# \
* \
^CfiUJAL8t^
THE \^v
GENTILE AND THE JEW
IN THE
COURTS OF THE TEMPLE OF CHRIST:
AN
j>ntr0burii0tt ta tt)e |iHtart) af Ctirifltianiti),
FROM THE GERMAN OF
JOHN J. I. DOLL1NGER,
PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH.
BY
N. DARNELL, M.A.
LATE FELLOW OP NKW COLLEGE, OXFORD.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. IT.
LONDON :
LONGMAN, GREEN, LONGMAN, ROBERTS, AND GREEN.
1862,
London:
printbl) by robson, levey, and franklyn,
Great New Street and Fetter Lnno.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.
BOOK VII.
THE RELIGIONS OF THE WEST : ETEURIA ROME— GAUL — GERMANY.
PAGE
I. The Religion of the Etruscans.
Connexion of the Etruscan religion with the Greek .... 1
Etruscan deities 2
Doctrine of lightning ; importance of lightning 5
II. The Religious System of the Romans.
1. Historical Development.
Elements of Roman existence as a people and a religion ... 7
Religious distinction between patricians and plebeians ... 9
Agrarian ingredients in the Roman religion 10
Influence of Greek mythology 12
Dissection of the idea of God 13
Laboriousness of the ceremonial .15
The Regia, the centre of the worship 16
The Capitoline temple 19
Expulsion of the kings ; the priesthood passes into the patrician fami-
lies 20
Admission of the plebs to priestly functions 23
Religion as a political instrument .23
Hellenising of the gods ......... 25
Numa's books 28
Introduction of foreign worships 29
Signs of decay in religion 31
Apotheosis 31
Varro's attempt at a restoration 34
2. The Roman Gods.
Service of Janus 35
Faunus Lupercus . . . . 37
Saturn .......... -^ 38
IV CONTENTS 0* VOL. II.
PAGE
Jupiter, and his cultus 39
Sol, Apollo 41
Mars 41
Other gods 42
Female deities : Ceres 43
„ Vesta 45
,, Minerva 46
,, Fortuna 47
,, Juno 48
,, Diana 49
,, Venus 50
Liber and Libera 51
The vast numbers of inferior deities 53
The Penates 59
The Lares 60
3. The Roman Priesthood.
Rise of colleges of priests 63
The pontiffs : derivation of their name 64
„ their occupations . 65
The king of sacrifice and the flamens 66
The Salii, priests of Mars 67
The Luperci, the oldest of the Roman priests 68
Epulones, Curiones, Augustales 69
Vestal virgins : their origin and number 69
,, „ privileges 70
,, „ duties .... .... 71
Augurs 72
,, their power and privileges .73
4. Roman Forms of Cultus. Prayers, Vows, Sacrifice, Ritual, and
Festivals.
Magical and formal character of prayer 75
Formulae and essential contents of prayers 76
Number and subject-matter of vows 77
Sacrifice 78
Choice of victims according to the peculiarities of the gods . . .79
Number of sacrifices 79
Expiatory sacrifices . . . .81
Quality of the animal sacrificed 81
Purity required in the sacrificers 82
Rite of sacrifice 82
Lectisternia, or banquets of the gods 84
Human sacrifice 85
Expiations and purifications, lustrations 88
Festivals of the dead 89
„ „ gods, feria? 92
CONTENTS OF VOL. II. V
5. Investigation of the Will of the Gods.
PAGE
Etruscan origin of Haruspicinium 99
Prodigies, how averted 99
Inspection of victims 100
Fulguratores 102
Augury from flight of birds 102
Soothsaying through the Sibylline books 106
III. The Religions of the Gauls and the Germans.
Druidism in Gaul 108
Great numbers of human sacrifices among the Gauls . . . .111
Gaulish deities 112
The German religion according to Csesar and Tacitus . . . .113
German deities . . . . . . . . . . .114
Priests and sacrifice 116
BOOK VIII.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE FROM THE END OF
THE REPUBLIC TO THE ANTONINES.
I. Philosophy and Literature in their relations to Religion.
1. Philosophy in Rome: Lucretius, Cicero. The Roman Stoic School: Seneca,
Epictetus. Platonico- Pythagorean Philosophy : Plutarch.
The Greek philosophy penetrates into Rome
Didactic poem of Lucretius, the first fruit of Epicurean teaching
Cicero and his philosophy, sceptical eclecticism
,, his doctrine concerning God
,, his ethics ....
Partiality to Stoicism in Rome
Teaching of Seneca
Cornutus, Musonius
Epictetus
Marcus Aurelius ....
The Platouics, and their position in regard to the other schools
Plutarch the platonic and eclectic
2. Literature: Diodorus, Strabo. The Poets of the Augustan age
Tacitus.
Religious creed of Polybius, Diodorus, and Strabo
„ the poet Manilius
,, Virgil and Ovid
Religious sentiments of Horace ....
„ ,, the elder Pliny and Tacitus
118
119
119
121
122
124
125
127
128
129
129
131
Pliny,
. 135
. 136
. 137
. 138
. 138
VI CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
3. Notions of a Future State.
PAGE
Uncertainty of these notions 139
Views of the older and new Stoics 140
Cicero on immortality 141
Doubts cast on immortality ; their cause 143
Their connexion with the views entertained concerning the origin of
the human race . . . . . . . . . .144
The later Greek notions thereon, according to Plutarch and Lucian . 145
Despondency 146
4. The later Platonists and New- Pythagoreans,
Return to a more believing mind 148
Platonists 148
New-Pythagoreans 148
Their interpretation of the popular gods 162
5. Duration and Influence of the Schools of Philosophers; their Dissolution.
Repute of the different schools, particularly those of the Stoics and
Platonists 155
Degeneracy and decrease of their repute . . . . • . 156
Decay and dissolution 159
II. State of Religion.
1. Idea of an Imperial Religion. Religious Tolerance and Persecution.
Identification of foreign deities with the Roman 160
Realisation of an empire-religion thereby attained . . . .161
Tolerance and intolerance of foreign worships 162
2. Apotheosis.
Deification of the emperors 165
,, female members of the imperial family . . . 167
Private^apotheosis 169
3. The Element of Superstition.
Blending of superstition with religious spirit . . . . .170
Examples: Sy 11a, Augustus, Alexander, &c 172
4. Fall of the old Roman Religion. Strange Gods and their Cultus. Female
piety. Taurobolia. Inclination to Judaism. Theolepsy. Theop&a and
Image-worship. Intercourse of Man with the Deity. Prayer.
Decay of the old Roman religion 173
Reliance on foreign worships 174
Success of the cultus of Isis 176
» ,, Serapis 178
Worship of the Idean Mother of the gods 178
Taurobolia and Criobolia connected with it 179
CONTENTS OF VOL. II. Vll
PAGE
. 181
. 182
. 184
. 185
. 186
. 188
Judaism among the heathen .....
Theoleptics and Fanatics, possessed people .
Theopsea, the science of inducting gods" into their statues
Idolatry in its proper and narrowest sense .
Ideas of a providence .......
Prayers, their material, nay immoral, objects
5. Decay of Morality and Religion on the increase.
The old believing sense still dominant 190
Impure worship of Aphrodite 192
Demoralisation through myths in themselves ..... 193
,, intensified by the representations of them in mimes . 194
,, by spectacles and gladiatorial combats . . . . 195
„ by impure paintings in houses and temples . . .196
Impurity in temples 197
Alexander the wizard . . . . . . . . . .198
Religious juggleries and impostures 199
6. The Oracles. Media of Divination. Dreams. Astrology.
Renewed life in several of the oracles 202
Explanation of their extinction 204
Generality of belief in divination and dreams 206
Astrology penetrates into Rome 208
7. Magic, Necromancy, and Theurgy.
Close connexion between magic and the pagan religious system . . 210
Magic favoured by philosophy 211
Necromancy and oracles of the dead 213
Human sacrifice for magical purposes 214
Theurgy, the highest form of magic . . .' . . . . 215
BOOK IX.
THE SOCIAL AND MORAL STATE OF GREECE AND ROME, AND OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE.
I. The Greeks.
1. Citizenship: Greek versus Barbarian. Political Freedom. Idleness and
Industry. Position of the Rich. Slavery. Education.
The personality of the Greek disappearing in the state . . .217
Opposition of Greek and Barbarian 218
Contempt of international law : the law of the stronger . . .219
Idea of freedom 220
Dependence of the individual on the state 222
Domination of poor over rich 223
VI 11
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
Dislike of labour among the Greeks 224
Slavery : Aristotle's theory thereon ....... 226
Number of slaves 226
Their treatment 228
Moral prejudice of slavery to slaves and masters 231
Education, and school instruction 231
2. Woman among the Greeks. Marriage, ' Hetairai. Paiderastia. Expo-
sition of Children. Depopulation.
Monogamy an advantage of the Greeks over the Orientals . . . 233
Women nevertheless thought light of 233
Marriage a duty ........... 234
Spartan legislation on marriage ........ 235
Hetairai, and their relation to married women 237
Paiderastia, the Greek national vice ....... 238
Socrates' and Plato's views upon it 240
Philosophers addicted to it . . . . . . . . . 243
Its causes and effects 244
Exposition of children as good as allowed 246
Moral depravity of the later Greeks 247
II. The Social and Moral Condition of the Romans.
1. Character of Roman Nationality. Roman jus privatum. Strangers.
Power of the father of the Family.
Roman national character : energy and egotism 248
Their jus privatum, a work of enduring value and effect . . . 249
Freedom of citizens ....... ... 250
Strangers out of the pale of the law . . . . . . .251
Household law 252
2. Women in Rome : Marriage, Aversion to, and Divorce from, it.
I Women in Rome : forms of marriage 253
Marriage-contract by confarreation ; divorce 254
Prevalence of divorces ......... 256
Augustus, marriage-law of 257
Advantages of the unmarried state 258
3. Slavery in Rome.
Cruel treatment of slaves 259
Their numbers 262
Slaves and gladiators 265
Number of slaves in relation to that of freemen 266
4. Effects of Slavery on the Free Population. Poverty. Exposition of Chil-
dren. Small Number of Children. Paiderastia. Courtesans. Female
Depravity.
Slavery a principal cause of the corruption of morals .... 267
„ a cause of poverty . 269*
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
IX
PAGE
The exposition of new-born children an every-day affair . . .271
Practice of abortion 272
Paiderastia among the Romans 273
Women of pleasure 275
Infrequency of marriage ......... 276
Female debauchery . . .277
5. Treatment of the Poor. Education. Public Spectacles,
The number of poor and of beggars
Hardheartedness of the rich towards them ....
Method of education : no public instruction
Slavery the principal source of the corruption of youth
Passion for public spectacles, particularly gladiatorial games
Contempt of life ; suicide .......
6. General Survey. Auguries of the Future.
Spread of corruption of morals from Rome into the provinces
Impotence of Stoicism to stem the tide of ruin
„ philosophy generally
,, the worship of the gods .
Objectlessness of life
Longings and hopes .....
The Capitol in Rome, and the Temple in Jerusalem
277
278
279
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
289
BOOK X.
I. Historical Development of Judaism.
1. Until the Elevation of the Asmonean Dynasty.
Beginning of the Jewish state 29 1
Its heyday under David and Solomon ....... 292
Division into two kingdoms : Israel and Juda 293
The Captivity 293
,, return from ......... 294
The Samaritans enemies of the Jews 295
Fusion of Jews with heathens 296
Their hellenising in foreign countries 297
The great Synagogue, and the teachers of the law .... 298
Persecution under Antiochus : rise of the Asmoneans .... 300
2. The Chasidim. Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, TherapeuUn.
The Chasidim or the pious . . . • • • • .301
Their antipodes, the Sadducees 302
The Pharisees no sect, but representatives of the whole nation . . 305
,, the national teachers 3°7
Pharisaic expansion of the law 308
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
The Essenes : time of their rise
„ ascetical mode of life ; akin to Pythagoreans
,, strict observance of the sabbath, and purity
,, cultus of the sun among ....
,, community of goods ,,
,, their position towards the dominant Judaism
The Therapeutse, and their contemplative mode of life
3. The Times of the Asmoneans and Family of Herod. The Roman
Government.
The Asmonee, John Hyrcanus ; splendour of his reign .
Crimes committed in the Asmonean family .
Its overthrow
Pompey conquers Jerusalem
The Jews under the double yoke of Herod and the Romans
Heathenism, inclination of Herod to .
His building of the Temple ; his cruelties .
The Jews under the immediate supremacy of Rome
The zealots against foreign rule .....
Increasing exasperation
Degradation of the office of high-priest
Expectation of the Messias ......
Philo's expectation of the same .....
Spirit of legal observance : its prejudicial effect .
The schools of Hillel and Schammai ....
PAGE
310
311
312
313
314
316
316
317
318
319
319
320
321
322
323
325
326
327
328
331
332
334
II. The Law.
1. The Moral and Social Condition of the Jewish People according to the Law.
Holiness the object of the law 335
Principle of love contained in the law ...... 335
Contents of the law 336
Constitution . . 337
The Sanhedrim at Jerusalem . . . . • . . . • 337
Marriage legislation .......... 338
Polygamy tolerated ........•• 339
Position of the female sex 341
Ordinances regarding sexual relations ....... 342
Slaves and their treatment. 343
Law of love of neighbour 344
Care for the poor 344
Law of protection for the stranger and for animals .... 346
Kinds of punishment .......... 347
Vengeance for blood limited ........ 347
2. The Religious Life.
Circumcision ........... 348
The Sabbath 349
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
XI
Sabbatical and jubilee year
The Levites ....
The priesthood ....
Its service
Maintenance ....
The high-priest, his duties, and his vestments
His position in regard to the king
The Nazarite, the monk of the Old Testament
The prophets, and schools of the prophets .
The Temple, its objects and its parts .
Law forbidding images : its principle ; its extent
Severity against every thing heathen .
The proselytes, and their baptism
Sacrifice : its importance ; materials of sacrifice
Different kinds of sacrifice .
Burnt-sacrifice
Trespass-offering ......
Sin-offering
Peace- or thank-offering ....
Meat- and drink-offering ....
Prayer, not contained in law, but in tradition
Vows
Festivals
Day of atonement ...
Fasting- days ... .
Synagogues
The clean and unclean
III. The Religious Doctrines of the Jewish People.
1. Scripture and Tradition.
Holy Scripture : its contents
Tradition ..........
2. God and the Angels.
God : His incomprehensibility, and two chief names .
His transcendance and other qualities ....
Anthropomorphism of holy Scripture .
The doctrine of the Divine Wisdom ....
,, the angels
,, their fall; Satan
3. Creation. Man and his Fall. God's Requirements of him.
Death and the Future State.
Creation of the world and of man
Fall ; original sin ; demands and mercy of God .
Repentance and remission of sins
Notions concerning Sheol ... ...
Belief in the resurrection, and prayers for the dead
PAGE
350
351
352
353
354
355
351 S
, 35S
. 359
. 362
. 363
. 365
. 366
. 366
. 367
. 368
. 368
. 369
. 371
. 371
. 372
. 372
. 373
. 375
. 376
. 376
. 376
377
37S
. 380
. 381
. 382
. 383
. 384
. 385
Penance.
386
387
388
389
390
Xll CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
4. Prophecies of the Messias.
PAGE
Importance of the prophecies of the Messias to the Jews . . .391
The older prophecies 392
The Son of David 392
The suffering Messias 393
Isaias, Daniel, and Zacharias touching the Messias .... 393
5. Alexandrine Judaism : Philo's Doctrines.
The temple of Onias 396
Aristobulus "... 397
Philo : his relation to the Greek philosophy 398
,, derives the Greek wisdom from Moses 400
Philo's teaching : the Deity 401
Matter : dualism 401
Mediate beings 402
The Logos 404
Angels and human souls 405
State after death 405
Composition of the human soul 406
The Fall : innate sinfulness 407
Philo's ethics ; doctrine of grace 408
Ecstasy 408
Chiliastic notions of the Messias . 408
6. The last Days of the Jewish State, and Church Polity.
The tyranny of the governors of the country 409
Hatred of the heathen 409
Corruption of the people 410
False prophets 411
The Zealots : their rule of terror 412
The eighteen resolves of the assembly in the house of Eleazar .412
Factions in Jerusalem, and their combats 413
Fate of captives after the taking of the city 414
Consequences of the destruction of the Temple 415
Impossibility of sacrificial worship 415
Hope in the restoration of the Temple 415
Sanhedrim and school at Jamnia 416
Rabbinism 416
Insurrections under Trajan and Hadrian 417
Bar Cochba 418
^Elia Capitolina 419
ERRATA IN VOL. II.
p. 3 1. 12 for Vidius read Vedius
„ 205 ter „ iEnomaus „ GEnomaus
„ 267 1. 31 „ novetius „ novitius
„ 290 „ 20 „ ago „ before
PART I.
THE GENTILE.
Books VII. to IX.
Encore que les philosophes soient les protecteurs cle l'erreur, toutefois ils ont frappe a
la porte de la Verit6 (Veritatis foi-es pulsant. Tertullian). S'ils ne sont pas entrSs dans son
sanctuaire, s'ils non pas en le bonheur de le voir et de l'adorer dans son temple, ils se sont
quelquefois present es a ses portiques, et lui ont rendu de loin quelque hommage.
Bossuet, Paneg. de Ste. Catherine.
BOOK VII.
THE RELIGIONS OF THE WEST.
Etruria — Rome — Gaul — Germany.
I. The Religion of the Etruscans.
The Etruscan state in Central Italy comprised the llasena, who
had probably immigrated as conquerors from the north ; the old
subjugated population of the Umbrians, who were of kindred
race with the Latins, and were anciently called Tnsci, dwelling
particularly in the southern parts of Etruria, between Tarquinii
and Rome : and the people of the coast, of Greek origin, with
the cities of Pisse, Alsium, Agylla, and Pyrgi, names which suffi-
ciently indicate they were Hellenic settlements. The Etrus-
cans had received art and the commencement of a literature
from Greece ; the connexion of Corinth with Tarquinii is well
attested. The Greek element, indeed, must have been lost in
the cities of the coast, which declined so early as hardly to be
mentioned again after the third century B.C.; but Greek in-
fluence is nevertheless unmistakable in the Etruscan religious
system ; and as the Rasena brought their own gods and notions
of religion with them from the north, and adopted others from
the conquered Tusci, the Etruscan religion is to be viewed as
composed of three elements. The Tusci had certain Latin and
Sabine deities, either in common with these kindred tribes from
the first, or receiving them afterwards at their hands. *
A purely Etruscan doctrine, and strange to Roman and
Greek, was that of the " veiled deities/'1 who were above even
1 " Diis quos superiores et involutes vocant." Seneca, Quiest. Nat. ii. 41 (from
Carina).
VOL. IT. B
2 ETRURIA..
Jupiter, and yet were not objects of regular worship, but only
resorted to by suppliants in certain cases, as supreme powers of
destiny, from whom a respite from an impending calamity might
be obtained.1 The Consentes and Complices must have been
distinct from these veiled deities. There were twelve of them,
six of either sex, with names unknown, because kept secret,
forming a council of gods, who stood at the side of Jupiter, but
were inferior to him. Their name was given them, according
to Varro, because they were born together and were to die toge-
ther2— an idea reminding one of the mortal " Asen" of the
north. Besides these were nine Novensiles, nine deities to dart
the lightning, to whom alone Jupiter conceded the power of
hurling his missiles; they included Juno, Minerva, Yejovis,
Summanus, Vulcanus, Saturnus, and Mars.3 Of the Tuscan
penates there were by rights four species or classes — penates of
Jupiter, of the sea, of the lower world, and of mortal men.4
Three supreme gods, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, necessarily
had their temples in every city of Etruria that would pass for a
city in the full sense of the term.5 Jupiter, sometimes repre-
sented as seated and with a beard, sometimes standing and
beardless, was called Tinia or Tina. A sun-god Usil, a god
Aplu, corresponding to Apollo, Yulcan under the name of Seth-
lans, and a Bacchic Phuphluns, with Turms or Mercury, are
known through works of Etruscan art. Varro calls the changeful
god of the seasons Yertumnus, whom the Yolsinian settlement
had brought with them to Rome, a chief god of Etruria,6 in spite
of his Latin name. Juno Regina, as city goddess of Veii, was
introduced into Rome by Camillus.7 Juno Curitis (Juno of the
lance), in the border town Falerii, by her Sabine surname made it
known that even where a language, differing in dialect from the
Etruscan, was spoken, a blending of races as well as of worship
had taken place. In the older times, young maidens were ac-
tually sacrificed to the goddess, whose rite resembled that of the
1 Serv. JEn. viii. 398, where, with O. Miiller, Etr. ii. 108, we roust read "postea
a fatis."
2 Arnobi iii. 40; Varro, E. E. i. 1 ; Mart. Capell. i. 41, p. 88, ed. Kppp.
3 Arnob. iii. 8.
4 Nigidius, in Arnob. iii. 40, says " Neptuni ;" but Neptune appears not to have
been an Etruscan god. The context shows that penates maris — " permarini," as
they are styled in Livy, xl. 52 — must have been meant.
5 Serv. Mn. i. 422. 6 Varro, v. 14. " Livy, v. 21.
ETRUSCAN DEITIES. 3
Argive Hera.1 Cupra was the name of this Etruscan Juno,
pointing to the circumstance that she had combined in herself
the properties of Aphrodite and Hera ; but on works of art there
is also found an Aphrodite with the name Turan. The Volsi-
nian head -goddess Nortia must have been a goddess of fortune
or fate, for she is compared with Tyche and Nemesis.2 The
Romans probably imported from Etruria the worship of Minerva,
who was also the patroness c° flute-music there. Janus, repre-
sented in Falerii with four faces, was by Varro's account the all-
seeing god of heaven there. Mantus, from whom the city of
Mantua took its name, was the ruler of the lower world,3 and
Vidius judge of the dead.4
Charun, a conductor of the dead, appears on Etruscan
sepulchral monuments, deformed and with distorted counte-
nance. This Etruscan Charon was distinct from the Greek one.
He was an active demon of the dead and of hell, and not only
conducted the shades into the nether world, but also murdered
men, and tormented the souls of the wicked. He is delineated
as an ugly, lean, gray-headed old man, frequently with the tusks
and features of a beast of prey, armed with a hammer, sometimes
also with a sword, and not seldom accompanied by other demons
with serpents. He is also found represented as the messenger of
death, leading or driving a horse on which the soul is sitting.5
The torments of departed souls in Orcus were not unfrequently
represented by the Etruscans in their sepulchral chambers. In
one of such, for instance, three souls are figured as naked men
suspended to the ceiling by the hands, and demons with instru-
ments of torture standing before them.6
The Etruscans shared the doctrine of Genii with the Romans.
The wondrous boy Tages, who in the fields of Tarquinii sprang
out of the soil opened by the plough, and communicated to the
Lucumones the doctrines of divination by sacrifice, by the flight
of birds, and by observation of the lightning, was the son of a
Genius, and grandson of Jupiter.7 The Lares are in name Etrus-
can ; and it seems Lar was the Tuscan name for all beings called
by the Komans Genii, Penates, or Demons.8
1 Plut. Parall. xxxv. 2 Mart. Cap. i. 18, 9.
3 Serv. .En. x. 199. 4 Mart. Cap. ii. 9, 3.
5 Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, ii. 206 et sqq.
6 Dennis, i. 348. 7 Fest. s. v. " Tages ;" Cic. de Divin. ii. 23.
8 Gerhard, Gottheiten der Etrnsker, in the Berl. Univ. Abhdl. 1845, p. 531.
4 ETRURIA.
The worship of the gods was worked up by the Etruscans
into a regular science, which was pursued with a zeal and care-
fulness unequalled by almost any other people.1 Hence, in the
judgment of antiquity, the Etruscans had the credit of being the
most religious nation of the whole West. This science was here-
ditary in the family of the Lucumones, a race of priestly nobles.
Ta^es had chanted them his lessons of lore, and the Etruscans
were admonished, once from Rome even, that at least six sons of
distinguished families should be trained in this holy discipline,
in order that a science, indispensable to the state, might not be
degraded to a trade, when practised by persons of the lower
ranks;2 for the Romans themselves could never thoroughly
master this science, and therefore made Etrurian haruspices
come to Rome from time to time. The books of Tages, from
which, besides the living tradition, the religious teaching and
ordinances were drawn, were cast in a rhythmical mould. One
part of them was the Acherontica, in which the double art was
taught, one of converting souls into gods by means of the blood
of certain beasts sacrificed to certain gods ; and the other of
averting, by similar means, a fatality which threatened human
life, and of effecting a respite of the same ; yet, according to Tus-
can teaching, this delay could not be asked to extend beyond
the eightieth year, for there were no means of obtaining such a
favour from the gods ; in general, however, it was inculcated in
the Tagetic discipline that, by having recourse to the right me-
thod, an event decreed by destiny might be retarded for ten
years.3
Resides the Acher ontic books, there were also books ritual, ful-
gural, and augural, books of ostenta, and collections of old prodi-
gies and oracles belonging to the sacred writings of the Etruscans.
A work of equal reputation with the Tagetic writings, and as-
cribed to the Tuscan nymph Begoe, was the science of the ful-
gurita, or of reconciling places struck by lightning, and it was
even preserved at Rome, along with the Sibylline books, in the
temple of the Palatine Apollo.4 These documents were con-
1 Liv. v. 1.
2 Cic. de Divin. i. 41. 92 ; comp. 0. Miiller's Etrusker, ii. 5, as to the right
reading here.
3 Arnob. ii. 02 ; Serv. JEn. viii. 89!) ; Censorinus de Die Fat. c. xiv. p. CG, ed.
Haverc.
4 Serv. Mn. vi. 72.
SCIENCE OF FT JLGU RATION. 0
suited by Tuscan interpreters of signs on emergencies. Learned
Romans, such as the Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus, a friend of
Cicero, studied them carefully, and used them in faith. Cor-
nelius Labeo. at a still later date (the second century after
Christ, or perhaps later) wrote a work in fifteen books upon the
Etruscan discipline of Tages and Begoe. Umbricius, the haruspex
of the Emperor Galba, was the author of an earlier treatise.
But in Etruria, naturally the sacred science and art was acquired
not only in books, but by colleges and schools for the purpose,
at the heed of which an old haruspex of tried sagacity was
usually placed. The essential contents of this doctrine or disci-
pline were formed of a doctrine drawn out into an artificial sys-
tem, upon the means and the ceremonies necessary to investi-
gate the will of the gods, and, when ascertained, to appease
them and avert the evil, should it signify misfortune or threaten
harm.
No people in the world have attributed so great importance
to thunder and lightning as the Etrurians did. Lightning was
to them the most distinguished instrument of divine manifesta-
tion, the surest source from which the knowledge of the divine
will was to be drawn, the language in which Tinia conversed with
them ; it was the one irrevocable presage ; its errand could not
be rendered futile or be changed by any other sign ; but it had
the essential power of blotting out all other signs and communi-
cations of knowledge,1 descending, as it did, immediately and
instantaneously upon earth, from the hands of God, its ruler.
The prognostics of evil afforded by the entrails of the victim,
,or the flight and notes of birds, were looked upon as set aside
so soon as a flash of good promise had ensued. Even Pliny
thought it not to be doubted but that the Tuscan science had ad-
vanced so far in the interpretation of the lightning as to predict
with accuracy, if, on a particular day, other lightnings would
take place, nay, if a flash was meant to avert a doom, or to indi-
cate another and hidden doom.2
It was one of the first tasks devolving upon the Tuscan sci-
ence of fulguration to decide what god it was who had hurled
the lightning ; for there were nine gods who performed that feat.
1 So the Etruscan Crecina, in Seneca, Qu. Nat. ii. 34 ; comp. Micali, Storia
clegli ant. Pop. Ital. ii. 156.
3 Plin. H. N. ii. 53.
ETRUR1A.
Jupiter had three manubise, or kinds of lightning. That which
he sent according to his own good pleasure showed him to be
well-inclined and placable, and was a mere reminder ; that, on
the contrary, which he threw with the advice of the twelve gods,
called Consentes, was an indication at times of something good,
but always involving a punishment or damage ; while the light-
ning, hurled only after he had taken the veiled gods into his
counsels, announced a change of the whole present situation,
to individuals, as well as to the state.1 These distinctions were
recognised in the colour and effects, in the quarter of heaven the
lightning came from, and other circumstances. The Etruscans
had divided the heaven into sixteen regions, and distributed the
gods amongst them. The author and the import of the light-
ning were decided according to the quarter from which it issued,
and still more by that to which it returned. Lightnings which
apparently came from the earth were held to be particularly
baneful.2 As, moreover, they were not taken in a passive sense,
simply as unexpected signs of the divine will, but as formally
demanded, and calculated beforehand, the Tuscan haruspices had
divided them into three classes. If the lightning happened after
the resolution and before the execution of a purpose, it was a coun-
selling flash, and showed if the matter was to be executed or to be
given up ; if the flash followed after the act was already com-
pleted, it was one of " authorisation," and prognosticated whether
good or evil was to come of it; in fine, if the lightning appeared at a
time when any thing was going on in a general way, in that case
it was a " reminder/' threatening or calling to action. Accord-
ing to the duration of their import, there were lightnings indi-
cating— some, an influence to extend over a whole life, or a de-
terminate time only ; others prorogative, the operation of which
might be delayed. There were also "domestic lightnings,"
appearing at birth, or marriage, or succession to an inheritance.3
All places where lightning struck were holy, and required a
particular consecration and atonement, in accordance with the
Tuscan rite, adopted even in Kome. The spot had to be con-
verted into a templum, i. e. a place consecrated by auspices, and
to be enclosed. The lightning was buried — that is, the earth
' Seneca, Qu. Nat. ii. 41.
- Pliny, H.N. ii. 53 ; Seneca, Qu. Nat. ii. 40.
3 Pliny, H. N. ii. 53 ; Seneca, Qu. Nat.ii. -'39-41.
LIGHTNING.
thrown up by it, or other matters struck by it, were put into the
ground at the very spot, and the place consecrated by the sacri-
fice of a two-year-old sheep, therefore called bidental. Such a
place was not to be touched, or even looked at. Whoever de-
stroyed it was punished by the gods with loss of reason.1 There
were formulae, besides, belonging to the Tuscan secret discipline,
by which lightning could be drawn down from heaven, partly by
way of entreaty, partly, too, by compulsion ; and as late as the
fifth century after Christ the Tuscan haruspices thought it was
they who had protected the town of Narnia by these means
from Attila, and offered to protect Rome too by " the arms of
Jupiter."
THE RELIGIOUS SYSTEM OF THE ROMANS.
I. Historical Development.
A Latin settlement on the Palatine hill by the Ramnes formed
the groundwork of the Roman state. These were joined by the
Sabine community of the Tities on the Quirinal. The united
community bore the name of Quirites, and were at first under a
double kingdom, which soon passed into an elective monarchy,
with a senate and a popular assembly. The Latin element was,
and continued to be, the predominant one; and the Ramnes
retained, on the whole, the same gods and forms of worship as
the Latins generally had in their old towns of Laurentum, La-
vinium, Alba, Ardea, &c. But the Latins, as well as the Umbrian
Sabines, were a race of the same stock as the Hellenes, being
descended, like them, from a common aboriginal people ; and
the elements of the old Italic religions that are of kin to the
Greek system of worship are partly to be explained by these
relations of race, partly by intercourse with the Greek commer-
cial marts and colonies in central and lower Italy. It was spe-
cially Cyme (Cumse), the oldest of the Greek colonies on the
western coast of Italy, which exercised an important influence,
even in religious matters, on Latium as well as Rome.
The Sabines or Tities had, above all, the Yesta worship, in
common with the Latin Ramnes; for this worship of the hearth-
1 Varro, v. 4"2; Ters. ii. "27. cum schol. ; Amm. Mare, xxiii. 5; Hor. Ars
Poet. 471.
8 ROME.
goddess was universal in families of the Hellenic Italian race.
Quirinus, on the other hand, and Sancus, the mythical ancestor
and king of the Sabine people, with his sanctuary on the Quirinal,
and Sun-god, were the deities whose worship was at first peculiar
to the Sabine settlement.1 The primeval sanctuary of the three
associate deities, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva (the last probably
a stranger to the Latins originally), which stood upon the old
Capitoline, i.e. Quirinal, prior to the Capitoline temple, was of
Sabine origin. So strong was this distinction between the Sabine
and the Latin form of religion felt in Rome, that a particular
association was formed expressly for the purpose of preserving
the Sabine rite.
In process of time, a third element, a tribus or tribe, composed
of Roman population, that of the Luceres, was annexed to the
Ramnes and Titles, the origin of which was obscure even to the
ancients. Yet it may be recognised as having been composed
of Alban Latins, who came and settled at Rome after the destruc-
tion of their city. This third race, receiving constant reinforce-
ments from Latin settlers, attained an equality of rights with
the two first, under the Tarquinii. An Etruscan immigration,
according to the saga, under Cceles Yibenna, is likewise men-
tioned; and from him the Tuscan quarter in Rome derived its
name. Thus Rome acquired a mixed population of Latins, Sa-
bines, and Etruscans, as the towns of Fidense and Crustumerium
had, except that the Etruscans fell short of the other two in
numbers, importance, and political rights. The Roman religion
was also formed, in essentials, of twro very different and peculiar,
though indeed kindred, national worships — the Latin and the
Sabine. From Alba and Lavinium came the primeval rite of
Yesta, with its priesthood; Janus, Jupiter, and Juno, Saturn
and Ops, Diana and Mars, with the Salian institute, and that of
the Arvalian brothers ; — this and more all formed part of the
Latin religious system ; and that this was for a length of time
independent of the Sabine, in Rome, is proved by the feast of the
Septimontium, during which sacrifice was offered in seven differ-
ent places in Rome, none of which were in the Sabine settle-
ments. Nevertheless a later saga made the Sabino- Roman
king Numa into the real founder of religion, and legislator of
1 Comp. Ambrosch, Studien, pp. 100-172; Preller, Horn. Mythol. pp. 633-637,
aud notes.
NUMA. 9
the divine ritual in the Roman state. Regulations have been
ascribed to him, while master of a petty state, still in its infancy,
and confined within a very limited jurisdiction, which in part
are clearly antique and pre-Roman, and in part exhibit a more
matured political development. It was he, they said, who intro-
duced the Vesta worship, the Salii, the Pontifices, and Flamines,
the Augurs, Feciales and Curiones; and established the cultus
of Quirinus to the honour of Romulus, and those of Terminus,
the Manes and Libitina ; and his intercourse with the nymph
Egeria was to impress the seal of a higher and divine revelation
upon these institutions, in order to free them from the suspicion
of being the arbitrary production of mere political wisdom in a
legislator. Now, though it quite contradicts every law of history
to discern in any one individual the creator of the complete Ro-
man cultus, which so clearly shows itself to be the product of a
longer development, and on the whole to be the organic creation
of the Roman people, the saga, nevertheless, by a violent ana-
chronism, converted Numa into a Pythagorean philosopher, and
there was discovered a striking resemblance between his religious
directions and their maxims. Accordingly Castor the Rhodian,
a contemporary of Cicero, instituted a comparison between the
Roman institutes and Pythagorean precepts. The fact of the
Roman people having for one hundred and seventy years wor-
shiped their gods without statues, was interpreted as a law of
Numa, which, in keeping with the Pythagorean creed, forbade
the Romans to set up human or animal representations of the
gods.1 With the like object, he was supposed to have instituted
unbloody sacrifices chiefly, consisting merely of coarse sacrificial
cakes and other inconsiderable things — a presumption not borne
out by history, and only invented to bear out a theory; the
plain truth being, that such Roman rites as bear the stamp of a
higher antiquity were, for the most part, connected with the
sacrifice of animals.
In the older times of the republic the plebs formed a por-
tion of Rome, quite distinct in a religious point of view. Having
had its origin in the Latin country-folk who had settled in the
city, and in the citizens of petty towns dismantled, who had been
attracted thither, and consisting of peasants and husbandmen
in a preponderating degree, it took its place, like a distinct
1 Clem. Alex. Strom, i. p. 358, Putt.
10 ROME.
but subject people, by the side of the old patrician burghers.
The plebeians had no portion in the worship and religious func-
tions of the old citizenship. The patricians, being alone qualified
for them by descent and purity of blood, remained in exclusive
possession of the priesthood and of the religious tradition trans-
mitted in their families, thus forming, in contrast to the
plebeians, a close priest-caste, to each member of which, by
right of birth, one sacerdotal function belonged, that of taking
auspices to ascertain the divine will; and as the application
of these was indispensable in an officer of the state, therefore
no plebeian could enter upon office. On the same principle
of religious separation, no connubium could take place between
patrician and plebeian. Accordingly, as often as the plebeians
made an effort to obtain office, the cry was, that divine and human
things were being confounded, and the sacred ceremonies pro-
faned ; and that the gods regarded the attempt as a sin, and their
anger threatened the republic with calamity.1
Such a state of things could not continue : in spite of the patri-
cian notion that the deity itself had established such distinctions
between men for ever, the plebeians won their way, step by step,
to access to the different offices of state, and, as is at the same time
self-evident, to the right of the auspices of the office, though still
not without a certain dependence upon the patrician augurs and
pontiffs. But they remained further excluded from sacerdotal
functions proper till the Ogulnian law, in the year 452 a.u.c
Thus, up to that time, they could offer no more than a private
worship to the public gods of Rome, and be present as spectators
of the sacrificial actions, and not all of them ; and yet they re-
tained their own worship and their own sanctuaries, which they
had brought with them from their earlier homes.
The oldest elements of the Roman religion pointed to agri-
culture, and indeed to the pastoral life, in some of its features.
The old Latin god Saturn owed his name to sowing. After the
beasts of the flock, the commonest offering was toasted flour,
from which the most solemn of the forms of marriage had its
name oiconfarreatio. The oldest Latin deities, Picus and Faunus,
were patron gods of agriculture ; the first, Picus, or Picumnus,
was the inventor of manure, as his brother Pilumnus of grind-
ing;- Faunus, himself a husbandman, but seer and soothsayer
1 Liv. i. 14 ; iv. 2 ; v. 14 : vi. 41 ; x. 0. - Serv. /En. ix. 4.
NO MYTHOLOGY. 11
besides, had a son Stercutius, also honoured as inventor of
manure.1 Mars even, though otherwise god of death, and in
his principal aspect a deity of ruin and destruction, was at the
same time an agrarian divinity, invoked to avert blight and mil-
dew from the standing corn ; to keep the flocks and herds in
health ; and having vows made to him for the well-being of the
cattle.2 There were soon special gods for all the occupations
of agriculture, for sowing, ploughing, harrowing, and grafting.
The very day the manure was carried from the temple of Vesta
was a half-festival day ; and to kill a plough-ox was as great a
transgression as killing a man.3 The offering of milk on the Pa-
lilia betrayed the pastoral origin of the feast, which was a prin-
cipal one till the latest times of the empire ; and Pales, in fact,
was a goddess of herbage.4 So too with the service of Rumina,
a shepherd-goddess of suckling and rearing, to whom offerings of
milk were made even after the Christian period.5 The institu-
tion of the Fratres Arvales, on whom lay the performance of
sacrifice for the fertility of the fields, and the conducting of the
victims about the newly ploughed land, was referred to Romulus
himself, and he was fabled to have been the first of these priests,
who was decked out in a crown of ears of corn, tied round with
a white fillet.6
A mythology such as the Grecian is quite foreign to the Roman
system. The Romans troubled themselves not with the origin
of things, nor how the human race arose : they took the world
as they found it to hand. It was no anxiety to them how it came
into existence ; myths, cosmogonic and theogonic, had no interest
for, nor place with, them. There are indeed indications of this
disposition. Particular gods have wives. Picus is son of Saturn,
and is himself the father of Faunus;7 but these gods do not, like
the Homeric deities, form a great family : the Romans knew no-
thing of successive dynasties of gods, or of their warfare. These
gods have no history, generally speaking; and if Augustin called
attention to the fact that it was entirely of the greater gods, the
' Selecti' of Varro, that such scandalous things and impurities were
told, while nothing of the kind was mentioned of the minor deities,8
1 Plin. H. N. xvii. 6. 2 Cato, E. E. lxxxiii.
3 Colum. E. E. vi. pr. " tarn capitale." 4 Sen', in Georg. iii. 1.
5 Aug. C. D. vii. 11. 6 Plin. H. N. xviii. 2 ; Gell. vi. 7,
7 Aug. C. D. xviii. 15. 8 Ibid. vii. 4.
12 ROME.
the ground of his assertion was this, that when the fusion of Ro-
man and Greek deities took place, the Hellenic myths were also
transferred to the Roman deities. It was also on this account that
the genuine Italic Janus, though one of the greater gods, formed
an exception : of him there were no myths, as he could not be
blended with any Greek deity. Hero-worship, too, was strange to
the Romans. Romulus even was not worshiped as a hero properly
speaking, but as a god, after he had been identified with the great
Sabine god Quirinus : and Numa was never worshiped in Rome,
though, as creator and arranger of the Roman religious system, as
favourite of Egeria, and conciliator of Jupiter,1 furnished with
magical powers, he had, agreeably to Greek notions, appropriated
the character of hero to himself before all others, and had earned
a full title to an heroic cultus. It is true that single sons of gods
make their appearance, here and there, in the old Latin and
Roman sagas; but their birth was explained in a different way
from that of the Greek myths ; the god had appeared as a phallus
in the ashes of the hearth, or as a spark had shot from out the
hearth into the woman's womb.
The chief deities of the Romans, before they had been co-
loured by Greek inspiration, were general nature-powers, or mere
abstractions of the human state ; they advanced to no real per-
sonality, but, on the contrary, remained far behind the plastic
individualisation of the Hellenic deity- world. The Romans had
no religious poetry, no Homer or Hesiod to give their gods a
form, and breathe life into them. Their sacerdotal books, besides
being inaccessible to the people, contained only dry registers of
the names of gods, with a short account of their sphere of action,
and the peculiarities of their rites. This was all changed when
the Roman circle of gods was enlarged by numerous accessions
from without, and many of their forms were humanised by being
blended together with corresponding Greek deities ; but under
the influence of Greek mythology, and, somewhat later, of Greek
philosophy, the old reverence for the gods died away ; the firm
belief in the universality and comprehensiveness of their power
was shaken ; and the downfall of the state-religon, like a severe
internal and incurable malady, began with attacking the upper
ranks, and so infected the whole body of the state.
1 See Preller, Romische Mythol. p. 170; Ovid. Fasti, iii. 202 et sqq., and
other passages there cited.
IDEAS OF THE DEITY. 1 3
The importance of Greek mythology to the Roman religious
system must not, however, be estimated by the position which
it occupied in Roman literature. The poets made many myths
and mythical ideas their own, as poetical matter, which never
passed into the religious creed of the Roman people. Among the
Romans there never could arise the case of such personal rela-
tions to particular gods as we find drawn in the most glowing-
colours in Greek poetry, and as was not unfrequently met with
in actual life. Even in the zenith of his state and of his religion,
the Roman did, without preference for this or that god, just as
much as law and custom demanded of him, not more, and not
less. It never occurred to him to draw closer to one god or
the other, or to attach himself particularly to the service of one.
But in this way the Roman system of gods, quite differently from
the Greek, was the most faithful of mirrors, in which every
act and constituent portion of public as well as private life
was accurately reflected. The world of a Roman's gods was, so
to say, the " double" of his daily doings and movements ; what-
ever he undertook, a special deity was sure to be at hand ; what-
ever happened in nature among the beasts, in vegetable or human
life, the intervention of a god had wrought it ; and the immediate
practical requirements of life were the soul and generating prin-
ciple of this religious system.
The Roman religion, as regards the nature of the deity, pre-
sents two peculiarities, which at first sight completely contradict
one another. On one side there is a bias to monotheism running
through it ; there must have been one single nameless god in ex-
istence at its mysteriously veiled commencement, who, in the
event, turned into a Jupiter Optimus Maximus, but was never
entirely lost to the conscience of the Romans, therefore they con-
tinued, even till late times, to invoke him in the most violent and
irresistible of natural phenomena, such as the earthquake. Rightly
does Augustin assert that all the manifold gods and goddesses
were, in the end, but the one Jupiter,1 for these gods melt away into
each other on nearer inspection. So near they are of kin, aud so
closely do they run into one another, that at last one is driven to a
single god, comprising in his one self all the powers of nature in
undistinguishable unity and totality; to a god, who, by the dis-
section of his essence into the various aspects of his operations,
1 Aug. C. D. iv. 11.
14 ROME.
and by the personising of liis individual powers and properties,
has been resolved into a multiplicity of gods.
Now the Romans went further than any other people of anti-
quity in this breaking-up of the idea of God, in the hypostasising
of particular powers, modes of operation, physical functions and
properties. From the earliest times they were in the habit also
of personifying human qualities and actions, whilst making them
into expressions of a divine being. In this way they swelled the
number of gods so incalculably, that the generality of Romans
were far from being acquainted with the names even of all their
deities, and we, too, remain in ignorance of many of them, in-
cluding such as had a worship of their own. A single human
action, for example, the conclusion or consummation of a mar-
riage, was actually split up into a number of moments, each of
which was shaped into a deity of its own. Once on this road,
there was no resting-place ; the god-casting business could never
be wound up. In proportion as the customs and fashions of life
changed, and assumed richer and more copious forms, new re-
quirements came in, new institutions arose, and new deities had
necessarily to be formed, or, in reality, coined for the emergency ;
and it is one of the strange things in the Roman religious system,
that one can get a peep, so to say, of the workshop where the pro-
cess went on. It lay within the sphere of a pontiff's vocation.
The pontifices had to take care that each new want and new
element in political life received its god, either by enlargement
of the occupations of a god who had already become an object of
worship, or by the introduction of the service of a new one. Thus
the Romans had a goddess Pecunia, who may have belonged quite
to the early times, when buying or bartering took place through
the exchange of cattle, instead of coined money. But when,
after the time of Servius Tullius, the use of copper money became
common in Rome, there arose a god iEsculanus ; and when, about
the year 485 a.u.c, silver money also came to be coined, a god
Argentarius had to be intercalated, who, of course, was a son of
this iEsculanus.
In the fourth century of the same era, when a voice, heard
down from the Palatine, was said to have announced the ap-
proach of the Gauls, the Greeks, in such a case, would have
discerned to a nicety which of their known gods or heroes such
voice belonged to; the Romans, on the contrary, were equally
INCREASE OF GODS. 15
ready with a new deity for the occasion : he was styled Aius
Locutius, and had a sacellum built for him on the spot from
which the voice proceeded.1
As the number of deities increased from within, by new crea-
tions of numina and by the progressive dismemberment and
hypostasising of particular properties in the gods already known,
so it waxed in proportion, from without, by the violent naturali-
sation of foreign and conquered gods. In old times, so often as
a hostile city was besieged and taken by storm, the custom was,
after a certain preliminary ceremonial, to invite the gods of it to
leave and settle away at Rome. They were promised in their
new domicile the same service, and still more zealous worship
than they had hitherto enjoyed ; and as it was hardly possible to
extend a becoming public cultus to all, they were in part dis-
tributed amongst Roman families, where they were treated with
a private one.3 Now this worship must have been the same as
that practised at their homes ; for every god was jealous about
the maintenance of the original form of his worship, as esta-
blished in accordance with his own will. Hence the Romans
were careful that images, ritual books, and every thing pertain-
ing to the cultus, should be brought from the conquered city to
Rome, and the pontiffs saw to the proper application of these
things.3
As, in this manner, whole troops of gods and an unmanage-
able amount of the most various forms of worship, ceremonial,
and sacrifice, came to be crowded into a single city, the priests
required special books of their own, in which to record the
names of the gods and the rites of their worship. These t in-
digitamenta, must have been, in part, of great antiquity, and
in their first rough form have descended from the regal period ;
for they were afterwards appealed to, in order, from the omis-
sion of a god's name in them, as for instance of Apollo, to infer
his introduction at a later time.4 But the worship, as indicated
in these indigitamenta, and other old records or traditions, was
in reality not expensive ; for all that was requisite was to be
taken from the most obvious necessaries of life, and could easily
1 Liv. v. 32-52 ; Cic. de Div. i. 45.
2 Arnob. iii. 38 ; Prudent, contra Symm. ii. 346 ; Macrob. Sat. iii. 9 ; S^rv.
JEn. ii. 351.
3 Liv. i. 38; v. 22; xxvi. 34. 4 Arnob. ii. 73; of. Maorob. Sat. ii. 12.
16 ROME.
be procured; but was none the less tiresome, wasteful of time,
and imperative on the whole man ; so much so, that Tertullian
compares Roman religious discipline with the burdensome yoke
of the Mosaic law ; and the ancients were of opinion that Kuma
— for to him the entire religious legislation was ascribed — in-
tended, by the imposition of this galling yoke, to soften and tame
a people still wild.1 For here even, the least thing was of the
greatest importance, and had to be looked to with a painful
accuracy and anxious vigilance, and to be executed strictly ac-
cording to rule. As the Romans believed in, and were convinced
of, the omnipotence of formula and ceremony, and that the gods
were thereby compelled to lend themselves to the will of man, —
for instance, to desert a city they had inhabited hitherto and
leave it a prize to the besiegers, — so they were fully impressed
with the belief that all the virtue and activity of the formula
depended on the most liberal and punctual fulfilment possible of
the solemn words and actions. A single omission or word out
of place attracted a guilt that required a special expiation, or
made the repetition of the whole act inevitable. It sometimes
happened that a sacrifice had to be repeated thirty times, because
a mistake had been made every time, or an unlucky circumstance
had occurred. In the sacred games and chariot-races of the
gods, if an actor came to a dead stop, or a flute -player paused
suddenly, or a driver let the reins fall, — here was a mischance
foreboding evil, and requiring an instant atonement. Cornelius
Cethegus and Quintus Sulpicius were both removed from the
sacerdotal dignity at the same time, because the first had not
laid the entrails of the victim upon the altar quietly, according
to rule ; the other because his priest's cap had fallen off his head.
If, at a festival where images of the gods or other sacred objects
were being carried about on litters, a horse became tired or
stopped, or one of the conductors took the reins in his left hand,
so surely it was at once determined to celebrate the desecrated
feast again.2
The centre of Roman cultus in the older times was the
Regia in the Forum, formerly Numa's house, partly used as a
residence for the Pontifex, and partly as a sanctuary, in which
the sacred spears of Mars were kept. Here the supreme gods
1 Tertull. Prrescr. xl. ; Cicero de Rep. ii 14 ; Liv. i. 21.
2 Arnob. iv. 31.
RELIGIOUS LOCALITIES. 17
of old Rome, Janus, Jupiter and Juno, Mars and Ops, were
adored : the service was conducted by the king in person, and
afterwards by the sacerdotal dignitaries who supplied for him,
the sacrificial king (rex sacrorum), the two Flamines, the Dialis
and Martialis, and the Pontifex Maximus. Close at hand stood
the Vesta- temple. Next to the Regia, the Palatine was reckoned
the seat of the genuine Roman gods, whilst the Sabine deities
were seated on the Quirinal. On this hill stood the old Capitol,
with the sanctuary dedicated to the three deities, Jupiter, Juno,
and Minerva. Seven objects of veneration, — the conical stone,
the earthen chariot of Jupiter from Veii, the ashes of Orestes,
the sceptre of Priam, the veil of Helena, the ancile thrown down
from heaven by Jupiter, and the Palladium, — were most carefully
preserved as protectors of and securities for the eternal duration
of the city. And yet, the whole of the hallowed objects and
rites indispensable to the Romans were not to be found in
Rome. The city had no Penates of its own, for they belonged
to and remained at Lavinium, the old metropolis of the Latin
confederation, whose daughter Rome was, and the " first city of
the Roman line," as Varro styled her.1 There were kept Tro-
jan images of the gods, in clay; and in the very times of the
highest power and pride of the state, none of the higher officers
entered office, none laid it down, nor did a proconsul leave Italy,
without having first sacrificed in Lavinium to Vesta and the
Penates, guardian-gods of Rome.2 Every year, there the Roman
flamines and augurs offered sacrifice in the name of the Roman
people.3 It was from thence, also, the legend of the Trojan
settlement in Latium had come to Rome, and of iEneas, after his
disappearance from the battle-field on the bank of the Numicius,
exalted to the rank of Jupiter Indiges, — for such were called
Indigetes, or indigenous deities, as had first dwelt in Latium
in human form, and were deified after their death.4 iEneas, in
his sanctuary on the Numicius, received every year from the
Roman authorities a worship, of the antiquity of which, however,
no account can be rendered.
In the time of the Tarquins, Etruscan, and, in a still higher
1 Varro, v. c. 32 ; Dionys. viii. 2].
2 Macrob. Sat, iii. 4 ; Serv. 2En. ii. 296 ; Val. Max. i. 6, 7.
3 Ascon. in Cic. Scaur, p. 21 ; Serv. iEn. viii. 664 ; corap. Zumpt de Laviuio,
p. 2]. 4 Macrob. in Somn. Scip. c. ix.
VOL. II. c
18 ROME.
degree, Greek influence worked upon the religious sense of the
Romans, modifying their system of gods and their forms of
worship. It was in particular Cumse, in the neighbouring Cam-
pania, a colony of the iEolian town Cyme, and the oldest of
all the Hellenic settlements in Italy, which was the medium of
this influence ; and from there the form of written letters and
the Sibylline books found their way to Rome. By the same
way probably some knowledge of the Homeric poems, or at least
of the Homeric cycle of legends, reached Rome ; for Octavius
Mamilius, son-in-law of Tarquin, traced his pedigree from Ulys-
ses and Circe ; and a temple of Circe and a cup of Ulysses were
to be found in the town of Circeii, a foundation of the older
Tarquin. The Latin federal sanctuary of Diana, on the Aven-
tine, was built under Servius Tullius, on the model of the Ephe-
sian Artemis-temple, and the wooden idol of the goddess re-
sembled that of the Phocseans of Massilia (with whom the
Romans had at that time concluded an alliance), and, there-
fore, resembled the one at Ephesus also.1 We must not omit
to add to the above instances the religious intercourse between
Rome and the Phocsean colonial town Yelia, as also with the
Tuscan one of Csere, which was so closely connected with Greece
as to have a treasury of its own at Delphi.
It was, then, owing to Greek influence that the important
transition from the hitherto imageless worship to the use and wor-
ship of wooden and clay idols now came in. Until Tarquin's
time, the Romans had only used holy symbols or fetishes, such
as those already mentioned, and the stone worshiped as Jupiter;
so that, quite at a late date, the most solemn oaths sworn
were by Jupiter the Stone.2 Now and henceforth images
of the gods were prepared for the new temples in Rome by
Etruscan artists, whose craft had already been developed under
Greek influences. Through the Sibylline books the Greek gods
and their cultus came into Rome ; the worship of Apollo, to
whom the first temple was vowed in the year 351 a.u.c, in
consequence of the great epidemic, thirty-four years later, and,
on the same authority and for the same reason, a lectister-
niuin was prepared for Latona, along with Apollo, Artemis, and
other Grecian deities.3 In the year 463, in order to guard
1 Strabo, p. 180 ; Dionys. ii. 22, iv. 25; Liv. i. 45.
2 Polyb. iii. 25 ; Cic. ad Fam. vii. 12 ; Gell. i. 21, 4. 3 Liv. v. 13.
THE CAPITOLINE TEMPLE. 19
against a lingering* pestilential sickness, the cultus of iEsculapius
was introduced from Epidanrus into Rome ;x and finally, in 549,
Cybele, the Id;ean mother, was brought from Pessinus in Phry-
gia, in the shape of a black stone, and her worship naturalised in
Rome by order of the Sibylline books.2 The Decemviri or Quin-
decemviri, too, to whom the consulting of the Sibylline books
was intrusted, had to perform their religious functions, not ac-
cording to the Roman, but the Greek, ritual ; particular decrees
of the senate, made on the spur of occasions, directed them
to that most distinctly.3 " It was not an insignificant brooklet,"
said Cicero, " but a rich and copious stream of Hellenic disci-
pline that here poured into the city."4 By frequent embassies to
Delphi to consult the oracle, this fusion of Roman and Greek
gods and rites acquired a new impetus.
Another event, and one fraught with important consequences
in the province of religion, was the building of the Capitoline
temple, and the founding of the worship there. Hitherto the
Sabine Romans had been in possession of the old Capitol on the
Quirinal, with a sacellum of three deities ; but now the religious
blending of the three races was to be attained through a new and
common sanctuary, and the political and national unity of the
Romans thereby strengthened. This requirement seemed to be all
the more pressing, as the Luceres up to this time had retained
their own rites, while the Plebs, in a complete religious isolation,
had never been admitted to a share of those of either of the two
first races. The new national sanctuary was to be built on the
Tarpeian rock ; but as this was already occupied by the altars
and chapels of the old Quirinic gods, the process of evocation
had to be resorted to. By sacrifice and promises of other tem-
ples, they were accordingly enticed from the spot ; but as Termi-
nus, Juventas, and Mars, refused to budge, they were therefore
included in the circuit of the temple. This Terminus, a mere
shapeless stone, which was afterwards taken for a boundary-stone
and converted into the god Terminus,5 was probably no other
than the old Jupiter Lapis. Of the three cells of the new Capi-
toline temple, the central one was set apart for Jupiter, the two
side ones for Juno and Minerva; gods, that is, who belonged
1 Liv. x. 47. epit. 11 ; Val. Max. xviii. 1, 2.
2 Liv. xxix. 10 ; Varr. vi. 15; Strabo, p. 567; Ovid. Fast. iv. 257.
3 Varr. vii. 88; Liv. xxv. 12. 4 De Eep. ii. 19. 5 Lact. i. 20-37.
20 ROME.
of old to all the races represented at Rome— Latins, Sabines,
and Etruscans.
By this time the Roman state had acquired a territory of
considerable extent in the heart of Italy. Several nations recog-
nised her supremacy. The new Capitol became the religious
centre of this empire, and there was no lack of portents and
predictions to the effect that the will of the gods had assigned
the sovereignty of the wide world to this state, and attached it to
this particular spot for all time.1 Images of all the gods were
by degrees set up in the Capitol.2 All presents which the state
and its allies devoted to Jupiter were deposited here ; all reli-
gious acts connected with the welfare of the entire community
were here performed, and done in honour of the Capitoline
deities. On the other hand, the old worship of the gods in the
Regia now lost somewhat of its earlier importance; it was,
at least in later times, exercised by priests of the older establish-
ment, but without the people, or any class of them, having a
share in it.
The Hellenisation of Rome was in full career when the
downfall of the sovereign power, and with it the circumscription
of the kingdom founded in Middle Italy by the last kings, took
place. By this event a stop was put for a length of time to
Roman familiarity with the seats of Greek worship and civili-
sation. The whole movement was, at the same time, one of
complete reaction against the in-coming tide of exotic Greek
elements, or, at any rate^ its working was such j and it strength-
ened the exclusive sacerdotal supremacy of the old citizen or
patrician families. Hitherto the king had been supreme head of
the priesthood, and of the cultus as a whole, and a priest himself,
in the proper sense of the word. This high-priesthood now was
transferred to the gentes, who, without it, already enjoyed the
privilege of filling up vacancies in all the sacerdotal dignities
from their own body. For, according to old Roman notions, the
genuine rite, and the only one acceptable to the gods and effec-
tive, was a something propagated in gentes attaching to birth,
and not transferable to others of alien blood; it was, at the
same time, a secret, on the observance of which the whole wel-
fare of the state hung ; and if strangers and foes succeeded in
1 Liv. i. 55 ; Dionys. iv. 61 ; Flor. i. 7.
2 Serv. Mn.ii. 319 ; Tertull. de Speclac. xii.
FAMILY WORSHIP. 21
furtively obtaining and appropriating to themselves a Iioman
rite, or in learning the hallowed and secret names of deities, and
therefore resorted to the practice of evocation, what mischief
might not result therefrom to the republic ! Thus, then, the
entire state-worship was exclusively in patrician hands until the
Ogulnian law (452 a.u.c). The plebeians had only the private
worship of the Roman gods allowed them. It is true they might
have continued to practise the worship of their ancestral gods,
but even so only in private.1 Yet they celebrated in common
the ancient feast of the Septimontium, national to the Plebs,
divided into seven hill-circuits ; and the solemnity of the Com-
pitalia, introduced by Servius Tullius, had the like object of
plebeian worship ; the whole city was divided into compita
of the Lares (of which, in Pliny's time, there were 265), 2 re-
sembling parishes, and at the corner of every street in Rome
stood the sacella of the compitales, like the Herman at Athens.
Here to the Lares of each vicus offerings were presented, and
sacrifices performed by the families included within the district.3
The religious functions which the kings had discharged passed
after the fall of the kingdom to the sacerdotal office of the rex
sacrorum, or sacrificial king, created for the purpose ; he was, how-
ever, stripped of all political importance, excluded from all offices
of state, and chosen by the colleges of pontiffs and augurs. He
was himself under the authority of the Pontifex maximus, though
in reality he had precedence of him in his religious character,
and therefore also ranked before him at the banquets of the gods.
This dignity was of course only accessible to patricians; and
they also succeeded in maintaining an exclusive possession of
these priestly offices from the beginning of the republic, for
the space of 209 years, in spite of all the pressure from
the plebs. Besides this, many patrician families had their own
private worship of gods, and priests of their own, such privi-
leges being founded in part on a fabulous pedigree, and in part
on special historical grounds. Thus the Nautii derived the
service kept up within their family to Minerva, from a certain
Nautes who had accompanied iEneas to Italy, and had brought
the image of the goddess with him.1 The Aurelii had a worship
1 Liv. i. 31. 2 Plin. H. N. iii. 5 ; Serv. ^En. xi. 836.
3 Dionys. iv. 14; Cato de R. R. v. ; Yarro, vi. 25 ; Macrob. Sat. i. 7.
4 Dionvs. vi. 00 ; Sew. Mn. ii. 166, v. 704.
22 ROME.
of the sun-god peculiar to themselves ; from him they claimed
to descend, and the state had actually appointed them a place of
their own on which to offer their sacrifice. The Julian family
always conducted the sendee of Vejovis at Bovillse, and it
was only when the Julii acquired sovereign power that the
cultus became a public one. The Fabii had a sacrifice to Her-
cules on the Quirinal; the Horatii certain expiatory rites to
direct ; the Servilii, iEmilii, and Cornelii had also similar family
obligations.1 The duties of a priesthood of this kind were always
to be executed by a male of the family, but beside him the
greater solemnities also required the presence of three or four
more only of the Gentiles.2 Still these duties were burdensome ;
for a general was often obliged to leave his army in the middle
of warlike operations, and to hurry to Home to take part in a
sacrifice of his gens.3
The long succession of victories, and the conquests, but seldom
interrupted by discomfitures, which the Romans made from
the beginning of the republic to the end of the second Punic
war, fed and cherished, during these three centuries, belief in,
and attachment to, the gods of Rome. Such a course of vic-
tories was to them the most striking proof that their gods were
the mightiest, and the devotion of the Romans the best and
most pleasing in their eyes. It was the gods who made Rome
great, Rome's arm invincible ; and they could not do otherwise,
for, by their zealous exactness in the auspices, sacrifices, and
ritual, their clients had, as it were, constrained them to give them
victory and dominion over the other nations. If a Roman army
or fleet met with a misfortune, that was a punishment for an error
occurring in their cultus, or a sin committed against the gods.
Thus the Roman fleet at Drepanum had to do penance for the
sacrilege of Claudius, who ordered the sacred pullets to be thrown
into the sea for not eating ; so, too, Flaminius was punished with
his own and his army's destruction at the lake Thrasymene for
daringly and contemptuously acting against the divine portents.
But, on the whole, " is it a marvel that the uninterrupted favour
of the gods should have watched over the extension and mainte-
nance of a kingdom which seems, with a superfluity of carefulness,
to submit the most insignificant religious relations to trial ? for
1 Macrob. Sat. i. 16. - Dion vs. ix. II). 3 Liv. v. 6 and lii. 41, 10, &c.
RELIGION A POLITICAL INSTRUMENT. X6
never has our citizen community turned away its eyes from the
most scrupulous observance of the worship of the gods."1 Thus
a Roman both thought and spoke.
The first blow of consequence which the existing state of re-
ligion in its exclusive patrician character received was inflicted
by the Licinian law, in the year 367 b.c Hitherto the custody
of the Sibylline books had been committed to two priests of
patrician blood ; now a college of ten men, afterwards increased
to fifteen, was formed, half of which number was to be made up
of plebeians. They were " interpreters of the destiny of the Ro-
man people -,"2 on their judgment any foreign worship was intro-
duced (the cultus of Apollo may be specified), and the holding of
the Apollinarian games was a duty of theirs. (These games, at
first only vowed casually, were repeated every year from 210 b.c,
and Apollo was added to the number of the guardian gods of
Rome, though he still had his sanctuary outside the city.) After
this, in the year 300 b.c, the Ogulnian law laid open even the
pontificate and the augurate to the plebeians, who were now
on terms of complete political equality with the patricians, and
through this the old order of things received a tremendous
shake. In the year 253, for the first time, a plebeian, Titus
Coruncanius, became Pontifex maximus, and in 210 another
was Curio maximus.
Greeks, like Polybius, who saw the whole edifice of the Ro-
man state-religion already in the first stage of its downward
progress (about 140 b.c), admired it still as a masterpiece of
human prudence and of political calculation, holding, in ac-
cordance with the notions of their day, the natural growth — the
produce of ages — to have been a systematic erection. " It is my
opinion," said Scipio's friend and counsellor, " that the Roman
constitution deserves the preference in its comprehension of
divine things, and just that which is blamed by others is to my
mind the mainstay of the Roman state, viz. a superstitious fear
(deisidaimonia) of the gods. For with them their religious sys-
tem is so surrounded with terror, and so woven into all the rela-
tions of social and political life, that nothing can surpass it. This
they seem to me to have done for the sake of the many ; for as
these are thoughtless, full of irregular desires, of blind anger and
hot passions, there is nothing left but to tame that multitude by
1 Val. Max. i. 1-8; cf. Plut Marcell. iv. 5. 2 Liv. x. s.
24 ROME.
such jugglery as will work ou their fears."1 This judgment of
one who lived seventeen years in Rome, and of whom it has been
said with justice that he was more an intelligent and politically
wise Roman than a Greek, assuredly was the view of not a few
Romans of the day.
The fact is, that the Roman religion, and, above all, the wide
field of auspices and other means of ascertaining the divine will
in it, was perfectly adapted to be a master-key to domination in
the hands of a priestly class of aristocrats. As all political trans-
actions were united with a host of religious formalities and ex-
ternal tokens of divine assent, so long as the patricians were in
exclusive possession of the state- auspices, the temptation was
always a proximate one to them to make use of these means to
throw obstacles in the way of all popular decrees that were dis-
pleasing to them. One sees this clearly in the case of the laws
^Elia and Fufia, 156 b.c. These, in the first place, inculcated
generally the necessity of taking auspices in the popular assem-
blies, and then further decreed that it was open to all the offi-
cers of state to observe the heavens when they chose ; and that,
when this happened, no assembly of the people could be held. For
it was, in fact, quite possible that any one of the public officials,
during his observation, might notice an unfavourable appear-
ance, lightning or such like, sufficient to say that the gods for-
bade the assembly and its decree. Later on, Bibulus (59 b.c)
employed this weapon in order to impede the new Agrarian law
of Cresar, giving notice of his intention to observe the heavens
every comitial day ;2 and, two years after, Milo resorted to the
same expedient.3 The Sibylline books, which were said by Cicero
to be so equivocal in their composition that any event could be
predicted from them, were similarly abused to the service of fac-
tions or influential persons, as, for instance, when the banished
Egyptian king Auletes repaired to Rome for assistance, they
were made to say that danger threatened Rome in case she re-
placed an expelled Egyptian king on the throne by force of arms.4
These examples are from the last times of the republic ; but it
cannot be doubted that the same thing happened frequently
' t?7 roiavTT) TpayaSia, Polybius says, vi. 56.
2 T)io. Cass, xxxviii. 6 ; Suet. Cses. 20; Cic. pro Domo sua, ]5; cle Harusp.
resp. 23. 8 Cic. ad Att. iv. 3.
4 Dio. Cass, xxxix. 15; Cic. ad Fam. i. ?, 3 ; Appian. Mithr. p xi .r> J .
ROMAN GODS HELLEN1SED. 25
before. Fabius Cunctator, himself an augur, veiling his want of
faith under a mask of patriotism, had before this time declared
that whatever was for the interests of the republic took place
under good auspices, whatever to its detriment under bad.1
Greek influence became eminently decisive of the existence
of the old Roman religion. Beginning with the middle of the
third century B.C., after the second Punic war, it penetrated with
irresistible force into Roman life, Roman ways of thought, and
religious views. The subjection of the Greek cities in lower
Italy, which took place at that time, had first the effect of
opening a way for the Greek tongue, and then for fragments of
Greek literature. The Romans next carried the war into the soil
of Greece proper, and, from the year 146 b.c till the Christian
era, the whole of the Greek-speaking world became, directly or
indirectly, tributaries to Rome. From the year 167, thousands
of Achaeans, who had been carried into Italy, the most cultivated
minds of their nation, carried Greek civilisation over the whole
peninsula ; and the philosophers, who came to Rome as ambassa-
dors from Athens in the year 155 b.c, awakened in the Roman
youth, whom they instructed, an entirely new enthusiasm for
Greek rhetoric and wisdom.
From this period there runs through Roman history a struggle
between two tendencies, extremely opposite, yet of very un-
equally matched powers. On the one side, the patriotic-minded
amongst the Romans were desirous of having the primitive wor-
ship of the gods of their fatherland preserved in as undisturbed
a purity as possible, and of excluding the insinuation of foreign
ideas and usages, especially Greek. But, on the other, the po-
verty and want of ideas in this religious system and service
pressed for the introduction of new types of gods and forms of
worship, with a richer garniture of mythology, and promising a
speedier contentment of the greatly changed requirements of the
Roman ; and called also for an assimilation of the old Latin and
Sabine gods, by blending them together with the Greek. To
these points the educated already felt themselves drawn through
the acquaintance they had formed with Greek literature. Only
by hellenising their own deities could they, on their side, delight
themselves in the poetic glory with which the Greek invested his
gods, and converted them into objects, if not of reverential devo-
1 Cic. de Senect. 4.
26 ROME.
tion, at least of sesthetical pleasure, and cheerful and intimate
relations. At bottom, the Roman religion was based only on
two ideas, — the might of the gods who were friendly to Rome,
and the power of the ceremonies over the gods. How could
a religion, so poverty-stricken of thought, with its troops of
phantom gods, beingless shadows and deified abstractions, re-
main unscathed and unaltered when it came in contact with
the profusion of the Greek religion, with its circle of gods,
so full of life, so thoroughly anthropomorphised, so deeply in-
terwoven into every thing human? Those primitive agrarian
deities and ceremonies, those sacrifices and rude rites of fratres
Arvales, Salii, and Luperci, must have struck the eye of the
Roman of Greek education, like the boyish sports of his people's
youth, which the mature manhood of a state, advancing with
firm stride to a world's dominion, had long outgrown.
Up to this time Rome had produced no literature. Docu-
ments about public contracts, a dry city- chronicle, ritual and
calendar notices of the pontiffs, which were for long inacces-
sible to the plebeians, augural books, genealogical records of
particular families and panegyrics of their more distinguished
members, — to such reading, and no better, Rome was limited.
After the year 250, Livius Andronicus and Nsevius began to
domesticate in Rome the Greek legends of god and hero ; the
first in tragedy, the latter principally in comedy. From the
year 200, a still more powerful impression was produced by
Ennius, the real creator of Roman poetry and poetical language,
who, in his poetical version of Euhemerus, made the Romans
acquainted with the theory that the gods were but deified men,
whose death and places of burial were known to people; and,
in his Epicharmus, published the Pythagorean doctrine of the
Sicilian comic writer about God, nature, and the soul; and
actually wove into his Roman annals long episodes of Pytha-
gorean philosophy. From him the Romans learned to con-
sider as the kernel of old Italic wisdom the doctrine that,
fundamentally, there was but one god, Jupiter, and that he
was naught else but the sun-fire, which, as the world's soul,
is the source of all that is living and spiritual, pervading cor-
poreal nature.1 An expression of his had been already welcomed
in Rome with tumultuous applause, to this effect : " I have ever
1 The passages in Varro, v. 64, 65.
ROMAN GODS HELLENISED. 27
said, and will say still, there is a race of celestial gods ; but I
believe they do not trouble themselves about the doings of
men."1
Meanwhile the number of Greek slaves increased at Rome ;
amongst them were rhetoricians, grammarians, and partisans of
one or other of the schools of philosophy; and the Romans began
to intrust the education of their sons to these men, in whose
eyes the old Roman rite was, certainly in many cases, nothing
but a rude and barbarian superstition. The experience was soon
acquired, which Cicero's grandfather gave expression to : " A
Roman's wickedness increases in proportion to his acquaintance
with Greek authors."2 The conquests in Greece and the East,
particularly the capture of Syracuse and Corinth, brought toge-
ther at Rome images of gods, the chefs-d'oeuvre of the best sculp-
tors, in ever-increasing quantities : the patriots took alarm ; they
feared, and rightly, the effects of these statues on their religious
system ; they heard many ridicule the simplicity and deformity
of the old clay gods of Rome, which now first struck all eyes
when compared with the Hellenic statues.3 But while the works
of Grecian art were now powerfully abetting the hellenising of the
Roman gods, the forms and rites of divine worship haughtily with-
drew from any more attractive transformation through the aesthetic
Greek ritual. The awe of the unassailable holiness of ritual was
too deeply rooted in a Roman's soul, and there were far too great
results from the punctual fulfilment of each particular, for people
to have ventured on meddling with it or introducing novelties.
Meanwhile the meaning of these antique usages had been lost
in many cases, with the thorough change of manners : a strange
sense was often imputed to them, as to the deities themselves ;
and the elder Cato already complained that many of the augu-
ries and auspices had become entirely obsolete through the negli-
gence of the college.4
In proportion as contact and intercourse with other nations
increased, the longing for strange gods also grew. Where a few
supreme gods do not absorb the complete and unconditional
confidence of their worshipers, as in the case of Syrians and
Phoenicians, polytheism is insatiable ; even the hosts of untold
gods, such as Rome possessed, could not satisfy them. There is
1 Cic. de Div. ii. 50. 2 Cic. de Orat. 6.
3 Liv. xxxiv. 4, xlv. 39. 4 Cic. de Div. i. 15.
28
ROME.
always a suspicion that this or that god may have been forgot-
ten, and perhaps one of the most important ; that if this much-
esteemed stranger-god and his worship could be introduced, people
would soon have satisfactory proof of the advantage of doing so.
And then such new gods take precedence of the old native ones ;
they have not been so used up ; they have still more of the mys-
terious about them ; there are not so many instances of prayers and
vows left unheard.1 As often as Rome was visited with heavy
distress, dangers, or misfortunes, this desire was roused, and the
people were not contented with the deities brought in on this or
that occasion, by advice of the Sibylline books. When a pestilence
lasted, shrines were raised of exotic and barbarian gods, and, in
private houses, new and extraordinary ceremonies and expiations
were resorted to ; this had been experienced as early as the year
428 b.c, during a lingering drought and plague. The iEdiles
had been directed by the senate to take steps against new and
foreign ceremonies; and to provide that no other but Roman
gods should be worshiped, and these only after the fashion of their
fathers. So again in the year 215, after the overthrow at Cannse,
the urban Prsetor, besides interdicting foreign rites, made pro-
clamation "that every one who had in his possession books of
divination, prayers, or instructions upon the service of the gods,
should deliver them up to him." These regulations had scarcely
even a transitory effect.
