30. Ovid, Fasti, iii. 523 foll. See also Roman Society in the Age of Cicero, p. 289. 31. See Mr. Heitland's History of the Roman Republic, vol. ii. p. 229 note, and cp. Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. s.v. "Bacchanalia.” 32. Livy xxxix. 8 foll. 33. Plato, de Rep. 364 B; cp. Laws, 933 D. 34. Quaestio de clandestinis coniurationibus decreta est," Livy xxxix. 8; so also in chs. 14 and 17. Cp. Sctm. de Bacchanalibus, line 13, "conioura (se)." This document is, strictly speaking, a letter to the magistrates "in agro Teurano" in Bruttium embodying the orders of the Senatus consultum. It will be found in Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani, or in Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin. 35. Livy xxxix. 16: "Omnia, dis propitiis volentibusque, faciemus, qui quia suum numen sceleribus libidinibusque contaminari indigne ferebant," etc. 36. Mommsen, Strafrecht, p. 567 foll. 37. Livy xxxix. 18 ad fin. Sctm, de Bacch. lines 3 foll. 38. Religion der Römer, p. 78. 39. Livy xl. 29 seems to have put his account together from Cassius Hemina and other annalists, so far as we can judge from the reference to them in Pliny, N.H. xiii. 84; Valerius Antias, who simply stated that the writings were Pythagorean as well as Numan, Livy rejects as ignorant of the chronological impossibility of making the king contemporary with the philosopher. The fragment of Cassius Hemina is quoted in Pliny, sec. 86; Val. Max. i. 1, and Plutarch, Numa 22, add nothing to our knowledge of the incident. 40. See Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, i. 268; Pliny, Loc. cit., calls him "vetustissimus auctor annalium," but his work was later than the Annals or Origines of Cato. 41. Ennius came from South Italy (Rudiae in Messapia), the home of Pythagoreanism. For traces of it in his works, see Reid on Cicero, Academica priora, ii. 51. 42. This is the view taken by Colin, Rome et la Grèce, 200-146 B.C., p. 269 foll. This reaction was probably only a part of the general reversion to conservatism which we have been noticing in the action of the government in religious matters. 43. See above, p. 149 foll. 44. Quoted by Aust, Religion der Römer, p. 64. The passage is in Zeller's Religion und Philosophie bei den Römern, a short treatise reprinted in his Vorträge und Abhandlungen, ii. 93 foll. 45. Ribbeck, Fragmenta Tragicorum Latinorum, p. 54. 48. Aust, op. cit. p. 66. 49. See Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol, i. p. 75. 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.1 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 groupsystem 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 2; 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 6 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.7 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 |