasised by historians, who contemplate the work of this shrewd statesman too entirely from the political point of view. I am sure that he had learnt from his predecessors in power that reform on political lines only was without any element of stability, and that he knew that it was far more important to touch a spring in the feeling of the people, than to occupy himself, like Sulla, in mending old machinery or inventing new. If he could but induce them to believe in him as the restorer of the pax deorum, he knew that his work was accomplished. And I believe that we have what is practically his own word for this conviction; not in his Res Gestae, the Monumentum Ancyranum, which is a record of facts and of deeds only, but in the famous hymn which Horace wrote at his instance and to give expression to his ideas, for use in the Secular Games of 17 B.C., to which I am coming presently. Ferrero has lately described that hymn as a magnificent poem, an opinion which to me is incomprehensible. It is neat, and embodies the necessary ideas adequately, but it is far too flat to be the genuine offspring of such a poet as Horace. To me it reads as though Augustus had written it in prose and then ordered his poet to put it into metre; and assuredly it expresses exactly what we should have expected Augustus to wish to be sung by his youthful choirs. I shall refer to it again shortly to illustrate another point; all I need say now is that he who reads it carefully and thinks about it will find there the conviction of which I have been speaking, that prosperity and fertility, whether of man, beast, or crop, depend on the Roman's attitude toward his deities; religion, morality, fertility, and public concord are the points which the astute ruler wished to be emphasised. That this hymn was a really important part of the ceremony is certain from the fact that it was given to the best living poet to write, and that his name is mentioned as its author in the inscription, discovered not many years ago, which commemorated the whole performance: "CARMEN COMPOSUIT Q. HORATIUS FLACCUS."

If, then, I am right, this strange movement was not merely a revival of religious ceremonies, but an appeal through them to the conscience of the people. A revival of religious life it, of course, was not, for what we understand by that term had never existed at Rome; but it was an attempt to give expression, in a religious form and under State authorisation, to certain feelings and ideas not far removed in kind from those which in our own day we describe as our religious experience. Whether Augustus himself shared in these feelings and ideas it is, of course, impossible to conjecture. But as a man's religious convictions are largely the result of his own experience and of that of the society in which he lives, and as Augustus' own experience for the twenty years before he took this work in hand had been full of trial and temptation, I am disposed to guess that he was rather expressing a popular conviction which he shared himself than merely standing apart and administering a remedy. And this view seems to me to be on the whole confirmed by the tone and spirit of the great literary works of the age.

Augustus did not become pontifex maximus till the year 12 B.C., nineteen years after he had crushed Antony at Actium; he waited with scrupulous patience until the headship of the Roman religion became vacant by the death of Lepidus. But this did not prevent him from pursuing his religious policy with great earnestness before that date, for he had long been a member of the pontifical college, as well as augur and quindecemvir. No sooner had he returned to Rome from Egypt than the work of temple restoration began, the outward and visible sign to all that the pax deorum was to be firmly re-established. The fact of the restoration he has told us in half a dozen words in his own Res Gestae: "Duo et octaginta templa deum in urbe ex decreto senatus refeci," adding that not one was neglected that needed repair. Among them was that oldest and smallest temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol to which I referred in a former lecture; and his personal interest in the work is attested by Livy, who says that he himself heard Augustus tell how he had found an inscription, relating to the second spolia opima dedicated there, when he went into the temple bent on the work of restoration. It needs but a little historical imagination to appreciate the psychological importance of all this work. We have to think not only of the bystanders who watched, but of the very workmen themselves, rejoicing at once in new employment and in the revival of an old sense of religious duty. Little more than twenty years earlier, no workman could be found to lay a hand upon the newly-built temple of Isis, when the consul Aemilius Paulus gave orders for its destruction as a centre of superstitio; now abundant work was provided which every man's conscience would approve. When I think of the Rome of that year 28, with all its fresh hope and confidence taking visible shape in this way, even Horace's famous lines seem cold to me (Od. ii. 6. 1):

delicta maiorum immeritus lues Romane, donec templa refeceris aedesque labentis deorum et foeda nigro simulacra fumo.