The discovery of the abominations practised in the Baccha-
nalia must have increased the repugnance in all Roman-minded
people to foreign religions. In Rome alone as many as seven
thousand men had joined these nocturnal orgies, which had
been brought by Greeks to Etruria, and from thence into
Rome and the rest of Italy, and in which unchastity, murder, or
human sacrifice, and poisoning were rife. Executions en masse
followed their discovery, in the year 186. The celebration of
the Bacchanalia was prohibited to all Romans and their allies ;
and it is only casually mentioned, that a few years afterwards
a Praetor condemned in one year three thousand men for poison-
ing, so frightful a hold had this union of crime and religious
worship taken.2
Shortly afterwards, in the year 181, the far-famed finding of
the books of king Numa took place. Two stone coffins were
1 Comp. Lucian. Icaromenipp. 2 Liv. xxxi. 8-19; Val. Max. vi. ;i 7.
FOREIGN WORSHIPS. 29
dug up in the field of a scribe, Petillius, one of which, according
to the inscription, professed to contain the corpse of the king,
and the other his writings. The first was empty, but the writ-
ings discovered in the second had quite a fresh appearance ; the
Latin, treating of pontifical law, regarded the principles of divine
rites and ordinances, and the Greek contained philosophy. It
was found that the tendency of the greater part of these writings
was to the destruction of religion, and they were therefore burnt
by decree of the senate.1 Every circumstance here points to a
forgery : whilst the bones of the king had quite disappeared,
from the length of time, in one of the coffins, the books in the
other seemed quite fresh; moreover, these books were written
on paper, which only came into use centuries after; and, besides,
were partly in the Greek tongue, and that at a time when
as yet no writings in prose had issued in Greece itself. All
these facts taken in connexion with the facility of reading the
documents, where and when the language had undergone a
thorough change, raise the suspicion of imposture almost to a
certainty. Many contemporary events point to a religious fer-
mentation and movement going on at the time; the occurrences
in the Bacchanalia, the translation of Euhemerus by Ennius,
the expulsion of two Epicureans, Alcseus and Philiscus,2 a few
years afterwards, and the decree of the senate of the year 161,
that philosophers and rhetoricians could not be tolerated in
Rome.3 The writings were certainly an attempt to interpret the
Roman gods and religious usages in the sense of a philosophical
system, probably that of Epicurus, and thereby to pave the way
to insure it a position in Rome.4
It cannot be affirmed that the Romans of the later times of
the free commonwealth were discontented with their state-gods
in a political point of view — gods who had granted their republic
to the full all they had in early times promised them, victory,
power, and dominion : and if a great calamity befell the state in
battle with a foreign people, like the loss of Crassus and his army,
most people were even ready to believe that the fault was imput-
1 Liv. xl. 29 ; Plin. H. N. xiii. 27 ; Plut. Num. c. xxii.
2 Athen. xii 68. p. 547 ; .Elian. V. H. ix. 12.
3 Gell. xv. 11 ; Suet, de Clar. Khet. c. i.
4 For what can be said as to the authenticity of the hooks, see Lasaulx, Studies
des Klass. Alterth. pp. 99-105.
30 ROME.
able to the generals having obstinately despised all warnings from
the gods.1 But in matters of private interest the old native gods
no longer satisfied the people. In sickness, love-affairs, gains and
losses, and the like, the foreign deities rendered, as they thought,
better service. In the last times of the republic it was no longer
in 'the power of the state-officers to check the current of this dei-
sidaimonia ; and yet, as a rule, it was only a foreigner who could
minister as a priest to a foreign god ; no born Roman was allowed
to give himself such an office.- Accordingly the Idsean Mother in
Rome had a priest and a priestess, but both were Phrygians ; and
Dionysius was particularly struck with this forbearance from
strange priesthoods on the part of the Romans, though indeed
this became different in the times of the Csesars. The senate
continued the war against the strange worships, such as the
people preferred; but its powers of resistance were constantly
being more and more crippled. It had the images of Serapis,
Isis, Harpocrates, and Anubis overthrown; but the people set
them up again by force.2 It decreed that the temples erected
to Isis and Serapis should be destroyed, but not a workman
would lay hand upon them; the consul iEmilius Paulus him-
self seized an axe and broke-in the doors of the temple ;3 but
not long after, the Isis-cultus was again in fall swing at
Rome. In Sylla's time there even existed a college of Pasto-
phori at Rome. In the year 48 b.c the haruspices again had all
the temples of Isis and Serapis destroyed; but shortly afterwards
the number of the priests of Isis was so increased that Volusius,
when exiled by the Triumvirs, chose their dress in order to slip
unobserved into the camp of Brutus.4 In the year 43, the
Triumvirs, Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian, even decreed the
erection of an Isis-temple.5
Dionysius was struck with admiration of this also in the Ro-
mans, that while they revelled in riches and luxury, they still
preserved the ancient simplicity and poverty of worship, and went
on setting before their gods cakes of barley-mea^l, toasted wheat,
and a few fruits upon the antique wooden tables in earthen pots
and dishes, and poured their libations from wooden cups and
beakers.6 It struck him how every thing that concerned the
1 Dionys. ii. 0. 2 Tertull. ad Nat. i. 14.
3 Val. Max. i. 3. 4 Val. Max. vii. 3-8; Dio. Cass. xlii. 20.
s Dio. Cass. i. 7-15. 6 Dionys. ii. 2-).
SIGNS OF RELIGIOUS DECAY. 31
gods was undertaken with prudence and reverence, quite different
from the ways of Greeks and barbarians. Nevertheless, the long
period of the civil wars, during which the republic was languishing
and dying out, was, on the whole, also a period of religious decay ;
and indeed it could not be otherwise, apart from all the influence
of Epicurean philosophy, in a religion so closely blended with the
being of the state, and only valued in proportion to the successes
it brought. A priesthood of such importance as that of the Flamen
Dialis remained vacant for the space of seventy -six years, till
Augustus at last, in the year 743, again appointed to it.1 The
auspices — what scores of times they had deceived during this last
period ! — were either quite given up, especially in war, or were
used as empty formalities to make a show, or they were publicly
treated as a mere political tool with which to hamper an adversary
in his undertakings. On the other hand, there were undoubtedly
religious solemnities of which a more extensive use was now
made than formerly. The supplications — those solemn prayer-
meetings or processions in which all ranks took part, and, with
garlands on their heads, marched to the temples of the chief
gods — used only to last a single day at first; then, on the
suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy, and afterwards in
thanksgiving for Caesar's victories, a solemnity of the kind was
ordained for fifteen days; and they were further prolonged
to twenty, forty, and even fifty days.2 This, however, took
place more with a view of doing homage to great statesmen or
conquerors than to the gods. There was also now no longer any
hesitation about adopting the oriental custom of apotheosis in
Rome. At first it was simply unapproved that Greek cities
should institute festivals, priests, and sacrifices to Roman gene-
rals or consuls ; and in this way the inhabitants of Syracuse had
already kept a feast in honour of Marcellus. In Asia Minor the
same devotion had been shown to Mucius Scaevola and Lucullus ;
Titus Flamininus, in Plutarch's time, still retained priests and
sacrifice in the town of Chalcis, which he had saved. Public
buildings there were dedicated to him and Apollo. The cities of
the province of Asia offered to erect a temple to Cicero, but he
1 Dio. Cass. liv. 36; Suet. Octav. 31; Tac. Ann. iii. 58 (where the time is
incorrectly stated at seventy-two years).
2 Caes. B. G. ii. 35, iv. 38; Cic. de Prov. Cons. 10; Phil. xiv. 11; Suet.
Cfes. 24.
32 ROME.
declined the honour.1 It happened, too, that states impeached
of extortion at Rome the very men to whom they had previously
erected temples at home, as was the case with Appius Clodius
and the Cilicians. The building of temples in honour of the
Roman proconsuls became a regular custom in the provinces,
though many of them were more like evil demons than philan-
thropic beings.2 This practice seems to have been favoured at
Rome ; for, in a law which forbade the governors of provinces
laying on arbitrary taxes, the case of an impost in aid of a build-
ing of the kind was expressly excepted.3
Though Cicero's opinion of the Asiatics was, that, through
long slavery, they had become inured to excessive adulation, yet
the Romans soon chimed in with the conviction that they were
allowed to do for their new lords what the other cities of the
empire had long done for the officers of the republic who were
liable to be called i nd recalled. The senate exalted Csesar, the
descendant of Venus, to a seat among the gods. His house
had a pediment like a temple ; and games were to be celebrated
every lustrum in his honour. His image was carried round in
procession with those of the other gods in the circus, and in
the lectisternia it was laid upon the cushions in the same com-
pany. He was called Jupiter, and a temple in common was
decreed to him and dementia, on account of his mildness, and
in it the two deities extended hands one to the other. Antony
esteemed it an honour to become the Flamen of the new Jupiter.4
And yet no temple of his own was built to the new deity during
his lifetime ; and instead of this he was made temple-associate of
Quirinus, where his statue was erected with the inscription " To
the invincible god."
Octavian, more moderate than Caesar, did not tolerate divine
honours being paid him in Rome itself; temples, at least, were
not allowed to be erected to him in Italy, though he winked at
that being done in the provinces. Immediately after his death,
however, his cultus was set up on the largest scale. Twenty-one
senators, chosen by lot, Tiberius himself being one of them,
undertook the priesthood of the new god, and his widow Livia
in like manner became his priestess.5 In a very short time every
1 Cic. ad Attic, v. 21. 2 Suet. Oct. 52. 3 Cic. ad Quint, fratrem, ep. i. 1.
4 Cic. Phil. ii. 42; Suet. Caes. 81; Flor. iv. 2; Dio. xliv.6; Appian, ii. 404,
519 ; Plut. Cass. 57. 5 Tac. Ann. i. 54.
AUGUSTUS SUPREME PONTIFF.
33
one of the more distinguished houses in Rome had its own col-
lege of worshipers of Augustus.1
When Octavian, now absolute sovereign, added to his other
dignities and powers the supreme priesthood as the keystone of
his princedom, he did not neglect to invest himself with the
conduct of the whole system of religion. All the colleges of
priests were put under him. He filled the vacated benefices,
he himself named the vestal virgins, and decided upon the
authority of books containing soothsayings and interpretations of
prodigies, as well as upon the consultation and exposition of the
Sibylline ones. In all religious cases, or such as were in any way
connected with religion, and over all crimes having the character
of religious offences, he constituted himself supreme judge.2 If,
in many instances, the colleges of priests still passed sentence,
yet there were others settled by a simple decree of the Caesar as
high-priest. The power of the pontifex maximus had previously
been confined to the city of Rome and its liberties, but under the
Caesars it was extended even to the provinces. There is an in-
stance on record of Pliny consulting Trajan whether an ancient
shrine of the Mother of the gods in Bithynia might be pulled
down.3
Octavian laid considerable stress upon the revival of this
office, partly to satisfy the obligations of his sacerdotal dignity,
and partly because of the almost universal conviction, even
including those Roman statesmen who were privately the most
unbelieving, that the religious system formed an indispens-
able basis of empire. He himself, it is true, by his union with
Livia, had thrown ridicule upon religion and the college of pon-
tiffs ; but now he restored many religious customs that had fallen
into oblivion;4 he increased the number of patricians, who during
the civil war had been so sadly reduced, in order that the rites
and sacerdotal offices of patrician families might not be extin-
guished.5 Meanwhile, though he was so strongly averse to foreign
religious practices, as a noxious parasitical growth sapping the
tree of the state, he was unable to curtail the extent of its grasp,
and to loosen its increasing tenacity in Rome, for a length of
time. The numbers of peregrini in Rome had been swelled
1 Tac. loc. cit. i. 73.
2 Dio. Cass. liii. 7 ; liv. 17 ; Cell, i. 12; Tac. Ann. iii. 59.
3 Plin. Epist. x. 7:3, 74. 4 Suet. Oct. xxxi. 5 Dio. Cass. Iii. 42.
VOL. II. D
34 ROME.
enormously since the opening of his reign ; and they could not
be prevented practising their native worship, at least in private
houses without temples. Rome became more and more a Pan-
theon of the gods and religions of the whole empire.
Terentius Varro, the most learned Horn an of his time, had
shortly before attempted to come to the assistance of these reli-
gious exigencies by another way, that of learned investigation and
compilations. His undertaking to revive and bring nearer to the
people the old religion, partly gone to decay and forgotten, and
partly obscured by mistakes and rude mechanical treatment,
evidently betrayed how desperate such a task was. Many tem-
ples, sanctuaries, and old images of the gods had already disap-
peared, or had been destroyed, or become private property.1
Many a rite that had been long in use was lost for want of place
to practise it, or from a family dying out. Varro, with his in-
dustry in compilation and his knowledge of Roman antiquities,
intended to put together again the, as it were, scattered limbs,
to replace what was lost, and to reinfuse life into the whole.
Addicted himself, at least in an eclectic way, to the Stoic philo-
sophy, he caught at an idea, first broached by the Stoics, and
then developed by the famous pontifex maximus Mucius Scaevola,
namely, that one must distinguish a triple religion and divine
teaching, — the mythical system belonging to poets, a religion
peculiar to philosophers, and the municipal one of cultus in the
cities. Varro certainly thought the latter had taken up the first,
the poetico-fabulous, and that these legends, unworthy as they
were of the gods, were represented in the theatrical games insti-
tuted by the state, as a component part of the worship of the
gods, and unfortunately found an easy entrance into the popular
creed. At this point philosophy was to come in to aid the state-
religion by symbolic explanation, of the myths. Varro used the
Stoic teaching for this purpose, starting with the dogma of an
ether-god, or divine world-soul. To him the primary Roman
gods are symbols of a mundus consisting of ether and body,
the two parts of which, Ccelus and Tellus, were at the head of
two series of gods, a male and female, whilst the demons
(Lares, Penates, and Genii) dwelt in the lower region of the air.
He explained the immense number of Roman deities simply by
the multiplication of names that were given one god according
1 Cic. N. D. i. 20; St. Aug. Civ. Dei, iii. 17.
THE ROMAN GODS. 35
to his different functions ; thus, on one side, comparing Jupiter
(his ether) with the God of the Jews/ on the other, enumerating
300 different Jupiters. And, as the soul of man is an emanation
from the world-soul, it was easy for him to adopt an order of
gods who had become so, namely, by being exalted through con-
secration from men to gods, and in this way to justify the cul-
tus of the Lares. But, since his explanations, as he probably him-
self felt, by no means squared with the real historical sense of the
system of gods and usages, again he maintained there was much
that was true in religion which it was not beneficial for the people
to know ; nay, even that it was often of advantage to the com-
munity that the people should hold what was false to be true.2
II. The Roman Gods.
The worship of Janus must have been as old in Italy as it was
widely spread. Both Etruscans and Latins had it ; and though,
according to one account, the god came from Perrhcebia, in the
north of Greece, to Italy, yet he was such a strange being, and
so different from the known Grecian gods, that neither Dionysius
nor Ovid was able to identify him with any single one of the latter.3
By origin he was a sun-god, or the power of nature working
through the sun, — an inference deducible from the antique
Jana, who was a goddess of the moon. He was represented
either with two heads, as surveying east and west, or as the
rising and setting sun, or with four heads in Falerii, as looking
to the four quarters of the heavens. In all he was a natural
and elemental god in the most general sense of the term ; hence
Varro interpreted him to be the world, i.e. the heaven ; or he
was made a son of Ccelus and Hecate (the primeval mother
Night), and people hesitated between this interpretation and the
other, which took him to be a sun-god.4 But as in the Roman
system of gods the elemental and astral deities generally retired
into the background, or were metamorphosed into beings more
personal and of greater freedom in action, it is also impossible
now to discern the ancient meaning involved in the Roman Janus.
1 St. Aug. de Cons. Evang. i. 22, 41. 2 Tertull. Apol. xiv.
3 Dionys. iii. 32 ; Ovid. Fasti, i. 89, 90. 4 Arnob. iii. 9.
36 ROMAN GODS.
He continued throughout one of the supreme gods, and was
eulogised in the Salian hymns as god of gods. The sacrificial
king continued to offer him the significant sacrifice of a ram in
the Regia ; but the Capitoline Jupiter had ousted him from his
earlier high position. As the saga, giving elsewhere expression
to a definite stage of reflection in the popular mind, represents
the gods as earthly monarchs and fathers of races, so in the Italic
saga Janus also was converted into the oldest of the native kings
of Italy, who taught the inhabitants their customs and how to
worship the gods. It was he who hospitably welcomed the
stranger Saturn on his arrival, and, when he became the inventor
of agriculture, associated him with himself as co-regent.
As to cultus, Janus was the guardian of the gates of heaven,
the opener and shutter of heaven, the land, and the sea: the
mover of "the hinges of the universe/' the bearer of the sym-
bolical key, and alternately invoked by the priests in the sacri-
fice, under the titles of Clusius and Patulcius, and in prayers
which related to propagation of the human species, as Con-
sivius. His power was of unlimited extent, for as vouchsafing a
beginning, and granting a blessing, it related to all states and
operations of nature, as well as of human life. He was, as St.
Augustine styles him,1 the Jupiter Initiator, who, from the com-
mencement, sent down blessing and increase on the whole work.
So, on every solemnity, he was the first to be prayed and sacri-
ficed to, in order, as Macrobius says, to open communications
with the god whom a man intended to worship, just as if he
passed the prayer on through his doors to the other deities.2 In
the myth of his having with Juturna begotten Fontus, the god
of springs, and therefore the parent- source of water, a trace is dis-
coverable of his antique elemental signification. It was only at
a much later period he became a god of time, though he early
had the beginning of the year dedicated to him ; and one of
the principal feasts, that of the first of January, celebrated with
the offering to him of the Janual, a sacrifice of cake. His
image — it was only afterwards and in exceptional cases that he
came to be delineated in human form complete — represented
with its fingers the number 365. It was the business of twelve
Salii, one for each of the months, to sing his praises ; and twelve
altars were dedicated to him. Perhaps, as a consequence of his
1 Civ. Dei, iv. II. a Macrob. Sat. i. «.).
FAUNUS. 87
attribute of a key, lie also became a god of the thoroughfare,
of the city gates, which had formerly two arches in Rome,
and of the house-doors ; and thus his power or action extended
to all in-comers and out-goers, and his two heads or faces
pointed to the exit or entrance through such gates or doors.
A gated hall in Rome was called Janus Bifrons, or Gcminus;
and, as the image of the god with its double face was placed in
it, it was afterwards also called a temple. This was the sanctuary
which, by a regulation dating back to Numa, was shut every
time peace was concluded, and opened on the outbreak of war.
In fine, Janus also stood in immediate relations to the Roman
citizenship. His titles were Quirinus, as protector of the Qui-
rites ; Curiatius, in respect of the assembly of the Curia r1 and,
besides the gated hall just mentioned, he had also another tem-
ple restored by Augustus, and dedicated by Tiberius.2
Whether Faunus be one with the phantom wood-god Sil-
vanus, or distinct from him, what his relation was to the
Fauns, and whether he were god or demon, are questions easier
asked than solved. His worship was pre-Roman, and Latin.
The Romans, says Dionysius, ascribe to this demon all panic-
striking and ghostly appearances, and all strange cries and sounds
that alarm the ear.3 It was, therefore, natural that he should
afterwards have been put on a par with the Greek Pan, whom
in fact he strongly resembles. Like him, he was a god of
flocks and herds, a provoking demon of the forest ; and as Pan
was also a god of oracles, there was, in a precinct at Tibur,
an oracle of Faunus, under the designation of the soothsaying
god Fatuus, the consulters of which slept upon the fleeces of
sheep, slain by the priests, in order to learn the god's answer in
dreams. He was called Lupercus, as guardian and preserver of
the flocks from wolves, and in old times human sacrifices were
offered to him, as is indicated in the saga, that he sacrificed
all the strangers coming into Latium. In Rome, on the feast of
the Lupercalia, goats were sacrificed, but at the same time, two
youths, led up to the altar, had their foreheads marked with the
bloody knives of sacrifice, the blood-mark being immediately
rubbed off with milk, upon which they were to laugh, as ex-
pressing their joy that the goats had been slain instead of them-
1 Varro, v. 165, vi. 34, vii. 85 ; Serv. ^En. vii. 608; Joh. Lyd. de Mens. p. 50.
2 Tac. Ann. ii. 49. 3 Dionys. Hal. v. 16.
38 ROMAN GODS.
selves. The skins of the slaughtered he- or she-goats were cut
into pieces and strips after the sacrificial banquet, and then the
Lupercus-priests, naked, except so far as the pieces covered, and
with the strips in hand, ran from the place of sacrifice through
the city, and struck with the strips all the maidens and women
they met, or who put themselves in their way in the hope of
being purified by the blows and becoming fruitful mothers.1
Saturn was one of the old Latin deities, who, at a very early
period, came to be identified with the Greek Cronos, and thus also
with the Phoenician. He and Janus, with whose worship his
own was intimately connected, belong to the oldest of the Italian
deities. The Saturnii, probably before the Trojan war, were
sacrificing to him upon the Capitol, and the sagas make him
into a primitive sovereign who came from the East into Italy,
and, by the introduction of agriculture, tamed and humanised
the aborigines. The sickle and pruning-knife were his em-
blems. He blest the harvest, and, as Stercutius, was also a
manure-god.2 To him was attached the memory of a golden
age and a peaceful kingdom. On his feast, which was celebrated
with banquets, slaves enjoyed a transitory freedom and equality
with, their masters, and offenders a remission of punishment. His
images were hollow, and filled with oil, the head covered, the feet
swathed in a woollen fillet, removed on feast-days ; and to him
alone sacrifice was offered with bare head and lighted tapers.3
The same confusion of deity, which frequently makes the real
nature of the Itoman gods so enigmatical and uncertain, is exhi-
bited in his being also a god of the lower world, and in the old
rite, which, however, was soon mitigated, requiring an atone-
ment of human life to be made him ;4 so that it was said of
him he had ruled with great cruelty in Italy, Sicily, and the
larger portion of Libya.5 With this double aspect of the god
appears to be connected the attribution of two different con-
sorts; the one, Lua, to whom after battle the captured arms
were burnt in expiation for the blood shed; the other Ops, like
himself, a goddess of fruitfulness and protectress of agriculture,
1 Varro, v. GO; Ov. Fasti, ii. iii") sqq.; Serv. JEn. viii. 343; Justin, xliii. 1.
- Macrob. Sat. i. 7 ; St. Aug. Civ. Dei, xviii. 15 ; Lact. i. 20, •".(;.
3 Macrob. Sat. i. 7; Fest. p. 484, v. " Saturno;" Serv. Mn. iii. 407.
4 Plut. Qusest. Horn. 11-34.
6 Lyd. de Mens. iv. 48; Macrob. Sat. i. ? ; Arnob. ii. 68.
JUPITER. 39
thence called Consiva, the plantress; but also a Chthonic deity
like Demeter ; and therefore, whoever invoked her, did not omit
touching the ground.1
Jupiter, like the Grecian Zeus, was preeminently the Roman
god of the heaven and the weather. As lord and giver of the
light, he was styled Lucetius ; and his power over the phenomena
of the atmosphere, rain and storm, thunder and lightning, was
indicated by the Romans in his titles of Pluvius, Fulgurator,
Tonans, and Serenator. His surname of Elicius, under which
invocation he had an altar on the Aventine, bore reference to
the saga that there was a secret means of drawing down light-
ning, and even the god in person, from heaven; and that Numa,
who succeeded in this practice with the aid of the other gods,
had obliged the god, demanding human sacrifices, to content
himself with a promise of substitutive symbols.2 As an emblem
of the lightning, he carried a flint-stone in his hand, from which
sparks could be elicited.
The worship of Jupiter Latiaris, who, as patron-god of the
old Latin confederation, had his annual festival with sacrifices of
bulls on the Alban Mount, passed into Roman hands. They
observed it with the greatest solemnity, but also with the addition
of a human sacrifice, for which purpose a criminal was chosen in
later times.3 But the real Roman state-god and supreme pro-
tector of Rome was Jupiter, " the highest and best," whose wor-
ship was already established on the Capitol by the Tarquins. There
stood his colossal bronze image, cast from the armour of van-
quished enemies; there were deposited all the presents that
Rome or her allies appointed to be made him ; and thither the
new consuls resorted to offer their vows for the welfare of the
republic, and the victorious generals to present their thank-
offerings. The warlike signification was the prevalent one in him,
in accordance with the tendency of the state, and the designa-
tions under which he held particular sanctuaries or images related
to battle and victory. He was called Imperator, Stator (the
stayer of flight), Feretrius (or the smiter of the flying foe), &c.
1 Varro, vi. 21 ; Macrob. Sat, i. 10.
2 Ov. Fasti, iii. 285 sqq. ; Arnob. v. i.
3 Minuc Octav. 30; Lact. i. 21 ; Prudent, adv. Symmach. i. 397. It is not
gladiatorial combats that are meant, as Hartung and Schwenck say : Minucius
expressly contradicts that view.
40 ROMAN GODS.
The Romans were cognisant of no mythical sagas of their
Jupiter j with them, who in general were averse to making their
gods genealogically related, he had neither parents nor sons. In
fact, so little was there of the concrete or personal about him,
that most of the other male deities were all but identical with
him, and had their rise in the idea of him. Thus one of the old
Latin gods was Vejovis or Vedius, an idol with arrows and hunt-
ing spears in its hands.1 When invoked by Lucius Furius in
the battle of Cremona, it was he who brought the rescue ; and in
urban devotions he was named along with Dis and the Manes.
Still it was not known whether he was an Apollo or a younger
Jupiter, or a panic-god of the nether world who had immigrated
from Etruria. Then, further, there was a lightning-god, Sum-
manus, whose image was on the pediment of the Capitoline tem-
ple of Jupiter, though after the war with Pyrrhus he also had a
temple of bis own dedicated to him in the Circus Maximus.
The Arval brothers sacrificed black lambs to appease him when
trees were struck by lightning ; and he was also propitiated by dogs
crucified alive on elder-trees ;2 and in inscriptions he is styled
Pluto, and associated with other Stygian gods. Since, however,
even Ovid could not tell who this Summanus really was, and the
lightning was exclusively Jupiter's prerogative, we are com-
pelled to assume him to be a Jupiter of the night.
When once the solar signification of Janus had fallen into
the back -ground or been forgotten, the sun-god in the Roman
system had very little prominence, notwithstanding his decided
bearing on agriculture ; indeed, he came to be yet more neglected
by the Romans than the Greeks. Sol, though a Sabine deity,
and, according to St. Augustine, a "deus selectus," was long with-
out any temple in Rome; people were satisfied with erecting
some altars to him in the open air. The reason given for this,
at a later period, that no one ventured to shut up in a building
him who is always visible in heaven, is certainly not the original
one. Only the single Sabine family of the Aurelii kept up his cul-
tus. At a later date, we find a sanctuary of his near the temple
of Quirinus ;3 and Augustus erected him an obelisk on the
Campus Martius. At a later date again, Sol is mentioned as
1 Ovid. Fasti, iii. 429 sqq. ; Gell. v. 12, 11; Serv. JEn. ii. 761.
2 Plin. H. N. xxix. 4 ; Mariiri, Frat. Arv. pp. 080 sqq.
3 Quintal, i. 7, 12; Varro, v. 52; Tertull. de Spectac. \ iii.
APOLLO MARS. 41
the genius imparting the breath of life to the newly born, for it
is the way of genii to enter by solar atoms into man, and thus
unite themselves with his soul.1 Luna, likewise a Sabine god-
dess, had betimes a temple dedicated to her by Servius Tullius
on the Aventine, and another on the Palatine.
Apollo, in whom the early Romans saw as little of the sun-
god as the Greeks, always continued in Rome to be a foreign
god in reality, though in high repute on account of his much-
consulted Delphic oracle. In the times of the Republic he had
no public sanctuary at all within Rome ; though he was known
from the Tarquinian era through the influence of the Phocseans
and of Cumae, and the Sibylline books, composed under his inspi-
ration, made him into a being of very great importance to the
Roman state. Accordingly it was to a Sibylline injunction that
the erection of the first Apollo-temple on the Flaminian meadow
in the year 323 was owing, for the averting of an epidemic dis-
ease.2 Henceforth he was adopted into the state-worship proper,
and then principally as a god of healing j pestilences every now
and then afforded occasions for recourse to him with vows and
offerings. The Apollinarian games were established to his ho
nour at the close of the second Punic war, in gratitude for the
victory, predicted by an oracle f and the sacrifices for the pur-
pose had to be conducted according to the Greek rite. It was
Augustus who first built this god the beautiful marble temple
on the Palatine.
Mars, however, or, in Sabine dialect, Mamers, was an abo-
riginal god of the Latin races, who had nothing, properly speak-
ing, in common with the Greek Ares, but rather was a god of
soothsaying, and had an ancient oracle in the Sabine territory,
which was given by a woodpecker (the bird sacred to the god),
perched on a pillar of wood.4 Besides, he was agricultural in cha-
racter, inasmuch as that up to a late date sacrifices were offered
him for the increase of the fruits of the earth and the flocks, and
the Arvalian fraternity kept a festival in his honour with parti-
cular solemnities as a guardian of the fields.5 But since Numa's
times he had already become a war-god, and as he was at the same
1 Orelli, Inscr. 324, 1928 ; Serv. ^En. xi. 57 ; Macrob. Somn. Scip. i. 19, 12.
2 Liv. iii. 63 ; iv. 24 ; Ascon. Or. in tog. cand. p. 90.
3 Liv. xxv. 12. 4 Bionys. Hal. i. 14.
5 Marini, Fr. Arv. p. GGO; Cato tie It. R. lxxxiii. 141.
42 ROMAN GODS.
time the reputed father of the ancestral hero, of the Romans,
there was no god, after Jupiter, held in such veneration at Rome
as Mars. In him, too, the deities of different races appear to
have been eventually blended in one, for Mars is to be found
in three different aspects at Ptome: as Mars Gradivus, the war-
god proper ; the agrarian Mars, or Silvanus ; and a Mars Qui-
rinus. This last name indicated originally a peculiar (Sabine)
deity, who with Jupiter and Mars was one of the gods-protectors
of Rome, and each one of these three had his own flamen and a
particular sacrifice. Servius, too, contrasts Quirinus as a god of
repose with Gradivus as war-god.1 But as Quirinus himself
was converted gradually into a war-god, he came also to coincide
with Mars.2
Lances and shields were the symbols of the god Mars, and
the pledges of his presence. The shield had fallen from heaven,
and, in order that it might not be stolen, it was counterfeited by
eleven other exact copies. These sacred shields (ancilia) and
spears, carefully preserved in the Regia, were a palladium of the
empire. Before an expedition, the general shook them with the
words, " Wake, Mars ;" but if they moved of themselves, it was
a sign betokening disaster, and expiatory rites had to be per-
formed. On the Campus Martius, which was consecrated to the
god for martial exercises, contests, and reviews, the October
horse was annually sacrificed, and its amputated tail carried in
such haste to the Regia that the drops of blood might still fall
on the hearth, and be used, with the ashes of a calf taken from
the carcass of a cow that had been sacrificed, for the purification
of the Roman territory, on the Palilia. The head of the horse of
sacrifice was hung round with bread, as with a garland, and
suspended on some public building.3
Yulcan, or Mulciber, i. e. the smelter, corresponded perfectly
with the Greek Hephsestos, and his workshops in Italy, too, were
all the volcanic mountains. He was god of the fires of the stove
and the hearth, and his image of clay was placed on the domestic
hearth. Originally he was a god worshiped by plebeians only,
and specially invoked by such craftsmen as were workers by fire;
and he, too, seems to have received human sacrifice in the oldest
times ; for on his feast, the Vulcanalia, live fishes were thrown into
1 Ad A'a\. i. 296. 2 Ovid, Met. xiv 828; xv. 862.
3 Plut. Quest. Rom. 97 ; Festus, pp. Ill, 186, 120; Ov. Fasti, iv. 733.
MERCURY — NEPTUNE — TELLUS — CERES. 43
the flames to him, evidently a substitute for the human lives
which were his due.1 Mercury and Neptune enjoyed still less
importance and consideration in Rome than Vulcan. Mercury
claimed to be Hermes, appropriating but one of the many pro-
perties of that god, namely that of patron of business and gain.
It was not till the expulsion of the kings, 495 b.c, that a temple
was built to him, when a merchant-guild (Mercuriales) was set
up and placed under his protection. On his festival (May 15),
the tradespeople offered incense and prayed to him for success in
business; at the same time they drew Avater from a spring sacred
to him, with which they sprinkled their hair and their wares, and
supplicated him, as Ovid says, to assist them in cheating, and to
pardon previous false oaths and affirmations in his name.2 After-
wards, indeed, when Greek literature had gained a wider influ-
ence, other attributes of Hermes were transferred to Mercury,
and so he passed for a god of the lower world also, for Psycho-
pompos, and hence as father of two Lares. The name of the sea-
god Neptune was still less frequently in use, though he had a
temple on the Campus Martins, and a festival, the Neptunalia*
kept merrily under arbours.3
Of the female deities, the Romans worshiped, as earth-god-
desses, besides Ops, already mentioned, first, Tellus, Ceres, Bona
Dea, and Maia. According to Ovid,4 Tellus and Ceres were
distinct, as the soil of the earth and her productive power, and
both were propitiated with sacrificial cakes and the sacrifice of a
sow in young. The solemn oblation of the Hordicidia was con-
sidered as proper to Tellus alone, during which a cow in calf
was sacrificed in each of the thirty curiae, and the calves taken
from their several mothers were consumed by fire. Devotions
were paid to Tellus as a deity of the lower world.5
Though a stranger and immigrant deity, Ceres, the goddess
of the corn and of the tilled soil, attained to an importance in
the Roman republic which appears to have obscured the cultus
of older and analogous goddesses. In the 258th year a.u.c. a
temple and service were appointed her by the consul Aurelius
Postumius, to avert a famine imminent from a failure in the
crops. She came from the Grecian lower Italy, and therefore
was the Demeter whose renowned cultus at Enna in Sicily re-
1 Varro, vi. 20, 57 ; Fest. p. 208. 2 Ov. Fast. v. 603 sqq.
3 Liv. xxviii. 11 ; Fest. p. 101. 4 Fasti, i. 074. 5 Liv. x. 29, 8, 9.
44 KOMAN GODS.
acted on the Roman. The whole rite was Greek from the com-
mencement, and Greek priestesses were ordered to Rome for the
purpose, chiefly from Naples and Yelia.1 A sow was sacrificed
to her before the harvest. On her feast-day, the 12th of April,
all were clad in white ; and therefore the feast was omitted after
the defeat of Cannae, because all the matrons were then in
mourning. Races in the circus, the throwing of nuts and flowers
amongst the people, the oblation of meal, salt, incense, and swine,
formed the ingredients of a festival which was principally a ple-
beian one. Its connexion with the Thesmophoria is shown by
the continence and fasting imposed on matrons, which fast was
first enjoined in the year 191 f.c, after consulting the Sibylline
books, as a religious ordinance to be observed once every five
years.2 Fasting was, otherwise, a thing strange to Roman no-
tions and habits. On the last day of the feast, which was to be
observed an entire week, foxes were let loose with burning
torches tied to their tails.3
Ceres had no special mystery-rite of her own in Rome.
There was nothing corresponding to the Thesmophoria and
Eleusinia in this particular. The Bacchanalia were hastily and
bloodily suppressed when on the point of becoming domesti-
cated, and the emperor Claudius was the first to undertake
the transference of the Eleusinian mysteries from Attica to
Rome.4 But Rome had a mystery-rite consecrated to one of
the other goddesses, the Bona Dea, who was called the good,
kind goddess, for her proper name was not to be spoken, as
was the case with the Greek Despoina.5 Her nature was so
many-sided, or rather so little concrete, and therefore capable
of so many interpretations, that she seems to be akin to or
identical with a number of Greek or Italian deities. She passed
for an earth-goddess, Maia, but in the pontifical books was
also designated as Fauna, Ops, and Fatua ; again she was taken
for a Juno, or a goddess invested with Juno's powers, and hence
she carried the sceptre in her left hand ; or she might be a Pro-
serpine by reason of the sacrifice of swine to her; or as goddess
of death, the Hecate of the lower world. The Boeotians took her
to be Semele. The Greeks distinguished her generally as the
deity of women, and even a Cybele was detected in her. Varro
1 Gic. pro Balbo, c. 24. 2 Liv. xxxvi. 37. 3 Ov. Fasti, iv. 683.
4 Suet. Claud. 25. 5 Paus. viii. 37.
BONA DEA VESTA.
45
knew her to be the chaste daughter of Faunus, who had never
passed out of the women's apartments, nor ever seen a man,
nor been looked upon by one. Yet another saga told of her
being killed with myrtle-branches by her husband Faunus, who
had found her intoxicated, and, when he rued the deed after-
wards, honoured her as a goddess.1 She had a temple erected to
her by the famous vestal virgin Claudia who, when her chastity
was suspected, proved its integrity by the ship, which carried the
mother of the gods from Pessinus, allowing her to tow it ; but
her festival, as being of the utmost importance for the welfare of
the state, was kept in the house of the consul or praetor. Women
only could take part in this solemnity, which was intrusted to
the vestal virgins : every thing male, down to the very animals,
was excluded, and the statues of males at least covered. The
myrtle too, the plant of the goddess of love, was in like manner
prohibited j an amphora of wine was at hand and broached, but
the wine was to be called milk, and the vessel mellarium. Tame
serpents were used in the rite, and the house and image of the
goddess bedecked with vine-leaves. Women were obliged to
prepare themselves by a previous abstinence of several days from
intercourse with men, after which the nightly worship was
celebrated in an excited and unrestrained manner : the music of
the orgies and the wine bred a fanatic madness and wild desires,
which in the times of the Empire broke out into the most hideous
excesses.2
The worship of Vesta was of great antiquity in Rome, and a
main feature of its religion. The goddess was the fire of the
house-hearth, conceived to be a deity, just like the Greek Hestia,
each house thus becoming, in fact, a temple of Vesta. Her
public sanctuary, where the inextinguishable fire was tended by
the vestal virgins, was connected with the Regia, in which the
pontifex maximus dwelt. But when this dignity fell into the
hands of Augustus, he had the sacred fire brought into his house
on the Palatine, and thus the palace of the Caesar became the re-
ligious centre of the state. To let the fire out from neglect was
visited on the culpable priestess with stripes, and a feast of ex-
piation resorted to with extraordinary sacrifices, to propitiate the
anger of the goddess. It was the duty of the Pontifex maximus
to kindle the fire anew by a kind of burning-glass, or by pure fire
' Varro, ap. Lact. i. 22, 9. 2 Juven. Sat. vi. 314 sqq.
46 ROMAN GODS.
produced by rubbing pieces of wood together.1 It was regularly
renewed on the first of March, the ancient new year. Vesta, too,
seems to have had some relation to water, for in her shrine,
which had to be daily sprinkled with it, and for the libations on
her feasts, only water from a particular spring, or from the brook
Numicius, could be used.2 For long the goddess was worshiped
without an image, and it is still doubtful whether there even
was an idol of her in her sanctuary, the inner room of which was
inaccessible to man, even the high priest ; and there stood the
vessels with the holy brine.3 Heifers of a year old were sacri-
ficed to her as a maiden goddess ; grasses, and the first-fruits,
and afterwards incense, were thrown into her fire, and water,
oil, and wine served as drink-offerings.
Minerva, a deity worshiped already by the Italic aborigines,
and specially a Sabine goddess, was a member of the supreme
triad of gods in the Capitoline temple. Varro believed he re-
cognised in her the personification of those Platonic " ideas" or
eternal archetypes after which Jupiter as Demiurge, or heaven,
had fashioned matter, which is Juno, into the world.4 Like the
Pallas Athene of the Greeks, she was a maiden goddess, to whom
accordingly none but intact heifers could be sacrificed. Her pro-
minent signification was that of a goddess putting into active
motion or stirring up : she inclined children to learn, men to
agriculture, the chase, and war ; hence the wakening cock was
sacred to her in the towns of the Aurunci, and in Home the
trumpet sounding the reveille ; and on the Tubilustria, the last
day of her feast of the Quinquatria (observed every five years
with gladiatorial fights), the trumpets sacred to her were purified
by the sacrifice of a lamb.5 The domestic spinning of wool by
the female portion of the family was also under her special
patronage.
Minerva's character in Rome, as a protectress of the state,
had reference chiefly to the palladium, kept in the shrine of
Vesta, the possession of which was thought to afford a divine
voucher for the welfare of the empire. It was kept with such
secrecy, that for a long time the people did not know whether
there really was an image of Minerva in the building ; and many
1 Pint. Num. 9. 2 Liv. i. 11 ; Pint. Num. 13; Tac. Hist. iv. 53.
3 Serv. Georg. i. 408 ; Macrob. iii. !). l Ap. Aug. de C. D. vii. 28.
5 Fest. p. 269; Varro, vi. 14; Ov. Fasti, iii. 849.
MINERVA — FORTUNA . 47
thought nothing else holy was there but the fire of Vesta ;
others that Samothracian symbols which iEneas had brought
with him were preserved there ; it was, however, really on the
spot, only male eyes were not allowed to look at it, probably be-
cause undressed, and the pontifex maximus Metellus, who saved
it from burning, was struck with blindness for doing so ; at last,
a second fire, under Commodus, brought it fairly to light.1 The
family of the Nautii were the guardians of another image of
Minerva, with a secret service, known only to themselves ; and
this idol, too, had the reputation of being the very palladium
stolen from Troy, and given by Diomede to Nautes, the hero-
progenitor of the line.2
. The worship of Fortuna was more in favour, and took a
deeper hold on life in Rome, than that of Minerva. To the
Romans she was not the mere personification of an idea, but a
divine form, replete with life, conducting and swaying the desti-
nies of individuals, filling all with hope, and imposing the duty
of gratitude on them ; and indeed the Roman state itself, raised
from its petty beginnings to the world's sovereignty, was the
bosom-child of the goddess, whose cultus was, in fact, first in-
troduced into Rome by that Servius Tullius who, as a special
favourite of the goddess, had been exalted from the condition of
a slave's son to kingly dignity. There are many ancient tem-
ples of Fortune, says Plutarch, and there are glorious ones too, in
all quarters and places of the city.3 The Fortuna Primigenia
from Praeneste was in particular esteem, and was there a god-
dess of fate, at whose breasts Jupiter himself had sucked, and to
her the consul Sempronius vowed a temple, dedicated 214 B.C., in
the struggle with Hannibal. The plebeians made merry on the
feast of Fors Fortuna, goddess of luck, when they had a water ex-
pedition in garlanded boats, in which they ate and drank sump-
tuously. The image of Fortuna Muliebris was forbidden to be
touched by a woman who had been twice married ;4 and the women
stripped themselves at a hot spring, and with offerings of incense
besought Fortuna Virilis to conceal their personal blemishes from
their husbands, and to maintain their affection towards them.5
But there were temples, chapels, images, and altars besides, of
1 Cic. Scaur, ii. 48 ;' Plin. H. N. vii. 43, 45; Herodian. i. 14.
2 Serv. Mn. ii. 166 ; iii. 407 ; Dionys. vi. 60.
3 Plut. Fort. Kom. x. 4 Serv. JEn. iv. 19. 5 Ov. Fasti, iv. 1 15.
48 ROMAN GODS.
the darling goddess of the Romans, under the most different in-
vocations, many of which were raised in fulfilment of a vow, and
a victory in consequence. Even the bad one, Fortuna Mala, had
an altar dedicated to her on the Esquiline.1 The universal wor-
ship of Fortuna, invoked and lauded in all places, and at all
hours, to whom people attributed, and of whom they asked, every
thing, appeared to the elder Pliny to be one of the strongest
proofs of the joint prevalence of irreligiousness and superstition.2
In Juno we have a goddess whose worship, on one side ex-
tending over the whole of central Italy, passed from Latins,
Sabines, and Etruscans to Rome ; but, on the other, was so little
certain and concrete, that it assumed numberless forms, in each
of which it seemed again to dissolve. In her particularly we
may discern the colourless, shadowy nature of Italic deities,
unable, from the defect of creative imagination peculiar to that
people, to develop into the form of mythic personalities, and
who consequently remained at a stand-still, almost on the
level of ghosts, until their outline received a firmer shape,
through the influx of Greek gods and myths. Originally Juno
was the female deity of nature in its widest extent, the deifica-
tion of womanhood, woman in the sphere of the divine, and
therefore also her name of Juno was the appellative designation
of a female genius or guardian spirit. Every wife had her own Ju-
no, and the female slaves in Rome swore by the Juno of their mis-
tresses; and as the genius of a man could be propitiated, so could
also the Juno of a woman. The whole of a woman's life, in all
its moments, from the cradle to the grave, was thus under the con-
duct and protection of this goddess, but especially her two chief
destinations, marriage and maternity. Accordingly the Roman
women sacrificed to Juno Natalis on their birth-day, and observed
in a similar manner the Matronalia in the temple of Juno Lucina,
in commemoration of the institution of marriage by Romulus,
and the fidelity of the ravished Sabine women. The goddess, as
Fluonia, in common with Mena, presided over the purification of
women, and was worshiped as Juga, Curitis, Domiduca, Unxia,
Pronuba, or Cinxia, according to the several usages immediately
concerning the bride, in the solemnisation of marriage. As
Ossipaga she compacted the bones of the child in its mother's
womb ; as Opigena she assisted mothers in labour ; and as Lucina
1 Cic„ N. D. iii. 25. • I'lin. H. N. ii. 5, 7.
JUNO — DIANA. 49
she brought the child into the light of day : and therefore when
the time of birth approached, Lucina and Diana were invoked,
and a table was spread with viands for the former.1 As Con-
ciliatrix and Viriplaca, she softened the wrath of a husband
towards his wife; and as Sororia, sustained harmony between
brothers and sisters.
The Romans, however, were also acquainted with Juno as
queen of heaven, — Juno Regina, in which character she had her
place in the Capitol, and on the Aventine as well, when translated
from Veii after its fall. Juno Covella, a title which had reference
to the vault of heaven, was invoked by the pontiff in the calcula-
tion and announcement of the days of the month. Under the
name of Populonia, she stood in the relation of increaser of popu-
lation to the whole people. She was called Moneta, as presiding
over mintage ; and the first silver money in Rome was coined in
her temple.2 Besides this, the worship of Juno Sospita and
Caprotina had been introduced into Rome from Lanuvium,
where she was worshiped as a goddess of defence, clad in a
goat-skin, while in honour of the latter the Poplifugia were
celebrated, — a festival of merry-making for women, in which also
the female slaves took part, and were allowed to place themselves
on terms of equality with their mistresses.3
Diana was a deity common to the Latin races. Servius Tul-
lius attached the league of the Latin people with Rome to her
cultus on the Aventine ; her name Dia Jana was old Latin. Her
festival in August was celebrated particularly by slaves, whose
patroness she was. If she was really identical, as Livy thought,
with the Ephesian Artemis, her statue must also have been like
the Ephesian one, and Rome have become acquainted with her
through the medium of the Phocaeans of Marseilles.4 No man
was admitted into the temple which she had in the Patrician
street. On the whole, her worship in Rome, when compared
with that of the other goddesses, stood somewhat in the back-
ground. It was of more importance and more frequented at
Aricia, one of the oldest towns of Latium. There she was said
1 Tertull. de Auima, 39.
2 Livy, vi. 20. Cicero, on the contrary, deriving the appellation from monere,
mentions a miraculous hint she once gave, ahout the sacrifice of a swine to her.
De Divin. i. 45.
3 Plut. Caniill. 33 ; Macrob. Sat, i. 11.
4 Dionys. Hal. iv. 26 ; Liv. i. 45 ; Strabo, iv. 1B0.
VOL. II. E
50 ROMAN GODS.
to be the Artemis Taurica, and Orestes to have carried off her
image from Tauris and brought it. Thither, then, the Roman
women repaired with garlands on their heads and lighted torches
in hand, to suspend their votive tablets within the precincts of
the goddess. The manner in which the priesthood there was
obtained points undoubtedly to human sacrifice at an earlier
date. The priest, or king of the grove, Rex Nemorensis as he
was called, was always a runaway slave, who fought and obtained
his office by the sword, but had in turn to be ready either to
master any claimant ambitious of the post, or to fall by his
hand.1 It is told of Caligula that he named a stronger man to
fight with the priest of the day, because he had been long in the
possession of his office.2 Diana, however, was nowhere a goddess
of the moon ; for there was a special one, Luna, having a temple
on the Aventine, and another on the Palatine : but Greek in-
fluence came into operation here too, later on ; for Horace, in
his Carmen Sseculare, addressed as Sun and Moon Apollo and
Diana, of whose relationship as brother and sister the Romans
had no conception previously.
The worship of Venus came to Rome from Alba with the
Julian family, originally of that place, and in the early times of
the state was kept up in part by the family, and in part by the
plebs ; she did not appear in the hymns of the Salii.3 She was
an old Latin goddess of the garden, so that Nsevius still used the
term " venus" for garden-produce ; and she was also convertible
with Flora. Then, in Rome, Venus came to be identified with
Aphrodite, it is not clear why ; and as the Romans traced their
descent from Ascanius, the son of iEneas, she became, in conse-
quence, the ancestral mother of the Roman people. It frequently
happens in the Roman system that the older and inferior deities,
by losing their independence, are merged in a kindred one of
higher distinction, and become mere attributes of theirs; and
this was the case with Cloacina, Murcia, Calva, and Libentia,
who were now combined with Venus. To this we may add that,
in the second Punic war, the Erycinian Venus, in reality a Phoe-
nician Astarte, and there honoured with an impure rite, was
transferred to Rome by the building of a temple to her.* She
got this first temple in the year 215 upon the Capitoline; and in
1 Ov. Fasti, iii. 271 sq. 2 Suet. Calig. 35.
3 Vano, i. 1 ; Plin. H. N. xix. 4, 19. 4 Cic. Verr. ii. 8 ; Hor. Od. i. 2, 33.
VENUS — LIBER AND LIBERA. 51
183, a second at the Colline gate, again in consequence of a vow
made in war. Here the courtesans celebrated a feast of their
profession, and presented their goddess with incense, cresses, and
chaplets of myrtle and roses, to obtain a good harvest from her
favour. Before these two, however, Fabius Gurges, about the
year 297, had already built a Venus-temple out of the fines of
matrons convicted of adultery.1 Another was erected to Venus
Verticordia in 1 1 4, when three vestal virgins at a time had been
convicted of unchastity.2 Besides these there were the later-
built temples of Venus Genitrix, or ancestral mother of the
Romans, and of Venus Victrix. Still, upon the whole, the wor-
ship of this goddess was more a matter of private devotion than
a state affair. There were no public festivals and sacrifices con-
secrated to her.
It is not easy to decide who Liber and Libera actually were.
That an old Latin country god was called Liber, is certain.
People thought he was styled " free" because of the looseness of
speech exercised on his festivals ; but when he was identified in
Rome with the Greek Bacchus, he was supposed to be so called
because, as god of wine, he freed the soul from care.3 Yet the
usages of his festivals show that he was not a wine-god proper,
but a god of blessing to the fruits of the country in general. In
the country a huge phallus was carried about on a wagon, then
set up at the crossways, and last of all in the town. In Lavinium
his festival was kept for a whole month, impure language being
bandied about on each day whilst the phallus was carried in pro-
cession, and the lengthy feast concluded with the crowning of
the phallus by the most respectable matron to be found.4 On
the Liberalia, hot cakes, dipped in honey, were offered to Liber, as
discoverer of honey j women, crowned with ivy, sat in the streets
to sell these cakes, and burned them as an offering for the buyer
upon a small hearth kept ready at hand.5 The ceremony of giving
young men the toga virilis on this feast probably implied that the
power of generation and manhood was of the essence of this god.
Libera, of whom one has but little to say, seems to have been
taken for the wife of Liber, and therefore Ovid calls her Ariadne ;G
1 Liv. x. 31. 2 Val. Max. viii. 15, 12 ; Jul. Obsequeus. 97.
3 Sen. de Tranq. Animas, xv. 15.
4 Varro, ap. Aug. C. D. vii. 21. 5 Varvo, L. L. vi. 14.
6 Ov. Fasti, iii. 512.
52 ROMAN GODS.
but she was also identified with the Proserpina Cora, and even
the Roman Libitina.
The Romans had a god of the lower world, Dis, or " the
rich" (because of the treasures to be found in the interior of the
earth), whom they compared to Pluto, but of whom nothing more
precise is to be said. The god Consus, who was invoked at a
subterranean altar in the great games of the circus, was perhaps
one with Dis. By the altar of Saturn, too, Dis had a shrine, to
which earthen puppets were broughf as offerings of atonement for
the offerer and his family, for it was said Hercules had taught
the Pelasgi to present such oscilla instead of human sacrifices.1
Dis too, like Consus, was not without a subterranean altar,
shared with Proserpine, and standing in Terentum, a part of the
Campus Martius, which was uncovered for the purposes of his
feast, and then covered with earth again. Here secular games
were celebrated at long intervals, afterwards at the distance of a
century. They were properly a commemoration of the dead, but
when Augustus had them held again, in the year 14 B.C., they had
already lost this signification. In the Comitium there was a pit,
sacred to Dis and Proserpina, and called Mundus, i. e. Orcus,
said to have been dug out by Etruscans at the command of
Romulus, into which were thrown first-fruits of all the necessaries
of life, and clods of earth from all the different territories in the
neighbourhood from which the followers of Romulus had come.
This hole was closed up with the Manes-stone (Lapis Manalis),
and taken off three days in the year, in August, October, and
November, and with it the doors of the realm of shadows being,
as it were, opened, people were afraid of undertaking any thing
of importance during the three dismal days.2
Proserpina (a name coined by the Romans in imitation of the
Greek " Persephone") was not properly queen of the kingdom
of the shades, for she had no independent worship ; it was rather
Libitina, whom Roman scholars, on etymological grounds pro-
bably, converted into an Aphrodite, for which reason Plutarch
compared her with the Aphrodite " of the tomb" at Delphi.3 All
that was required for the burial of the dead was deposited in her
temple, and was sold or let out to hire ; and, according to a law
originating with Servius Tullius, a piece of money was to be paid
1 Macrob. Sat. i. 11. 2 Macrob. Sat. i. 10 ; Varro, 16.
3 Plut. Qua?st. Kom. 28.
MANIA — INFERIOR DEITIES. 53
there for every dead person. The bier, or death- bed, too, on
which the corpse was burnt, used to be called Libitina,1 and so
the poets termed death itself.
In the time of the kings, boys had been sacrificed to Mania,
a goddess of death, for the well-being of families, " head having
to be atoned for by head," in obedience to an oracle of Apollo ;
under the republic, heads of poppy and garlic were offered for the
purpose, and the hanging up of images of Mania at the house-
doors was a sufficient propitiation against a danger imminent
on a family.2 Lastly, to this circle of deities also belonged
Naenia, the personified death-wail, and Viduus, the god who
deprived the body of its soul.
The Romans, with their dry and practical understanding,
went far farther than the imaginative Greeks in god-making, and
gradually invented gods for every relation and action of life. To
the principal deities, who had a distinct sphere of life assigned
them, — birth, for instance, marriage, and agriculture, — they added
a host of single subordinate gods, who sometimes were not even
representatives of an action, but only of a circumstance, purely
accidental and insignificant, accompanying an action. Many may
have grown into independent gods out of a title assigned to a
deity. The numbers were swelled by a troop of allegorical
beings, who had temples and chapels erected to them.
The boundary-god, Terminus, had his stone in the Jupiter
temple on the Capitol, and the feast of the Terminalia, with its
unbloody offerings, consecrated to neighbourly concord. The
wood-god, Silvanus, was at once a guardian of bounds, a keeper-
off of wolves, and a goblin, the terror of lying-in women ; while
against his pranks women who had given birth to a child required
no less than three protecting deites, Intercidona, Pilumnus, and
Deverra, and for them a couch was prepared in the atrium, where
the woman in labour lay.3 Vaticanus attended to the first cry of
the newly-born child, which, when laid upon the ground accord-
ing to Roman custom, the father took up ; if he omitted to do so,
the omission was equivalent to a repudiation, and the child was
killed or exposed. Hence there was a goddess of this taking-up,
a Levana.4 A cradle-goddess, Cunina, a Statilinus, an Edusa
and Potnia, a Paventia, Fabelinus, and Catius, were all called
1 Plm. H. N. xxxvii. 3, 11. 2 Macrob. Sat. i. ?.
3 Vai-ro, ap. Aug. C. D. vi. 9. 4 Gell. xvi. 1? ; Aug. C. D. iv. 8.
54 ROMAN GODS.
into play in' the first period of the child's life, of his nourishment,
and speech. Juventas, a goddess of youth, had a temple, and a
lectisternium was dressed up for her when the portents were
threatening. Orbona also, the goddess of orphan age, had her
sanctuary. Two temples were erected to the goddess of fever,
who was invoked in precaution against this sickness. Pietas,
Pax, Bonus Eventus, Spes, Quies, Pudicitia, Honos, Virtus, and
Fides, had their temples or chapels. Concordia was particularly
rich in sanctuaries.
Over and above these, Rome abounded in deities whose origi-
nal value had been obscured or blotted out in the course of time,
or who, with all the importance of a worship, were wanting in the
plastic and mythical capacity for refinement, or of such again as,
with little importance in themselves, were but rarely mentioned.
Thus, on the banks of the Tiber, on the fifteenth of March, the
festival of Anna Perenna was observed, who also had a sacred
grove. In the open air, under arbours or tents, people surren-
dered themselves to unrestricted mirth and sumptuous feasting,
accompanied with obscene songs and jokes, and sacrifices were
offered her to obtain a successful year;1 but of her antecedents
so little was known, that she was actually converted into a sister
of the Carthaginian Dido. The fable of Leucothea had been
laid in Rome upon Mater Matuta, a Latin goddess of the dawn
of day and of voyaging, to whom the Matralia, or mothering feast,
was celebrated by the Roman women ; female slaves were for-
bidden entrance into her temple, only one was introduced in allu-
sion to the legend of Ino, scourged, and thrust out again. The
correction of maid-servants seems to have been put under her
superintendence.2 Of the Stata Mater, whose image was in the
Forum, and to whom fire was lighted at night under the open
heaven, no one in Ovid's time seems to have had any accurate
knowledge.3 The case was no better with the goddess Vacuna,
of great repute among the Sabines, and of whom Ovid only men-
tions that on her festival people either stood or sat before the
Vacunalian hearth.4 The goddess Laverna, on the contrary, who
had both altar and grove in Rome, was well known to thieves
1 Ov. Fast. iii. 523 sq., 654 sq. ; Macrob. Sat. i. 12.
2 Plut. Qusest Rom. 17, Camil. 5; Ov. Fast. vi. 46!) sq.
3 Hor. Fp. ii. 2, 186 ; Col am. xxii. p. 57.
4 Fast. vi. 305.
PALES — FLORA. 55
and impostors, who were her supplicants for protection in their
pursuits. Horace makes one of the class pray : " Beauteous
Laverna, grant me to deceive, to be fair and pure to the
eye; throw night round my misdeeds, and a cloud over my
frauds."1
The Roman religion was exceedingly well stocked with deities
of flocks and of gardens. To the Dea Dia, not farther known,
and who had an altar and precinct in the neighbourhood of
Rome, the Arval brothers offered a worship, which proves her to
have been protectress of the fruits of the field. Pales, god of
shepherds, deriving his name from straw, whose sex, neverthe-
less, the Romans could not certify, was honoured by the im-
portant festival of the Palilia on the twenty -first of April.2
Protection and increase was implored of the deity on the flocks
and domestic animals; and therefore the sacrifices had to be
unbloody ; to put beasts to death, while asking for their preser-
vation, would have seemed a contradiction. At the same time
a great ceremonial of purification was gone through ; flocks and
cattle leaped over kindled hay and straw, they were asperged
with water, and, in the city, the reserved blood of the October-
horse, and the ashes of the calf that had been taken from the
carcass of its mother and consumed by fire on the feast of the
Fordicidia, were used in the purification of the people.
The service of Flora was of great antiquity in Rome : Tatius
was said to have vowed her an altar, and Numa to have insti-
tuted a flamen for her, and in 239 b.c a temple was built out
of pecuniary fiues, and annual games appointed her in conse-
quence of a failure in the harvest. The solemnities now reached
the highest degree of license and oflensiveness ; it was customary
for prostitutes, who presented themselves at them as actresses,
to throw aside their clothes, and play naked, sometimes chasing
hares and roe-deer, at others fighting like gladiators.3 The le-
gend probably arose from this, — Flora had been a courtesan who
had earned a large fortune, made the people her heirs, and ap-
pointed a certain sum for keeping up the games called, after
her, Floralia ; but the senate, to palliate the scandal, gave out
1 Ep. i. lfi, 60.
2 Ov. Fasti, iv. 721 sq ; Serv. /En. ii. 325 ; Georg. iii. 1.
3 Ov. Fast. v. 183-375 ; Plin. H. N. xviii. 29, lix. 3 ; Juvenal, vi. 249, and the
Schol.
56 ROMAN GODS.
Flora to be a goddess, who presided over the flowers.1 A tradi-
tion, quite similar, attached to Aeca Larentia; while some ex-
plained the mortuary solemnity which took place yearly at her
grave, by her having been the nurse of Romulus, others pre-
ferred to assert she was a rich courtesan, who made a present of
the Campus Martius to the Roman people at her death, and had
hence acquired the worship paid her in Rome.-
The old Latin Vertumnus, original representative of the
changes of the seasons, became, by degrees, a god of sowing,
corn-fields, and fruit-gardens, receiving their first-fruits from
gardeners, and having in Rome the feast of Vertumnalia in
October, with temple and statue. His female aspect, Pomona,
made by the myth into his wife, had a flamen of her own, the
lowest of the fifteen flamines.3 In every field, garden, and
vineyard, a Priapus, daubed red with vermillion, and with an
immense phallus, was set up as guardian-god. Milk, honey,
cakes, and even he-goats and asses, were sacrificed to him.4 The
Romans received him first from Greece ; but there was a very
similar old Roman phallus-god, Mutinus-Tutunus, or Fascinus,
and, as the belief in the protecting and averting power of the
phallus was deep-rooted among the Romans, his image, or at
least the simple phallus (fascinum), was set up every where, and
his worship carefully tended. People believed he had the power
of putting a whole army to flight by a sudden panic-fear; for
instance, he had made Hannibal's force retire from Rome;5 and
he was considered specially effective against wicked enchanters
and the magical operations of envy and jealousy. Hence a colossal
phallus of Tutunus was set up in the courts, or even over the
hearths of private dwellings, and on it a newly-married bride
had to take her seat on her entrance into her husband's house.6
Even the vestal virgins were obliged to the worship of this god,
as belonging to the protecting deities of Rome. His phallus was
1 Lact. i. 20 ; Arnob. iii. 23, where " nieretrix" clearly ought to he read, and
not " genetrix ;" Minuc. Fel. 25.
2 Varr. vi. 23 ; Macrob. Sat. i. 10 ; Ov. Fasti, iii. 57 ; Gell. vi. 7.
3 Ovid. Met. xiv. 641 ; Propert. iv. 2 ; Varro, v. 46, 74.
4 Ov. Fast. i. 391, 415 ; Serv. Georg. ii. 84.
s Varro, ap. Nonium, p. 47.
6 Aug. CD. vi. 9; Arnoh. 417 ; Lact. i. 20. Conip. Pitture d'Ercolano, pi.
26, p. 178 sq. ; Antiq. Hercul. (bronzi), ii. p. 372, pi. 94. Panofka, Terracotte,
pp. 67, 106.
PARC7E— CARMENTA. 57
set upon the car of the " triumphator," and people used it for
the protection of small children, and at Rome matrons sacri-
ficed in his sanctuary, though with veils on.1
Deities of fate, on whom birth and death particularly de-
pended, were also known in Rome ; but the belief of the Romans,
during their religious time, was not generally fatalistic, as in
fact planet-worship, which elsewhere generally led to fatalism,
was well-nigh excluded from their system. Nevertheless, on
the seventh day after the birth of a child, the Fata Scribunda
were invoked, i. e. the nameless deities who marked out before-
hand his future destiny for the child. The Parca — for the Ro-
mans of old knew probably but one — received her name, accord-
ing to Varro's assumption,2 from birth, and was originally an
assistant at births ; and there was also a Morta in opposition to
her. Then, in order to put together three Parcse, after the Greek
pattern, Nona and Decima were counted as such, goddesses of
birth, so called after the number of the months of pregnancy,
and Morta, the Death-Parca. The names of the Greek Moirai,
Clotho, Lachesis, and-Atropos, were also made use of.3 The
place of deities of fate was really occupied amongst the Romans
by Fortuna, changeable and capricious, but still accessible to
prayer, and adhering to the everlasting city in other respects
with a fidelity unheard of elsewhere.
Further, there was a Mana-Geneta, or " kind birth-goddess/'
to whom young dogs were sacrificed,4 with the prayer that no
one in the house might become a Mane. Carmenta seems to
have been of a like signification, but not capable of more accu-
rate definition, into whose sanctuary nothing of leather was
allowed to be brought. On occasion of a dispute of the senate
with the women, two sacrifices were appointed her, one for boys,
and the other for maidens. But altars had also been erected to
two Carmentas for the prevention of unhappy births, who were
styled Antevorta or Prorsa, and Postvorta, with relation to the
position of the child in the maternal womb.5 Egeria too, Numa's
counselling nymph, and worshiped at Rome on the Aventine,
was invoked by pregnant women to help them in labour.
1 Plin. H. N. xxviii. 4, 7 ; Fest. pp. 103, 172.
2 Varr. ap. Gell. iii. 16. 3 Caesell. Vindex, ap. Gell. iii. 16.
4 Plm. H. N. xxix. 4; Plut. Qusest. Eom. 52.
5 Ov. Fast. i. 499 sq. ; Gell. xvi. 16 ; Serv. ^En. viii. 339.
58 ROMAN GODS.
i The Roman Hercules enjoyed a higher reputation in Rome
than in Greece, being in Rome more god than hem, which was
caused partly by the immigrant Heracles from Sicily and lower
Italy having combined with the Sabine god Sancus-Fidius. This
Sancus, who retained, however, his own worship on the island of
the Tiber, and in a temple on the Quirinal, was the ancestral god
of the Sabine people, and was therefore also conceived to be their
first king. Oaths were sworn in his name, and the records of
treaties deposited in his temple.1 He was, in a general way, the
Sabine Jupiter, and his name of Deus Fidius was also repeated in
that of Zeus Pistios. This same god may be detected in Hercu-
les; people swore by him, and his name was the ordinary formula
of asseveration; and just as the person swearing by Sancus-Fidius
betook himself out of the house into the open air, so also boys,
when they intended to swear by Hercules, were taught to leave
the room and to go outside the house.2 The special place of his
worship was the famous Ara maxima, at the foot of Mount Aven-
tine, erected by himself to Jupiter, in memorial of his combat
with the giant Cacus, who had stolen his cattle. Here tithes of
booty and spoil acquired in war, or of profit made, were dedicated
to him, an oblation not omitted by wealthy Romans of so late a
date as Lucullus, Sylla,-and Crassus.3 By Tertullian's time, in-
deed, it was hardly a third of the tithe that was laid on the altar
of Hercules.4 Sacrifice was offered to Hercules or Sancus on
setting out for a journey. A great number of victims and popu-
lar banquets were generally offered to Hercules, as the " mighty
protector" or " victor," in which characters he had two temples
at Rome ; from these festivities, however, women, slaves, and
freedmen were excluded.5 At the same time the ordinance, that
in the prayers for the occasion no other god but he should be
named, proves that, in fact, and in spite of all the transfer from
the Greek of the Heracles legends, and in spite of a great deal of
the Greek rite being ingrafted on his worship, the old god Sancus-
Fidius preponderated in him. When, in the year 310 b.c, at the
instigation of the censor, Appius Claudius, the Potitii, who had
had the care of the worship of the god from time immemorial,
sold their priesthood to public slaves, the whole family died
1 Dionys. iv. 58 ; Hor. Ep. ii. I, 25.
2 Varr. v. 66 ; Plut. Quajst. Rom. 28. 3 Diod. iv. 21.
4 Tertull. ApoL 14. 5 Plut. Q. R. lx. 90.
PENATES — STATE PENATES. 59
out within a short time, and Appius fell blind,1 — events which
confirmed the Romans in their conception of the greatness and
power of the god.
Every Roman family had its particular guardian-gods presid-
ing in the interior of the house ; the gods and guardians of the
penus, or domestic store and household provisions, whose num-
bers, names, and race were unknown. They were invoked under
the common designation of Penates. In the atrium, the interior
and partly unceiled space of the house, where the community
life of the family was spent, their images were placed near
the hearth, on which offerings were made them, the never-
extinguished flames of the hearth-fire always burning in their
honour,2 and the family table being always spread and furnished
for them, with a salt-cellar and some viands. In general the
kitchen was dedicated to them. The son took his father's place
at the head of the household, under the protection of the Penates,
who were handed down with the succession from generation to
generation. They had the care of the welfare and honour of
the family, and were also the patrons of the domestics and of the
laws of hospitality, and whoever could embrace their images was
in safety.
There were also Penates of the Roman state, having their
own temple on the Velia, a piazza on the Palatine hill. No one
could give any accurate account of who these Penates were. In
the eyes of the Romans those were the true and genuine Penates
of the state which were worshiped in the old Latin metropolis at
Lanuvium, whither the Roman consuls, praetors, and dictators
betook themselves on entering into office, in order to sacrifice to
them and Vesta.3 In the two temples both at Rome and Lanu-
vium, the Dii Penates were kept from the sight of the people, and
could only be seen by the priests.4 The historian Timaeus only
heard that in the innermost shrine at Lanuvium iron and copper
heraldic staves and earthen vessels, inherited from Troy, were to be
found.5 Amid the contradictions met with in the Roman accounts
of the nature of the Penates, the assertion of Varro, supported by
the pontifical books, continues to have the greatest weight, viz.
that the Penates of the state were the great gods, who had their
1 Liv. ix. 29, 34. 2 Virg. Mn. i. 707 ; Serv. ^En. ii. 460.
3 Varro, v. 144 ; Macrob. Sat. ii. 4. 4 Serv. JEn. ii. 290 ; iii. 12.
5 Ap. Dionys. i. 67.
60 ROMAN GODS.
dwelling-place in the penetralia of the heavens; and he designates
them in an abstract manner as " Heaven and Earth/' the two
principles of all that exists (in the books they are styled Saturn
and Ops) . Symbols of these for the popular belief were the two
little male images which, after being carried by Dardanus, first
to Samothrace and then to Troy, and from thence by iEneas to
Latium, ended with being honoured there as powerful guardian
deities ; these were two youths seated with spears in their hands
in the temple on the Velia, which were also taken to be the
Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux.
The Romans had received the worship and name of Lares, or
" lords," from Etruria. They were not of the number of great
gods, like the Penates, with whom, nevertheless, they were often
interchanged, but were gods who had become so, souls of men of
earlier times exalted to the dignity of god or hero. In the houses
where, like the Penates, they were set up as images in the
atrium (or sometimes in a lararium of their own), and had
their own cultus on the hearth, they were the guardian spirits of
families, over whose continuance they watched. They belonged,
as a species, to the genus Manes, these not being honoured,
but only the lares ; and amongst the lares of the house there
was one, the Lar familiaris, who was oftenest named, and also
most distinguished in worship : he was master of the family, its
divine head, though one did not attach to him the idea of a dis-
tinct individual, bearing a name and belonging to the ancestors,
as for instance first father of a line. " It is now many years
since I came into possession of this house," says the Lar famili-
aris in Plautus.1 This Lar seems rather to have been a per-
sonification of the vital and procreative powers, assuring the
duration of a family; bound up as he was with the family, he
changed houses along with it. As the Romans, up to the time
of the laws of the twelve tables, kept the remains of their dead
relatives in ashes in their own houses, the veneration for the de-
parted, then turned into family gods and guardian spirits, with
whose remains or " deposits" a man shared the same roof, was
all the more natural. But as to the question which of the mem-
bers of a family belonged decidedly to the Lares, and which not,
whether women for instance, and maidens as well as others, it
was probably never raised; it is only mentioned that the re-
1 Prolog. Aulular.
LARES — THE GENIUS. 61
mains of children dying before the fortieth day, and which
were kept under the roof, were called the Lares grundiles.1 At
meal-times the Lares received libations and first-fruits ; on do-
mestic festivals they were crowned, and the bride, on entering
into the house, made her offering to the Lares first of all.
But as there were two kinds of Penates, domestic and public,
so there was also, besides the family Lares, others to which a
public service was rendered. Of this number were the Prsestites,
the patron spirits of the town, and the Compitales, to whom
Servius Tullius ordered wooden chapels to be erected at the cross -
ways intersecting the quarters of the city. In the temple proper
of the Lares, restored by Augustus, together with their public
worship, then fallen into disuse, two figures were to be found,
probably Romulus and Remus; before them a dog, their ordinary
sacrifice, for " god and dog love the ' compita/ " as Ovid says.2
But what was the relation of the Genius to the Lares ? This
was a difficult and obscure question even for a Roman, and in
answering it people seem to have been satisfied, for the most part,
with very vague notions. Into the idea of a " genius," Etruscan,
Greek, and peculiar Roman conceptions entered. In many of the
authorities the genius appears as the guardian spirit imparted to
man at his birth, inseparable from him indeed, but still essentially
distinct ;3 in other expressions, it is not possible to distinguish
the genius of a man from himself: he seems to be but the habi-
tual bias or direction of a man's own will, objectively conceived;
and where, as with Varro, a philosophical system comes in, there
the genius is that divine ingredient of the spirit dwelling in each
man, that portion of the divine world-soul, which, thinking and
willing in man, returns to it after death ; and as the world-soul is
termed god, so the genius also is god. But the genius again was
conceived as a being of generative power, deciding the position
and distinctive properties of a man from his first origin.4 The
idea of a man having two genii, one good and exhorting to good,
the other evil,5 is more rarely met with ; yet it is well known that
shortly before his death his evil genius was reputed to have
1 Voss. in Etymol. " subgrundaria."
2 Tac. Ann. xii. 24; Ov. Fasti, v. 129 sq.; Propert. iii. 22, 22 (Paley); Arnob.
iii. 41; Serv. yEn.v. 64.
3 Censorin. de Die Nat. c. iif. 5 ; Amm. Marc. xxi. 4.
4 Paul. Diac. p. 71 ; Hor. Ep. ii. 2, 183 sq.
5 Serv. Mn. vi. 743.
62 ROMAN GODS.
appeared to Brutus.1 As a rule mention is made but of one, who
is called Juno in the case of women; and Pliny saw, in the whole
of this belief and worship, a formal self-deification, proceeding
upon the view that the genius or Juno was nothing else but
the spiritual element of individual men.2 In life, people's be-
haviour was in accordance with this view : what the Roman did
for the enjoyment of life, he therewith enlivened his genius; his
self-imposed privations did detriment to his genius. The birth-
day was the annual festival of this genius : he was then treated
with wine and flowers, sacrificial cakes, honey, and incense, and
the offerer alone tasted of the offerings.
Not only the individual, but each and every place also, had
its genius. There were countless genii of places. " Why talk to
me/5 says Prudentius, " of the genius of Rome, when your wont
is to ascribe a genius of their own to doors, houses, baths, and
stables ; and in every quarter of the town, and all places, you
feign thousands of genii as existing, so that no corner is without
its own ghost ?"3 " No place/5 says Servius, " is without a genius,
generally manifesting itself in a serpent/5 The people, the Curias,
the centuries, the senate, the army^ the different burgher com-
panies, each and all had their genius. There were even genii of
particular deities. Amongst the twenty gods whom Varro enu-
merates as the select, we find, besides Jupiter, the " Genius ;"4 a
Genius Jovialis was counted among the public Penates of Rome,3
and the Etruscan Tages was a son of the genius, and grandson of
Jupiter. The Genius Jovialis was therefore an emanation of
Jupiter, the generator generated by him. Only in a religion such
as the Roman, one must not expect an idea of the kind to be in
any way firmly grasped or developed ; so then there is no further
mention of this Genius Jovialis.
1 Val. Max. i. 7, 7 ; Plut. Brut. 36. 2 Plin. H. N. ii. 5-7.
3 Prucl. adv. Symmach. ii. 444. 4 Ap. Aug. C. D. vii. 2.
5 Csesius, ap. Arnob. iii. 40.
63
The Roman Priesthood.
The Roman state -worship originated in those of single families
and gentes; and when these rites came to be public, or common
to the whole state, the gens, which had hitherto kept the cultus
to itself, formed a college of priests. The priesthoods for the
most part were already in existence in the time of the kings : on
the rise of the republic the sacrificial king took the place of the
king, and in 196 b.c the triumviri Epulones, the last indepen-
dent creation were added. In proportion as the plebeians aimed
at obtaining their share in the sacerdotal offices, hitherto ab-
sorbed by the patricians, such offices were enlarged in many
ways, doubled, or otherwise altered. Thus, by the Licinian law
first, the Sibylline decemviri were increased, for the sake of the
plebs, to the number of ten. About the same time, too, that
the pontificate and augurate, and the community of vestals were
thrown open to the plebs (159 b.c), a plebeian also obtained
the dignity of Flamen Carmentalis, who had a sacrifice to offer
to the soothsaying goddess Carmenta.
