ROMAN IDEAS OF DEITY.* Da. WARDE FOWLER, than whom there
is no greater authority
living on the subject of Roman religion, attempts in his new work to reach some understanding of the views of the
ordinary Roman on the divine nature in the last century before Christ. The question is difficult because the material for deciding it is so overlaid with alien importations. Greece and the East had found a ready market for their divinities
in the Roman world, and it is hard to get at the true Italian survivals. Cicero's famous work De Nauru Deorum, which might have been expected to give help, cannot be used without reservation. Cicero was an "interested amateur" in religion as in most other spheres, and he wrote the book at the end of a troubled life, when he had come to crave for some
fixed point in the shifting sands of mortality. But he was too "literary," too much steeped in Greek philosophy, to represent any strong current of actual religious feeling. His was an age of theology rather than religion, of an antiquarian interest in old rites rather than a belief in their value. He was too sophisticated to speak for the ordinary man, and as a good Roman and a good Republican in a world which saw a new Rome and the downfall of Republicanism he was driven inevitably to something akin to the Lucretian point of view. His' book is an exercise in speculation according to certain approved models, and not a reading from facts.
The first thing to note about the indigenous Roman faith was that it was highly unspiritual, as Greece and the East counted spirituality. For a Roman the conception of divinity was peculiarly difficult :—
" His interest was centred in the cult rather than in the object of it, a tendency against which it was the Mission of the Jewish prophets unceasingly to contend, as destructive in the long run of the noblest idea of God and His relation to his people. He did not speculate on the nature of his numina, or invent stories about them ; the priest and the cult were there to keep him in right relation with these manifestations of the Power controlling his life and welfare, and there was an end of his interest in it. It did not occur to him, as to Greek thinkers in the age of enlighten- ment, to try and pass beyond the manifestations to the Power behind them."
Hence his warship is always associated with some concrete institution like the family or the State, and the notion of deity is apt to be faint. But as time passes the tendency
• Roman Ideas of Deity in the Lag Century before the Christian Era. By W Warde Fowler. London: and Co. [58; net.]
is to link on homely and practical rites to some wider con- ception which approaches nearer to divinity.
The religion of the family was the most abiding cult in Roman life, for it continued among the mob of new deities till it was forbidden in the fourth century in the interests of Christianity. Veita and the Di Penates, the Genius of the paterfamilias, the cult of the dead—such worship in most Roman households was a very real thing even in the last century B.C. It was a valuable antidote against poly- theism, for it was homely and simple and free from any priestly medium, and it had a close relation with common life. There was divinity in it too, for it implied the recog- nition of some Power greater than man in the continuance of man's most cherished possessions. In Vesta we have the continuity of family life; in the Penates the perpetuity of the means of subsistence ; in the Genius the power of the head of the family to carry on its life within the Gens; and in the cult of the dead the old human instinct that death is not the end. If gods are needed for the family, they are still more vital for the State. " Gods," says Cicero, " are required for the main- tenance of the social system ; without them society would be a chaos; fides, justitia, societas generis humani would all go to pieces." So we find the supreme deity of the Italian State, Jupiter, the Father of Heaven, the Sanctioner of Oaths. Originally a local numen, with his dwelling on the Capitoline Hill, Jupiter had acquired in the last century is.c. many of the attributes of the World spirit of the philosophers. The Jupiter of the Capitol now ruled over the civilized world ; he was akin to the Universal Reason of the Stoics, to Cicero's " numen praestantissimae mentis." But side by side with these institutional deities went the cult of the old Roman Fortuna, which had developed into a worship of a blind Fate which seemed to rule in that troubled century. The earlier Roman did not think his deities capricious ; he was no fatalist, and opposed manfully his own virtue to a hostile world. For him the worship of Fortuna was always linked with that of Spes. To the great souls of the last century B.C., such as Cicero, " fortuna " was only another name for " necessitas " and "prudentia "—a name used by men when causes were hid from them. But the rank-and-file had come to see in Fortuna the goddess of blind chance, the most potent because the most intimate of the immortals. Perhaps she was not exactly a. deity, but only a causative agent who acted when the Di Majorca were not actively interested. We might parallel the belief from Mr. Punch's rustic's view of Providence : "That there old Providence has been agin me from the first; but there's One above wot'll settle with 'im."
But of all the popular religious beliefs of the last century before Christ the most interesting is that of the Man-God, the great man who has given a little security for life and goods in a turbulent age. It was a natural cult in a time when the power of all the creeds was slackening, when famine and war walked the world, and when it seemed that man, if he were well disposed, was more helpful than any god. Dr. Wards Fowler shows that there was nothing degrading in the worship of such a man, whether alive or dead, for it repre- sented a more genuine religions impulse than the conventional polytheism. There had always been a vague notion that "there is in man a possibility of something over and above our common human nature, something that the Greeks could express by the word 84.4aor and the Romans by genius." It is true that the deification of man was a strange conception to the Roman mind, which did not know personal deities; but Greek and Etruscan influence had prepared it for the change. The Stoic belief, too, in the possibility of man identifying himself with the divine nature was an influence in the same direction. Dr. Warde Fowler examines carefully the evidence for the first deification of the Caesars. Everything in the last century was making for monarchy, and with a population lacking any dominant creed, it was a short step from monarchy to the ascription of divinity to whoever should appear as a saviour of society. We find traces of the movement long before. The statue of Scipio Africanus was placed in the Capitoline temple, and Roman governors were often received by their provincials with divine honours. In Cicero's time Marius Gratidianus, the praetor who improved the coinage, was adored by the populace with incense and candles. This, of course, is not technically deification. " What it does seem to show is that when the populace believed in a Euergetea or &ter they were apt to show their gratitude in terms of
religion . . . without perhaps meaning that the object of their veneration was in any sense really divine." But it all prepared the way for the Caesar-cult. The great Julius was far too balanced and wise a man to care for tawdry honours, and he almost certainly shared Cicero's views about the comedy of the attempt to deify him. Dr. Warde Fowler thinks that the last and most serious attempt during his lifetime was due to Antony, who was deliberately trying to ruin him :—
" He knew perfectly well that genuine Romans, even of the city, were not yet ripe for appreciation of a god-man ; and that Caesar was not well enough known in Rome to be as yet accepted as Euergetes in his lifetime. I may be wrong, but I still think, as I have long thought, of Antony as Caesar's evil genius, playing him false and tempting him on; and I suspect an intrigue against Caesar between Antony and Cleopatra, who was in Rome at this time. Caesar was extremely busy himself, as we may see from the famous letter of Cicero describing his entertainment of the dictator; his mind was full of politics, of literature, and of military preparation, and I do not for a moment believe that he troubled himself much about his own worship."
With the death of Caesar came the irresistible popular demand for the deification of the greatest of mortal men, and the Government officially sanctioned the entry of Divus Julius into the Roman pantheon. There was no degradation in thinking of a dead man as endowed with divinity as a reward for his work on earth, and Dr. Warde Fowler is probably right in regarding this new worship as elevating rather than lowering in its moral effect. The Roman feeling, as opposed to Orientalism, was still predominant, and we have as yet no official deification of a living man, for Augustus resolutely refused to be honoured as a god during his lifetim% The fact that he seized upon the old Roman idea of Genius, and had his own Genius placed between the images of the Laces Compitales, shows that this master of statecraft realized that the autochthonous Roman form of the religious con- sciousness had not yet been wholly ousted by Greek polytheism or Eastern mysticism.
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