The restoration of the temple buildings implies also a revival of the old ritual, the cura et caerimonia. As to this we are very imperfectly informed,—we have no correspondence of this age, as of the last, and the details of life in the Augustan city are not preserved in abundance. But Ovid comes to the rescue here, as in secular matters, and on the whole the evidence in his Fasti suggests that the old sacrificing priesthoods, the Rex and the flamines, were set to their work again. He tells us, for example, how he himself, as he was returning to Rome from Nomentum, had seen the flamen Quirinalis carrying out the exta of a dog and a sheep which had been sacrificed in the morning in the city, to be laid on the altar in the grove of Robigus. In spite of all its disabling restrictions, it was possible once more to fill the ancient priesthood of Jupiter; and of the Rex sacrorum and the other flamines we hear in the early Empire. They were in the potestas of the pontifex maximus, and as after 12 B.C. that position was always held by the Princeps himself, it was not likely that they would be allowed to neglect their duties. Other ancient colleges were also revived or confirmed by the inclusion of the Emperor himself among their members (a fact which Augustus was careful to record in his own words), e.g. the Fetiales, of whom he had made use when declaring war with Antony and Cleopatra; the Sodales Titienses, an institution of which we have lost the origin and meaning; the Salii, Luperci, and above all the Fratres Arvales, the brotherhood whose duty it had once been to lead a procession round the crops in May, and so to ensure the pax deorum for the most vital material of human subsistence. The corn-supply now came almost entirely from Africa and Egypt; the inner meaning of this old ritual could not be revived, and we must own that all this restoration of the old caerimonia must have appealed rather to the eye than the mind of the beholder. It was necessary to put some new element into it to give it life. Here we come upon a most important fact in the work of Augustus, which will become apparent if we take a rapid glance at the work and history of the Fratres, and then go on to find further illustration of the curious mixture of old and new which the Roman religion was henceforward to be.

The fortunate survival of large fragments of the records of the Brotherhood, dating from shortly after the battle of Actium, show that it continued to work and to flourish down to the reign of Gordian (A.D. 241), and from other sources we know that it was still in existence in the fourth century. These records have been found on the site of the sacred grove, at the fifth milestone on the via Campana between Rome and Ostia, which from the time of this revival onwards was the centre of the activity of the Fratres.

The brethren were twelve in number, with a magister at their head and a flamen to assist him; they were chosen from distinguished families by co-optation, the reigning Emperor being always a member. Their duties fell into two divisions, which most aptly illustrate respectively the old and the new ingredients in the religious prescriptions of Augustus, as they were carried out by his successors. The first of these is the performance of the yearly rites in honour of the Dea Dia, the goddess or numen without a substantival name (a form perhaps of Ceres and Tellus), whose home was in the sacred grove, and who was the special object of this venerable cult. Secondly, the care of vows, prayers, and sacrifices for the Emperors and other members of the imperial house. I must say a few words about each of these divisions of duty.

The worship of the Dea Dia took place in May on three days, with an interval always of one day between the first and second, according to the old custom of the calendar. On the first, preliminary rites were performed at Rome, in the house of the magister; on the second was the most important part of the whole ceremony, which took place at the sacred grove. These rites will give a good idea of the old Roman worship, and of the exactness with which Augustus sought to restore it. At dawn the magister sacrificed two porcae piaculares to the Dea, and then a vacca honoraria, after which he laid aside the toga praetexta or sacrificial vestment, and rested till noon, when all the brethren partook of a common meal, of which the porcae formed the chief part. Then resuming the praetexta, and crowned with wreaths of corn-ears, they proceeded to the altar in the grove, where they sacrificed the agna opima, which was the principal victim in the whole ceremonial. Other rites followed, e.g. the passing round, from one to another of the brethren, fruits gathered and consecrated on the previous day, each brother receiving them in his left, i.e. lucky hand, and passing them on with his right; and the singing of the famous Arval hymn to Mars and the Lares to a rhythmic dance-tune. Then after another meal and chariot-racing in the neighbouring circus, they returned to Rome and finished the day with further feasting. A cynical reader of these Acta might suggest that the appetites of the good brethren were made more of than their pietas; but the feasting may be just as much a part of the ancient practice as any of the other curiosities of ritual.

The utensils employed were of the primitive sun-baked clay (ollae), and seem to have been regarded with a veneration almost amounting to worship. Long ago I had occasion to note how the old form of piacular sacrifice was used and recorded whenever iron was taken into the grove, or any damage done to the trees by lightning or other accident. Once, when a tiny fig-tree sprouted on the roof of the temple, piacula of all suitable kinds had to be offered to Mars, Dea Dia, Janus, Jupiter, Juno, Virgines divae, Famuli divi, Lares, Mater Larum, sive deus sive dea in cuius tutela hic lucus locusque est, Fons, Hora, Vesta Mater, Vesta deorum dearumque, Adolenda Commolenda Deferunda,—and sixteen divi of the imperial families! As the date of this extraordinary performance is A.D. 183, nothing can better show the extent to which the revival of elaborate ritual had been carried by Augustus, and the amazing tenacity with which it held its ground.