The ministers of religion in Rome were partly individual
priests, such as the Fiamines, the king of sacrifice, and the
Curiones, though these latter had a superior in the Curio Maxi-
mus, yet without forming a college in reality, and were partly
independent communities, such as the Pontiffs, the Salii, Lu-
perci, and Arval-brothers, filled up by election (cooptation) from
their own body. At no time was there in Rome one organised
association of the priests comprising every member of the sacer-
dotal class, to present the appearance of a whole and powerful
corporate body. The separate sacerdotal ones were tolerably
independent of one another; their members could not be de-
prived, and kept their office for life; yet a flamen would lose
his dignity by a small oversight committed in ritual; and a
Salian on becoming consul or prsetor had to resign. They were
not, however, civil authorities, responsible either to senate or
people : they might fill the political and military posts at the
same time, and it was not uncommon for an individual to be in
possession of several priesthoods at once. This, however, does
not seem to have taken place in earlier times. The first of
64 THE ROMAN PRIESTHOOD.
whom history makes mention is Otacilius Crassus, pontifex and
augur together, after the second Punic war.1 The emperors not
only invested themselves with the high-priesthood, but also be-
longed to a number of the colleges of priests, sometimes to all.2
The holiness and importance of the ceremonial required a
special and unvarying tradition, and a careful training of the
postulant for the duties of a religious office. This double re-
quirement could only be satisfied by close corporations. Such
colleges as those of the pontiffs and augurs filled up the vacan-
cies in their numbers, caused by death, by a free choice (coop-
tatio), and thus preserved the peculiar spirit of their order, and
the tradition which they received and handed on. By a law of
Domitius Ahenobarbus, tribune of the people, in the year 10^
the right of election to these colleges was first made over to the
popular comitia tributa. These named an individual, who was
then received by cooptation (now become an empty form) and
was inaugurated into the society. After many changes of the
law on this head, these appointments fell at last into the hands
of Augustus and his successors.
The Pontifices appear to have derived their name from the
Pons Sublicius, which they had built and kept in repair in order
to be able to sacrifice on either bank of the Tiber, and celebrate
the Argean rite on the bridge itself. According, however, to a
later opinion, the name was deducible from the knowledge of
numbers and arithmetic, which was a requisite accomplishment,
for calculating the festal calendar was one of the occupations of
this college.3 In any case, their employment in the historical
times was not sacrificial service principally, but general superin-
tendence of the whole religious system, and their place, within
the sphere of their own operations, resembled that of the senate
in the civil life. Still they certainly had a succession of reli-
gious duties, vows, and sacrifices to fulfil in the name of the
Roman people and state. The kings were at first presidents of
their college; whence too, at the beginning of the common-
wealth, certain regal rights passed to the new head, the Pontifex
maximus. The society first consisted of four members, two for
1 Liv. xxvii. 6.
2 Dio. Cass. liv. 19 ; Eckhel, D. Num. xvii. 102 ; Marini, Atti dei Fr. Arv. p.
153 ; Lamprid. Commod. 12.
3 L. Lange, Rom. Alterthiimer, Berlin, 1856, p. 267.
THE P0NT1FEX MAXIMUS. 65
each of the races, the Rhamnes and Tities. The supreme pontiff
was chosen out of the college itself. Their number was doubled
by the Ogulnian law.
The supervision of the pontiffs extended therefore to all
public and private worships ; they were the guardians of the old
tradition, propagated in part by oral communication and prac-
tice, and partly stereotyped in their written documents, or In-
digitamenta; and as the civil law was originally most closely
connected with the religious, they had also to keep up an ac-
quaintance with law, and had juridical decisions to give. Their
decisions concerned the law of marriage and inheritance, public
games, the consecration of a temple, the form of a ceremony to
be performed, or the validity of one that had been, and the like.
All priests and their ministers were their subjects; and as they
settled the calendar, they had scope for a powerful and frequently
a decisive influence on the whole of the public and civil life of
the people. They could not only inflict pecuniary punishment,
but even pass sentence of death ; for instance, in case of incest,
i. e. a crime consisting in the profanation of a sanctuary or a re-
ligious function by unchastity, as when a vestal virgin allowed
herself to be seduced, or Clodius in woman's attire stole into
CaBsar's house at the celebration of the rite of the Bona Dea j
though in this latter case, by an exceptional decree of the people,
a mixed judicial board of fifty-six persons was specially instituted
to try the offender.
Ordinarily, in republican times, it was only an elderly man,
who had already discharged curule offices, who attained to the
dignity of pontifex maximus. He conducted the business and
voting of the college, promulgated and executed its decrees, and
in matters of any consequence dared not act lightly in opposition
to it. Yet he acted on the plenitude of his own power where
the application of an existing law, or of a custom that had ac-
quired the force of a right, was indubitable. His office was held
in such high veneration, that when attacked on the score of the
use of his power, he almost always got the best of it, and he could
make any one, even against his will, Flamen Dialis, a dignity
encumbered with great and burdensome personal restrictions.1
This sacerdotal chief was elected from the college by the people
in the Comitia Tributa. It was only late, in the times of the
1 Val. Max. ix. 8 ; Liv. xxvii. 8.
VOL. II. F
66
ROME.
downfall of the religion, that he was allowed to exercise secular
functions; thus Licinius Crassus, in 131 B.C., as pontifex maximus,
became consul also, and went in person to command in Asia,
breaking through the custom of no bearer of that dignity leaving
Italy.1 The Regia, in the Via Sacra, that place of old sanctuaries
of the state, was also the official residence of the pontifex maximus
and of the king of sacrifice ; but Augustus converted a portion
of his own house into state buildings in order to have a separate
sacerdotal residence, without being obliged to live in the Regia.2
The priest who had to perform the sacred duties, formerly
proper to the kings, had the title of " king," in other respects so
grating to Roman ears ; for people in Rome generally went upon
the axiom, that religious relations ought to be immutable ; care
was taken, however, that, in despite of his high rank and title, he
should be without the reality of power, even in the religious de-
partment. Named by the pontifex maximus (but not till he had
advised with the pontiffs and augurs), he was also dependent on
him, could never assume a secular office, but was always chosen
from the patricians only, and at banquets enjoyed precedence of
all the other priests. The wife of the king of sacrifice was styled
" queen," and had to assist him in certain sacrifices. The Comi-
tium in the forum, the place appointed for the assembly of the
people to deliberate on political and legal objects, was only fre-
quented by the sacrificial king for the purpose of offering the
monthly sacrifice, after which he hurried away, so that he might
not by tarrying longer be led through his lofty title into the
temptation of ambitiously mixing himself up with public pro-
ceedings ; and this was called the Regifugium.3
The fifteen Flamines, who, without composing a college, were
consecrated to the service of separate deities, had their name
either from the woollen bands wound round their sacerdotal
caps,4 or from lightning. The three flamines majores, of Jupiter,
Mars, and Quirinus, were priests held in the highest esteem, who
appeared always together, and were at all times to be chosen
from patrician families, whereas the plebeians too could become
flamines minores. The people chose them, and the pontifex maxi-
mus received and initiated them with the assistance of the augurs.
The regulations by which the life of the Flamen Dialis had to be
1 Liv. Epit. 59 ; Dio. Cass, fragm. 62. 2 Dio. Cass. liv. 27.
3 Pint. Qu.nest. Rom. 1. 63. 4 Varro, iv. 15 ; Festus, s. v.
THE FLAMINES — THE SALII. 07
guided are surprising; they give the impression of a kind of
foreign, non-Roman institution, in no way connected with the
other religious ideas of the Romans, and seeming to present the
appearance of ruins of an older and more comprehensive system
of ceremonial ordinances more detailed. Ovid calls the Flamen
Dialis a Pelasgic priest,1 and by this designation, as well as by
the prescriptions alluded to above, one's suspicions are aroused
that the priesthood of the Flamen Dialis, in any case primitive
and pre-Roman, might have been somehow or other connected
with the equally Pelasgic institute of the Selli in the Dodonean
sanctuary of Zeus, whom Homer describes as a body of priests
living: under a distinct and austere rule.2 The flamen also was
not allowed to take an oath, to ride, or have any thing knotted
about him, or to look at bodies of armed men. The sight of a
prisoner in chains, or criminal taken to be scourged, made him
unclean. If any such met him, his fetters were taken off, or the
chastisement deferred till another day. If a man in chains took
refuge in his house, his chains were thrown over the wall into the
street. On festivals he was defiled by the sight of a man occupied
in work, and if one so employed put his work purposely within
sight of the flamen, he was punished, For fear of becoming un-
clean, the flamen also could not touch a goat, or dog, or raw flesh,
beans, or leaven. He could not bathe under the open heaven,
lest Jupiter should see his nakedness, nor could he spend a night
outside of the city. No slave could cut his hair, while his cut-off*
hair and the parings of his nails had to be buried under a fruit-
bearing tree. His wife took her part in his ministry, and was in
great measure subject to the same regulations ; he was obliged to
live united with her in the marriage which had received the sacer-
dotal benediction of confarreatio, and ought himself to have been
born in the same. If the flaminica died, he had to resign his office.3
He enjoyed still higher honours. No oath could be exacted of
him when acting as witness ; the sella curulis, the apex of Roman
ambition, belonged to him, as well as a place in the senate.
The priesthood of the Salii, who danced in armour, is in like
manner of pre-Roman and Pelasgic origin. It was to be found
in the oldest Latin towns, and ancient records point to Mantinea
1 Fast. ii. 282.
2 Iliad, xvi. 233 sqq., where they are called avnrTSirooes. xalxa-lsvvau.
3 Gell. x. 15; Plut. Qusest. Eom. 109 sqq. ; Llv. v. 52.
68
ROME.
and Samothrace as places from which, in the Pelasgic period, this
rite was introduced into central Italy.1 As priests of Mars, and
divided into two colleges, always consisting of twelve young men,
they went about in March in embroidered garments fitting the
body, with brazen cuirass, sword, spear, and shield, and, accom-
panied by flute-players and singers, danced through the city, on
the Forum, and in the Capitol; at their head they had a magister,
a dancer before them (prsesul), and a precentor. In their antique
Saliaric hymn, besides Mars, Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Hercules,
Mania, and Volumnia, were introduced, and, as a rare distinction,
also the praises of individuals of eminence, as, for example, Octa-
vian during his life, and Germanicus after his death, by a special
decree of the senate; and, later still, Marcus Aurelius caused the
name of Yerus to be inserted.3 As the procession through the
city, with the sacrifices in different places, lasted a number of
days, the Salii had their stations accordingly, where they passed
the night, after a sumptuous repast. On the fourteenth of March,
the last day of the procession, called the Mamuralia, a man went
with them, wrapped in thick skins, who quietly submitted to be
beaten with long sticks. He was the representative of the Ma-
murius, celebrated in the hymn, — probably Mars himself in his
Sabine name, — who, according to the later sagas, was the maker
of the sacred shields.3 Of the two colleges, that of the Palatine
Salii was the older and the more respectable; the second and
younger, the Colline or Agonensic Salii, were established by
Tullius Hostilius to honour the sons or comrades of Mars, Qui-
rinus, Pavor, and Pallor : with them the warlike signification of
the god and the rite seems to have been the prevalent one, while
the ancient Salii of the Palatine, at least according to the old
view, afterwards confessedly obscured, celebrated a feast of the
new year, for the year formerly began in March, thus worship-
ing Mars as the conductor of the year and god of the month of
spring ; the number twelve of the Salii also had relation to that
of the twelve months.
The Luperci too, the oldest priests in Rome, the institution
of whom was therefore put as far back as the Arcadian Evander,
were divided into two colleges of Fabii and Quintilii, to whom
1 Serv. An. viii. 285, ii. 375 ; Fest. s. v. Salios.
2 Hor. Carm. iv. 5, 31 ; Tac. Ann. ii. 83; Capitol. Ant. 21.
3 Lyd. iii. 29, iv. 30 ; Fest. s. v. Mamurii.
THE VESTAL VIRGINS. 69
Caesar afterwards added a third of Julii. It was thus a priesthood
of families, but in the later period of the republic was no longer
in esteem, because of the strangeness and indecency of its rite.
Cicero reproached Antony with having become a Lupercus, and
spoke of the college as a boorish institution, begun previous to
all civilisation, and to any thing like law;1 and yet they kept their
ground till the fall of the Empire. The equally primitive Arvalian
fraternity of twelve were in higher repute. Their office was for
life, and was not even forfeited by exile. They filled up their
numbers by cooptation, until the emperors at length appointed
them, and they had a magister at their head.
In order to relieve the pontiffs of the number of sacrifices
which they had to perform, the Epulones were instituted in the
year 196 b.c. They were at first three, then seven, and under
Caesar ten, and had the charge of the sacrificial banquets, the
luxury of which gradually became proverbial.2 The Curiones
were spiritual ministers of the curiae, thirty in number, each
selected by his own curia, and then instituted by the augurs;
they too were, as might be supposed, of patrician rank only.3
Nevertheless, plebeians too were afterwards admitted, when the
divisions of the curiae had lost their importance, and the office had
become a mere sacerdotal one.4 How long the Tities continued
to be the special ministers of the Sabine cultus is not known.
In the year 14 after Christ the Sodales August ales, a congrega-
tion of priests, consisting of twenty-five, taken from the highest
ranks, were appointed.5 Similar colleges were afterwards erected,
in succession, for the deceased emperors become gods ; and we
meet with Claudiales, Titiales, Flaviales, Hadrianales, and so on,
and from time to time a single Flamen Augustalis makes his
appearance.6
Apart from the foreign female ministers of Ceres, the Romans
had but one kind of priestess, the vestal virgin. To them was
intrusted the custody of the holiest securities, on which the
welfare of the state depended, and their institution originated in
Alba Longa, according to the legend. At the first there were
four, two each, that is, of the two oldest races ; by the addition
of the Luceres they became six, which number remained un-
1 Cic. pro Cselio, c. 2. 2 Liv. xxxiii. 42. 3 Dionys. ii. 21, 04.
4 Liv. xxvii. 8, xxxiii. 42. 5 Tac. Ann. i. 54.
6 Tac. Ann. iii. 64 ; Suet. Claud. G : Galb. 8.
70 ROME.
changed till the very last times of the state. The right of choos-
ing them passed from the kings to the pontifex maximus; but
afterwards the Papian law decreed he should look out for twenty
maidens, and that one of them should be chosen by lot; still, by
a provision of the Papilian law, a father could offer his daughter
to the pontifex as a vestal virgin. In order to be perfectly sure
of their maidenhood, they were chosen while still children, be-
tween the ages of six and ten years. According to the legal
expression, the pontifex was to possess himself of the maiden, and
to carry her off like a booty ; whereupon she was inaugurated,
but did not incur any obligation for life ; she might leave and
marry after a service of thirty years, and this sometimes took
place through a kind of formal exauguration ; but the gods, it was
thought, were not favourable to such a step. Evil befell the mar-
ried pair, and the recusant came to an unhappy end.1 Ten of a
vestal's thirty years were spent in learning the sacred usages,
ten in their practice, and the last ten were devoted to giving
instructions.
Only a maiden both of whose parents were still living could
become a vestal. Patrician birth was required at first, but after-
wards plebeians were admitted. Augustus even gave permission
for the choice of freed women (libertinse), but it never took place.
Families often tried to evade the choice of one of their daughters,
so that Tiberius publicly thanked Fonteius Agrippa and Domi-
tius Pollio for the offer of theirs ; by so doing they had laid the
state under an obligation. And yet, putting aside the loss of
marriage, their lot was as brilliant as the state could make it.
They received the highest honours ; whoever attacked them had
death to expect in requital.2 To meet them accidentally saved a
criminal who was being led out to die ; consuls even, and prsetors,
had to give way to them in the streets, or, if that were impossible,
had to lower their fasces to them.3 Contracts and wills were de-
posited with them. In the enjoyment of ample revenues, they
led a very independent life, assisted at all public entertainments,
not only in the circus and the theatres, but even in the amphi-
theatre at the contests of gladiators, and Augustus appointed
them a special seat there, over against the praetor's. Attended
by a numerous retinue, and carried on litters (even to the Capitol),
they visited their relations, were invited to dinner by them, and
1 Dionys. ii. 67. 2 Plut. Num. 10. 3 Sen. Excerpt. Controv. vi. 8.
DUTIES OF VESTALS. 7l
received the visits even of men in the daytime, and of women at
night, at their dwelling in the Hegia. Their intercession conld
not lightly be passed unheeded,1 as in the case of Csesar, when
proscribed by Sulla, who was spared accordingly. Their mere
presence protected from violence ; on which account the daughter
of Appius Claudius Pulcher, a vestal, took her place in the
triumphal car beside her father, in order to prevent the tribune
of the people tearing her father down from it. With, the right
to give evidence in court, they could not be compelled to take
any oath.
Besides the daily ministrations in the temple and sacrifice of
Vesta, and care of the sacred fire, the vestals were charged with
the preparation of the casta mola and the sacrificial cakes of
meal from the ears of corn and of brine, articles necessary for
every sacrifice. They took part in many sacrifices, namely,
those of the Bona Dea, Ops Consivia, the Fordicidia, and of the
Argei. On certain occasions they were intrusted with extraor-
dinary sacrifices and prayers, expiatory actions and lustrations,
by the senate or pontiffs. Their prayers and rites were reckoned
to be particularly efficacious ; amongst other things, it was com-
monly believed that they could, by a formula, infallibly detain
runaway slaves who had not yet left the city.2 On an appointed
day they repaired to the sacrificial king to invite him to vigilance.
It has been scarcely noticed, but is nevertheless well accredited,
that the vestal virgins were also intrusted with the attendance on
a holy serpent, who, it is highly probable, was worshiped as the
genius of the city of Rome. They had to supply his table with
meats on all the Kalends, and every five years to furnish a more
sumptuous banquet.3 All the vestal virgins, even the maxima,
who, as the eldest, had precedence, were under the pontifex
maximus, who exercised a very strict superintendence over them,
actually chastising them with blows for any grievous negligence
in their duties, as for letting the sacred fire go out, an event of
the most sinister foreboding.4 A vestal virgin convicted of in-
continence was buried alive, to prevent the executioner laying
1 Tac. Ann. ii. 32 ; Hist. iii. 81 ; Cic. pro Font. 17.
2 Plin. H. N. xxviii. 3.
3 Paulin. adv. Pagan, i. 143 ; Tertull. ad Uxor. i. 0. Compare the passage from
the apocryphal acts of St. Sylvester, in Lips, de Vesta, Opp. iii. 1097.
4 Val. Max. i. 1, 6 ; Plut. Numa, 10 ; Dionys. ii. 67 ; Liv. xxviii. 11.
72
ROME
hand on her, and that her death might ensue without having re-
course to violence, and every year expiatory rites were performed
over her burial-place. In the later Roman history the number
of trials and condemnations of vestal virgins for violation of
chastity appears very frequent in proportion. If the fire under
their charge was extinguished, or they happened to attire them-
selves with too great nicety, great suspicion was awakened, an
investigation followed, and sometimes they were admonished and
absolved by the pontiff.1
The augurs did not belong, strictly speaking, to the Roman
priesthood, but their proper concern was with the inquiring into
and communication of the divine will • and yet mention of sacri-
ficial acts of theirs does occur, though not frequently. To help
decision by a plurality of votes, their college was generally com-
posed of an uneven number of members, at first but three, and
then four or five. Vacancies were filled by coaptation. An augur
was never displaced or degraded : he was for good and all a seer,
initiated in science which was always receiving a new lustre and
perfection from time, and could only be accurately understood by
one who had long pursued it as a vocation ; and hence the augurs
were in high estimation, and their influence on state occasions
was often decisive. By their obnuntiatio, or declaration that the
signs were unfavourable, they could compel the authorities to
break up a popular assembly leaving business undone, and dismiss
an assembly or session already opened, or render the decrees of
one already held invalid. A single augur standing out was suf-
ficient to interrupt at once the prosecution of a matter in hand ;
their decision bound even the consuls to lay down their office, and
it was in their hands to grant or to deny permission to deliberate
with the assembled people.2 Besides this, the higher curule
magistrates, after their election, further required inauguration
from an augur, for it was only by that they were put into a posi-
tion to make use of the auspices in official business.
In the earliest times, there does not seem to have been an
augurate apart from the magistracy, and so the kings them-
selves practised augury, as a gift imparted to them from the
gods ; and Romulus, in the legend, has the character of being
the best augur.3 The fact of the legend attributing to him or
1 Liv. iv. 44 ; Plut. cle Inim. Util. 6. 2 Cic. de Legg. ii. 12.
3 Cic. de Div. i. 2.
POWERS, ETC. OF AUGURS. 73
Numa the first appointment of augurs proper, speaks certainly
for the high antiquity of the institution, i.e. the business became
soon so difficult, and, in proportion as it became more artificial,
demanded so much time, care, and observation, that it seemed
matter of necessity to have in the state competent persons to
choose this science as their profession ; and at last the system of
taking auspices became a kind of disciplina arcani, the principles
of which were understood only by the augurs themselves.1
It is true particular auspicia still continued to be taken and
decided upon by the officers of the state, without the assistance
of an augur, as, for instance, on the naming of a dictator, or in a
campaign ; it is also true, when the auspices were taken by the
augur, the magistrate continued to be the commander, the augur
the executive f but if the magistrates once called in an augur,
they were obliged to obey his nuntiatio or obnuntiatio. There
was therefore a mutual interdependence between magistrate and
augur. The augur could not proprio motu and at his own plea-
sure consult the auspices (whether lightning or birds) in regard
to the transaction of a matter of state ; he required an authorisa-
tion from the magistrate for the purpose, and only when he had
given the commission was he obliged to act upon the report of
the augur. The augurs, however, had important privileges on
their side too, for they had the power, without their being com-
missioned, if, without their seeking, the auspices appeared un-
favourable, of interrupting the comitia by simply reporting the
fact; and they could also investigate how a state officer had
conducted the auspices, even when no augur had been called in
to assist, and, after inquiry made according to the rules of their
art, could pronounce upon the admissibility or validity of the
acts of state in respect of which the auspices had been taken in
the first instance.3 The college of augurs also decided doubts
arising on the validity of an act, and thus it happened not unfre-
quently that magistrates were obliged to resign, because, in the
judgment of the college, a vitium, that is, any unfavourable por-
tent, had occurred in their election. Still more frequently laws
and judicial proceedings were annulled on the same ground or
pretext.4
1 Liv. viii. 23, ix. 38. 2 Cic. de Div. ii. 34.
3 Cic. Phil. ii. 33 ; De Legg. ii. 12 ; Dio. Cass, xxxviii. 13.
4 Cic. de Div. ii. 35 ; de N. D. ii. 4.
74 ROME.
By the Ogulnian law, five plebeian augurs, chosen by the
people, were added to the hitherto patrician ones. Sylla increased
their number to fifteen, and Caesar added a sixteenth. The em-
perors named augurs at will, and in excess, too, of the legal
number. The slippery art which they practised required a close
combination amongst them, and hence provision was made that
no one living in enmity with any of the members of the college
should be chosen augur,1 and farther, that the younger augur
should honour as a father the elder one who had admitted him.
Even after the time of the Ogulnian law, the augurate was still
predominantly the organ of the aristocracy, and its influence was
often employed as a counterpoise to the power of the tribunes of
the people.
The keepers and expounders of the Sibylline books were
originally but two ; they could not undertake any political office
or military service. After the plebs had acquired their share in
these sacerdotal dignities, there were ten of them, five patricians
and five plebeians, and in Sylla's time fifteen. The Haruspices,
whose duties included the inspection of the entrails of beasts, and
the interpretation of prodigies, were established in Rome first
after the expulsion of the kings, and were as exotic as their art ;
in fact, they always came from Etruria, and therefore enjoyed no
personal esteem, and formed no college, but were frequently con-
sulted by decree of the senate. Lastly, the Feciales were a half-
sacerdotal, half-political society, consisting of patricians, and
coeval with the state itself. Their functions regarded the foreign
relations of Rome, negotiations with other people, embassies,
conclusions of peace, and declarations of war, and they had to
look after the fulfilment of treaties that had been made. In such
occurrences many ceremonies of a religious nature had to be
observed, the exact performance of which was either matter of
personal obligation to themselves, or had to be superintended in
others. In earlier times it had been their task to pass sentence
upon the justice of a war; but after that this right had passed
into the hands of senate and people, they had only formalities to
decide.2
1 Cic. ad Faro. iii. 10. 2 Liv. xxxi. 8, xxxvi. 3.
75
IV. Roman Forms of Worship.
Prayers, Vows, Sacrifices, Ritual, and Feasts.
The magic and thoroughly formal character of the Roman reli-
gion, in no way concerned as it was with the instruction, eleva-
tion, or purifying of man, but only with the most effectual means
of making the gods subservient to its own designs, is discerned
principally in the employment of prayer, and in the contents of
the Roman formulae of prayer. Every thing here depended on
the words used, — a mistake might render the whole prayer in-
operative ; but if the formula was pronounced correctly, without
a wrong word, an omission or addition, all disturbing causes and
things of evil import being kept at a distance the while, then was
success assured, independently of the intention of the person pray-
ing. Hence, as Pliny tells us,1 the highest officers of state, during
religious acts, had the formula read before them from a ritual,
one priest being obliged to follow attentively each word as it was
pronounced, and another to keep silence among the assistants ;
moreover, the flutes were played to prevent another word besides
being heard. For experience, he thought, had proved that, as
often as a noise or word of bad omen was heard during the time,
or any error committed in the prayer, a defect portending cala-
mity, or a monstrosity of some kind, was sure to be discovered in
the entrails of the victim.
The Romans when at prayer were in the habit of covering
the head, or, properly speaking, the ears, so that no word or
sound of evil augury might be heard at the time.2 One of the
acts to be performed by a suppliant praying was to kiss his
right hand, and then turn round in a circle by the right, and
seat himself upon the ground.3 This was supposed to be a direc-
tion of Numa. The turning round in a circle signified, so subtle
criticism made out, the circular movement of the world; the
sitting posture and repose indicating confidence that the prayer
would be heard. If a man found himself near an altar of the
deity to whom his prayer was to be addressed, it was necessary
to touch the altar, as the only way of softening the deity.4 Also
1 H. N. 28 : cf. Cic. de Div. i. 29. 2 Plut, Quasst. Eom. 10.
3 Suet. Vitell. 2 ; Plut. Numa, 4 ; Plin. H, N. xxviii. 2. 4 Macrob. Sat, iii. 2.
76
ROME.
to touch or embrace the feet of images was considered peculiarly
efficacious. In temples where the images were enclosed, people
had recourse to the door-keepers, and begged to be admitted to
the image, to pray to it on the spot.1 In crises of great import-
ance, or danger impending, the Roman women would throw
themselves on the pavement, and rub the slabs clean with their
hair.2 But if prayer and other means of appeasing the deity
proved ineffectual, then it came to pass, as when the death of
Germanicus ensued in spite of all the prayers and sacrifices
offered, that the temples were pelted with stones, and the altars
overthrown, and many went so far as to cast the idols of their
family Lares out of the house.3
A certain selection and order of precedence had, as was
natural, to be observed in the prayers. Janus, as the god of
all good beginnings, was frequently first named. In prayers of
more general importance, particularly those offered on behalf of
the state, Jupiter Capitolinus ordinarily assumed the first place,
as was his due. If there were many gods to be invoked, Vesta
usually formed the conclusion. It is not clear by what rule on
special occasions, at Rome, sometimes only single gods, at others
many of them together, had " supplications" presented to them.
At times also general prayer-feasts were appointed to all the
gods together. As it was often not known exactly whether it
were god or goddess to whom the prayer or the sacrifice should
be directed, or how the deity was to be addressed, people ex-
pressed themselves cautiously, using the proviso, " Be thou god
or goddess." Sometimes, too, the name of the deity was omitted,
for fear of substituting a wrong one. Indeed, the Romans could
not be surpassed by any other people in the number and con-
stant repetition of formulae, and in crowding together invocations
of gods, and expiatory and purifying rites, into every nook and
cranny of life. If it was but the most trifling action, toll of
prayers and homage had to be paid to a whole series of gods ;
and it was a critical matter to pass over but one of the per-
sons or things having claims or weight in the matter.
It was an indispensable condition of success that an appointed
form of prayer should be repeated three times, in some instances
nine.4 As often as he mounted his chariot even, Caesar usually
1 Sen. Ep. 41. 2 Liv. iii. 7, xxvi. 9; Lucan. ii. 30.
3 Suet. Galig. 5. 4 Marini, Atti dei Fr. Arv. p. 004.
vows. 77
repeated three times a formula to avert dangers ; a custom gene-
rally in vogue in the time of Pliny. Of Marcus Aurelius it was
observed that, as master and president of the Salii, he required
no one to repeat before him the forms at his inaugurations and
exaugurations, because he knew them by heart.1 The Emperor
Claudius also repeated the words of prayers before the people
himself. In all the formulas, no instance is to be found of any
thing else ever being asked for, but prosperity and health for in-
dividuals, and victory and power for the state, nor of prayer being
offered for moral good ; and, indeed, it was not to be expected from
the character of the Roman religious system. Many prayers and
hymns were taken up with the praise of the gods, and salutations
to them; for some people had the habit of making early morning
visits, the first hour of the day, to particular gods. Arnobius
speaks of morning serenades sung with an accompaniment of fifes,
as a kind of reveille to the sleeping gods, and of an evening salu-
tation, in which leave was taken of the deity with the wishing
him a good night's rest.2 Prayer was also addressed to the gods
at meals, and while, at the end of the first course, a second was
being set on the table, crowded with dishes, that which had been
selected from the repast, and consecrated to the gods, was taken
to the " focus," and was thrown into the fire, amid the solemn
silence of the company, the slave crying out, "The gods be
gracious !"3
If the Romans laid claim to be the most pious of all people, it
was partly because they dwelt, in mind, upon the great number of
their vows, and their care and conscientiousness in the fulfilment
of them ; for to vow the dedication of a temple, or altar, or pub-
lic games to a deity for the welfare of the state generally, or the
obtaining of any particular favour, a victory or the taking of a
city, was one of the most frequent resources of Roman statesmen
and generals ; the latter particularly thought to increase at once
the spirit of their troops and their certainty of victory by vows
pronounced aloud immediately before the beginning of a battle.
At home an epidemic was the most common motive of vows ;
and in the uncertainty as to which deity sent the calamity, and
which was the fittest to remove it, many gods were included in
one and the same vow. Thereupon special decrees of the senate
1 Capitolin. M. Aur. c. 4. 2 Arnob. vii. 32.
3 Marini, Atti dei Fr. Arv. p. 530.
78 ROME.
were made, and the vow then was executed with particular solem-
nity, according to a formula first enunciated by a priest, often
the pontifex maximus himself. The promise was inscribed on
a tablet, and hung up on the walls or pillars of the temple.
Most of the temples, and a great number of altars, were
erected in Rome in fulfilment of vows ; not unfrequently too it
was great sacrifices, share in spoils, or the best of the armour
captured, golden crowns, festal games, and libations, that were
vowed ; and to these sometimes lectisternia were added, or, when
there was a long drought, Nudipedalia, i. e. pilgrimages of Roman
matrons barefoot and with dishevelled hair.1
Towards the end of the republic began the custom of making
public vows for the safety of persons in authority. This first
took place when Pompey fell ill, and next for Csesar, and for
the latter, indeed, annually. This led on, by a natural progress,
to their being renewed for all the emperors yearly, then for the
happy return of an emperor from a journey or campaign, for
the happy delivery of the empress, and the like. Countless were
the votive offerings to conciliate a god promised by individuals
in illness, at the outset of a journey, in undertakings, in storms,
and other dangers; these always consisted of victims or hallowed
presents ; they were specially made to a man's genius and to Juno
Lucina on his birthday. The most peculiar one was that of a
" sacred spring," in accordance with which all cattle born between
the first of March and the last of April were dedicated to Jupiter.
This Ver sacrum was promised in the second Punic War, after
the overthrow and death of Flaminius, and the promise after-
wards performed. With, the Italic races, Samnites, Sabines, and
others, the Ver sacrum included still more, embracing the whole
generation of a spring ; man and beast were offered alike, boys
and girls were allowed their lives, but sent out as colonists when
grown up, being carried over the borders with their faces veiled.2
The sacrificial rites of the Romans coincided for the most
part with the Greek, still having much that was peculiar to
themselves. On the whole, sacrifices were very frequent among
the Romans, more so than the Greeks, Athens excepted. Thanks-
giving for benefits received, the fulfilment of vows made, and
1 Tert. de Jejun. 16 ; Apol. 40 ; Petron. Sat. 44.
2 Paul. Diac. p. 379 ; Fest. v. Mamertini; Liv. xxii. 10 ; Justin, xxiv. 4 ; Flin.
H. N. iii. 18.
SACRIFICIAL RITES. 79
propitiation of the gods, were the objects and occasions of ex-
traordinary sacrifices, which were performed in addition to the
standing one, regularly recurring; in particular, sacrifices of
atonement were more common among the Romans than the
Greeks. There were*, besides, sacrifices of consultation, the
principal object of which was inspection of entrails, to inquire
into the will of the gods, or get counsel from them ; in these the
surrender of the life of the animal to the deity was a secondary
matter, while it was a primary one with the others, which were
therefore called " animal."1
In the laws of the twelve tables it was said " such beasts
should be used for victims as were becoming and agreeable to
each deity ;" the animal therefore stood in some peculiar rela-
tion or other to a characteristic of the god. White cattle with
gilded horns were sacrificed to Jupiter Capitolinus, but no bull
or ram.2 A bull could only be sacrificed to Apollo, Neptune,
or Mars. Asses, cocks, and horses were sacrificed to Mars ; a
white cow, because of her moon-shaped horns, to Juno Calen-
daris ; an intact heifer to the virgin Minerva ; a sow in young
to the great Mother; doves and sparrows, as wanton animals,
with the loins of numberless other beasts, to Venus. Swine
were the due of almost all agrarian deities; and to Mars,
Ceres, and Tellus, they were also used for sacrifice in impre-
cations and on the conclusion of treaties. Female deities or-
dinarily had female animals sacrificed to them. Unweaned
puppies were offered as victims of expiation to Robigus, the
Lares, and Proserpine. To the gods of the infernal regions
black animals were slaughtered, with their necks bowed down-
wards, and the blood poured into a hole dug for its reception.
Sheep and swine were the animals in most frequent use for
sacrifice.
The expenses incurred by the state in the sacrifices which
it appointed were paid out of pecuniary penalties or the for-
feited goods of condemned criminals ;3 but as these sources were
not adequate, they became by degrees such a burden on the
state-finances that the Emperor Nerva did away with many of
them for this reason.4 Indeed, Servius says : " One must know
1 Macrob, Sat. iii. 5. 2 Serv. Mn, ix. 028 ; Macr. Sat. iii. 10.
3 Fest. v. Sacramentum et Supplicia.
4 Dio. Cass, lxviii. p. 770; /En. ii. 116.
80 ROME.
that, in sacrificing, the appearance is taken for the reality ; ac-
cordingly, when animals difficult to be got are required for the
purpose, representations are made of them in bread or wax, and
are offered as substitutes." But this took place in the public
sacrifices only on very unusual occasions, as when it happened
that the demand for the sacrifice of such uncommon animals
originated with the Sibylline books. The number of beasts con-
sumed in a single sacrifice was often very great : thus, after the
defeat at lake Thrasymene three hundred bulls were sacrificed
to Jupiter, white cattle to many other gods of the first rank, and
to the rest victims of less value. Hecatombs do not seem to
have been frequent, though Marius vowed one in the Cimbric
war; iEmilius Paulus, too, vowed and slaughtered a hundred
oxen in the Macedonian. At this kind of sacrifice, the Romans
commonly erected a hundred altars of turf close by one another,
and then sacrificed on them one hundred sheep or swine, and
so on. If it were an imperial sacrifice, even lions, eagles, and
such-like animals were used.1 It is calculated that on the
death of Tiberius, and on Caligula's mounting the throne, up-
wards of one hundred and sixty thousand victims, principally,
perhaps, oxen and calves, were slaughtered throughout the Ro-
man empire in testimony of the universal joy.2 Augustus and
Marcus Aurelius required so great a number of beasts for their
sacrifices, that it was said of them, " All oxen and calves hoped
and prayed they might never return from their journeys or
campaigns, as otherwise they were infallibly lost."3
In private and family life, too, important events were solem-
nised by sacrificing — above all, marriage. The nuptial sacrifice
admitted the bride to a participation in the " sacra" of her spouse.
In earlier times no marriage was concluded without sacrifice, as
an essential ingredient of the religious ceremony ;4 but later on,
when bare consent rendered a contract of the kind valid, sacri-
fice came to be considered as no longer necessary, though still
it was in frequent use. In those ancient days the bridegroom
offered the sacrifice (a swine) in person, with the aid of the
bride; but afterwards competent people, popse or victimarii,
assisted in that duty.
1 Capitol, in Max. et Balb. c. 11. 2 Suet. Calig. 14.
3 Sen. de Benef. iii. 27 ; Amm. Marc. xxii. 14, xxv. 1.
4 Serv. Mn. 136.
SIGNS IN THE VICTIM. 81
Sacrifices of expiation must have been of very common oc-
currence among Romans who were at all punctilious in the
observance of their religion ; for the faults, negligences, and
evil prognostications, which had to be atoned for or averted by
them, were of the greatest variety, and in numberless instances
unavoidable. If a sacrifice was interrupted by a sudden attack
of illness, a new one was required as an atonement. If any one
washed animals, or watered the fields, on a festival, or if the
vestal virgins placed their holy-water vessels on the ground, —
these were transgressions that had to be expiated by a sacrifice.
A common sacrifice of this kind, and almost always resorted to
in all lustrations, was the Suovetaurilia,1 in which the animals
to be slaughtered — a swine, sheep, and bull — were conducted
three times in procession round the object to be purified, i.e.
the whole people, and were then sacrificed to Mars. By the
state of the entrails it was known whether the deity was really
appeased and propitiated : if they presented unfavourable signs,
the sacrifice required repetition as long and as often as the
state of the entrails did not pronounce the god to be reconciled.
Cato himself supplies the formula that was to be used in the
Suovetaurilia, in case of repetition : " Father Mars, if any thing
has been not to your mind in the previous sacrifice, so now do
I propitiate thee by this new sacrifice."2 Symmachus, writing
in the latest period of decaying paganism, says it caused him
much anxiety that there was so great difficulty in making ex-
piation for the prodigy at Spoletum, though the sacrifice was
so often repeated, and Jupiter hardly contented the eighth time.3
On the day of his assassination Csesar, though he slaughtered
one hundred victims one after the other, could not arrive at a
litamen, or true atonement and its proof in the favourable ap-
pearance of the entrails.4 Paulus iEmilius succeeded in this
object at the twentieth time.
The choice of the victims from the flocks and herds de-
manded great attention : for there was much that entered into
consideration, down to the length of the tail. A calf was only
fit for sacrifice when its tail reached the joint of the leg. In
a sheep the points to be looked to were, that the tail was not
1 Dionys. ii. 22. 2 Cato de E. K. c. 141.
3 Synimach. Epist. i. 49 ; Plaut. Poen. act. ii. sc. 5.
4 Flor. iv. 2.
VOL. II. G
82
ROME.
pointed, the tongue not cloven, and the ear not black.1 An ox,
to be available for sacrifice, ought to be white ; and if with spots,
they had to be rubbed white with chalk.2 Then, in the action
of the sacrifice itself, there were many bad signs, rendering it
dubious whether the god had really accepted it or not ; as when
the beast bellowed on arriving at the altar, or even after re-
ceiving its death-wound, or did not keep quiet at the altar, or
ran away ;3 for all the fillets it was tied with were taken off it at
the altar, as any thing fastened on the beast was of bad import,4
and therefore a popa held the creature by one of its horns. It
was also an unfavourable omen if the beast sprinkled the as-
sistants with its blood/' and if it did not bleed copiously, or fell
to the ground not in the right position,6 or if the portion thrown
on the pan of live coals would not burn properly,7 or, in fine, if
the flames of the altar did not mount up to heaven straight and
pure.
After bathing in spring- water, the sacrificer should appear in
fresh white garments for the sacred action, and wash his hands
again before beginning. In many sacrifices abstinence from
sexual intercourse was required the night before, sometimes for
many days previously. It was not on the strength of any ideas
of morality attaching to this abstinence, but because such ab-
staining, like the fresh-washed garments and hands, &c. were
calculated to produce that physical purity with which a person
ought to present himself before the deity, and enter into the
communion of sacrifice with him : hence the poetical dictum,
" The pure is pleasing to the celestial;" and Cicero's prescription,
" One should approach the gods in purity."8
It was usual for a man to veil himself during the action of
the sacrifice, except in sacrifices to Saturn and Hercules. The
animal was first tried by a libation of wine or water upon the
1 Plin. H. N. viii. 70. 2 juv# x# (jo#
3 Sil. ItaL v. 05; Lucan. i. 611; Flor. iv. 1 ; Suet. Ital. 10; Lucan. vii. 165.
4 Serv. JEn. ii. 133. 6 Liv. xx^ 63.
6 Fest. v. piacularia; Senec. CRdip. ii. 2. 51. 7 Virg. Georg. iii. 486.
8 This Zumpt translates, and rightly, " Ad Divos adeunto caste" (De Legg. ii.
8), not as Lasaulx (Studien, p. 153) translates it, " A man must approach the gods
with a pure heart," adding besides that this prescription was the ordinary one
in antiquity, whereas all the Roman authorities adduced by him merely speak of
the physical purity of the body, of washing of hands, &c, indicating this by the
term " castus," the idea of which does not approximate to the modern one of
purity. Purity of heart might well consist with what was here directly forbidden ;
SACRIFICIAL RITES. 83
head ; if it moved or trembled during that, it was considered
qualified.1 "Far" too, that is meal and salt mixed, was crum-
bled upon each victim (immolatio), and the same was done to the
knives used and to the altar. Next, the priest cut off the animal's
forelock and threw it into the fire, as a symbol of the consecra-
tion of the whole victim, together with incense and a little wine.
The success of the sacrifice with the deity was gathered from the
smoke and the crackling ; and then the victimarius slaughtered
the victim at the priest's bidding with axe or knife : if for a deity
of the super-terrestrial world, the knife was thrust from below
upwards into the neck, if to an infernal deity, in the contrary
direction. The blood was poured on and about the altar, but
the beast was sprinkled on the sacrificial table with wine and
incensed, and then disjointed.2 The entrails were not to be
touched, but taken out with knives. In case the haruspex found
them favourable, the second principal act of the sacrifice began
with a libation, for which the sacrificulus presented a flagon with
wine to the assistants round. Upon this the priest, having first
sprinkled the entrails with wine, meal, and incense, set them upon
the altar and burnt them; holocausts seem to have been very
infrequent among 'the Romans, except when the sacrifice was
intended for an infernal god. In earlier times the flesh of the
victim was carried to the qusestors of the public treasury, who
sold it for the advantage of the state. It sometimes happened
that contagious diseases arose from the quantity of accumulated
flesh of the sacrifices becoming suddenly corrupt ; to avert these,
games of a peculiar kind (ludi taurii)3 were once held. Later
on, the priests, popse, and victimarii divided among themselves
what was over of the sacrifice, the flesh-meat or cakes ; if the
sacrifice was offered by private individuals, these took home
what remained (the polluctum), and made a meal upon it.4 The
poorer class availed themselves of the offering of an animal
on the other hand, as the expressions of the poets prove, such as offered sacrifice
and invoked the gods to ohtain the satisfaction of impure lust, were in the habit
of submitting punctiliously to the required abstinence one or more nights. Vico
and Bayle had already hit off the meaning of Cicero's expression when they
asserted there was no idea of chastity involved in it. The first (Scienza Nuova,
xi. 14, Opere, v. 278) translates it, "Let him who goes to sacrifice first make tbe
sacred ablutions.'' What Bayle says is to be found in his GEuvres, iii. 256.
1 Serv. .En. vi. 244. 2 Ovid. Fasti, iv. 934 sq. ; Hor. Od. i. 10. 14.
3 Festus, s. v. Taurii. 4 Plautus, Rud. v. 3, fi.S ; Mil. Glor. iii. 1. 117.
84 ROME.
victim, the cost of which was defrayed by several contributing,
or they brought baked images of animals from the bakers of
such sacred articles/ instead of real ones, or lastly, contented
themselves with the simple offerings of milk, meal, and salt.
Sacrificial cakes were also baked of " far," without which no
sacrifice could be made, according to a provision of Numa ; and
these appeared under a great variety of forms and names. Such
liba were sacrificed, i. e. thrown into the fire and burnt, to many
gods by preference, as to Tellus, Ceres, Janus, Priapus, and
Terminus.2 " The cakes are ready, the sacrifice prepared ; come
and sacrifice," cries the freedman in Varro.3 Besides this, the
priests had composed a peculiar religious art of cookery of their
own, and method of killing and cutting up, with a number of
technical terms not in use in ordinary conversation; the most
varied dishes, especially sausages, cakes, and buns, were made out
of numerous ingredients, and of the different parts of the victim,
and were again offered to the gods, and consumed on the altar.
A late authority says : " People seem to have strange notions of
the daintiness of the gods, since they invent innumerable meats
to set before them, sometimes roast, sometimes still dripping
with blood, at others half boiled and almost raw ; and they must
needs think the favour of the gods is to be purchased by the
testicles and windpipes of beasts, and preparation of tripe and
pieces of tails."4
The banquets prepared for the gods in Rome, and to which
they were formally invited, are likewise to be considered as
sacrifices, but in a wider sense of the word. Thus there was
yearly in the Capitol, at the Roman and plebeian games, an epu-
lum of Jove furnished, in which Juno and Minerva took part.5
The supreme god lay at it, on a pillow, while the two god-
desses were set upon chairs. Lectisternia of the kind took place
in most of the temples throughout the whole year, and therefore
almost daily •/' and on extraordinary occasions, feasts of thanks-
giving, or " supplications," particularly when it was a matter of
danger threatening, or the expiation of prodigies, they were pre-
pared for a number of gods together, whose images were laid in
1 Fictores a fingendis libis, — Varr. vii. 44.
2 Virg. Eclog. vii. 33; Dionys. ii. 74; Ovid. Fast. iv. 743.
3 Varro de E. R. ii. 8. 4 Arnob. vii. 24, 25.
* Val. Max. ii. I. 1, 2 ; Arnob. vii. 82 ; Li v. v. 52, 31.4, 33. 42.
a Liv. xlii. 30.
HUMAN SACRIFICES. 85
pairs on cushions beside the table, or set up at them ; these
lasted several days. The oldest lectisternium was held in the
year 355 a.u.c. Once, Livy tells us, the gods turned on their
cushions away from the table, upon which the mice came and
devoured the meats.1 As in the epulum of Jove the epulones
and senators dined with the god at the Capitol, so, on the other
hand, the lectisternia were popular feasts of harmony and union,
in which hospitality was practised in the widest sense, with open
doors ; so at least, with a touch of poetical colouring, Livy de-
scribes the celebration of the first lectisternia : but afterwards
there is no more mention of such general good-will and hospi-
tality. We also find that the company of the gods to dinner was
formally asked. Thus it is said on an old tablet, that on the
birthday-feast of the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, before the
decuriones sat down to table, the genii of the Csesars were to be
invited to dine by incense and libations of wine at the altar of
Augustus.2 Hence a serpent frequently appears on the monu-
ments representing the genius as fed by the libations. The
meaning was the same when little images of the gods were placed
upon the dinner-table. The notion of the gods enjoying the
odour and steam of the meats appears to have been at the bottom
of this practice.
Innumerable indications, preserved both in rites and in the
sagas, bear abundant testimony to the fact of human sacrifices
having been offered by the Romans, and races kindred to them,
in prehistoric times. Every year, on the ides of May, twenty-
four shapes of men, made out of rushes, were thrown by the
vestal virgins from the Sublician bridge into the Tiber. They
were substitutes for the human victims once thrown into the
stream, bound hand and foot, to Saturn.3 In like manner, on
the feast of Mania and of the Lares Compitales, at the crossways
and before the house-doors, woollen puppets (oscilla) were hung
up, to the number of persons of both sexes in a family, these
also supplying the place of the earlier human sacrifice :4 Mania
and the Lares, it was expected, would be contented with these
puppets, and spare the living. A custom the oldest Romans
had of casting gray-headed men of sixty from the Pons Sublicius
1 Liv. xl. 59. 2 Marini, Atti dei Frat. Arvali, p. 91.
3 Ov. Fasti, v. 621 ; Plut. Qusest. Rom. 32 ; Fest. p. 32 ; Yarro, vii. 44.
4 Macrob. Sat. i. 7. 34, 35.
86 ROME.
into the Tiber, must have been retained up to historical times,
and probably the rush figures were substituted instead of them.1
But it was not always that human sacrifice was supplied for
by these unbloody representatives. In spite of the disinclination
manifested by the Romans to such victims, and the dislike with
which, they observed the use of them among other nations, they
themselves had frequent enough recourse to the same means of
propitiation. In the year 227 B.C., it was discovered from the
Sibylline books that Gauls and Greeks were to make themselves
masters of the city. To ward off this danger, a decree was passed
that a man and woman of each of those two nations should be
buried alive in the forum, and so should fulfil the prediction by
being allowed to take that kind of possession of the city.2 It was
done ; and though Livy speaks of it as a thoroughly un-Roman
sacrifice, yet it was often repeated. Plutarch mentions a similar
one of Greeks and Gauls, on the occasion of two vestal virgins
being deflowered, and a third struck with lightning, which was
regarded as a prodigy portentous of evil.3 In the year 95 B.C.,
indeed, all human sacrifices were interdicted by decree of the
senate; up to that time, as Pliny says, they had been per-
formed in public ; but on extraordinary occasions it was thought
admissible to set aside this prohibition : and the same Pliny
observes that instances of it had occurred in his time.4 There
was a particular form of prayer for this kind of sacrifice, when
carried into effect by burying alive, which the master of the
college of the Quindecemviri had to repeat first, the peculiar
force of which, Pliny remarks, made itself felt by every one who
read it.
In times of violence and disturbance, the idea of a strange
effectiveness in human sacrifice always returned upon the people.
Once, when a tumult was raised by Caesar's soldiers in Rome,
two of them were sacrificed to Mars by the pontiffs and the
flamen martialis in the Campus Martius, and their heads were
fixed upon the Regia, the same as in the sacrifice of the Oc-
tober horse.5 Besides this, the Romans were familiar with the
notion of offering human lives as victims of atonement for the
dead ; this was the object with which gladiatorial games had
1 Ov. Fast. v. 623 : Fest. p. 334; Varr. ap. Non. pp. 86, 523, 214.
2 Liv. xxii. 57. a Pint. Marcell. 3; Oros. iv. 13.
4 Plin. H. N. xxviii. 2. 5 Dio. Cass, xliii. 24.
HUMAN SACRIFICES.
87
begun.1 In the slave war, Spartacus took a heavy revenge when
he dedicated to his fallen comrade Crixus a mortuary offering of
three hundred Roman prisoners, whom he made to fight around
the funeral-pile.2 The triumvir Octavian afterwards competed
with the slave-general, when he caused three hundred prisoners
to be put to death, as an offering of expiation, at the altar of
Divus Julius, on the surrender of Perugia.3 The fact has been
doubted on the ground that the times and manners of the age
would not have suffered it :4 but the evidence is far too strong.
The previously mentioned example of a sacrificial murder com-
mitted by the most distinguished Roman priests, in the heart of
Rome, on Roman soldiers, shows how little custom was a re-
straint : and the time was that of the proscriptions, and of pro-
miscuous butchery, in which citizen-blood was poured out like
water. Sextus Pompeius, too, had men thrown alive into the sea
along with horses, as an oblation to Neptune, at the time when
his enemies' fleet was destroyed by a great storm.5 Caligula's
having innocent men dressed out as victims, and then thrown
down precipices, as an atonement for his life, was indeed the act
of a bloodthirsty tyrant ; but it shows what ideas were abroad.6
In the year 270 a.d., further proof was given that, in spite of the
late decree issued by Hadrian, recourse was still had, from time
to time, to this means of appeasing the angry gods in dangers
threatening the state, when, on an irruption of the Marcomanni,
the emperor Aurelian offered the senate to furnish it with prison-
ers of all nations for certain expiatory sacrifices to be performed.7
But there was also a standing sacrifice of the kind. The
image of Jupiter Latiaris was annually sprinkled with human
blood ; that shed by the gladiators in the public games was used
for the purpose. A priest caught the blood in a cup from the
body of one who was just wounded, and threw it when still warm
at the face of the image of the god. This was of regular occur-
rence still in the second and third centuries after Christ : Tatian,
amongst many others, speaks of it as an eye-witness.8
1 Yal. Max. ii. 4. 7. 2 App. Bell. Civ. i. 424 ; Flor. iii. 20 ; Oros. v. 24.
3 Dio. Cass, xlviii. 14; Suet. Octav. 15 ; Senec. de Clem. i. 1 1 ; Zonar. x. 21.
4 Druniann, (resell. Roms, i. 412. 5 Dio. Cass, xlviii. 48.
6 Suet. Calig. 27- 7 Vopisc. Aurel.
8 Auctor Libri de Spectac. post Cypriani, opp. p. 3 ; Minuc. Octav. xxi. 30 ;
Tertull. adv. Gnost. 7; Apol. 11; De Spect. 6; Just. Mart. Apol. ii. 12 ; Lact. i.
21 ; Tatian, c. 46 ; Atban. adv. Gr. c. 25 ; Firmic. Mat. 20.
88 ROME.
The more external and mechanical the relation was in which
the Roman stood to his gods, the more they appeared to him as
beings who, in the closest connection with nature, were perpetu-
ally being injured by nature, and by natural things without free
will. There was a number of purely physical acts and accidents
through which a deity might be so wounded, and for which its
vengeance had to be averted by an atonement. This did not
depend on the mind or the purpose of the author of the act : it
was not a question merely of doing adequate penance for sin in-
curred in unth ought -of ways; on the contrary, a man might
undertake, with full prevision, any thing that involved an offence
against the deity, provided only he took care the expiation or pia-
culum followed immediately thereon, or indeed even preceded the
act.1 Thus, for example, the holy groves consecrated to a god
had to be kept in good condition, cleared from time to time, and
rotten branches cut away from the trees ; but, as contact with
iron polluted and profaned the trees, it was necessary, as often as
any thing of the kind took place in a precinct, to have a piaculum
made by the sacrifice of a swine. It was just the same if digging
took place in the grove, or in the field adjoining : even the simple
act of carrying an iron tool through the grove required an expia-
tion. Thus, again, the Arval brothers had, in the grove of their
goddess Dia, a temple, and in it marble tablets on which their
several religious acts were recorded : and as often as the stylus or
graver was taken in or out again, a sacrifice of atonement was re-
quisite on each several occasion.2 If a fig-tree in the grove was
rooted up, or the temple of Dia repaired, or the grove cleared of
trees struck by lightning, the greater atonement of the Suovetau-
rilia was necessary. In like manner every little offence, though
quite unintentional, against a prescription of the ritual, or against
custom, was to be atoned for by an expiation of its own.
Grand acts of atonement and purification (lustrationes) were
celebrated on certain occasions on behalf of the state. One of
the kind was held in the Campus Martius for the people collec-
tively who were present at the closing of the census, or taking
the estimate of the number and property of citizens, and consisted
in the sacrifice of a swine, a ram, and a bull, which were first
led three times round the entire people in procession. In like
1 Comp. Cato de R. E. c. MO.
3 Marini, Atti dei Frat. An. pp. 21s, 309, 339, 363; Cato, 1. c.
SACRIFICES FOR THE DEAD. 89
manner an army was lustrated before a campaign, as also before
and after battle. The lustration of a fleet was in this wise : on
the extreme edge of the shore, where the waves dashed up, an
altar was erected ; the ships, with their crews complete, lay at an-
chor before it. The priests went quite into the water and sacri-
ficed the victims, with which they then proceeded round the whole
fleet in small boats ; afterwards the victims were divided, and the
one half consumed by fire, the other thrown into the sea.1
All sacrifices of animals were performed, of course, in the
open air, and not in the temple. The altar of sacrifice stood
before the principal entrance, and was usually adorned with a
triple fillet of wool, garlands of verbena and flowers.2 These
altars were very unequal in height; those of Jupiter and the
heavenly gods were to be very high, while those of Vesta and
Tellus were low.3 On the altars in the interior of the temple
incense was burnt before the images of the gods; a custom which,
according to the observation of Arnobius, took its rise only in
later times, and was practised neither by Latins nor Etruscans.4
The Christians afterwards, speaking of the sacrificial altars pro-
per, said they were but places for the burning of animals by fire ;
and that it was not supposable that the smoke and stench of
hides, bones, bristles, fleeces, and feathers, a smell intolerable to
the sacrificers themselves, could excite an agreeable sensation in
the nostrils of the gods.5 Where the images of the gods were
placed in the open air, they were frequently blackened by the
smoke of the sacrifices.
Though they had very imperfect notions about the state of
souls after death, the Romans nevertheless took a deal of
trouble about them, and their festivals of the dead were most
strictly observed. So soon as the bones showed in the burning
of the body, the nearest relations cried out that the dead was
now a god,6 and collected in their garments whatever remained
unconsumed, sprinkled them with wine and milk, and en-
closed them in an urn, after mixing spices and aromatic waters
with them. These urns were then deposited in the dead-cham-
ber. Nine days after this deposition, the novemdialia were cele-
i App. B. C. v. 90.
2 Propert. iv. 6. 6 ; Virg. Eel. viii. 64 ; Hor. Carm. iv. 11. 6.
3 Vitruv. iv. 8. 4 Arnob. vii. 26.
5 Arnob. vii. 16 ; Tertull. Apol. 6 Plut. Qusest. Piom. p. 267.
90
ROME.
brated in memorial of the departed, during which the funeral
feast (silicernium) , generally a very luxurious banquet, took
place. Solemn games and contests of gladiators were also held
on occasion of the death of rich and distinguished Romans. A
swine or a sheep was sacrificed to Ceres on behalf of the dead, a
libation of wine poured out to him in his funeral chamber, and
a limb severed from the corpse; a finger or bone remaining after
the funeral pile was then first buried, i. e. covered with earth ;
or if this was not done, earth was still sprinkled on the grave,
one or other being absolutely necessary to save the family from
being unclean.1 Next, a peculiar rite of purification, the Deni-
calia, had to be performed ; for the idea that every touching of a
corpse, as well as of a woman in childbed, was an abomination
and defilement, and only removable by careful purifications, be-
fore any kind of religious act could be gone on with, was as pre-
valent among the Romans as the Greeks. If a man died at sea
and was thrown overboard, the family, according to the decision
of Mucius, the pontifex maximus, were to be considered clean,
because not a bone of the dead was visible upon the earth ; and
yet the heir had to observe three days as ferise, and to sacrifice
a swine in expiation.2
Every year a public general festival of the dead (Feralia or
Parentalia) was solemnised on the nineteenth of February, when
meats were offered at their sepulchres. Generally speaking, the
Roman service for the departed was a strange combination of
erroneous and contradictory notions. People gave out their
dead relations for gods, if they had owed duties of affection
and reverence to them when living. " When once I am dead,"
wrote Cornelia to her son Gracchus, "then wilt thou sacrifice
to me, and invoke thy goddess-mother. Wilt not thou then be
ashamed to ask the intercession of a divine being, whom living,
and present to thee, thou hast not cared for, but despised?"3
But there is no instance of such thing as a father invoking his
dead son as a god ; nor did it ever occur to any one to look
upon a member of another family as god, and to honour him
accordingly. On the whole, the endeavour to satisfy the spirit
of the departed with sacrifices and dainties, to appease him and
to keep him at a distance, was the prevailing one. And there
1 Van-, v. 23 ; Fest. s. v. memlmim abscindi ; Cic. de Legg. ii. 24.
2 Cic. de Legg. ii. 22. 3 Corn. Nep. Fragm.
CHARACTER OF FESTIVALS. 91
could be no certainty whether this or that departed spirit be-
longed to the good and guardian Lares, or to the Lemures and
Larvae ; for it was thought that the souls of such as had been evil-
doers in life were turned into night-errant spectres after death. i
And yet this can only have been a partially received notion, dis-
seminated in a kind of way in some few countries, otherwise
there would have been more general evidence of it. For this
reason the houses were lustrated with sulphur, resin, and torches,
sulphur being held to be particularly operative against spirits f
and in May again, for three whole nights, the Lemuria, or cere-
monies of atonement and expulsion, were celebrated. The father
of the family proceeded at midnight, barefoot, to the front doors,
driving the spirits from before him by waving his hand, which he
then washed three times in running water. He then turned
round, putting black beans into his mouth, which he went on to
throw behind him with the words, " These I give unto you ; with
these beans I purchase me and mine." This form had to be re-
peated nine times, after which he washed again, made a din with
vessels of brass, and cried nine times, " Out with you, ye paternal
Manes !"3 The redemption with beans, which were a dead-offer-
ing, and must have had a particular relation to the dead, resem-
bles that other practice appointed for the Lares Compitales, and
their mother Mania, of presenting dolls of wool to them, in the
stead of the members of a family.
There can be no mistake about the fact of human sacrifices
having been offered to the dead, when one considers the real sig-
nification and intention of the gladiatorial combats.4 This kind
of sacrifice was held in the higher esteem for the dead because
of the uncertainty who was to fall in the contest, and of the ap-
pearance of a voluntary renouncement of life. In the year 217
b.c. the three sons of Emilius Lepidus made twenty-two pairs
of gladiators fight for three days at the funeral-games of their
father.5 Somewhat later, Titus Flaminius held for three days a
combat of seventy-four men in honour of his father.6
After that the Romans changed from a small agricultural
people into a martial and victorious one, and the bearing of arms
1 Apul. de Deo Socrat. p. 152 f. Oud.
2 Ov. Fasti, ii. 35 sq. ; Juvenal, ii. 156 ; Plin. H. N. xxxv. 15.
3 Ov. Fasti, v. 419 sq. ; Varro, ap. Nonium, p. 135.
4 Serv. iEn. iii. 67. 5 Liv. xxiii. 30. 6 lb. xli. 33.
92
ROME.
had become their chief occupation, their festivals of the gods
also assumed a different character. Labour was no longer their
employment, but rather was unbecoming in a Roman citizen. In
the intervals of his campaign s, he would take his repose, and his
victories supplied him the means, in booty, and slaves to work
for him. Thus the popular assemblies in part, and in part the
festivals, became the leading duties of his city-life. About fifty
of such feasts composed his calendar, most of them embracing
several days, and so filling up a third of his year. The old
country and agricultural festivals were kept up indeed, but under
entirely different relations, with a change of signification, or
without any at all but that of serving as days of enjoyment for
an idle town population.
Festival- time received its name (Ferise1) from sacrifice, the
essential act of the religious life. The day on which sacrifice
was offered for the people was equivalent to a " festus dies/' a
day which could only be employed in religious acts, or was ex-
empt from work. When we add thereto banquets, games, and
various enjoyments, the idea of the Roman feast-day is com-
plete. There were also ferise not feast-days, i.e. on which
sacrifice only was offered, as was the case with the Nundinse, on
which the sacrificial king finished the Nonalia at the citadel (the
Regia of Numa) . When the state became more wealthy, that is,
after the fall of Carthage, and rivalry arose between corporations
and state officers as to which should celebrate the services of
the gods with the greatest possible splendour, and to the greatest
satisfaction of the popular taste, lectisternia were multiplied,
and contests and games in theatre, amphitheatre, and circus
were introduced.
Accordingly there grew up amongst the Romans a peculiar
law of festivals, on which a complete literature was expended.
Days were fasti or nefasti, on the former of which only the
transaction of legal business was allowed ; further, there were
days called " black ;" on such public business was unhallowed,
nor could a battle be fought, nor any action of divine service
or political necessity be undertaken. Great calamities had be-
fallen the state for not regarding this distinction : for instance,
the defeats on the Allia and Cremera were entirely owing to sa-
crifice having been offered on a dies nefastus,2 — so the haruspex
1 Fest. s. w. feriae, and feriendis victimis. 2 Macrob. Sat. i. 18.
FESTIVALS. 93
assured the senate ; and hence all days after the calends, nones,
and ides in each month, as well as those following a feast-day,
were interpreted to be black days ; this would give about eighty-
six of such.
The pontiffs had declared it to be sin against religion to take
in hand any ordinary business on a holy day, and the trans-
gressor of the prohibition had a fine imposed upon him, and to
make an offering of a swine as an atonement ; but works of ne-
cessity, the omission of which would have been detrimental, were
allowed ; and this also held good of a feria suddenly proclaimed,
because of a prodigy, or on an extraordinary occasion. Lamen-
tations too, and brawling and scolding, were to be avoided on
feast-days.1 When once, on a day of the plebeian games, a
Roman had chastised his slave in the morning upon the arena,
Jupiter communicated to another citizen that the leader of the
dance in those games had displeased him, and that the whole
must be begun over again.2
Taking a glance at the more important festivals, as they fol-
low in succession throughout the year, we find the more recon-
dite meaning of the Janus- feast of the Agonalia, on the ninth of
January, and two days in May and December, to have been lost
amongst the Romans themselves. And they seem to have had
as little knowledge of the women's festival of the Carmentalia
on the eleventh of January; yet there was an opinion that it
was held to commemorate a reconciliation between the Roman
husbands and their wives, who were exasperated by an attempt
to forbid them the use of chariots. The thirteenth of January
was a festival in honour of Octavian's receiving the surname of
Augustus on that day. It was followed on the sixteenth by a
feast of the dedication of a temple of Concord, on a reconcilia-
tion effected between the plebeians and patricians, and of the in-
stitution of the palatine games by Augustus in honour of Caesar,
and the completion of the Venus temple. Sementina and Am-
barvalia, feasts of sowing and of the fields, were celebrated by
the country-folk before the termination of January. A special
peace-festival had been established by Augustus in memorial of
the closing by him of the gates of Janus. The month concluded
with the feast of the penates, on whose day an ox was sacrificed.
The first of February was sacred to Juno Sospita, the saviour,
» Ovid Fast. i. 71 sq. 2 Plut. Fab. Max. 18 (? Tr.).
94 ROME.
the old goddess of Lanuvium, and on it the consuls had to offer
a sacrifice of she-goats to her. We have already mentioned how
on the feast of the Lupercalia the Roman women let themselves
be struck by the naked Luperci, as they ran about, in order to
become mothers of a numerous family. The feast of the Forna-
calia, the next in succession, retained the old agrarian character,
and was to the honour of an oven-goddess Fornax, that she might
make the drying of the corn succeed, and prevent its burning.1
Next came, for eleven days, from the eighteenth to the twenty -
eighth of February, the Februatio, from which the month had its
name, a general festival of purification and atonement, united
with the mortuary feast of the Feralia,2 both being connected
together through Februus, an old Etrurian god of the lower re-
gions. Between the two the Charistia were also kept, a family
festival for the adjusting of quarrels amongst relations, by their
joining in a banquet iu common. The Terminalia, observed on
the twenty-third of February, the last of the year, old style, be-
longed to the more important feasts ; and as the Greeks placed
their boundaries under the protection of Zeus Horios, so in Italy
the sacredness and irremovability of the boundary-stones were
secured by the cultus of the god Terminus, who had also his
place in the Capitol, in the shape of a parallelogram of stone.
On the Terminalia the boundary - stones were anointed and
crowned as the protecting genii of places and ways, the god re-
ceiving offerings of milk, cakes, wine, and fruits, which were
thrown from an altar of turf three times into a fire brought
from the house ; the bloody sacrifices of sheep and lambs were
a later addition.3
In March fell the feasts of the Liberalia, kept by the country
people with uproarious mirth : and in Home young men were
solemnly invested with the toga libera, or virilis/the only way of
accounting for which seems to be the similarity of the words,
Liber and toga libera.4 Five days after these were occupied by
the Minerva feast of the Quinquatria. The first day was treated
as the birthday of the goddess ; and as she was goddess of
wisdom, arts, and trades, unbloody offerings were made to her,
at which all who pursued any calling that required technical
skill or intellectual qualifications, astronomers, shoemakers,
1 Ov. Fasti, ii. 525 sq. 2 Lyd. de Mens. p. 68 ; Isidor. (Drip;, v. 03.
3 Dionys. iii. 00. 4 Ovid. "Fasti, iii. 771.
FESTIVALS OF APRIL. 95
poets, dyers, sculptors, turners, medical men, and so on, crowded
into the temple to invoke the goddess : and, in particular, troops
of young scholars took part in the festival. On the following
days, the warlike aspect of the goddess came out in the gladia-
torial contests held in her honour. The feast concluded with
the Tubilustria, on which flutes and trumpets used in the ser-
vice of the gods were purified by the sacrifice of a lamb, and
dedicated to sacred worship.1
April opened with the Megalesian festival, and games in
honour of the mother of the gods and her Attys. They lasted
six days. The bringing-in of the pine-tree into the temple, the
search for, the emasculation, the finding and resurrection of
Attys, &c, and on the last day the solemn ablution of the sacred
stone representing the goddess, constituted the acts of the feast.
Begging, and carrying before them the curved knife, the instru-
ment of their mutilation, the emasculate Galli went about the
streets of the city in white dresses f and the Quindecemviri, the
guardians of the Sibylline books, were not ashamed to join the
procession.3 On the twelfth of April followed the Cerealia, dig-
nified by the Circensian games, and a great festal procession
after the circus. There was a kind of offering to the goddess in
the shape of foxes, which were tied together in pairs, with a
lighted torch fastened between them, and so were thrown into
the circus.4 After this came, on the fifteenth of April, the feast
of the Fordicidia, with the sacrifice of the thirty cows in calf for
the thirty curise of the people ; and, on the twenty-first, the
country one of the Palilia, when the country people leaped through
fires of burning straw ;5 but in Rome the day of the foundation
of the city was celebrated. The Romans procured from the
altar in the temple of Vesta the means of purification, namely
horse's blood, the ashes of the calves that were burnt on the
Fordicidia, and bean -straw; these were cast on live coals, and
the persons to be purified were at the same time sprinkled with
lustral water. The first Vinalia were next celebrated on the
twenty- third. In them an oblation of new wine was made to
Jupiter by opening a cask ; and then the Robigalia, to obtain
of the demon of blight, Robigus, that he would spare the Roman
corn-fields. The sacrifice consisted of red dogs and swine, whose
1 Ov. Fasti, iii. 813 sq. 2 Lucr. ii. 621. 3 Lucan, i. 600.
4 Ov. Fasti, iv. 682. 5 Ibid. iv. 721 sq.
96 ROME.
colour is said to have had reference to the dog-star rising on the
twenty-fifth of April, and who is pernicious to the harvest.1 The
month terminated with the Floralia, beginning on the twenty-
eisrhth, and famous for their licentiousness. It is also remark-
able that no sacrifices were offered to the goddess Flora, but
only the games were dedicated to her.
In May the secret sacrifice of the women to the Bona Dea
took place. There were games, instituted by Augustus, in honour
of Mars, that were held in the circus : a second Tubilustrium
followed for the consecration and purifying of the trumpets of
sacrifice and funeral-fifes. In June, first of all, an oblation of
lard and bean-meal was made to the goddess Carna, under the
notion of her being the president or protectress of the inner parts
of the human body. After that, seven days, from the seventh to
the fifteenth, were devoted to Vesta, during which the purifica-
tion of the entire sanctuary of the goddess was undertaken ; and
as a sign of mourning, the flaminica, the wife of the flamen dialis,
would not comb her hair, or pare her nails, or allow her husband
to touch her. The proper feast of the Vest alia was solemnised
on the ninth of this month, and, in remembrance of the prepara-
tion of bread which once took place in the Vesta temple, was at
the same time a special feast for bakers and millers, who led asses
through the city, bedecked with collars of little loaves strung on
ribbons.2 It was said an ass had waked Vesta when lying asleep
and intoxicated in the grass, and so saved her from the snares of
Priapus.3 The Roman ladies made pilgrimages barefoot on the
day to the shrine of the goddess. The Matralia, kept on the
tenth of June in honour of Matuta, were one of the feasts only
celebrated by women.
On the seventh of July the so-called Populifugium, in memo-
rial of an occasion, that was forgotten afterwards, in which the
people had taken to flight, concurred with a merry-making fes-
tival of women and female slaves, called the Nonse Caprotinse,
when Juno was presented with the sap of the wild fig-tree
instead of milk.4 In obedience to an announcement of a seer
called Marcius, the games of Apollo were celebrated with drama-
tic and gymnastic representations from the year 214 b.c. A
1 Aug. C. D. iv. 21 ; Fest. s. v. catularia.
2 Ovid. Fasti, vi. 311 sq. ; Lyd. de Mens. iv. 59. 3 Ovid. Fasti, vi. 319-346.
4 Macrob. Sat. i. 11 ; Varro, vi. 18 ; Plut. Itomul. 29.
FESTIVALS OF OCTOBER. 97
festival, the Lucaria, on the nineteenth and twenty-first, also
combined with games, is said to refer merely to some Romans
having hidden in a wood, who had been defeated by the Gauls.1
Of the August festivals we are for the most part deficient in
accurate knowledge. A feast of slaves, in which the women
washed their heads, the Portunalia and the Consualia, a second
Vinalia, solemnised to Jupiter to implore a blessing on the vint-
age ; and then the Vulcanalia, on the twenty-third, celebrated by
throwing animals into the fire, by fireworks, and torch-races ;
finally, the Opeconsivia, kept in a secret apartment of the Regia,
in the presence of the vestal virgins and the sacrificial king only.
These were the religious solemnities of August. September was
poor in feasts, with the single exception of the Ludi Romani,
dedicated to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, with scenic entertain-
ments, which fell within it.
In October the Meditrinalia occurred, a wine - festival, in
which the new wine was broached. The late-established Augus-
talia, in commemoration of the victorious return of Augustus to
the Capitol, were celebrated with such a pomp and lavish expen-
diture on games as to throw most of the older feasts into the
shade. On the fifteenth the October horse was sacrificed to
Mars, and its head attached to a wall : and on the nineteenth
the Armilustrium took place, a martial feast of sacrifice, cele-
brated by consecration of armour and blowing of trumpets.2
On November, which was without feasts, followed December,
with its Saturnalia, which lasted at first but one day, but was
extended under Augustus to three, and under Caligula to five.
The shrines of Saturn were then illuminated with wax-lights, and
the woollen fillets bound about his feet were loosened. The ori-
ginal meaning of the feast was one of thanksgiving for the har-
vest, with which was inwoven a memorial of that primitive
Saturnian age when as yet master and slave were not. In Rome
the festival-days were spent in unbridled merriment, with feast-
ing and drinking-bouts, dice-playing, and interchange of presents.
The richer people kept open table. To the slaves especially it
was an interruption of their misery, like a kind of armisticekin
the perpetual war with their masters.3 . Released from all their
toils, they wore the toga and the hat, tokens of freedom, might
indulge in sportive jests, and dine with their masters, who some-
1 Test. s. v. 2 Ibid. s. v. ; Varro, vi. 22. 3 Arrian. Epist. iv. 1, 58.
VOL. II. H
98 ROME.
times even served them at table.1 To the Saturnalia were
annexed the Opalia, a feast of the earth-goddess Ops, and the
Sigillaria : the latter, a festival of images and puppets, derived
its name from the little clay figures, offered to Saturn instead
of living children, as it was said, by Numa; afterwards it was
little images of the gods which were made presents of to
children.2 Last of all came the Compitalia and Larentalia,
festivals of the Lares and deities of the crossways, which were
also counted in as belonging to the Saturnalian holiday-tide.
