Phases in the Religion of Ancient Rome

By Cyril Bailey

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1932.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520338586

Cyril Bailey

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SATHER CLASSICAL LECTURES

VOLUME TEN

1932

PHASES IN THE RELIGION

OF ANCIENT ROME

PHASES IN THE RELIGION

OF ANCIENT ROME

BY

CYRIL BAILEY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

1932

COPYRIGHT, 1932

BY

THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON, ENGLAND

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY JOSEPH W. FLINN, UNIVERSITY PRINTER

PREFACE

This book represents the substance of lectures given as Sather Professor of Classical Literature in the University of California. It cannot claim to throw much new light on the religion of the Romans, but is an attempt to review the various elements which at different rimes went to compose it. The notes appended are intended to supply fairly complete references to the ancient authorities, and important passages and those taken from less accessible authors are quoted in full.

I should like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere thanks to the University of California for a very delightful experience and to the authorities of its Press for constant care and much help.

C. B.

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA,

April, 1932.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I MAGIC—CHARM, SPELL, AND TABOO

CHAPTER II THE SPIRITS BELIEF

CHAPTER III THE SPIRITS WORSHIP

CHAPTER IV THE GODS ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND FOREIGN INFLUENCES

CHAPTER V THE GODS INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION—THE STATE-CULT

CHAPTER VI EMOTION AND MYSTICISM—THE ORIENTAL CULTS

CHAPTER VII PHILOSOPHY—EPICUREAN AND STOIC

CHAPTER VIII THE LAST PHASE: SYNCRETISM AND SUPERSTITION

NOTES

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

The history of religion is the history of man’s search for God. It is a long history—as long as the life of man on the earth—and it is incomplete, for even the greatest of religions do not claim to reveal the full vision. It may be viewed from many angles. If we think that this search for God is a vain search, and that there is no reality to be discovered, if we believe that the idea of God is a figment of man’s brain and the religion which he fashions is in effect1 a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties, then the history of religion becomes a study of the aberrations of the human mind moving about in worlds not realized: it has its interest, but the interest is psychological and antiquarian. Nor is the substantive import much deeper, if we hold that any one religion is so exclusively true that all others are but will-o’-the- wisps, luring lights which blind men’s eyes to the truth. But if we believe that the object of the search is there, never capable of full comprehension by the finite mind of man, but always the greatest goal of his effort, then even if the light of one religion be as that of the sun to the stars, yet these minor lights are worth exploration and the story of the development of religious ideas is the most important part of human history. It is in this spirit that I wish to study the religion of ancient Rome in the following lectures.

In a striking passage of the Testament of Beauty Robert Bridges expresses his faith that

As mind in man groweth So with his manhood groweth his idea of God, Wider ever and worthier.

This may be true of the human race as a whole, but in the religious history of a single people, especially one with barbarism not so far behind it, there are ups and downs: instinct may at one time develop into thought and then sink again into mere emotion or superstition. Except perhaps in the history of the Hebrews we find no example of steady religious progress, and even there it is interrupted by relapses and reactions.

The modern study of anthropology and comparative religion has revealed in the history of primitive man certain phases of development in religious conceptions, through which most peoples seem to pass. They do not always succeed one another in the same order, and practices are often customary at the same time and even in the same rite, which imply very different views of the nature of the higher power, and very varying attitudes toward it; magic and animism, animism and anthropomorphism will often be found side by side among the same people at the same epoch. It is the task of the psychological historian, who is trying to distinguish underlying conceptions, to endeavour to disentangle the complicated web which is seen in the history of a nation’s religious development.