The second part of the activity of the brethren well illustrates the new element which Augustus adroitly insinuated into the old religious forms: but I shall not dwell upon it, for the worship of the Caesars in its developed form is not of either Roman or Italian origin, any more than the other kinds of cult which were now pressing in from the East; and it thus lies outside the range of my subject. The revival of this old priesthood, and doubtless of others, the Salii for example, was turned to account to mark the sacred character and political and social predominance of the imperial family. All events of importance in the life of the Emperor himself and his family were the occasion of vows, prayers, or thanksgivings on the part of the Fratres; births, marriages, successions to the throne, journeys and safe return, and the assumption of the consulship and other offices or priesthoods. These rites all took place at various temples or altars in Rome, or at the Ara Pacis, recently excavated, which Augustus had built in the Campus Martius. Here, by way of example of them, is a "votum susceptum pro salute novi principis," on his accession.

"Imperatore M. Othone Caesare Augusto, L. Salvio Othone Titiano iterum consulibus, III kalendas Februarias magistro Imperatore M. Othone Caesare Augusto, promagistro L. Salvio Othone Titiano: collegi fratrum Arvalium nomine immolavit in Capitolio ob vota nuncupata pro salute imperatoris M. Othonis Caesaris Augusti in annum proximum in III nonas Ianuarias Iovi bovem marem, Iunoni vaccam: Minervae vaccam: Saluti publicae populi Romani vaccam: divo Augusto bovem marem, divae Augustae vaccam: divo Claudio bovem marem: in collegio adfuerunt, etc."

This record, which belongs to the year 69 and the accession of Otho, shows the divi, i.e. the deified emperors Augustus and Claudius, together with the deified Livia, associated with the trias of the Capitoline temple and the Salus publica in the sacrificial rites. But under the Flavian dynasty which followed this association was judiciously dropped. It may serve for the moment to illustrate what was to come of this new element so subtly introduced into the old worship; how it led to practices which are utterly repulsive to us, and repulsive too to an honest man even in that day. The noble words of Tiberius, declining to have temples erected to him in Spain, have been preserved by Tacitus from the senatorial records: "Ego me, patres conscripti, mortalem esse fateor"; and he added that his only claim to immortality lay in the due performance of duty. Tiberius, whatever else he may have been, was beyond doubt an honest man; and so too was Seneca, the author of the famous skit on the deification of Claudius. But the extravagances of Caesar-worship are not to be met with in Augustus' time; for him the new element may be defined, as in Rome (and in Italy too, so far as his own wish could limit it) nothing more than the encouragement of the belief in him, and loyalty to him as the restorer of the pax deorum. To this end he sought to magnify his own achievements as avenger of the crime of the murder of Julius, by which the pax had been grievously disturbed. I propose to finish this lecture by giving some account of the way in which he attained this object. Let us briefly examine the famous ritual of the Ludi saeculares, of which we have more detailed knowledge than of any other Roman rite of any period; it marks the zenith of his prosperity and religious activity, and belongs to the year 17 B.C., two years after the death of Virgil,—a date which may be said to divide the long power of Augustus into two nearly equal halves.

This famous celebration is an epoch in the history of the Roman religion, if not in the history of Rome herself. It stands on the very verge of an old and a new régime. It was the outward or ritualistic expression of the idea, already suggested by Virgil in the fourth Eclogue and the Aeneid, that a regeneration is at hand of Rome and Italy, in religion, morals, agriculture, government; old things are put away, new sap is to run in the half-withered trunk and branches of a noble tree. The experience of the past, as with Aeneas after the descent into Hades, is to lead to new effort and a new type of character, of which pietas in its broadest sense is the inspiring motive. Henceforward the Roman is to look ahead of him in hope and confidence, virtutem extendere factis. Augustus, the Aeneas of the actual State, was firmly established in a prestige which extended beyond Italy even to the far East; his faithful and capable coadjutor Agrippa was by his side to take his part in the ritual, and no cloud in that year 17 seemed to be visible on the horizon.