V. Investigation of the Will of the Gods.
Nature and deity are so inseparably connected and identical
in the Roman religious system, that people conceived them-
selves obliged to consider directly as a manifestation of deity what
the other said to him, or what he drew from her. The gods,
who fill nature in all her departments, animating and moving
her, make known to men, partly through the animal world,
partly through the other provinces of creation, their will, and the
future in store for them, by certain signs, by phenomena, and
antecedents : and all depends only on the accurate observation
and right interpreting of this language of signals. Such was the
ruling idea of the Roman in this matter. Not in the state only,
but even in private life, nothing took place without the auspices
having been previously taken.3 " If there be gods," — this was
even the Stoic's conclusion, — " they must care for man; and if
they care for him, then also must they necessarily supply him
with tokens of their will and of the future."4 But here a certain
selection was unavoidable : for it could not be the ordinary and
perfectly regular e very-day incidents in the natural life that
might be indifferently consulted regarding the will of the higher
powers ; nor could every beast pass as the organ of the divine
revelations. There were of necessity certain species of beasts —
some extraordinary phenomena not explainable by the intel-
1 Macrob. Sat. i. 7 ; Dio. Cass. Ix. 19 ; Hor. Sat. ii. 7, 4.
2 Arrian. Epict. i. 29 ; Mart. xiv. 70. 3 Yal. Max. ii. 1, 1 ; Liv. vi. 41.
4 Cic. de Div. i. :?8, ii. 49.
PRODIGIES — THEIR EXPIATION. 99
ligible catena of causes — which were subservient to man's use
therein : the physical circumstances of the country, and an-
cient tradition, determined this point. In those early times
one cannot think of conscious imposition and prudential views
of state as having turned the error of the greater number into
a political tool ; though, indeed, in later times, many Romans
and Greeks did think that such calculation might have been
at the bottom of the whole system from the beginning. If
Eastern people attempted to read the decrees of the deity and the
destiny of man in the stars, it was a science that was strange to
the Romans, and excited their suspicions ; it was long before
they would tolerate the Chaldeans and astrologers, and repeated
sentences of banishment were issued against them and other
strange artists in soothsaying. There was no such thing as a
Roman oracle, though the Delphic one was consulted, from time
to time, for state purposes. Soothsayers and prophets — the de-
clarations, for instance, of a certain Marcius, and of a Cornelius
Culleotus in the Octavian war — were exceptionally reverenced
during times of heavy trial and great danger, and adopted as
canons.1
The Romans had naturalised among themselves the institute
of the haruspices, which they had translated from Etruria, and
that in both its branches, of divination from the entrails of ani-
mal victims, and of the interpretation and careful observing of
lightning and prodigies, yet so as always to procure a succession
of their haruspices from Etruria, thereby contriving to remain
in such a state of dependence on that country, before it was
subjugated, as frequently proved burdensome. The energies of
these seers, indispensable as they were to the state, were directed
principally towards the wide field of prodigies. A want of
acquaintance with nature, an eager desire and readiness to find
something of the wonderful in things the most insignificant, and
a boundless credulity, multiplied these signs of warning to such
a degree, that we can only dwell with astonishment on the inde-
fatigable anxiety of the senate in taking them all into account.
Not only eclipses of sun and moon, but other phenomena of both
these heavenly bodies, rainbows of unusual colours, shooting
stars, and abortions of man and beast, entered into the list of
these prodigies. Then there were showers of stones, earth, chalk,
' Cic. cle Div. i. 2, 40.
100 ROME.
and ashes j idols shed tears or sweated blood, oxen spoke, men
were changed into women, cocks into hens, lakes or brooks ran
with blood or milk, mice nibbled at the golden vessels of the
temples, a swarm of bees lighted on a temple or in a public
place, or lightning struck a temple or other public building, an
occurrence especially alarming. For all these prodigies, which
terrified senate and people, a procuration was necessary, that is,
they had to be averted by prayer and expiatory rites, for the fa-
vour of the threatening or angry deity had to be reconquered.
A shower of stones, under king Tullius, already gave ground for
a public sacrificial solemnity of nine days, and thenceforward
supplications of the same length and costliness were frequently
ordained on similar occasions. Ordinarily it was a sacrifice of
beasts by which a procuratio was fulfilled, either in obedience to
the Sibylline books, consulted thereupon, or to the behests of
haruspices or augurs.
The inspection of the entrails of victims too, or extispicium,
was a Tuscan science : and still, in the times of the empire, it
was Etruscans born who had the best understanding of the art.
Hence Tuscan haruspices accompanied the armies ; and powerful
Romans, such as afterwards the emperors, kept their own inspec-
tor of the sacrifice. Tongue, lungs, heart, liver, gall-bladder,
spleen, kidneys, and caul, were the parts which they made the
closest inspection of, with a small knife or a needle. According
to the division of the sacrifice of beasts into animal and consult-
ing, this investigation of the state of the entrails, to ascertain
the will of the gods therefrom, was the chief object of the latter.
Accordingly there were in the organs enumerated supposed fa-
vourable and inimical parts. If the adverse side was particularly
strong, and had largely-developed veins, that was a signification
of misfortune. There were fissures or indentations appearing in
the examined parts, some of which portended danger, some ad-
vantage ; sometimes there were defects in them, at other times
they were in excess. It was an eminently disastrous token when
the head or protuberance in the right lobe of the liver was want-
ing.1 As the liver was taken out and boiled with other entrails,
if it shrunk together, the sign was of the very worst import.2 The
Romans, however, were far removed from the weakness of allow-
1 Cic. de Div. ii. 12, 15; Lucan. i. 617, 028; Sencc. CEdip. 302 sq.
2 Liv. xli. 15; Fest. s. v. Monstrum.
INSPECTION OF THE VICTIM. 101
ing themselves to be deterred from carrying out an undertaking
that had been resolved upon, because of a bad presage in the en-
trails: they determined to be successful in the sacrifice (litare),i.e.
the sacrifice ought and must exhibit favourable signs, and in this
they commonly obtained their object; for either sacrifices were
offered to many gods at once, and then it hardly ever happened,
if one victim showed unfavourable signs, that there were not
favourable ones from another ; or the sacrifice Avas repeated over
and over again, with new victims, till the desired result was
attained : and it frequently occurred, as Cicero tells us, that
while the victim but just now exhibited the most terrifying of all
phenomena, the want of a head to the entrails, the very next
gave all the tokens that could be desired.1
There was no want of cases in which the truth of the harus-
picini was strikingly confirmed by the result. When Csesar was
sacrificing shortly before his death, the day on which he first took
his seat in the golden chair, and went into public in the purple
robe, there was no heart in the bull : and on the following day the
liver of another victim had no head. By this time Spurinna, the
haruspex, had intimated that danger threatened the life of the
dictator. On the morning of the day of his death the sacrifices
again gave unfavourable signs as often as they were repeated.2
With such examples, they who were inclined to disbelieve
silenced their doubts, whilst they only awoke those of others.
The question was asked, What explanation could be given of the
strange changes of mind in the gods, often threatening evil on
the first inspection of the victim, and at the second promising
good? How did it happen that a sacrifice to Apollo gave favour-
able, and one to Diana unfavourable signs ? Why did the Etrus-
can, the Elean, the Egyptian, and the Punic inspectors of sa-
crifice interpret the entrails in an entirely different manner ?
Again, what connection in nature was there between a fissure in
the liver of a lamb and a trifling advantage to a man, an inherit-
ance to be expected, or the like ?3 And on a man's intending to
sacrifice, did a change, corresponding to his circumstances, take
place in the entrails of the beast ; so that, supposing another
person had selected the same victim, he would have found the
1 Cic. de Div. ii. 15.
2 Ibid. i. 52 ; Pint. Cses. 63 ; App. ii. 500 ; Hor. iv. 2.
3 Cic. de Div. ii. 12, 14, 15.
102 ROME.
liver in quite a different condition ? And yet, while the genuine
Roman augury from the flight of birds had fallen into disesteem
and disuse, the extispicium maintained a certain reputation, and
in the last times of the republic was resorted to, where in earlier
ones auspicia had been employed.1 Cato, indeed, who probably
disliked the foreign and un- Roman character of the inspection of
the victim, declared he wondered how an haruspex did not laugh
when he met another of the craft : and the responses and pro-
mises made during the civil wars deceived people numbers of
times, above all Pompey, who held much to them.2 The science,
however, still kept its ground; a single striking example of a
fulfilment, such as happened on the occasion of Caesar's death,
had more weight than twenty deceptions, for which people were
always ready with apologetic explanations.
For a long time in Rome the haruspices were not employed
as fulguratores, or observers of lightning, which was reckoned
among the prodigies, and, as such, in certain cases, required pro-
curatio (an expiation) and burial ; for example, if lightning was
seen in a clear sky, which was considered exceedingly ominous,
and then the services of the haruspices were required. The ques-
tion, of much importance with the Etruscans, as to which of the
nine lightning-gods had thrown this or that flash, did not trouble
a Roman, who attributed all the day-lightning to Jupiter, and
all the night-lightning to Summanus.3 But, in the time of
Diodorus, lightning-observers were already spread over the face
of the earth,4 and, later on, they often appear in attendance on
the Roman armies, and on the emperors, when taking the field.5
The haruspices, too, found a zealous patron in the emperor
Claudius, who was particularly well versed in Etruscan matters ;
and it seems that, in his reign first, a regular college of harus-
pices, numbering as many as sixty members, was founded,6 and
ranked along with the other sacerdotal guilds. In the rest of
the imperial period, they had dangerous rivals in the Chaldeans,
towards whom the favour and confidence of the people was, on
the whole, more strongly evinced.
There was a division of views among the Romans themselves
on the point whether the system of augury of old time was really
1 Cic. de Div. i. 12. 2 Ibid. ii. 24. 3 Plin. H. N. ii. 5:3.
4 Diodor. v. 40. 5 Suet. Dom. 1G ; Amm. Marc. xxv. 2, xxii. 12, xxiii. 5.
6 Suet. Claud, xxii. 25 ; Tac. Ann. xi. 15.
AUSPICIA. 103
based on a conviction of its being possible to ascertain the will of
the gods through it, or was merely introduced on political specu-
lation as a well-contrived engine of state. Two clever augurs,
Marcellus and Appius, as we are told by Cicero/ favoured, the
one the first, the other the latter opinion. But the fact, already
established by Cicero himself elsewhere,2 that in the earlier times
of the Roman state the use of auspices was general even in
domestic life, and that scarcely any thing of any importance was
undertaken without their intervention, is decisive that this was
no matter of politic invention, but a something rooted in the
prevailing error. In truth, the augural system, as practised in
Rome, was a combination of the Tuscan, Latin, and Sabine
systems.
The kinds of birds appropriated to divination were divided
into Oscines, or such as had significant voices or notes, and
Alites, in which the quickness or slowness of flight, and the flap
of the wings, was the decisive point. If their flight was from the
left of the augur to his right, that was a favourable sign ; if in
the contrary direction, the matter had to be given up or deferred.
Eagles, vultures, and some other species of birds gave augury
by flight; while ravens, crows, woodpeckers, screech-owls, and
cocks announced by note, good or evil, the approval or disap-
proval of the gods. Besides, the side from which the voice came
had to be considered ; a raven's croak from the right, or a crow's
from the left, was an augury of assent ; the cry of a screech-owl,
on the contrary, was always of evil import. And if all the birds
of augury kept silence, that too was in like manner a bad sign.3
Moreover, auspices were divided again into great and small, ac-
cording to the size and importance of the bird ; so that when, for
instance, a crow gave a sign, and thereupon an eagle gave an
opposite one, the auspicium of the latter, as the greater, made
that of the former of no effect ;4 but even when the auspices
were most favourable, the squeak of a mouse was sufficient to
render them entirely inoperative.
If the augur, or the state official with him, intended to observe
the auspices, the latter with his lituus quartered off on the right
and left from a fixed point (tabernaculum), chosen according to
1 De Legg. ii. 13. 2 De Div. i. 16.
3 Cic. de Div. i. 39 ; Plut. Asin. ii. 1, 111 ; Hor. Carm. iii. 27, 10 ; Lucan. v.
396. « Serv. Mn. v. 374.
104 ROME.
rule, the space in the heavens and on the earth (templum) within
which he resolved to reckon as an augury whatever he observed
during a given time; and he prayed Jupiter to send an indication
of his will.1 If twenty-four hours elapsed without any sign being
given, the consulter returned back into the city, in order to re-
new the attempt on the following day, but not from the same
spot. Altogether, in the whole business, there was a good deal to
observe, and nothing was easier than to discover a mistake or
omission afterwards that made every thing connected with the
auspices go for nothing. No temporal or spiritual officer could
be elected or nominated, or any senate or popular assembly be
held, without the auspices having preceded : hence the obnun-
tiatio of the augurs, i. e. the announcement of unfavourable
auspices, dissolved every assembly, and barred all transaction of
business. When Tiberius Gracchus held the comitia for the
election of new consuls, one of the rogatores (the holders of the
election) dropped down dead suddenly. The haruspices, on being
consulted by the senate on the point, replied that Gracchus was
disqualified from holding the comitia. Gracchus answered an-
grily, in refutation of the haruspices as Tuscans and foreigners,
who had nothing to say in a question of Roman divining by the
auspices, that he had, as augur, correctly observed the flight of
the birds. Afterwards, however, he discovered that he had really
committed a clear error in doing so, having neglected, when he
passed the pomcerium of the city to betake himself a second time
to his tabernaculum for the purpose of observing the auspicia,
to wait for the proper sign warranting his again passing the city
boundary : and by virtue of a decree of the senate, the consuls,
whose election was vitiated by this oversight of Gracchus, had to
lay down their office.2 And so Antony could threaten, that as
augur he had power to prevent or invalidate the election of
Dolabella to the consulship by the auspices in any case ; and he
carried his threat into execution by falsifying them, as Cicero
says.3 One can understand how an art of soothsaying like this,
that had been trained up into a formalism, so pedantic and in-
significant, and that allowed an augur at once the most bound-
less caprice and the grossest abuse, fell into contempt and decay
still earlier than other modes of inquiring of the gods ; so that
1 Cic. de Div. ii. 35; Varro,i. 51 ; Liv. i. 18
2 Cic. N. D. ii. 1. 3 Cic. 2 Philipp. 33, 35.
AUSPICIA. 105
in spite of its pure old Roman character, it was obliged to yield
precedence to the Tuscan estispicia in Cicero's time ; and Cicero
himself was of opinion that the office of augur had only been
allowed to exist for political considerations a long time past.1
Meanwhile people were still appealing, on behalf of the credit
of the augural system, to the old augur Attus Navius, who had
demonstrated the truth of his art to king Priscus by cutting
through a whetstone with a razor.2
Less troublesome for investigating the will of the gods, less
insecure and exposed to the caprice of the augur, was the di-
vining from the eating of fowls, which was resorted to before
comitia, but especially on a campaign. Young chickens for the
purpose were kept by the pullarius shut up in a cage, and starved
intentionally ; when the birds pounced voraciously on the food
presented to them, and that some of it fell from their beaks on
the ground (which was called a tripudium), this was a happy
omen. Cicero describes how the art was practised in his time,
before which an experienced person had to be called in by the ge-
neral ; in his time, the best person within reach was invited, who
responded at once to the question, if there were silence, without
looking round, " There seems to be silence," i. e. nothing observ-
able in the heaven to render the augury defective.3 Here, too,
the result had strikingly confirmed the divining power of the
chickens. Claudius, who had ordered them to be thrown into
the sea, when they did not eat, was, with his fleet, beaten in a
naval engagement; and Flaminius, besides being defeated, lost
his life, when, instead of putting off the battle for a day accord-
ing to the counsel of his pullarius, he ridiculed people's acting
only when the chickens were hungry, and doing nothing when
they were full.4
Besides the flight and notes of birds, and the feasting of the
chickens, thunder and lightning played an important part in the
Roman system of augury. It was a rule, when Jupiter thun-
dered or lightened, that no comitia should be held;5 and thus
Marcellus was compelled to lay down the consulate because it
thundered on his accession to office. Otherwise, lightning was a
favourable sign, in particular demand on such occasions. But
1 Cic. de Div. ii. 12 ; but see tie Leg. ii. 13. 2 Ibid. i. 17.
3 Ibid. ii. 34. 4 Ibid. ii. 35.
5 Ibid. ii. 18. 35; Tae. Hist. i. 18.
106 ROME.
as lightning was not so easy to be had, nor always at the right
time, people arranged the matter conveniently for themselves at
a later period. On the occasion of an officer of state entering
on his duties, he arose before sunrise, and went into the open
air accompanied by an augur, where he prayed ; then the augur
said he had seen lightning, though he had seen no such thing ;
and that was enough.1
The Sibylline books presented another means of inquiring
into the divine will, though less usual and" ordinary, and one only
resorted to when prodigies were very threatening and gloomy.
The saga pointed out by name several women in Greece, and
Lower Italy with its Greek population, who had prophesied
coming events under the inspiration of Apollo, and collections
of whose prophetical announcements were in circulation. The
generality of these were rough- cast, obscure, and enigmatical in
sound, and left a wide margin for interpretation. The collection
preserved in Rome, which had found its way there under the
last Tarquin, from the Graeco - Campanian city of Cumae, per-
haps in consequence of his connection with Aristodemus of that
place, seems to have travelled thither from Hellas, nay, from
Gergis in Troas, through Erythrae and Cyme, the parent city
of Cumae. The Erythrean collection of Sibylline oracles was
the most famous, and probably the most copious. When the
Apollo-temple at Rome was burnt, the Sibylline books preserved
there also fell a prey to the flames ; and therefore the Romans
sent in the year 670 a.u.c to Samos, Ilium, Africa, Sicily, and
the cities of Magna Graecia, and even to Erythrae, in order to
collect oracles ; and on that occasion it was discovered that the
collection of the last-mentioned city was identical with the lost
Roman one.2 The Romans brought back from thence about a
thousand verses transcribed, and others were added from other
places. Thus, neither the elder nor the latter Sibylline oracles
originated in Cumae, but in the Ionian and Asiatic state of
Erythrae ; and so the Cumaeans had not a single oracle of their
Sibyl to show, as Pausanias observes.3 Apollo-worship came
along with the Sibylline books to Rome, for these prophecies
1 Dionys. ii. 0.
2 So I understand the words of Servius (Mn. vi. 36) in Varro, "Apud Ery-
tbram ipsa inventa sunt carmina." Comp. Lact. i. G. 11, 14; Dionys. iv. C2.
3 Paus. x. 12, 8.
THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS. 107
were given by Apollo ; and thus people learned to refer all pow-
ers of divination to him. The Sibyl in her oracular sentences
asserted of herself that her body after death would indeed be-
come dust, but dust which would feed plants and vegetables,
and these would render beasts that fed on them fit for extispicia;
while her spirit would mingle with the air, and communicate to
that element prophetic voices and sounds.1
Augustas and Tiberius ordered a fresh revision of the Sibyl-
line books, and had the spurious parts cut out; the numerous
unauthentic collections in private hands were all ordered to be
destroyed, and thus as many as twro thousand books in roll were
then burnt. Such as were acknowledged genuine were com-
posed in Greek acrostic verse, so that the first letters of the
verses, when read together, expressed the idea of a whole piece.
This acrostic form served as well in the elimination for a cri-
terion, as, in consultation, for a means whereby to find the right
oracle. For example, supposing the books to be consulted on
account of an epidemic breaking out in Home, the six verses
would be arranged whose first letters in succession formed the
word " Loimos," and in them would be found, certainly not
without laborious interpretative skill in many cases, what was
understood to be the prescribed expiatory remedy.2 Only the
decemviri, afterwards the quindecemviri, assisted, however, by
two Greek interpreters, were allowed to read these books,3 and
their contents were not to be communicated to the people
without express authority from the senate.4 The answers usu-
ally discovered were to the effect that, in order to obtain the
favour of the deity, or to appease an angry one, a new festival
should be established, new ceremonies be added to old ones, or
this or that sacrifice should be offered; for consultation was
mostly resorted to when it was a case of calming spirits agitated
by an alarming prodigy, or danger, or when there was any
serious cause to fear for the well-being, or perhaps existence, of
the state.5 It is self-evident that very much in this depended
on, and resulted from, the interpretation preferred by decemviri
or quindecemviri, and hence it was that so much stress was laid
by plebeians on obtaining seats in that college. For the pro-
1 Plut. de Pyth. Orac. p. 398. 2 Cic. de Div. ii. 54 ; Dionys. iv. 62,
3 Zonar. vii. 11. 4 Dio. Cass, xxxix. 15.
5 Liv. xxii. 9 ; Varro de R. R. 1.
108 RELIGION OF THE GAULS.
phecies were so contrived as to fit all possible cases, or, as Cicero
says, so that whatever took place might seem to have been pre-
dicted, inasmuch as all accurate definition of persons and times
was wanting. The composer, he adds, took shelter in obscurity,
so as that the same verses might be accommodated to a variety of
periods and a variety of objects ;l or, as Boethius expresses him-
self, commenting on Plutarch, " the authors had poured out
words and phrases combined at hazard into the sea of undefined
time in such way that their fulfilment was pure accident."
As, however, the Sibylline books of the Romans were of Greek
origin, the worship of Greek divinities was naturally preferred
and recommended throughout them. The cultus of Apollo and
of his mother Latona, with which the Romans first became
acquainted in this way, were followed by those of iEsculapius,
Dis, Ceres, and Cybele. It is remarkable, too, that human
sacrifices were found to be prescribed therein.2
III. THE RELIGIONS OF THE GAULS AND THE
GERMANS.
The Gauls had a body of priests, the Druids, who occupied
among them a position similar to that of the same body in
Egypt. Without forming a regular caste, for their dignity was
not of hereditary right, they were nevertheless an exclusive cor-
poration, in possession of a secret doctrine, which was only
presented under the veil of symbol. Although they kept the
disciples who solicited reception into their order sometimes as
many as twenty years under training and probation, yet the
sons even of their most distinguished families eagerly strove for
admission.3 The Druids, indeed, were alone possessed of intel-
lectual civilisation ; and their course of instruction included not
merely the department of religion, but those of mathematics,
astronomy, natural science and ethics, imparted, however, with-
out writing, and only by oral tradition, so that their lore might
more easily be kept secret. At the head of the whole order,
itself in the enjoyment of the unlimited confidence of the peo-
1 Do Div. ii. 54. * Plut. Marc. ■> ; Qusest Rom. 88.
3 Ctes. B. Ci. vi. 13, U : Mela, iii. 2.
THE DRUIDS. 109
pie, and probably divided into grades, stood a high-priest, whose
election was sometimes decided by wager of battle, the dignity
lasting his lifetime. His power was supreme in the nation ;
for the Druids, at whose head he was, themselves composed
the dominant class in the collective social or political life of
the Gauls. The entire power of judging and punishing was
in their hands. Amongst the iEdui they elected the president
of state for the year, the Vergobret.1 The yearly convention of
their council of state was held in the district of Chartres, in
the heart of Gaul; and the contending factions of the whole
country appeared there to adjust their differences. Whoever
they banned, or excluded from the sacrifices, was avoided by all,
and was stripped of his rights and honour. In Csesar's times
the power of the Druids was already on the wane, in face of the
nobiliary influence of the clans ; but the hypothesis of Ameclee
Thierry2 is not probable, that, according to the Cymric tradi-
tion, the entire Druidical system, with its religious teaching and
composition, had been introduced amongst the Gauls, till then
addicted to a rude religious rite of nature, through a victorious
invasion of the Cymri under their afterwards deified leader,
Hesus. Nothing appears in Gaul proper of such a dualism of
a stranger conquering race and a subject Celtic one, — the ne-
cessary consequence of an event of the kind supposed. True,
Thierry thought Druidism had become the prevalent worship in
Southern and Eastern Gaul without force of arms ; but still the
difficulty remains, how a foreign institution, not the growth of
the nation, should have attained to so complete an authority,
and one that dominated the whole life of the Gauls.
It seems that the Bards, the religious minstrels, and the
Eubagse, engaged in the functions of religion,3 both belonged to
the Druid order in a wider signification. The real Druids led a
retired life, devoted to intellectual pursuits. The Druidesses,
too, had a very considerable influence ; for instance, there were
sacrifices which could only be performed by priestesses, and
sanctuaries open only to them. These priestesses must some of
them have been married, and others have abstained from wed-
1 Caes. i. 16, comp. vii. 32, 33.
2 Histoire des Gaulois, Brux. 1S42, ii. 128.
3 Amm. Marc. xv. 9 [? Perhaps the reference is to Strabo, iv. p. 27G (Oxf.),
UpoTToioi Ktxl (pvaioAoyoi. Tr.~\
110 RELIGION OF THE GAULS.
lock either temporarily or for life. On the island of Sena, off
the western promontory of Armorica, there was a commnnity of
nine maidens, who gave oracnlar responses, and to whom an
extraordinary power over nature was ascribed.1 Another col-
lege of priestesses of the tribe of the Nannetes2 inhabited a
little island at the mouth of the Loire, which the foot of no
male could approach. They were obliged to take the roof off
their temple once a year, and then replace it in the space of one
night. If one of these lady-priests allowed any of the building-
material to drop in so doing, she was straightway torn to pieces
by the rest.3
The teaching of the Druids concerning the state after death
is generally understood as adopting a kind of Pythagorean mi-
gration of souls. Diodorus says this in terms, and Caesar
seems to say it;4 but on weighing his words more accurately,
when taken together with the distinct testimonies of Mela5 and
Lucan,6 and the funeral usages of the Gauls, it is clear that it
was not the Pythagorean metempsychosis the Gauls believed in,
but a life after death, in another world of the departed : death,
according to Lucan' s expression, would only be the mid-entrance
into a long life, transferred to a world beyond the grave, di-
viding the two halves of life, — the earthly and unearthly. This
also explains the Gaulish custom of burning every thing with
the dead, whatever belonged to or served them, and all that
they particularly cherished, — utensils, arms, animals, and even
slaves, — and also the throwing into the flames of letters for de-
livery by them to other deceased, their predecessors. Mela, who
wrote in the year 44 a.d., mentions accounts and bills of debt
incurred by the deceased being, formerly at least, burnt along
with them, and sometimes that their friends shared their funeral
pile in order to live in their society in another world ; but that
in his time — and Caesar, too, had found it so before him— people
were content with committing to the flames along with him what
a man had made use of in his life.
Human sacrifices, wherever the influence of the Druidical re-
ligion extended, were exceedingly numerous; and the Romans
looked upon the Gauls as a people who distinguished themselves
1 Mela, iii. 6, 23. 2 B. G. iii. 9. 3 Strabo, p. 498 (277, Oxf.).
4 B. G. vi. 14, " Animas or .... ab aliis post mortem transire ad alios."
5 Mela, iii 2. 6 Lucan, i. 455 sq.
HUMAN SACRIFICES. Ill
above all others by its devotion to the service of the gods, and
that a very bloody and cruel service. The priest administered
the death-stroke from behind to the victim appointed for sacri-
fice, with the sword, on the diaphragm; and the will of the
deity, or the future, was read in the manner of his falling head-
long, the convulsions of his limbs, and the colour and gushing
of his blood. Ordinarily, grown men, and not cattle, were sa-
crificed. According to Druid doctrine, the deity would not be
satisfied for the life of one man without the death of another,
and preferred a human sacrifice to every thing else, because hu-
manity was the best of all seeds.1
The victim was not always struck down by the sword ; some-
times the man was bound to a stake in the middle of the temple,
and there put to death by arrows and javelins. It happened
still more frequently that a gigantic basket of wicker-work, in
human form, was filled with men and beasts, and then kindled.2
Sacrifices of this kind were particularly set up, in consequence
of a vow; for before a battle the presentation of warlike tro-
phies, and amongst them of prisoners also, was the subject
of vow, or at other times, in extremity of illness, a man wTould
promise the sacrifice of the life of slaves and clients. If it
were a state sacrifice, the criminals were produced who would
otherwise have been executed, and they were often kept many
years for this purpose. If there were none such, men were
bought and fed, and taken in procession round the city on
the day of the solemnity, and at last crucified outside of it,
or put to death in some other way. There were volunteers
besides, prepared either to share the pile with an honoured
person deceased, or to sacrifice their own life for that of a
sick person. When the Romans rigorously suppressed these
human sacrifices, the custom still continued of scratching the
skin of the person devoted, and offering the deity the blood so
obtained.3
The Druids held the mistletoe, the parasitic plant growing
on oaks and other trees, to be quite a remarkable boon from the
deity, a kind of panacea, a remedy for barrenness and against
poison. The gathering of this plant was conducted with great
solemnity; a golden sickle was used, and a couple of white
1 Varro, ap. Aug. C. D. vii. 19. 2 B. G. vi. 16 ; Strabo, p. 108 (277, Oxf.).
3 Mela, iii. 2.
112
TIELIGION OF THE GAULS.
cattle sacrificed on the occasion.1 No less effect, in other re-
spects, was claimed for a certain pretended egg of a snake, of
the origin of which strange histories were told by the Druids;
but which, from Pliny's account, seems to have been a petrifac-
tion, an echinite.2 It was a sure way of winning a cause or
trial ; and a Roman knight from the territory of the Gallic Vo-
contii, who carried one about his person with that object, was
executed for so doing by the emperor Claudius, the enemy and
persecutor of the Druids and their religion.
Of the Celtic deities there is little certain to be advanced.
Romans, such as Csesar, gave those that struck them most, from
some incidental resemblance, the names of Roman deities of the
first class. Accordingly, Caesar styles the six most prominent
Gallic gods, Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, Minerva, and
Dis. Lucan alone mentions the native designations of the
three principal gods, Hesus, Taranis, and Teutates,3 males only,
while a female is found in Caesar's list. Probably the Gauls
had but this one chief-goddess ; and yet we meet with a god-
dess Belisana on an inscription, supposed to be the Minerva of
Csesar,4 and an Arduinna, who would be Diana. One of their
most general worships was that of the Matrons, a name appear-
ing often on inscriptions, who may have been female genii,
guardian spirits, and goddesses of destiny ; generally there were
but three of them, sometimes more ; afterwards, in consequence
of their romanising, the Gauls seem to have substituted on their
monuments Junos, Parcse, and Nymphse. The Apollo of C?esar,
a god of healing, was called, in Celtic, Belenus ; their war-god
appears under the name of Camulus ; Taranis, the thunder-god,
was confounded with the Roman Jupiter : Teutates-Mercury had,
according to the same author, the most extensive cultus, and the
greatest number of idols ; in him was honoured the inventor of
all arts, the god of gain and trade, and the patron deity of roads,
and conductor on journeys.5 Regarding the god Esus, or Hesus,
who is represented on a monument at Paris as cutting branches
from a tree, there is nothing more to be said.
All the images of gods found in Gaul belong to the period
after the Roman conquest. And yet it is likely that the Gauls
1 Plin. H. N. xvi. 44. * H. N. xxix. 3.
3 Cms. E. G. vi. 17; Lucan, i. 445 sq. 4 Martin, Kelig. des Gaulois, i. 504.
5 Caes. vi. 17.
GERMAN DEITIES. 11 3
had such images already before their romanising, for it is cer-
tain they had temples j1 though thick groves, such as Lucan
poetically describes, were their favourite haunts for worship,
and were the most frequent witnesses of the flow of human
blood. But all the more important temples were erections of
the Roman period; and the Roman titles of gods either expelled
the Celtic ones, or were coupled with them.
From their organisation and influence on the people, the
Druids were far too powerful a corporate body to be endured
by the emperors. They composed the core and the connecting
link of Gallic nationality ; this was to be crushed and broken,
and the people were to become romanised in manners, language,
and religion. This fusion was in general effected through the
aid of numerous Italian colonies, and of the elastic Grseco-
Roman system of deities, which was able to assimilate and
absorb rude coarse worships such as the Gallic. And this fu-
sion was the easier, as, in the thorough victory of the Romans,
the Roman gods had proved themselves the true potentates and
wielders of earthly destinies, while those of the Gauls had sur-
rendered their worshipers, or proved too weak to protect them.
The Druid hierarchy had, however, to be broken up. Tiberius
early began the task of the suppression of the institute ; and
Claudius took a still more decided step by forbidding the entire
Druid worship under pain of death.2 Whether that interdict
led to formal persecutions or not, we do not know; at least
there is no mention made in the later insurrections of the Gauls
of the suppression of their religion having been the pretext for
their taking up arms.
Regarding the nature of the German gods, we are reduced
to accounts of Caesar and Tacitus, and particularly the latter, for
Caesar seems to have contented himself with a very general and
superficial impression. "The Germans," he says, "have no
Druids who superintend in divine things, and they are not zeal-
ous in sacrificing. They acknowledge those only as gods whom
they see with their eyes, and by whose power they feel them-
selves unmistakably supported, — the sun, Vulcan, and the moon;
the rest are not even known to them by report." According
to this, the German religion had become a mere worship of the
element and stars, from which, it is obvious, there was but one
1 Suet. Cffisar, v. 4 ; Plut. Ciesar, 26. 2 Plin. H. N. xxx. 1 ; Suet. Claud. 25.
VOL. II. I
114 RELIGION OF THE GERMANS.
element — that of fire — deified by the Germans. The addition,
that no other god was known to the Germans bnt these three,
can only be defended if understood of the Roman gods, or such,
at least, as easily admitted of being blended with them. Long
before Caesar, as early as the time of Pytheas of Massilia, the
Germans were in possession of gods other than those named by
Caesar, two brothers of immortal youth, in whom the Greeks,
as the Romans after them, recognised the Dioscuri.
The statements of Tacitus, made one hundred and fifty years
later, are more accurate, and to be depended upon, though still
not without Roman admixture. While, however, he advanced
that the Germans had no images of the gods, or temples, as
deeming it unworthy of gods that they should be shut up within
walls, or that images of them should be made, he was probably
lending his own Stoic-philosophy views to the Germans. They
had no temples while and where they had no towns, when they
were often changing their settlements, and when artistic skill
was wanting to them for the construction of temples and idols in
human form. The rule was not without exceptions, and Tacitus
himself speaks of a temple of Tanfana, and tells how the goddess
Nerthus was carried about on a wagon, and bathed in a lake,
which would suppose an image of her.1 Like the Greeks and
Romans, the Germans too, in their earliest times, had honoured
sanctuaries, half fetishes, half symbols, stakes or pillars, or even
figures of beasts ; and where they afterwards settled down for
good, there also temples were raised.
Tacitus mentions three gods by name, as distinguished by
preference in the worship of the Germans, — -Mercury, Hercules,
and Mars. The testimony of Paul the Deacon leaves it un-
doubted that by the first named, Wuotan, or Wodau, the su-
preme god common to all the Germans, is meant, though it is
difficult to say on which of his attributes the Romans relied to
assign him a position so subordinate as that occupied by Mercury.
The god of the sun, mentioned by Caesar, is probably none other
than Wodan. Though the growth of the corn and the abund-
ance of harvest was ascribed to him, still his nature was to the
Germans predominantly gloomy and terrible. He appears at
the same time as god of the infernal world and of death ; and
on appointed days human sacrifices were allotted him, consisting
1 Germ. 40.
DEITIES. 115
most frequently, it may be supposed, of prisoners of war. It is
to this god that the holy grove, the common sanctuary of the
S em nones, must have been consecrated, to which all people of
that name, at fixed times, forwarded delegates to arrange a so-
lemn human sacrifice. People only ventured to visit the sanc-
tuary in chains ; and whoever fell in it, could not rise again, but
was obliged to be rolled out of it on the pavement.1
We may conjecture, though not assert, that the Hercules
and Mars of Tacitus correspond to the two old German deities,
Thunaer, or Donar, and Ziu. In any case, they were both war-
like gods, who were invoked at battles. Songs of battle were
current, addressed to Hercules before all the other gods. As
god of lightning and fire, Donar was, without doubt, the Vulcan
whom Caesar found amongst the Germans. Particular German
tribes, the Suevi, for instance, had their particular cultus.
Tacitus speaks of three female deities : Isis, whose worship he
believed he discovered in existence among a portion of the
Suevi, they having, as a symbol of the goddess, a ship of the
build of a Liburnian galley ;2 and centuries after, a custom is
met with of dragging about with festal pomp a ship of the kind.
The mother of the gods was worshiped among the CEstyi ; she
was symbolically represented by figures of boars, which, when
carried into battle, afforded security to the bearers.3 The mo-
ther-earth, Nerthus, who was worshiped by seven of the Suevic
clans on the Baltic, and on an adjacent island, was assuredly
the same goddess. Every year she was jaunted about on a car,
harnessed with cows, and covered with a white cloth, and every
where received with demonstrations of joy, and then bathed in
a lake by slaves,4 who were drowned after the ceremonies were
concluded. Among the Naharvali a priest in woman's apparel
ministered in the rites of the two brothers " Alcis," whom the
Greeks and Romans took to be Castor and Pollux.5
We learn further through Tacitus that the divine progenitor
of the German races was the god Tuisco, a son of the earth, and
that from his son Mannus, and his three sons, the three princi-
pal branches of the nation descended.6 On this statement, and
on the nature of the gods of the Germans generally, a light
would be thrown only by the introduction of Scandinavian
1 Germ. 39. 2 Ibid. 9. 3 Ibid. 45.
4 Ibid. 40. 5 Ibid. 43. 6 Ibid. 2.
116 RELIGION OF THE GERMANS.
mythology into the question ; but as to the extent to which
such a process would be admissible as a complement to these
obscure and very unsatisfactory Roman notices, there are the
widest differences of view ; in any case, it is no longer possible,
in consequence of the community of fundamental principles, to
determine how much is to be put down to Scandinavian in-
fluence lasting eight hundred years. The Anglo-Saxons traced
their origin back to Woden himself. But following the forma-
tion of words, it is certainly probable that by Tuixo, or Tuisco,
a son of the war-god Tiu, or Ziu, is to be understood.
Caesar's account of the Germans not being much addicted
to sacrificing must be -understood as spoken in a comparative
sense : they were not so zealous in that duty as the Gauls, that
is, they did not suffer human blood to flow in streams, as the
others did, on merely private occasions. Human sacrifice, it
seems, was offered to Wodan only ; Hercules and Mars received
that of certain beasts dedicated to them.1 The priest performed
all religious actions for the community, the father of the family
in it and for it. The priests, reverenced and invested with
great authority, and in war with the exclusive power of punish-
ment, formed no hereditary or close caste with a compact hier-
archy, like the Druids. On them it lay on public occasions to
investigate the will of the gods, and to execute the sentence of
death on malefactors and traitors, which was considered a re-
ligious act, an atonement made to the gods ; and having also
the conduct of the popular assemblies, they appear as the first
and most powerful class. The Germans had no priestesses, —
they are only spoken of among the Cimbri, who were probably
not a pure German tribe ; but they had prophetesses, who were
reverenced as holy women, — Velleda, for instance, among the
Bructeri in the time of Vespasian, or Aurinia, and Ganna. The
Germans, who generally ranked women high, and honoured
them, were so far carried away with the notion of their being
organs of the deity, speaking through them, that they actually
worshiped particular women as goddesses, if the expression of
Tacitus be not too strong.2
As with the Gauls, so with the Germans, groves were their
favourite places of worship : here were to be found residences of
priests and altars; here were their national objects of venera-
i Germ. 0. * Hist. iv. 61.
HOLY GROVES AND TREES. 117
tion, and here their military ensigns and implements of sacrifice
were deposited. Some trees were invested with a special sanc-
tity, such as the thunder-oak at Geismar in Hesse, connected
with the cultus of Thor or Donar; and the preachers of the
gospel had often in later times to inveigh against tree-worship,
as well as the reverence for springs and streams. That there
were holy pillars in existence, is clear, from the mention of
pillars of Hercules in North Germany ; as also of the Irmen-
pillar, destroyed by Charlemagne, an upright trunk of enormous
size, the name of which signified "the all-supporting world-
pillar." There is no appearance of the worship of particular
animals in Egyptian fashion among the Germans ; yet they had
sacred beasts, — the white horses, for instance, which were kept
in holy groves at public expense, and had to draw the holy
chariot, and whose prophetic neighings priests and kings in-
terpreted.1 Divination was also practised from the flight and
notes of birds.
1 Germ. 10.
BOOK VIII.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
FROM THE END OF THE REPUBLIC TO THE ANTONINES.
I. PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATUKE IN THEIR RELATIONS TO
RELIGION.
1. Philosophy in Rome : Lucretius, Cicero — The Roman-
Stoic School: Seneca, Epictetus — Platonico-Pythago-
rean Philosophy — Plutarch.
When the Greek philosophy first made its way into Rome, it
appeared to Roman statesmen like a foreign element, of suspi-
cious aspect, threatening the religion of the state and the whole
Roman system, the extent of the bearings of which it was im-
possible to calculate. But the attempt to prevent it spreading
early betrayed its own fruitlessness ; and the zeal of Porcius
Cato, which effected the speedy dismissal of Greek philosophers
from Rome, was soon ridiculed by the Romans themselves as
narrow-minded and short-sighted. Scipio Africanus and his
friend Lselius were already in confidential intercourse with the
famous teachers of Stoic doctrine, Panetius and Diogenes of
Babylon. If in this way a Stoic school was soon formed among
the Romans, the doctrines of Epicurus also found an early en-
trance, and — we are at the last days of the expiring republic —
from the general tendency to a voluptuous sensuality, met with
greater applause from numbers than any of the other systems ;
though, indeed, Cicero still asserted, that no Epicurean dared to
LUCRETIUS — CICERO. 119
make open acknowledgment of his creed before the people, and
that snch a confession would disgrace him even in the senate.1
And yet the new Academy was then planted in Rome by Philo
of Larissa and Antiochus.
The first fruit of importance was the doctrinal poem of Lu-
cretius, consecrated to the glorification of the Epicurean teach-
ing. This poet died by his own hand when only forty-four years
old ; but the end of all his efforts, the glory which he claimed,
was this, that following in the wake of the great teacher and
benefactor of mankind, he had rendered powerless the curse
which pressed heavily on the human race, viz. the horrors of
religious illusion, and had emancipated spirits from the op-
pressive thraldom of god-worship. No doubt, no scruple re-
strained him from holding out the popular belief as equally
unworthy of the gods as it was deserving of the contempt of
man. The heroine of his poem is in reality Nature, whom he
personifies as creative power, all-ruling, for whose freedom he
contends, while he refutes the error of a divine domination.
Man, on the contrary, is not free, in his view \ for our will is
dependent on the conceptions of the soul, and these are deter-
mined by the impressions of sense received from without.2 But
the soul itself (composed of heat, air, breath, and a fourth, the
subtlest material, the seat of perception) is dissolved as soon as
she is despoiled of the protecting shell of the body ; and thus
immortality is a silly delusion. That Lucretius approved and
recommended a man's blunting the edge of sensual lust through
the satisfactions obtained by indiscriminate indulgence, we can-
not contemplate for a moment as any peculiarity of himself or
his school, when we regard the ordinary views that were current
in his day.
In naming his contemporary, Marcus Tullius Cicero, the
most important and influential of the Roman friends of philo-
sophy, we must, at the same time, remember that he did not
approach philosophy with the profound earnestness and specu-
lative endowments of the great Greek thinkers, and that he was
far removed from considering such investigations as the highest
object of his life. He had indeed received in his earliest youth
the instructions of Phsedrus the Epicurean, and was afterwards
the pupil at Athens of the Academicians, Philo of Larissa, and
1 De Fin. ii. 22. 2 Lucr. iv. 887 sqq.
120
ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
Antiochus; and of the Stoics, Diodotus, who lived and died in
his house, Posidonius at Rhodes, and Antiochus of Askalon :
and yet philosophy was to him but the complement of his
more vacant hours and an employment of compulsory leisure.
Without being an independent thinker, his only aim was to
make the Romans acquainted with the results of the Greek
systems in an agreeable and generally intelligible form. Far
removed too was he, as all the Romans, from the thought
that religion could be a guide to morality and virtue. Only
philosophy, he deemed, could bar the frightfully increasing de-
generacy; either she or nothing led to virtue.1 Cicero pos-
sessed in the highest degree the faculty of assimilating the ideas
of others, provided only they did not approach that higher level
of speculation in which he was unable to breathe. With his
elastic and richly-imaginative spirit, he also expanded much of
what he drew from his Greek sources, though there was often
also a failing in acuteness of comprehension. Whether from
design, or unintentionally, he broke off the points of many of
the Greek philosophical apothegms, or softened away accidental
asperities. His point of view was that of half sceptical eclec-
ticism; he felt himself most drawn to the new Academy. In
morals he was more of a follower of the Stoic school. No one
view, however, really satisfied him : in each he met with hesi-
tation or defect; and therefore also he preferred throwing the
pro and the contra of conflicting systems into the form of a dia-
logue, without adding any conclusion of his own at the end.
For in all, even the highest and weightiest questions, man can
only bring it to a matter of probabilities ; real knowledge for
man there is none ; all truth has an element of the false in its
composition, with so strong a resemblance to the true, that no
safe criterion is discernible to form a judgment or found an
assent upon.2 By these means, nevertheless, he preserved a
greater liberty of spirit than the Romans and Greeks, his philo-
sophical contemporaries, who for the most part gave themselves
up as unconditional tributaries to a single school, while he car-
ried his detachment to such an extent, that he could say of
himself, that he lived on, in regard to philosophy, from day to
day, and gave utterance to whatever just recommended itself
to his intellect from its probability.3
1 De Off. ii. 2 ; de Fin. i. 4. 2 N. 1). i. 5. 3 Tusc v. 11 ; de Off. i. 2.
CICERO. 121
Cicero preferred the Socratic philosophy in so far as it had
betaken itself to the province of the moral and practical, and
had set physical speculations aside ; though he himself again
was of opinion that a knowledge of nature and of science was
the true bliss, in the enjoyment of which even the gods were
blest.1 But to him, to know was but a means to an end, to
action. With him knowledge was always as it were the lower,
and action the higher ; and when he renounced certainty in ac-
cordance with his sceptical bias, in which the contradictions
of the philosophical schools hardened him, he thought even the
probable was adequate for his object, practical action.
In the highest problems, to which Cicero turned with pre-
dilection, he himself felt the meagre and unsatisfactory nature
of his theory of probability, and sought to fill it in by the
adoption of innate ideas. The germ of morality, he asserted,
the seed-corn of the virtues, the first comprehensions of right,
the ideas of the deity and immortality, are already lying within
us from the first, and develop themselves in our intellect ne-
cessarily, and independently of all experience.2 On the strength
of the divine origin of our soul, we have a natural knowledge
of the existence of God, consequently one common to all people,
even the most barbarous ; but that is confined to the existence
only,3 for the most contradictory notions are current among
men as to what God is ; and his own opinion was that nothing
certain could be predicated of the nature of the deity.4 He is, in-
deed, for having God conceived to be a sort of simple free spirit,
unmixed with aught that is transitory, cognizing and moving all,
and itself endowed with eternal power of motion ;5 and yet he
could imagine this spirit only as material, as fire, air, or like the
fifth primal substance of Aristotle, ether ;6 and at another time
he inclined to the view that God was the extreme sphere of the
universe, embracing within itself and dominating all the others.7
In speaking of the existence and nature of the deity, Cicero
uses the expressions "god" and "gods" indifferently, more fre-
quently the latter, more perhaps out of regard to the state re-
ligion and universally received ideas. He felt himself obliged
1 Hortens, ap. Aug. de Trin. siv. 9 (Cic. ed. Gronov. not.).
2 Tusc. iii. 1 ; Fin. v. 21 ; Legg. i. 8. 3 Tusc. i. 13 ; Legg. i. 8.
4 N. D. i. 21, iii. 40. & Tusc. i. 27.
6 Ibid. i. 26. » De Rep. vi. 17.
122 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
to the conception of a supreme God and ruler of the universe ;
but has not spoken out precisely what he held concerning the
popular deities. In his work on " Laws/' he nowhere speaks of
the service of the one supreme deity ; only the worship of the
gods as a body is enjoined, and that in three classes, of those
who had always been held celestials, of heroes and semi-gods,
and of personified virtues.1 His notion that even the gods of the
first class were deified men,2 did not prevent his accepting their
worship. It seemed to him perfectly right, that men should be
regarded as gods after death. " Know that thou art a god f
so he represented the glorified Scipio addressing himself in a
dream.3 Then he also accepted a divine providence having sway
over the whole world, only he could not be clear as to its limits ;
the saying of the Stoics, " the gods care only for great things,
and neglect small," seems to have met his approbation.4
Now it is striking that Cicero had no understanding how to
make any use of his knowledge of the deity in the whole depart-
ment of ethics. In his work, " De Officiis," he slurs over the
duties of man to the deity with a short notice, though he ac-
cords them a precedence over all others ; one gets no informa-
tion as to what they consist in. Nowhere is the doctrine of the
gods brought into close relation with moral doctrine ; nor are
moral precepts and obligations based on the authority, the will,
or the pattern of the deity ; his motives spring always and only
from the beauty and excellence of the " honestum," and the evil
and disgracefulness of vice. If, in speaking of testimony to be
given on oath, he bids us think that man has called god to wit-
ness, the next thing is, we find this god none other than our own
soul, as the divinest gift man has received from god.5 The idea
of a retribution after death was not only strange to him, as to so
many of his contemporaries ; but he openly declared it in one of
his speeches to be an absurd fable, and that, he added, was the
general opinion :6 " Do you take me to be so crazy as that I
should believe such things ?" is the exclamation he puts in the
mouth of a hearer on the mention of a judgment in the lower
world after death. And as regards the state after death, he knew
no other alternative than either a cessation of existence or a
state of bliss. In taking an oath, it should not be the fear of
1 Legg. ii. 8. 2 Tusc. i. 13. 3 De Rep. vi. 24.
4 N. D. ii. 06. » De Off. iii. 10. « Or. pro Cluent. c. 61.
SEXTIUS. 123
the anger of the gods that restrained people from perjury, for
the gods have no such feeling as anger, but simple regard to
rectitude and truth.1
As a statesman, and under the conviction that without reli-
gious institutions the Roman commonwealth could not be sus-
tained, Cicero expressed himself strongly conservative of the
existing system of religions. As he generally took it for lawful
that the magistrate should impose on the people, so religion ap-
peared to him to offer the most appropriate means of deception ;
and though he gave vent to a sweeping critique upon the whole
system of divination in his work on that subject, yet he laid
stress on the point that all magistrates should have the right of
auspices, so as "to be supplied with available pretexts for stop-
ping detrimental assemblages of the people."2 He required,
indeed, that superstition should be eradicated,3 but with the
saving clause that it became a wise man to maintain the ordi-
nances of his ancestors by the observance of holy rites and
ceremonies ; and thus, in fine, all must prove to be superstition
that is strange and foreign, and not instituted by the state, in
religious matters, and the investigation of the future. Every
thing, on the other hand, should be externally observed and
treated with extreme respect that rested upon the practice of
forefathers, on law or on custom, however corrupt and full of
imposture it might be; and this was the ordinary view of the
statesmen of antiquity.
No attempt was made by any Roman towards a new crea-
tion, or any thing peculiarly Roman, in the department of philo-
sophy. If any one of them occupied himself entirely with that
study, he was either content to attach himself unconditionally to
one system, or to put together eclectically or syncretically por-
tions of various systems. This last course Quintus Sextius took,
in the time of the transition of the republic into a monarchy,
and so became the founder of an ephemeral school, to which
Sotion, Seneca's tutor, belonged, whose lectures contained a
practical morality, partly Stoic, and partly Pythagorean. In
particular, abstinence from flesh -meat, and animal food gene-
rally, was required in it, with reference to the migration of
souls;4 and that the wise man was just as powerful as Jupiter
1 De Off. in. 29. 2 Legg. iii. 12. 3 De Divin. ii. 72.
4 Sen. Ep. 59 ; Qiuest. Nat. vii. 32 ; Sotion, ap. Stob. Serin, xiv. 10 ; lxxxiv. 6-8.
124
ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
himself, was the doctrine of Sextius in common with the
Stoics.1
In Rome the Stoic doctrine alone met with enduring ap-
plause and adherents, alongside of the more transitory success
of Epicureanism. Yet not only in Rome, but in all other parts
of the empire, the schools of philosophy became extinct after
the rise of the imperial power ; and they only held their ground
whose tendency was predominantly practical, and directed to
the department of ethics. In Seneca's time the old and new
Academies had already died out, and the school of Pyrrho was
silent.2 The prevalent bias of the age was to acknowledge
nothing real but what was corporeal, nothing to exist beyond
nature, and to turn all science into mere physics. Meta-
physics seemed like an empty phantom; for all incorporeal
intelligible beings passed for mere abstractions of thought,
sensation for the single source of our knowledge. Thus philo-
sophy, especially in Stoicism, had become much simpler, more
superficial, and accommodating. Plato's ideas, " the pure in-
telligence" of Aristotle, were shelved; the sensualistic dogma-
tism of the Stoical physics, with a palpable solution in readiness
for all questions, suited the Romans. In -this system God and
the world are only logically distinct ; man, as the crown of, and
most perfect element in, nature, is God's equal, nay, stands
higher than God ; the divine nature really reaches perfection in
man only. Such a creed as this flattered the pride of the Ro-
mans; but it was also in a better position than any other system
of Greek speculation to justify the whole system of religion and
of the gods, so important and indispensable to the statesman;
and to represent participation in it as a something beseeming
even a philosopher, and which did not entangle him in ahy
contradiction with his principles. For the material pantheism
of the Stoic admitted of worshiping, in each natural product
or fragment of the same, in every manifestation of a physical
power, the all-pervading and all-moving divine power ; and eight
thousand gods, or personifications of physical matter and powers,
had just as much of truth and authority for themselves to plead
as one or two. And then the better kind of Roman also felt
himself attracted by the ideal of the Stoic wise man, which
streamed upon him, in all the more brilliant colours, when con-
1 Sen. Ep. 73. 2 gen. QUPCSt. Nat. vii. 32.
STOICISM : SENECA. 125
trasted with the general corruption. The doctrine probed him
to the heart, which promised to make its followers invulnerable
to the destroying might of an inimical destiny ; and in a period
of forced subjection to a despotic dynasty, Stoic apathy, calm
acquiescence in all the decrees of fate, cold resignation and con-
stant readiness for a self-chosen death, seemed the disposition
that best became a Roman.
Meanwhile, in its Roman school, the Stoic system was ever
dwarfing and shrinking into narrower dimensions. If metaphy-
sics had already become mere physics, Seneca was by this time
maintaining that it was only the intemperance of man which had
allowed philosophy to extravagate so widely ; that she must be
simplified, and limited to what was immediately of advantage for
life and conduct.1 Though this famous philosopher, — who in fact
was far more of a brilliant rhetorician, delighting in antithesis
and nervous epigrammatic sententiousness, than of a calm in-
quirer,— desired rather to be taken for an eclectic than for an
affiliated Stoic, yet he never in reality travelled beyond the
boundaries of the Stoic system. The pride, which lies at the
heart of Stoicism, not unfrequently cropped out in his writings
without disguise. The wise man, he says, lives on a footing of
equality with the gods, for he is really God himself, or bears
within him a portion of the deity.2 We are at the same time
God's companions and his members. The good man differs from
God only by duration; and God, though surpassing man in
duration of time, yet, as concerns bliss, has no advantage of
him;3 nay, in one point, the wise man has even the better of
God, insomuch as God is of his own nature wise already, while
the wise man owes his wisdom to no one but himself. And who
could possibly be afraid of the gods ? no one in his sound senses
is so.4 The gods neither can nor will injure any one ;5 and
they are as little capable of receiving as inflicting harm ; and
thus it is utterly impossible for man ever to offend the deity.6
Even prayer is of no use. Why lift up the hands to heaven ?
Why trouble the gods, when you are able to make yourself
happy? It is in your own hand, to be company on even
terms for the gods, instead of appearing before them as their
suppliant.7 The everlasting succession of destiny unfolds events
i Ep. lxxxix. 106. 2 Ep. 50. 3 De Provid. 1. 4 De Benef. iv. 19.
5 De Ira, ii. 27. 6 Ep. 95. 7 Ep. 41.
126 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
in an unalterable order, just as in the huddling brook of the
wood the preceding wave of water is ever pressed upon by its
successor ; its first law is to stand firm to its decrees, and there-
fore expiations, ceremonies, and prayers are of no avail, and
serve only as consolations for a sick spirit.1
If, according to Seneca's notion, we speak of nature as hav-
ing given us any thing, that is but another name for the deity,
who is interwoven with the whole of the world and its parts, and
whom we may distinguish by a variety of names. We call him
Jupiter, or even destiny, for that is nothing else but the chain of
causes holding together ; God being the first link of that chain,
and the one from which the rest depend. But we also style
him Father Liber, or Hercules, or Mercury, each one being a
distinct name of the very same deity, exercising his power now
in one way, now in another.2
The intrinsic contradiction in the anthropology of the Stoics
comes out clearly to light in Seneca. Every man carries God
about with him in his bosom : in one aspect of his being he is
God; accordingly, nothing further is required for virtue than
that we should follow our nature, the easiest thing in the world
at bottom.3 But now, consistently with all experience, men are
vicious ; they have been so, and will be so in future. Dominant
vices may change, but vice itself will never cease to prevail;4
and we all have erred. Whence, then, this universality of sin ?
Seneca can account for it in no other way than a general mad-
ness among men. And so little did he cherish the hope of an
amelioration, that he thought, after the destruction and recon-
struction of the world, the new race and innocent, who inhabited
the new world, would soon forfeit their innocence again;5 we
are provided with no explanation how the gods, in human
form, come to this common madness. Seneca, indeed, had
much that was beautiful to say about divine providence; for
God — the world - directing power or world-soul — is intelligent,
but is limited by matter that is in no way to be entirely kept
under ; and the immutability of this matter bears the brunt of
the charge of God's being so far from upright in the appoint-
ments of fortune, and of his sending poverty and suffering upon
the good.6
1 Quffist. Nat. ii. 35. 2 De Benef. iv. 7. 8. 3 Ep. 41.
4 De Benef. i. 10. ' Qucest. Nat. iii. 30. 6 De Provid. 5.
SENECA. 127
Unlike those earlier Stoics in the time of Cicero, who de-
fended the entire system of augury, Seneca handled the religion
of his day with severity, in his work " Against Superstitions."
He rejected the whole sacrificial system, for God could not take
delight in the butchery of innocent creatures.* The entire of
the pagan worship of images was folly to him ; they dressed the
gods in human forms, or in those of beasts and fishes, or even
in a compound of these, — calling a creature divine, that would
appear a monster to us were it ever to come into existence and
before our eyes. The old Romans had even converted Pavor
and Pallor, fear and anguish, into gods. It were madness,
beyond that of any tyrant, to think of appeasing the gods by
mutilation and wounding of self. While ridiculing the mar-
riages of the gods, and the common herd of deities whom
superstition had amassed together in the course of time, he
concluded, nevertheless, with the advice, that one might even
adore this rabble rout of gods, provided one remembered such
act of adoration was a mere matter of custom.2
Seneca, however, appears to have stood alone among the
Stoics with his trenchant views on the popular and state re-
ligion. Two contemporaries of the same school, Cornutus and
Musonius, struck out in another direction. The first, in his
work upon " The Nature of the Gods," put forth a physico-alle-
gorical interpretation of the Greek and Roman gods in the Stoic
manner. The latter would not allow philosophy any other ob-
ject at all than the department of practical ethics, or confess it
of other importance than as a theory of virtue, and a guide to
conduct; and on this very account he would require all, even
women, to study philosophy ;3 for philosophy, as he naively ex-
pressed it (meaning, of course, his own), was the remedy for
that thorough corruption of society in his day that filled every
reflecting mind with the gloomiest perplexity. Moreover, on
questions concerning the deity and the soul of man, he was an
unconditional believer in his school, speaking without suspicion
of the nourishment which the gods attract to themselves from
the exhalations of earth and water ; and of the human soul, cog-
nate to the gods, as a material substance, composed of warm
exhalations, and sustained by vaporous secretions from the
1 Ap. Lact. vi. 25. 2 Ap. Aug. Civ. D. vi. 10.
3 Ap. Stob. Serm. App. pp. 415, 425.
128 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
blood, and which is liable, as other bodies are, to be spoilt,
dirtied, and wetted by bodily influences.1 This does not pre-
vent his asserting that the wise man despises exile, as he bears
the universe about with him.2 With him, as with the rest
of the school, who have much that is very beautiful to say of
the respect and imitation of the deity which beseems mau,
the imitating of God turns out to be but the following one's
own nature and light, allowing the divine substance which each
one carries within him its play ; and Proteus is the closest sym-
bolical representation of the god of the Stoics, — a substance in
itself formless, but clothing itself in every possible variety of
form in the world.
The far-famed Stoic moralist, Epictetus, a scholar of Muso-
nius, displays a clearer insight into the inner life of the soul
than his predecessors of the same school, and, with the exception
perhaps of Aristotle, has exercised a wider influence than any
other thinker of ancient times upon succeeding generations, the
Christian period inclusive. Philosophy to him begins in the
consciousness of our own weakness and impotence. In order
to be good, we must first come to the understanding that we
are bad.3 Philosophy, above all, must clear away the darkness
caused by our erroneous belief that we are lacking in naught, as
well as from mistrust in our own strength. Epictetus then di-
rects man to God. In God man has to seek for what is wanting
to him, moral help;4 and never was there a system of morality
which found so many and such striking echoes in Christianity as
his does. Still, the God to whom we must betake ourselves is
the God in us, for God has stripped himself of part of his own
being and assigned it to us.5 This demon in us,6 — i.e. our own
intelligence, and our own will, as emanating originally from God,
and conceived in its ideal purity, — that is the higher power,
in whose aid we must confide, and which we must invoke.
The doctrine of Epictetus bears throughout a deep impress
of egoism. Freedom from desires and passions, an undisturbed
tranquillity of spirit, carried out into impassibility, are objects
of attainment at any cost. We ought not to trouble ourselves
about externals at all, parents or brothers, children or father-
land ; nay, Ave are instructed to refrain from sympathy for the
1 Ap. Stob. Serm.xvii. 43. 3 Tb irav, ap. Stob. xl. 9. 3 Diss. ii. 11.
4 Ibid. ii. 18. s Ibid. i. 14. 6 Ibid. i. 15.
MARCUS AURELIUS. 129
misfortunes of others; at times perhaps we may assume the
semblance of such compassion, but we must never really indulge
the feeling. The man of perfect wisdom will also abjure mar-
riage.
The succession of Stoic moral philosophers closes with one
of the noblest and grandest forms of antiquity, the emperor
Marcus Aurelius, Still it is as if he were filled with the pre-
sentiment that all about him, the very school and- doctrine he
was so closely bound up with, would come to an end. The un-
certainty and nothingness of all human things, the resistless
stream of life, in whose vortex all being, and every struggle after
a frail and fleeting existence, are sucked up and disappear, form
the ever-recurring burden of his thoughts. A sentiment of
sorrow and a' deep disheartenment cast as it were a black veil of
mourning over the whole of his system of contemplation, and
almost every one of his reflections,. " Farewell all hope to you
who enter here," was the inscription upon the gates leading into
the sanctuary of the Stoa.
Towards the close of the first century a school was growing
up by the side of the Stoic philosophy, and gradually absorb-
ing it, in which the Platonic and Pythagorean doctrines were
blended, and a third and new form, the last birth of Grseco-
pagan philosophy, issued; not, however, without some of the cha-
racteristics of the Aristotelian and Stoic creeds. Stoic natural-
ism, with its comfortless fatalism, and the contradictions between
its theory and its moral precepts, no longer gave satisfaction to
minds. Even Platonism in its original form, and after the de-
fects which Aristotle had laid bare in its doctrine of ideas, could
not now again be raised into new life. There still, however, pre-
dominated among the later Platonicians for a considerable time
the notion of a substance existing external to God, and inde-
pendent of him, eternal and material, thrown into wild and
irregular motion by a soul of its own. A division, however, al-
ready existed on the question whether this soul of matter, passive
and impotent in itself, had been subjected from eternity to the
will and law of God (which Alcinous, about 150 a.d., represented
as the doctrine of Plato1), or whether a living active principle of
evil, resisting the divine activity, were to be adopted as the only
possible explanation of evil in the world. The latter was the
1 Alcin. Introd. in Plat. Dogm. 12-14.
VOL. II. K
130 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
view taken by Plutarch/ Atticus,2 and Numenius, all Platonists,
who, at the same time, discovered in their master the doctrine of
a primal chaos, overpowered and fashioned by God, and yet
without his being able to annihilate or transform the evil prin-
ciple therein inherent.
The Aristotelian doctrine had allowed the divine intelligence
on the one side, and the world containing the human soul on the
other, to stand in immediate opposition to, and severed from one
another in such a way, in fact, that the world itself seemed to be
defective in a principle of unity. Stoicism, on the contrary, had
attained a unity on the principle that the whole of nature was
contained in God as the universal soul, thereby making God (the
intelligent primal fire) rise in nature, and fall with it. The Pla-
tonists recognised the necessity, and felt the desire, of a living
God, really supernatural and external to the world, at once in-
telligent and willing; they wanted to make nature more de-
pendent on God than she was in the Peripatetic system, and the
human soul at the same time more independent of matter. But
on them too Stoic ideas worked strongly ; and while they clung
to this universal soul of the Stoics, they sought to ally it, though
without confounding it with God, to a higher principle, to a God
beyond nature, but they failed in getting beyond a second mate-
rial principle, not depending on God for its existence; at the
same time they could not free themselves from the thraldom of
Stoic views, and they transferred the laws of the material world,
eternal motion, to the soul and to God himself. Thus, about the
middle of the second century, Numenius assumed three divine
hypostases, the Supreme Being or the good, the father, accord-
ing to him, of the second hypostasis or God the world-creator,
the third being the world ; at the same time he described the
repose of the first as the eternal motion implanted in it by
nature.3 And as the Demiurge, the creator of the world, thus
also becomes the world-soul, and is therefore identical with the
third hypostasis, while the first is the essential equivalent of the
second, the result is that the whole of nature was again thrust
back into the essence of God.
In the Syrian Numenius we already discover traces of
Jewish and Christian, or at least Gnostic, influences; while,
1 Plut. do an. procr. vi. p. 1015. 2 Jarabl. ap. Stob. Eel. i. 894.
3 Ap. Euseb. Praep. Ev. xi. 18.
PLUTARCH. 131
on the other hand, the Pythagorean Apollonius, somewhat his
senior, takes his stand still upon the ground of pure Grecian
speculation. In the letters bearing his name, which if not really
composed by him, at any rate are exponents of the views of
the Neo-Pythagoreans,1 he is represented as teaching that all
coming into and going out of being, birth and death, were but
apparent, and had no existence in fact ; that birth was the tran-
sition from the state of substance to that of nature ; death, the
return of nature into substance : what takes place in them was
but a mere appearance and disappearance of matter, according
as it was condensed or rarefied, or alternated between emptying
and filling. If matter fills the being, it becomes visible, and
that is what is ordinarily termed birth ; if it withdraws from the
being, that is termed death. The substance of things remains
always the same : there is but the change from motion to rest.
It is an illusion in parents to suppose they generate the child,
whereas they are but purely passive instruments. Man, how-
ever, by death becomes God, inasmuch as it is not his nature
which is changed, but only the form of his being. Such is this
theory of a general metamorphosis effected through the modifi-
cations of the one substance ; the same as Ovid2 had previously
put into the mouth of Pythagoras himself, and was probably at
that time taught by his followers.
Plutarch, the contemporary of Apollonius, takes a higher
rank than he, and unquestionably the highest among the Greeks
of this later period. He was born a.d. 50, and died at a great
age under Hadrian. Though addicted to Platonism more than
any other doctrine, yet he was, on the whole, an eclectic, and
frequently came into contact with Stoicism, which he combated
with spirit. No one, to our knowledge, has, in those times,
shown so warm a love for the religion of his people as he. His
earnest endeavour is to contrive to keep the sinking creed above
water, and yet at the same time to purge religious ideas and
rites, and to make them accord as nearly as possible with his
own view of the just medium between superstition and unbelief.
According to Plutarch, the authorities one has to hold with
in a knowledge of the gods and of religion are the poets, the old
lawgivers, and the philosophers ; but the reliance to be placed
on the poets and lawgivers is again so circumscribed as to
1 Apoll. Tyan. Ep. lviii. s. 25, 26. 2 Metam. 15.
132 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
leave the ultimate decision upon divine things to philosophers
alone. These, however, should not be either Epicureans or
Stoics ; Plato was principally to be followed. The special pro-
vince assigned to philosophy was that of putting a right con-
struction on the rites and the festivals established by law ;l in
other words, to prop up ceremonies by a substructure of ideas,
that were to be borrowed chiefly from the circle of the Platonic.
Plutarch himself supplies a copious illustration of the caprice and
violence pursued in this matter of philosophical interpretation.
He lays it down as a canon : " In the poets, and especially in
the myths, should any thing unworthy be attributed to the gods,
if Mars be spoken of, we must imagine it as said of war ; if
Hephrestos, as of fire ; if Zeus, as of fate ; but if any thing ho-
nourable, then as of the real gods." He explains the adultery of
Ares and Aphrodite as if Homer intended to convey through it
the lesson that bad music and bad language generated effeminate
manners.2 One fruit of his philosophy besides is the assertion
that the different nations of the world always worshiped the
same gods at bottom, the one God namely, and the ministering
powers by him placed over people.3 He himself took Isis and
Osiris to be really deities, whom the Greek did well to honour,
though they were strangers.
Plutarch was, in reality, a monotheist, in so far as he ac-
cepted a one personal supreme god, Zeus, to whom he attributed
every imaginable perfection, moral and spiritual, making his
blessedness consist in his knowledge. Far too high and distant
though he be to stand in any relation whatever with the world,
nevertheless the universe is sustained by his will and his thought.
There are also intermediate beings who occupy themselves with
the world, nature, and man, or even appertain to nature, yet
are subordinated to the supreme God : these are the gods of
the Greeks. Plutarch reckons, as belonging to them, the Sun
and Moon, beings with souls, whom, as he says, all men pray to
as gods.4 Further, Apollo is, he thinks, the god of nature, who
takes pleasure in his own transformations, so far as he is changed
into fire; and Dionysos the same, so far as he is turned into
wind, water, earth, stars, plants, and beasts.5 In justification of
polytheism, Plutarch appeals to the fact that there were divine
1 De Isid. 08. 2 De Aud. Poet. 4. 3 De laid. G7.
4 Adv. Colot xxvii. p. 1123. s De Ei. ap. Delph. 9.
PLUTARCH. 133
properties which would undeniably remain at once objectless and
inoperative in God, and could be turned to no account, were
there not other godlike beings in existence by the side of the one
supreme God ;l meaning, that in God there was a justice and a
love which would be without object, unless there were other gods.
Plutarch is a dualist, in so far as he adopted a principle
of evil (Typhon, Ahriman, Ares, and Hades) confronting the
perfect God from all eternity. But in reality he has three
principles, God, Hyle, and the evil unintelligent world-soul,
which, even after the complete organisation of matter by God,
still lords it over its lower parts, and is the ever-active source
and cause of all that is evil and counter to God, as well as of
all the irregular and wicked impulses stirring the human soul.2
With Plutarch, therefore, it is not matter itself which is the seat
of evil ; rather, matter in its higher elements is of kin to the
divine nature, and longs for its formative influence; but that
evil soul has cooperated with God in the creation of the world.
One might accordingly have expected Plutarch to hold two
world-souls,— one good, the other evil; and yet he speaks but
of one, and one only, composed of two absolutely inimical ele-
ments, one of which is the divine intelligence, pouring itself out
on matter, the divine principle of life implanted in matter at the
creation of the world, which, while a portion of God himself, is
at the same time detached from the divine being;3 the other
portion is that old and evil soul, originally inherent in matter,
which can never be wholly brought into subjection by the good
and divine, but is every where setting evil at the side of good,
and is also at work in the human soul, producing sensual desires
and uncontrolled passions.4 Hence Plutarch enters into conflict
with the doctrine of other schools concerning a primitive matter
without properties ; for then the existence of evil in the world
would be unexplained, as God would have fashioned such matter
into something perfectly good, having no one able to resist him.
In order, therefore, not to be untrue to his Platonism, Plutarch
essays to fasten this doctrine of a double world-soul, the one
tending to good, and the other eternally bad, upon certain pass-
ages of Plato.5
Plutarch's whole cosmical theory, and particularly his way of
' De Orac. Def. xxiv. p. 423. 2 De Isid. 46-49. 3 Qusest. Plat. ii. 1, 2.
4 De Isid. 49 ; de an. procr. 24. 5 De an. procr. 8, 9 ; de Isid. 48.
134
ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
looking at the religion of his fathers, which seemed to him to
stand in urgent need of a purgation, forced him into laying
greater stress upon a species of intermediate demonic beings,
holding a position half way between God and man. These
beings, souls clothed with an aerial form, are of a changeable
nature, weak and imperfect, and partially subject to the condi-
tions of mortality ;l and from the frequent confusion of the
demonic with the divine, a thorough misunderstanding has
arisen.2 Deny the existence of demons, and you destroy all
communion between the gods and man. To do that would be
to set aside all intermediate natures, obeying and interpreting
the will of the gods.3 These demons are the vehicles of the dif-
ferent kinds of divination ; they are invisible assistants at wor-
ship, and at secret rites of initiation, and are, so to say, servants
and secretaries of the gods. Many of them traverse the earth
as avengers of impieties committed. Such demons Plutarch re-
quired for his Theodicea, for the special purpose of laying on
their shoulders whatever he deemed unworthy of the gods. Ac-
cordingly he lets the evil world- soul appear and energise in them,
yet so as that a slight residuum of evil exhibits itself in one, while
in another it is much stronger and more difficult to annihilate.
As to marked division or insurmountable barrier between men,
demons, and gods, there is none such. The souls of men can
become heroes and then demons, and these again gods. There
are but few demons that are able to arrive at a perfect partici-
pation of the divine nature, and that only by a long process of
purification in virtue ; others, in whom the evil was strongly pre-
dominant, are obliged to enter again into mortal bodies, and to
lead a sad and gloomy existence.4 To evil demons of this class
Plutarch ascribes the introduction of human sacrifice. Every
feast and sacrifice, he thinks, in which raw flesh was consumed,
people gashed themselves, fasted and lamented, uttered words of
shame, or accompanied distortions of the body with shrieks, were
modes of appeasing and keeping off evil spirits.5
Plutarch believed that divine revelations were vouchsafed to
man. It was the gods themselves who allowed him a certain
knowledge of divine things ; but the instruments of these reve-
lations, which generally relate to the future, were, he thought,
1 De Def. Orac. 12. 2 Do Ei. ap. Delph. 21. 3 De Def. Orac. 13.
4 Ibid. x. 12. 5 IbiJi U-
PLUTARCH. 135
partly demons, and partly vapours arising from the earth, as in
the oracles — Delphi, for instance. Now as the character of the
demon imparting the revelation is itself obscure, and one might
be easily deceived by mistaking an evil demon for a good, the
chances of the truth of such a manifestation must have been but
problematical in Plutarch's eyes. As for other things, he thought
people ought to worship God and demon according to the po-
pular tradition to which he belonged.1 Besides, he was well
furnished with resources for removing what was corrupt or of-
fensive to the eyes of others in myths and ritual ceremonies ;
in each of which he discovered either a religious idea, or a
physical relation, or a moral precept and practical rule of life,
symbolically expressed, or a record of an event in the life of a
demon. His treatise on Isis and Osiris shows particularly how
cleverly he could make his way out of every difficulty arising in
this department, and sometimes, too, by very forced and far-
fetched interpretations. This notwithstanding, Plutarch is the
last of the really religious-minded Greeks, who were devoted to
their hereditary religion in its entirety. After him there was no
one to take up the cause of the Greek religion with the like
warmth, or at the same time with such cultivated philosophical
abilities. The religious zeal and conservative opinions of the
Neo-Platonists, of whom Plutarch was in some degree a pre-
cursor, took an essentially different direction.
2. Literature : Diodorus, Strabo. The Poets of the
Augustan Age. Pliny, Tacitus.
If we may judge of the prevailing tone of an age from the lead-
ing names in the literature surviving to us from it, the educated
classes during the last times of the Roman republic, and the first
of the empire, among the Greek-speaking portion of the world,
as in Rome, were infected with an unbelieving spirit, either hos-
tile or indifferent to the gods. There was a change in it, how-
ever, towards the close of the first, and the beginning of the
second century a.d., when religious paganism made a new and a
last effort.
An undisguised contempt for the Hellenic worship pervades
i De Def. Orac. 12.
136 ROMAN LITERATURE.
the judgments of a Polybius and Dionysius on Roman religion.
The political point of view which they both occupy in passing
them, shows strikingly how religious grounds were wanting.
The historian Diodorus, of Agyrium in Sicily, a contemporary of
Caesar and Octavian, gives us in his first six books the mythical
and primitive history of Asiatics and Greeks ; but in vain does
one look for a single positive evidence of his religious creed
throughout his work. Sometimes, indeed, he speaks as if belief
in mythical history still existed, but not a word ever of a divine,
world- creative intelligence. He usually explains the origin of
things from physical causes, from the relations between the dif-
ferent elements of matter alternately uniting together by virtue
of their specific gravity, or repelling one another in consequence
of their opposite essences. His gods* are but stars or deified men.
