The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  Other spirits came to his aid as he grew up: Cuba watched over his sleep, Abeona guided his first steps, Fabulina taught him to speak. When he left the house he found himself again and everywhere in the presence of gods. The earth itself was a deity: sometimes Tellus, or Terra Mater—Mother Earth; sometimes Mars as the very soil he trod, and its divine fertility; sometimes Bona Dea, the Good Goddess who gave rich wombs to women and fields. On the farm there was a helping god for every task or spot: Pomona for orchards, Faunus for cattle, Pales for pasturage, Sterculus for manure heaps, Saturn for sowing, Ceres for crops, Fornax for baking corn in the oven, Vulcan for making the fire. Over the boundaries presided the great god Terminus, imaged and worshiped in the stones or trees that marked the limits of the farm. Other religions may have looked to the sky, and the Roman admitted that there too were gods; but his deepest piety and sincerest propitiations turned to the earth as the source and mother of his life, the home of his dead and the magic nurse of the sprouting seed. Every December the Lares of the soil were worshiped in the joyful Feast of the Crossroads, or Compitalia; every January rich gifts sought the favor of Tellus for all planted things; every May the priests of the Arval (or Plowing) Brotherhood led a chanting procession along the boundaries of adjoining farms, garlanded the stones with flowers, sprinkled them with the blood of sacrificial victims, and prayed to Mars (the earth) to bear generous fruit. So religion sanctified property, quieted disputes, ennobled the labor of the fields with poetry and drama, and strengthened body and soul with faith and hope.

  The Roman did not, like the Greek, think of his gods as having human form; he called them simply nurmna, or spirits; sometimes they were abstractions like Health, Youth, Memory, Fortune, Honor, Hope, Fear, Virtue, Chastity, Concord, Victory, or Rome. Some of them, like the Lemures or Ghosts, were spirits of disease, hard to propitiate. Some were spirits of the season, like Maia, the soul of May; others were water gods like Neptune, or woodland sprites like Silvanus, or the gods that dwelt in trees. Some lived in sacred animals, like the sacrificed horse or bull, or in the sacred geese that a playful piety preserved unharmed on the Capitol. Some were spirits of procreation; Tutumus supervised conception, Lucina protected menstruation and delivery. Priapus was a Greek god of fertility soon domiciled in Rome: maidens and matrons (if we may believe the indignant Saint Augustine) sat on the male member of his statue as a means of ensuring pregnancy;2 scandalous figures of him adorned many a garden; little phallic images of him were worn by simple persons to bring fertility or good luck or to avert the “evil eye.”3 Never had a religion so many divinities. Varro reckoned them at 30,000, and Petronius complained that in some towns of Italy there were more gods than men. But deus, to the Roman, meant saint as well as god.

  Under these basic concepts lurked a polymorphous mass of popular beliefs in animism, fetishism, totemism, magic, miracles, spells, superstitions, and taboos, most of them going back to the prehistoric inhabitants of Italy, and perhaps to Indo-European ancestors in their ancient Asiatic home. Many objects, places, or persons were sacred (sacer) and therefore taboo—not to be touched or profaned: e.g., newborn children, menstruating women, condemned criminals. Hundreds of verbal formulas or mechanical contraptions were used to achieve natural ends by supernatural means. Amulets were well-nigh universal; nearly every child wore a bulla, or golden talisman, suspended from his neck. Small images were hung upon doors or trees to ward off evil spirits. Charms or incantations were used to avert accidents, cure disease, bring rain, destroy a hostile army, wither an enemy’s crops or himself. “We are all afraid,” said Pliny, “of being transfixed by curses and spells.”4 Witches appear in Horace, Virgil, Tibullus, Lucian. They were believed to eat snakes, fly through the air at night, brew poisons from esoteric herbs, kill children, and raise the dead. All but a few skeptics seem to have believed in miracles and portents, in speaking or sweating statues,5 in gods descending from Olympus to fight for Rome, in lucky odd and unlucky even days, and in the presaging of the future by strange events. Livy’s history must contain several hundred such portents, reported with philosophic gravity; and the elder Pliny’s volumes so abound in portents and magic cures that they might well have been called Supernatural History. The most serious business of commerce, government, or war could be deferred or ended by the priestly announcement of an unfavorable omen like abnormal entrails in a sacrificial victim or a roll of thunder in the sky.