The Ludi saeculares are also unique in respect of the records we have of them. By wonderful good fortune we can construct an almost complete picture of what was done in that year on the last days of May and the first three of June. We have the text of the Sibylline oracle,—how manufactured we do not know, nor does it much matter,—which prescribed the ritual, preserved by Zosimus, a Greek historian of the fifth century A.D., together with his own account. Thus the outline of the ritual has been known all along, together with many details; and to help it out we have also the perfect text of the hymn written by Horace for the occasion, and sung by two choirs of boys and girls respectively. But great was the delight of the learned world when, in September 1890, workmen employed on the Tiber embankment, close, as it turned out, to the spot where the nightly rites of the ludi took place, came upon a mediaeval wall partly made of ancient material, in which some marbles were found covered with inscriptions relating to this same celebration. This treasure was badly mutilated, but the inscription was easily decipherable; it contains a letter from Augustus giving instructions, two decrees of the Senate, and a series of records of the Quindecemviri, who were of course in charge of a ritual which had been ordered by a Sibylline oracle. Some few points were at first puzzling, but have been cleared up since the discovery. Mommsen, of course, took the work in hand, and his exposition is still, and always will be, the starting-point for students. Wissowa has an excellent popular account of it, and recently, in the fifth volume of his Greatness and Decline of Rome, Ferrero has utilised it to give an animated account of the whole ceremony.

The Ludi saeculares take their name from the word saeculum; and the old Italian idea of a saeculum seems to have been a period stretching from any given moment to the death of the oldest person born at that moment,—a hundred years being the natural period so conceived. Thus a new saeculum might begin at any time, and might be endowed with special religious significance by certain solemn ceremonies; in this way the people might be persuaded that a new leaf, so to speak, had been turned over in their history: that all past evil, material or moral, had been put away and done with (saeculum condere), and a new period entered on of innocence and prosperity. There are faint traces of three early celebrations of this kind, beginning in 463 B.C., traditionally a disastrous year, and renewed in 363 and 263. But in 249, another year of distress and peril, a new saeculum was entered on with a new and a Greek ritual, ordered by a Sibylline oracle. A subterranean altar in a spot by the Tiber, near the present Ponte St. Angelo, and called Tarentum (possibly to mark the original home of the rite), was dedicated to Dis and Proserpina, Greek deities of the nether world; and here for three successive nights black victims were offered to them. The subterranean altar and the use of the word condere (to put away), might suggest that this rite may have had something in common with those well-known quasi-dramatic ones in which objects are buried or thrown into the water, to represent the cessation of one period of vegetation and the beginning of another. Or we may look on it in the light of one of those rites de passage in which a transition is made from one state of things to another, without any definite religious idea being attached to it. There is no doubt some mystical element in the primitive idea of the beginning and ending of periods of time, which has not as yet been thoroughly investigated.

Now it is easy to see how exactly a rite of this kind, with suitable modifications, would fit in with Augustus' purposes as we have explained them. Fortunately too Varro had in 42 B.C. published a book in which the mystic or Pythagorean doctrine was set forth of the palingenesis of All Souls after four saecula of 110 years each; the fourth Eclogue of Virgil may have been influenced by this, among other mystical ideas, as it was written only three years later; and in any case the doctrine was well known. But Augustus had to wait a while, until peace and confidence were restored. Why eventually he chose the year 17 is quite uncertain; it does not exactly fit in with any calculation of four saecula of 110 years starting from any known date. But a saeculum, as we have seen, might begin at any moment; and in any case it was easy to manufacture a calculation, which was now duly accomplished by trusty persons, chief among them being the great lawyer, Ateius Capito, an ardent adherent of Augustus and his projects. Probably too it was necessary to take advantage of the popular feeling of the moment, that a better time had come, and that it should be started on its way in some fitting outward form.

So an elaborate programme was drawn up, the main features of which I must now explain. On 26th May and the two following days (for the mystic numbers three, nine, and twenty-seven are noticeable throughout the ritual) the means of purification (suffimenta)—torches, sulphur, bitumen—were distributed by the priests to all free persons, whether citizens or not; for this once, all in Rome at the time, with the exception of slaves, were to give an imperial meaning to the ceremony by their share in it. Even bachelors, though forbidden to attend public shows under a recent law de maritandis ordinibus, were allowed to do so on this occasion. No doubt the idea was that the whole people were to be purified from all pollution of the past; it is what M. van Gennep calls a rite de séparation, the first step in a rite de passage. The next three days all the people came to the Quindecemviri at certain stated places, and made offerings of fruges, the products of the earth, as we do at our harvest festivals; these were the firstfruits of the coming harvest. It may be worth while to recall the facts that it was on these same days that the procession of the Ambarvalia used to go round the ripening crops, and that in the early days of June the symbolic penus of Vesta was being cleansed to receive the new grain. That Augustus wished to emphasise the importance of Italian agriculture is beyond doubt, and is apparent also in the hymn of Horace, Fertilis frugum pecorisque Tellus spicea donet Cererem corona, etc.