In his preface he speaks once of the divine providence which
brought the stars and natures of man into combination and har-
mony, and thus had formed for all time a circle within which
it stores all that destiny has marked out for every individual.1
The same providence, then, has so interwoven the course of
the stars and the events of man's life, that, as regards men, it
has no other part to play than that of executioner of astrological
destiny.
Strabo, who lived some thirty years later than Diodorus,
displays a kindred spirit to that of Polybius and Dionysius of
Halicarnassus,2 so far as concerns the myths of the gods, and
their political use for the guidance of the multitude. He thinks
the commoner sort of people and women are not to be led by
the understanding, but by the fear of the gods, which cannot be
aroused without fabulous and marvellous tales. Founders of
states employed stories of the avenging power of the arms of the
gods as bugbears for the simple. He, too, makes mention once
of a "providence" as having decided to produce gods and men
as its noblest creations.3 Is it Zeus he was thinking of under
this providence ? and how far were the two species of creations,
gods and men, distinct from one another ?
The astronomical poem of Manilius, who wrote towards the
close of the reign of Augustus, preached a kind of fatalistic pan-
theism, borrowed probably from Stoic sources. To him the
1 Diod. i. 1, p, 2. 2 Polyb. vi. 54; Dionys. ii. 13; Strabo, i. p. ID.
3 Strabo. xvii. p. 8lCf.
MANILIUS — VIRGIL — OVID. 137
world itself is God, and he explains himself thus, — that " the
spirit infused into the world," the world-soul, is God ; who has
preferred man alone of all creatures, has descended into him
and striven to become conscious of himself in him.1 Who could
form an idea of God for himself, without being at the same time
a portion of the deity? Therefore Reason can neither deceive
nor be deceived.2 But the destiny and life of man nature has
made dependent on the stars,3 so that nothing can be with-
drawn from the empire of the supreme intelligence ; and for the
prevailing corruption, for the fears that torment us, the blind
desire and the everlasting anxiety, we have no other consolation
proffered than that " the fates steer the world's course, and each
must bear his own destiny."
Virgil and Ovid, contemporaries of Manilius, make use of
the entire Grseco-Roman system of gods and mythology in their
works. That this is but matter of poetical and theatrical effect,
and of acquiescence in the current ideas, on their part, is trans-
parent from passages in the works of both. There is a soul,
says Virgil, in the centre of the universe filling and moving the
huge body. Heaven, earth, sea, sun, moon, beast, and even man
himself, are penetrated with it. It is the divine fire, bestowing
and sustaining universal life. As soon as the particle of the
world-soul assigned to each has broken its earthly bonds, down
it descends into the lower world, where it encounters a just judg-
ment. A new body is assigned to it to animate ; and if at last,
after long migrations, its stains are wiped away, it returns like
purified ether back again to its fount.4
This ether-god, with the pythagorising doctrine of souls, is
also Ovid's favourite notion. The formation of the world out of '
chaos is with him the work of nature herself.5 For the etherial
fire, or holy ether, the igneous power of the heavens, has chosen jjjjf*
itself a dwelling-place on the heights of Olympus. The ether,
therefore, is Zeus, the hurler of lightning. A spark of this ,'ty
divine ether, descending into the womb of the earth, only just ^j
formed, gave being to man.6 Further on Ovid puts his views into "■■;.;';'.
the mouth of Pythagoras,7 who has received the doctrine from
1 Manil. Astron. ii. 104-] 07, " seque ipse requirit."
2 Manil. ii. 128-131. 3 Ibid. iii. 58.
4 iEn. vi. 727-751. s "Deus et melior natura," Metam. i. 21.
6 Ibid. i. 26, 27, 251, &c. 7 Ibid. xv. 153-175.
138 ROMAN LITERATURE.
the gods ; and it is no other than that of the eternal and uni-
versal metamorphosis of Apollonius. As concerns the gods, he
says elsewhere quite openly, " It is useful there should be gods ;
and as it is so, we should therefore hold that they do exist."1 But
Virgil esteems the man as blest " who has been enabled to fa-
thom the causes of things, and has trampled under foot all fears,
and destiny the inexorable, and the din of greedy Acheron."3
Horace is, in practice, the disciple of the Epicureans, whom
he ridiculed in his poems. It is impossible to get any where a
clear grasp of his sentiments, so changeful is he in his varying
sharply-contrasted colours. True to his often-quoted maxim,
that the shortness of life admits but of the enjoyment of its
sweets,3 he seems to have kept all serious thought and inquisitive
reflection at a distance. At one time he confesses his unbelief,
and his hostility to the worship of the gods, and talks of the
Manes as fables;4 at another he would turn his back upon the
human wisdom which has led him astray with its delusions, and
return to the old gods ; warning the Romans to rebuild the de-
cayed temples, and discovering in impiety the cause of public
calamities and corruption of morals.5
We must look for the sentiments of the more serious Romans
upon religious points in the elder Pliny, and in Tacitus. First
and foremost, in Pliny we find the universe explained pantheisti-
cally to be a divine being, and in it again the sun to be the su-
preme deity in nature, as being the spirit of the whole.6 Man,
however, weak and circumscribed, has divided the whole into
parts, so that every one might worship the one of which he stood
most in need. It is folly to believe in countless gods, and to con-
vert even the vices and virtues of men into them. Nevertheless
the number of the inhabitants of heaven has become greater than
that of earth; while every one adopts his own favourites, and
coins Junos and Genii at will. To the mortal, he is God who is
of use to the mortal, and this is the road to undying fame ; and
the names of the gods, Pliny thought, have usually originated in
the very ancient practice of deifying those to whom man's grati-
tude was due. That undefined supreme being does not trouble
himself about human things; and it is difficult to decide whether
it were more pious on the part of the human race not to worship
1 De Arte Amandi, i. 397. " Georg. ii. 490. 3 Hor. Carm. i. 0.
4 J lor. Carm. i.34. 1. 5 Ibid. iii. 0. 1 sqq. 6 l'lin. H. N. ii. 0.
PLINY TACITUS. 1 39
this deity at all, than offer him a service at which man must
needs blush nowadays. This is therefore hylozoistic pantheism;
and Pliny thought the number of gods had been increased in
some measure by the deification of certain parts of nature, as
also by the apotheosis of men. He concludes with the expres-
sion, " The imperfection of human nature supplies a special con-
solation in the thought that even to the deity not every thing is
possible, inasmuch as in itself it is nothing but the power of
nature." Whether this nature-power be intelligent in the sense
of the Stoics, or not, he leaves undecided.
The confessions of Tacitus, the greatest of the Roman his-
torians, are much less explicit. He has let fall no hint about
the being of God. In one passage he denies, with bitter irony,1
there being any appearance of a retributive justice in human
affairs ; and the concluding sentence of the Germania, that " the
Fenni were secure against the gods by their poverty and want of
civilisation/ ' is conceived in the same spirit. In fact, he seems
to have imagined the gods to be, if not utterly hostile to man, at
least enemies of the Romans. He speaks distinctly and repeat-
edly, to this effect, of the anger of the gods weighing heavily on
the Romans since the times of Sylla and Marius, and of its fruit
being always new impieties and vices amongst them.3 He has
no belief in the conduct of events by a divine providence ; only
he is not certain " whether human affairs are set a-going by des-
tiny and immutable necessity, or by hazard;"3 adding, "the
generality have not their minds made up as to whether their
future is decided for all, immediately on their birth ; but there
is much that happens otherwise than is foretold by the impos-
tures of lying seers ; who thereby throw discredit upon a science
to which past and present have born undeniable testimony."
Undoubtedly when he wrote thus, he was himself a sharer in the
fatalistic principles of the generality of mankind.
3. Notions of a Future State.
If the belief in God and the belief in a personal existence are
most intimately connected together, and if the denial, or mistaken
1 Ann. xvi. 33. 2 Ibid. iv. 1.1; xvi. 10 ; Hist. i. 3. 2, 38.
3 Ann. vi. 22.
140 ROMAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE STATE.
views, of a free personality in God also lead logically to the ac-
ceptance of the destruction of a man's personality after death,
then we must be prepared to find the ideas entertained by philo-
sophers and educated people generally of man's future state be-
yond the grave, presenting the same picture of uncertainty, doubt,
confusion, and contradiction as their religious ideas have, during
the period between Sylla and the Antonines. Unquestionably the
greatest influence upon the entire moral world of this age was
exercised by the Stoic school ; and we must accordingly consider
whether the later Stoics, who departed in some weighty par- |
ticulars from the old Stoa, allowed themselves any license in .
this matter, or remained faithful to the old dogma.
As has been already mentioned, the older Stoics taught that •
souls, being substantially an evaporation of blood, penetrated with
ethereal fire from the world-soul, continued to exist a certain
time after death in a separate state of being, especially in the
case of wise men, but that no souls could exist longer than till
the general conflagration of the world, when they would be ab-
sorbed in it, and return into the primal fire. Epictetus, howr
ever, seems to have believed that this refusion of the human soul
into the world- soul took place immediately on its separation from
the body. Death to him is a joyful return to, and union of man
with, kindred elements ; whatever was igneous in his composition
reverted to the element of fire, and so on ; and there was no
Hades, Acheron, or Cocytus.1
If, as Numenius reports, some Stoics taught that only the
world-soul was eternal, but that all other souls would be mingled
and blended with it immediately after death, Seneca, on the
contrary, speaking at least for himself and such as himself,
favours its continuance till the next periodical conflagration.2
When the whole of matter, he says, is on fire, all that now
shines systematically will burn in one mass of fire; and, if it
please the deity to grant a new beginning to that whole, then
shall we, blest spirits, we who have attained to the eternal,
in the general ruin, ourselves a small addition to the huge
waste and desolation, be metamorphosed into the old elements."3
Seneca, therefore, must have looked upon the whole question' .of
a state after death as something very uncertain, and have varied
1 Epict. Diss. iii. 18. 1. 2 Ap. Euseb. Prtep. Ev. xv. 20.
3 Consol. ad Marc. 26. , .
SENECA — CICERO. 141
in his views about it. At times the last day of the present life
is a birthday to an eternal.1 He talks much about a happier
state after the spirit has been delivered from the bondage of life,
and received into the region of the departed. But doubt is ever
recurring; he has only believed what he has advanced on the
word of great men, who promise more than they prove.2 In
other passages, again, he has nothing to console himself and
others with but a state of insensibility, the loss of all conscious-
ness, and therefore also the impossibility of any condition of dis-
comfort. Death, he says expressly, has already preceded our
present existence, we have experienced nothing disagreeable be-
fore birth, nor shall we after death.3 Here, then, he agreed
with Torquatus the Epicurean, in Cicero.4 Marcus Aurelius be-
trays a like hesitation. He, too, is uncertain whether the disso-
lution and refusion of the soul is immediately consequent on
death or only on the conflagration of the world, yet he inclines
to the former opinion. He has no doubt on the principal point,
the souPs sooner or later disappearing, or being blended and ab-
sorbed into the world -soul, which comprises the germs of all
being.5 Every part of me, he says, will on my dissolution re-
enter into its corresponding portion of the universe, and this
again will be changed into another portion of the universe, and
so on to all eternity.
Thus Cicero was the only Roman undertaking to rest a real
and individual existence of souls after death on philosophical
grounds. He did so as a Platonist; but philosophy had made
no progress with this question since Plato's time. Dicsearchus
and Aristoxenus, the Peripatetics, had denied in a general way
that there were souls. The Stoic Panaetius had only lately,
while renouncing the doctrine of his school touching the periodi-
cal conflagration of the world, rejected as well the temporary
duration of souls, its corollary;6 and with all his respect for
Plato, had pronounced his doctrine of immortality untenable.
Now Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations accepted the reasoning
of Plato in essentials. Whatever the soul is, it is a being that
feels, thinks, lives, and is active, and must consequently be of a
1 Ep. 102, ad. Lucil. 2 Consol. ad Polyb. 28 ; ad Marc. 25 ; Ep. 76, 03.
3 Epist. 55; Consol. ad Polyb. 27 ; ad Marc. 19. 4 De Fin. i. 15.
5 Antonin. Meditat. iv. 21 : ets rbv ru>v '6\wv (TirepiiariKhv \6yov.
6 Cic. Tusc. i. 32.
142 ROMAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE STATE.
heavenly and divine original, and eternal in principle. God and
the human soul must be of the same spiritual texture, and there-
fore after death we ourselves shall be also either gods or at least
their associates.1
As Cicero, then, while accepting from Plato the eternal du-
ration of the soul, thought himself obliged to its eternal pre-
existence along with it ; he also took advantage of the Platonic
proof derived from the spontaneity of the souPs motion. But as
he drew out this proof, starting from the position that the soul
had the principle of its own movement within itself, he was
driven to regard man's soul as a being existing independently
from eternity, and subsisting by its own strength, which it was
impossible to distinguish in substance from the deity. Thus he
was bound to take the soul for an emanation from the divine
spirit f and though he could not go the whole length of Euripides
and say it was God, he still thought and called it divine ; God,
as he thought, being either air or fire, the spirit of man should
be of the same consistence.3 With a rapturous eloquence he re-
signs himself to the confident expectation of the glorious day on
which he was to join the divine society and communion of souls,
and be delivered from this bustle and turmoil here, adding, " If
I err in holding the souls of men to be immortal, I do so gladly ;
nor while life lasts will I suffer this error, in which I delight, to
be torn from me. If we are not immortal, then it is desirable for
man that he should be extinguished at his hour of departure."
The doubt betrayed in these words came out more clearly in his
letters, where, to console himself and others, he does not rely
on immortality, but insensibility;4 "if there is nothing good in
death, at least there is no evil."5 He himself both felt and said
that his arguments, invariably drawn from the subtle, airy, fiery,
or ethereal nature of the soul, produced but a certain amount of
probability. He was a total stranger to all moral grounds. Nei-
ther a divine providence, nor a retributive justice in God, seemed
to him to further the cause of immortality ; the latter the less, as
he denied expressly avenging justice in the deity. Herein, he
said, agree all philosophers, not only those who maintain that
i Tusc. i. 27. 31.
2 Tusc. v. 13; cf. do Divin. i. 4i). 3 Tusc. i. 2G.
4 Ad L. Mescin. Epp. v. 21 ; ad Toran. vi. 21 ; cf. de Amicit. c. 4 ; Epp. vi. 2.
5 Tusc. Disp. i. 38.
UNBELIEF GENERAL. 143
God neither troubles himself or others, but such as allow God to
be ever active and energising, that he is never angry, nor ever
punishes." Nevertheless, his view of the preexistence of souls
led him on to the idea of their existence here being in a general
way a state of punishment and penance for sins committed in a
previous life. He threw this out in his " Hortensius" and in
his " Consolation," written after the death of his daughter Tullia,
coupling it with an observation, also borrowed from the Greek,
1 ' Not to have been born were best ; the earliest possible death the
next best."1 In the same essay he made a formal confession of
Euhemerism ; men and women after death had been raised to be
gods, and therefore he would have his daughter exalted to the
same honour, as having deserved it best, and he would dedicate
a temple to her.2 And yet, as far as we know, in all these ques-
tions he never got beyond conjecture, and a state of doubt and
vacillation.
The greater proportion of his contemporaries, and the Ro-
mans of the subsequent period, were far from imitating Cicero
in this half-hopeful, half-doubting tone. Csesar and Cato, in the
senate's hearing, were agreed there was an end of all things
after death, and neither joy nor sorrow found place beyond the
grave.3 Cicero, too, in one of his orations against Catiline,
speaks of the doctrine of punishment after death as but an old
fancy, cherished by the ancients. Virgil, Ovid, and Horace,
sought protection against the comfortless thought of an inevit-
able descent into the gloomy night of the nether world and into
an eternal sleep, in the enjoyment of the present moment, in the
pleasures of the table, wine, women's love, and cheerful inter-
course with friends of like mind.4 They encouraged themselves
and their friends not to waste the fleet but precious hour, on
which was to supervene a weary night and an eternity of exile,
when we shall be but dust and ashes. " Let us live and love,"
cried Catullus to his Lesbia; "for when the short day is past
and gone, the sleep of eternal night awaits us both." "Even
children no longer dream of there being any truth in the Manes
and a subterranean realm," is Juvenal's expression.5 " There is
1 Lact. iii. 18, 19 ; Aug. contra Julian, iv. 15. 2 Lact. i. 15.
3 Sail. Catil. 5.
4 Mn. vi. 390 ; Hor. Od. i. 4. 15 sqq. ; ii. 3. 27 ; iv. 9. 28, 7. 7.
5 Sat. ii. 149.
144 ROMAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE STATE.
nothing after death, and death itself is nothing ; you will then
be with the unborn/' says the tragic poet who bears the name
of Seneca. Lastly, Pliny, in his short and dry style, declared
the idea of existence after death to be an invention of childish
folly, and of the insatiable desire of mortals not to come to an
end. To him it is sheer vanity to dream of the immortality of
the soul; and yet his contemporary Tacitus hoped that a few
distinguished souls would be allowed an existence beyond the
tomb.1
The notions of the nature of the soul, as then current, had
a great deal to do with this general unbelief. Philosophers ut-
terly failed in grasping the idea of personality. Hemmed in by
their material horizon, they understood by the soul a kind of
secretion or evaporation of brain, blood, or heart, or a sort of
respiration.2 They described it as a subtle, aerial, or fiery sub-
stance ; or conceived it to be a mere quality, like the harmony
of a musical instrument, which was lost in the dissolution of the
body.3 Hence the alternative of either admitting the soul to be
extinct along with the body, or of explaining it to be a portion
and emanation of the divine world-soul. In the latter case, it
was open to one to speak in high-flown language, along with
philosophers, of the heavenly origin of the soul, of its having
descended from the bosom of the Deity to this life, and its re-
turn after death to its home, without meaning more than the
Epicureans (Lucretius, for instance) expressed, when speaking of
the heavenly seed from which we all are sprung.4 The return
was only a refusion into the whole of the part, temporarily sepa-
rated or severed from it, accompanied by the extinction of in-
dividual consciousness. The relation was conceived to be like
that of an ocean, in which were floating a number of bottles
filled with water; break one of these, and then the hitherto
severed portion of sea-water is again united with its whole.5
But the ideas of man's annihilation or existence after death
are also further influenced by those of the origin of the human
race. Such, then, as would not be satisfied with the myths of
Prometheus and Deucalion had to choose between two theories ;
1 Agric. 40. 2 Cic. Tusc. i. 9, 10, 11.
3 Stob. Eel. Phys. 80; Senecae Ep. 88 ; Pseudo-Plut de Plac. Philos. iv. 23.
4 Lucr. ii. 990.
6 Comp. the observation of Gassendi, Animadv. in Diog. Laert. x. 550.
THE LATER GREEKS. 145
the one, maintained by Peripatetics and Pythagoreans, that the
human race had no more a beginning than the world had, but
that both existed from all eternity, through an infinite series of
successive generations; the other admitted a beginning of the
race, not, however, through a conceivable act of divine creation.
Man was a product of the earth ; and, like other animals, first
crept in pairs out of the slime of the earth, impregnated either
by the sun or spontaneously. The question was raised, where
this teeming of the earth with a human progeny originated; and
Attica, Arcadia, and Egypt, all asserted their claims to the dis-
tinction.1 The two theories led to an annihilation of indi-
viduality. The first made the history of the human race a great
circle as it were of perpetual birth and death, without any
abiding personality. The second was forced to the adoption of
a material soul, consisting of finer matter, and then to leave it
to the destiny of all that was thus generated of earth or slime.
Plutarch tells us what the later Greeks thought of the state
of souls after death. " The idea of annihilation was," he says,
"intolerable to the Greek mind. If they had no choice left
them between entire extinction and an eternity of torment in
Hades, they would have chosen the latter ; almost all, men and
women both, would have surrendered themselves to the teeth
of Cerberus, or the buckets of the Danaidse, rather than to
nonentity." But there were but few believers in, and tremblers
at, punishment in Hades. The generality looked on the ac-
counts as old women's tales ; while such as feared secured them-
selves by initiations and purifyings, and then had no doubt but
that they would spend a pleasant life of playing and dancing in
Hades.2 His own opinion was, that it was useless to inquire
what rewards or punishments awaited the soul in its state of
loneliness or severance from the body; it was beyond us, and,
indeed, it was hidden from us. Yet Plutarch expressly defended
the immortality of the soul itself; a divine providence, he said,
and the immortality of the soul, are truths which stand or fall
together. It was absurd to imagine souls were made only to
bloom for a day in a delicate body of flesh, and then to be for
ever annihilated on the most trivial occasion. The Dionysic
mysteries are in his eyes a special warrant and a mainstay of
1 Censorinus de Die Nat. c. 4 ; Theocloret. Therap. 5.
2 Plut. Non pos. suav. viv. sec. Epic. pp. .1104, 1105.
VOL. II. L
146 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
this belief of his.1 He certainly treats the fear of things after
death as the workings of superstition ; and speaks once of the
hope of immortality being founded on mythic representations f
yet, though rejecting such myths, and agreeing with other phi-
losophers that there could be nothing to fear after death,3 he
still clings firmly to the dogma in question, — the immortality of
the soul ; and, in the story of Thespesius, probably an invention
of his own, has left us a view of the state of the departed. The
souls of the dead, ascending through the air, and, in part, reach-
ing the highest heaven, are either luminous and transparent, or
dark and spotted on account of sins adhering to them, and some
have even scars upon them. The soul of man, he says else-
where, comes from the moon, his "nous" from the sun; the
separation of the two is only completely effected slowly after
death. The soul wanders awhile between the moon and earth
for purposes of punishment, or, if it be good, of purification,
until it rises to the moon, where the nous leaves it, and returns
to its home, the sun, while the soul is buried in the moon.4
Lucian, on the other hand, whose writings for the most part
are a pretty faithful mirror of the notions in vogue among his
contemporaries, bears testimony to the continuance of the old
traditions of the good reaching the Elysian fields, and the great
transgressors finding themselves given up to the Erinyes in a
place of torment, where they are torn by vultures, crushed on
the wheel, or otherwise tormented; while such as are neither
heavy sinners nor distinguished by their virtues, stray about in
the meadows as bodiless shadows, and are fed on the libations
and mortuary sacrifices offered at their sepulchres. An obolus
for Charon was still placed in the mouth of every dead body.5
There is as little trace in the Greek literature of the day as
in the Roman of any very strong hope. In the epigrams of the
Anthology, the dead is content with asking passers-by to strew
flowers on his grave, or bewailing his early death. The transi-
toriness of every thing human is frequently alluded to, but al-
ways for the sole purpose of enforcing the moral, that as much
enjoyment as possible should be won, and as it were pressed out,
of the fleeting moments. " Let us drink and be merry ; for we
1 Consol. ad Uxor. p. 611.
2 CH Trepl rb /jLv6a>5es t^s aidi6rr]ros ihvis. Non poSS. suav. viv. sec. Epic. p. 1104.
3 De Ser. Num. Vinci, pp. 5G3-5G7. 4 De fac. in orb. Lun. pp. 942-945.
5 Lucian. de Luct. 7-9.
FRONTO. 147
shall have no more of kissing and dancing in the kingdom of
Proserpine : soon shall we fall asleep to wake no more." Such
is the ordinary burden of poem and discourse.1 In harmony
with this the prevailing current of thought is the common
custom remarked upon by Crito, in Plato's Phsedo, of allowing
criminals condemned to death to spend the last day of their life
in eating and drinking, and other and worse excesses.2
A similar strain of thought occurs in many of the inscrip-
tions on Roman sepulchral monuments of that period. Such as,
" What I have eaten and drunk, that I take with me ; what I
have left behind me, that have I forfeited."3 "Reader, enjoy
thy life ; for after death there is neither laughter nor play, nor
any kind of enjoyment."4 " Friend, I advise, mix thee a goblet
of wine, and drink, crowning thy head with flowers. Earth and
fire consume all that remains after death."5 Another assures
us on his gravestone, that as he believed in life, so has he found
it in death. " Pilgrim, stay thee, listen and learn. In Hades
there is no ferryboat, nor ferryman Charon ; no iEacus or Cer-
berus ; — once dead, and we are all alike."6 A third is concise :
" I have lived, and believed in naught but life •" or, " Hold all a
mockery, reader; nothing is our own."7
Cornelius Fronto, rhetorician and senator, master and friend
of Marcus Aurelius, is a striking proof of the utter helplessness
of the men of that day, if it happened (as in his case, one of
losing a beloved grandchild) that a heavy domestic calamity fell
like a thunder-bolt, and made them sensible of the comfortless
night of an existence without hope and without belief. How
Fronto beats about to find a single solace ! what efforts to catch
at every straw of hope, and how each and all evade him in the
grasp ! " Is it the gods," he cries, " who have struck me this
blow ? Is it cold, dead destiny? Is there a divine justice, a
providence ? Is death really better than life, so that the earlier
one dies, one is to be esteemed the more blest ?" He preferred
to believe this rather than that the world is swayed by no pro-
vidence at all, or only an unjust one.8
1 Asclep. Epigr. 9, Anthol. i. 145. cf. p. 148 ; Alex. ap. Athen. xi. 9.
2 PhEed. pp. 401, 402. a Ap. Murat. Thes. Inscr. p. 1677, n. 2.
4 Novelle Fiorent. i. 27, p. 3C2. 5 Fabretti, Inscr. Ant. expl. c. 5, n. 387.
6 Murat. p. 1321, n. 10. 7 Nov. Fior. xxxiii. p. 38.
8 Front. Reliq. ed. Niebuhr, p. 147 sqq.
148 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
The Later Platonists and Neo-Pythagoreans.
On the whole, the tone of literature and philosophy towards reli-
gion from the beginning of the Empire was more guarded and
respectful in countries where Greek was spoken than in Rome.
Since the middle of the first century after Christ, a growing
prominence was observable in the return to a more believing
disposition. One feels that a great change has taken place in
the intellectual atmosphere when one compares Polybius, Strabo,
Diodorus, and Dionysius, with Plutarch, Aristides, Maximus of
Tyre, and Dio Chrysostom; and the difference between Greek
and Roman is discernible when expressions of such men are con-
trasted with those of Seneca, Pliny, or Tacitus.
The Greek spirit was too elastic, whilst keeping in the track of
the Stoic and the Epicurean schools, to allow itself to be crushed
under the burden of the fatalism which was necessarily the off-
spring of the identification of the deity with nature. The con-
sciousness of the personal and supernatural powers which swayed
nature revived vigorously among them ; and for this reason the
Platonic philosophy recommended itself afresh, with its rich
mines of speculation and images, and its capacity for assimilating
new and foreign ideas, borrowed, in fact, from the religions of the
East. Far from the exclusive stiffness of physico-mechanic sys-
tems, Platonism offered the advantage, so important to all people
who feel the need of religion, of having conceived a supreme
deity really and purely intellectual, and independent of matter.
The development of the Neo-Pythagorean school took place
also about the same time, in the first century. What was Py-
thagorean in this school was the doctrine of a metempsychosis,
and its consecutives, abstinence from animal food, with the rejec-
tion of bloody sacrifices. Its metaphysics were Platonic, with a
mixture of Peripatetic and Stoic ideas. So also was the doctrine
of a world-creating God, though one identical with the world
itself, being acknowledged as the intelligent soul dwelling in ma-
terial nature. The popular gods were accepted as protecting genii
of the various parts and powers of this world ; the immortality of
the soul, because divine and unbegotten ; the present life as a
punishment and imprisoning of the soul within the body, from
which it is freed by the true philosophy : whosoever has a par-
PYTHAGOREANISM : APOLLONIUS. 149
ticularly active consciousness of a previous existence partakes in
a proportionately higher degree of the divine being, to which
each individual human life is essentially akin. Man is even
allowed to become actual God by means of this enduring remi-
niscence, and the virtue and wisdom which are its necessary re-
sults. For in principle it is the one divine spirit who, ever one
and the same, individualises himself in the different souls of men.
Such is the groundwork of the doctrine which Philostratus
represents as taught by Apollonius, in the life he has written
of him. There is evidence elsewhere, too, of its being the
common confession of the school, then and in the succeeding
period, propagated from the old Orphico-Pythagorean sect. The
two Pythagoreans, Nicomachus and Moderatus of Gades, — the
latter a contemporary of Apollonius, the former of a somewhat
later date, — both laid down the dualism of God and matter. The
" numbers" of Pythagoras, identified with the Platonic " ideas,"
are the principles and types of all things preexisting in the di-
vine reason, the real and eternal, yet completely immaterial sub-
stance.1 Apollonius himself, in a fragment still preserved of his
work upon sacrifice, taught that man ought not to sacrifice to
the one supreme God, for there was nothing in all nature pure
enough to be offered to him ; nay, every single product of nature,
vegetable or animal, not even excepting the air itself, was in-
fected with a miasma, by virtue of the antitheistic principle of
matter already abiding in it. Omitting, then, every external
and symbolical action, man should do homage to God by that
which is distinctive of what is noblest in him, his nous, — by
thought, and elevation of mind, without words.2 On the other
hand, there is no doubt Apollonius approved of making unbloody
offerings to the gods of the lower order.
This proves that Platonists and Pythagoreans at this time
were agreed in many and important points. Above all, they had
a common platform in religious sentiment, and in the endeavour
to indoctrinate heathendom, and to effect what none of the
earlier philosophical systems were able or willing to do, — the
conciliation of philosophy with the existing and popular state re-
ligions. To this object they were helped by their distinction of
the one supreme God, between whom and the gods of the upper
1 Nicomach. Aritbm. i. 6 ; Moderat. ap. Siuiplic. Phys. 50.
2 Ap. Euseb. Prsep. Evang. iv. 13.
150 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
and lower worlds they interposed a deep gulf, and whose resi-
dence they fixed far from all worldly contact, and on a height
only attainable to philosophic speculation. Here they could
make Zeus pass either for this distant god, or as one of the
lower gods, in which case he would more and more assume the
signification of a sun-god. All the rest of the people's gods
found their place in the two classes of intermediate beings
adopted by the two schools, namely, the souls of the stars, and
the genii of the different provinces of nature and the demons.
It was, however, only the few who drew an accurate line of de-
marcation between gods and demons ; these were confounded by
the generality.
To represent this system, there are three individuals of the
second century, almost contemporaries, — Maximus of Tyre, Apu-
leius, and Celsus ; all three, the two last especially, hot partisans
of polytheistic religion, and devoted to Plato. Maximus con-
ceived his one supreme God as also maker of the world out of
matter, and that matter the source of all evil.1 Celsus and Apu-
leius, on the contrary, discovered in God a being exalted above
all activity, the maker of nothing that was mortal, and with
whom the souls of men originate.2 The gods of the lower
sphere are God's sons, says Maximus, not a mere thirty thou-
sand, as Hesiod thought, but innumerable ; some of them stars,
some demons of the ether, and therefore in part visible, in part
invisible ; some of them, so to speak, intimate friends of and
sharers of house and table with the great king, others their
servants and helpmates, and others of a lower grade again.3
These lower gods or demons dwell between heaven and earth;
their power is less than that of gods and greater than that of
men ; they are mediators of the communion of gods and men ;
they appear, and reveal themselves to the latter, affording them
that support which mortals require of the deity, healing their
sicknesses, and making known to them the future. To indi-
viduals they are united as guardian spirits ; and the multiplicity
of their natures is equal to that among men.4 Maximus him-
self asserts positively that iEsculapius and Hercules had appeared
to him, not in his dreams, but when wide awake ; and the Dios-
curi too, whom he had seen on shipboard, as luminous stars,
1 Diss. xli. 4. 2 Apul. de Deo Socrat. 3 ; Celsus, ap. Orig. iv. 52.
3 Diss. xvii. 12. 4 Diss. xiv. 8.
MAXIMUS OF TYRE — APULEIUS — CELSUS. 151
harbingers of safety in a storm.1 He too deems the hnman
soul eternal and divine : so long as it dwells in the prison of the
body, it has but a dreamy consciousness, without a clear remem-
brance, of its real existence ; but the moment it is free by death,
it attains to the society of the gods, and is incorporated in the
heavenly host under its leader, Zeus.2
The teaching of Apuleius is somewhat different. He also
divides the gods into visible or the stars, and invisible, amongst
whom he reckons the twelve Olympic gods, offshoots of the su-
preme Spirit, eternal and blest. Most men worship these gods,
but in a wrong manner ; all fear them, indeed, simply from igno-
rance, and only a few deny them.3 Demons enjoy immortality
in common with the gods, and partake of the passions of man ;
they are accessible to anger and pity, and let themselves be won
by gifts. They are properly the objects of god-worship. Their
nature accounts for the great variety in the ritual and worship
of popular religions, the Egyptian gods delighting in lamentation,
the Greeks in the dance, and those of the Barbarians in the din
of trumpets, timbrels, and flutes.4
The supreme God, Celsus teaches, is absolutely immutable.
Hence he cannot condescend to men, else he would submit him-
self to change, in other words, of a good being become an evil
one. But between him and men are the spirits presiding over
the world, God's vicegerents, and controllers of all things in
heaven and earth. It is a duty to believe in these spirits, to do
sacrifice to them as the laws of the land prescribe, and to invoke
them to be gracious : we have all come into the world under
this obligation. Whatever we enjoy, the water even, and the
air we breathe, all is the gift of these spirits placed over nature.
Whoso serves them, by his act includes the supreme God ; he
honours a something that pertains to him, beings whom he re-
cognises as his own. If the Sun or Pallas be praised, the honour
done to the Supreme at the same time is the greater. For all
these beings, gods, demons, heroes, are only carrying out his law
given once for all ; he has once established the world immutably,
and it has no further need of his immediate supervision and go-
vernment. Evil is only a necessary result of this arrangement
1 Diss. xv. 7. 2 Diss. xvi. 3 sqq. 9.
3 De Deo Socr. pp. 668, 669 ; Theol. Plat. p. 584.
4 De Deo Socr. pp. 684, 685.
152 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
of the world, according to which all remains in a groove of eter-
nal sameness, past, present, and future, all perfectly alike, with
the same proportion of evil always in the world.1
This was the way these Platonists and Pythagoreans, clearly
as they saw the practical corruption in existing heathendom,
effected a compromise with the polytheistic forms of worship,
and befriended them. iVstral deities were generally adopted ; for
hardly any one doubted but that stars were intelligent beings,
with a will and power extremely great. Seneca himself proves
that we owe to sun and moon a homage of thankfulness, as they
benefit us willingly and knowingly f and Apollonius went into
India to obtain better information concerning the gods, there
than any where else, as the men of that country were nearer to
the fount of life-giving heat, and therefore to the deity.3 But
apart from the heavenly bodies, the popular gods were open to
an interpretation inserting them in the cosmical theory of phi-
losophers. Thus the Platonists, not without a glimmer of truth
enabling them to a deeper insight into the essence of God, re-
presented Athene coming in full armour out of the head of
Zeus, as the being through whom the hidden and supreme God
made the first manifestation of himself. She remains, they said,
with the Father, as grown with his growth. She breathes back
her being into him again.4 She only is alone with him as his
assessor and counsellor. Zeus begot her by withdrawing him-
self into himself.5 The Ephesian Artemis was nature, as uni-
versal nursing mother,6 Hestia, the central fire or world-soul;
and, if the earth were distinguished into a Psyche and a nous
or intelligence, then Hestia was the latter, and Demeter the
soul of the earth.7 How clever Plutarch was in laying all he
could on the goddess Isis and her Osiris, filling up many a gap
in his theory therewith, in which no Hellenic deity would stand !
To him she is the mediatrix between the first or supreme God
(Osiris) and earthly and transitory things, and the female side
of nature as well, to whom all generation is attributable, who
carries implanted within her the love for the first and highest of
all beings that is identical with the good.8 Apuleius, too, makes
1 A p. Orig. adv. Cels. viii. 55 sqq. 2 De Benef. vi. 2-3.
3 Philostr. Vit. Apul. i. 31 ; ii. 38; vii. 10. 4 'Avanve? els o.vt6i>.
5 Aristid. Or. i. pp. 12 sqq., Dindorf. 6 Nicomach. Aiitlmi. p. 24.
7 So Violin. lam. iv. 4, p. 7?;>, ed. Qxon. 8 De Isid. 53.
VIEWS OF EVIL. 153
almost all the female deities run off into Isis ; and she is nature,
mother of all things, mistress of all the elements, the beginning
of all times, the supremest among the gods, queen of departed
souls, ruling over heaven, ocean, and the lower world, Phrygian
mother of the gods, Pallas at Athens, Urania at Cyprus, the
Artemis of the Cretans, Persephone too, Demeter, Juno, He-
cate, Bellona, and Rhamnusia.1 But Maximus makes the easiest
work. " You have only to change denominations, and you find
philosophers saying exactly the same of the gods as the poets.
Call Zeus the all-supreme intelligence, which is the primal cause
and ruler of all things. Let Pallas be styled prudence in action
and life ; in Apollo's stead put the sun, in Poseidon's the motive
and sustaining power that pervades earth and ocean."2 With
such notions as these, an accommodation with the religion of
the state and people surely could appear nothing else than irony
and a silly mockery.
We have already seen what a close connection there was be-
tween the defective knowledge which the old philosophy had of
human freedom and of the nature of evil, with the relation in
which the Deity stood to both. These thinkers were wanting
in an insight into the nature and conditions of the personality
of God, as well as of men ; and therefore looked upon evil as
partly resulting from mere defectiveness or infirmity of means
of knowledge, they set it down to ignorance, and thought ac-
cordingly there was no other or higher remedy than philosophy.
And partly from not distinguishing between the physical evil and
the moral bad, they charged matter and its natural repugnance
to the intellectual with being the source of the bad. Hence,
the idea of sin was in fact strange to them ; they had no per-
ception how a free act of evil done by the creature bore upon
divine holiness and justice. In fine, the Stoics had further ob-
scured this important question by their theory that evil was as
absolutely necessary in the order of the world as the shadow is
to the light, and that all evil was equal. They raised man
above all responsibility and account, and represented him as
without freedom, the irresistibly determined tool of destiny.
Even the emperor Marcus Aurelius, with his mild temperament,
found a complete justification herein for the greatest criminal.
A man of a certain nature can do nothing else but act viciously.
1 Metam. xi. p. 241. 2 p}ss# x 8#
154 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
To make him responsible for his actions, would be on a par with
punishing another for having bad breath, or bidding a fig-tree
bear any thing besides figs.1 It was utterly impossible for vi-
cious men to act otherwise than we see them act, and to demand
impossibilities is folly.
This view of evil was expressly combated by Platonists like
Plutarch. Evil had not come into the world like an episode,
pleasant and acceptable to the Deity; it filled every human
thing ; the whole of life, equally stained from its opening to its
concluding scene, was a mass of error and misfortune, and in no
part pure and blameless.2 Later on he said, " No one is sober
enough for virtue ; but we all of us are in unseemly and unblest
confusion." This severe notion of evil, its universality in the
life of man, and the deep roots it had struck in his nature, is a
characteristic of thinkers of this period. We meet with similar
expressions in Seneca, to the effect that not a man will be found
who does not sin, has not sinned, and will not continue sinning
till his dying hour.3 Galen, a physician, and at the same time
one of the acutest of the philosophers of this latter time, went
further still. He declared the dispositions of children to evil to
be in excess, and thought that only by little and little the dispo-
sition to good got the upper-hand, the more the intelligent soul
attained the mastery over the two others — for he adopted with
Plato a threefold division of the soul.4
The solution of the problem of the origin of evil appeared
all the more difficult now. All did not accept the comfortable
expedient of Platonists like Celsus, of its having sprung from
matter in existence from eternity; or, like Plutarch, who ac-
cepted an evil and eternal world- soul, and an unintelligent ele-
ment of essential evil in the soul of man. Maximus of Tyre,
therefore, thought that Alexander, instead of consulting the
oracle of Ammon about the sources of the Nile, should rather
have put a question of importance to humanity generally, namely
that of the origin of evil. He then made an attempt of his own
at a solution, which only ended again in placing the seat and
fount of all evil in matter.5
1 Medit. ix. 1 ; x. 30 ; viii. 14 ; v. 28.
2 Adv. Stoic. 1-1. 3 De Clem. i. G.
4 Compare Daremberg, Fragniens du Commentaire de Galein sur le Timee,
Turis, 1848, pp. 18, 19. * Diss. xli. p. 487 sqq.
DURATION OF SCHOOLS. 155
Duration and Influence of the Schools of Philosophy:
their Dissolution.
Even after the creative power and productiveness of Greek
philosophy had died out, to be, and to be called, a philosopher
continued a title to honour and reputation. Those who were
partisans of one or other existing school made a livelihood upon
the rich inheritance of ideas and glory which the golden age of
the Greek mind had left them in survivance. The splendour
of great names, like Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,
shed still a partial lustre on their successors, little as they under-
stood the management of the intellectual patrimony that had
devolved upon them. To belong to the herd of Epicurus was
nowhere, it is true, matter of credit or respectability ; the mem-
bers of that school had only to pride themselves on their unity
and obstinacy in adhering to the unbroken tradition of their
founder. The Stoics, Platonists, and Peripatetics, stood higher
in public estimation, on the whole. The latter had fallen out of
notice, and became extinct, after descending, as they had long
done, to be mere interpreters of the works of Aristotle. The
majority of Cynics were despised, in literature as well as in so-
ciety, on the score of their ostentatious disregard of propriety,
and animosity towards religion. Coarse fellows, and proud as
beggars, throwing the Cynic mantle over disgusting vices, they
thronged greedily to the tables of the rich, and were flatterers
and blusterers in turn. Lucian's testimony is, that it was they
who degraded philosophy in the eyes of the people. In Nero's
time, however, they still had a man esteemed as a model of a
philosopher, Demetrius. The Platonists enjoyed a better repu-
tation, being already favoured by the general diffusion of the
works of Plato, which were really read a great deal at that time;
but as far as concerned seriousness and depth of thought, they
were far below a master whom they did not always understand.
The Stoics knew how to inspire esteem by the rigorism of their
ethical principles, which, in fact, frequently degenerated into an
ill-founded conceit of, and idle talk about, virtue (aretology) .
The ideal life held up for a pattern in their schools was never
realised in the individual life of their philosophers; and, after
Marcus Aurelius, no distinguished man bore the designation of
156 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
Stoic. The Pythagoreans meanwhile had shot up again into
an influential sect, still in the ascendant.
In all parts of the empire the priesthood was dumb, without
doctrine or tradition, a mere liturgical executive ; and through
this the philosophers attained to so considerable an influence
upon the people. They, and they only, were in possession of a
doctrine ; and from out the circle of their ideas they could coun-
sel, warn, and interpret, speaking to the heart of practical life
in its confusion and errors. Had a priest attempted to do so
on the strength of his office, he would have been regarded as
arrogant and absurd, so little did people connect the idea of
teaching and the care of souls with that of a priest of the gods.
This entire social province, ever indispensable to civilised people,
thus fell to the share of the philosophers; and hence we are told,
when a misfortune befell a man, the death, for instance, of a be-
loved object, he would have a philosopher summoned to impart
consolation to him.1
This favourable situation, notwithstanding the credit of phi-
losophers, began gradually to be on the wane from the close of
the first century after Christ. As numbers of them wore the
beard, cloak, and stick, by which they were recognised at first
sight, it was the more perceptible that the ranks were swelled
with a medley of insignificant, and often disreputable, persons ;
and after Marcus Aurelius established the payment of a salary
to them, it was observed that the care of a magnificent beard
was, with many, the only occupation to justify the drawing of
their pension.2 Without method in philosophising, as without a
fixed tradition, they extracted at will a few isolated and para-
doxical maxims from the teaching and works of their great
masters, and made account of their example to excuse their own
vanity and presumption. The extremest disapprobation is uni-
versally expressed by their contemporaries of the character of
the philosophers at the end of the first, and during the second
and third centuries. The picture drawn by Lucian of their
hypocrisy, vanity, avarice, and immorality, is surpassed by the
one which Aristides has left behind him. " Their greediness,"
he says, ' ' is insatiable ; their pillage of others' property they call
community of goods ; their envy is nicknamed philosophy ; their
1 Dio. Chrysost. Or. xxvii. p. 529 ; cf. Plut. de Superst. 7.
2 Tatiaii. Apol. 32.
DECLINE. 157
beggary, contempt of money. Haughty to all others, they creep
before the rich, nay before the very cooks and bakers of the
rich. Their strength lies in impudence in asking, in abuse, and
in calumny."1 Quintilian is no less severe upon them. " In
our days most people hide the grossest vices under those names
(old philosophers) ; a long face, gloominess, and a demeanour
entirely different from that of other men, are used as a cloak
for the worst morality."2
The influence and respectability of the schools suffered much
with the people from this rabble of philosophers, but more from
the contests which the different sects had with one another, the
weapons used in them, and the means by which they won and
retained their disciples. As all the schools occupied a distinct
position, friendly or not, towards the popular religion, some de-
clining, others attempting eclectic reforms in it, so they had
assumed towards one another quite the aspect of a variety of
religious parties engaged in a hostile struggle. The war was
conducted with all the passionate bitterness of religious dis-
cord, and presented to the eyes of lookers-on a spectacle of irre-
concilable contradictions, and a deep-rooted division upon the
first and most important questions. The age was by no means
sceptically inclined j on the contrary, it had a strong drawing
to philosophic and religious knowledge, a deep avidity for belief
and for authority that could be relied on. But the teachers and
disciples of the several philosophical schools destroyed the con-
fidence which thousands would have willingly reposed in their
teaching. They were themselves far too evidently the slaves
of an authority arbitrarily constituted and internally valueless,
wanting in capacity as well as inclination for steady and consci-
entious sifting of truth. " Before they themselves were able,"
says Cicero, " to discern what was best, they were bound down
to a system, and then, at the very weakest period of their life,
either from some deference to a friend, or caught by a display
of the first speaker whom they ever listened to, they form a
judgment on points which they are utterly ignorant of, and to
whatever school the wind, no matter from what quarter, drives
them, there they squat as on a sand-bank. They have hardly
heard a thing, and they are ready with their judgment; and the
authority of a single individual is enough to determine them."3
1 Opp. ed. Jebb, xi. 307-14. 2 Inst Or. i. pro. 15. 3 Acad. Qu. ii. 3.
158 ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.
Lucian, in his Hermotimus, describes in a lively and agree-
able manner the situation of a person going to decide upon one
or other of the philosophical schools or sects, and the prin-
ciples guiding him in his choice. Hermotimus is giving an ac-
count to his friend Lycinus for his selection of the Stoic sect ■
and first he tells him he had been directed in choosing the true
philosophy by the number of its adherents, confessing at the
same time he does not really know if the Stoics are more nume-
rous than other schools or not. As a farther ground he assigns
his having heard it generally said, that the Epicureans lived for
pleasure merely, that Peripatetics loved money, the Platonists
were puffed up with empty conceit ; but the Stoics were perse-
vering and wise withal, and their disciples the only perfect men.
He is obliged, however, to allow that all his information is really
derived from the ignorant and uneducated. Therefore, he tried
another ground, the one that decided him, that is, he had ob-
served the Stoics were orderly and serious in their deportment,
decently clad, and with their heads closely shaven. On this
Lycinus makes him sensible of the worthlessness of all these
grounds, and compares philosophy to a city, the road to which a
man is seeking. There are a number of roads running in the
most opposite directions ; many guides present themselves, each
one, affirming he alone knows the right way, abuses the other
guides. The upshot of the debate is, that one would need the
life of a phoenix, in addition to the qualities of acuteness, un-
wearied assiduity, and perfect impartiality, in order to make a
fair trial of all the sects ; that possibly all may be error, and the
truth not yet discovered ; that if a man were minded to give
himself up to another as teacher and guide, he would first re-
quire the warrant of a third person for his chosen teacher's capa-
city, and then a security for this, and so on ad infinitum.
The Stoics, therefore, were the most popular and respect-
able sect up to the second century; they defended the reli-
gion of the people, and asked, with some few exceptions, for
no radical changes in it ; though, indeed, the grounds on which
they took religion under their protection were, to one who
had a knowledge of their system, highly transparent, and often
not much better than the grand conclusion, the sheet-anchor
of the Stoic Timocles in Lucian, — " If there are altars, there
must be gods ; now altars there are, therefore gods there must
FINAL DECAY. 159
he."1 The school had not even a solid answer to make to the
question what God really was. For while Zeno and the gene-
rality of Stoics replied the ether, or the subtle fire, penetrating
the whole world, Cleanthes maintained the sun was the god who
ruled the world. Touching this point, Cicero says, "In such
difference of opinion amongst the wise, we are in no position to
know our lords and masters, as, in fact, we are uncertain whether
we are subjects of the sun or the ether."2 And how many, on
nearer inspection of the esoterical part of Stoic doctrine, might
have affirmed Plutarch's reproach, " That it was spreading an
abominable and impious doctrine to make the gods into mere
personifications of physical things, as the Stoics did, and, like
Cleanthes, to call Persephone the breath sighing and dying away
among the fruits of the field."3
Thus all the schools died a natural death, while Paganism
was still in full swing, and, to all appearance, in unbounded re-
putation. Indeed, the historian Dio Cassius praises the emperor
Marcus for the measure by which he granted a considerable pen-
sion to the occupiers of philosophical chairs at Athens, and so
had not only honoured Athens, but in Athens had supplied the
whole world with teachers.4 In the more important towns, at
least after Antoninus, there were professors of philosophy, well
paid, and often with money made up in part from the imperial
treasury. In Rome, Severus and Caracalla declared philoso-
phers exempt from taxes, whether with or without salary. There
was no want then of external encouragement. Longinus assures
us that in his youth (about 230 a.d.) many philosophers were
living, with all of whom he became acquainted, and he mentions
by name several Platonists, three Peripatetics, and four Stoics,
who exerted their influence in Rome, Athens, and Alexandria,
partly by writing, and partly by giving oral instruction. He
seems to have passed over the Epicureans through contempt, as
he would not hear of their being called philosophers. These phi-
losophers, however, as Longinus himself observes, were only able
to comment upon the labours of their predecessors. And after a
few years, the symptoms of decay were so evident, with the entire
cessation of all after-growth, that Longinus himself added, " But
now (about the year 270) there is an incredible want of them."5
1 Luc. Jup. trag. 51. 2 Academ. ii. 41. 3 Plut. de Isid. 60.
4 Dio. Cass. lxxi. 31. 5 Ap. Porphyr. Vit. Plotini, c. 20.
160 ROMAN RELIGION.
Thus the chairs of philosophy became empty. Master and
pupil disappeared together ; the bands of studious youth gathered
more eagerly round the rhetoricians, who taught how to put
words in the place of thoughts, and hid their deficiency in exact
knowledge under their flowers of speech. At last, on the ruins
of the collective schools of the elder philosophy, there remained
but one as universal inheritress to Greek speculation, that of
Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus, founded in the third century.
This school, combining a groundwork of Platonism with Pytha-
gorean principles of life, attempted a reunion of philosophy and
religion by means of ecstasis, and to impart fresh youth and a
new form to the pagan worship of the gods.
II. STATE OF RELIGION.
1. Idea of an Imperial Religion — Religious Tolerance
and Persecution.
After the Roman religion had adapted itself to the Grecian, and
people in Rome as well as in Greece indulged in the innocent
belief of identity of the gods of both, it appeared to the Romans
that the deities of other people whom they had subdued showed
a strong affinity to their own ; the names, as they thought, only
differed, but they were in principle and essence the same forms in
different localities. As they became acquainted with the gods of
oriental nations, of Syria, Asia Minor, and Egypt, chiefly through
a Grecian medium and under the Greek names already given
them, they found every where confirmations of their previous
judgment, and came into contact with them with a settled reso-
lution to find well-known forms under the images of stranger
gods. No sooner had Cresar set foot in Gaul than he was cer-
tain the Gauls had pretty nearly the same notions about the gods
that other people had. He overlooked, or ignored, the peculi-
arities of the Gallic deities. To him they must be Mercury,
Jupiter, Mars, and Minerva. Tacitus, and those who preceded
him, took precisely the same line about the German deity sys-
tem ; and so it was in Spain and Hlyria. As deities of nature,
of course they all had certain traits in common, and where
VIEWS OF PLATONISTS. 161
a god failed to correspond with a Grseco- Roman deity, the dif-
ficulty was easily got over by understanding the god to be a
mere " genius loci." The natives of the different countries were,
on their side, quite content that their gods, those of the van-
quished and the subject, should turn out identical with those of
their victors and rulers. Accordingly, temples were speedily
raised in the provinces, in which Roman and barbarous deities
exchanged names and attributes with one another, little claim as
they had to personify the same thought originally. In this way
throughout Gaul Jupiter was worshiped in company with Hesus,
Mercury with Teutates, Mars with Camul, Hercules with Ogmius,
and Apollo with Belen.
Thus there grew up in the minds of Roman statesmen and
dynasts the idea of a universal religion of the Roman empire, in
which, notwithstanding all the variety of forms of cultus and
names, the same gods were every where worshiped. The doc-
trine of the Stoa, under whose influence many Roman politi-
cians stood, came in aid of this theory of political fusion of gods
and of empire-religion. From it the Romans learnt that the sig-
nificance of the gods of all nations was equally little or equally
great; that as many might be conceived and adored as there
were manifestations of divine power in nature ; that every god,
or name of a god, was always a way of terming an incorpora-
tion of the god identical with primal matter; and thus that
nothing could prevent the admission of ten, a hundred, or,
with Hesiod, of thousands of gods along with the one God, or
the ether omnipresent as the world -soul, nor, in fact, could
forbid the claim of the wildest produce of the imagination to
a cultus.
The Platonists, on their part, took a point of view which ad-
mitted of all these pagan systems being considered as nearly
related, as so many distinct forms representing one single funda-
mental idea. " Great," said Maximus of Tyre, " as is the want
of unity, and the variance and contradiction amongst men, con-
cerning religion, yet will you find universally upon the face of
the earth one maxim and one speech, namely, that one God is
the king and father of all, and that there are many gods who are
his sons and sharers in his rule. Greek and barbarian agree in
this."1 Yet this theory is evidently based upon a very super-
1 Diss. xvii. 5. ed. Davis.
VOL. II. M
162 ROMAN RELIGION.
ficial induction, and did not apply, in fact, to any one of the
religions of the day ; still it squared all the better with Roman
policy.
In the worship of Augustus and other deified emperors, Rome
already found a religious bond to link together every part of the
empire. Rome herself was a microcosm, in which as well all
people as all the various divine rites in the empire met together,
settled down quietly side by side, and, willingly or not, submitted
to the despotic mind of the great imperial pontiff; nay, the priest-
hood itself, which presented the strongest organisation combined
with the strictest exclusiveness, the Egyptian, submitted to the
supremacy of a Roman arch-priest. Thus Roman potentates had
reason to hope that the process of religious fusion would pro-
gress steadily on a par with the already successfully-established
identity in administration and language. There were religions,
however, which shrunk from and withstood this process ; some,
as being under the conduct of a well-organised priesthood, hav-
ing a tradition to maintain, and preserving strictly a religious
difference between things pure and impure; others again, be-
cause knowing and adoring but one God, they held themselves
in an attitude of exclusiveness and abhorrence towards all other
pretensions to deity.
On these principles the Roman state regulated its relations
towards non-Roman and strange religions. In general there was
a sufficent tolerance, or, properly speaking, contemptuous in-
difference and disregard in respect of doctrines and opinions
started in the province of religion. Stoic or Epicurean, Pla-
tonist or Pythagorean, all were left alone in peace. Scornful
criticism, even of the whole existing religious system, was in-
dulgently endured; and when a persecution of philosophers
broke out, as it did under Domitian, it was by no means because
of their religious views. Such toleration or indifference, how-
ever, found its own limits at once whenever the doctrine taught
had a practical bearing on society, interfered with the worship
of the state-gods, or confronted their worship with one of its
own ; as well as when a strange god and cultus assumed a hostile
attitude towards Roman gods, could be brought into no affinity
or corporate relation with them, and would not bend to the su-
premacy of Jupiter Capitolinus. Hence, as a rule, the religion
of conquered nations remained unassailed ; in other countries of
RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION. 163
the empire all could honour the gods of their own native land
after their own fashion ; in Rome itself peregrini were allowed
to set up the gods, altars, and shrines which they had brought
with them, and to assemble for religious purposes. But the
religion of Egypt, though it had free play at home, soon became
intolerable at Rome. It was too demure and whimsical ; and it
was only after a long time, and with much reluctance, that those
in power at Rome gave in to the irresistible hankering of their
people after the Isis worship. True, the rite was banished from
the Pomserium, the suburb of the city; still it maintained its
ground in the vicinity, and also slunk into the outlying quarters
of the city, where the charm of mystery gave it a greater impulse.
A decree of the senate under Tiberius shows with what rigour
and cruelty a religion could be suppressed that was not accept-
able. Four thousand freedmen, tainted with Jewish and Egyp-
tian superstitions, were ordered out to Sardinia against the
banditti there, in case they did not renounce the profane rite
within a specified time. This was equivalent, in a climate so
fatal, to condemning half the number to be executed. After
resorting to various expedients of alternate violence and mercy,
both emperor and senate had at last to give in, and the Egyptian
worship became formally domiciled.
So long as the Druidical priesthood stood its ground with its
well-knit organisation and its traditionary creed, the religion of
the Gauls also stoutly resisted fusion with the Roman. The
Romans accordingly threw all their energy into the scale to
crush and extirpate Druidism, not merely on account of its hu-
man sacrifices, which they had suppressed elsewhere, in Africa
for instance, without attacking the actual religions there, but be-
cause the resolution had been come to of annihilating the whole
Druidical system wherever the Roman power extended. The
practice even of the unbloody rites of that worship was accord-
ingly punished with death. That Gallic knight who wore a sup-
posed serpent's egg on his person had to pay the forfeit of his life ;
and Suetonius boasts of the emperor Claudius having completely
annihilated Druidism.1 Such was at least the intention. Along
with these violent measures against their territorial religion, the
cultus of their deified emperor was also pressed on the inha-
bitants by force. The Gauls had made a feint of cheerful ac-
1 Suet. Claud. 25.
164 ROMAN RELIGION.
ceptance of the imperial deity, and sixty Gallic clans had raised
a temple to Augustus at Lyons by common contributions ; but
the spirit of their British neighbours was not yet so broken. Ac-
cording to Tacitus/ the temple of Divus Claudius, erected by
the Romans at Camulodunum, was a religious fortress-prison for
the British people, the priests of the temple practising the most
frightful pillage under the cloak of religion. A great insurrec-
tion took place in consequence, followed by a bloody war. In
other cases it happened that it was mere cupidity that incited
the Romans to attack religious belief in their provinces ; at least
there seems to have been no other motive in the destruction of
the sanctuary of the god Men- Arcseus at Antioch in Pisidia with
its numerous hieroduli and large landed property.2
The ancients therefore, whether Romans or Greeks, knew
nothing in the main of religious tolerance proper. The conduct
of Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, towards the Jews was a
formal religious persecution. Every means, inclusive of the most
sanguinary cruelty, were to be put in force to compel them to
deny their God and his law, and to worship the Hellenic gods.
This indeed was not purely out of religious zeal for Zeus and
Apollo; the king had political reasons of his own. So long as
the Jewish religion existed, a complete fusion of the people with
Greeks and Syrians was impracticable; they continued always
behind their own strong lines of demarcation, paid their tribute,
but could never be brought to the condition of subjects, nor form
a part of a compact united state. That people would be perse-
cuted for opinions only in Greece even, Anaxagoras had early
experience ; then Diagoras and many others ; still later, the phi-
losopher Stilpo, and a good many Epicureans. No more cases
of the kind occurred under Roman rule, as the cities of Greece
no longer possessed power for the purpose ; while the Romans
themselves refrained, not at all from any principle of religious
tolerance, but simply because all depended on the external act,
the rite prescribed, and by no means on the interior sentiment.
This was a general rule in pagan religions, and particularly suited
Roman notions. As for any one having refused on the ground
of his opinions, for conscience -sake, to take part in the worship
of state-gods, such a case never occurred. No philosopher ever
1 "Arx (or Ara) seternse dominationis." Ann. xiv. 31.
2 Stmbo, xii. 577.
APOTHEOSIS. 165
had the boldness to practise such an act of religious isolation
himself, or to advise it in others. Romans and Greeks had their
first experience of an actual resistance to the state-religion, on
the grounds of doctrine and conviction, from Jew and Christian.
If an opinion unfavourable to the apotheosis of any member of
the imperial dynasty happened to be dropped, it was dangerous
in itself as falling within the purview of the law of high- treason ;
and so it fell out in the case of Thrasea Psetus, who refused to
believe in the deification of Poppsea.1
In other respects religious crimes were very numerous ac-
cording to Roman ideas. It might easily happen to believers,
and vigilant ones, to incur a charge of disrespect to the gods or
their shrines. Thus, in the year 104 B.C., iEmilius Scaurus was
indicted because the service of the Penates at Lavinium was not
properly conducted through his fault.2 We may see how easy
it was to trump up an accusation, by the haruspices declaring in
answer to the senate, that the gods were angry because " holy
places had been desecrated." There were numberless such, and
a man had only to build on a spot once occupied by a holy
place to incur a charge of profanation. One of Cicero's speeches3
shows us that a considerable number of people were exposed to
danger of a condemnation on like grounds. Clodius used to
boast of no less than two hundred decrees of the senate having
issued against him for offences against religion.4 Pretexts were
multiplied under the emperors, as negligence or mistake in the
service of the deified emperors was so easy.
2. Apotheosis.
In investigating the peculiarities of the later system of pagan
religion throughout the Roman empire, if we would characterise
it more accurately and in detail, the first striking point will be
the worship of new gods, to wit, the emperors, living and dead.
Already in the title of " Augustus," as Dio Cassius has observed,
men's minds were being directed to a something superhuman.
And in later times it was said that on the assumption of the title
of Augustus, the emperor was to be worshiped as a deity present
1 Tac. Annal. xvi. 22. 2 Asc. in Cic. pro Scauro, p. 21.
3 De Harusp. resp. 14. 4 Cicero, 1. c. c. 5.
166 ROMAN RELIGION.
in the body.1 If it is undeniable that the predominant calcula-
tion in the imperial minds with regard to Apotheosis was one of
consolidation of power and name, we have on the other side the
fact that, since Augustus, these divine honours were rather forced
upon, than sought, by them. The provinces soon began a race
of emulation in dedicating temples and altars to the living and
dead Augustus ; and there is an appearance as if a presentiment
of a divine Redeemer of the world having appeared among men
had then touched their minds; a presentiment, however, that
had missed its right object, and had transferred their homage
and adoration to the ruler of the world in Rome. And yet that
ruler, if he did not break the yoke of error and sin, still freed
them from the chaos of civil war, and the tyranny of proconsuls.
Octavian had tolerated in Pergamus and Nicomedia the de-
dication of an altar and temple to him in common with the
deified city of Rome, the services of which were to be directed
by Greek and not Roman citizens ; at Nicaea and Ephesus
even Roman citizens were allowed to worship not him, but the
goddess Roma and the Caesar. This example was now fol-
lowed by other cities. After his death, the worship of the new
god was introduced into Rome and Italy, where it had not been
tolerated during his life. The senator, Numerius Atticus, made
oath to having seen Augustus ascending to heaven; and his
assertion procured him a valuable present of money from Livia,
while an indictment on the charge of having profaned the deity
of Augustus by perjury cost Rubrius his life. By the time of
Tiberius it had become a crime to testify an indisposition to
worship the imperial god; and for it the city of Cyzicus forfeited
its freedom.2 Under the same emperor eleven Asiatic cities con-
tended for the honour of being allowed to build a temple to the
Caesar on the throne. Smyrna was the successful candidate, on
the ground of having been the first to erect a temple, as early as
after the second Punic war, to the goddess Roma.3 Yet Tiberius
pretended afterwards to repent of having granted this permission.
Cities now began to covet the distinction and privilege of styling
themselves Neocori, servants of the temple of the Caesar-god,
and inserted the title on their coins.4 They had to obtain this
1 Lydus de Mens. iv. 72. Veget. 25 : " tancmam proesenti et corporali Deo
fideli^ est proestanda devotio."
2 Tac. Aim. iv. 30. 3 lb. iv. 56. J Mionnet, Suppl. vi. 162, n. 548.
PRINCESSES DEIFIED. 167
privilege from the senate at Rome. Then there were periodical
games in honour of the emperor connected with this Neocoria ;
and on the election of a new one, the office was granted two or
three times over. Thus Ephesus, under Caracalla and Helio-
gabalus, reached a fourth neocoria, and did not fail to inscribe
this singular distinction on its coins. Though the whole city or
all its citizens were avowedly considered as bearing the title
inclusively, particular priests were of course appointed for the
service. Every temple had a statue of the Caesar to whom it was
dedicated, which was held more sacred than any images of the
other gods.1
It was a principle in Rome, till the time of Caius Caligula,
to follow the general analogy of the Manes, and not to raise the
Caesar to divine honours till after his death, and then by special
decree of the senate and his successor. Caius desired to be ac-
knowledged and worshiped throughout the whole empire equally
as visible god. A decree of the senate had conceded him one
temple in Rome ; he erected another to himself, and had priests
and priestesses of his own, amongst them his uncle Claudius, and
the Csesonia who was subsequently his wife. This ministry was
bought at enormous prices. Only rare and costly animals, phea-
sants, peacocks, and the like, were allowed to be sacrificed. He
himself ordained a temple to be built to him at Miletus, for all
Asia, and wanted to have one of those belonging to Apollo there
to be appropriated for the purpose. Not content with having a
simple chapel in the sanctuary of Jupiter Capitolinus, he must
have a public worship in a temple of his own on the Palatine
Hill. The theatrical display which he made of his godhead and
worship might have seemed ridiculous, and a proof of pride that
had run over into madness, had not the Caesar- god met with
such spontaneous devotion and homage from the whole extent of
the empire, with the single exception of the Jews.2
And now princesses of the imperial family came to be deified.
Caius had the same divine honours as were paid to Augustus
decreed to his sister Drusilla, with whom he had lived in inces-
tuous intercourse. Claudius raised his grandmother Livia to
the same dignity, and made the vestal virgins conduct her sacri-
fices, and women swear by her name. He would not accept for
» Philostr. Vit. Apoll. i. 15.
2 Dio. Cass. lix. 28; Suet. Caius, 21. 22.
168 ROMAN RELIGION.
himself the divine honours of genuflection and sacrifice, though
he had a temple in Britain.1 So matters went on. Nero had
his father Domitian, and Poppsea his wife, exalted into deities
after death. Vitellius possessed a chapel, where he even adored
the freedmen Narcissus and Pallas, favourites of his uncle Clau-
dius.2 Domitian followed the example of Caius. He styled him-
self in documents " Lord and God," and no one dared afterwards
to address him otherwise. The roads to the Capitol, Pliny tells
us, were filled with flocks and herds, that were being driven to
be sacrificed before his image.3 The same Pliny praises Trajan
for having inserted his predecessor Nerva among the gods, not
with any view to his own exaltation, but from a real conviction
of his being a god.
But the greatest extravagance on this head was reserved for
Hadrian's time. Diviners had warned the emperor of his being
exposed to great danger in case a creature that was dear to him
should not offer himself as a voluntary sacrifice for him. Anti-
nous, a young Bithynian, living in the shameful relations with
the emperor that were common in that day, devoted himself and
threw himself into the Nile. The priests, after an inspection of
his entrails, declared that Hadrian had fully satisfied the decree
of the gods. The emperor wept like a woman for him, built
the city Antinopolis to his honour on the spot where he died,
erected temples to him, and had games celebrated at Mantinea
and elsewhere, and statues of him raised all over the empire.
Antinous received priests and prophets, who interpreted his
oracles, the composition, it is ordinarily supposed, of Hadrian
himself. Coins are still found with his likeness, as the new
Iacchus, in Asia, Greece, Syria, and Egypt; and astrologers
were not long in discovering a new star in which Antinous was
recognised to be shining, as Csesar had been in a similar one be-
fore. This affair by no means ended with Hadrian's death, and
therefore was not the effect of mere fawning and flattery, exhi-
bited towards a freak of the then emperor. The worship lasted
for centuries more, particularly in Egypt, where the god worked
a succession of miracles in the city erected to his honour ; and,
as Origen says, men, tormented by their own weak and stricken
consciences, fancied the god Antinous chastised and punished
1 Dio. C. lx. 5 ; Tac Ami. xiv. 31. 2 Suet.Vitell. 3.
3 Suet. Dom. 13 ; Oros. vii. 10; Pliit. Panog. 11.
PRIVATE APOTHEOSIS. 169
them.1 An inscription on the Isis temple at Home actually gives
him the title of " the temple associate of the Egyptian gods."2
Between the first deification of Csesar and the apotheosis of
Diocletian fifty-three of these solemn canonisations may be reck-
oned, fifteen of which were of ladies belonging to the imperial
family. The difference between the deification of the living, and
apotheosis of the dead, may be stated thus : the latter swelled
the numbers of the heathen Pantheon as new gods; while the
former were usually venerated as incarnations of a god already
generally worshiped, and mostly of that particular one for whom
they had a special predilection. That this was so, we find from
the coins of Greek cities in particular. The Empress Sabina,
Hadrian's wife, was invoked as the new Demeter.3 Faustina,
the wife of M. Aurelius, was represented on coins as Cybele, with
the attributes of the Mother of the gods; and there is discovered,
as far away as the town of Jotapa in Cilicia, a high priestess of
the goddess Faustina.4
Every one who possessed the means to give the matter a cer-
tain degree of consequence and eclat was, in reality, free to deify
his deceased relations and to treat them as heroes, with the
worship of an established sacrifice. Thus Herodes Atticus in-
serted his wife Regilla in this class, and erected a monument to
her at Athens in the form of a temple.5 In Smyrna Asclepiades,
the physician of Augustus, was honoured after death as a hero.
Engraved on stone, and to be found at Verona, is a will of the
Spartan Epicteta, instituting the worship of her deceased hus-
band Phoenix and her sons, to be solemnised in a temple which
she had built and consecrated to the Muses, and also to serve as
a sanctuary for an Heroiim. She appoints her grandson Andra-
goras priest. The relations were to meet every year, in the month
Delphinium, at the sanctuary, to offer sacrifice, on the nineteenth
to the Muses, on the twentieth to the hero Phoenix and heroine
Epicteta, and on the twenty-first to their two sons.6 Here we
see the testatrix decreeing herself divine honours by anticipation,
to be paid her after her death. There was nothing extraordi-
1 Dio. Cass. lxix. 10 ; Spartian. Hadr. 14; Plin. H. N. 219 ; Pausan. viii. 9.4 ;
Tatian. c. Grsec. 26 ; Grig. c. Cels. iii. 36.
2 Ap. Gruter. lxxxvi. 1.
3 Inscription at Megara ; Letronne, Inscr. Egypt, i. 102.
4 Corp. Inscr. Gr. n. 4411.
5 Zoega de Obelise, p. o&). 5 Maffei, Mus. Veron. p. 14 sqq.
170 ROMAN RELIGION,
nary, therefore, in Cicero's intention of converting the sepnlchre
of his daughter Tullia into a temple ;l and it is a feature of the
time adopted by Apuleius, who makes his widow have her de-
ceased husband, for whose loss she is inconsolable, represented
as Liber the god, and paying the image a worship of its own,
with the ordinary testimonials of divine honour.2
3. The Element of Superstition.
In this later age of heathendom, the complaint of the spread of
superstition is frequently repeated. Nothing, however, is more
vague, indistinct, or capricious than the " deisidaimonia" of
Greeks, and the " superstitio" of Romans. No one drew or was
capable of drawing the line between this erroneous excess of re-
ligious sentiment and real religiousness. The Romans of the
early period had certainly a simple criterion. A religious man
they deemed one who adhered to the legal traditions of his
country in his relations to the gods ; one who gave himself up
to strange gods and rites, a superstitious one.3 But this dis-
tinction was no longer available in the earlier times of the
Caesars; when there were, on the one side, hardly any persons
to take up the cause of the entire hereditary cultus, with its
endless confusion of gods, or, on the other, to reject every
outlandish worship and god merely because of their foreign
original. Still less was this distinction available to those who
spoke Greek ; for with such the old internal connection of re-
ligion with the state had ceased on the fall of the latter, or had
utterly lost its importance. So the attempt was made to fix the
relative position of religion and superstition by other criteria.
This was Varro's notion;4 he thought the superstitious were
those who feared the gods as enemies ; the religious, those who
honoured them as fathers. Maximus of Tyre explained the reli-
gious man as the friend, the superstitious as the flatterer, of the
deity. Both are interpretations pointing to a particular feature
in superstition, and yet in reality quite inadequate to form a
canon of religious manifestations in life by. In the Greek idea
of superstition, the notion of dread was predominant, as is evident
1 Ep. ad Att. xii. 35. 2 Apul. Metam. i. 527, Oud.
3 So the definition in Festus, s. v. " Superstitio." 4 Ap. Aug. C. D. vi. U.
MEANING AND VIEWS OF SUPERSTITION. 171
from the meaning of the word; accordingly Theophrastus ex-
plained superstition as nothing else but a cowardly fear of any
deity;1 and Plutarch's whole treatment of it hinges on the senti-
ment of anxiety, and terror of the wrath of the gods and the
punishments of the world below, as evidenced by those whom it
haunted. It is true, the sensation of religious fear in Greek
and Roman was usually expressed as a distortion, often be-
trayed under the most monstrous and absurd forms; ail here
turning on the conception, entirely external and mechanical as
it was, of the nature of defilement, of ritual omissions and errors,
or the jealousy of one deity aroused by recourse being had to
other powers. The idea of the divine holiness, if we except a
few philosophers, was quite unknown to the ancients in practical
life and in intercourse with the gods ; and therefore they were
equally ignorant of the true fear, grounded precisely upon this
sanctity of God, and of which fear theirs was but a caricature,
an anxious trembling before the power of capricious tyrants,
whose smiles could neither be won nor retained, except by con-
tinual sacrifices, and the most painful observance of ceremonies ;
and could be forfeited again, and converted into wrath, by an
infinite number of possible mistakes and omissions. Now phi-
losophers, while they rejected all such ideas of the deity, and
discovered the essence of perverted religion or deisidaimonia in
them, fell into the assertion of the contrary view, that the deity
need not be the object of fear at all, but only required to be
loved and honoured, love and fear being incompatibles ; such,
for instance, was Seneca's ground.2 They had no perception of
fear being inseparable from the true love of an all-holy God.
Hence nothing was so vague or subjective as the reproach of
superstition. In principle every one regarded his neighbour as
superstitious if he worshiped different gods, or the same in a dif-
ferent manner ; or if he performed the same function, but more
frequently than seemed necessary to the party passing the sen-
tence. Theophrastus includes the frequent lustration of houses
among superstitions, though this was a traditionary usage, either
performed, or that ought to have been performed, by every Ro-
man. Washing the hands on coming out of a temple, he con-
siders religious ; but the sprinkling of oneself with blest water,
superstitious. To a Polybius the whole Roman system of religion
1 Cliavact. 16. 2 Epist. 47.
172 ROMAN RELIGION.
appeared in reality a deisidaimonia, but calculated on a basis of
prudence and policy. On the other hand, philosophically edu-
cated Greeks of this later period must have looked upon as genu-
inely religious and commendable just what the patriotic Roman
rejected and persecuted as superstition, — for instance, the wor-
ship of strange and outlandish gods, Isis and Osiris, and others.
The piety, the Greek would say, which extended itself to every
thing was the most perfect.1 All the honours paid to the gods,
Hellenic as well as Asiatic and Egyptian, terminate in the glori-
fication of a supreme God, and all acts of disrespect in the same
manner fall back upon him. But how dangerous it was, on the
contrary, to intend to serve this one supreme God only ! "Be,
above all things, on thy guard," said the judge Rogatian to a
Christian, " lest in thy acknowledgment of one God only, thou
draw upon thyself the anger of many to thy ruin."2
But as in theory superstition could not be distinguished
from religion, so in life and in practice religiousness ordinarily
assumed the appearance of superstition. Three of the most pro-
minent characters in ancient history may be quoted as examples
of this, — Sylla, Augustus, and Alexander. The dictator Sylla,
distinguished by his good fortune as well as his vices, and those
the bestial ones of excess and unnatural lust, esteemed himself a
special favourite of the gods ; his confidence, however, was prin-
cipally placed upon a certain little image of Apollo from Delphi,
which he carried about with him in war, and used to embrace in
the presence of his troops, beseeching it for victory.3 No one
gave more thorough credit to Chaldeans, oracles, dreams, and
signs than he. He even had his dying wife carried into another
house, that his own might not be polluted by the corpse.4 The
same Augustus who, in the provinces of the empire, allowed
himself to be invoked as a living god, observed every sign with
the most minute care. It was a presage of an evil if in the
morning he had the left shoe brought him instead of the right.
