LECTURE XII

THE PONTIFICES AND THE SECULARISATION OF

RELIGION

IN the last lecture we saw how the new experiences of the Roman people, during the period from the abolition of the kingship to the war with Hannibal, led to the introduction of foreign deities and showy ceremonies of a character quite strange to the old religion. But there was another process going on at the same time. The authorities of that old religion were full of vigour in this same period; it may even be said, that as far as we can trace their activity in the dim light of those early days, they made themselves almost supreme in the State. And the result was, in brief, that religion became more and more a matter of State administration, and thereby lost its chance of developing the conscience of the individual. It is indeed quite possible, as has recently been maintained,1 that it stood actively in the way of such development. I have no doubt that there was a germ of conscience, of moral feeling, in the religio of old days-the feeling of anxiety and doubt which originally suggested the cura and caerimonia of the State; but the efforts of the authorities in this period were spent in gradually destroying that germ. True, they did not interfere with the simple religion of the family, which had its value all through Roman history; but the attitude of the individual towards public worship will react on his attitude towards private worship, which may also have lost some part of its vitality in this period.

The religious authorities of which I speak are of course the two great colleges of pontifices and augurs. Of the latter, and of the system of divination of which they held the secrets, I will speak in the next lecture. Here we have to do with the pontifices and their work in this period, a thorny and somewhat technical subject, but a most important one for the history of Roman religious experience.

I have so far assumed that this college existed in the age of the kings, and assisted the Rex in the administration of the ius divinum. It is legitimate to do this, but as a matter of fact we do not know for certain what was the origin of the college itself, or of its mysterious name. In the period we have now reached we come, however, upon a striking fact, which is luckily easy to interpret; the king's house, the Regia, has become the office of the head of the college, the pontifex maximus, and also the meetingplace of the college for business. Obviously this head, whether or no he existed during the kingly period, has stepped into the place of the Rex in the control of the ius divinum. Again, we know that in the third century B.C., when written history begins, the pontifices and their head had reached a very high level of power, as we shall presently see more in detail; the process of the growth of this power must therefore lie in the two preceding centuries, during which Rome was slowly attaining that paramount position in Italy in which we find her at the time of the Punic wars. Thirdly, we know that in that third century B.C. the college was laid open to plebeians as well as to members of the old patrician gentes, and that one of the most famous of all its many distinguished heads was not only not a patrician, but a Latin from Cameria, Ti. Coruncanius. Putting these three facts together we can divine in outline the history of the pontifices during these two centuries. With the instinct for order and organisation that never failed them, the Romans have constructed a permanent power to take charge of their ius divinum, i.e. all their relations to the deities with whom

they must maintain a par; the circumstances of their career during two centuries have exalted this power to an extraordinary degree of influence, direct and indirect, internal and external; and, lastly, in a period which saw the gradual amalgamation into a unified whole of privileged and unprivileged, patres and plebs, they have with wonderful wisdom thrown open to all citizens the administration of that ius which was essential to the welfare of the united community. These are indisputable facts; and they are thoroughly characteristic of the practical wisdom of the Roman people in that early age.

In order to understand how the pontifices attained their great position, the one thing needful is to examine the nature of their work. This I propose to do next, and then to attempt to sum up the result of their activity on the Roman religious system.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the college in the early history of Roman law; and for us in particular that importance lies in the fact that they were the sole depositaries of the religious law in the period during which the civil law was being slowly disentangled from it. If we look at the so-called leges regiae, which are probably the oldest rules of law that have come down to us (though they may have been made into a collection as late as the very end of the Republic),3 we see at once that they belong to the ius divinum; and there is little doubt that they were extracted from those books of the pontifices which I shall have to explain later on. In other words, it is the maintenance of the pax deorum that they are chiefly concerned with; the crime of the citizen is a violation of that pax, and the deity most concerned will punish the community unless some expiatory step is taken to re-establish the right relation between the human and divine inhabitants of the city. "Pellex aram Iunonis ne tangito; si tanget, Iunoni crinibus demissis agnum feminam caedito." "Si parentem puer verberit, ast olle plorassit, puer divis parentum sacer esto." 5 The harlot who touches the altar of Juno, the deity of married women,

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breaks the par with that deity, and she must offer a piacular sacrifice to renew it; the son who strikes a parent is made over as the property of the divi parentum, i.e. those of the whole community, the peaceful relation with whom his act has imperilled. With such rules as these the civil magistrate of the republic can have had nothing to do; they belong to an older period of thought and of government, and survived in the books of the college which under the republic continued to administer the ius divinum; for these rules doubtless continued to exist side by side with the civil law as it gradually developed itself, and the necessary modes of expiation were known to the pontifices only. Roman society was indeed so deeply penetrated for many ages with the idea of religio-the dread of violating the pax deorum,-that the idea of law as a matter of the relation of man to man, as "the interference of the State in the passions and interests of humanity only," must have gained ground by very slow degrees. This primitive religious law then, ie. the regulation of the proper steps to be taken to avoid a breach of the pax deorum, was entirely in the hands of the religious authorities, the Rex at first and then the pontifices, as the only experts who could know the secrets of the ius divinum; and from their decisions and prescriptions there could be no appeal, simply because there was no individual or body in the State to whom an appeal was conceivable. But after the rule of the Etruscan kings, with all its disturbing influences, and after the revolution which got rid of them, there must have been an age of new ideas and increased mental activity, and also of increasing social complexity, the signs of which in the way of trade and industry we have already found in certain facts of religious history. In the domain of law this meant new problems, new difficulties; and these were met in the middle of the fifth century B.C., if the received chronology is to be accepted," by the publication of the XII. Tables.

In order to get some idea of the work of the pontifices

T

at this time, let us consider one or two of these difficulties and problems.

Within the family every act, every relation, was matter of religion; the numina had to be considered in regard to it. The end and aim, then as throughout Roman history, was the maintenance of the sacra of the family, without which it could not be conceived as existing-the due worship of its deities, and the religious care of its dead. Take marriage as an example: "the entry of a bride into the household-of one who as yet had no lot in the family life-meant some straining of the relation between the divine and human members," and the human part of the family must be assured that the divine part is willing to accept her before the step can be regarded as complete. She has to enter the family in such a way as to share in its sacra; and if confarreatio was (as we may believe) the oldest form of patrician marriage, the bride was subjected to a ceremony which was plainly of a sacramental character-the sacred cake of far being partaken of by both bride and bridegroom in the presence of the highest religious authority of the State. In the simplest form of society there would be no call for further priestly interference in marriage; but in a society growing more numerous and complex, exceptions, abnormal conditions begin to show themselves, and new problems arise, which must be solved by new expedients, prescriptions, permissions, devices, or fictions. For these the religious authorities are solely responsible; for what is a matter of religious interest to the family is also matter of religious interest to the State, simply because the State is composed of families in the same sense as the human body is composed of cellular tissue. All this, we believe, was once the work of the Rex, perhaps with the college of pontifices to help him; when the kingship disappeared it became the work of that college solely, with the pontifex maximus as the chief authority.

So, too, in all other questions which concerned the maintenance of the family, and especially in regard to the