In the last fifty years much has been done, particularly by the scholars of Germany, France, England, and America toward analyzing in this spirit the religion of ancient Rome. I propose to avail myself of their work and to try to present pictures of some at least of the phases through which Roman religion passed. It is not strictly a historical development that I have in mind or a succession of stages, for though there was much change and some progress, the religion of the Romans was at any given period a composite web, often of inconsistent threads. My purpose is rather to try to follow up those threads individually, to discover, when possible, their beginning, and to watch them as they enter the web and become entangled in its labyrinth. But the result should also have a historical bearing, for as new threads were picked up, the old were lost or dropped into the background, sometimes to re-emerge in a different form. Warde Fowler’s great book was entitled The Religious Experience of the Roman People; I would ask you to think of these lectures as an attempt to trace the elements which at various times went to make up that experience.

1 S. Reinach, Orpheus, p. 3.

CHAPTER I

MAGIC—CHARM, SPELL, AND TABOO

It is no easy matter to define religion and many attempts have been made, but to express what I shall have in mind in these pages I cannot do better than follow ¹ Warde Fowler in adopting the definition given by a recent American writer: Religion is the effective desire to be in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. It will be seen that this definition has two implications, one, the belief in the existence of a Power (or Powers) manifesting itself in the universe, and the other, the desire on the part of men to put themselves into a right relationship to it. The first has in it the germ of faith, the second we might designate with ² Frazer, if we give the word a very wide sense, as works; I should myself rather be inclined to call it worship. Belief, then, and its practical expression in worship must be the objects of our inquiry.

If this definition be used as a touchstone in the analysis of the Roman religion, ³ there are certain practices and customs, which, though akin to religion, must yet be excluded from religion in the strictest sense, because the attitude of mind which they imply does not conform to it. They involve indeed the recognition of some kind of supranormal force, which can influence or change the course of events, but this force is not an independent power; it is thought of as residing either in natural objects themselves or in the actions and words of man, which are supposed to control events. This conception, which is generally considered to be more primitive than religion, manifests itself in Rome mainly in three different ways, in the supposed supernatural power of certain objects, especially stones, in the practices of magic, and in the custom of taboo. We will look briefly at each of these and endeavour to see its relation to religion.

Of the sacredness of stones among peoples in an early state of civilization, ⁴ Frazer has collected many examples from different lands, especially of the efficacy of such stones in the making of oaths. This seems to have been their main association in the minds of the Romans, and we are able here to trace the passing of the pre-religious attitude into the religious.

In the old agricultural life of the Latin farmers the boundary stones (termini) between their properties were always objects of great sacredness, as we know they were also among the Hebrews; ⁵ the man who removed the boundary stone was accursed (tacer), and so was his ox team. ⁶ The Terminaba celebrated on February 22 was one of the regular festivals in the old calendar of the Religion of Numa, as the Romans loved to call it, at which the owners of the neighbouring fields met and after garlanding the boundary stones made a common sacrifice and held feasting and general rejoicing. This ceremony was a symbolic renewal of the original compact made between the farmers when the stones were first placed, and, though Ovid represents the farmers as making prayer to Terminus as a spirit or deity, it is significant that no inscription to a deus Terminus is found before Imperial times: Ovid himself in his preliminary invocation exclaims Terminus, whether thou art stone or stake planted in the field. In other words the ceremony goes back beyond animism to a time when the stone itself was the sacred thing, which had in it the constraining force to make the farmer keep within his own boundaries. In course of time the stone came, as Ovid says, to have a numen, or indwelling spirit; later still we find the deus Terminus, but he never has an anthropomorphic representation and there is always the sense that he is still just the stone. This is strikingly seen even in the fully developed State cult. In the great temple of luppiter Capitolinus was an ancient boundary stone: legend told that when the temple was built, Terminus refused to budge and so was included in the temple, but above the stone was left a hole in the roof, for Terminus must always be worshipped in the open air. The stone is older than luppiter and is, as it were, taken under his protection.