When the suffimenta had been distributed and the offerings made, all was ready for the putting away or burying of the old saeculum. On the night before 1st June Augustus himself, together with Agrippa, sacrificed to the Greek Moirae, the Parcae of Horace's hymn, perhaps in some sense the Fata of the Aeneid; on the second night to Eilithyia, the Greek deity of childbirth; and on the third to Mother Tellus. The form of prayer accompanying the sacrifice is preserved in the inscription; it is Latin in language and form, as dry and concise as any we examined in my lectures on ritual, and contains the macte esto which I was then at pains to explain. Augustus prayed for the safety and prosperity of the State in every way, and also for himself, his house, and his familia. The scene on the bank of the Tiber, illuminated by torches, must have been most impressive.

These were the nightly ceremonies. But each day also had its ritual, in which the Roman deities of the heaven were the objects of worship, not, as by the Tiber bank, Greek deities of the earth and the nether world. On the first two days Augustus and Agrippa offered the proper victims to Jupiter and Juno respectively on the Capitol; Minerva is omitted, and probably the other two are reckoned in Greek fashion as a married pair. The form of prayer was the same as that used by night, with the necessary modifications. Thus the great Capitoline temple and its deities have a full share of attention, and they go too far who think that Augustus was so wanting in tact as to put them in the shade. But on the third and last day the scene changes from the Capitol to the Palatine, the residence of Augustus, where he had built his great temple of Apollo; here for the first time in the ceremony Horace's hymn was sung. On all the days and nights there had been shows and amusements, and a hundred and ten chosen matrons had taken solemn part in the services. But I must pass these over and turn in the last place to the question, as interesting as it is old and difficult, as to how and where Horace's hymn was sung, and how we are to understand it.

The instructions given to the poet by Augustus are obvious as we read the Carmen in the light of the ceremonial of which it was to mark the conclusion. He was to bring into it, as we have already seen, the ideas which were to be revived and made resonant, of religion, morality, and the fertility of man, beast, and crop; and they are all there. He was also to include all the deities who had been addressed in prayer both by day and night, by Tiber bank and on the Capitol, and to give the most prominent place to those who on this last day were worshipped on the Palatine; to Apollo, for whom Augustus had built a great temple close to his own house (in privato solo), as his own specially protecting deity since Actium, and Diana, who as equivalent to Artemis, could not but be associated with Apollo. Thus the deities of the hymn are both Latin and Greek, and this expresses the undoubted fact that the religion of the Romans was henceforward to be even in outward expression a cosmopolitan or Romano-Hellenic one, in keeping with the fact that all free men of every race might take part in this great festival. But it cannot fail to strike every careful reader that the great trias of the Capitol is hardly visible in the poem, though Jupiter and Juno had been the chief objects of worship on the two previous days. Jupiter is twice incidentally named, but in no connection with the Capitol; and it is only when we read between the lines of the fourteenth stanza that we discover Jupiter and Juno as the recipients of the white oxen which had been sacrificed to them there. I have already said that we must not make too much of the neglect of Jupiter and Juno by Augustus; but it is plain that he directed Horace not to make them too prominent in this hymn, and I think it is quite possible that Horace a little overdid his obedience.

The result of all this is that the hymn, in spite of its neatness and adequacy, is wanting in spontaneity, and presents the casual reader with an apparently unmeaning jumble of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. The only way to clear it up is by taking it in immediate relation with what we know about the places in which it was sung. To me at last it has become clear enough in all its main points; and I will give here my own results, which do not altogether coincide with those of other recent inquirers.

Before the discovery of the great inscription we knew that this hymn was sung before the new temple of Apollo on the Palatine; we now know that it was also sung on the Capitol, thus uniting in one performance the old religion of republican Rome with the new imperial cult of Apollo. But this new fact has, in my opinion, led to misapprehensions both of the manner of singing and the order of subjects in the hymn. Mommsen thought that the first part was sung on the Palatine, the middle part on the Capitol, and the last again on the Palatine, and he is followed by Wissowa; and both seem to think it possible that there may have been singing too during the procession from the one hill to the other. I think we need not trouble ourselves about the latter point, for the Via Sacra, by which the procession must have gone, was far too narrow and irregular to allow fifty-four singers, with the tibicines who must have been accompanying them, to walk and perform at the same time. The inscription, too, says plainly that the hymn was sung on the Palatine and then on the Capitol, and by that plain statement of fact we had better abide.