He had faith in days, never undertaking any thing important on
the nones, and never setting out on a journey on the day after
the nundinse.5 He, the supreme pontiff, the restorer of Roman
1 So, for example, Celsus, ap. Orig. c. Cels. 8.
2 Euinart, Acta MM. sine. p. 281.
3 Val. Max. i. 2. 2; Front. Strat. i. 11 ; Plut. Sylla, 20.
4 Plut. 35. * Sueton. Octav. 90-92.
FALL OF THE OLD RELIGION. 173
religion, punished the god Neptune because he lost a fleet in a
storm, by forbidding his image to be carried in the procession of
the next Circensian games ; and in a public oration against the
prevalent celibacy of the day, he recommended marriage to the
Roman grandees as a desirable state, because it was the practice
of the gods themselves to marry. The treatment of Neptune by
Augustus reminds one of Alexander the Great, who first set out
by giving an example of religious expansiveness on a large scale,
sacrificing to Achilles and Priam at Troy, doing homage to Apis
in Memphis, in Tyre to Melkarth, and to Bel in Babylon. Be-
sides, his palace swarmed with soothsayers, who had to sacrifice
and perform ceremonies of purification for him; and in every
unusual event he recognised a sign of warning from the gods ;
and yet, on the death of his favourite Hephsestion, he had the
altars and images of the gods overthrown, and wreaked his ven-
geance on JEsculapius in particular, whose temple he ordered
to be burnt. When he had the misfortune to kill his friend
Clitus in a fit of frenzy, he fancied, or allowed his diviners to
persuade him, that Dionysos had instigated him to the fatal act
in requital for his having neglected him in a sacrifice.1 Such
outbreaks of passion against particular gods as have been men-
tioned in the instance of Augustus and Alexander were not un-
frequent even amongst the most jealous servants of the gods.
Thus, when the emperor Julian, in the Parthian war, intended
to sacrifice ten choice and beautiful bulls to Mars the Avenger,
nine of them sullenly lay down as they were being led to the
altar, and the tenth broke his bands ; whereupon the infuriated
Caesar swore, by Jupiter, he would offer no more sacrifice to
Mars.2
4. Fall of the old Religion of Rome.
strange gods and their rites— female piety— taurobolia — inclination to
judaism— theolepsy — theop^a and worship of images — intercourse of
MAN WITH THE DEITY — PRAYER.
The old Roman religion pure had, in fact, already come to an
end by the time of the Caesars, even though the worship of Janus
i Pint. Alex. 13 ; Curt, viii. 2. 6 ; Arriani Exp. Al. iv. p. 261.
2 Amm. Marc. xxiv. C.
174 ROMAN RELIGION.
and a few other ancient Latin and Sabine deities were con-
tinued, as ancestral rites, and offered by the state ; but the popu-
lar confidence had been transferred to other gods, Greek, Asiatic,
and Egyptian. As early as the close of the Punic wars, the
desire of the people for a more lively type of deity, and one richer
in mystic lore, and the influence of Sibylline books, with their
collegiate interpreters, the quindecemviri, had contributed in
the first instance to place the entire Grecian system of gods im-
mediately at the side of the old Roman ; and then, by degrees,
it grew up along with the other, by a transfer of its mythology
and its individual stamp of deity to the Roman gods, with the
exception of a few who were too unhellenic to undergo trans-
formation. Thus it came to pass that many religious ceremonies,
formerly of great importance, disappeared utterly. In the early
periods, in great calamities and perils of the commonwealth,
when all other resources had failed, or seemed unequal to the
pressing nature of the danger, it was the custom to choose a
dictator for the sole purpose of driving a nail into the temple-
wall of Jupiter. Later on, after the time of Scipio, no reliance
whatever seems to have been placed on the virtue of this nail,
and the matter was no more mentioned. Lectisternia and sup-
plications, the holding of the Latine ferise, vows of costly offer-
ings, or the introduction of a new worship, became the remedies
resorted to in misfortunes and danger.
Strange rites ever grew and multiplied in Rome, and en-
croached grievously upon the old ones. And now, after a long
struggle, the worship of Isis had taken its place with those of
iEsculapius and Cybele. From the times of the Mithridatic war
the Romans had become acquainted with Ma, a goddess of Co-
mana, as to whom the Greeks could not be certain whether she
was their war-goddess, Enyo, or a moon-goddess, or their own
Athene;1 the Romans blended her with their own old Italic
goddess, Bellona, or Duellona, who already occupied a temple in
the vicinity of the city, erected a new sanctuary for her, and gave
the administration of her worship to the Bellonarii, a college con-
sisting of Cappadocian priests and priestesses.2 These " fanatici,"
clothed in black, made their progress through the city on festi-
vals of the goddess, using the same means as the priests of Cy-
bele to throw themselves into an ecstatic state of frenzy, during
1 Tlut. Sylla, 9. 2 Orelli, Inscr. 2316, 2317 ; Acron. ad Hor. Ser. ii. 3, 223.
TRUST IN FOREIGN RITES. 175
which their bodies were without sensation; they prophesied,
gashed themselves with a double-headed axe on the arms and
other parts of their bodies. The blood that flowed was caught
in a small shield, and given to such as desired to consecrate
themselves to the goddess, as an initiating drink.1 The trick
was to cut themselves so as to let the blood flow without the
wound being dangerous, and therefore Commodus ordered the
Bellonarii to make a deeper incision into the flesh.2
So powerful was the charm exercised by all that was dark,
sombre, and mysterious in the gods, that the very ignorance of the
nature of this goddess seems to have been her best recommenda-
tion to the Romans. Every rite, indeed, pursued under the veil
of secrecy was held to be more salutary and effective than public
and official rites of religion ; an error partaken in by the greatest
and worthiest of the ancients. Even his Stoic philosophy proved
no preservative against the attraction to Marcus Aurelius. In the
war against the Marcomanni, he ordered priests from all coun-
tries to come to him at Rome, and spent so long a time over
the rites of strange gods, as to keep his army waiting for him.
Sacrifices were commanded on so large a scale on the occasion,
that it was jestingly hinted the white oxen had written to him
thus: "If thou art victorious, we are all lost."3 At the bidding
of an oracle, interpreted to him by the wizard Alexander, he had
two lions, with an abundance of aromatic herbs, and the most
precious offerings, thrown into the Danube ; the lions, however,
escaped by swimming, and instead of a victory, the Romans suf-
fered an overwhelming defeat, leaving twenty thousand men on
the field of battle.4 Thereupon the emperor betook himself to an
Egyptian priest, Arnuphis, and was fully convinced that he was
indebted to his incantations and skill in magic for the timely
rain which helped him and his army to victory.5 From this
date he seems to have become a devoted worshiper of Egyptian
deities. On Roman inscriptions he avowed himself an adorer
of Serapis; and in the journey which he shortly afterwards un-
dertook to Egypt he is said to have behaved like an Egyptian
citizen and philosopher in all the temples and sacred groves.
1 TibuU. i. 6. 43; Tert. Apol. 9 ; Lact. i. 21 ; Juven, vi. 511.
2 Laraprid. Commod. 9. 3 Amm. Marc. 25.
4 Lucian. Pseudomant. 48 : comp. Jablonskii Opusc, ed. Te Water, iv. 29 sq.
5 Dio. Cass. ii. 1183, ed. Eeimar ; Suid. s. v. '\ov\iav6s.
176 ROMAN RELIGION.
So, in the time of Domitian, the cities of the Hellespont were
alarmed by an earthquake. Their public and private resources
were drained to offer in common a very special and secret sacri-
fice to Poseidon and the Earth, through Egyptian and Chaldean
priests, who demanded no less than ten talents for their services.
Of course, in case of earthquakes, the danger was great of mak-
ing a mistake in the invocations and sacrifices, and of going
to the wrong god altogether, in lieu of the real author of the
mischief.1 Every where we see how the religious bias of the
period was, not to be satisfied with the old deities of the coun-
try. The ground of confidence in them was cut away since the
time these deities were unable to maintain the independence
of their worshipers against the superior power of Rome; and
the foundations of their worship were shaken after the political
framework of the several states was broken up. And as soon as
men felt themselves to be members of a vast empire, embracing
an immense number of nationalities and rites, the infinitesimal
division of the divine nature, and medley host of gods and god-
desses became disgusting to them, from the exorbitance of their
pretensions, and the painful uncertainty about them and their
worship. Hence a powerful revulsion towards, and longing
after, a one deity, to surrender oneself entirely to, and be a stay
and resource in all situations and difficulties, without the dis-
quiet and doubt arising from the necessity of flying first to this
and then to that god. The sharp-cut features and speciality of
Hellenic gods, further limited by their belonging to a numerous
divine society, had no such fitness for the purpose of filling the
void as the Egyptian gods had, from their being far less indi-
vidualised, and far more enveloped in the attractive cloud of
mystery, — Isis and Serapis, for instance, or the sun-gods of the
Orientals.
The Isis worship took the lead of the rest ; and since the
time of Alexander had begun to spread over all the countries
where Greek was spoken. We find a strong evidence of the
great attraction to the service of this goddess in the fact that, in
Rome, where before it was not tolerated, the emperors in person,
Otho, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, and Alexander, now be-
came its zealous partisans. The priests of the goddess announced
that she cured diseases of every kind ; and it was these miracles
1 Amm. Marc. xvii. 7.
WORSHIP OF ISIS. 177
of healing, Diodorus says, by which her name was acknowledged
throughout the whole world.1 The Greeks, by grecising her
myth, had quite domiciled her amongst them; while the Orphic
minstrels exalted her into the omnipotent queen of nature and
of the rest of the world of gods. She often stepped into the place
of Demeter, Persephone, Artemis, and Hecate, and became dis-
pensatrix of food, mistress of the lower world and of the sea,
and goddess of navigation. She was also metamorphosed into
Fortune; and the philosophico-physical view discovered in her
the sum of female passive nature and matter in opposition to the
male sun-power, as also the humid universal mother of life.
Thus she became identical with the Phrygian mother of the
gods, with Rhea, and the Syrian goddess of Hierapolis; and
her being grew daily more comprehensive and formless, till it
reached the extreme and last conception — that chaotic primal
night, from out of which the universe was evolved,2 — with it,
of course, all her personality was lost, and the imagination, in
search of an universal god, rested, in fine, upon a mere hollow,
ghostlike abstraction. In inscriptions she was now styled pan-
theistically, "the one, who is all."3 This, however, was no
popular view, nor ever became so. The people worshiped her
principally as Isis Salutaris (a title often found in inscriptions),
the inventress of remedies, and revealer in dreams of cures for
diseases. She was distinguished for restoring sight to the blind.
Hence it was that the incubatio took place in her temples, and
the walls were covered with votive tablets.4
Wherever the Isis worship existed as a standing institute, or
was only performed by priests errant, there A.nubis with his
dog's head was sure to be found, represented by a priest in the
train of the goddess ; as also the entire drama of the search
after, and discovery of, Osiris, with its cries of lamentation and
joy to boot. For nine days and nights the actresses in the play
fasted, and, to merit the favour of the goddess, abstained from
sexual intercourse, after the pattern set them by herself in her
grief. The silver serpent, borne by the image of the deity in
her left hand, gave notice of errors committed by shaking its
i Diod. i. 25.
2 Plut. de Isid. 56 ; Iamblich. Myst. JEg. viii. 5 ; Simplic. in Aristot. Phys.
ausc. iv. p. 150.
3 Orelli. Inscr. n. 1871 ; Mommsen, Inscr. R. Neap. n. 3580.
4 Tibull. i. 3, 27.
VOL. II. N
178 ROMAN RELIGION.
head, and they were atoned for by gifts of geese and cakes to
the priests.1
Serapis too, about whose true character much obscurity pre-
vailed even in Egypt itself, gradually rose into a god of univer-
sal importance from the beginning of the second century after
Christ, and was much worshiped. He himself was said to have
answered a client of his, Nicocreon, king of Cyprus, with an
oracular response to the effect that the heaven was his head, the
sea his body, and the earth his feet, his ears being in the ether.
He was frequently given out as the sun-god, or identical with
Zeus. Aristides, in an oration of his, describes him as a god who
rules the winds, makes the sea- water drinkable, awakes the dead,
and displays the light of the sun to mankind. The whole of
human life, from the cradle to the grave, is committed to his
charge, and he is the bestower of wisdom as well as riches.2 But
he, too, was eminently a god of healing, who reveals to the sick,
or rather the priests for them, the proper remedies for their resto-
ration to health, by the process of incubatio in his temples. The
verse of Julian indicates how Serapis absorbed other deities, or
blended with them: "Serapis is a Zeus, a Hades, a Helios;"
and Mithras, Attis, Jupiter Ammon, and Adonis were all re-
garded as his counterparts.3
The worship of the Idean mother of the gods constantly
maintained an undiminished, or rather an increasing, reputation.
It certainly contributed to the lasting credit of this rite that the
Galli went about, in their voluntary effeminacy, speaking testi-
monies to the might of the goddess; for what other explanation
could be given of the ecstatic state in which the painful opera-
tion was consummated by them on themselves, than the over-
powering influence of the goddess, before which both Athens and
Rome had long since bowed ? so much so, that the Galli were
fully acknowledged in the Roman state by the laws of the twelve
tables. i Juvenal depicts the crude superstitions of this rite
in its most pitiable aspect ; how the plump Archigallus, his
voice predominant amid the hoarse din of his subordinates,
and the drums of his herd of followers, terrified the credu-
lous women with the threatened dangers of September, and the
south wind that brings autumnal fever; and then how these
1 Juven. vi. 533-541. a Aristid. Or. in Serap. p. 82 sqq. Dind.
3 Mart. Cap. p. 233, Kopp; Jul. Or. iv. p. 136. 4 Cic. de Legg. ii. 9.
THE TATTROBOLIUM. 179
women redeemed themselves with hundreds of eggs, and cast- off
clothes, into which the Galli exorcised the fatal miasmas of the
season.
A more serious matter still was the rite of Taurobolium and
Criobolium, attached to the worship of the Idean mother, and
one of the most solemn, and, as was thought, the most effective,
religious functions of later paganism. The old and ordinary rites
of purifying and lustration, common to Greek and Koman, no
longer sufficed, though they still continued steadily in use. Peo-
ple were still purifying houses, temples, property, whole cities,
by carrying water about and sprinkling it for expiatory pur-
poses.2 Living animals, oxen, sheep, and swine, cats and dogs,
were led, or carried, round about; persons and things were
asperged with the blood of the victims, and their ashes were
also used; the purgamenta (or different articles employed in
the ceremony) were then thrown away with averted face into a
stream or the crossways. Ovid paints to the life Roman trades-
people sprinkling themselves and their wares with water drawn
from the Mercury-spring at the Porta Capena, in order to clear
off the guilt incurred by their lies and cheating and false oaths.3
Both Ovid and Tertullian allude to the notion of the general
efficacy of bathing in running water, or washing, for the removal
of the stain of any crime, murder inclusive, as an idea and a
practice of an earlier time ; the poet crying, ' ' O fool of heart,
that thinkest to remove from thee the irremediable guilt of mur-
der in the running stream !"4 On the other hand, the notion
remained of blood, the seat of vital power, being the most
effectual means of atonement and purification, particularly at
the very moment of its gushing in a warm stream of life from
the victim consecrated to the deity. ' Whoever was completely
bathed in this blood, and thoroughly well saturated with it, be-
came radically pure from all guilt and defilement, and supplied
with a fund of sanctity for many years to come. Such was the
origin of the taurobolia and criobolia. A roomy grave was
covered with pierced boards. The victim, a bull or ram, was
brought and sacrificed on these, so that the blood dropped
through the holes like rain, and was caught by the man below
on his whole body, who took especial care that cheeks, ears,
1 Juv. vi. 511-521. 2 Tertull. cle Bapt. c, 5.
3 Fasti, v. G73-690. 4 Fasti, v. 2-45. .
180 ROMAN RELIGION.
lips, eyes, nose, and tongue, should be wetted.1 He then came
out of the hole, dropping with blood, and exhibited himself to
the people, who greeted him reverentially as a being perfectly
pure and hallowed, and threw themselves on their knees before
him. He continued to wear his bloody clothes till they were in
tatters.2 A taurobolium such as this purified him who submitted
to it, and rendered him pleasing to the gods, during a space of
twenty years, at the expiration of which he again put himself
under a similar shower of blood. A certain Sextilius, however,
was found to affirm of himself that he had been regenerated for
an eternity by the application of the taurobolium as well as the
criobolium.3
The taurobolium was resorted to not only for individual
purification, but also for the welfare of others, particularly the
emperor and the imperial family; and this, too, frequently at
the express instance of the Mother of the gods, communicated
by herself through the mouth of her priest.4 Whole cities or
provinces would undertake a taurobolium for this object ; and in
this case it was usually women who had themselves consecrated
by the rain of blood. The solemnity with which the function
was performed is shown by the priests from Valence, Orange,
and Viviers, all appearing at the celebration of one at Die ;5
while at another, offered by the city of Lyons for the well-being
of the emperor Antoninus, on the Vatican hill at Rome, iEmi-
lius Carpus, who was the recipient of the expiatory blood on the
occasion, carried the frontal bone of the bull sacrificed, with
the horns gilded, to Lyons, where it was buried with religious
ceremony.
The first instance of a taurobolium, as far as is known at
present, occurred in the year a.d. 133. This we learn from an
inscription.6 The act then must have been esteemed one of
great importance and effect, for the remembrance of it to have
been preserved on a monument, even if it only regarded the
purification of a private individual. The sacrifice of a.d. 133,
1 Prudent. Peristeph. x. 101 sqq. ; Firm. Mat. de err. prof. rel. c. 27.
2 See the verses edited by Salmasius in Van Dale, Diss. ix. Ainst. 1743, p. 48.
3 Ap. Van Dale, 1. c. p. 127.
4 e. g. It is said in an inscription found at Jein on the Rhone, " ex vatici-
natione Pasonii Juliani Archigalli." Colonia, Hist. Litt. de Lyon, p. 200. In
others, " ex imperio Matris Deiim."
5 Colonia. 1. c. p. 223. 6 Mommsen, Inscr. R. Neap. n. 2C02.
THE TAUROBOLIUM — JUDAISM.
181
however, was not offered to the Phrygian Mother of the gods, as
all the others were, but to the Carthaginian Ccelestis, who was,
in fact, identical with Cybele by this time. The common opinion
that the taurobolic atonement of blood originated in an imitation
of Christian baptism, is certainly erroneous, for one reason, be-
cause the origin of the rite falls in a period when the attention
of the heathen had never been directed to the imitation of
Christian rites ; and the mouthpieces of the age, Plutarch, Pliny,
Dio Chrysostom, Aristides, and Pausanias, were some of them
unacquainted with Christians, while the rest treated them with
silent contempt, as unworthy of notice. A second reason is,
because the heathens had long had a substitute for Christian
baptism in ablutions and bathing in running water. But in the
fourth century, when the taurobolia were become general and
frequent, and the most distinguished officers of religion and state
submitted to the disgusting rite, the need of a sacrament on
which implicit reliance could be placed, equal to that of the
Christians in their baptism and communion, may possibly have
contributed to their multiplication.
It might seem strange that in this confused medley of rites,
each overbidding the other in its promises, the Jewish religion
should have found a place so early as Augustus, — for a worship,
devoid of image or sacrifice, and at a distance from its temple,
poverty-stricken in point of ceremonial, necessarily formed the
most striking contrast with heathen worships. But the very
aspirations after the one omniscient and omnipotent God, which
the heathen conscience (lacerated, as it was, by the multitude
and the pretensions of its deities) could nowhere else satisfy,
explain how the God of the Old Testament drew to Himself
vast numbers of proselytes from paganism in Rome herself, and
wherever a Jewish synagogue happened to be built. Precisely
because He alone was not one amongst many, and endured
not another by his side, and because no myths were attached to
his name, the imagination of many a Gentile, wearied with the
search after a higher and less anthropomorphic being, was won
over ; while the observance of the Sabbath, prayer, and the law
of abstinence from meats, laid a yoke on him, borne by no
means unwillingly; for man finds repose the easiest and most
cherished in the consciousness of a worship precisely formu-
larised and strictly enjoined.
182 ROMAN RELIGION.
To the generality, indeed, in those times, the Jewish God was
so strange and unintelligible a being, that Juvenal imagined
the Jews prayed to nothing but the clouds and empty heaven.1
Accurate observer as Strabo was, he thought the God of Moses
was naught else but what we call the heaven, or world, or nature
of the universe.2 Celsus, too, insisted that the Jews prayed to
the heaven.3 Notwithstanding these mistakes, and the combined
hatred and contempt shown to the Jews more than any other
people, the number of those inclined to Jewish rites kept con-
tinually increasing j and Seneca, by his time, could lament the
wide extent of the influence which the customs of this degraded
people had gained, their having already made their way into all
lands ; and that, though conquered, they had given laws to their
conquerors. The observance of the Sabbath seemed to him only
one of the many forms of superstition in which man wasted the
seventh part of his life in doing nothing, and much harm re-
sulted from one's not acting just at the proper moment.4
Heathendom presented another almost invariable feature in
the wide-spread and contagious tendency to produce a state of
violent excitation of body and soul, mounting up to Bacchanal
frenzy, spectators as well as actors holding the effect to be- an
operation of the deity and a part of his worship. This took
place not merely in the case of members of certain colleges of
priests, like the Bellonarii before mentioned, for with them it
was part of their vocation ; there were numbers of others gad-
ding about as god-possessed people. They were called Fanatici,
because they stayed in the temples or their vicinity, and were
supposed to inhale the " numen," the divine spirit, along with
the exhalations of the sacrifices which they diligently attended.-''
These theoleptics were dirty and of bewildered aspect, with long
matted hair. Violent agitations of the head, and distortions of
limbs, accompanied the broken phrases which they jerked out,
as if they had a difficulty in delivering their breasts of the mess-
age of the god which they were intrusted to announce to men.6
The variety of expressions in use among the Greeks for this con-
dition is already a proof of its frequency; and the dry Roman
jurists put the question whether it were a defect making the
1 Sat. xiv. 06 sqq. 3 Str. xvi. p. 760.
3 Orig. c. Cels. i. p. 18, v. p. 234. 4 Ap. Aug. C. D. vi. 11.
8 Tertull. Apol. 23. 6 Finnic. Mathes. iii. 7 ; Minuc. Octav. 27.
FANATICS VARIETIES OF FANATICISM. 183
sale of a slave null, if, after it, he proved to have been one of
these fanatical prophets who jerked his head about.1
Thus, then, the gods had in reality a vast number of instru-
ments through which to make known their will ; and those of
the greatest variety, from the Delphic oracle downwards to the
slave shaking from inspiration as from the chill of a fever. And
yet, in this wealth of divine manifestation, the souls of men were
hungry and starving j not as if there was any lack of believers,
nay, rather, any one who came forward in the name of his deity,
and as inspired by him, provided he played his own part de-
cently, was sure to gather round him crowds of followers. " If
a man shakes a sistrum" (an Isis priest), Seneca says, " and lies
as he is bid ; if a master in the art of slashing" (a Bellona priest)
" with upraised hand makes arms and shoulders drip blood ; if
one creeps in the public way on his knees, howling ; or if a
grizzled fellow, clothed in a white vestment" (an Egyptian priest),
"crowned with laurel, and carrying a torch in full daylight, shouts
at the top of his voice, ( Some one of the gods is angry/ — then
run ye together in crowds and cry, ' The man's inspired/ "2
Such states of possession, real or fictitious, were, one may
imagine, much more frequent among men than women; at least,
there is but little mention of the latter. Still, the yoke of hea-
then superstition pressed with double weight on the female sex.
The constant demand, though always theoretical, of Roman and
Greek, Cato and Plutarch, was that wives should have and wor-
ship no other deities than their husbands ; but if the men had
long ago broken through the limitations of earlier times, the
women were still less able to be satisfied with the ancient gods
and the simpler rites and sacrifices. Fear and hope stir them
stronger; swayed by sentiment and imagination, and torn by
their passions ; at once more helpless and dependent on another's
will; incapacitated, besides, by a more susceptible organisation
for the endurance of doubt or uncertainty, and to suspend their
judgment until after patiently investigating, they threw them-
selves headlong into any worship which a chance slave-juggler
or greedy priest enticed them to by vaunting its superior effica-
ciousness. It was said of the Greek women of the period, that
they worshiped gods whose very names were unknown to their
husbands ; while Juvenal speaks of the Roman women as quite
1 Digest, xxi. 1, 1, !). 2 De Vita beata, 27.
184 ROMAN RELIGION.
prepared, at the bidding of a priest of Isis, to stand naked in
the Tiber in the early morning, and afterwards to creep on bare
knees from the end of the Campns Martius as far as the Isis
temple.1 Moreover, the established mystery-rites of the Thes-
mophoria and Bona Dea, performed by women only, were fully
calculated to goad them on to the lust of other worships, pro-
mising a more plenary satisfaction of their passions.
One may well fancy in what the religious practices of women
consisted, when the Roman men served their gods at the Capitol
in the way which Seneca describes. " One," he says, " sets a
rival deity by the side of another god; another shows Jupiter
the time of day; this one acts the beadle, the other the anointer,
pretending by gesture to rub in the ointment. A number of
coiffeurs attend upon Juno and Minerva, and make pretence of
curling with their fingers, not only at a distance from their
images, but in the actual temple. Some hold the looking-glass
to them ; some solicit the gods to stand security for them ; while
others display briefs before them, and instruct them in their law
cases. Artistes, in fact, of every kind spend their time in the
temples, and offer their services to the immortal gods." These
were men's proceedings. Seneca continues, "Women, too,
take their seats at the Capitol, pretending that Jupiter is ena-
moured of them, and not allowing themselves to be intimidated
by Juno's presence."2
Theopaea was the art of inducting the gods into their statues,
and of compelling them by mysterious hymns and ceremonies to
take up their abode in the new places prepared for them, and
was constantly practised, particularly by Egyptian and Greek
priests and wizards. It was pronounced the most sacred and
effective kind of worship;3 and writings are extant in which
Hermes instructs his son Asclepios that it is in man's power
to animate images by means of the secret art, handed down
amongst them, and to compel the gods to a union with them,
similar to that of soul with body.4 Notwithstanding, the gods
not unfrequently took themselves off, and quitted temple and
image, to the no small alarm of the people. They did not do
this unobserved, but left indications of their departure : for in-
stance, the images fell down from their pedestals, or, as most fre-
i Sat, vi. 522. 2 Ap. Aug. C. D. vi. 2.
3 Orig. c. Cels. vii. ' Ap. Aug. C. D. viii. 1 , 2.
THEOP^SA — IDOLATRY. 185
quently happened, the temple-gates opened of their own accord
at night-time. The Roman historians repeatedly observe, on the
occurrence of great catastrophes, that traces of the withdrawal
of the gods had been discovered in Capitol or Forum.1
Lucian, who drew so impartial a picture of the religious sys-
tem of his times, and represented it as he found it in the mass
of mankind, always asserts that the worship of the people was
paid directly to the metal or stone images of the gods ; that they
saw, in these representations, the earthly residences of their
heavenly forms, the bodies inhabited by the deity as by a soul.
He makes his Cyniscus (little Cynic) say to Zeus, "Many of
you, if of gold and silver, had to suffer being melted down
when Destiny so decreed."2 Of the far-famed statue of Zeus, at
Olympia, he observes, "All who entered the temple believed
they beheld, not the gold and ivory of the image, but the son of
Cronos and Rhea in propria persona, transferred to this earth by
the hands of Phidias."3 In an amusing scene of his " Tragic
Zeus," Hermes has to show the gods to their seats in the as-
sembly according to their value ; the consequence is, that Bendis
and Anubis, Attis, Mithras, and Lunus, the gods of the barba-
rians, all occupy the first places, as being of gold, taking preced-
ence of the Hellenic deities, who are generally of stone or brass,
only in a few instances of ivory.
Lucian's banter is borne out by the more serious complaint
of Plutarch, as to the fatal error to which the Greeks gave firm
hold, by calling gods the image-work of brass or stone, or even
pictures, and then saying that Lachesis had stripped Athene, Dio-
nysius shorn Apollo of his golden locks, and that the Capitoline
Zeus had been burnt and destroyed in the civil war ;4 and yet
Stilpo was punished with banishment from Athens for main-
taining that the statue of Athene by Phidias was no deity.5
Seneca charged the Romans with this same sin of idolatry
in the strictest sense of the word. " People pray," he says, " to
these images of the gods, implore them on bended knee, sit or
stand days long before them, throw them a piece of money, and
sacrifice beasts to them, and in so treating them with deep re-
spect, despise meanwhile the men who made them."6 " I my-
1 See the passages in Ansaleli, De Diis Komani evocatis, Brix. 174-3, p. 19.
2 Jup. Confut. 8. 3 De Sacrif. 11. 4 De Iside, 11.
5 Diog. Laert. ii. 116. G Ap. Lact. ii. 2.
186 ROMAN RELIGION.
self," says one, by no means of the lowest grade, but on a level
with the educated persons of his time (the close of the third
century), — "I myself, not so long ago, worshiped gods just
taken out of the furnace, fresh from the hammer and anvil of the
smith, ivory, paintings} old trees swathed in fascias; and if I
happened to cast my eyes on a polished stone smeared with
olive-oil, I made reverence to it, as if a power were present
therein, and addressed myself in supplication for blessings from
the senseless block, doing grievous despite to the very gods in
whose existence I believed, while implying they were wood, or
stone, or ivory, or to be found in any such material."1
It is worthy of notice, that the worship of mere stones, here
alluded to by Arnobius, should have maintained itself in such
favour with Greek as well as Roman. Theophrastus beforetime
had mentioned it as one feature of deisidaimonia, that people
could not pass a holy anointed stone at the cross-roads without
pouring oil upon it, genuflecting, and showing it reverence. Lu-
cian remarks the same of one Rutilian, a noble Roman.2 Every
one, it appears, took care to have stones of the kind on his
property; for Apuleius stigmatises iEmilian, one of his adver-
saries, because no such thing as an anointed stone, or garlanded
branch, to say nothing of a holy grove, was to be found on his
premises.3
If we attempt to dive deeper into the springs of religious
action peculiar to the period, and to answer the question, what
was really the motivum of a worship, so active, often toilsome,
and always claiming so large a proportion of time, as was then
offered to the gods, it cannot but strike us most convincingly
that the higher powers of the soul, and the moral requirements
of man, had little or no share therein. A few words suffice to
indicate the void. There was wanting there the conviction of
divine holiness, and the need of human sanctification. The
state of his soul was never laid open to the deity in prayer.
The thoughts of man, or the direction of his will, never approxi-
mated to the deity, nor were troubled thereupon about them ;
many even imagined that the gods knew nothing of them. Nay,
the very notion of a god really omniscient had something in it
frightful to many. It was intolerable to them to be unable to
be alone with their own thoughts and wishes, to acknowledge an
1 Arnob. i. 39. - Pseudomant. :{<>. s ApuL p. 849.
THEORY OF PRAYER. 187
overseer above them, who saw through their most inward incli-
nations and desires. " A god," says the heathen Csecilius,1 " who
carefully notes the ways and acts of all, ay, and their words too
and most secret thoughts, must needs be a troublesome, restless,
and shamelessly inquisitive being; who, as he wanders about
every where, is incapacitated from helping individuals, divided
as he is among all together, nor yet can satisfy that corporate
whole, as being occupied with individuals." The philosophy of
the time was in keeping with this fundamentally. " The human
race," says Seneca, "is assuredly under the providence of the
gods; still it is only at times they trouble themselves about
individuals."2 Plutarch accepted the axiom of Euripides, that
the deity was only concerned about the most weighty matters,
leaving the more trivial to accident.3 Cotta in Cicero designates
this as the ordinary teaching of the Stoics ;4 and the Platonists,
besides, were of opinion that it was not generally beseeming the
dignity of the celestials to enter into, and interest themselves
about, things happening on the earth below.5 It was pretty
generally believed, however, that certain sudden instincts, pas-
sions, and resolves were kindled in the soul of man by a god ;
people were always ready to set down to the account of a deity
acts which they were ashamed of or rued. " It was the god who
tempted me to it," is the excuse of the seducer of a maid to his
father in a play of Plautus.6
The examination of one's own interior state, the sifting of
the conscience before God, therefore, formed no part of heathen
prayer. The idea of reconciling the two things, and bringing
them into an intimate connection, would have seemed not only
strange but absurd to men of those days. They had no appre-
hension of the duty of any such return into oneself; and hence,
in spite of the good counsel given on the point by the Stoic
philosophy, there was a universal deficiency of self-knowledge :
" Yet not one of us strives, not one, to sift himself to the bottom ;
All eyes as we are to discern the burden on shoulders before us."7
So, people prayed for wealth, the comforts of life, good for-
i Minuc. Oct. 10. 2 Epist. 95.
3 Pr»cepta ger. Kep. xv. p. 811. 4 Cic. Nat. D. iii. 3G-39. ^
5 Apul. de Deo Socr.p. 669 sq. "neque enim pro majestate Deum coelestium
merit hsec curare."
6 Aulul. iv. 6. 11. 7 Pers. Sat. iii. 23 sq.
188 ROMAN RELIGION.
tune, and success in undertakings ; but no one ever thought of
asking moral good of the deity. " Let Jupiter bestow life and
riches on me/' says Horace, " I'll be indebted to myself for a quiet
and contented mind."1 Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius made an
exception here ; but Seneca himself teaches, " Man must make
himself fortunate : it were a shame to burden the gods with
applications of the kind. By virtue, man's own gift to himself,
he begins to be a companion meet for the gods, and leaves off
being a suppliant."2 Maximus of Tyre devoted a whole treatise
to prove it were better for man to omit prayer altogether. All
human affairs were, he thought, subject in part to a divine pro-
vidence, immutable in its decrees; partly ordained beforehand
by a firmly fixed destiny, and in part depending upon accident :
in any case, therefore, prayer is useless and absurd.3
Taking one's point of view from another religion, one might
expect in the masses, involved as they were in the greatest
moral corruption, an entire cessation from prayer. This effect,
however, was not in consonance with the spirit of paganism. It
is not on the score of abandonment of prayer and sacrifice that
contemporary writers deplore the moral state of their age, but it
is the frightful exposition which they make of the objects of
prayer. They prayed for the speedy demise of a rich uncle ; that
they might find a treasure ; for success in forging an alteration
in a will ; for an opportunity of gratifying unnatural lust.4 Mar-
ried women prayed for the welfare and success of dancers or
actors with whom they carried on adulterous intrigues.5 To
sanctify these prayers, as Persius says, people plunge over head
in the Tiber three times a morning. Nothing indeed could be
expected from the gods gratis. When the object was important,
or the favour great, the promise of a corresponding return was
looked for. The senate set the example ; and in cases of emer-
gency, used to vow a thousand pounds of gold together for a
votive offering to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.6 Luckily
for the less rich, there were often ceremonies, formulae of prayer,
1 Epist i. 18, ad fin.
2 Ep. xxxi. 41. If Seneca once bids a friend ask, "bonam mentem bonam
valetudinem" (Ep. 41), be does not meantbereby the moral but physical health of
the mind, which is not in man's power, and therefore the opposite of craziness,
<fcc. &c.
3 Diss. xi. p. 155 sq. 4 Pers. Sat. ii. 3 sq.; Petron. lxxxviii. 7 sq.,lxxxv. 5.
5 Juven. vi. 366-378. 6 Petron. ut supra.
PRAYER.
189
exorcisms or sacrifices, appointed to secure a hearing to prayer ;
only it was very easy, and at the time dangerous, to make some
mistake or other in the names or the ceremonies ; and if a god
was addressed wrongly, his anger might be roused, and the im-
prudence unpleasantly requited.1
The sources of acquaintance with the Greek life of this period
are only scanty, and therefore but few features bearing on the
point are traceable. We recognise one of the prevailing senti-
ments in a remark of Artemidorus, that persons who fell into
any great misfortune never failed to renounce religion.2 In the
letters of Aristsenetus, an adulteress prays the gods to show her
the way to the embraces of her paramour ;3 and in the epigrams
of the Anthology they are besought to be propitious to that
hideous vice so inseparably connected with the Greek name.4
Theocritus actually represents the death of a youth struck by
lightning, before an image of Eros, as a punishment from the
gods for having a short time previously rejected a shameful pro-
position.5
When prayers and vows did not attain their object, the tone
towards the gods often changed right round, and indignation
was vented in blasphemies, or ill-treatment of the images, in-
stances of which have been mentioned before. Germanicus,
Titus, and Servian who was executed by Hadrian, are reported
as having charged the gods with injustice, or loaded them with
execrations at the time of their death. The same angry feeling
comes out even in inscriptions on the graves of relatives snatched
away by an early death. Take, for instance, one on a child who
died at five years of age. " To the unrighteous gods, who robbed
me of my life." Or another, on the monument of a maiden of
twenty, called Procope, " I lift my hand against the god who
has deprived me of my innocent existence."6
There is another trait not to be passed over, namely, that it
was no easy matter to get a friend to promise to pray for you,
or no one was anxious, or made it an object, to gain the inter-
cession of another. On the other hand, it was quite a common
practice to offer sacrifices for another, and, so far as prayer en-
tered into that function, it may well be said that intercession
1 Arnob. iii. 43. 3 Oneirocr. ii. 133. p. 199.
3 Epist. ii. 15. 4 Meleag. Epigr. xxii. 5 ; Automed. Epigr. 2.
5 Idyll. 23. 6 Mabillon, Iter Ital. p. 77.
190 ROMAN RELIGION.
was of frequent use in heathendom. The dread of execration
was all the stronger and more universal according to Pliny's ob-
servation.1 A greater influence was attributed to a man's hate
than to his love ; and a prayer for vengeance was believed to
find a readier hearing from the gods than one of blessing.
5. Continued Attachment to the old Gods and Rites —
Worship of Aphrodite — Myths: their Influence, and
how represented by Mime and Picture — Impurity in
the Temples — Religious Imposture and Wizardry.
On the whole, and taking a large view, the period from Au-
gustus to the Antonines is by no means to be looked upon as
one of wide-spread unbelief. With the exception of the greater
cities, the masses continued to cling fast to the old gods of the
country, whom they had inherited from their fathers. In the
time of Pausanias there were hamlets in Greece where a firm
faith in the sagas of god and hero, with the memories of the
days when gods and mortal men shared a common roof and
table, still survived among the natives, male and female. The
fable of Cronos and his dethronement was actually believed by
many still, as Sextus Empiricus tells us.2 The ashes of the fune-
ral piles of Niobe's children, the stones of Amphion, and the
cypresses of Alcmseon were still pointed out.3 In Phocis the
belief still existed that larks laid no eggs there for the sin of
Tereus; and Delphi possessed the stone which Rhea gave to
Cronos to devour. Plutarch speaks of the modellers in clay
and wax, and the statuaries of his time, as not doubting that
the gods had assumed human forms, and fashioning some for
themselves accordingly, and praying to their own creations in
contempt of philosophers and statesmen, and of all their demon-
strations to prove that the majesty of the deity is united to good-
ness, benevolence, generosity, and providence.4 Even the ridicule
of religious belief and worship in Lucian shows this belief still
prevalent in the masses, and among the educated too : man of
pregnant wit as he was, he would never have brought a whole
1 H. N. xxviii. 2. 2 Pyrrh. Hyp. i. 147.
3 Pans. ix. 1 7. 1 . 4 De Superst. 6.
THE OLD WORSHIP CLUNG TO. 191
armoury of sarcasm into play upon a subject already thrown
aside and out of date. Up to and after the second century, evi-
dence may be found every where to corroborate an earlier obser-
vation of Dionysius, that the people took the myths in their
grossest and most obvious sense, and therefore either treated the
gods with cod tempt, or fortified themselves in the commission of
the most shameless crimes by their example.
There were, it is true, gods and shrines forgotten and ne-
glected, and temples in ruins;1 but others were visited all the
more eagerly : new temples were constantly being built, new
feasts established, new gods introduced into cities from the
stranger by popular decree. Nowhere did any reform move-
ment show itself, nor was any effort made to purge worship of
what was particularly offensive to morality, or to replace anti-
quated absurdities, or morally noxious rites, by more rational
and pure ones. The image of Hermes Dolios (the cheat) was
still standing, up to the time of Pausanias, on the road to
Pellene, and the god was said to be always ready to listen to the
prayers of his worshipers.2 The people of Chios sacrificed to
their hero from gratitude for his having made known the artifices
and knavery of their slaves ; the slaves on their part offered him
the first-fruits of their pilferings.3 At Altis, the statue of Gany-
mede was seen by the side of Zeus.4 Young maidens of Trce-
zene dedicated their girdles to Athene Apaturia, the deceiver,
as she was called for having wilily betrayed iEthra into the
hands of Neptune, the island where it happened being styled
the holy island.5 On festivals of Bacchus prizes were given to
the deepest drinkers ; and festivals were kept at times with still
greater license and debauch, and even cruelty, than ever : for
some of the more opulent, not finding further scope for their am-
bition in political activity, tried to earn popular favour by multi-
plying shows and games on solemnities, and by the most lavish
expenditure. They exhibited fights of gladiators, had hecatombs
slain, feasted a whole populace luxuriously, and then the grate-
ful cities immortalised them in monumental inscriptions.6
Pausanias was a spectator of the cruel sacrifice to Artemis at
1 Joseph, c. Apion. ii. 35, p. 1287, Oberth. 2 Paus. vii. 27. 1.
3 Nymphod. ap. Athen. vi. 90. * Paus. v. 24. 1.
5 Paus. i. 33. 1.
6 See the inscriptions in the Corp. Inscr. Gr. ii., particularly those of Galatia.
192 ROMAN RELIGION.
Patrse, where a number of animals were burnt alive ; and also
of the bloody scourging at the altar of Artemis Orthia in Sparta,
though Spartan discipline had long since come to an end with the
state.1 Unbridled mockery and shameless ridicule were inva-
riably practised as religious acts, even at the most solemn festi-
vals, such as that of Demeter at Eleusis ; for there were gods
whom the law, as Aristotle said, ordered to be honoured by buf-
foonery;2 that of Apollo iEgletes at Anapha was of this kind;
and the Attic feasts of Pan, and those of Anna Perenna at Rome,3
were so celebrated; and Lucian specifies a filthy panegyric of
psederastia as the kind of thing one fell in with only on a holy
day.4 In all countries speaking Greek, and at Rome as well, the
worship of Aphrodite was characterised by a shameless impurity,
and a studied excitement of gross lust, surpassing all that earlier
times had seen up to Alexander. The old cosmical signification
of Aphrodite Ourania was forgotten ; and though the distinction
between Ourania and Pandemos was retained, both were ho-
noured with the same sensual and lustful rites. Lucian' s women
of pleasure make their vows of she-goats and heifers to one as
well as the other for success ;5 and in an epigram of Dioscorides
it is to Urania that Parmenis consecrates a fan purchased by the
earnings of her prostitution.6 The solemnities of the Aphrodisia,
usually kept up three days and nights consecutively, were cele-
brated often in groves or gardens, with banquets and song and
frantic whirls of the dance, accompanied by prayers to the god-
dess, amid a tumult of inebriety and lust. This was the Pan-
nychis or Pervigilium of Venus. Whatever was done, was done
in honour of the goddess, and as a means, consecrated by herself,
to assure her favour. Plautus may be consulted for the petitions
addressed to her on such occasions, not by loose women merely,
but modest maidens.7 On those days, too, pimps plied their trade
actively, under the protection of the gods, in buying and lett-
ing out maidens for prostitution ; and one of them, in Plautus,
laments over his ill luck in having already sacrificed six lambs
to the goddess without results.8 Famous courtesans now main-
tained shrines under the different titles of Aphrodite at their
1 Paus. vii. 18. 7. " Polit. vii. 15.
3 Conon. 49 ; Lucian, Bis accus. c. 11 ; Ov. Fast. iii. G75.
4 Amor. 53. 5 Dial. Meretr. vii. 5.
6 Diosc. Epigr. 12 ; Anthol. i. 247. » Pcen. i. 2. 120, iv. 2. 27, v. 3. 13 sq.
8 Poen. ii. 6 ; comp. iv. 2. 25 sq.
OLD MYTHS STILL IN POSSESSION. 193
own cost. Such were those of Aphrodite-Lamia and Pythio-
nike at Athens and Babylon, the Lesena Ctelesylla in Ceos, and
Aphrodite- Stratonikis at Smyrna.1 In Rome there was now a
Venus Drusilla in the temple of Venus Genitrix.
Here was the worship of a goddess proving an ever-open
school of vice, and a gulf of corruption yawning for successive
generations of youths and maidens. But we must not pass over
the additional evil of the myths. These sagas of the gods, pos-
sessing wholly the imagination and conscience of men who fed
on them from youth upwards, exercised a most pernicious in-
fluence on their morale ; gods were taken as patterns of be-
haviour, and their example pleaded in excuse for all misdeeds.
No one had recourse to the physical explanations of the myths
which the Stoic school attempted to put in circulation, nor was
any acceptance found among the people for the theories of Pla-
tonists, like Plutarch, that instead of the gods, inferior beings
and demons should be considered as the actors in myths dis-
honourable to the deity. Neither the already-quoted testimony
of Dionysius, nor the well-known scene of Terence, shall be
reproduced here. The serious Seneca, the true mirror of the
condition of his age, observes in regard to the myth of Zeus and
Alcmene : " What else is this appeal to the precedent of the
gods for, but to inflame our lusts, and to furnish a free license
and excuse for the corrupt act under shelter of its divine proto-
type ?"2 In another treatise he waxes warm against the poets
for representing Zeus as an adulterer, ravisher, and corrupter of
youth, of his own kith and kin too, as unnatural towards his
own father, and so on. " This/' he adds, " has led to no other
result than to deprive sin of its shame in man's eyes, when he
saw the gods were no better than himself."3 What notions the
Romans had of their gods by the time of the second Punic war
may be better judged from a single feature in the year 216 b.c
than from a whole treatise. After the defeat at Cannse, the
belief was that the anger of Juno had brought this disaster on
the Roman arms. Her anger or her jealousy had been aroused,
because Varro, who had the command on the fatal day, had
once, when sedile, placed a beautiful youth in the car by
Jupiter's side in the procession of the Circensian games. Some
1 Athen. xiii. 595; Anton. Liberal, c. i. 2 De vita brevi, 10.
3 De vita beata, 2(5.
VOL. II. O
194 ROMAN RELIGION.
years afterwards an expiatory sacrifice was offered to the god-
dess, in sober earnest, on this very ground.1
Lucian, too, makes the Cynic Menippus tell how, in his
youthful years, he had read much in Homer and Hesiod of the
wars and quarrels of the gods, their adulterous gallantries, and
acts of violence and robbery, all of which had seemed to him
praiseworthy, and proved no little spur to him to attempt the
like. But when he reached manhood, and found the laws for-
bidding such things, his embarrassment and doubt were great
whether he should obey gods or lawgivers.2 Ovid dwells on the
strain, that women would do well to shun the temples of the
gods, in order never to be reminded of Jupiter's doings or the
adventures of the goddesses, and so be led into temptation.3
But it wras not only in Homer and Hesiod people read these
myths; it was not only in the nursery that they listened to
them j — they were represented to the life in public spectacles,
and the most voluptuous ones the most frequently. Already by
the time of Socrates it was usual to give representations from
the mystic history of the gods, to enliven the guests at a banquet.
In the Symposium of Xenophon4 there is a description of the
mime of the loves of Dionysos and Ariadne, their courtship and
union, being played before Socrates and his friends for the
delight of the spectators. Afterwards, this art attained a high
degree of perfection in the theatre. The Greeks invented a
number of names for the different species of these mimic
dances. The loves of Aphrodite with Mars and Adonis, the
adventures of Ganymede, Danae, Leda, and others, were the
subjects most in favour. These mimic entertainments had be-
come so frequent in Rome by the time of the emperors, that
the whole year was filled up with them, except the winter
months : they were given as interludes, together with the drama
proper, and proved the darling pastime of the populace ; for
their sensual attractions wrere excellently calculated as food for
lustful eyes to dwell on. Such fables about the gods as related
to the intercourse of the sexes, were represented by dancing men
and women in expressive pantomime with a flute accompaniment.
They wore a close-fitting dress, which showed the forms and
motions of the whole body as completely as a state of nudity.
1 Val. Mux. i. 1, Hi; Lact ii. 10. 2 Luc. Menipp. 3.
3 Trist. 2. ■ Syinp. ix. 1, 5.
GAMES AND PUBLIC SPECTACLES. 195
Juvenal paints vividly the effects produced upon the impressible
spectators of both sexes;1 and it was no exaggeration in Zosimus,
after him, to find one of the principal causes of the decay of the
Roman empire in these pantomimes.2
"The sacerdotal colleges and authorities," says Arnobius,
" flamenS) and augurs, and chaste vestals, all have seats at these
public amusements. There are seated the collective people and
senate, consuls and consulars, while Venus, the mother of the
Roman race, is danced to the life, and in shameless mimicry is
represented as revelling through all the phases of meretricious
lust. The great mother, too, is danced ; the Dindymene of Pes-
sinus, in spite of her age, surrendering herself to disgusting pas-
sion in the embraces of a cowherd. The supreme ruler of the
world is himself brought in, without respect to his name or ma-
jesty, to play the part of an adulterer, masking himself in order
to deceive chaste wives, and take the place of their husbands in
the nuptial bed." He then describes how the whole assembly
rises, and makes the vast space of the theatre echo with a tumult
of applause, when the gods themselves are bespattered with all
the ridicule and contempt of these comedies :3 and thus, says
Augustine, the very gods were laughed to scorn in the theatres,
who were worshiped in the temples.4
Now these games themselves were regarded and conducted as
religious acts. They formed part of the festal solemnity, and
were vowed to obtain a favour of the gods, as well as exhibited
in expiation, when opportunity presented itself of appeasing and
averting divine indignation manifested by natural phenomena.
People really thought the gods themselves commanded these
shows, or extorted them as if by threats. The very same as-
sembly that assisted at them one morning, on the same or fol-
lowing day would glut themselves with the carnage of a gladia-
torial fight. There again they all are reseated, priests and
senators, ministers of state and their wives, and the vestal
virgins and people of all ranks and classes, to drink in and dwell
on the sweet draughts of human blood flowing in streams, and
to feast their eyes on the gaping wounds and convulsive throes
of dying men. Banishing mercy, they call to the champion to
make an end of his fallen adversary, that none might escape by
a feigned death. They lose all patience with the combatant if
1 Sat. vi. 07 sqq. 2 Hist. i. G.
3 Arnob. iv. 34, 35. 4 De Civ. Dei, vi. 8.
196 ROMAN RELIGION.
one does not speedily breathe his last. And then fresh pairs must
enter the arena at their call, so that no time be lost in satiating
their eyes with blood. Thus the inhabitant of the vast city went
round the cycle of his year in devilish alternations of lust and
blood, and all to the greater glory of the gods.1 He could
vaunt that his entire life and his every enjoyment were one
sustained act of divine worship.
What mimic art produced in the theatre, was reproduced in
paintings on the walls of temples and houses. It is known full
well what abundant material for obscene pictures mythology
supplied. Religious-minded men, like Aristides, indeed, com-
plained "of revolting and impious images being introduced
into the very temples." Aristotle had recommended the au-
thorities not to tolerate any obscene statues or images, but ha4
nevertheless allowed of their use in the temples of those gods
in whose worship the law connived at banter and buffoonery.
At every step which a Greek or Roman took, he was surrounded
by images of his gods and memorials of their mythic history.
Not the temples only, but streets and public squares, house-
walls, domestic implements and drinking-vessels, were all covered
and incrusted with ornaments of the kind. His eye could rest
nowhere, not a piece of money could he take into his hand,
without confronting a god. And in this way, through the magi-
cal omnipresence of plastic art, the memory of his gods had sunk
into his soul indelibly, grown up with every operation of his
intellect, and inseparably blended with every picture of his ima-
gination. There were, besides, it is true, representations not
unworthy of the divine majesty, such as the Zeus of Phidias,
which produced a profound impression, and elevated the thought
to the deity. They were, however, but comparatively few. How
many there must have been who never in their whole life fell in
with such an image ! How many, on the other hand, in whom
the Ganymede, standing close by, awoke an opposite current of
thought ! And there was far too great a profusion of these las-
civious and impure images. The youth of both sexes grew up
constantly in sight of them ; their first ideas of the gods were
irretrievably coloured by them, and their imagination polluted.
A Propertius2 even allows a complaint to escape from him that
modest virgins should be made acquainted far too early, through
the house-images, with things that would otherwise have been
i Compare the life-like description in Lactantius, vi. 20. 2 Eleg. ii. 5. 10-2(1.
IMPURITY IN THE TEMPLES. 197
hidden from them. And if he only looks at one side of the ques-
tion, on the injury done to female modesty, Clement, a later
writer, takes up the matter energetically in a religious point of
view.1 The naked Aphrodite, caught in the net with Ares, Leda
and the swan, and the like, were, we learn from him, the fa-
vourite pictorial decorations of wall and ceiling. It was thus a
show of religiousness was thrown round what was in principle
only calculated to supply fuel to impure passions. According to
Clement's expression, men treated with religious reverence these
records of their shamelessness, because they were images of the
gods at the same time.
As impurity formed a part of religion, people had no scruple
in using the temple and its adjoining buildings for the satisfac-
tion of their lust. The construction of many of the temples and
the prevalent gloom favoured this. " It is a matter of general
notoriety," Tertullian says, " that the temples are the very places
where adulteries are arranged, and procuresses pursue their vic-
tims between the altars."3 In the chambers of the priests and
ministers of the temple, impurity was committed amid clouds of
incense ; and this, Minucius adds, more frequently than in the
privileged haunts of this sin.3 The sanctuaries and priests of Isis
at Rome were specially notorious in this respect. " As this Isis
was the concubine of Jove herself, she also makes prostitutes of
others," Ovid said.4 Still more shameful sin was practised in the
temples of the Pessinuntine mother of the gods, where men pros-
tituted themselves, and made a boast of their shame afterwards.5
It is well known what a bloody vengeance Tiberius took for a
crime committed by Isis priests in Rome. Under the pretence
that the god was enamoured of her, they had betrayed a Roman
lady to the passion of a young Roman in the temple. A case of
the kind happened in Alexandria afterwards. Tyr annus, a priest
of Saturn, announced the orders of his god that certain beautiful
women should spend the night, in his temple. Their husbands
trusted him ; and the priest, who had concealed himself in the
hollow image of the god, contrived to extinguish the lamps by
drawing some strings, and then became the god's substitute.6
1 Cohort, p. 53, Potter. 2 Apol. c J 5.
a Octav, c. 25. 4 Art. Am. i. 77; cf. iii. 393 sqq.
5 Firmicus is to be understood as speaking of these alone, when he uses the
expression "in ipsis templis," without entering into further detail. De Err. Prof.
Eel. iv. p. 04, (Ehler. . 6 Rutin. H. E. xii. 24.
198 ROMAN RELIGION.
Alexander of Abonotichos is a flagrant example of the ex-
cess to which credulity in marvels was carried in those times,
and of what a practised impostor could cheat men into without
fear of being unmasked. Alexander lived under Antoninus and
Marcus Aurelius. In the Apollo temple at Chalcedon he buried
tablets of brass bearing an inscription to the effect that iEseu-
lapius would soon be coming to Abonotichos with his father
Apollo. The tablets were laid where they could easily be found,
and produced the effect, foreseen by Alexander, of intense ex-
pectation. An oracle, composed and circulated by himself,
promising the advent of a divine prophet, with no obscure allu-
sion to himself, assisted his enterprise. In the foundations of a
new temple at Abonotichos, he hid an egg containing a young
serpent. The next day he sprung, as if inspired, upon an altar
in the market-place, and proclaimed to the people the immediate
appearance of iEseulapius. He then extracted the egg from its
hiding-place and broke it before the Paphlagonians, who exulted
in the presence of their god among them in serpent form. The
fame of the portent attracted multitudes to the spot. A few
days afterwards, Alexander, who gave himself out to be a son of
Podalirius, and therefore a grandson of iEsculapius, exhibited
himself under the guise of a prophet, in a half-darkened room,
with a huge tame serpent brought from Macedonia, which
wreathing itself round his body, displayed a human head and
black tongue ; and this was the serpent-god Glycon, soon grown
to his strength — the last epiphany of iEsculapius. The new god
had his worship and oracle, and was represented in silver and
bronze ; and not only the whole of Paphlagonia, but Bithynia,
Galatia, and Thrace streamed thither. Questions were trans-
mitted to the prophet in sealed writing tablets, who knew how to
open them unobserved by a secret legerdemain, and returned
oracular responses in metre. Even Severian, the Prefect of Cap-
padocia, who was intending an expedition against the Parthian
king, was fool enough to consult the oracle. In Rome too Alex-
ander met with a warm reception; and Rubilian, a noble lloman,
married his daughter, the fruit, as he pretended, of an amour
with the goddess of the moon. He ransacked the entire of Asia
and Europe, and was able to maintain in his temple a whole host
of well-paid retainers, emissaries, scouts, composers of oracles,
scalers, and interpreters. He also invented a new mystery festi-
WIZARDRY AND IMPOSTURES. lt>9
val, to last three days, in which were represented the bringing to
bed of Latona, the birth of Apollo, of iEsculapius, and the new
god Glycon, not forgetting his own love-intrigue with the god-
dess Luna. The towns of Pontus and Paphlagonia were required
to furnish him the most beautiful youths for the service of his
oracle, and for chanting the hymns, and these he shamefully
abused. Many married women boasted of having children by
him, and their husbands considered it a distinguished honour.1
An extraordinary combination of intellectual and bodily gifts
were requisite to play the part which Alexander played with
brilliant success for so many years, up to his death at an ad-
vanced age. His history may supply us with the data for calcu-
lating the vast numbers of religious impositions carried on by
priest and wizard on a smaller scale in so fertile a soil. We are
acquainted with a few of the numerous expedients most fre-
quently employed in making gods, demons, and the dead, who
had to be conjured up, appear. The believer was bid to look
into a stone basin, filled with water, which had a glass bottom,
and stood over an opening in the floor. The imaginary god was
found below. Or a figure was traced on the wall, which was
smeared over with a combustible composition. During the evo-
catio a lamp was imperceptibly brought close to the wall so na
to set fire to the material, and a fiery demon was exhibited to
the astonished believer.2
The apparition of Hecate was specially efficacious. Believers
were told to throw themselves prostrate on the ground at the
first sight of fire. The goddess of the crossways and roads, the
Gorgo or Mormo wandering among the graves at night, was
then invoked in verse, after which a heron or vulture was let
loose, with lighted tow attached to the feet, the flame of which
frightening the bird, it flew wildly about the room, and as the
fire flashed here and there, the prostrate suppliants were con-
vinced they were eye-witnesses of a great prodigy. Similar
artifices were employed to make the moon and stars appear on
the ceiling of a room, and to produce the effects of an earth-
quake. To make an inscription show itself on the liver of a
victim, the haruspex wrote the words previously with sympa-
thetic ink on the palm of his hand, which he kept pressed on
the liver long enough to leave the impression behind. And so
1 Lucian, Pseudomantis, 10-51. * Hippol. Philosophum, pp. 70-73.
200 ROMAN RELIGION.
the neo-Platonists contrived to cheat the emperor Julian when
Maximus conducted him into the subterranean vaults of a temple
of Hecate, and caused him to see an apparition of fire. By
means of a grain of incense purified, and the low soft melody of
a hymn, the same Maximus made the statue of Hecate smile,
and torches light of themselves.1
The " Pneumatica" of Heron, who lived at Alexandria about
the middle of the second century B.C., abound in this kind of
lore. Here you have instructions how to build a temple so that,
on the kindling of the fire on the altar, the doors open spon-
taneously, shutting again in the same way when it is extin-
guished ; as also how, by lighting a fire on an altar, to contrive
that two figures at the side of it should pour a libation on the
flame, a serpent being heard to hiss at the same time. Plans
are given for the construction of a vessel of sacrifice, the throw-
ing of a piece of money into which makes water flow ; as
also how to manage that, on opening the door of a temple, the
clang of a trumpet should be heard ; and to build an altar, on
which, while the sacrificial fire is burning above, dancing figures
are shown in its under-part, which is transparent.2 We see the
variety of artifices with which the priests were conversant ; and
if any one is tempted to think that such transparent impostures
could not fail of being detected, and of drawing down public
disgrace, or what was still worse, on their contrivers, he has
only to recur to the adventures of Alexander of Abonotichos,
and a great deal that is similar, even among the phenomena of
more modern times.
These impostures and juggleries are not to be estimated by a
later and Christian standard, for it was an acknowledged prin-
ciple, that it was both lawful and expedient to impose upon the
people, to conceal the truth from them, and to confirm them in
their errors by public speeches and state ceremonial. Accord-
ingly, the pontifex Maximus Sccevola declared it to be unad vis-
able to rectify popular religious notions as, for instance, to the
deification of Hercules, ./Esculapius, and Castor and Pollux, who
were but mortal men; or as to the sexual distinction of the gods,
1 Theodoret, H. E. iii. 3; Greg. Naz. Or. iv. 1. 1014; Eunap. Vita Max.
p. 62, ed. Boisson.
2 The Pneumatics of Heron, translated by B. Woodcraft, London, 1851, pp.
33, 37, 57, 83.
PRIESTLY IMPOSTURES. 201
and holding their images in the temples to be truthful repre-
sentations.1 Varro, in the same spirit, would have a great deal of
truth withheld from the people, and that the public, weal required
their continuance in their false notions.2 With such principles
religious impositions need not be thought of any great import-
ance, as long as no one was hurt by them, and they really con-
tributed to the maintenance of a trust in the power of the gods.
The authorities never troubled themselves to investigate and
to compromise the priests, and there were many instances of a
neighbourhood or city suffering detriment when the reputation
of its local sanctuary was diminished by a discovery of the kind.
In the time of Pausanias the Eleans were still proud of Dionysos
having visited them in person. Three empty cauldrons were
placed in a cellar, and sealed up by priests in the presence of
citizens and strangers ; the next day they were found filled with
wine by the god's own hand, a prodigy confirmed on oath by all
present. At Andros too, every year, on the festival of Dionysos,
wine flowed from the temple, as Pausanias was told, though
Pliny only says the spring -water had a flavour of wine on the
day.3 Servius mentions the temple of the mother of the gods
being opened, not by the hand, but by prayer.4 Pausanias was
eye-witness to smoke issuing of its own accord from the tomb of
the Heraclid Pionis in Pionise every time a mortuary offering
was made to it.5 These sacerdotal impostures seem to have
been practised most frequently in the temples of iEsculapius and
the Serapsea. The object was to support the credit of these
places of healing, the priests on the spot taking care to hire poor
people to feign suffering and disease of all kinds, and to pre-
tend to be cured by a miracle wrought in one or other of these
temples, or by an oracle therein communicated.6
One need not be astonished, then, that people appealed so
confidently to these theophania, or various appearances of the
gods, manifesting themselves to individuals ; instances of which
were rife, according to Celsus; whilst Origen tells us that iEscu-
lapius still appeared to different persons.7 Maximus of Tyre
speaks positively to having seen gods more than once. When
educated people allowed themselves to be so imposed upon,
1 Ap. Aug. C. D. iv. 27. 2 Ibid. iv. 31. 3 Plin. H. N. ii. 106.
4 .En. vi. 52. 5 Pans. ix. 18. 3.
6 Clemeutin. Homil. ix. 18. p. OiJ I. 7 Contr. Cels. iii. 3.
202
ROMAN RELIGION.
we may conceive how easily in outlying country places counter-
feits were produced of the visit of Paul and Barnabas to Lystra
in Paphlagonia, where the cure of a palsied man by the former
induced the inhabitants to adore them as Zeus and Hermes.
0. Oracles — Media of Divination — Dreams — Astrology.
An irresistible desire to pry into the future, and a belief that
the will of the gods was made known through signs and pro-
digies, possessed the souls of men of these times. The old and
scientific augural school of the Romans had indeed fallen into
decay and discredit, and in the imperial period not much notice
was taken of fowls eating or birds flying, or how the lightning
fell ; the Italian sortes, or divinations by tablets with inscrip-
tions, which a boy mixed and then drew, as once practised at
Csere, Falerii, Patavium, and Prseneste, had gone out, with the
exception of those of the last-mentioned town. Cicero some
time ago had explained them away as a patent imposture, which
no officer of state or educated person would employ.1 After-
wards, however, these sortes were again in greater demand.
The extinction of so many Greek oracles was a particularly
striking feature in the last times of the republic and under the
first emperors, and partially indeed before. In Bceotia, once so
rich in oracles, that of Trophonius at Lebadea was alone in
existence in Plutarch's days : the others were either silenced, or
their sites completely desolate ; and so the generality of those in
Greece and Asia Anterior, as well as that of Ammon in Libya,
were either defunct actually, or had sunk into contempt. This
lasted till the time of Hadrian and the Antonines, when the
pagan religion every where gave signs of returning vigour, and a
more cordial cooperation in its votaries. Many oracles then re-
vived, and became again places of resort and consultation. In
particular we find that Delphi had been able to maintain an
uninterrupted tradition, though with inferior pretensions, and a
single Pythia instead of the three of better days. The oracles
next in reputation to the Delphic were that of Claros near Colo-
phon, which was only interrupted for a short time, for Germani-
1 Do JDiv. ii. 41.
REVIVAL OF ORACLES. 203
cus, the nephew of Tiberius, consulted it,1 and the oracle of the
Branchidse at Didymi near Miletus. The responses here con-
tinued to be made in verse; and we learn from inscriptions,
besides a prophetes, it had a poet of its own,2 whose business it
was to clothe the language of the prophetes in poetry ; and still
at times the answers were made in Homeric verse.3 The pro-
phetess at Didymi had, up to the later age of heathendom, to
prepare herself by a strict fast of three days, by baths and so-
litary retirement in the sanctuary, so as to be already in an
exhilarated state of ecstasy before she entered the oracular
chamber or set her foot in the vapour of the spring. The case
was the same at Claros, where the prophetes who returned the
oracles was of the male sex. He too submitted to a lengthy
preparation for the act, the ceremonies lasting some nights. He
observed a strict seclusion, fasted a day and a night, and ab-
stained from every dissipating occupation. On drinking of the
spring he fell into a state of unconsciousness, in which he gave
the responses without being seen by the consultants, and only
came to himself by degrees, and without any remembrance of
what he had said.4
The cave of Trophonius retained throughout its ancient
power of showing visions. The oracle of Apollo at Argos was
still standing in the time of Pausanias, where the priestess threw
herself into an ecstatic state by drinking the blood of a lamb
sacrificed.5 After the middle of the first century b.c Apollo
also had an oracle in the island of Delos, where the answer was
given in words, while that of Dodona employed only the sounds
of vessels of brass for communication. In the East, besides the
Cilician oracle of Mopsus, that of the sun-god at Heliopolis in
Syria was of considerable repute. There the image of the god
was borne on the shoulders of the priests, gave an answer in the
affirmative by a forward motion of the bearers, and a negative
by the contrary.6 In Alexandria, Serapis not only revealed
remedies in dreams, but at times gave responses in words. Both
/Esculapius and Isis had numbers of places where incubation
was practised ; and that of Amphiaraus, at Oropus, of the same
kind, where people slept on the fleece of a ram of sacrifice, and
1 Tacit. Ann. ii. 54. 2 Inscr. Gr. 2895.
3 Sozom. H. Eccl. i. ?. 4 Jambl. Myst. Mg. iii. 11, p. 73.
5 Paus. ii. 24. 1. 6 Luc. tic l)ea Syr. 36.
204 ROMAN RELIGION.
dreamt the cures of their diseases, was always reckoned one of
the most frequented.1
The history of the oracle established by Alexander at Abo-
notichos is a proof of the insatiable credulity of the people of
the second century, and of the strength of their passion for
oracles. It cannot be matter of astonishment, then, that many
of the decayed oracles revived, i. e. that persons were to be found
to spread the report that the god, who had long kept silence,
was now again graciously minded towards men, and wished to
be consulted ; and they took care accordingly that answers were
given to such as applied. This was all the easier, as the ques-
tions usually put were only about ordinary matters of private
life, and the god was no longer called upon to arbitrate upon
political relations between rival states.
Nevertheless, the disappearance of many oracles, and the
protracted silence of others, has still to be accounted for. There
were oracles too, the Delphic, for instance, that were never in-
terrupted, but which no longer maintained their old reputation
for veracity, and more frequently took people in. Thus evasion
had to be attempted before Cicero's time to account for the fact
of the spot from whence the exhalation issued that inspired the
Pythia having long lost its virtue. The Roman sarcastically
replied, " This is as if one spoke of wine or salted fish which lose
their flavour by time, whereas the question is of a divine, and
therefore eternal and incorruptible, power."2 There was, he
thought, a simple solution of the problem, in people having be-
come less credulous than of old. Plutarch, who had the credit
of the oracles profoundly at heart, when as yet there were no
appearances of their revival, attempted to frame a more accept-
able and better-grounded explanation. Writing on "extinct
oracles," he maintained that the inspiriting vapour which threw
the prophetess into frenzy was by no means possessed of a virtue
eternal and unalterable, but the contrary, and therefore that it
might easily be dissolved by violent rain, or absorbed by light-
ning, or put an end to by an earthquake filling the chasm up.
The oracle of Teiresias, at Orchomenos, had thus entirely ceased
on account of a pestilence there.3 He brought to his aid, as
analogous, his favourite Platonic theory of intermediate beings,
mortal demons; these, as presiding over particular localities,
1 Paus. i. 35. 3. " Dv Div. ii. 27. 3 De def. Orac. U.
ATTACK OF JENOMAUS. 205
might die, and the virtue of the oracle disappear simultaneously;
and he quoted, as a case in point, the pilot of a ship in the time
of Tiberius being hailed from one of the islands off the iEtolian
coast, and being told to announce, on his arrival at a certain
place, that the great Pan was dead, and that the message was
given and received with a general lamentation.
But there were individuals who set themselves against all
such apologies for the oracular system, and subjected them to a
severe critical inquiry, while explaining the whole as imposture
and jugglery. Chrysippus had done this before, in one of his
works; and in the second century, a Cynic, iEnomaus of Gadara,
in Syria, wrote an " Unmasking of the Jugglers,"1 in which, in
a popular style and tone, at times of irritation, at others of hu-
mour, he aimed at showing that these oracles had exercised a
destructive influence so long as the Greek republics put them-
selves under their guidance, and in particular under that of
Delphi ; that they were often guilty of causing war and blood-
shed, and that by ambiguous answers and inexplicable enigmas
requiring another oracle to interpret them, they had imposed
upon and befooled mankind. His own experience embittered
him. Partaking himself, as he said, in the reigning folly, he had
consulted the Clarian oracle about the true wisdom, and received
an answer capable of application to any thing, the burden of
which was a garden of Heracles always in full bloom. A by-
stander swore he had heard the identical response made to a
merchant of Pontus who had consulted the god about his trade.
iEnomaus then assailed a canonisation by oracle of a certain
Cleomedes of i^stypalsea, a common prize-fighter, and the flat-
teries and homage paid by them even to sanguinary despots, not
forgetting the injunction laid upon the Methymnseans to wor-
ship a log, which the sea had cast up, as Bacchus.
Withering as this exposure might have been, still it seems to
have had but little effect ; for the publication of the book cor-
responds exactly in date with the new impulse which the oracles
received. Maximus, a contemporary, speaks with respect of the
oracles ; and a historical work of Phlegon, a freedman of the
emperor Hadrian, was stocked with answers of oracles fulfilled
to the letter. The longing after divine revelations was far too
powerful ; and even though many responses had been proved to
1 (pupa yo-hrwu. The fragments are in Eusebius, Prrep. Evang. v. 19 sqq.
206 ROMAN RELIGION.
be false and base impostures, was that any reason for the rejec-
tion of all ? and was pure gold to be thrown away as adulterated
because found among coins of base metal? A number of oracles,
brilliantly confirmed by the event, were in general circulation,
all attempts to explain which, in a natural way, must be a
failure; and the very persons who had been taken in by the
oracles, attempted to satisfy their thirst of inquiry into the fu-
ture by one of the numerous other media of divination then in
fashion.
That some of these media at least, if not all, really performed
what they pretended, few people then were inclined to doubt.
Men will never make up their minds to believe in the worthless-
ness of that which they passionately desire and covet, and the
aid of which seems indispensable to them. And this was the
case with divination. Heathendom was utterly without religious
teaching and teachers : no authority any where, only traditional
ceremonies and myths. The gods were bound to speak, if men
were not to despair ; and as* they did not do so through a doc-
trine revealed by a firmly-organised body of teachers, they ne-
cessarily did so by oracles and birds, liver or spleen of animal
victims, by dreams and stars, and any thing at all capable of
being moulded into a sign to which a meaning could be attached,
and by which hope or fear could be fed.
Plutarch and Sextus Empiricus, though so opposed in other
respects, both agree in their testimony that divination was uni-
versally honoured as a divine and infallible science.1 To recom-
mend and corroborate this view of divination, Celsus adds that
it was borrowed from the beasts, which, as being endowed with
a higher intelligence, had a foreknowledge of the future, and
were more pleasing to the deity, with whom they stood in closer
relations than man.2 That sober investigator of nature, Ga-
len, was himself an apologist for the possibility of predictions
from the position of stars, the flight of birds, and the like.3 In
fact, the dominance of this error was a general yoke pressing on
the men of that day, from which but very few were ever able to
escape, and which formed a main support of the religion and
worship of the gods. Cicero eloquently describes this thraldom.
1 Plut. de Fato,p. 574 ; Sext. Emp. c. Mathem. ix. 182.
2 A p. Orig. c. Cels. iv. 88. p. 509, Delarue.
3 In the treatise vep) dwd/jL(a>i> cpvaiKuv, i. 12.
BELIEF IN DREAMS. 207
" Wherever we turn, superstition follows us ; be it soothsayer
thou hearkenest to, or omen (that crosses thy path), suppose thou
seest a sign in the victim, or the flight of a bird, thou must be-
take thyself to a Chaldean, or an inspector of entrails ; the
same if it lightens, or thunders, or a bolt fall, or any kind of
prodigy is born or happens, all things, one or other of which
must always be happening ; so that man nowhere can be tran-
quil of heart, not even in sleep, for the greatest number of
anxieties and alarms spring from dreams."1
The primitive belief, in fact, was, that dreams were sent men
from the gods for their instruction, warning, and encouragement;
and the whole history of antiquity is full of dreams, attaching to
the weightiest and most decisive events. The same Chrysippus,
who tore the veil of imposture off the oracles, took the trouble
to make a collection of prophetical dreams in order to show their
meaning. Neither Hippocrates2 nor Galen3 doubted of dreams
being god-sends, or of there being men who understood the art
of interpreting them ; and Macrobius distinguished five kinds of
dreams, two of which were exceptionable, and three prophetic.4
With the Greeks the interpretation of dreams formed a complete
literature of itself. Artemidorus, whose treatise on the subject
is extant, assures us he compiled it at the express bidding of
Apollo ; and that the science of interpretation of dreams occu-
pied him day and night.5 Merely with the view of collecting
dreams, he took long journeys into Asia, Greece, and Italy ; and
he furnishes precise instructions for the method of soliciting the
grace of a prophetic dream from the gods.6
It was a dream that determined the emperor Augustus to
appear one day every year in the streets of Rome as a beggar.