⁷ Next to the great Capitoline temple was the still older shrine of luppiter Feretrius, and there too was a stone of immense sacredness, the silex or lapis, probably a celt believed to be a thunderbolt, which gave luppiter a special cult title as luppiter Lapis. There was never a cult statue in the shrine and the deity was represented by the stone and nothing else. Clearly in an earlier stage the stone itself was the object of cult. This is borne out by the use of a lapis silex, not necessarily the particular stone in the shrine of luppiter Feretrius, in the taking of oaths. We are told that one who wished to swear by Jove, took a stone in his hand and said: if I knowingly swear false, then may Dispiter cast me from my possessions without harm to city and citadel, even as I cast this stone from my hand. The oath is couched in the later terms of religion, but the act is in origin one of sympathetic magic. ⁸ For this function of the holy stone in oaths we may compare the famous stone at Athens on which the nine archons stood when they swore to rule according to the laws. Here then seems to be the germ of religion: it is no far step from the thought of an automatic vengeance which would arise from a false oath on the holy stone to the external spirit, luppiter, whose symbol the stone has become, who of his own power wreaks that vengeance. Looking ahead in the history of Roman religion we may recall in this context ⁹ the black stone which in 204 B.C. was brought from Pessinus to Rome as the representative of the Magna Mater, itself in origin no doubt a sacred stone with its own sanctity and power.

Another sacred stone prominent in Roman ritual was the ¹⁰ lapis manalis which was preserved not in any shrine or temple but outside the Porta Capena to be brought in for use in the city as a rain charm.

The second and more important class of survivals of primitive custom consists of a rather miscellaneous collection of practices, which may be classed under the general head of magic. The relation of magic to religion may be left for discussion until we have examined some examples of its occurrence in Roman life, but it may here be said roughly that a magic practice is one in which man, by act or word, by ceremony or spell claims the power to alter the course of events, whether to his own advantage or—as is not infrequently the case—to some one else’s hurt, without invoking the aid of any external spirit or power. ¹¹ Sir James Frazer in a famous chapter of the Golden Bough, which is at once a storehouse of information and the cause of much discussion, while grouping all such practices together under the name of sympathetic magic, on the ground that they all assume some communication or, as he puts it, telepathy between the objects used in the ceremony and those to be affected by it, subdivides them into two classes; homeopathic magic, whose purpose is to produce a given effect by imitating it; and contagious magic, which intends to affect a person by means of some object which has once been in contact with him. Though these classes are not in practice mutually exclusive and some rites imply both ideas, the distinction is valuable as calling attention to a real difference of intention.

In considering the survival of magic practices at Rome a sharp line must be drawn between private and public rites. In private life there can be little doubt that magic practices were in vogue right through the history of the Roman people: magic is the most persistent part of superstition and even in highly civilized communities it is rarely wholly eradicated. We meet such practices in the Roman poets in many passages where we have no reason to think, as we have in ¹² Virgil’s famous love-spell eclogue, that there is Greek influence. There is a good typical instance of a magic rite with hostile intent in ¹³ Ovid’s account of the celebration of the Feralia. Ostensibly the old woman concerned is performing rites to the Silent Goddess (Tacita), but we have clearly a picture of an old magic ceremony intended to close the mouths of backbiting enemies: With three fingers she puts three lumps of incense beneath the threshold [always a spirit-haunted spot], where the tiny mouse has made herself a secret path. Then she binds enchanted threads on to the dark magic wheel, and twists and turns seven black beans [which have always chthonic associations in Roman ritual] in her mouth. Then she roasts in the fire the head of a sprat which she has plastered up with pitch, pierced with a bronze needle [bronze has magic associations; see p. 24], and sewn up; she pours in also drops of wine, all the wine that is left she or her companions drink, she more than they; as she departs she says We have bound the tongues of foes and the mouths of enemies, and so she goes tipsy away.

