43

common one in the annals, " supplicatio ad omnia pulvinaria indicta." The lectisternia were ordered five times in the fourth century; by that time, it would seem likely, the supplicationes had become an authorised institution, and had perhaps embodied the practice of lectisternia in the way suggested above. We shall meet with them again when we come to the religious history of the war with Hannibal.

One word more before I leave this subject for the present. In all this innovation we must not forget to note the growth of individual feeling as distinguished from the old worship of civic grouping, in which the individual, as such, was of little or no account. I pointed out the first signs of this individualism when speaking of the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter, and we shall have reason to mark its rapid growth further. We are now, in fact, and must realise that we are, in a period in which, throughout the Graeco-Roman world, the need was beginning to be felt of some new rule of individualistic morality. The Roman population, now recruited from many sources, was but reflecting this need unconsciously when it insisted on new emotional rites and expiations. The Roman authorities were forced to satisfy the demand; but in doing so they made no real contribution to the history of Roman religious experience. It was impossible that they should do so; they represented the old civic form of religion, "bound up with the life of a society, and unable to contemplate the individual except as a member of it." The new forms of worship, the supplicatio and lectisternium, could not be, as the old forms had in some sense been, the consecration of civic and national life. They were to the Romans as the worship of Baal to the Jews of the time of the Kings; and, unlike that poisonous cult, they could never be rooted out.

44

NOTES TO LECTURE XI

1. This is the expression of Sallust, Catil. 12. 3.

2. See my paper on the Latin history of the word religio, in Transactions of the Congress for the History of Religions, 1909, vol. ii. p. 172. W. Otto in Archiv, 1909, p. 533 foll.

3. Cic. de Nat. Deorum, ii. 8.

4. Cic. Harusp. resp. 19.

5. Livy xliv. I. 11; Sallust, l.c.; Gellius, Noct. Att. ii. 28. 2. 6. Polyb. vi. 56.

7. Posidonius ap. Athenaeum vi. 274 A; Dion. Hal. ii. 27. 3. 8. Gell. ii. 28.

9. Marquardt, iii. 126.

10. Cato, R.R. 142.

11. Calpurnius, Eclogue, v. 24. I have described a similar scene in the Alps in A Year with the Birds, ed. 2, p. 126.

12. Petronius, Sat. 117: "His ita ordinatis, quod bene feliciterque eveniret precati deos, viam ingredimur." I owe this reference, as others in this context, to Appel's treatise de Romanorum precationibus, p. 56 foll.

13. Varro, R.R. i. 1.

14. e.g. Virg. Aen. v. 685 (Aeneas during the burning of the fleet); Aen. xii. 776 (Turnus in extremity). Cp. Tibull. iii. 5. 6 (in sickness).

15. A good example is Captivi, 922: "Iovi disque ago gratias merito magnas quom te redducem tuo patri reddiderunt," etc.

16. For gratitude to human beings see Valerius Maximus v. 2. A good example of gratitude to a deity is in Gell. N.A. iv. 18; but it is told of Scipio the elder, who was eccentric for a Roman. When accused by a tribune of peculation in Asia he said, "Non igitur simus adversum deos ingrati et, censeo, relinquamus nebulonem hunc, eamus hinc protinus Iovi Optimo Maximo gratulatum." Public gratitude to the gods is frequent in later supplicationes, e.g. Livy xxx. 17. 6.

17. Gellius, N.A. xiv. 7. 9.

18. Servius ad Aen. xi. 301 ("praefatus divos solio rex infit ab alto").

19. This was in a contio: "Cum Gracchus deos inciperet precari." See above, Lecture VII. note 13.

20. See R.F. p. 74 foll.; Wissowa, R.K. p. 243. For the relation of the pomoerium to the wall, see above, p. 94.

21. The process is amusingly explained by Carter in The Religion of Numa, p. 72 foll.

22. R.F. p. 75.

23. See Aust, De aedibus sacris P.R., passim.

24. Lately this has been denied by Pais, Storia di Roma, i. 339. 25. Pliny, N.H. 35, 154.

26. I owe the information to my friend Prof. Percy Gardner.

27. See Carter, op. cit. p. 66; but I am not sure that his reasons are conclusive.

28. Diels, Sibyllinische Blätter, p. 6 foll., and cp. 79.

29. It should be noted that the cult of Apollo in Rome was older than the introduction of Sibylline influence; so at least it is generally assumed. Wissowa, however (R.K. p. 239), puts it as "gleichzeitig." The date of the Apollinar in pratis Flaminiis, the oldest Apolline fanum in Rome (outside pomoerium), is unknown; that of the temple on the same site was 431 (Livy iv. 25 and 29). There is little doubt that the Apollo-cult spread from Cumae northwards, and was by this time well established in Italy. (The foundation of the temple of 431, consisting of opus quadratum, still in part survives: Hülsen-Jordan, Rom. Topographie, iii. 535).

30. Heracleitus, fragm. xii., ed. Bywater. 31. Phaedrus, p. 244.

32. So Korte in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl., s.v.

"Etrusker."

33. The present tendency is to take the plebs as representing an older population of Latium before the arrival of the patricians; see, e.g., Binder, Die Plebs, p. 358 foll. But the plebs of later days is not to be explained on one hypothesis only.

34. e.g. in religious matters the duoviri aedi dedicandae ; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, ii. 601 foll.

35. Carter, Religion of Numa, p. 77 foll. It is uncertain whether there was a Roman Mercurius of earlier origin, or whether the name Mercurius (¿.e. concerned in trade) was a new invention to avoid using the Greek name, as in the case of the trias Ceres, Liber, Libera.

36. Carter, op. cit. 81. The connection of this PoseidonNeptunus and Hermes-Mercurius is confirmed by the fact that the two were paired in the first lectisternium, 399 B.C. Livy v. 13. 37. Wissowa, R.K. p. 254.

38. See Diels, Sib. Blätter, p. 12, note 1.

39. Livy v. 13.

40. I have discussed the possibility of the epulum Iovis being an old Italian rite in R.F. p. 215 foll. For the Greek origin of these shows see Dict. of Antiquities, ed. 2, s.v. "lectisternia."

41. Livy iii. 5. 14, and 7. 7.

42. The plebeian tendencies of the time are suggested, e.g., by the fact that immediately before the first lectisternium a plebeian was elected military tribune (Livy v. 13). The fourth century is of course the period of plebeian advance in all departments, and ends with the opening of the priesthoods to the plebs by the lex Ogulnia, and the publication of the Fasti. Plebeian too, I suspect, was the keeping open house and promiscuous hospitality which is

recorded by Livy of the first lectisternia; this was the practice of the plebs on the Cerealia (April 19), and was perhaps an old custom connected with the supply of corn and the temple of Ceres (see above, P. 255). It was not imitated by the patrician society, with its reserve and exclusiveness, till the institution of the Megalesia in 204 B.C. See Gellius xviii. 2. II.

43. The expression crinibus demissis is found in a lex regia (Festus, s.v. "pellices"); the harlot who touches Juno's altar has to offer a lamb to Juno "crinibus demissis." This is therefore Roman practice.

44. For the supplicationes see Wissowa, R.K. 357 foll.; Marq. 48 and 188; and the author's article in Dict. of Antiquities. The passages already referred to as doubtful evidence (Livy iii. 5. 14, 7. 7) describe all the features of the supplicatio as early as the first half of the fifth century. A list of later passages in Livy will be found in Marq. 49, note 4. On the whole I doubt if much was made of these rites before the third century and the Punic wars.

.45. Wissowa, R.K. 356, note 7.

46. Caird, Gifford Lectures, vol. ii. p. 46.

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.