  The state did what it could to check these excesses—called them, indeed, precisely that, superstitio. But it sedulously exploited the piety of the people to promote the stability of society and government. It adapted the rural divinities to urban life, built a national hearth for the goddess Vesta, and appointed a college of Vestal Virgins to serve the city’s sacred fire. Out of the gods of the family, the farm, and the village it developed the di indigetes—or native gods—of the state, and arranged for these a solemn and picturesque worship in the name of all the citizens.

  Among these original national gods Jupiter or Jove was the favorite, though not yet, like Zeus, their king. In the early centuries of Rome he was still a half-impersonal force—the bright expanse of the sky, the light: of the sun and the moon, a bolt of thunder, or (as Jupiter Pluvius) a shower of fertilizing rain; even Virgil and Horace occasionally use “Jove” as a synonym for rain or sky.6 In time of drought the richest ladies of Rome walked in barefoot procession up the Capitoline hill to the Temple of Jupiter Tonans—Jove the Thunderer—to pray for rain. Probably his name was a corruption of Diuspater, or Diespiter, Father of the Sky. Perhaps primitively one with him was Janus, originally Dianus: first the two-faced spirit of the cottage door, then of the city gate, then of any opening or beginning, as of the day or year. The portals of his temple were open only in time of war, so that he might go forth with Rome’s armies to overcome the gods of the foe. As old as Jupiter in the respect of the people was Mars, at first a god of tillage, then of war, then almost a symbol of Rome; every tribe in Italy named a month after him. Of like hoary antiquity was Saturn, the national god of the new-sown seed (sata). Legend pictured him as a prehistoric king who had brought the tribes under one law, taught them agriculture, and established peace and communism in the Saturnia regna—the Golden Age of Saturn’s reign.

  Less powerful but more deeply loved than these were the goddesses of Rome. Juno Regina was the queen of heaven, the protective genius of womanhood, marriage, and maternity; her month of June 7 was recommended as the luckiest for weddings. Minerva was the goddess of wisdom (mens) or memory, of handicrafts and guilds, of actors, musicians, and scribes; the Palladium on which the safety of Rome was believed to depend was an image of Pallas Minerva, fully armed, which Aeneas was said to have brought from Troy through love and war to Rome. Venus was the spirit of desire, mating, fertility; sacred to her was April, the month of opening buds (aperire); poets like Lucretius and Ovid saw in her the amorous origin of all living things. Diana was the goddess of the moon, of women and childbirth, of the hunt, of the woods and their wild denizens, a tree spirit brought from Aricia when that region of Latium came under Roman power. Near Aricia were the lake and grove of Nemi, and in that grove was a rich shrine of Diana, the resort of pilgrims who believed that the goddess had once mated there with Virbius, the first “King of the Woods.” To ensure the fertility of Diana and the soil, the successors of Virbius—all priests and husbands of the huntress—were replaced, each in turn, by any vigorous slave who, having taken as a talisman a sprig of mistletoe (the Golden Bough) from the sacred oak tree of the grove, attacked and slew the king—a custom that endured till the second century of our era.8

  These, then, were the major gods of the official Roman worship. There were lesser, but not less popular, national deities: Hercules, god of joy and wine, who was not above gambling gaily for a courtesan with the sacristan of his temple;9 Mercury, the patron deity of merchants, orators, and thieves; Ops, goddess of wealth; Bellona, goddess of war; and countless more. As the city spread its rule it brought in new divini
ties—di no-vensiles. Sometimes it imported the god of a beaten city into the Roman pantheon as a sign and surety of conquest, as when the Juno of Veii was led captive to Rome. Conversely, when the citizens of a community were moved to the capital their gods were brought with them, lest the spiritual and moral roots of the new inhabitants should be too suddenly snapped short; so immigrants bring their gods to America today. The Romans did not question the existence of these foreign deities; most of them believed that when they led the statue away the god had to come with it; many believed that the statue was the god.10