Here we have a rite, many of whose details are merely intended to create a general atmosphere of magic: the central and effective parts of the ceremony are the plastering and sewing of the fish’s mouth, clearly an act of imitative or homoeopathic magic, and the magic formula at the close. More familiar in the poets are the charms to create or restore love, such as that in the eighth eclogue or in ¹⁴ Horace’s wild picture of the witch Canidia burying the boy up to his neck in the ground and leaving him to die of hunger with the food that he cannot reach before his eyes that his dried marrow and parched liver might be a love potion. It is hard to class this rite under either of Frazer’s heads, but Horace is no doubt exaggerating and using his fancy. That such spells (carmina) and curses (dirae) were not the figments of the poets, but were in current use at Rome we have ¹⁵ ample evidence both in literature and in the tabellae defixionum which have been found here and there, mostly in graves. It is clear that in Roman magic, even more than in Greek, it was the words or rather the singing of the magic chant (carmen) that was the important and efficacious part of the rite. This is proved not only by the constant recurrence of the word ¹⁶ carmen in such contexts in literature, but from the use of the corresponding words incantare and incantamentum.

In the inscriptions which have come down to us the carmen is usually associated with the magic rite of defixio, nailing, of which there appear to have been two varieties. In some cases a wax image ¹⁷ of the person to be affected was made and either pierced with a needle or nail or burnt in the fire, the latter being the usual process when the intention was not to harm an enemy but to secure a reluctant lover’s affection. In other cases, and it is these that we naturally meet in the tabellae, it was enough to write the victim’s name and pierce it with a nail. ¹⁸ I may perhaps select a few instances from the surviving tabellae to illustrate the manner and extent of these devotiones. In some the object is clearly to bring harm to a personal enemy; thus, on a tablet found by a spring near Arezzo

Quintus Letinius Lupus, who is also called Caucadio. … in the presence of your power (numen) I commit, devote and desecrate [the words are almost untranslatable], so that you, boiling waters, or Nymphs or whatever other name you wish to be called by, may destroy and undo him within a year.

A similar tablet is interesting as showing the attempt to get in a written imprecation the effect of the mutilation of an image by mentioning all the parts of the victim’s person and his possessions:

The eyes, hands, fingers, arms, nails, hair, head, feet, thigh, belly, rump, navel, chest, breasts, neck, mouth, cheeks, teeth, lips, chin, eye, forehead, eyebrows, shoulder blades, shoulder, nerves, bones, marrow, stomach, leg, money, profits and health of Nico, I, Malcio, nail on to this tablet.

Others are love charms either to cause the failure of a rival or to secure the love of an indifferent; thus an inscription evidently buried in a tomb:

As he who is buried here is dead and can neither speak nor converse, so may Rhodine in the presence of Marcus Licinius Faustus be dead and unable to speak or converse. As the dead is acceptable neither to gods nor men, even so may Rhodine be acceptable to Licinius and have as much power with him as has the dead who is buried here. Father Dis, I hand over Rhodine to thee, that she may ever be hateful to Licinius.

A charm nearer akin to the spirit of Eclogue viii is the following fragmentary inscription:

May Vettia, daughter of Optata, do whatever I desire, that by your aid for love of me she may not sleep or be able to take food or nourishment. I chain Vettia’s sense, wit, understanding, mind and will that she may love me, Felix, son of Fructa, from this day, that she may forget father and mother and all her kith and kin and other friends and for love of me may have me, Felix, only in her mind.

For all its crudity, there is a pleasanter touch about this. A strange tabella, showing the range of these carmina, is one in which a betting man prays for a curse on the horses of the rival factions in the circus:

I adjure thee, demon, whoever thou art, and require of thee from this hour and from this day and from this moment, that you torture and kill the horses of the greens and the whites, and that you slay and dash in pieces the drivers Clarus and Felix and Primulus and Romanus, and leave no breath in them.

But the carmina were not always thus destructive. There were many charms of a medical character, to heal a wound or a disease, and of these we may take¹⁹ an example from Cato for the cure of a dislocated limb, which has the additional interest that it gives us the magic jargon of the actual spell:

If a limb is dislocated, it can be cured by this charm. Take a green reed four or five feet long, split it down the middle and let two men hold it at the hips [presumably of the sufferer]. Begin to chant moetas vaeta daries dardaries asia- darides una petes, until the broken parts join, motas vaeta daries dardares astatories dissunapiter, till they join. Throw a knife over them. When they have joined, grasp the knife in your hand and cut [presumably the reeds] on the right and the left, bind them close to the dislocation or the fracture, it will be cured. But sing the chant every day. Or else this huat hauat huat ista pista sista dannabo dannaustra; or this huat haut haut ¡stasis tarsis ordonna- bon dannaustra.