Now let us note that these two stations on the two hills were the best possible positions for Augustus' purpose, not only because of their religious importance, but because they afforded the most spacious views of the city, now everywhere adorned with new or restored buildings. The temple of Apollo was built upon a large and lofty area at the north-east end of the Palatine. Recent excavations have shown it to be some hundred yards broad by a hundred and fifty in length, and Ovid, in a passage of his Tristia gives us an idea of its height:

inde tenore pari gradibus sublimia celsis ducor ad intonsi candida templa dei.

On this area the choirs of boys and girls took their station, facing the marble temple, on the fastigium of which was represented the Sun driving his four-horse chariot. After singing, probably together, the first two stanzas or exordium of the hymn, they addressed this Sol:

alme Sol, curru nitido diem qui promis et celas, aliusque et idem nasceris, possis nihil urbe Roma visere maius.

As they sang these last words, they would turn towards the city that lay behind them, and look over it to the Tiber and the scene of the nightly sacrifices of the Tarentum; and with the deities of these rites, who must of course be taken before those of day and light, as in the order of the festival, the next five stanzas are occupied: Eilithyia, the Moirae (Parcae), and Tellus or Ceres. When that duty is over they turn once more to the temple, and the Greek deities of the Tarentum are mentioned no more. Three stanzas are devoted to Apollo and Diana (Luna), with a happy allusion to the Aeneid, and then once more the choirs turn, and this time they face the Capitol; the hymn is long, and these changes of movement would be at once a relief to the singers and a pleasant sight to the spectators. They address the deities of the Capitol in appropriate language:

di probos mores docili iuventae, di, senectuti placidae quietem, Romulae genti date remque prolemque et decus omne.

The allusion to Jupiter and Juno is thus veiled:

quaeque vos bobus veneratur albis clarus Anchisae Venerisque sanguis, impetret, bellante prior, iacentem lenis in hostem.

Horace has cleverly made Augustus himself the leading figure in this and the following stanza, and the listeners forget the Capitoline gods as they note the allusion to Venus, the ancestress of the Julii, the prestige of Augustus that has brought envoys to him from Scythia, Media, and India, and in the next stanza the public virtues, presented here as deities—Fides, Pax, Honos, Pudor, Virtus—on whose aid and worship the new régime is based.

At the sixteenth stanza the choirs again face about to the temple of Apollo, and with him and Diana again the next two stanzas have to do. Only one remains, in which as an exodos we may be sure the two choirs of boys and girls joined; it sums up the whole body of deities, but with Apollo and Diana as the special objects of the day's worship:

haec Iovem sentire deosque cunctos spem bonam certamque domum reporto, doctus et Phoebi chorus et Dianae dicere laudes.

The performance on the Palatine was now over, and the procession streamed down the hill to join the Via Sacra near the Regia and the Vesta temple, and so to make its way up to the Capitol, where the performance was repeated. Taking station at this noble point of view, he who will can again follow its movement with the hymn in his hand. The area in front of the Capitoline temple looked across to the Palatine, and the image of Sol and his quadriga must have been in full view; thus the exordium and the next stanza (alme Sol) would be sung looking in that direction. Equally well in view, if they turned to the right, would be the scene of the midnight sacrifices across the Campus Martius; and so on throughout the singing the changes of position would be easy and graceful, here as on the Palatine.

Here I prefer to make an end of the performance, following the text of the inscription, which tells us nothing of a return to the Palatine. It would be far more in keeping with Roman practice that the Capitol should be the scene of the conclusion of the processional ceremony, even on a day when Apollo was, with Augustus himself, the principal figure. From the musical point of view, too, a third performance is improbable, for the singers were young and tender.

And here, too, with this impressive scene, which can hardly fail to move the imagination of any one who has stood on Palatine and Capitol, I will close my account of the religious experience of the Romans. A few remarks only remain for me to make about its contribution, such as it was, to the Latin form of Christianity.

Notes to Lecture XIX

Note.—The whole question of the singing of the Carmen saeculare in its relation to the two principal sites and to the topography of the festival generally, is fully discussed by the author in Classical Review for 1910, p. 145 foll.

Lecture XX