  But some of the di novensiles were not conquered but conquering; they seeped into Roman worship through commercial, military, and cultural contacts with Greek civilization—first in Campania, then in south Italy, then in Sicily, finally in Greece itself. There was something cold and impersonal in the gods of the state religion; they could be bribed by offerings or sacrifice, but they could seldom provide comfort or individual inspiration; by contrast the gods of Greece seemed intimately human, full of adventure, humor, and poetry. The Roman populace welcomed them, built temples for them, and willingly learned their ritual. The official priesthood, glad to enlist these new policemen in the service of order and content, adopted the Greek gods into the divine family of Rome, and merged them, when possible, with their nearest analogues in the indigenous deities. As far back as 496 B.C. came Demeter and Dionysus, who were attached to Ceres and Liber (god of the grape); twelve years later Castor and Pollux were received, to become the protectors of Rome; in 431 a temple was raised to Apollo the Healer in the hope that he might allay a plague; in 294 Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine, was brought from Epidaurus to Rome in the form of a huge snake,11 and a temple-hospital was built in his honor on an island in the Tiber. Cronus was accepted as substantially one with Saturn, Poseidon was identified with Neptune, Artemis with Diana, Hephaestus with Vulcan, Heracles with Hercules, Hades with Pluto, Hermes with Mercury. With the help of the poets Jupiter was elevated into another Zeus, a stern witness and guardian of oaths, a bearded judge of morals, a custodian of laws, a god of gods; and slowly the educated Roman was prepared for the monotheistic creeds of Stoicism, Judaism, and Christianity.

  2. The Priests

  To appease or enlist the aid of these gods Italy employed an elaborate clergy. In his home the father was priest; but public worship was conducted by several collegia—associations—of priests, each filling its own vacancies, but all under the lead of a pontifex maximus elected by the centuries. No special training was necessary for membership in these sacred colleges; any citizen might be enrolled in them or leave them; they formed no separate order or caste and were politically powerless except as tools of the state. They received the income of certain state lands for their support, with slaves to serve them; and grew rich through generations of pious legacies.

  In the third century before Christ the main pontifical college had nine members. They kept historical annals, recorded laws, took auspices, offered sacrifices, and purified Rome with quinquennial lustrations. In performing the official ritual the pontiffs were aided by fifteen flamines—kindlers of the sacrificial flames. Minor pontifical colleges had special functions: the Salii, or Leapers, ushered in each New Year with a ritual dance to Mars; the fetiales sanctified the ratification of treaties and declarations of war; and the Luperci, or Brotherhood of the Wolf, carried on the strange rites of the Lupercalia. The college of the Vestal Virgins tended the state hearth, and sprinkled it daily with holy water from the fountain of the sacred nymph Egeria. These white-clad, white-veiled nuns were chosen from among girls six to ten years of age; they took a vow of virginity and service for thirty years, but in return they received many public honors and privileges. If any of them was found guilty of sexual relations she was beaten with rods and buried alive; Roman historians record twelve cases of such punishment. After thirty years they were free to leave and marry, but few took or found the opportunity.12

  The most influential of the priestly colleges was that of the nine augures who studied the intent or will of the gods, in earlier times by watching the flight of birds,I later by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals. Before every important act of policy, government, or war, the “auspices were taken” by the magistrates and interpreted by the augurs, or by special haruspices—liver inspectors—whose art went back through Etruria to Chaldea and beyond. As the priests were occasionally open to financial persuasion, their pronouncements were sometimes adjusted to the needs of the purchaser; for example, inconvenient legislation could be stopped by announcing that the auspices were unfavorable for further business on that day; or the Assembly might be induced by “favorable” auspices to vote a war.13 In major crises the government professed to learn the pleasure of Heaven by consulting the Sibylline Books—the recorded oracles of the Sibyl, or priestess of Apollo, at Cumae. Through such means, and occasional deputations to the oracle at Delphi, the aristocracy could influence the people in any direction to almost any end.14

  The ritual of worship aimed merely to offer the gods a gift or sacrifice to win their aid or avert their wrath. To be effective, said the priests, the ceremony had to be performed with such precision of words and movements as only the clergy could manage. If any mistake was made, the rite had to be repeated, even to thirty times. Religio meant the performance of ritual with religious care.15 The essence of the ceremony was a sacrifice—literally making a thing sacer—i.e., belonging to a god. In the home the offering would normally be a bit of cake or wine placed on the hearth or dropped into the domestic fire; in the village it would be the first fruits of the crops, or a ram, a dog, or a pig; on great occasions, a horse, a hog, a sheep, or an ox; on supreme occasions the last three were slaughtered together in the su-ove-taur-ilia. Holy formulas pronounced over the victim turned it into the god who was to receive it; in this sense the god himself was sacrificed;16 and since only the viscera were burned on the altar, while priests and people ate the rest, the strength and glory of the god (men hoped) passed into his feasting worshipers. Sometimes human beings were offered in sacrifice; it is significant that a law had to be passed as late as 97 B.C. forbidding this. By a variant of these ideas of vicarious atonement a man might offer his life for the state as the Decii had done, or Marcus Curtius, who, to propitiate angry subterranean powers, leaped into a chasm that an earthquake had opened in the Forum—whereupon, we are told, the chasm closed and all was well.17