Galba took the precaution to have expiation made for a dream
that disturbed him. This, too, was deemed necessary to avert ill
consequences that might result from menacing dreams, to resort
to certain deities called the Averrunci, and offer them incense and
salted cakes of meal.7 Purifications were also submitted to, and
the Greeks employed women for the purpose. When harassed
by a dream, people bathed in the sea, remained sitting a whole
day on the ground, wallowed in filth or besmeared themselves
1 I)e Divin. ii. 72. 2 Opp. ed. Van der Linden, p. 033.
3 Opp. ed. Paris, 1070, t. vi. c. i. 3, 4, 5. 4 In Somn. Scip. i. 3.
5 Oneirocrit, ii. 70. 6 Ibid. iv. 2. 7 Tibull. i. 5.
208 ROMAN RELIGION.
with it.1 Numerous records and inscriptions of these later times
testify to the frequent apparitions of gods to their votaries in
dreams, and expressing a desire for something or other, com-
monly a sacrifice. A nocturnal visit from Isis seems to have
been the commonest of these inflictions.2
Astrology, one of the most clinging and obstinate diseases of
the human spirit, was greatly in esteem from the influence of the
star-gazers, the Chaldeans who came into contact with the West
after Alexander's conquest, and of the Stoic philosophy playing
into their hands. Starting from the principle of the unity of
essence in God and nature, Stoicism had got so far as to consider
the stars as eminently divine, and to place the divine govern-
ment of the world in the unalterable determination of the course
of the heavenly bodies. The heaven and its stars, the planets
especially, passed with them for a book in which the events of
earth and human destinies were written in a hand intelligible to
the initiated ; and the skill of the Chaldeans in deciphering these
characters was the less doubted, as they professed to have studied
them four hundred and seventy-three thousand years, up to
Alexander's time. After him the Mathematici and Genethliaci,
astrologers of the Chaldean and Egypto-Alexandrine schools,
were dispersed over Asia, Hellas, and Italy. They agreed in
teaching3 that a secret virtue streamed incessantly from heaven
to earth, and that a connection and sympathy existed between
planets, in the heavenly bodies, and earth with its creatures ;
that human affairs entirely depend upon the stars, the planets
especially being the rulers of their destinies : it is they whose
operation is decisive in the birth, death, and actions of man;
some of them, as Jupiter and Venus, are essentially benevolent ;
others, as Mars and Saturn, noxious ; others again, like Mercury,
of an undecided character, alternately doing good and harm.
Their peculiarities are shared by the constellations which they
inhabit, so that a cycle of action and reaction takes place among
them, and their properties are modified and altered according to
their mutual positions and aspects. The result of this is, that
1 Hut. de Superst. 3.
2 Conip. the Inscriptions collected in Marquard, in the continuation of Becker's
Pom. Alterth. iv. 109, 110.
3 Clem. Alex. vi. p. 813; Chaerem. ap. Eus. Prsep. Ev. iii. 4; Sext. Emp. adv.
Mathem. v. p. 338; Tetrabibl. ed. Norimberg, 1535, pp. 2 sqq. This work was
long ascribed to Ptolemy, but is in any case older than that of Firmicus.
ASTROLOGY. 209
mixture of good and evil streaming from them upon earth, and
the possibility of increasing the good, and averting the evil, by-
prayer and worship addressed to them. For in their dwellings,
that is, within their distinct sphere of operation, the planets have
greater powers than out of them, and they can be influenced
accordingly by homage and vows of prayer. Hence particular
astrological formulae of prayer were composed and used in favour
of certain emperors ; for instance, Antoninus.
In the same spirit, people believed that by the horoscope or
exact position of a star, taken at the moment of birth, the whole
destiny of a man's life and his character itself could be calculated ;
little as there was to answer the adverse argument, as to those
born under the same constellations exhibiting the most striking
differences in character as well as fortunes. They were Greeks
chiefly who practised this, as well as every other lucrative art.
By the year a.u.c. 615, an edict of the Roman praetor P. Lamas
was issued against them, bidding them quit Italy within ten days ;
but, thanks to the support of the Roman nobility, they were soon
back again. To Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, they promised a
long life of repose, and a late death in peace. Cicero expresses
his astonishment that their numerous followers were not unde-
ceived by the palpable falsity of their predictions. But confi-
dence in them was still in the ascendant. People were convinced
that they possessed in astrology a science in earnest, based on
profound calculations and scientific and systematic combinations.
The former edict of banishment was followed by another from
Agrippa, in 721, without effect. Augustus, who forbade their
speaking of life and death in their predictions, consulted the
mathematician Theogenes before he ascended the throne. Tibe-
rius and Otho had their private astrologers, though the former
ordered one of his to be thrown down the Tarpeian rock, and an-
other to be scourged and beheaded, " in conformity with ancient
custom.-"1 They retaliated on Vitellius, who had ordered them to
leave Rome and Italy before the tenth of October, by predicting
he would not himself see that day. Justly did Tacitus reflect on
his countrymen, when he asserted that this kind of people, whom
the great could not rely upon, and who deceived the hopeful,
would always be found in the capital, in the face of all the edicts
against them.2 The perniciousness of their influence was most
1 Tac. Aim. ii. 32. - Hist. i. 22.
VOL. II. P
210 ROMAN RELIGION.
sensible under Domitian, whose cruelty they stimulated through
their artifices, at the same time showing him his victims, and
how to strike the blow. Their predictions that he would be
murdered filled him with the gloomiest suspicion, which cost a
multitude of victims. He had the horoscope of many men of
high rank cast, and ordered to execution all of whom he seemed
to gather that they were born to greatness. At last Alexander
Severus, notwithstanding the number of decrees against the
astrologers, allowed them to open public schools in Rome.
7. Magic — Necromancy and Theurgy.
Of a higher grade than astrology, magic occupied a position
in closest relation with the pagan religion, and necessarily and
infallibly developed out of it, in the most varied forms and rami-
fications. We cannot here undertake to give a complete account
of all the experiments and practices forming the basis of magic,
nor to distinguish how much, in this boundless field, was mere
deceit and jugglery; nor again how far an abuse of mysterious
powers of nature, which have not even yet been satisfactorily
explored, or a formal worship of demons, was mixed up with it.
Our task here is only to exhibit in some of its features the con-
nection between magic and the heathen creed, and the collective
moral and religious aspect of the period.
The Greek and Roman states, in addition to their public wor-
ship, had also sacrifices and ceremonies of secret observance, to
which the special power was attributed of making the gods sub-
servient to the will of man. This barrier betwixt the religion of
state and magic proper being partially removed, we discover the
magic character in particular rites and ceremonies, as, for in-
stance, the Roman rites of the dead, in the formula? of prayer,
a matter which the Romans were so thoroughly conversant
with, that the perceptible difference between a prayer and a
charm was rather formal than essential. The Roman evocation
of the gods falls entirely within the province of magic. We have
already seen what an important position the magic element oc-
cupied in the Persian religion of Zoroaster by means of its dual-
ism, its doctrine of Ahriman and his demons, and the operation
MAGIC FAVOURED BY PHILOSOPHY. 211
of the herb Omomi. The same is true of the Egyptian religion,
with its threatenings of the gods, its star worship, and the tho-
roughly magical character of its system of therapeutics. The
same again is true of the Chaldeans, who were not satisfied with
merely forecasting destiny by the constellations, but undertook
to fix it by sacrifice and ceremony, and through these media to
react upon the stars, avert foreseen calamities, or direct them
upon others. Thus, from Persia, Babylonia, and Egypt, a tide
of magic arts and usages set in towards the west, and mingled
with the kindred rites and ceremonies which had been long pre-
viously in existence there.
The influence of philosophy contributed to this result. It
is true the Stoic teaching, with its comprehensive and binding
fatalism of a mere concatenation of physical causes, was not
favourable to the development of magic art ; but the Pythago-
rean system, on the other hand, was all the better suited for and
disposed to it : in it was a supreme first cause, anterior to all
quantity, though virtually comprising it, by means of which it
was supposed possible for man, provided he knew how to put him-
self en rapport with them, to sway the laws and conditions of the
physical world. Hence among the younger Pythagoreans, magic
was quite identical with the genuine worship of the gods in its
higher and purer forms ; to their minds it consisted in the science
and art of using certain means, — sacrifice, formula?, and cere-
monies,— so that the gods being carried away in the current of
events, and implicated in the chain of physical causes, in accord-
ance with man's desires and wants, changed that current in our
favour : and not only gods, but demons, heroes, and souls of
men, endowed with greater or less power over nature, in the
different quarters of the universe which they were distributed
amongst, could thus be made man's subjects, upon the Pytha-
gorean principle that all beings with souls are homogeneous.1
By reason of this homogeneity and affinity the spirit of man can
act directly on higher natures, and attract them into the circle
of its existence and its requirements ; but as he has a double
soul, that is, besides that which has emanated from the deity, a
natural one, in affinity with other natural beings, so he is en-
abled, on the strength of this other soul, to exercise a magic
power on nature.
1 Porpb. Vita Pytbag. p. 13.
212 ROMAN RELIGION.
To this may be added the doctrine of demons, a favourite one
of the later Platonists. Plato himself had referred mantic inspi-
ration and magical effects to these higher beings of a mediate
character.1 The notion was, that they inhabited the region of
air near the earth, having passions in common with men, so as
" to be moved/' in the words of Apuleius, " by anger or pity,
enticed by presents and appeased by prayers, exasperated by in-
sult and influenced by demonstrations of respect."3 Plato's idea
of demons was a higher one, nearer the Christian angel, per-
fectly good and loving men, yet accessible to sorrow and joy.3
Xenocrates had been the first, as far as we know, to assert the
existence of evil demons by the side of the good, spirits of gloom
and hostile to man : and this too was the Stoic view. The result
of this acknowledgment of it by religion and philosophy opened
a wider field for magic. According to the object in view, white
or black magic might be used, and good or malicious demons be
addressed.
Magic in Greece was not an appendix to the worship of the
Olympic gods, but in part to that of deities of foreign origina-
tion, in part to that of the subterranean ones, in whose train
these demons were supposed to follow as ministering spirits.
Foremost was Hecate, the genuine goddess of witchcraft, invoked
by men in the preparation of charms to infuse irresistible virtue
into them.4 Further, the whole worship of the Phrygian mother
of the gods was stamped with a magic impress ; and the Metra-
gyrtse were among the most energetic, though the lowest and
most mountebank adepts in witchcraft, and adroit enough to in-
sinuate themselves every where.
Magical means were employed in striking others with disease
or madness. Cicero mentions loss of memory as caused by
them.5 The crazincss of Caligula was attributed to a potion he
had been induced to swallow, which was intended to work as a
philter.6 Caracalla's frenzy, too, was considered to be the con-
sequence of magical adjuration.7 Love-potions were in great
request at Rome, and were prepared with magical practices from
the so-called hippomanes, a humour flowing from mares; wax*
1 Conviv. p. 1194; Phcedr. p. 1220.
2 Apul. de Deo Socr. pp. 132, 147, Oud. 3 Epinom. i. 984 sqq.
4 Ilor. Epod. v. 57 ; Sat. i. 8. 5 Brut. 00.
0 Juven. vi. 615. 7 Dio Cass, lxxvii. 15.
NECROMANCY.
213
images, too, for melting in the fire, and a vast variety of other
charms, are on record, with an infinity of amnlets and talismans
for protection, engraved with mystical characters. Among for-
mulae of the kind, the Ephesian and Milesian words and names
enjoyed the reputation of greatest efficacy. The former were cha-
racters engraved on the pedestal, girdle, and crown of the Ephe-
sian Artemis, meaning " Darkness, Light, Earth, Year, Sun, True
Sounds/' and were worn engraved on a stone or ring as amulets.1
Necromancy had been domesticated in Asia as well as in
Greece from primitive times, and was most intimately connected
with the magical worship of demons. The Greeks early had
their own oracles of the dead ; for instance, the one consulted
by Periander in Thesprotia, where secret arts were employed to
compel the soul of a deceased person to appear and answer.2
There was one of this kind in Italy at Misenum, on the lake
Avernus. Their use was not only investigation of the future or
hidden things, but also in appeasing the angry manes of such as
had died a violent death. Maximus says3 of the Italian one,
that on the victim being slain, the libation poured forth, and the
dead invoked, a form appeared, though dim and not easy of
recognition, which, however, spoke, and disappeared on answer
given. Besides these institutions, there were also a number of
necromants, or psychagogues, who practised the art of adjuring
the dead. Apion, the grammarian of Pliny's time, assures us he
consulted Homer about his native land, but has suppressed the
reply.4 Appius, a contemporary of Cicero, gave himself up to
these wizard arts of evocation;5 and of the emperors, Nero6 and
Caracalla7 practised them, the former on the score of his mur-
dered mother, the latter to appease the spirits of his father and
brother, all according to the rites once used by Thessalian psych-
agogues for the Lacedaemonians, in laying the ghost of Pau-
sanias, whom they had put to death.
There is a proof of the great spread of this art of magic in
the fact that people might publicly and avowedly practise it,
provided they had no object of injuring others. Thus, Tibullus
, confesses to having resigned himself into a witch's hands in order
j; to secure himself the love of his Delia. The hag purified him,
i Clem. Alex. Strom, p. 568 ; Hesyeh. s. v. 2 Herod, v. 92.
3 Diss. xiv. 2. 4 Plin. H. N. 32. 5 Tusc. i. 16.
6 Suet. Ner. 34. 7 Herodian, iv. 12. 3.
214 ROMAN RELIGION.
and made him sacrifice a black lamb by torch-light.1 It was
chiefly women, as was naturally to be expected, on the score of
their more passionate temperament and deeper sense of their
own weakness, from whom the countless tribe of wizards, male
and female, drew their most credulous votaries. Thus the old
man in Plautus enumerates amongst the disadvantages of mar-
riage the constant calls of the wife for supplies of money to
pay witches and interpreters of dreams, and people of that cast.2
Magic was also resorted to for murdering others. The whole
empire believed that Tiberius had thus caused the death of Ger-
manicus. Parts of exhumed corpses were found on the floor of
his house, charms and curses, tablets of lead inscribed with his
name, bloody bones half scorched, and all the apparatus by which
souls were devoted to the infernal deities.3
Wherever human sacrifice was offered, it was always either
in direct connection with magic, or magical usages were coupled
with it. Thus Pliny remarks the generality of the art in Gaul
and Britain, and connects it with the Druiclical human sacrifices;
he even speaks of cannibalism among them. The Romans had
children sacrificed principally with this object of witchcraft.
The decree of the Senate in the year 97 b.c, forbidding human
sacrifice, was probably meant to include boys and children ; but
the existing system of slavery made it impossible to carry it out
to the letter. Cicero could cast into the teeth of Vatinius, " It
is thy wont to evoke by adjuration the spirits of the dead, and to
offer the bowels of slaughtered boys to the gods of the lower
world."4 Pliny said of Nero that there was no lack of human
blood in the magical incantations to which he had given him-
self up for a time.5 Catiline and the emperors Didius Julianus
and Heliogabalus are all accused of child-sacrifice, Julian's ob-
ject being to appease thereby the hate of the populace towards
him. The emperor Valerian was prevailed upon by an Egyptian
magician " to sacrifice the children of unhappy fathers, to disem-
bowel new-born babes, and mangle God's creatures."0 The same
expressions are used by Juvenal of the haruspex of Commagene,
who promised the lustful wife a lover or a rich inheritance :7
' Eleg. i. 2. 40-G4. 2 Mil. Glor. iii. 1. v. 05-100.
3 Tac. Ann. ii. 69 ; Dio Cass. lvii. 18. 4 Cio. in Vatin. c. 0.
5 H. N. xx\. ->. ti Dionys. Alex. ap. Eus. 11. E. vii. 10.
7 Sat, vi. 550.
THEURGY. 215
" Pullets' breasts he ponders o'er, and the entrails of a whelp,
And now and then a boy's."
There was a still more revolting custom, that of cutting the
embryo child out of a living woman's womb, as did the tribune
Pollentianus in order to conjure up the spirits whom he was
curious to consult as to the successor of Valens.1 Maxentius
did the same at Rome.2 After the death of the emperor Julian, a
woman was found suspended by the hair and her body cut open
in a temple at Carras, which he had devoted to mysterious rites.3
He was suspected of having committed the crime himself, but
the priests of the place might have done it without his bidding.
The custom itself was already described by Lucan.4
People of philosophical education used to speak with con-
tempt of those magicians and wizards who were chiefly natives
of Egypt, or had been schooled there, because their whole science
was exposed for sale in the market-places for a few oboli ; they
pretended to expel demons from the possessed, to blow diseases
away, to summon the souls of heroes, and made tables appear
spread with sumptuous repasts, and figures of animals move as
if animated.5 But, with the exception of the Epicureans, it was
not easy to find people who rejected magic in toto and in all its
forms, or looked upon it as a mere imposture. Pliny seems to
have regarded the greater part of it as worthless. He thought
Nero had experienced the deceitfulness of these things, he
having thrown himself with a passionate curiosity on the black
arts of theurgy, and it being an easy matter for him to furnish
all that the magicians gave out as necessary for the success of
their experiments, human sacrifices, and sheep perfectly black,
&c.6 Artemidorus begins with the Pythagoreans, and goes
through a long list of proficients in the m antic science, whose
predictions he conceived should be considered as a cheat, for not
one of the professors understood any thing of the true mantic
art ; while people were bound, on the other hand, to rely upon
and accept the art, and the declarations of priests sacrificing, of
the observers of birds, of interpreters of stars and dreams, and
inspectors of livers. As to the mathematicians and genesialo-
1 Amm. Marc. xxix. 2. 2 Euseb. H. E.viii. 14.
3 Tlieocl. H. E. iii. 21, 22. * Phars. vi. 554.
5 Cels. ap. Orig. c. Cels. i. p. 53, Spenc. 6 Plin. H. N. xxx, 2.
216 ROMAN RELIGION.
gists (horoscopists), he suspends his judgment, nor does he pro-
nounce upon or enumerate the different species of true magic.1
The highest and most difficult part of magic was theurgy, the
secret science so lauded by neo- Pythagoreans and Platonists, by
which a man did not communicate with the lower and mediate
beings or demons, but was enabled to enter into the presence of
the very gods, and make them subservient to certain of his pur-
poses. This was done by a purification of the lower soul, which
was put through a severe discipline, cut off from the external
world, and thrown back upon itself. An exact knowledge, under
the strictest secrecy, of the right names of the gods, sacrifices,
and forms of prayer, was requisite for success in theurgy. An
acquaintance with the names adequately representing the pro-
perties of the gods was imparted by themselves to the theurgi
of the time of Marcus Aurelius, Proclus assures us, and that in
return for the use of these appellatives, the accomplishment of
one's own desire was received from them.2 Further, there were
forms which served equally as passports for souls, and had, be-
sides, such powerful influence upon the middle class of beings
(demons) dwelling in the mid regions of the air, as to oblige
them to give free passage through their demesne to souls wing-
ing their way through to heaven.3 The magician philosophers of
this discipline had their mysteries, into which their pupils were
to be initiated step by step till they reached the contemplation
of the gods manifesting themselves in a variety of forms, chiefly
human, but not unfrequently too in formless light only.4 Pro-
bably this did not mean a mere scenic phantasmagoria, but an
artificial state, akin to magnetic clairvoyance, in which people
found themselves surrounded with light, like that of the Byzan-
tine navel-inspectors of the fourth century. It was not seldom
these pretentious theurgic operations failed of effect, in conse-
quence of some mistake or other having been made ; and then,
instead of the god invoked, beings of another kind, demonic,
of grosser material and called Antithei, appeared to mock the ig-
norant with lying and illusive phantasms.5
1 Oneirocrit. ii. GO. 2 Procl. in Cratyl. p. 77.
3 Arnob. ii. (52. 4 Procl. in Tolit. p. 371).
* Arnob. iv. 12 ; Iambi. Myst. iii. 31.
BOOK IX.
SOCIAL AND MORAL STATE OF GREECE, ROME, AND
THE ROMAN EMPIRE.
I. THE GREEKS.
1. Citizenship — Greek versus Barbarian — Political Li-
berty— Idleness and Industry — Condition of the Rich
— Slavery — Education.
The Greek was a political being in the strictest sense of the
term. Citizenship and political freedom, consisting in a par-
ticipation in the supreme power of the state, was his highest
good. A complete dependence on the state, and the absolute
surrender of the individual member to the body, was the senti-
ment that had grown with his growth, and formed the ground-
work of his moral being. The sum of his duties was to merge
his personality in the state, and to have no will of his own dis-
tinct from that of the state. What position an individual was
to occupy in the community was not left to his good pleasure,
but was traced out beforehand for him. And, properly speaking,
there was no department within which a Greek could be justi-
fied, according to his judgment, in free action merely as a man;
and wherever the good of the individual clashed, or seemed to
clash, with the welfare of the whole, in that case he must yield
and fall a sacrifice; he and his rights were trampled underfoot.
Hence ostracism in Athens, Megara, Miletus, and Argos, and
petalism in Syracuse.
The Greek idea of justice, then, may be summed up in this,
218 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
that all was right and just that benefited the state. Morality
and virtue consisted in the conformity of one's own will with
that of the community, in capacity for its service and for ad-
vancing the public weal in the highest degree. The religiousness
of the Greek partook of the same political character ; the wor-
ship of the gods was accurately prescribed and enjoined on each
member of the state, itself of divine constitution ; and its pre-
cepts were fulfilled for the sake of the community, and as a
political duty.
There was no such thing, however, as a Greek confederation,
but only small and separate states, generally with a single city
and a limited territory. All the Greeks felt themselves united
by their common language and customs, and an identity of re-
ligion and national character, in opposition to the barbarians, i.e.
all non- Hellenic nations. They had an instinctive feeling of
their intellectual superiority to all these people, many of whom
had never attained to a regular social life, while others lived in
shameful and degraded servitude. Even the Egyptians, whose
ancient traditions and sacerdotal wisdom they held in a high
esteem ; the Carthaginians, whose constitution an Aristotle con-
descended to panegyrise and thought worthy of comparison with
the Greek ;l Phoenicians, Etruscans, Macedonians, and Romans,
— were all stigmatised by the Greeks as barbarians. They be-
lieved themselves in possession of all the qualities combined, but
one of which at most distinguished the above-mentioned nations.
Though there was much they had received secondhand from
other nations, they claimed the glory of having always perfected
what they received, and inserted it, as a well-fitting member,
into the organism of a civilisation that embraced the whole of
man. Hence, Maximus of Tyre compared a soul delivered from
the body and transferred to a higher region to a man who had
passed from a barbarian land into the Hellenic soil;2 and So-
crates gave expression to the general feeling in his countrymen
when he thanked the gods daily for being man and not beast,
male and not female, Greek and not barbarian.
The hostility of the Hellenes and barbarians was natural
and necessary.3 The Greek, at least his orators and poets told
him so, was fitted by nature and appointed by the gods to be
* Pol. v. 10. 2 Diss. xv. 6.
3 Plat. Pep. v. 470 ; Demosth. adv. Mid. 40.
THE RIGHT OF THE STRONGER. 219
lord over the barbarian. As to the expressions of individual
philosophers, Democritus, Socrates, and Plato, that the contrast
between Greek and barbarian was by no means so decisive, and
that there was a cosmopolitan view, fully borne out by fact,
which regarded humanity as an organic whole, — they were not
recognised by the Greeks in general, to whom the word " hu-
manity" was a stranger. In the letters ascribed to Apollonius
of Tyana, and probably written under Christian influences, we
first meet with the expression that it is of obligation to regard
the whole world as one's fatherland, and all men as brothers and
friends, bound together by community of descent.1
There was therefore no question about the barrier of an inter-
national law with reference to barbarians; the inviolate character
of ambassadors is perhaps the only exception, and that was not
acknowledged as a principle, and was often, in fact, infringed.
But besides, there were no recognised equitable relations be-
tween the several Greek states, and in their intercourse with one
another, " might makes right" was the real order of the day ;
and no circumlocution was needed to envelop the plain maxim,
that man's real mission was the subjugation of his fellow-man to
prevent his own f or, as Pericles put it to the Athenians, that
one may confidently despise the hatred of others only when one
is dreaded by them.3 The gods themselves, as the Athenians
said to the Melians, had given men the example of the stronger
turning his power to account in keeping down the weaker.4 Yet
in the second century, the rhetorician Aristides gave the name
of sophists and pedants to those who pretended to doubt this law
of nature, that the strong man should use his power to trample
on his inferior.5 Now the Greeks in their international dealings
carried out this law, the only one that they knew and acknow-
ledged, with a hardness of heart and mercilessness sufficient to
make one who is acquainted with their history ask the question,
if deceit and cruelty were not deeply-graven traits of the Greek
national character? Wholesale executions, the exterminating
of entire populations, the sale of women and children as slaves,
were all practised by Greek on Greek, not in the transient mad-
ness kindled in combat, but in cold-blooded deliberation after
victory, and on a calculation carefully made beforehand ; and de-
1 Ap. Philostr. p. 395 ; Ep. 44. 2 Thuc. i. 70, 77. 3 Ibid. iii. 37-40.
' Thuc. v. 105. h Aiistid. l'miatlien. 1288, Diud. cf. Or. xliv. 1. 835.
220 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
mocracies and aristocracies, Athens and Sparta, rivalled one
another therein. And as the selfish love of domination and gain
did not only arm state against state, bnt also introduced the
spirit of division and party-faction into the several states, so the
absorption of individuality which we have delineated above was
far the most frequently exhibited under the form of an envenomed
hatred between democrat and aristocrat, in which but few suc-
ceeded in extricating themselves from taking a side. Fortunate
it was for the worsted faction when it was only exiled and plun-
dered, but escaped death, for only a few instances occurred of
this. The selfishness of party quenching all spirit of commu-
nity soon aroused an individual selfishness fatal to every nobler
aspiration ; and hence, as Aristotle records, the oath by which
the oligarchs bound themselves in their clubs to a perpetual
hostility to the demos, and to do it all the harm they could.1
Isocrates complains of there being more banished and pro-
scribed people from a single state than from the whole Pelopon-
nese in older times.2 And thus Greece swarmed with homeless
outlaws, collecting in troops of banditti to plunder and waste,
and serving any chance master as mercenaries. The freedom
and independence of states, and along with them the whole
groundwork of Greek morality, were utterly and irrecoverably
lost. "All," said Aristotle, u desire justice to be done them-
selves, but in their relations to others the question of justice is
unheeded."3
In antiquity, and among the Greeks in particular, the idea of
freedom differed toto cmlo from that of later Christian nations.
In antiquity either not a notion of a conscience appears, or one
very unlike the Christian one, and therefore the freedom, which
was coveted and realised, was quite a different thing. Christen-
dom has blended the moral and religious consciousness of man
into an indissoluble whole ; and this moral principle in him, in-
formed and regulated by religion, — this consciousness of the most
scrupulous responsibility, in regard of every action, to an omnis-
cient Creator, — is called his conscience, and is fundamentally,
or ought to be, the sole ruler and lawgiver in practical conduct.
Through this, and over against the power of the state, which,
being independent for itself, cannot possibly be the rule of his
conscience, there is within man's bosom an indestructible ne-
1 rol. v. 7. 19. 2 Archidam. 08. 3 Pol. vii. 2. 8.
GREEK IDEA OF FREEDOM. 221
cessity for, and effort after, autonomic action and comprehensive
self-determination. He then understands by liberty the greatest
admissible enlargement of those spheres in which, according to
his light, and following simply the voice of his conscience, he can
exercise command untrammelled by political or official tutelage.
He requires to manage his own affairs personally, or in corporate
union with men of like mind and will ; to maintain and pursue
his own interests ; while he regards as the state's proper function
to keep its distance from, and respect, this province of his own
free self-determination, and to protect him and it, without inter-
ference or tutelage, through the forms of administrative justice
and the shield of power.
Quite different was the Greek's case. First and foremost he
felt himself to be a member of a small corporate body, with a
horizon easily commanded, and interests patent to the eyes of
all, the welfare of which was most intimately bound up with his
own. His moral convictions were influenced by religion in but a
few points. The greater part of his moral conduct, when he had
given the gods their own in regard of their traditional sacrifices
and ceremonies, had little to do with them. Morality and good-
ness to him were limited to what was expedient to the well-being
of the state, and also to the well-understood interest of the indi-
vidual at the same time. Any other canon, such as might con-
sist only in a conscience guided, even in minutiae, by faith, there
was none, properly speaking. The end, the state's good, sancti-
fied the means ; and in matters to which this general good could
in any way be extended, the desire of being free, and of following
a subjective and selfish direction, was like a contradiction to a
Greek mind, and bore every appearance of an egoistic intention
and one hostile to the state. Thus there was no sphere of life
in which the individual wished to be, or knew himself, completely
extricated from the grasp of the state. He felt not the prescrip-
tion of the state as an oppressive yoke, for he had his own share
in the creation of the law by which it was governed ; he was
joint sovereign. The succession might happen to include him, to
take his own part, as magistrate, in carrying the law into effect :
there was no distinct order of state officers, acting on views and
interests of their own. In antiquity, therefore, freedom was sy-
nonymous with participation in the power of the state, together
with a conviction of being a subject, in common with others, of
222
GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
the laws that proceeded from the votes of a majority, however
deep those laws might penetrate into private life. The will
of the state, of the majority that is, was the will of the indi-
vidual ; the laws themselves being so many contracts by which
all were mutually obliged of their own accord to one certain
mode of action. The minorities, in case of being out- voted, —
the rich, for instance, if a law was carried in the interests of
poor and less substantial members, — had no resource left, no
freedom more. They had got the worst of it, and were obliged
to submit to the law of the conqueror in its full measure. Pro-
tection there was to be had in a Greek state for individual as
against individual, but there was none as against the state or
the majority.
It is well enough known to what lengths state tutelage and
restrictions on the whole of social life were carried in Sparta.
Speaking in the strict modern acceptation of the word, and ac-
cording to our own feelings, the Spartan was the being of all the
world furthest from freedom conceivable, though he indeed was
quite of another mind. The laws of Zaleucus and Charondas
subjected ordinary intercourse with bad citizens to a penalty;1
and the use of unmixed wine without the leave of a physician
was visited actually with death.2 Athenian law had decided how
often a month a husband should sleep with his wife f and hence,
too, self-murder, regarded as a robbery of the state, had the pen-
alty of atimia (public disgrace) imposed upon it, and at Athens,
for example, was punished with the cutting off of the right hand.4
Consistently with this view, the state enjoyed an indefinite
right to the property of its members. The lawgiver in Plato
declared, "Ye yourselves are not your own, still less is your
property your own: you belong collectively to your whole
family, and still more does your collective family appertain to
the state."5 On this principle the Spartan constitution was
founded, and went so far in the limitation of ways of gain as to
forbid the possession of silver under the pain of death, and no
trade or commerce could be pursued. There, then, the far
niente, the exclusively national education for war, and the perpe-
tual community life among the men, admitted of no manner of
1 One could indict another for KaKOfuKia, Diod. xii. 12.
2 Athen. x. 33. 3 Hut. Sol. 27 ; Amator. p. 769.
4 Aristot. Eth. Nic. v. 1 1 . s Legg. xi. p. 923.
DOMINATION OF POOR OVER RICH. 228
earning money by business. The fall of the Spartan republic
was, all the more inevitably, the consequence of impoverishment
— in the year 240 b.c their whole landed property being found
in the hands of one hundred individuals — and the exhaustion of
the male population.
In Athens, where the conduct of the state was wholly in the
hands of the popular assembly, the poorer class by its majority
of votes had completely the upper hand of the rich, and threw
all the government expenses upon them, causing themselves to
be maintained, and entertained with gorgeous festivals, proces-
sions, and dramatic shows, at the cost of the state, i.e. of the
rich and of their allies. Athens was a paradise to the poorer
citizens. They received pay for attending the Ecclesia ; and as
Heliasts shared in largesses of corn, and were pampered with
sacrificial and festal banquets. The demos understood the
squeezing of the rich like sponges by means of liturgies, cho-
ragic, gymnasiarch, architheoric, and trierarchic, the last of
which, especially the equipment and maintenance of ships at
sea, was the chief cause of the ruin of many great fortunes.
Another, and still more ruinous, expense was brought on the
rich by the administration of justice being in the hands of the
poor, as it were a sword suspended over the heads of men of pro-
perty by a hair, which the others had only to cut. Exclusive of
the Areopagus, there were at least ten tribunals in existence, in
which the poor, always a majority, were judges, and where they
feasted their eyes upon the misery of the defendants in trembling
expectation of their sentence, and scarcely protected by juridical
forms.
The Greeks had neither jurisprudence nor jurisprudents.
All the law they had was subject to manifold change, from the
changing minds or humour of the majority making the law, and
it was therefore unfitted for scientific treatment; by far less
stress was laid on the strict observation of protective forms with
them than with the Romans. The judges, of course, were all
the more at ease, and the use they made of their judicial power
was all the less considerate, influenced often by jealousy, hatred,
selfishness, and party interest.1 The orators, as might be ex-
pected, frequently omitted to appeal to the sense of justice in
5 Cf., e. g., Isoc. c. Locliit. Or. Att. ii. 475; Demosthenes also in his speech
against Midias. The same is frequently met with in Tsreus, e. g. Orat. Att. iii. 52.
224 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
the judges, and addressed themselves directly to their interest
and passions. The legal obligation on every citizen to bring
any one to trial who seemed to them to have inflicted an injury
on the state, opened a wide door to the disorders caused by sy-
cophants, those bloodhounds of the democracy, who, while they
frowned on the demos, drove at the same time a thriving trade
by prosecutions. Matter for such could not fail to be found in
the vague term of the " welfare of the state." The accused, it
often happened, was not once admitted to speak in his own de-
fence.1 Sometimes the fines were paid to the judges themselves,2
though they generally fell to the state, and thus they returned,
at least indirectly, into the hands of the judges. The rich were
therefore driven to buy themselves off from the sycophants'
threats of prosecution, and conceal their wealth, and keep the
demos in good humour by gross flattery and lavish expenditure.
Men, generally speaking, whom predominance of personal cha-
racter or fortune exposed to the jealousy and cupidity of their
neighbours, had no security nor any tolerable existence in a city
where a despotic democracy acknowledged no law above itself,
and a precarious majority of votes passed decrees, involving the
life and property of citizens. Men therefore of that class drew
off and lived out of the way, only showing themselves now and
then, after long intervals, in their native city. This was par-
ticularly observable during the last years of the Peloponnesian
war, and the period subsequent to it, down to the extinction of
the independence of Athens.
Aversion to work, and propensity to idleness, is a characteristic
trait of the ancients. Mechanical trades and industrial occupa-
tions were held in special contempt. " The Germans," says
Tacitus, " cannot endure repose, and yet are fond of inactivity.
They consider it idche and dishonourable to earn by the sweat
of their brow what they can win by the sword. They hand over
the care of house and field to women and old and infirm people,
sleep and the banquet forming their own pastimes."3 The
Gauls too looked down upon every kind of labour, agricultural
included.4 The people of Tartessus, in Spain, appealed to a law
of their first lawgiver, Hatis, by which manual labour of any kind
1 Isocrat. de Antid. Oratt. Att. ii. 351.
2 Demosth. c. Aristogit. 1 ; Or. Att. v. 92. 3 Germ. xiv. 15.
4 Cic. de Rep. iii. 0.
AVERSION TO LABOUR. 225
was forbidden to citizens, and reserved for slaves.1 The Lusi-
tanians and Cantabrians intrusted all works of necessity to their
women and slaves, and preferred living themselves by plunder.2
Herodotus, speaking of the Greeks, says he does not know
whether they borrowed the contempt with which they regarded
work from the Egyptians, as he found the same to be the case
amongst Thracians, Scythians, Persians, and Lydians, and that
by the larger proportion of barbarians the learners of mechani-
cal arts, and their children too, were looked down upon as the
lowest order of the state. All Greeks, the Lacedemonians espe-
cially, were educated in this idea.3 It was not, of course, the
mere handiwork of itself that brought this stigma upon trades,
but the notion of the pay they are recompensed by, rendering
the workmen dependent on the buyer or orderer.4 In many
states, and Sparta especially, manual labourers were excluded
from offices and political privileges ; and a citizen of Thebes
must have given up handicraft at least ten years to enable him
to take part in the government.5 People thought the pursuit of
manual labour only fitted for slaves and non-citizens ; and the
free labourer was already degraded in the eyes of others by hav-
ing slaves for competitors. Sedentary occupations, keeping aloof
from the agora and the gymnasia, and defective education, com-
bined to render the idea of the banausos and banausia in the
highest degree distasteful in Greek eyes, and every paid work of
the hand vulgar and mean.6 Such folk could not be reckoned
good men and true as passed their life not in the open air, but
sitting still in close shops.7 The Corinthians alone formed a
remarkable exception, as Herodotus already remarks. Hence, in
Athens, commerce and trade were pursued by strangers, or car-
ried on by wealthy people through their slaves, or hired ope-
ratives almost on the level of slaves. There was no real middle
class. The first thought of the poorest Athenian citizen was to be
free, i. e. idle, and to trouble himself only with business of state,
and to be supported by the state. The day was spent in the agora,
in the assemblies of the people, the courts of law, the gymnasia,
and theatres. Of twenty thousand Athenians, Demosthenes tells
us every one spent his time in the agora, and was occupied there
1 Justin, xliv. 4. 2 lb. xliv. 3. 3 Herod, ii. 167.
4 Aristot. Pol. iii. 2, 8. 6 lb. iii. 3, 4; vi. 4, 5.
6 lb. viii. 2 ; Plat. Kep. vi. 495, ix. 590. i Xen. CEc. iv. 2.
VOL. II. Q
226 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
either with public or private business.1 The democracy had ab-
rogated the earlier laws, restraining idleness as an attack upon
their independence. It was not till sunset a man repaired to
his house, which was used but as a shelter for the night.
Trade, then, and commerce on a small scale, were left in the
hands either of slaves or of domiciled settlers, called metceci,
who, though Hellenes (non-Hellenes being always reckoned as
barbarians), had no rights, could acquire no landed property, and
therefore were excluded from all privileges attaching to such
property, were not allowed to intermarry with citizen families,
and always required the protection and mediation of a native
patron to obtain justice. Every Greek was a stranger from the
moment he set foot without the walls of his town or the territory
of his petty state.2 So a special contract was needed merely to
enable the two inhabitants of different Cretan towns to inter-
marry.3 In modern states, naturalisation places the stranger on
an equality with the citizen, and a second generation usually
makes the fusion complete; in antiquity disadvantages and ex-
clusions continued to be visited on the descendants of immigra-
tors. But, in fact, the condition of a stranger in Hellas was far
better than in the East, where — -in Egypt and Persia for in-
stance— he was held to be impure, religiously speaking, and his
society defilement ; besides, hospitality, as practised towards
travellers, and in the mutual relations of states, was held sacred
by the Hellenes, and contributed to soften down many asperities
in the law regarding strangers ; least, however, in Sparta, where
the law of xenelasia entirely prevented the settlement of stran-
gers, and frequently too mere visits.4
Slavery was the foundation on which the whole social and
political life of the Greeks was based. Doubt as to the equity
and advantage of such an arrangement never entered into a
Greek mind; it was a self-evident case; the idea of another
state of things was impossible to conceive ; and what would have
become of Greek civilisation, Greek power and independence, if
slave-labour had to be suppressed, and men to work themselves,
or let themselves out to hire for others ? There is no perfect
1 Demosth. Aristog. i. 51.
2 Bockh's Public Economy of Athens, i. 15i; on the authority of Demosth.
pro Phorm. 6.
3 Sainte Croix, Legisl. de la Crete, p. 058. 4 Plut. Lyeurg. 27.
THEORY OF SLAVERY. 227
household state, according to Aristotle, that does not consist of
slaves and freemen, the slave being but an animated instrument,
as an instrument is a slave without a soul.1
The Stagirite has, in fact, left us a complete theory of slavery,
as an institution founded on the nature of social order. Slavery,
according to him, is necessary, as a true household could not exist
without slaves ; and it is equitable, as corresponding to a natural
law, — the greater part of the human race, the barbarians to wit,
being born slaves, whom it beseems only to be governed and to
obey, and who, being in reality minors, were furnished with but
just wit enough to comprehend orders. Slaves and domestic
animals supply our requirements with their bodies, with but a
slight shade of difference. And as the master stands towards
his slave in the relation of an artist to his tools, and as the soul
to the body,2 he cannot have much more love for him than for
his horse or his ox, for there is nothing in common, and no
equity between the parties. Still Aristotle remembers that a
slave is also a human being ; and overlooking the contradiction
in this compulsory distinction, is of opinion that the master may
feel friendship for his slave in so far as he is man.
The number of slaves was considerably greater than that of
the freemen. The census of Demetrius Phalereus showed a sum
total of 20,000 citizens, 10,000 metics, and 400,000 slaves, in
Attica;3 this not including female slaves, who were, however,
much fewer than the male. In Sparta there were 36,000 citi-
zens, 244,000 helots, and 120,000 periceci, whose condition only
differed from the helots' in their masters not having power of life
and death over them, or selling them off the land. There were
460,000 at Corinth, and, at one time at least, 470,000 in iEgina.
Of these, the great proportion were employed in agriculture, in
mines, and manufactures. They were in part descendants of
the ancient inhabitants of the land, who had been conquered,
and in part were purchased in the slave-market, a regular ap-
pendage to every town of importance. Others were slaves born
in the house, children of its master by a slave -woman or of
slave-marriages, which, though generally no formal unions took
place between slaves of both sexes, were sometimes allowed as a
favour by the master,4 yet were not legally acknowledged or pro-
1 Polit. i. 3 ; Eth. Nic. viii. 13. - Eth. viii. 13.
3 Athen. vi. p. 272. 4 Xen. (Ec. ix. 5.
228 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
tected, it being always open to the master to sever the tie, if the
slave could not. It was generally found more economical to
purchase able-bodied adults than to educate them from child-
hood; the more so, as these house-born slaves, or cecotribes, were
looked down upon as of little use. Those purchased were ex-
posed for sale, naked, in the market ; of whom some were pri-
soners of war, not unfrequently Greeks ; others had fallen into
this condition from piracy or kidnapping. In most cases, how-
ever, prisoners of war, being Greeks, could ransom themselves :
perhaps a tenth of the slaves may have been Greeks, reduced by
war to servitude; and these were either without the means of
redeeming themselves, or an embittered feeling denied it them.
Metics, not paying their taxes or without a patron, supposititious
children, and strangers who had usurped the rights of citizens,
all equally passed under the hammer. The large proportion of
slaves constantly purchased were barbarians, Carians, Phrygians,
Thracians, and Cappadocians. The principal slave -markets at
Chios, Samos, Cyprus, Ephesus, and Athens supplied the whole
of Greece. The Cilician pirates, in Strabo's time, disposed of
myriads of slaves at Delos in a day.1 The poorest Greek, if not
utterly destitute, kept his one or two slaves ; and was invariably
attended by one, or if of better condition by several, when he
went out of doors.2 It was not the custom for women to leave
the house without several female slaves.3 Plato takes it for a
general rale,4 that every wealthy man at Athens possessed more
than fifty slaves; such a man could say with Democritus, "I
treat my slaves as members of my body, and put each one to a
different use."5
On the whole, the condition of the Greek slave was not so
bad as that of the Roman : it was best at Athens,6 where the
constitution guaranteed him many privileges, only reserved for
freemen elsewhere.7 The beating of foreign slaves was for-
bidden there ; and in dress and external appearance, their hair
inclusive, they were not distinguishable from their masters.
The master could not put his slave to death, but he could ill-
1 Strabo, vii. 407. 2 Athen. vi. 88. 3 Ibid. xiii. p. 582.
4 Hep. ix. p. 578. 5 Stob. Floril. lxii. 45.
6 And worst at Sparta (Pint. Lye. 28) ; the best place to be a freeman, tbe
worst to be a slave. (Te.)
7 Xen. de Rep. Ath. i. 12.
STATE-SLAVERY. 229
treat him if he chose. Many thousands worked in the mines in
chains.1 When severely treated, the slave could take refuge at
an asylum, like the Theseum, or at an altar, and excite the people
to take compassion on him, and procure his being sold to ano-
ther master.2 Runaway slaves were frequently branded on the
forehead.
The situation of the serfs of the state differed in many re-
spects. These consisted, for the most part, of the older con-
quered and subjugated inhabitants of the soil, — the Penestse, for
example, in Thessaly, the Bithynian Mariandyni in Heraclea of
Pontus, and particularly the Helots in Laconia. The state gave
private persons the use of the latter, but they could neither be
sold nor emancipated. They had families and a dwelling of their
own, but were compulsory servants to their masters, whom they
had to supply with agricultural produce to a fixed amount. All
the ancients agree in describing their lot as a frightfully hard one.
Whether the particulars entered into by many of them — for in-
stance, the historian Myron3 — are correct, and detail a perma-
nent condition or not, is extremely doubtful. If it was really
the custom to scourge them once a year for no offence, but only
to remind them they were slaves, and to oblige them to wear a
degrading dress, it is hard to understand how the Spartans could
employ them on expeditions as soldiers so frequently. It is cer-
tain that the cryptia were not formally intended as sanguinary
raids upon the helots ; yet it would appear that many of those
who were surprised in the streets, in spite of the notice given,
were put to death in the barbarous chase. It is a fact, however,
that the helots, and the penestse in Thessaly, were always ready
to take advantage of any calamity occurring ; while the Spar-
tans, on their side, were ever on the alert, watching their helots
as dangerous foes, and sometimes trying to weaken them by a
massacre. In the Peloponnesian War two thousand of the
bravest of these helots were declared free, but all were after-
wards quietly put out of the way by assassination. This is why
the hatred of the helots and all the other slaves rose against their
masters to such a degree, that, according to the testimony and
expression of an eye-witness in 397 b.c, they would gladly have
torn every Spartan in pieces, and eaten him alive.4
» Athen. vi. p. 272, 2 Pint. Thes. 30; Poll. vii. 13.
3 Ap. Athen. xi. p. 657. 4 Xen. Hell. iii. 3. 0.
230 GREECE I SOCIAL AND MORAL.
When a slave had to give testimony before a court of justice,
his deposition was always accompanied by torture; a custom
quoted with approbation by all the Attic orators, Lysias, Anti-
phon, Isseus, Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Lycurgus. What the
oath was to the freeman, torture was to the slave ; except that
the latter was generally regarded as the more reliable expedient
of the two.1 Very little confidence was placed in the oath of a
witness at Athens. Dependence was placed only on the evidence
of a slave given under torture, and that whether it concerned the
public or private citizens.2 Demosthenes was always for resort-
ing to this expedient ; it was the last and most effectual resource,
which, when he had exhausted his other stock of proofs, he re-
served for the end as decisive.3 The accused offered his slaves for
torture, and the accuser demanded it, pretty much in the same
way as an oath is tendered to the opposite party nowadays. To
elude the demand was dangerous. When Andocides refused to
submit one of his slaves to this proof, all the world held him
convicted of the crime on which he was charged.4 Female slaves
were equally exposed to this barbarous treatment with the males,
sometimes even more, when the question was one of domestic
misdemeanour, the details of which they were supposed to be
more likely to know. If the slave came out of the torture
maimed, or otherwise in bad plight, at the most a pecuniary
recompense was made to his master.5
The prevailing notion was, that every slave's soul was funda-
mentally corrupt, and that no one in his senses could trust a
slave.6 Philosophers, such as Plato, were against keeping many
slaves of the same country and language ; they were to be dealt
with rigorously and chastised sedulously ; remonstrance was only
employed to spoil them ; simple words of command should be
used to address them.7 Plato, too, regarded it as one of the
marks of an educated man, that he despised his slaves.s The
state of the poor slave was all too well adapted for making this
contemptible being of him. As a general rule, he was furnished
with but two springs of action, fear and sensuality; and the em-
ployment of his life was to carry out the latter in all its branches,
i Antiph. p. 778. 2 Isocr. Trapezit. 27 ; Isseus de Ncered. Ciron. p. 202.
3 Demosth. contra Aphob., Oratt. Att. v. 130.
4 Plut. Vit. x. ; Orat. Andoc. iii. p. 384. s Demosth. c. Near. p. 1387.
6 Plat. Legg. vi. p. 77 7. 7 Ibid. p. 778. 8 Rep. viii. 549.
EDUCATION OF YOUTH. 231
and revel in every form of vice, gluttony, drunkenness, and wan-
tonness, cheating and robbing his master, and yet so as to avert
vengeance from his own head. The moral disadvantages of this
relation were equally prejudicial to the master as to the slave.
The Greek knew right well that all unlimited and irresponsible
power over others was the moral ruin of a man, the certain de-
velopment of the vices which it fed and fanned, arrogance, per-
petual suspicion, anger to infuriation, and lust : these effects they
painted in their tyrants in strong relief. And yet they could not
see that every slave-owner was a petty tyrant, though they had
abundant evidence of the worst of despotism every day before
their eyes in slavery and its consequents. If it was the master's
pleasure to debauch his male or female slave, resistance was
naturally impossible to conceive. Tired of his slave- concubine,
he would make her over to the Pornseum,1 let her out for hire,
or sell her to a brothel-keeper. It was no uncommon thing for
female flute-players to be sold during a drinking-bout, and even
to pass through several hands.2 It was considered a duty of
hospitality to provide the stranger-guest a female house - slave to
pass the night with ;3 and even when she obtained her freedom,
no other resource, generally speaking, was left her than to stay
where she was, or to embrace prostitution.
The education of youth was one of the domestic relations in
which the prejudicial operation of slavery made itself sensibly
felt. The education of the child during its first years of life was
the business of the mother and the female slaves of the house.
From boyhood upwards to his seventeenth year, the father gave
his son a pedagogue, who was a slave, who attended the youth
every where, took him to school and to the palestra, and particu-
larly had to guard him against the corruptions of paiderastia.
For this purpose a slave was frequently selected whose bodily
infirmities and advanced age rendered him incapable for other
duties; and thus Pericles himself assigned as pedagogue to his
ward Alcibiades the gray-headed Zopyrus, the most useless of his
slaves.
School education was general even in the villages ; but the
state did not meddle with masters and schools, which were
treated as matters of private concern. There was no public in-
struction in the modern form. Every one who liked could keep
1 Antiph. p. 611. " Atlien. xiii. p. 607. 3 Tlaut. Merc. i. 1. 101.
232 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
a school ; slaves seem to have been used by their masters for the
purpose; and it was an occupation looked down upon, as all
paid ones were. This made Plato propose to intrust all the edu-
cation in his republic to salaried strangers.1 The instruction
given was the same every where, with the exception of Sparta.
Grammar, including reading, writing, and arithmetic, music and
gymnastics, were the subjects generally in requisition for the
education of a Greek. His gymnastic exercises began as early
as his seventh year, or still earlier, according to the demands of
Plato and Aristotle.2 The paidotribe, in his palestra, imparted
the first instruction in the practice of running, throwing, brand-
ishing, and wrestling. Besides these private schools for bodily
training, there were also gymnasia, institutions of state, where
the Greek youth amused themselves under the eye of the gym-
nasiarch, though just as they chose, and without compulsion, in
darting the spear, pugilism, and the pentathlon. Music was
cultivated from the thirteenth year, ordinarily, as Aristotle re-
marks, as an accomplishment of taste befitting an idle hour, but
also with a view to religious choir-singing: in Athens the lyre
and singing, in Thebes the flute. The reading of the national
poets, Homer and Hesiod, formed a main ingredient in school
instruction. Homer especially was the real and only school-
book. In vain did Xenophanes of Colyphon, and Heraclitus, de-
mand the expulsion of the two poets from schools, on the score
of their mythological contents. Homer maintained his ground
as the universal educator of the Greek intellect and of the na-
tional spirit, the religious book of boys, youths, and men, to
supply for deficiencies in instruction, along with the sight of
the divine images and ceremonies. To an Athenian, however,
dramatic poetry, with its different aspects and nobler forms of
deification, made a counterpoise in some degree.
In Sparta, where no effort was spared to form the boy into
a brave, hardy, and implicitly-obedient member of a military and
conquering state, intellectual training went to the wall. Accord-
ing to Socrates, not even the elements of science were taught
among the Spartans ; and Aristotle reproaches them for educat-
ing their children to be as wild as the beasts.3 The gymnasia
and sword-exercise were, it was said, their only anxiety ■ if they
1 Legg. vii. p. 804. * Ibid. vii. 794; Arist. Pol. vii. 17.
3 Pol. viii. 4.
WOMEN. 233
happened to want music, poetry, or a physician, they would call
in strangers to their aid.1 Besides them, the Boeotians come
second in reputation as the most ignorant of men.2 For youths
of intellectual enterprise, from and after Plato's time, philoso-
phy had become a study accessible to the educated classes ; and
philosophy with rhetoric furnished worthy subject-matter for
employment upon. In the Roman period, though the general
obligation to gymnastic training had ceased, every city still had
its own gymnasium, frequented by its ephebi. Nevertheless, the
growing impoverishment of Greece deprived most young people
of much leisure for training in these athletic arts and exercises.
2. Woman amongst the Greeks — Marriage — Hetairai —
Paiderastia — Exposition of Children — Decrease of
Population.
Aristotle boasts, with justice, of its being a capital distinction
and immense advantage of Greek society over oriental and bar-
baric, that woman amongst them had been raised to be the real
helpmate of man, and not degraded to the level of the slave.3
The Greeks had a healthy and well-organised political existence
only through their adherence to a real domestic life, founded
on monogamy. Plurality of wives was unknown among them,
bigamy occurring but rarely, and polygamy only coming in with
the Macedonian monarchy, along with other oriental habits then
introduced. Hence their women were not kept under lock and
key, and watched by eunuchs, as in a harem ; but their position
was rather one to which law and custom multiplied securities,
and maintained with acknowledged rights. In the interior of
the household they exercised authority over slaves and children.
In reality, however, woman amongst the Greeks was regarded
but as a means to an end, as an evil indispensable for the order
of the household and procreation of children. It is true, the
custom of the Lydians and Etruscans did not extend to the
Greeks, of the maiden's dower being composed of the earnings
of her prostitution; but the carelessness in which the Greeks left
their daughters intended for marriage to grow up, without true
1 iElian. V. H. xii. 50. 2 Dio. Chrys. Or. x. p. 306, Keisk.
3 rolit. i. 1. 5.
234 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
education or instruction, is a convincing proof of the low estima-
tion of women amongst them. Their education was limited to
the performance of the most necessary household duties, and a
little dancing and singing, to enable them to take part in certain
religious festivals. The virtues of the wife were reduced to the
maintenance of good order in her household, and obedience to
her husband.1 There was a general notion of the woman being
more naturally vicious and inclined to evil than the man ; of her
being more addicted to envy, discontent, evil- speaking, and wan-
tonness ; and of her being equally ready to deceive as to be de-
ceived. Hence in Athens the wife was treated, all her life long,
as a minor, the mother falling to the guardianship of her son
when he attained his majority. The law invalidated whatever a
husband did by the counsel, or at the request, of his wife : the
wife, on her part, could transact no business of importance in
her own favour, nor by will could she dispose of more than the
value of a bushel of barley.2 Cases of marriage of mutual incli-
nation between the parties could occur but seldom, as marriage
was concluded often without their having seen one another be-
forehand, the father disposing of his daughter as he liked, and
the brother after the father's death. No stranger was allowed
to enter the women's apartment; the wife being allowed but
scant intercourse with her nearest relations, and, indeed, with
her own husband, as they lived in separate parts of the house :
thus the principal society she had was that of her slaves. If the
husband entertained a guest, her presence was not allowed.3
Hence Plato designates women as a sex habituated to a life of
seclusion and darkness ; and it occurred to him that syssitia,
or common meals, might be established amongst them.
Greek history accordingly, and, if we except Euripides, Greek
literature, is not distinguished by noble specimens of the sex.
We hear or see but little of the beneficial influence of mother or
wife on the actions or character of son or husband. Marriage
was of obligation, the gods requiring an ample succession of
worshipers, the state one of citizens and warriors, and the human
species of posterity. The principal object of marriage being
perfect citizens, bachelors were looked down upon as men who
1 Aristot. H. A. ix. 1. cf. Polit. i. 5 ; Magn. Mor. i. 34 ; Plat. Legg. vi. p. 781 ;
Democr. ap. Stob. i. 73. 62.
2 Isaeus de Arist. Hacr. p. 259. 3 Herod, v. 18.
WOMEN IN SPARTA. 235
did not fulfil their duties as such, and were quite set aside in
many cases, an Athenian law decreeing that only a married man
should be an orator or a general;1 nay, further, Plato and Plu-
tarch both say expressly, that marriage was a matter legally
compulsory in Athens. Nevertheless the number of voluntary
bachelors went on increasing; which was all the worse for the
women, as voluntary virginity could not occur in the entire
deficiency of a religious motive, or of a tolerable position in
society, while involuntary virginity was contemplated as the
height of misfortune.2 What confidence could a Greek have
in daughter or sister when intemperance was considered the
ordinary failing of the sex ?3 Plato says quite commonly that
marriage and the procreation of children were acquiesced in, not
naturally and spontaneously, but by the compulsion of the law.4
Spartan legislators, regarding marriage entirely as an insti-
tution for the supply of healthy and robust children, regulated
the relations of husbands and wives accordingly. Their maidens,
obliged to the gymnastic exercises of the palestra in a state
bordering on nudity, and in the presence of men young and old,
including frequently strangers, were educated in a reckless free-
dom and a hardihood ill becoming their sex ;5 their very dances
are represented as of a license degraded to indecency. The idea
of conjugal fidelity being of sacred obligation, was in reality
never dreamt of. Marriage was, in their eyes, but a form,
having its object attained in the produce of sturdy soldiers for
the state, whose paternity was matter of perfect indifference;
for, as Plutarch observes, citizens should not be jealous and
exclusive about the possession of their wives, but rather should
readily share them with others, — an oldish man ought to give
up his wife to a younger for a time, in order to have children of
her : and so it was accounted a proper thing, as Polybius tells
us6 (and it was of frequent occurrence), for a husband who had
already several children by his wife to lend her to a friend of
his. Therefore, in Sparta, if a man was desirous of children,
1 Dimarch. in Demosth. p. 51,
2 Soph. CEd. Tyr. U92 sq.; Eurip. Hel. 291.
3 Anthol. Pal. xi. 298 ; Aristoph. Thesm. 735, Eccl. 218 ; Atben. x. 57.
4 Sympos. p. 192.
5 Plut. Lye. xiv. 15 ; Athen. xiii. 20. On the island of Chios young men and
maidens were actually allowed to wrestle together in public.
6 Hist. xii. 6.
236 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
without burdening himself with a wife, he would borrow his
neighbour's wife for a period;1 and this promiscuousness was
carried so far, according to Polybius, that three, and sometimes
four, Spartans had one woman for a wife in common.2
If, then, the assertion of a Spartan is quoted, to the effect
that adultery never happened in his state, the meaning only
could be, that the relation called marriage in Sparta was in fact
never broken by what was elsewhere looked upon as adultery,
the state not acknowledging such a crime ; on the contrary, it
was a kind of legalised ordinary occurrence of every day. Al-
ready in the time of Socrates, the wives of Sparta had reached the
height of disrepute for their wantonness throughout the whole of
Greece :3 Aristotle says they lived in unbridled licentiousness ;4
and, indeed, it is a distinctive feature in the female character
there, that publicly and shamelessly they would speed a well-
known seducer of a woman of rank by wishing him success, and
charging him to think only of endowing Sparta with brave boys.5
Such a state of things was offensive to the other Greeks,
and especially the lonians ; nor had female licentiousness of the
kind any attractiveness in Athens ; but this was compensated,
and more, by the room given to the capricious humours of the
husband, who might put away his wife at will, and take another
fairer and younger and richer. It was pretended, on the agree-
ment of the two parties, the marriage might be dissolved thence-
forth, without the observance of any formality beyond a single
attestation in writing before the archon ; but the wife's consent
was in most cases illusory, as she was entirely in her husband's
power, and dared not refuse. She had to allow things to take
their course, and to be but a chattel, transferable and marketable
to others, and a subject of testamentary disposition. Besides,
the husband's will alone seems to have been adequate to dis-
solve a marriage. Only the dower, which belonged neither to
the husband nor to the wife properly speaking, but to the guar-
dians of the latter (who had given her in marriage), and which
was only for the usufruct of the husband, acted in some slight
degree as a protection when it was inconvenient to the husband
1 Xen. de Rep. Lac. i. 8.
2 Fragm. in Scr. Vet. Nov. Coll. ed. Mav. ii. 384.
3 Plat. Legg. 1. 4 Aristot. Polit. ii. 5.
a Plut. Pyrrh. 28. cf. Parth. Narr. 23.
HETAIRAI. 237
to restore it.1 Marriage without a dower bore, in fact, a consi-
derable resemblance to concubinage.
Demosthenes declares before the Athenian people, ' ' We have
Hetairai for our pleasure, concubines for the ordinary require-
ments of the body, and wives for the procreation of lawful issue
and as confidential domestic guardians."2 The relation of concu-
binage was often the subject of contract, and under the protection
of the law. The influence of hetairai was still greater, and more
corrupting. If retirement, restraint, ignorance of the world,
and legalised respect, were the portion of married women ; free-
dom, education, and the homage of men, ending in contempt,
fell to the lot of the hetairai. Young women destined for this
pursuit received a careful education, such as was denied daugh-
ters intended for the marriage state. Hence the hetaira was
connected with the arts, the literature, and even the religion of
her country, and this gave her a kind of historical importance.
As regards her religious aspect, it has only to be remembered
that the Aphrodite Anadyomene of Apelles, and the Cnidian
goddess of Praxiteles, were both statues of the far-famed Phryne ;3
that the courtesans of Athens raised an image to their god-
dess at Samos from their gains ;4 and that those of Corinth were
for reasons of state under the obligation of assisting at the sacri-
fices offered to Aphrodite in public dangers or misfortunes.5
It was held to be no profanation of the national sanctuary at
Delphi that an image of Phryne should be placed there.6 After
Aspasia and Pericles had refined, if not ennobled, this con-
dition and relation in the eyes of the Greeks, it never occurred
to any one to disapprove of the intercourse even of married men
with hetairai. Hence a dispute for the possession of one of
these courtesans between two rivals was decided in court of law
by assigning her to both for a day each in succession.7 Con-
sidering the precautions which Socrates recommended to his
disciples in their intercourse with women, and his own visits
in their company to the courtesan Theodota, and the counsels
i Examples : Demosth. c. Eubulid., Oratt. Att. v. 514, 515 ; pro rhorm., ib.
p. 218; c. Aphob. pp. 103, 104.
2 Dern. c. Nea?r., Or. Att. v. 578. cf. Athen. xiii. 31.
3 Ath. xiii. 59. 4 Alexis of Athen. xiii. 31.
5 Athen. xiii. 32 ; Strab. p. 581.
6 Plut. Arnat. p. 753 ; cle Pyth. Orac. p. 400. 7 Demosth. c. Neaer.
238 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
which he gave her as to the mode of winning and retaining her
lovers ;l and further, that this is all contained in a book written
with the avowed object of defending Socrates from the charge,
among others, of being a corrupter of youth, — we are sufficiently
furnished with the means of estimating the prevalent opinions of
the day as to this connection. Every time it was publicly men-
tioned in legal processes or on other occasions, it was always
in the light of a thing indifferent or of course. Artists, poets,
philosophers, orators, and statesmen, set the fashion by connect-
ing themselves with hetairai. The names of Pericles, Demades,
Lysias, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Aristotle, Speusippus, Aristip-
pus, and Epicurus, are but a few in the long list of their pro-
tectors. Areopagites, even, were met at the table of Phryne.
Many of these courtesans were treated as queens, and public
statues were erected to a great number.
A closer insight into the relations of paiderastia among the
Greeks will be indispensable here, as it bore most closely on the
marriage state and domestic life generally among them. The
vice itself, it may be truly said, was shared by the Greeks in
common with most of the nations of antiquity, but with this one
distinguishing feature, that the inclination of a man of ripe age
for a youth hardly out of boyhood assumed, with them first, an
aspect at once educational and political, and aesthetically philo-
sophical. Reference to the heat of the climate and the refine-
ment of civilisation explains nothing. Against the former it is
enough to set the fact, that people dwelling in a far warmer
climate — Egyptians, Jews, and Arabians — kept themselves in
great measure free from this sin ; whilst, on the other side, the
Celts of the north were deeply tainted with it. As to civilisa-
tion, one glance at the people with whom the vice was domesti-
cated suffices to indicate that the degree of civilisation a people
had attained to might qualify the form, but not affect the sub-
stance of the matter. The descendants of those hordes who
conquered central and northern Asia under Genghis Khan and
Timour, the Usbeck Khans, had plunged so deep into it as to
consider it a bad sign and a weakness for one to keep himself
free from this universal habit.2
With the Greeks this phenomenon exhibited all the symp-
1 Xen. Mem. Sow. iii. 13.
2 Svlv. de Sacy, in the Journal des Savans, juin 1829, p. 331.
PAIDERASTIA. 239
toms of a great national disease, a kind of moral pestilence. It
showed itself like a passion stronger and more vehement, wilder
and more irregular than the love of women among other nations.
Infuriate jealousy, unconditional self-sacrifice, hot lust, tender
toying, night-long vigils at the door of the beloved one, — all
that makes a caricature of the natural love of the female sex
was to be found here. The strictest moralists in pronouncing
upon this relation were excessively indulgent, nay, worse than
indulgent, for they often treated it with mere ridicule, tolerat-
ing even the society of the guilty. In the whole of the literature
of the anti-Christian period there is hardly a writer to be met
with who has expressed himself decidedly in hostile terms as to
it. In very truth, the whole of society was infected with it, and
people inhaled the pestilence with the air they breathed. It was
glorified by poetry in all its forms. The erotic sayings or dis-
courses of philosophers contributed to fan the evil flame. The
tragic drama made it the turning-point of many of its creations ;
while the comic indicated, openly and by name, generals, states-
men, and leading citizens engaged in this commerce of love;
thereby impressing thousands with the conviction, that if they
entered the same boat they would find themselves in goodly
company. The Greeks, we know, generally chose to attribute
their darling sins and vices to their gods, and to represent them
plastically in myths : hence the sagas of Ganymede, and of the
rape of Pelops by Poseidon, necessarily assumed the form of the
reigning vice, and Apollo and Heracles were turned into paider-
asts. Hence, too, it came to pass that in countless passages, —
poets, orators, and philosophers, — where the subject is love, wo-
man's love is not thought of; and in a court of justice a case of
" criminal conversation" with a boy would be dealt with as pub-
licly, and with the same shamelessness, as one with a courtesan.1
In the Doric states, Crete and Sparta, the love of the male
was favoured as a means of education, which the law itself
acknowledged. The assertion of Aristotle, that Cretan legisla-
tion had in view to check the growth of population by such
provision, perhaps does not touch the real root of the matter,
though showing what a baneful influence was at work in the
island, and how the Cretan character was affected. In Sparta,
according to Xenophon, the connection between the elder lover
1 Lysias, Apol. c. Simon, Oratt. Att. i. 191, 192.
240 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
and the young beloved was just as pure as that between parent
and child. Exile and disgrace were the punishments of a child's
violation ; but the reprobatory sentence of Plato is evidence that
the law was frequently set at naught in society.1 Plutarch de-
scribes the violent effort at self-mastery it cost Agesilaus to keep
under his passion for the youthful Megabates; and while his
friends ridiculed his refusing even the kiss of the youth, it was
the opinion of Maximus of Tyre that Agesilaus deserved greater
praise for so doing than Leonidas for the exploit at Thermo-
pylae2 Socrates himself, who in other respects took a far higher
ground, removed from the follies, weaknesses, and vice of his
countrymen, could not forbear feeling like a Greek on this
point. Plato makes him give expression, in the Charmides, to
the strong emotion which he experienced in happening to see a
beautiful youth half-naked. He confesses on the occasion he
could not, for his part, remember any time he had not been
enamoured of some one or other,3 and that he always was
smitten with the beauty of boyhood.4 He was himself certainly
free from acts of vice ; his intention was rather to ennoble a pro-
pensity which had enslaved the whole of Greece, not excepting
himself, and to make use of it as a means of beneficial action on
the part of the lover to the object of his affection. Still, the
question is, whether, in lending the sanction of his honoured
name to it, he did not in reality inflict a greater injury on suc-
ceeding generations than on his immediate contemporaries. So
strong was the influence of the prevalent epidemic on Plato,
that he had lost all sense of the love of women, and, in his
descriptions of Eros, divine as well as human, his thoughts were
centred only on this boy-passion. The result in Greece con-
fessedly was, that the inclination for a woman was looked upon
as low and dishonourable, while that for a youth was the only
one worthy of a man of education. Ideally as Plato has pic-
tured this unnatural passion in the Phredrus and Symposium,
yet he adds, that in an unguarded hour, or in the excesses of
inebriety, " the two wild horses meet together," meaning, that
at times also in the nobler erotic intercourse between men and
youths, something may happen that " passes with the multitude
1 Legg. viii. p. 836.
2 Plut. Ages. xi. cf. Lacon, Apophth. p. 209 ; Max. Diss. xxv. p. 307.
3 Xen. Mem. viii. 2. 4 Plut. Araator. 138.
PAIDERASTIA. 241
for the height of enjoyment." In his last work, however, on
Laws, when age and experience had doubtless taught him better
he has expressly rebuked and condemned a relation, the ruinous-
ness of which he fully recognised.1
The general opinion that Athens was the head-quarters of
this impurity, and that it was worse there than elsewhere in
Greece, is already untenable on Plato's evidence. He says ex-
pressly that a special law was necessary to prevent his fellow-
citizens from being corrupted by the rest of Greece and most of
the barbarians, exposed as they were to seeing and hearing of the
progress of this abominable vice amongst them, and the fearful
mastery it was gaining every where.2 Our acquaintance with
other Greek cities and their interior state can only be drawn
from the fertile sources which we possess in Athenian literature.
Most of these cities had no law against the vice.3 It was in the
time of the emperors first, when Athens and Corinth were the
only two flourishing cities of Greece much frequented by stran-
gers, that the former town was characterised by Lucian4 as be-
ing the head-quarters of paiderastia, as the other, Corinth, was
the metropolis of the association of hetairai. Bceotia and El is
had the reputation of the vice being practised throughout them
shamelessly and with a kind of public approval ;5 while at Athens
it was looked on as discreditable, according to Xenophon, or the
author of the Symposium bearing his name. But this passage
can only be meant of the pathics at Athens, who prostituted
themselves ; as it is patent on the face of all their literature, in
Aristophanes, Plato, and the Orators, that the attempt to pos-
sess himself of the person of a youth reflected no actual dis-
credit on the aggressor; and the Athenian law only included
two cases, inflicting the punishment of atimia, of infamy and
incapacitation for public offices, on the citizen who sold himself
for money to this shameful vice, and a fine upon the violation
of a boy a minor. In order to protect youth from corruption,
an older law had forbidden grown-up people to enter schools,
gymnasia, and the palsestrse ; but this law had fallen into gene-
ral desuetude from the time of Socrates, a period with which we
are better acquainted. The legislation of Solon, in forbidding
^eSS- P- 837. 2 fxiyiarov 5vua/u.ei/r)V, Legg. p. 840.
3 Xen. Eep. Lac. ii. 14. 4 Am. 51, and the Scholia.
5 Xen. Sympos. viii. 34.
VOL. II. R
242 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
this impure attachment to slaves, seems to have regarded it as
a privilege to be allowed to free persons only.1 On the other
hand, young slaves were driven by their masters to public pros-
titution, as houses were appropriated there to male impurity.'2
Thus Phaedo, the founder of the Socratic-Elean school, had been
publicly subjected to this treatment as a prisoner at Athens;
and Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, is said to have been in
his youth a victim of the same class.3
The example of the renowned tyrannicides, Harmodius and
Aristogeiton, whose infamous connection gave occasion to the
murder of Hipparchus, was always quoted in Athens with special
approbation in excuse of the dominant vice, which in the time of
Aristophanes had reached such a height, that, notwithstanding
the law, many young people made a traffic of their persons for
money, or, what was considered more respectable, the present of
a horse, or sporting dog, or a valuable suit of clothes.4 Formal
contracts were actually drawn up for the purpose ; and yet this
vice left an indelible mark on those who practised it, and a pro-
verb was current, which said it was easier to hide five elephants
under one's arm than one pathic.5 But the state made profit of
the numerous subjects of this wretched trade, imposing a prosti-
tution tax, which was annually leased out by the senate of five
hundred, and had to be paid to the lessees.6 Hence there was
no very great shame attaching to young persons who came be-
fore the court to claim the reward of their prostitution from
such as refused the payment :? and iEschines, in one of his court
speeches, while he designates with strict accuracy the citizen
who hired Timarchus, and always kept some young people in
his house with the same object, adds, "he mentions him by
name not in order to damage him in public estimation, but only
that it may be known whom he had in his eye."8
In such a state of things, producing exactly the same scenes,
fighting, trials, and bankruptcies, as are common in connections
with courtesans, one may conceive fathers and pedagogues never
once allowing young people to enter into conversation with a
1 Plut. Sol. 1 ; .Esck. cont. Timarch., Or. Att. iii. 295.
2 ^Esch. cont. Tim. p. 274. 3 Suid. s. v.
4 Aristoph. Plut. 153 sq. ; Av. 704 sq. ; ML ap. Suid. v. MeA^-ros.
6 Lucian. adv. indoct. 23. 6 iEsch. c. Tim., Or. Att. iii. 289.
7 ^Esch. 1. c. p. 801. 8 Ibid. p. 263.
PAIDERASTIA AMONG PHILOSOPHERS. 243
stranger, unless before witnesses.1 This extended even to phi-
losophers, who were fond of attracting beautiful youths, and
enticing them into such relations. Hence their reputation
generally was so bad in this respect, that, as Plutarch observes,2
parents commonly would not tolerate their children having any
acquaintance with philosophers. Parmenides, Eudoxus, Xeno-
crates, Aristotle, Polemo, Crantor, and Arcesilaus, are all spe-
cially pointed out as paiderasts, and the names of the youths
they were enamoured of are recorded. According to the state-
ment of Sextus,3 the Cynics and the heads of the Stoic sect
treated the love of boys as a thing indifferent. Even Zeno, the
founder of the Stoa, speaks with a Cynic hardness, as if it were
exactly the same, an adiaphoron, whether a man lived in im-
purity with a boy, or contented himself with the natural inter-
course with the other sex ;4 nay, it is told of him that he never
had connection with women, but always with beautiful youths.5
Cicero ridiculed the excuse, that this love of philosophers for
children and boys was not of a coarse and sensual kind. " Why,
then," he cries, "how does it happen that no one falls in love
with an ugly youth, or a handsome old man?" And he justifies
Epicurus for having spoken out as to the thoroughly carnal cha-
racter of this affection.6 Lucian expressed himself to the same
effect. " It was not souls, as philosophers pretended sometimes,
but bodies that were the objects of their tenderness;" and at
last he concludes with this distinction, that the marriage-bond
was made for all other men, but that philosophers might be in-
dulged in their passion for boys.7 " It is the beginning of vice to
bare the body among citizens."8 Such are the words in which
Ennius had, betimes, pointed to the practice of nudity in the
gymnasia and palaestrae, as the main source of the Greek vice we
are speaking of. Long before him, Plato himself had declared,9
that the perversion of the sexual instinct was a burden incurred
by all states in which the public exercises, with their indispens-
able nudity, were in practice.10 In many gymnasia and palaestrae
an altar was erected to Eros, which was the ordinary resort of
1 Plato, Synrpos. p. 183. 2 De educ. puer. 15.
3 Pyrrh. Hypot. iii. 24. 4 Ap. Sext. Emp. adv. Ethic. 190.
5 Athen. p. 563. 6 Tusc. iv. 33.
7 Amor. 51. t. v. p. 315, ed. Bip. 8 Tusc. iv. 34. 9 Legg. i. p. 636.
10 It is inconceivable how, in the face of such evidence, Oifr. Miiller (Dorians,
ii. 294) and Hock (Creta, iii. 118) can deny these facts.
244 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAT .
the paiderasts, and there his wings grew so large, to use Plu-
tarch's expression, that there was no longer any containing him.1
So when Polycrates would not endure these connections, he be-
gan with closing the gymnasia and palaestrae.2
Further, as a second main cause of the evil, we may add
the displacement of the relative position of the sexes, the de-
gradation of the woman, and the exclusion of the uninitiated
part of them from men's society. Wherever such a state of
things exists, the sensual instincts of the male are sure to de-
viate towards the younger and fairer portion of his own sex,
and the deviation once made will infallibly increase. Socrates,
speaking of Critobulus, takes for granted that there was no
one he spoke less to than his wife, evidently only because
such were the general habits, and he (Critobulus) confirms
this.3 Men and striplings, on the other hand, lived perpetually
together at the agora, in the syssitia, and hetairiai. The effect
then must have been such as we know it to have been among a
people so susceptible and sensual, and at the same time so ex-
citable and imaginative, as the Greeks. The careful tending and
strengthening of the body, with the continual use of rich meats
and strong wines, joined to idleness, the privilege of the free
Hellene, who would never consent to be a base mechanic, all con-
tributed their modicum to the evil. And from this unnatural
passion again there resulted a disinclination and aversion to the
marriage state, which was now generally considered a burden.