We are certainly in a very primitive stratum of incantation here! An almost odder remedy was that for epilepsy, when the disease was cured by driving an iron nail into the spot touched by the diseased man’s head, when he fell to the ground—a very literal defixio morbi. Besides medical charms there were others against bad weather. ²⁰ Pliny tells us that in his day there were carmina extant against hail as well as against various kinds of diseases. ²¹ An instance of this kind is to be found even in the State cult in the custom that in a time of pestilence the consul entered the cella lovis, the inmost shrine of the Capitoline temple, and drove a nail into the wall, when the pestilence would stop.

I have dwelt at some length on the private practice of magic at Rome in order to give an idea of its extent and duration. There was always behind religion this background of superstition which at different times came into prominence. The examples given show the wide range of purpose for which those incantations were used. It will have been noticed too that the inscriptions quoted vary greatly in their literary quality; this becomes clearer when the grammar and even the spelling is examined; some are couched almost in literary Latin, others are hopelessly illiterate. We may infer from this that all classes of the community were more or less given to these magic practices. The dates also range from Cato the Elder (circa B.C. 159) to well on into the Empire. We may perhaps get a clearer notion of the duration of magic if we realize that the practice of putting a charm on one’s neighbour’s helds, so as to transfer their fertility to one’s own, ²² is expressly forbidden in the XII tables, and that ²³ in connection with the death of Germanicus, Tacitus tells us that there was evidence of spells and devotions and the name of Germanicus inscribed on leaden tablets (clearly for the purpose of defixio). The relation of magic to religion must be more fully discussed later, but here two points may be observed: that the condemnation of magic by the XII tables is characteristic of the attitude always adopted by the State and the official representatives of religion toward it, and secondly, that in the inscriptions themselves the writers seem to slide imperceptibly from magic to religion. Sometimes the curse is a mere magic spell, sometimes a deity or spirit is invoked to carry it out: sometimes the two ideas are combined in the same tablet. Whatever the theoretical difference, there is no difficulty in the mind of the writer in passing from charm to prayer.

The example set in the XII tables, which besides the special prohibition just noticed pronounced a more sweeping ban on anyone who ²⁴ chanted an evil charm" was rigidly followed by the organizers of the State cult, who, ²⁵ as Warde Fowler pointed out, deliberately excluded magic from the ritual of the State; but here and there a rite survived either by itself or imbedded in a later ceremony, which is undoubtedly of magic origin. Some of these were connected with the magic stones, which were noticed earlier in this chapter. The ²⁶ silex which was preserved in the temple of luppiter Feretrius —or more probably another stone or stones to represent it, for we hear of one occasion when two parties were sent out with stones and herbs of their own—was used by the fetiales, the special sacred officials who were employed in the making of treaties, the demand for restitution, and the declaration of war. Two fetials apparently took part in the ceremony: when it was their duty to make peace, the chief fetial, having demanded of the Rex the wrbenae or sagmina, sacred herbs plucked from the Capitol, and intended as a magic protection against harm from the enemy, then appointed another fetial as pater patrat us. The two proceeded to meet the fetials of the other contracting party, and after the recitation of the terms of the treaty, the fetial announced that