  Pleasanter was the ceremony of purification. This might be of crops or flocks, of an army or a city. A procession made the circuit of the objects to be purified, prayer and sacrifice were offered, evil influences were thereby dispelled, and misfortune was turned away. Prayer was still imperfectly evolved from magic incantations; the words for it—carmen—meant not only a chant but a charm; and Pliny frankly reckoned prayer as a form of magical utterance.18 If the formula was properly recited, and was addressed to the correct deity according to the indigitamenta, or classified directory of the gods compiled and kept by the priests, the request was certain to be granted; if not granted there must have been an error in the ritual. Akin to magic were also the vota, or vowed offerings, with which the people sought to gain the help of the gods; sometimes great temples rose in fulfillment of such vows. The multitude of votive offerings found in Roman remains suggests that the religion of the people was warm and tender with piety and gratitude, a feeling of kinship with the hidden forces in nature, and an anxious desire to be in harmony with them all. By contrast the state religion was uncomfortably formal, a kind of legal and contractual relation between the government and the gods. When new cults flowed in from the conquered East it was this official worship that declined first, while the picturesque and intimate faith and ritual of the countryside patiently and obstinately survived. Victorious Christianity, half surrendering, wisely took over much of the faith and ritual; and, under new forms and phrases, they continue in the Latin world to this day.

  3. Festivals

  If the official worship was
gloomy and severe, its festivals redeemed it, and showed men and gods in a lighter mood. The year was adorned with over a hundred holy days (feriae), including the first of every month and sometimes the ninth and fifteenth. Some of the feriae were sacred to the dead or to the spirits of the lower world; these were “apotropaic” in their ceremonies, aiming to appease the departed and turn away wrath. On May 11-13 Roman families commemorated with awe the feast of the Lemures, or dead souls; the father spat black beans from his mouth, and cried: “With these beans I redeem myself and mine. . . . Shades of my ancestors, depart!”19 The Parentalia and the Feralia, in February, were similar attempts to propitiate the fearsome dead. But for the most part the festivals were occasions of feasting and jollity, often, among the plebs, of sexual freedom; on such days, says a character in Plautus, “you may eat what you like, go where you like . . . and love whom you like, provided you abstain from wives, widows, virgins, and free boys”;20 apparently he felt that a wide choice would still remain.

  On February 15 came the strange Lupercalia, sacred to the God Faunus as averter of wolves (lupercus): goats and sheep were sacrificed; and the luperci—priests clad only in goatskin girdles—ran around the Palatine praying to Faunus to drive away evil spirits, and striking the women whom they encountered with thongs of hide from the sacrificed animals, to purify them and make them fertile; then puppets of straw were cast into the Tiber to appease or deceive the river god, who had perhaps, in wilder days, demanded living men. On March 15 the poor emerged from their hovels and, like the Jews on the Feast of Tabernacles, built themselves tents in the Field of Mars, celebrated the coming of the New Year, and prayed to the goddess Anna Perenna (Ring of the Years) for as many years as they quaffed cups of wine.21 April alone had six festivals, culminating in the Floralia; this Feast of Flora, goddess of flowers and springs, continued for six days of bibulous and promiscuous revelry. The first of May was the Feast of the Good Goddess, Bona Dea. On May 9, 11, and 13 Liber and Libera, god and goddess of the grape, were celebrated in the Liberalia; the phallus, symbol of fertility, was frankly honored by gay crowds of men and women.23 At the end of May the Arval Brethren led the people in the solemn and yet joyful Ambarvalia. The gods were neglected in the autumn months, after the crops were safely in, but December was again rich in feasts. The Saturnalia ran from the 17th to the 23rd; they celebrated the sowing of the seed for the next year and commemorated the happy classless reign of Saturn; gifts were exchanged, and many liberties were allowed; the distinction between slave and free was for a while abolished or even inverted; slaves might sit down with their owners, give orders to them, rail at them; the masters waited upon their slaves, and did not eat till all the slaves were filled.24