the people of Rome will not be the first to break these terms. If it shall be the first to break them of common purpose and malice prepense, then do thou, Sky-father, so strike the people of Rome as I shall today strike this boar pig; and strike it the more in that thou hast greater power and might. And when he had said these words, he struck the pig with a flint stone. The words of the formula are here religious in their appeal to the god for punishment of a breach of the treaty, but the action is pure homoeo pathic magic, and it is almost certainly the older part of the ceremony. ²⁷ The other stone used in a magic ceremony was the lapis manalis, which figured in the ritual known as the aquaelicium. The stone was moved from its seat near the Porta Capena and was carried into the city in a procession which included the pontífices, the magistrates without their robe of office, and the lictors with their fasces reversed, all this exhibiting the participation of the State in the ceremony. What exactly was done with the stone we do not know, but from its name, the dripping stone and the parallel of other ceremonies, we may be fairly sure that water was poured over it with a view to procuring a fall of rain upon the earth. ²⁸ Frazer quotes a similar custom from a Samoan village where the priests in time of drought carried a stone in procession from the house of the rain-making god and dipped it in a stream. ²⁹ It has been suggested that the dripping stone was hollow and that it was filled with water till it overflowed the edge; this we cannot tell, but that the rite was again one of homoeopathic magic we can be fairly sure. A possible parallel in Rome may be found in the strange ceremony of the Ar gei, when wicker puppets were thrown over the Pons Sublicius into the Tiber, if ³⁰ Mannhardt’s suggestion be adopted that this was a rain charm, the puppets representing the vegetation spirit drenched in the water of the river. But of this explanation I feel rather doubtful. A much more certain instance of a rite of sympathetic magic is found in the very crude ritual of the ³¹ Fordicidia of April 15, when the unborn calves were torn by the attendants of the Vestal virgins from the wombs of their mothers and burnt, the ashes being retained by the Vestals for use at the Parilia. In historic times this barbarous ceremony was regarded as an offering to the earth deity, Tellus, but it is clearly a magic rite intended to secure the fertility of the crops and is indeed so described by classical writers. Ovid, who often preserves a trace of the old meaning of rites, narrates that the festival was instituted by Numa in a time of bad harvests, and a later writer describes it as a sacrifice for the sown corn to secure a good year.

An originally magic act must also, I think, be recognized in the most solemn of all Roman ceremonies, the purificatory procession, or lustratio. In historic times we meet it in many forms, in the Ambarvalia, the farmer’s procession round the boundaries of his fields, and the lustratio pagi, the procession round the boundaries of the agriculture settlement or parish, as we might call it; in the Amburbium, the adaptation of the rustic ceremony to the life of the city, in the lustratio exercitus, the purification of the army before it set out to war, which ultimately took the political form of the census, and in those quaint ceremonies the Tubilustrium, the purification of the trumpets of war, and the Armilustrium, the lustration of the sacred shields of Mars’ Salii. Finally it is impossible not to recognize a similar ceremony in the drawing of the pomoerium or sacred boundary round the site of a newly founded city or colony. Now each and all of these rites in historical times was no doubt fully religious. ³² The procession passed round the boundaries, driving with it the victims for the sacrifice—in the Ambarvalia, the most solemn offering of the suovetaurilia, the pig, sheep, and ox, which represents the farmer’s herds—and when the full circuit has been accomplished—three times at the Ambarvalia —the sacrifice is made and prayer offered to the god for the protection of the fields or city or host from evil. But it is not unreasonable to recognize in this ceremony an earlier magic rite in which the place or persons or objects are protected from evil influences by the drawing of a magic circle round them, which marks off, as it were, the sacred from the profane: a line is made over which evil influences cannot pass. ³³ This interpretation, first suggested by an eminent French sociologist, was almost admitted by Warde Fowler and is adopted in Pauly-Wissowa’s Lexicon. We are here trying to penetrate behind the evidence we possess, but the analogies of other primitive customs afford ample justification. Moreover the word lustratio is undoubtedly derived from luere, ³⁴ as Varro tells us, and that means to get rid of impurity or evil, an idea suggestive of a magic rite rather than a religious prayer.

There is one strange festival in the Roman State cult, which more than all others seems to have magic elements embodied in it, ³⁵ the Lupercalia of February 15, which has become notorious to all readers of Roman history because of its celebration in 44 B.C., when Mark Antony, acting as one of the Luperci, took occasion to offer the crown to Caesar—the scene has been immortalized by ³⁶ Shakespeare. The rite, which was recognized by the