Plato and Plutarch both remark this feature of the times. The
former says, " It is not naturally, but only by the compulsion
of the law, that a man whose inclinations have been to youth
enters into the bonds of matrimony."4 But so soon as legal
compulsion, and the motive of patriotism, the procreation of
citizens and soldiers for the state, disappeared with the disso-
lution of the Greek republics, the evil of celibacy must have
developed to a terrible degree ; and one might be quite justified
in attributing the subsequent and lasting depopulation of Greece,
at least in part, to the baneful effects of this national vice.5
A variety of causes, however, were cooperating to bring
about a gradual decrease in the population. The larger propor-
1 Amator, p. 751. 2 Athen. xiii. 78.
3 Xen. (Econ. 12. * Plato, Sympos. 192; Plut. Amator, p. 751.
3 Zumpt on the State of Population in Antiquity, p. 14.
DECREASE OF POPULATION. 245
tion of the inhabitants of Hellas consisted, as we have before
mentioned, of slaves. The agricultural serfs were, indeed, mar-
ried, but not so the workers in the mines and manufactories.
As for house-slaves, they seem to have been allowed to marry
in Attica only, and there but partially. As the number of
female slaves in the towns was very hmuc the minority, and
of these again a considerable proportion were reserved for the
pleasure of freemen, — some in houses of prostitution, and some
as flute-players and concubines, — celibacy became a necessity
for most of the male slaves, inasmuch as there were no wives to
be found for them, even if their masters had allowed them to
marry. The medium price of a grown slave, able to work in
field or mine, was somewhere about two hundred florins ;l and
as the expense of rearing a slave child was much more con-
siderable than that of purchasing an able-bodied slave, the in-
terests of the master became an additional hindrance to the
propagation of the slave species.
Putting together, then, the mode of conducting warfare, the
incessant ravaging of countries, the destruction of fruit-trees,
and the consequent deterioration of the soil, the wide-spread
distaste for marriage, paiderastia, the condition of slaves, and
the means hereafter to be mentioned that were taken to diminish
the full number of children in families, one cannot forbear com-
ing to the conclusion that no people in history laboured more
obstinately than the Greeks at their own obliteration and ex-
tinction.
It is striking how few examples we find of a numerous family
among the Greeks, at least in the times succeeding to the Pelo-
ponnesian war. We hear of two, sometimes three, brothers
and sisters, — seldom more. Some of the older legislations had
indeed prohibited abortion by the mothers f yet the matter was
of such ordinary occurrence, that philosophers like Plato and
Aristotle formally approved and recommended it. ' ' If perchance
the custom of the place," says the latter, " is against the expo-
sition of newly-born children,3 abortion previous to the embryo
1 Dureau de la Malle, in the Mem. de l'Acad. des Inscr., nouv. se'r. xiv. 319.
2 Stob. Serm. lxxiv. lxi. and lxxv. 15.
3 Aristotle uses aTroriQecrdai— exposition in an out-of-the-way or unfrequented
spot, to allow of the child's perishing, — in distinction from enOeats, or the putting
out of a child to any one who would take it.
246 GREECE : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
receiving life and sensation must be resorted to, to prevent the
births being too numerous."1 It would seem that the ancients
were acquainted with means of obtaining such a result without
endangering the mother's life.2 And Hippocrates accordingly
tells us, with the utmost simplicity, of his having thus relieved
a woman to whom pregnancy had become burdensome.
The exposition of children had been always permitted in
Greece, and was termed " chytrism,"3 because an earthen vessel
was often used for the purpose. It was most ordinarily practised
in cases of weak and deformed children. In Sparta it was under
the superintendence of the state ; the elders of the family in-
spected the newly -born babe, and if it did not please them it
was carried into the chasms of Taygetus.4 In Athens, Solon is
said to have allowed the parents of the child to put it to death.5
The frequent mention of exposition in plays shows that it was
not of rare occurrence. According to iElian, Thebes formed
the only exception, and there the child whom its father refused
to bring up was sold by the magistrate to the highest bidder,
whose slave it then became. Plato adopted the prevailing cus-
tom in his Utopian republic. " Children born to wicked men,
misshapen, illegitimate, and of parents advanced in years, shall
be exposed, that the state be not burdened with them."6
Now for the evidence of a statesman like Polybius as to the
effects produced in Greece by this custom. " It is," he says,
"the unanimous opinion of all, that Greece now (in the first
period of the Roman rule, after the taking of Corinth) enjoys
the greatest prosperity j yet there is such a scarcity of popula-
tion, and the cities are so desolate, that the soil begins to lose
its fertility from want of hands to cultivate it. The reason is,
that men, even when they live in the married state, will not
bring their children up, and this because of their effeminacy,
love of comfort, and idleness ; at best they will only rear one
or two out of many, in order to leave them a good inheritance.
Hence the evil has been becoming gradually greater ; for when
war or sickness has snatched away the only child, the family
1 Ar. Pol. vii. 14. 10.
2 Barth. St. Hilaire makes this observation on the passage of Aristotle, p. 110.
3 Moeris Attic, p. 138 ; Hesych. s. v. 4 Pint. Lye. 10.
5 Sext. Emp. Hypotyp. p. 3, 24; Hermogen. de Inv. i. 1.
6 Rep. v. p. 400.
DETERIORATION OF GREEKS. 247
dies out, of course. This state of things/' he says, "is not to
be remedied by recourse to gods or oracles; men are able to
help themselves, and ameliorate it by adopting another practice,
and where they will not, the law should define that all children
who are born shall be brought up."1 The Greek mind, however,
did not change in this respect : no law was passed, and a couple
of centuries later, even after a long period, of repose and peace,
we have the pen of Plutarch to record what the results were.
In the times following the Peloponnesian war, the dark side
of the Greek character came out in stronger and clearer colours.
Cunning and cold ferocity in war, and interior political conflicts,
unrestrained sensuality and lust, greediness after gain in all
shapes, — these were the features that struck even a Greek in his
own nation, as also the Romans, their conquerors. Venality had
become so ingrained amongst them, according to Polybius,2 that
no one would do any thing gratis. King Philip, betimes, di-
rected with his gold the politics of the Greek states at his own
will, and to their own destruction. Scarce a man was to be
found who had not cheated and plundered the state when oppor-
tunity presented itself.3 For long the evidence of a slave, wrung
from him by torture, had more weight assigned to it with the
people than the testimony upon oath of a freeman.4 No one
trusted his neighbour in a matter of money or gain : witnesses,
hand-writing, nothing was binding enough.5 Greek honour,
Greek cupidity and lying, had become proverbial. Even the
excess of intemperance and wanton debauchery was nicknamed
" grecising" by the Romans.6 Pliny, in fine, designates the
Greeks as the inventors of every vice.7
1 Polyb. Exc. Vatic, ed. Geel, Lugd. Bat. 1829, p. 105 sq.
2 Polyb. xviii. 17. 3 jl^. y^ 5^
4 Demosth. pro Phano, 21 ; Anaxim. Khetor. xvi. 1.
5 Polyb. vi. 56 ; Cic. pro Placco, c. 4.
6 Cic. Verr. ii. 1. 26; Hor. Sat. ii. 2. 11. * Hist. Nat. xv. 5.
[ 248 ]
II. THE SOCIAL AND MORAL STATE OF THE
ROMANS.
1. Character of Roman Nationality — Roman Jus Privatum
— Strangers — Power of the Father of a Family.
We encounter 'here a nationality of power so intensive, and. of
energy so overwhelming, as to absorb and convert into its own
substance all the foreign material of people which it admitted
within its circle. In league with this energetic national system,
there appears a gigantic selfishness, to which nothing was want-
ing on the score of readiness for self-sacrifice and self-mastery
in the pursuit of the great object of world- empire. The Ptomans
mastered all other peoples, because they were always masters of
themselves first, and always preferred the final success and ag-
grandisement of the whole body, the state, to their own private
advantage, the pleasure, and the convenience of the individual.
Rome, as a military republic, excellently organised for the
purpose of sustained wars of conquest, was a school of citizens
habituated to strict discipline, obedience, and the privations of
a prolonged military service, and taught to look on all as light
and easy, for the sake of the one object, victory and conquest.
Thus the Roman national character developed in its profound
egotism, valuing each thing according to its fitness to the one
end with an obduracy as of steel, a patience never to be tired
out, a steadfastness in misfortune, and. a sober practical sound
sense.
The Romans were not, in reality, possessed by one simple
idea, for the propagation or realising of which they strained
every sinew ; it was not the universal acknowledgment and wor-
ship of the gods which they strove to spread. Far from sur-
rendering themselves to these gods of theirs as their property
and their instruments, they rather looked upon them as, by
quasi contract, their ministers, under obligation to point them
the way to dominion and the means of securing victory to their
side. For five hundred years they persisted in their labour of
world- conquest, with no other higher motive in view, with only
the instinct of being called to rule all nations, and thereby to
fulfil the destiny provided them by the gods and by fate. Their
whole history and action is exhausted in the two problems of
NATIONAL CHARACTER. 249
legal and political equality at home, and of world empire abroad.
The first of these, however, was never pursued at the expense of
the latter, and the exuberant fulness of vigour which filled the
veins of this people would assuredly have long before been sui-
cidally turned upon themselves and their own state, had not the
continual wars served as a diversion and safety-valve. Accord-
ingly one Roman was mostly the facsimile of the other. All
their distinguished men were of the same stamp. Individuality
was merged ; and the rich profusion of original characters which
Hellas had to exhibit, while they are all Greek every inch of
them, had no counterpart in Rome, nor was it till the last times
of the republic that there was any change in this respect.
Avarice and rapacity, however, early showed themselves to
be features of the Roman character. War was not conducted
only for honour's sake and the glory of conquest, but served
besides as a main source of gain for those who took part in it.
While there was a greater simplicity of manners and a stricter
frugality in private life, there were still always landed properties
as prizes for the increasing numbers of citizens to win. It was
indeed only at a later period that the genuine insatiate, all-ab-
sorbing greediness developed when fed by thoughtless profusion ;
but in order to recognise this feature in its original symptoms,,
one has only to cast a glance at the merciless iron laws against
debtors of the olden time, when almost every patrician house
was at the same time a prison, where poor plebeians, victims of
usurious interest and patrician cupidity, pursued their slavish
toil, the law " for their protection" allowing their chains not
to weigh more than fifteen pounds each,1 and authorising the
creditor to sell his insolvent debtor for a slave on the other side
of the Tiber.
Setting aside its wars and conquests, the Roman people only
accomplished one great enduring work, — a work, sooth to say,
of imperishable value and effect, namely, the creation of its Jus
privatum (or civil law of individuals), — a huge edifice that took
twelve hundred years to build, yet a work of one casting, unsur-
passed for temperate reasonableness, sharp-cut details of general
design, and logical consequence calculated with a mathematical
precision. Its foundations were laid in the keenest appreciation
of meum and tuum, the perfect grasp of the absolute and exclu-
i Gall. xx. 1.
250 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
sive notion of personal property ; while its starting-point was
that of " taking with the hand," or mancipatio, i. e. strength of
arm appropriating its booty. " What Romans take from their
enemies/' says Gaius, " that they hold, before all things, to be
their own property." l Such possession only gives a right, does
not involve an obligation : one may do what one likes with one's
own plunder ; the dominion over one's own is unlimited, requir-
ing no account to be given of the use made of it, so long as
there is no infringement on the property of others of equal right
with your own. Hence there was but one duty accompanying
this unconditional right, and that merely a negative one, " In-
jure no one." Whoever only does not interfere, against the
consent of others, in the province of their rights, is safe from
external assault : it is no matter how he uses his power, and
how he treats things or persons subjected to him, whether mo-
rally or immorally. This was the spirit and principle of the
Roman law; this sovereign action of the possessor might be
softened in its application to particular cases, by usage or the
prevalent public tone, and by the institution of the censorship,
subservient to both.
The Roman commonwealth in its aspect of individual right
thus became a vast institute for the security of private property.
This absolute and exclusive possession, this unlimited dominion
over property, dead as well as living, things as well as persons,
without reciprocity between property and proprietor, master and
servant, or father and children, formed the basis and soul of
Roman legislation.
The citizen, the active participant in state matters, and lord
and master of himself, enjoyed a far larger share of freedom in
Rome than in the Greek republics. That tight hold which the
Greek state laid on the whole life of its citizen, including even
his domestic relations, and that omnipotence of state, as Plato
himself has attempted to spiritualise it in his model republic,
was natural to the Greek ; the Roman was unacquainted with,
and would not have endured it. The foundation of personal
liberty, in the sense of a right and title to regulate oneself and
one's actions according to one's own standard within the limits
set down by law, is contained in the Roman law,2 though it did
1 Gains, iv. 16.
2 According to the definition, L. 3 pr. D. de statu hominum.
FREEDOM.
251
not receive its full extension till towards the close of the re-
public. As the Roman citizen shared in the government of the
state, shared in the powers of legislating and of judicial punish-
ment, and had a voice in the election of officers, and even in the
management of the police, it follows that the limitations imposed
by particular laws, which in certain cases and relations circum-
scribed his freedom, were self-imposed laws. Legislation, as
practised by the assembled citizens (and the practice was pre-
served, at least in theory, under the emperors) required no sub-
mission to another's will. Thus the Romans were actually the
first among whom the citizen (and he alone) gained the greatest
latitude for his own caprice, with a complete independence
of rights as regarded his person and his goods ; but to this
autocracy of self-will, acknowledging no duties collateral to
and curtailing his rights, or any reciprocity of action, was due
that selfish hardness in his character, which the Roman and his
law exercised against the vanquished, the debtor, and the poor.
A people with such law, and such liberty, was like a powerful
crushing machine, pursuing the ceaseless toil it was so thoroughly
fitted for, of imposing an iron yoke of domination on all the
other nations of the world.
Agreeably with the Roman view, or rather that of antiquity
generally, those who did not belong to the same state considered
one another as " hostes/' a name given to strangers by the Ro-
mans from the earliest times. Hence the law of the stronger
was the only one in existence between Romans and non-Romans,
where no special league or covenant of amity intervened : the
one party was entitled to subjugate the other, plunder its posses-
sions, and make its members into slaves.1 Accordingly " pere-
grini," for so strangers were called afterwards, had no claim in
Rome to legal protection, except in the case of a Roman patron
taking up the matter and making it his own, or of support from
a member of a Roman family with whom the stranger's house
had relations of hospitality. After the first Carthaginian war,
however, when the confluence of strangers to Rome became
greater, and it was her pride as well as her interest to become
one of the centres of the world's resort, matters were changed.
A new magistracy was created, that of the praetor peregrinus,
whose' tribunal was exclusively for strangers, and a Jus gentium
1 L. v. 2. D. xlix. 15.
252 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
formed to regulate the intercourse of peregrini one with the
other, and with the Romans. Yet they always remained, whe-
ther provincials or barbari, subject to great restrictions and dis-
advantages; were repeatedly banished the city; were allowed
neither connubium nor commercium, and were therefore inca-
pable of being testators or inheriting, or contracting a marriage
with the ordinary civil consequences. They were exposed to the
disgraceful punishment of scourging; and were excluded from
participation in Roman sacrifices, to many of which they were
not even admitted as spectators.1
Only as father of a family and master of a household the
Roman citizen became entitled to all the power which the legis-
lation conferred upon individuals, — a power that converted his
will into an absolute law for all the members of his household.
There was no difference, as far as law went, between the paternal
power over the children, that of the " manus" over the wife, the
master over the slave, and the dominion over movable property.
In his own house the Roman was despotic lord, neither con-
strained nor restrained by any thing beyond his own inclination,
and a regard to custom and public opinion. As father, he had
right of life and death over his children, and the cases of fathers
having their sons put to death are by no means of rare occur-
rence ; yet custom seems to have required that a family council
should be called before the act was perpetrated :2 several parents
exempted themselves from this restriction, and judged their
children without assessors. Alexander Severus was the first to
ordain that a father should take his son before a magistrate to
be tried, and not put him to death without a hearing.3 A father
could also sell his children, and the law of the twelve tables
decreed that a child should not be exempted from the paternal
authority till after the third sale, that is, after the first or se-
cond manumission by a purchaser he fell again into his father's
power.4 A married son, however, could not be sold, according
to a law attributed to Numa.5 In the earliest period probably
the sale of children was of frequent occurrence, but at a later
date custom and regard to public opinion considerably modified
this exercise of parental power.
1 Paul Diac. v. Exesto, p. 82. 2 Val. Max. v. 8 ; Plin. H. N. xxxiv. 4.
3 Cod. viii. 47. 3. 4 Ulp. x. 1 ; Gaius, i. 1 32 ; iv. 79.
5Plut. Numa, 37.
[ 253 ]
2. Women in Rome: Marriage — Aversion to and
Divorce from it.
The Romans, like the Greeks, regarded marriage as a contract
entered into for the sake of procreating, and for the education of,
children. Yet with them it was not devoid of a kind of sacred-
ness ; it was a covenant embracing the duration of the life of the
parties to it, and a community of joy and sorrow, together with
the mutual cares of education. The husband reserved nothing
to himself exclusively j on the contrary, the wife enjoyed her full
share in all her husband's possessions and rights, the religious
ones of sacrifice inclusive. Monogamy was expressly secured.
Every second marriage during the life of the parties to the first
was null, entailed infamy and the punishment of adultery through
the decree of the prsetor.
The position of the mother of a family by her husband's side
was an honourable and respected one ; she conducted the affairs
of the house, and had free access to her relations; but in the
case of the full and strict marriage, that contracted by the
" hand," she was entirely dependent on her husband, and was
under his " hand," in other words, completely in his power : for
in the earlier times the will of the father of the household ruled
the family with despotic authority, and with the right of life and
death. He could put his wife to death on the spot when sur-
prised in the act of adultery, and even when he caught her hav-
ing drunk wine ; and Egnatius Mecenius actually put his wife
to death for this reason, without having to answer for the act.1
The husband alone had the property; all the family earnings
were his. There were two safeguards with which the wife was
provided against the abuse of this power : one consisted in the
censorship, the office of which in old Rome was to preserve the
ancient customs, thus forming a salutary refuge for marriage,
and the position of the wife ; the other, in the husband being
bound by public opinion to exercise his authority over his wife
with the concurrence of her relations, at least in a matter
involving life and death.
There was also in existence from ancient times yet another
1 Serv. JEn. i. 737 ; Plin. xiv. 13.
254 HOME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
form of marriage, of less strictness, a marriage " without hand/'
in which the wife, if withdrawn from the domestic tyranny of
her husband, remained under her father's power or the guar-
dianship of her relations, and in possession of all her property,
dower excepted. But she was not any the freer in reality, for she
continued under the strict surveillance of her father or agnates ;
and a father could either demand the wife back from her hus-
band or divorce her from him. Yet the husband retained his
right of chastising his wife, in this kind of marriage too, which,
by the beginning of the empire, had already become the more
common form, and by degrees completely excluded the other.
Full marriage "with the hand" took place either by "co-
emption/' where the husband acquired his wife by an imaginary
sale, or by ' ' usus," on her having remained a full year uninter-
ruptedly with him. In case she spent three consecutive nights
of this time away from her husband's house, the father retained
his rights over his daughter, and the privilege of redemanding
her. The true old way, consecrated by religious solemnity, of
contracting a full marriage was " confarreation." This genuine
patrician nuptial rite, as giving a title to the priesthood, required
the presence of the pontifex maximus, the namen dialis, and ten
citizens as witnesses : what was, essentially, a kind of commu-
nion took place : the bride and bridegroom, after sacrifice offered,
being seated on the fleece of the victim, had the sacrificial cake
divided between them, and ate it with the accompaniment of a
solemn form of words.1 By the formula used for the occasion,
the espoused parties were united in the presence of the gods,
and their union placed under their protection. But this reli-
gious sealing of marriage became in time very inconvenient,
partly because a mistake might easily be made in the ceremonies,
which would oblige the repetition of the whole, and partly be-
cause women generally became more and more disinclined to the
strict form of marriage. Thus it came to pass, under Tiberius,
that there remained but three patricians to be found who were
issues of a marriage of confarreation, and who could as such be
eligible to the sacerdotal dignity of namen dialis.
If the account of Dionysius be literally correct,2 that not a
single divorce had taken place in Rome during a space of five
1 Ov. Fasti, i. 319 ; Tac. Ann. iv. 16; Caj. i. 112 ; Serv. ^En. iv. 374.
3 Dion. ii. 25.
divoiice. 255
hundred and twenty years, Carvilius Ruga being the first to
furnish a precedent for it, the Romans must be accorded the
meed of estimating the sacredness of the conjugal tie beyond all
the nations of antiquity. Still we must remember that as early
as 422 a.u.c, and therefore a century previous to this divorce of
Carvilius, a number of wives entered into a conspiracy against
their husbands, the most distinguished of whom died by poison ;
whereupon twenty married women were compelled to partake of
the poison which they had prepared, and died at the moment.
On further inquisition made, one hundred and seventy others
were discovered to have been implicated in the like guilt, and
were all sentenced to death. Also, fifty years after the divorce,
a number of wives, all of high rank, were involved in the abomi-
nations of the bacchanalia. These facts, betraying so profound
a corruption among the female sex and in the heart of domestic
life, make such a state of innocence, as could furnish no example
of divorce, both incomprehensible and incredible. In the year
447 there also occurs a case of repudiation on frivolous grounds,
which was punished by the censors ;x and according to the old
laws, the husband was allowed four grounds of divorce from his
wife, — poisoning, adultery, drinking, and the substitution of a
spurious child. But as such crimes were ordinarily punished
with death, under the sentence of the husband, conjointly with
the kindred of the wife, as assessors, it might easily happen that
at that time a formal divorce was of rare occurrence.2 The
wife, besides, had no right to sue for a divorce. We are justi-
fied, then, in maintaining, on these grounds, that, till the period
of the second Punic war, the popular voice and current of moral
feeling were against divorces as a general rule ; that they were
limited through censorial supervision; and that the husband
who arbitrarily repudiated his wife was punished in his property
and possessions. We must not, however, overlook the further
fact that a husband at all times was free to make what use he
chose of his female slaves. A marriage of confarreation was
dissolved by the ceremony of " diffarreatio ;" for as man may
not of himself, and of his own authority, separate what the
gods have joined together, a solemn act of religion was requi-
site to obtain their consent, and to make atonement for the
rupture of a bond religiously entered into. Diffareation was
1 Val. Max. ii. 0. 2. 2 Plin. xiv. 13 ; Plut, Num. coinp. 3.
256 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
performed by a priest, and was accompanied by lugubrious rites
and maledictions, that were probably meant to fall upon the
guilty partv. The marriage of the flamen dialis was indissoluble,
until Domitian allowed him too free right of divorce. To marry
again, or live in second marriage, was generally considered as
an unfavourable omen, at least in earlier times, which accounts
for the pontifex maximus and the sacrificial king not being per-
mitted to take a second wife j1 and therefore, too, it was dis-
creditable to a woman to take a second husband, only those
who had been but once married being allowed as pronuba, and
admitted to the worship of Pudicitia, Fortuna Muliebris, and
Mater Matuta.2
The case was different with the freer kind of marriage with-
out hand. Here the tie was always dissoluble at the option of the
wife's father, and, as was natural, of the husband too, and also
by mutual consent of both parties ; with the exception that, in
the old time, the censors animadverted upon frivolous divorces,
even in this instance, by fine or in other ways. After the second
Punic war the series of divorces was multiplied, and facilitated,
in rapid progression. The most trifling reasons were adequate
to the purpose, or served as a pretext. C. Sulpicius divorced his
wife because she had gone into the street without a veil; and
Q. Antistius Vetus his, for speaking confidentially in public to
one of his freedmen. P. Sempronius Sophus repudiated his wife
for going to the theatre without his knowledge;3 and Paulus
iEmilius, the conqueror of Perseus, put away his without assign-
ing a reason of any kind. And how stood matters with Cicero's
contemporaries? He himself separated from his first wife in
order to take a wealthier ; and from this second because she was
not sufficiently sorry for his daughter's death. The stern mo-
ralist Cato divorced his first wife, Atitia, who had borne him two
children, and gave up his second, Marcia, with her father's con-
sent, to his friend Hortensius, and wedded her again after his
death.4 Pompey put away Antistia in order to connect himself
with Sylla, whose stepdaughter, iEmilice, he espoused, and she
had first to be separated from her husband Glabrio, by whom she
was pregnant at the time. After her death he took Mucia to
1 Tertull. de Exh. ad Cast. 13; de Monog. 17 ; ad Uxor. i. 7.
2 Plut. Qusest. Kora. 105 ; Tac. Ann. ii. 86 ; Propert. v. 11. 36.
3 Val. Max. vi. 3. 10-12. 4 Plut. Cato Min. vii. 57.
MARRIAGE-ENACTMENTS OF AUGUSTUS. 257
wife, whom he divorced in like manner to enable him to marry
Caesar's daughter, Julia. Wives, on their part also, took to get-
ting divorced from their husbands, on no ground whatever but
their own fancy, though custom required of the wife to tolerate
her husband's debaucheries ;l and the sin of adultery in Rome,
as among other nations in general, was only laid upon the wife :
the only exception being when a husband seduced the wife of
another, in which case the man was regarded as the adulterer.
The disorders of nuptial and domestic life now increased
enormously. A kind of rivalry in impurity grew up between the
two sexes, and there were more seducers than seduced of the
female sex.2 At the Gallic triumph of Csesar, the cry of the
soldiers to the Roman citizens was, " Citizens, see to your wives ;
we are bringing you the bald gallant/'3 Augustus, censor for
life, as Caesar was, not only debauched other people's wives for
reasons of policy, as his friends said, to worm their husbands'
secrets out of the wives, but also despatched covered litters to
the houses of Romans of quality, to bring their wives to him
in his palace.4 His daughter, whom he exiled to an island for
her incorrigible debaucheries, used to spend the whole night
drinking in the public squares.5
And yet Augustus conceived the intention of arresting by
legal enactments the corruptions which had already assailed the
foundations of the state, and of restoring at least the semblance
of order in domestic life. If, on the one side, divorce and adul-
tery were the order of the day in Rome, on the other, celibacy
was making alarming advances, and through this every kind of
impurity and licentiousness was being multiplied in either sex
alike. The men dreaded to ally themselves and their fate to such
furies and insatiable prodigals as the women were, or soon be-
came ; the unfettered life of celibacy was far more to their mind.
Even in the better times of old, marriage had been regarded as
a necessary evil ; and, in the year 602, the censor Metellus had
gone so far as to say in public, " Could we but exist as citi-
zens without wives, we should all be glad to get rid of such a
burden ;"6 and now that all sense of patriotism had disappeared
along with the old constitution, the generality of Romans were
1 Plaut. Merc. iv. 6. ] sqq. 2 Drumann, Gesch. Roms, csi. 741.
3 Suet. Caes. li. * Dio. Cass. lvi. 43.
5 Dio. Cass. Iv. 10. « Gell. N. A. i. 6 ; Liv. Epit. 59.
VOL. II. S
258 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
very far removed from the notion of sacrificing their own com-
fort to the public good.
When, in the year 736 (b.c. 18), Augustus struck his first
legislative blow against celibacy, he encountered a strenuous
opposition ; and as the lavish expenditure and moral degeneracy
of the sex were pleaded as causes leading to the dislike of mar-
riage, he attempted first to reduce these evils. Female expendi-
ture was limited, women of rank were forbidden the stage, and
adultery was punished with deportation to an island and heavy
fines ; but the husband was deprived of the right of taking self-
satisfaction on the adulterer or his paramour, by putting them
to death.1 At last, he overcame the resistance made to his law
of marriage, the Lex Julia and Papia Poppsea, after being obliged
to soften it down considerably, and to allow its coming into ope-
ration to be frequently deferred. The law had for its basis the
principle, that all Romans, men or women, at maturity, were
under obligation to marry, and procreate children, males till
sixty, and women till fifty years old. The penalties were directed
against both celibates and childless couples (against the former
the heaviest of the two), and were sorely oppressive in a financial
point of view. On the other hand, married men with at least
three children, provided they had not married wives of damaged
reputation, were rewarded with many privileges, and exempted
from many burdens.2 Augustus also made an attempt to reduce
the frequency and facility of divorces by the introduction of an
established procedure, and the infliction of a pecuniary mulct
upon the guilty parties.
These laws, however, did not attain their object, or at least
had but a transient effect. Augustus indeed stood firm against
all demands made by whole classes for the repeal of the law, and,
even so, could not help frequently overlooking its evasion; and
it was just as often mollified by himself and his successors con-
ceding to childless or even unmarried persons the " rights of
those who had three children/' The advantages of celibacy and
barrenness outweighed the legal disadvantages. Instead of prodi-
gal sons, anxiously awaiting their father's decease, an unmarried
man had his devoted adherents, and was loaded with adulations
and presents from all who hoped for a share in his succession.
1 Dio. liv. 2.
2 Ulpian, xvi. 1 ; Juven. ix. 80 ; Tac. Ann. iii. 28, ii. 51, xv. 19 ; Dio. liii. 13.
SLAVERY IN ROME. 259
" In our state," says Seneca, " the being without children brings
more of favour with it than it destroys, advancing old people to
power, so that many fall out with their children, repudiate them,
and make themselves out childless." 1 Pliny gives utterance to
the same remark, that many felt their children to be a burden,
while the advantages of being without them were so great.2
Equally ineffectual were the attempts to impede and diminish
divorces, the remedies resorted to being, in fact, thoroughly in-
adequate. By enacting that the husband should restore his
injured wife's dower, or that the guilty wife should forfeit the
eighth, or sixth, part of it, but few could be induced to continue
in a relation that had become either burdensome or intolerable.
u There is not a woman left," says Seneca, " who is ashamed of
being divorced, now that most of the high and distinguished
ladies count their years, not by the consular fasti, but by the
number of husbands, and are divorced in order to marry, and
marry in order to be divorced."3
3. Slavery in Rome.
The slave in Rome was a chattel and a possession, had no
individuality or " caput •" whatever he earned belonged to his
master, and he might be made a present of, lent, pawned, or
exchanged. His union with a wife was no marriage, that is, was
devoid of all its privileges and effects, and only a contubernium,
or cohabitation. A master might torture or kill his slave at
will ; there was no one to prevent his doing so, or to bring him
to account. The modes of torture and punishment were various
and cruel, and the ordinary punishment of death was crucifixion.
Every thing was allowable and privileged as against a slave.
There was nothing a master could not do, and a great deal that
any freeman could. Insult, ill-treatment, and violence, gave even
the master of the slave who had been subjected to them no action
or remedy against the free oppressor.
The numerous female slaves in personal attendance on their
mistresses were often obliged to perform their various services
with shoulders and bosom bare, that their nudity might intensify
1 Consol. ad Marc. c. 19. 2 Epist iv. 15; cf. ii. 20.
3 De Benef. iii. 16.
260 ROME : SOCTAL AND MORAL.
their feelings of pain.1 One cruel infliction, and not unfrequently
resorted to, was chaining to a block of wood, which served the
poor sufferer for a seat, and which she had to drag about with
her day and night. This was the ordinary meed of such as had
provoked the jealousy of their mistress.2
Slaves in the country, who had to till the ground, were chained
by the foot, and kept at night in an ergastulum, or underground
room.3 Terrible was the fate of such as endeavoured to escape
ill-treatment, either in city or country, by flight. The tracking
and recapture of runaway slaves formed a trade of its own, that
of the fugitivarii.4 Recovered slaves were branded on the fore-
head, and their sum of ill-treatment and labour doubled ; or, in
case the master was indifferent to the life of his slave, he was
thrown to the wild-beasts in the amphitheatre.5 In order to
escape the cruelty of their masters, many offered themselves in
their despair to fight in the arena with the beasts, or as gladia-
tors, and yet were restored to their masters afterwards.6.
The conduct of the elder Cato, that brilliant example of Ro-
man virtue, may supply us with groundwork for a picture of the
merciless treatment dealt out to these " souled instruments."
To him there was no difference between the beast and the slave,
except that the latter as a reasoning being was held accountable.
That his view was the genuine Roman one is proved by the old
Roman legislation, which inflicted the punishment of death for
killing a plough-ox, while the murderer of a slave was called
to no account whatever.7 Cato, too, was in the habit of selling
his slaves, or expelling them the house, when old age rendered
them useless. He had them trained like dog or horse, and
allowed them to couple in order that they might breed. To
prevent their mutinying, he sowed dissension and enmities
amongst them ; their least transgressions were visited with an
ample return of chastisement, and no sparing of executions ; and
his credit stood so low for merciful dealing, that a slave hung
1 Juv. vi. 475 sqq. ; Martial, ii. GO ; Ovid, de Art. Am. 235-243 ; Amores, i. 14,
13-18.
2 Juv. ii. 57.
3 Colum. i. 8. 16 ; Seneca de Ira, iii. 32 ; Plin. H. N. xviii. 3.
4 There was no asylum in Rome where a slave could take refuge, as at Athens ;
so he was almost sure to he caught again, sooner or later.
5 Gell. v. 14. 6 Dig. xi. 4. 5.
7 Colum. vi. praef. 7.
TREATMENT OF SLAVES. 261
himself who had not done what he was bid by him.1 The same
Cato made a traffic of his fellow-men under a disguised name. His
slaves were ordered to buy and train boys, whom he sold again.
The proverb, " As many slaves a man has, so many are his
enemies/' was a universal one. " They are not our enemies/'
Seneca replied, "but we make them such/' and he describes
the mode. " The unhappy slave (in his master's presence) is
not free to move his lips, even for speaking. Whispering is
silenced with the rod : even accidental acts, like coughing,
sneezing, or hiccuping, meet with the same retribution. Every
sound to break the silence has a heavy penance attached to it :
they have to continue the whole night through fasting and
dumb ; — we abuse them, in fact, not as if they were men, but
beasts of burden."
As it seldom happened any crime was committed without the
aid or privity of slaves, their masters had often urgent grounds
for putting such dangerous witnesses out of the way, or making
them incapable of doing harm. Cicero mentions the case of a
slave being crucified, but not till he had had his tongue cut out
to prevent his betraying his mistress.2 Martial records a similar
case of a master cutting his slave's tongue out, and alleging it
had been done by others.3 If a slave murdered the master of
the house, all his fellows under the same roof were doomed to
die. Thus, when Pedanius Secundus was assassinated under Nero,
four hundred slaves were executed for not preventing the mur-
der.4 There were instances of masters having their slaves' hands
cut off, or ordering them to be thrown to feed the mursense in
the fish-pond, for breaking a vase. Augustus, who had himself
saved a slave of Vedius Pollio from this punishment, ordered
Eros, his steward,5 to be crucified on the mast of his ship, for
having roasted and eaten a quail of his that had been trained for
the quail-pit, and had won many mains.
The slave-merchant made his purchases from armies after
battle, pirates, or even in the slave's own country and home. He
then exposed them for sale in the cities upon a wooden scaffold.
They all had tablets round their necks, stating the particulars of
their health and freedom from blemishes. The fairest and finest
1 Pint. Cat M. x. 21 ; Plin. H. N. xviii. 8. 3.
2 Cic. pro Cluent. 66. 3 Epig. ii. 82.
* Tac. xiv. 42-45. 5 Plut. Apophth. vi. 778, Pteisk.
262 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
slaves were to be found at the taberna of the merchant, where
they had to strip themselves at the request of purchasers.1 Asia
was the great supplier of slaves : Syrians, Lydians, Carians,
Mysians, Phrygians, and, above all, the vigorous, large-limbed
Cappadocians, were purchased in troops at Rome. Accident has
furnished us with a notion of the way in which these people
became slaves. When Marius, at the command of the senate,
required Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, to supply his contingent
of auxiliary troops, the king replied he had no subjects fit for ser-
vice, for nearly all his able-bodied men had been carried off by
Roman collectors of customs, converted into slaves, and dispersed
among the different provinces.2 Slaves from Gaul and Germany
were chiefly employed in field-labour. All the issue of female
slaves, besides, were slaves-born, and belonged to the master of
the mother, whoever the father might be. Thus it must have
frequently happened that a brother was the slave of his brother.
The rich employed one slave only in one office, and the same
duty was often performed by several. There were atrienses for
the hall ; cubicularii for the sleeping apartments ; secretarii
for letters; lectors, introductors, nomenclators, dispensators or
stewards, bath-attendants, cooks, tasters, letter-carriers or tabel-
larii, litter-bearers, grooms, &c. The porters were chained, like
watch-dogs. The mistress of the house had her own suite of
slaves of both sexes ; and as for city slaves, no less than 120
different officials and duties were reckoned up. Many of them
never saw their master at all, or had any acquaintance with
him ;3 and many masters must have had a slave for the sole
purpose of telling him the names of his slaves at need. There
were also silentiarii, to maintain silence and order among the
throng.4 Some rich people possessed as many as 20,000 slaves,
the majority of whom, as might be expected, were field-labourers.5
Crassus had so many, that his company of architects and carpen-
ters alone exceeded 500 head. Scaurus was master of more than
4000 urban slaves, and as many country ones. In the time of
Augustus, a freedman died, leaving 4116 slaves, and that after
suffering considerable losses in the civil wars. When the wife
1 Suet. Octav. C!) ; Pers. vi. 77 sqq. ; Mart. ix. CO.
2 Diod. Fragm. xxxvi. 3. 1. 3 Petron. 37.
4 Sen. Ep. 47 ; Fabretti, Inscr. p. 206 ; Salvian de Gub. iv. 3.
* Sen. de Vita beata, 17; Plin. H. N. xxxiii. 1.
SLAVE-LAW. 263
of Apuleius left the smaller portion of her country villa to her
son, 400 slaves were found upon it. A number of slaves was a
principal evidence of wealth in the possessor : hence they formed
part of a bride's dower. A law of Augustus, to limit testamen-
tary emancipation, forbade a master to set free more than a fifth
of his slaves, and fixed one hundred males as a maximum to ma-
numission at one time, which proves that 500 male slaves was
not an unusual number in a household. Horace seems to have
accounted ten as the lowest number admissible to be kept by a
person of means, and will not tolerate the praetor Tullius coming
into Rome from his country house with but five slaves.1 Many
slaves, however, of the higher class had slaves of their own, or
had deputies called vicarii.
In Rome, as well as in Greece, the deposition of a slave was
not admissible in a court of justice except after torture ; only
in Rome no slave could lay information, or give evidence, against
his master, a few cases excepted. Yet slaves were tortured, to
get a favourable testimony out of them for a master on his trial ;
and the same was done to stranger slaves, to obtain evidence
from them against an accused person, whose property they were
not.2 If it were the case of misdemeanour, a crime committed
by a slave himself, torture was ordinarily in requisition.3 In the
time of the emperors, however, slaves were frequently tortured
for evidence against their masters.4
It is in vain one looks for any thing like common human feel-
ing in the Roman slave-law of republican times and that of the
earlier empire. The breaking-up of slave families was entirely
in the hands of the merchant or the owner j husband might be
separated from wife, and mother from children, all dispersed and
sold off into the houses of strangers and foreign towns. Slavery
is equivalent to death in the eye of the civil law, which does not
admit the existence of the slave;5 which entirely avoids and annuls
the contract of a master with his slave;6 gives the slave no action
at law against him ;7 admits not of adultery being committed by
or with one of them ;8 makes over all a slave's earnings to his
1 Sat. i. 3. 12, G. 107 sqq.
2 Tac. Ann. iii. 67; Paull. v. 16. 2 sqq. 3 Paull. v. 16. 1 ; Cod. h. t. 15.
4 Abundant testimony on all these points is to be found in Wasserschlefen de
Qua?st. per Torment, ap. Eom. (Berlin, 1837), pp. 18 sqq., 35, 78 sqq.
5 Dig. xxxv. 1. 50. 6 Ibid. 1. 17. 32.
7 Cod. ii. 14. 13. 8 Dig. xlviii. 5. 6.
264 ROME I SOCIAL AKD MORAL.
master; and compels female slaves to surrender themselves to
their master's lust against their will :l — such were the dominant
principles of the Roman slave-law. Even in the imperial time,
the sick or infirm slave, who had become useless or burdensome
to his master, was exposed on an island in the Tiber to pine away
there, — an abuse afterwards prohibited. The emperor Claudius
allowed his freedom to an infirm slave2 dismissed by his master ;
an ordinance indeed which proved in most cases of no benefit at
all to the unlucky wretch ; for what could he gain, ill and help-
less as he was, from the boon of freedom ? Hospitals there were
none. Vegetius too observes, such used-up slaves as masters
were in a hurry to get rid of, were sold for a ridiculously small
sum, not equal to that of a beast of burden. Almost the only
trace of protection afforded to slaves occurs in the earlier times,
when the censorship was in activity as a guardian of public
morals; and then the master who treated his slaves with ex-
cessive cruelty, or suffered them to die of hunger, was visited
with censorial penalties.3
In the imperial time, the lot of the slave was in one respect
aggravated, as torture was more frequently resorted to then than
before, in order to induce the slave to compromise his master by
his admissions. But in another respect there were considerable
alleviations introduced. As long as the Romans framed their
own laws, they had no thought of curtailing despotic dealings
of the owner with his slaves ;4 but when obliged to accept them
from imperial masters, the Lex Petronia made its appearance,
interdicting the sale of slaves for the combat with beasts with-
out approbation from competent authority.5 This prohibition
was extended by degrees to putting a slave to death, or making
a eunuch of him, at will.6 The praetor urbanus could inter-
fere in cases of savage treatment, or starving a slave to death
through the avarice of the master.7 And then asylums for slaves
were introduced ; and one who had taken refuge there from the
cruelty of his master might be sold by the magistrate to another.
Augustus and Tiberius had previously ordered visitations of the
ergastula, into which it sometimes happened freemen had been
1 Sen. Controv. v. 3:5. " Suet. CI. 25.
3 Dionys. Fragni. xx. 1, ed. Maii. 4 Dig. 1. 17. 32.
5 Dig. xlviii. 8. 11. 6 Spart. Hadr. 18 ; Suet. Domit. 7.
7 Sen. de Benef. iii. 22.
SLAVES AND GLADIATORS. 265
thrust, and compelled to hard labour.1 Hadrian, who did the
most of all the emperors for the general alleviation of slavery,
suppressed these subterranean dungeons entirely f and yet they
still continued to exist in many places.
Slavery was spread over the whole face of heathendom, and
found in Gaul and Germany as well as in Rome ; but the insti-
tution of gladiators was peculiar to the latter, nor was there any
exhibition of the kind elsewhere. Compulsory combats of these
unfortunates were first established by private persons, as mor-
tuary games ; but in the last century of the republic became
public amusements, forming part of the state expenditure, and
therefore under the care of the sediles, which made their celebra-
tion periodical and fixed. Rich and distinguished individuals
still indeed kept them up in honour of their dead at their private
charges, but principally with a view to win popular favour. The
number of combatants went on increasing. A lucrative trade
was pursued by the lanistae, who had the training of the slaves
as gladiators, let them out to hire, and otherwise trafficked with
them. Most of the powerful Romans maintained troops of gladi-
ators, who at the same time served them as a body-guard in
several instances. The fashion set by Rome now grew conta-
gious. Schools (ludi) for gladiators arose in many places, and a
passion for the sanguinary scenes of the arena possessed the in-
habitants of all the cities of importance. Perseus had introduced
them betimes into Macedonia ;3 and Herod Agrippa, in Judaea,
made seven hundred couple fight in one day.4 The people of
Pollentia, in Liguria, would not allow the body of a centurion to
be buried until his heirs paid down a certain sum for a combat
of gladiators.5 In Greece, too, the same exhibitions were given,
at Athens and Corinth, and in Thasos.6 Amphitheatres were
built every where. Emperors were zealous in procuring them-
selves and the people these gratifications ; for which the day no
longer sufficed, the combat being prolonged by torchlight. Caesar
once brought 320 pair of gladiators into the arena ;7 but Trajan
on one occasion had 10,000 slaves engaged together, and pro- -"
longed the massacre 123 days.8 For a change, the Roman people
1 Suet. Oct. 32 ; Tib. 8. 2 Spart. Hadr. 18.
3 Liv. xli. 21. 4 Joseph. Ant. Jud. 15. 8, xix. 5.
5 Suet. Tib. 37. 6 Luc. Demon. 57 ; Orelli, Inscr. 256L
7 Suet. Dom. 4. 8 Dio. Cass, lxviii. 15.
266 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
enjoyed the baiting of wild-beasts, in which the bestiarii, for the
most part condemned slaves, engaged lions, leopards, tigers, and
other animals, which they had to face naked and weaponless, and
sometimes actually chained together.1 Or there were naval com-
bats (naumachise), for which great reservoirs had to be excavated,
and in these thousands were killed, or perished in the water, at
a time, in one sham fight. Gladiators were selected from the
strongest prisoners or slaves, Thracians, Gauls, Germans, or Sar-
matians. At the leading schools of Ravenna, and in Campania,
they were practised in different modes of fighting, and by that,
as weU as by variety of armour, a kind of relief to the monotony
of carnage was obtained. In return for the abundant food which
the lanista provided them with, they swore to suffer themselves
to be burnt, fettered, and killed by the sword f and after living
months and years in daily intercourse,3 they were necessitated to
murder one another, like mortal foes, to please the spectators.
Conspiracies, risings, and executions en masse of slaves, draw
one continuous track of blood through the later Roman history.
Under Eunus in Sicily, and Spartacus in Lower Italy, slave armies
were formed of enormous magnitude ; Cleon and Eunus having
200,000 fighting men under their orders at a time. They all
at last fell, to a man. The struggle was murderous beyond all
precedent, and the revenge such as was to be expected from Ro-
mans. Crassus, the conqueror of Spartacus, had crosses erected
the whole length of the route from Capua to Rome, on which
10,000 slaves were executed.4 In the civil wars both parties
strengthened themselves by arming their slaves ; and Augustus
lauded himself, on the Ancyran monument, for having delivered
to their masters for execution (in violation of his parole) 30,000
slaves who had fought for Sextus Pompeius.
Only a kind of approximation can of course be made to the
relative numbers of slaves and freemen ; the provinces of the
empire certainly varied considerably in this point. For example,
there were probably many fewer slaves in Egypt than in Gaul.
Wherever Roman colonies were planted, their numbers were
always peculiarly large. In Rome herself the proportion of
slaves was at the largest; but the calculations differ widely.
1 Cic. pro Sest. G4 ; Ep. ad Quin. fr. ii. C.
2 Sen. Ep. 37. 3 Sen. cle Ira, ii. 8.
4 Plin. Ep. x. 38, 39.
EFFECTS OF SLAVERY. 267
Blair1 supposes the number of freemen and slaves to have been
nearly equal, between the expulsion of the kings and the de-
struction of Carthage ; but that from the fall of Corinth to
Alexander Severus (146 b.c. to 222 a.d.), the slaves were three
to one. On the other hand, Dureau de la Malle2 maintains the
proportion of slaves to free men to have been as one to twenty-
five in 476 b.c, and in 225 b.c. to have been as twenty-two
to twenty-seven, counting in peregrini. Zumpt holds Bunsen's
numbers to be far too low, when he puts the slave population of
Borne in the year 5 b.c. at 650,000, and would himself count
two slaves for one freeman.3 With greater certainty it may be
affirmed, that male slaves exceeded female four to one ; and as no
slave could intermarry with a free citizen, it is evident that to at
least four-fifths of the males a contubernium even with a female
slave was rendered an impossibility. It is not necessary to
enlarge upon the depth of the abyss of destruction we gain a
glimpse of from this one relation.
4. Effects of Slavery on the free Population — Poverty —
Exposition of Children — Decreasing numbers of them
— Paiderastia — Courtesans — Corruption of the Female
Sex.
Slavery in Rome, as well as in Greece, was one of the main
causes of the prevailing moral corruption, and of progressive
decay. The Roman law, by its distinction between a novice and
a veteraD slave, furnishes a test of the operation of servitude on
the slaves themselves in Rome. A slave who had been in service
a year or more was a veterator, and an experienced hand, and
therefore of proportionately less value ; for, says the code, it is a
very hard task to mend one who has been in use, and to fit him
for the service of a fresh master. For this reason, the slave-
merchant would often pass off a veterator as a novetius. Thus
we see one year of slavery was enough to corrupt a man, so as
to lower his value considerably, like any other second-hand
article.4
1 Inquiry into the State of Slavery among the Eomans, Edin. 1830, pp. 10, 15.
2 Econom. polit. des Komains, i. 270 sqq.
3 Ueber den Stand der Bevolkerung, p. 60. 4 Dig. xxxix. 4. 16, § 3.
268 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
If the masters ruined their slaves, the slaves, on their part,
were the most influential agents in the moral corruption of their
masters. As a consequence of this reciprocity of evil, Rome,
and all the towns, were thronged with people devoid of all mo-
tives of morality, and whose only duty was unconditional obedi-
ence to their owners. They were mostly influenced by one fear,
that of corporal punishment; and while accustomed to see them-
selves employed in all that was shameful and degrading to a
human being, they nevertheless came frequently into contact
with the mistress of the house and children of the family, as also
with freemen out of the house. Being composed of every va-
riety of nations, eastern and western, they formed a company to
which each member contributed, as it were, the failings and
vices of his own country and race, as to a huge capital of human
depravity, each imparting to the other the species of debauchery
to which he was as yet a stranger. The frequency of manumis-
sion enabled these fellows, who had often grown gray in the
school of every vice common to slaves, to mix without restraint
among free people, and to swell the complement of the half-
extinct citizen body. They brought with them for their portion,
from their former class to their new one, an ingrained propensity
to lying and deceit, that had become a second nature to them ;
and renouncing every spring and rule of moral action, they
became mere blind tools of others' wills, or rushed as blindly to
the satisfaction of their own lusts, living like parasites upon the
rich, and as indolent consumers of the public exchequer. It was
the lucky and wealthy adventurers of their body who supplanted
the patrician families, decayed in fortune through their vices
and the civil wars. Tacitus puts into the mouth of a speaker in
the time of Claudius the confession that the greater part of the
knights, and very many senators, derived their descent from
freedmen j1 while, by the time of Nero, these liberti formed the
main stock of tribe, curia, and cohort.
Already, by the time of the Gracchi, we find slavery exercis-
ing a baneful influence on the free population of Italy outside
the towns, who were capable of bearing arms. Great people,
with their swarms of agricultural slaves, exempted from military
service, oppressed the small landed proprietors and free labour-
ers : from this arose that vast agglomeration of property called
1 Ann. xiii. 27.
EFFECTS OF SLAVERY ON THE FREE. 269
the latifundia, and nothing but slaves were to be met with for
large tracts of country. The free population disappeared. The
plebeian, as possessor, found himself driven out of his patrimonial
acres, and as tenant from the lands of the state, and, at last,
excluded from all agricultural pursuits whatsoever.1 By de-
grees people found it more comfortable and profitable to change
plough-land into pasture; and then on the spot where an in-
dustrious and free race of tillers of the soil had settled, and
formed the training-school of Roman legions, there wandered a
bondsman or two watching his flocks and herds. Thus was
obliterated the Italic peasant, the stoutest prop of the gigantic
empire of Rome. Where once Cincinnatus ploughed, there were
now gangs of chained and branded slaves to be seen, and ergas-
tula cumbered the ground once occupied by populous hamlets :
the soil, according to the expression of Columella, was handed
over to the refuse of the Roman slaves as to a hangman.2 Italy
became sterile, and dependant on foreign lands ; and Africa and
Sicily had to contribute their corn-harvests, Cos and Chios, Spain
and the Gauls their vintage.3
The population, expelled the country, streamed into the
towns, principally into Rome, whither the charm of public lar-
gesses of corn and money attracted them,4 and where every one
could traffic with his vote. The oligarchy of the wealthy grew
more and more contracted ; till a consul, Lucius Philippus, could
say, in an harangue to the people, there were not two thousand
citizens in Rome who possessed means of their own.5 In fact,
there was no class of free artisans well-to-do in Rome ; for trade
was looked down upon there too, though the repugnance to, and
disrepute of, handicraft was not so great as it was in Greece.
Still the Romans did not acknowledge any other manual em-
ployment than agriculture as respectable : Cicero pronounced
all mercenary trades to be sordid and degrading, where the re-
muneration was paid for the labour and not the art. According
to him, all mechanics pursued an illiberal craft, as a workshop
could never be beseeming a freeman's dignity. Hence all petty
retail trades were classed by him in the same category: only
1 Hor. Od. ii. 18. 23 sqq. ; Sail. Jug. 41 ; Sen. Ep. xc. 38 ; Quintil. Declam. 13.
2 Colum. i. praef. 3.
3 Varro de K. R. ii. pra?f. 3 ; Colum. i. prsef. 20 ; Tac. Ann. iii. 54.
4 App. Bell. Civ. ii. 120. 6 Cic. de Off. ii. 21.
270
ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
architecture, medicine, commerce on a large scale, and teaching,
could respectably be pursued by certain classes of men.1
Hence the confluence of slaves must have contributed further
to the freeman's aversion to labour. Wealthy people, from the
number of slaves they had working for the house, could dispense
almost entirely with free labour and free products. The larger
slave -masters, besides, found it advantageous to buy up young
slaves and have them educated to a trade, on which they might
employ themselves on their master's account, or as hired serv-
ants. It was thus the sturdy, industrious, middle class was lost
to Rome; the free population consisted of proletarii, living in
republican times by the sale of their votes, and under the em-
perors upon the public distributions of money and corn ; de-
graded and demoralised, they were despised by the rich, and
assimilated more and more to slavery. Their rulers attempted
to remedy the evil. Caesar compelled twenty thousand families
to leave the city and devote themselves to tillage. Eighty
thousand men he sent from Rome over sea to distant colonies,
and thus reduced the number of applicants for largesses from
three hundred and twenty thousand to one hundred and fifty
thousand.2 Augustus and the best of his successors took pains
to induce the free to return to labour in the city as well as the
country ; and yet Augustus was obliged to admit two. hundred
thousand citizens to share in the sportula.3 The Roman people
was, through slavery, diminished, depraved, and utterly changed
in its heart's core. The genuine plebeian stock had in reality
ceased to exist. Already, by 150 b. c, Scipio iEmilianus had
taunted the grumbling populace with the assurance that he
should never tremble before those whom he had himself brought
in chains to Rome.4 It was not the latifundia, as Pliny thought,
but slavery that had ruined Italy : had the latifundia been peo-
pled by free tenants, the consequences would have been dif-
ferent. But the slaves on the estates drove the free people
into the towns, where, instead of founding families, they mostly
died out in a short time, for the inclination to celibacy went
on increasing, till, under Augustus, the number of unmarried
1 De Off. i. 42. The opposition is between sordidi qurestus, sordid re artes,
and ingenuse.
2 Suet. Cres. xli. 42; Dio. Cass, xliii. 21.
3 Dio. Cass. lv. 10. 4 Val. Max. vi. 11.
EXPOSITION OF INFANTS. 271
citizens in Rome far exceeded that of the married.1 And this,
indeed, was the case with the slaves too, who were still more
speedily made away with by bad treatment, inferior food, un-
wholesome dwellings, and severe labour ; but they were easily
replaced by continual reinforcements from all quarters of the
globe.
Besides the prevailing disgust for marriage, there was yet
another impediment to the growth of population, namely, the
frequent exposition of new-born children. It was quite at the
father's option whether he would educate his offspring, or cast
it away and leave it to perish. The old Romulean code only
allowed of the exposition or murder of the infant in the case of
malformation, and then under the inspection of neighbours ; a
law holding as to all males and to the first-born daughter.2
How long this law continued in observance is uncertain ; in
later times it was quite effete. Paulus the jurist, under the
emperors, admits the right of the father to put his children to
death immediately on their birth without limitation; and, in
fact, exposition was the ordinary practice of the day. Thus Sue-
tonius records that the day of the death of Germanicus was
signalised by exposition of children born upon it, as one of the
proofs of the general sorrow.3 Tacitus quotes, with a side-blow
at the malpractice of the Romans, the Jews and Germans as
considering it a crime with them not to rear all their children.4
Even Augustus, who made such marked efforts against the
causes tending to diminish population, not only did nothing to
check so shameful and immoral a custom, but actually sanctioned
it by his own example, when he ordered the child born to his
granddaughter Julia after her banishment to be exposed.5
Tertullian expresses himself strongly and freely upon this
vice. " How many" — (he is speaking to the Roman people) —
" how many are there among you, and they, too, in the magis-
tracy, who put an end to your children (by exposition) ? You
deprive them of the breath of life in water, or you suffer them to
die of cold or hunger, or to be eaten by dogs." And in another
work, " The laws, indeed, forbid your taking the lives of your
newly-born children, but never was law so little heeded, or set
1 Dio. Cass. lvi. 1. 2 Dionys. ii. 15.
3 Calig. 5. 4 Hist. v. 5 ; Germ. 19.
5 Suet. Oct. 65.
272 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
aside with such indifference .'n This also happened not unfre-
quently, as Tertullian himself observes, under the hope that a
passer-by would pick the child up and educate it. The lanistse
were in fact allowed to appropriate the males whom they found
exposed, and to bring them up as gladiators. The female chil-
dren, however, were the most frequent victims ; and there were
women every where on the look-out for the poor creatures to
make a profit of them, when grown up, by their prostitution.
Justin remarks, "This was not only practised in the case of
female children, but that men, eager for gain, reared males,
whom they found exposed, in order to their future prostitution."
Thus, then, it came about, as Minucius expresses it, that father
or mother unwittingly fell into incestuous commerce with their
own children.2 Not unfrequently these infants fell into the hands
of men who disfigured and maimed them, with a view to associate
them with themselves in the vocation of mendicants.3
Exposition was by no means so common amongst the higher
classes. These, like the Greeks, made use of ascertained means
of abortion in the womb, which were compression of the embryo,
or medicaments; and there were women, as Juvenal expressly
tells us, who committed child-murder for hire,4 i. e. made a trade
of procuring abortions. And this was so frequent, that the same
poet asserts there were hardly any women of rank who were
brought to bed. Not seldom was the crime committed out of
mere weakness and coquetry, the women being afraid of the
pains of child-birth, and the detriment to their figure and com-
plexion. The children so lost were readily supplied by found-
lings, of whom there was no scarcity.5 Matters must have been
carried to a great length, if Seneca could claim as a special dis-
tinction for his mother, Helvia, that she had never destroyed the
hopes of motherhood in her womb, after the fashion of other
vain women.6 It is true, a woman could have been banished,
according to the law, for causing her child's death by abortion
against the father's will ;7 but it is well known how easy it was
for wives, with the help of their female attendants, to deceive
their husbands on this score. The average number of children,
1 Tert. Apol. 9, ad nationes, 15. Here he is alluding to the above-mentioned
law of the twelve tables.
2 Octav. xxx. 31. 3 Sen. Controv. x. 4. 4 Sat. vi. 592 sqq.
5 Juv. vi. 602. 6 Consol. ad Helv. 16. ? Dig. xlviii. 8. 8.
INFLUENCE OF PAIDERASTIA. 273
issues of Roman marriages, is a sufficient test of the state of
a family, and of the means that must have been resorted to.
Among Christian people the average issue of a marriage is four
or five ; but in Rome the law granted to the father of three living
children exemption from all the personal burdens of state, while
the six children of Germanicus passed for an extraordinary
instance of fecundity. Five children to a marriage was con-
sidered an exceptional case among the higher ranks. Not one
of the Roman emperors left a numerous family, and many died
childless. It has been observed before this,1 that the authors of
the early imperial times, though living a married life in obedi-
ence to the lex Papia Poppsea, yet remained without issue : thus
Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus, Seneca, the two Plinys,
Suetonius, Tacitus. Martial, in one of his epigrams, sues Do-
mitian for the jus trium liberorum in his own favour, and, in
the succeeding one, takes leave of his wife, as having no more
use for her.2
We are obliged here to revert again to the vice of paiderastia ;
for though the spread of it was not so great, nor its effects ruin-
ous in such a wide circle as among the Greeks, yet it had no
small share in the accumulative destruction of society, as having
struck deep root into the Roman empire, and tainted every
social relation with its poison.
In the earlier centuries of the republic cases of this vice were
few and isolated. In the fifth, Titus Veturius, the son of a
Roman general, who had fallen into the hands of C. Plotius as
a slave for debt, was punished in servile fashion by the latter,
as his master, for refusing to prostitute himself;3 an act at the
same time evincing the consequences of the nexum, that dis-
grace to the Roman patriciate. From this date, in spite of the
heavy penalties imposed for the prostitution of a freeman, in-
stances of such prostitution became more numerous ; a centurion,
Lsetorius Mergus, extricated himself by suicide from the punish-
ment of death incurred by that crime. At the close of the sixth
century the evil had become so general, that Polybius tells us of
many Romans paying a talent for the possession of a beautiful
youth.4 The abuse of slaves and freedmen had always passed as
an admitted license. Caius Gracchus actually claimed in public
1 Zumpt, iiber den Stand der Bevolkerung, p. 67.
2 Mart. ii. 91, 92. 3 Val. Max. vi. 1. 9. * Polyb. xxxii. 11.
274 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
the merit of uncommon self-restraint for never having coveted
the slave of another for such purposes.1 The Scatinian law, im-
posing a pecuniary mulct on those who committed the sin with
a free person, soon fell into desuetude.2 It was dormant under
the empire; only Domitian once had some senators sentenced
upon its provisions :3 and generally the emperors themselves,
even the best of them, such as Antoninus and Trajan, set the
example of violating it. By the time the last days of the free
republic were reached, the vice had attained a fearful degree
among the Romans. On a political trial, beautiful youths, the
sons of senators, and they too of the first Roman families, were
offered to the judges, thus serving to buy the votes of such as
were inaccessible by money.4
With the exception of Ovid, all the poets of the Augustan
age have left behind them in their works traces of their paide-
rastic propensities, frequently, as in the case of Catullus, with a
shamelessness beyond belief: and as regards Ovid, the reasons
which he assigns for his contenting himself with women, are
worthy of the man and of the age. On the whole, this vice
exhibits a grosser aspect among the Romans than among the
Greeks; with the latter it had often a dash of spiritualism
mixed up with it ; the sin, so to speak, was crowned and veiled
with the flowers of sentiment, and of a devotion amounting to
sacrifice. But in the Romans it came out in its naked filth, so
common and so grossly disgusting as to defy and reject all ex-
cuse. We are forced to conclude, from the number of examples,
that alternate commerce of impurity with women as ay ell as boys
and youths was the general fashion. The shameful connection of
Caesar with the Bithynian king, Nicomedes, furnished the theme
for the satirical songs of the soldiers in his Gallic triumph.5
Horrors such as only the most depraved imagination could
conceive were made possible through slavery. The Romans now
came to have harems of males, euphemistically styled paida-
gogia. Here the unfortunate victims destined for the lust of
the possessor, and called exolcti, were first made eunuchs of, in
order to expose them to abuse the longer,6 and these were given
1 Gell. xv. 12. 2 Christii Hist. Legis Scatiniw, Halae, 1727, pp. 7, 9.
3 Suet. Dom. 8. 4 Cic. ad Att. i. 10. 6 Suet. Caes. 49.
6 " Exoletos suos, ut ad longiorera paticntinm impudicitioc idonei sint, ampu-
tant." Sen. exc. Controv. x. 4.
WOMEN OV PLEASURE. 275
a certain kind of educational polish to render them more effec-
tually objects of desire \ while all artifices were resorted to to
delay the development of the child into the youth, and the youth
into the man. " Decked out like a woman," as Seneca says of
one of these, " he wrestles and fights with his years. He must
not pass beyond his age of boyhood. He is kept back perforce ;
and, though robust as a soldier, he retains his smooth chin ; his
hair is all shaved off, or removed by the roots."1 These epicenes
were sometimes classed together by nations and colour, so that
all were equally smooth, and their hair all of one tint.2 That
they might keep a fresh complexion, longer, they were obliged,
when on a journey with their master, to cover their faces with a
mask.3 It was thus Clodius on his travels took also his exoleti
about with him as well as his women of pleasure.4 Tiberius, at
Caprea, and even Trajan, kept such boys in droves; and in those
days formal marriages between man and man were introduced
with all the solemnities of ordinary nuptials.5 On one of these
occasions Nero made the Romans exhibit the tokens of a pub-
lic rejoicing, and treat his elect, Sporus, with all the honours
of an empress.6
The cause, however, of the wide spread of celibacy, that was
sapping the foundations of the state, is not to be looked for so
much in this unnatural vice, as in the general facility of inter-
course with women of pleasure. Multitudes of female slaves,
manumitted along with their daughters, afforded a free choice.
The law of Augustus, imposing penalties on adultery, and inter-
course with free-born maidens out of marriage, was for the most
part impracticable, and its only effect was to drive the Romans
to attach themselves still more to foreign women, who had been
emancipated, and who were thoroughly experienced in all the
artifices of wantonness and luxury. In order to escape the pun-
ishments inflicted by the Julian law on adultery, in the time of
Tiberius, married women, and even those of illustrious family,
had themselves enrolled as public prostitutes on the lists of the
sediles, renouncing utterly their rank and position as honoured
wives. Every free-born woman could do this ; and when Tibe-
i Epist. 47. 2 Ibid. 95. 3 ibid. 123.
4 Cic. pro Mil. 21; Julian. Cses. ed. 1796, p. 6; Spart. Hadr. 4.
5 Juv. ii. 117 sqq. ; Mart. xii. 42.
6 Suet. Ner. xxviii. 29 ; Dio. Cass. lxii. 23. lxiii. 13 ; Tac. Ann. xv. 37.
276 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
rius wanted to except from this category wives whose husbands
or brothers were senators or knights, he met with resistance.1
These relations were all the more seductive to the male sex,
young and old, as no feeling of shame, or apprehension of public
opinion, could find place to disturb them. A young man would
be told how Cato, the strict censor of morals, meeting a youth
coming out of a house of ill fame, expressed his satisfaction
thereat : and Cicero declares, in one of his public speeches, that
intercourse with prostitutes had, at all times, been looked upon
at Eome as a thing permitted and uncensured.2 Hence, too,
there were some twenty temples ■ and shrines of Venus there,
some of them to Venus Volupia, or Lubentina.
In times when and countries where religion still preserved a
salutary ascendant, and extended protection to the female sex,
the case might occur of the males being plunged into the grossest
moral corruption, while the females kept clear of being carried
away in the vortex, and on the whole retained possession of a
higher degree of purity. In Home, where such kind of religious
influence was not to be dreamt of, the women were necessarily
deprived of all moral support, and became just what the men
made them, and so sank, with them, incessantly deeper and
deeper. The generality of marriages became mere temporary
connections, with a virtual though tacit agreement on both sides
to break off the relations as soon as they became a burden to
one or both. "No woman," says Seneca, "is to be found so
contemptible or so mean as to be contented with a couple of gal-
lants, without having laid out her hours one after the other,
the day being otherwise too short to go the circuit of all."3 And
thus the law of Augustus against adultery became completely
obsolete within ten years of its enactment. The higher-minded
emperors, indeed, took some pains to put an end to the immoral
practice of men and women bathing together. Trajan, Hadrian,
and Marcus Aurelius, all launched edicts against it, but to no
purpose; Alexander Severus made a fresh attempt at an inter-
diction.4 The custom had now been introduced of wearing fine
stuffs of texture quite transparent, that made clothes incapable
1 Tac. Ann. ii. 85 ; Suet. Tiber. 35.
2 Pro Coelio, c. 15. 3 De Benef. iii. 10.
4 l'lin. H. N. xxxiii. 54, 3; Spart. Hadr. 18; Capitolin. M. Ant. Phil. 23;
Lamprid. Alex. Sev. 24.
TREATMENT OF THE POOK. 277
of hiding the body or its shame, and such as, when put on a
woman could not swear with a good conscience she was not
naked.1
In the debauchery, which the Romans carried out to a
greater extent than any other people, the women would not be
in arrear of the men. The same witness observes upon their
having forfeited the ancient privilege of the sex, to be exempt
from certain complaints; and baldness and gout had become
common amongst them.2 As wives of proconsuls and other
foreign officials, these degraded creatures turned into scourges
of entire provinces. In all indictments for extortion, it was
always the wives against whom the loudest and most general
cry was raised : it was on them the rapacious rabble of the
provinces depended, and on their account Caecina, in the time
of Tiberius, brought forward an unsuccessful motion in the
senate, forbidding the functionaries appointed to the provinces
to take their wives along with them.
5. Treatment of the Poor — Education— Public Spectacles.
The view has frequently been taken, that it was slavery which
prevented the extension of education to the poor and the prole-
tarii in the ancient states ; but this was to overlook the fact that
the existence of slaves was a source of poverty, and a cuttiug-off
of their means of subsistence to the lower classes. There can be
no mistake about the numbers of the entirely needy and desti-
tute, at any time, under the imperial sway, having been very
considerable, and always on the increase. To the question now
asked, What the position of the rich and wealthy was towards
the poor, and how the poor were circumstanced? the answer
must be, that mercy and kindness to poverty did not, as a general
rule, belong to the Roman character at all. "A Roman never
gives any one any thing ungrudgingly," Polybius informs us.
The case, however, was different when such immense fortunes
were accumulated in the hands of a few. It was then the inte-
rest of the possessors to bethink themselves of the ways and
means of expenditure, and how to gather a following round them
1 De Benef. vii. 9 : cf. ad Helv. 16. 2 £p. 95 . c£ juven< vi, 250.
278 ROME: SOCIAL AND MORAL.
from the poorer citizens and clients. Not a few of these latter
owed their entire subsistence to the largesses of the sportnla
from their wealthy patrons. At the same time the state had
200,000 poor citizens to provide for, besides their wives, sisters,
and daughters ; and further, there were crowds of poor excluded
from these bounties, and who found their only shelter in the
public halls and the colonnades of the temples ; and, moreover,
the collective peregrini, who had no claim at all. These swarms
of proletarii and beggars were further increased by the manu-
mission of slaves, after it had become a custom among the great-
est to present a number of their slaves with freedom by their
wills ; a practice which Augustus was obliged to limit. As for
other cities, where there were no such regular distributions of
money and corn, the number of helpless poor must have been
still larger.
There were thus herds of beggars. Seneca often mentions
them, and observes that most men fling an alms to a beggar
with repugnance, and carefully avoid all contact with him.1 To
the ancients it was of evil omen only to meet a mendicant.2
" Could you possibly let yourself down so low as not to repel a
poor man from you with scorn ?" was said by a rhetorician of
the imperial times to a rich man.3 The extremest concession
which Roman morality admitted of towards the indigent, was to
give a stranger what you could bear the loss of without any
further prejudice to yourself.4 " What is the use, too," says a
popular poet, " of giving a beggar any thing ? One loses what
one gives away, and only prolongs the miserable existence of the
receiver."5 On this point the Stoic philosophy came in aid of the
rich with its maxim, that there was no real evil in any human
wretchedness, necessity, or poverty; and therefore bidding the
wise man be on the watch against giving way to any active com-
passion for misery.6 It is characteristic, too, how Virgil, in his
beautiful passage describing the peace and repose of the wise
1 De Clem. v. 6.
2 Hermogen. irep\ a-rda-eau, cap. irepi (rroxa(Tfj.ov (ap. Walz. Rhett. Gr. t. iii.
p. 25), makes one of them say he had begged at night and not by day, '6ti ou
fiovKerai dvirotcavLarbs elvai.
3 Quintil. Decl. 301, iii. 17. 4 Cic. de Off. i. 10.
6 Plaut. Trinumm. i. 2. 58, 59. The passage afterwards excited much dis-
pleasure. Lactantius called it " detestanda sententia," Inst. vi. 1 1 .
6 Epist. Enchir. c. 22.
EDUCATION. 279
man, introduces as one of the features his being exempted from
feeling pity for a necessitous person.1 No one, then, of the
thousands of rich men settled at Rome ever conceived the notion
of founding an hospital for the poor, or hospital for the sick.
Julian was the first to be struck with the aspect of Christian in-
stitutions of this kind, and to view them as a standing reproof to
heathen selfishness.
And now, if we cast a final glance at the question of educa-
tion, we shall find but little to say of it, as far as regards the
period before Cicero. In the republican times the state did not
trouble itself about the training of youth : a few prohibitory re-
gulations were laid down, and the rest left to private individuals.2
Thus no public instruction was given ; public schools there were,
but only as private undertakings for the sake of the children of
the rich. All depended on the father; his personal character
and the care taken by the mother in education decided the deve-
lopment of the child's disposition. Books there were none ; and
therefore they could not be put into the hands of children. A
few rugged hymns, such as those of the Salii and Arval brothers,
with the songs in Fescennine verse, sung on festivals and at ban-
quets, formed the poetical literature. A child would hear, be-
sides, the dirges or memorial verses, composed by women in
honour of the dead, and sometimes, too, the public panegyrics
pronounced on their departed relatives, a distinction accorded to
women also from the time of Camillus. Whatever was taught a
boy by father or mother, or acquired externally to the house,
was calculated to make the Roman a virtus" appear in his eyes
the highest aim of his ambition ; the term including self-mastery,
an unbending firmness of will, with patience, and an iron tena-
city of purpose in carrying through whatever was once acknow-
ledged to be right.
The Greek palestra and its naked combatants always seemed
strange and offensive to Roman eyes. In the republican times
the exercises of the gymnasium were but little in fashion ; 3
though riding, swimming, and other warlike exercises were in-
dustriously practised, as preparations for the campaign. The
slave psedagogus, assigned to young people to take charge of
them, had a higher position with the Romans than the Greeks ;
and was not allowed to let his pupils out of his sight till their
1 Georg. ii. 449. 2 Cic. de Eep. iv. 3. 3 Cic. Legg. ii. 15.
280 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
twentieth year. The Latin Odyssey of Livius Andronicus was
the school-book first in use ; and this and Ennius were the only
two works to create and foster a literary taste before the destruc-
tion of Carthage. The freedman Sp. Carvilius was the first to
open a school for higher education. After this the Greek lan-
guage and literature came into the circle of studies, and in con-
sequence of the wars in Sicily, Macedon, and Asia, families of
distinction kept slaves who knew Greek. Teachers quickly mul-
tiplied, and were either liberti, or their descendants. No free-
born Roman would consent to be a paid teacher, for that was
held to be a degradation.
The Greek language remained throughout the classical one
for Romans : they even made their children begin with Homer,
As, by the seventh century of the republic, Ennius, Plautus, Pa-
cuvius, and Terence, had already become old poets, dictations
were given to scholars from their writings. The interpretation
of Virgil began under Augustus,1 and by this time the younger
Romans were resorting to Athens, Rhodes, Apollonia, and Mity-
lene, in order to make progress in Greek rhetoric and philoso-
phy. As Roman notions were based entirely on the practical and
the useful, music was neglected as a part of education ; while,
as a contrast, boys were compelled to learn the laws of the twelve
tables by heart. Cicero, who had gone through this discipline
with other boys of his time, complains of the practice having
begun to be set aside ; and Scipio iEruilianus deplored, as an
evil omen of degeneracy, the sending of boys and girls to the
academies of actors, where they learnt dancing and singing, in
company with young women of pleasure. In one of these schools
were to be found as many as five hundred young persons, all
being instructed in postures and motions of the most abandoned
kind.2 This taste of the Romans for the dance grew into a very
passion afterwards, under the influence of the mimic dances of
the theatres. It is of course natural to man that he should
practise himself, or have at his home, what he sees and admires
out of it: and so Horace describes the enjoyment young women
had in being taught the soft and voluptuous movements com-
posing the Ionic dance.3 On the other hand, the gymnastic
exercises, which had once served the young men as a training
for war, fell into disuse, having naturally become objectless and
Suet, de 111. Gram. 16. 2 Ap. Maorob. Sat. ii. 10. 3 Oil. iii. G. 22.
SLAVES THE CORRUPTORS OF YOUTH. 281
burdensome, now that, under Augustus, no more Roman citizens
chose to enlist in the legions.1
Still slavery was, and continued to be, the foremost cause of
the depravation of youth, and of an evil education. The dwell-
ings of the rich and noble had no sooner become hot-beds of all
vice, and schools for propagating corruption, through the conflux
of slaves of both sexes, and of every imaginable nation, than
morals were poisoned at the root through them, and children
from the earliest age fell into the worst of hands. It was no
longer the mothers who educated their own children : they had
neither inclination nor capacity for such duty, for mothers of the
stamp of Cornelia had disappeared. Immediately on its birth,
the child was intrusted to a Greek female slave, with some
male slave, often of the worst description, to help her.2 Young
maidens were frequently committed to a paedagogus; and thus
it was that Fannius Saturninus killed his own daughter and
the slave who had debauched her.3 The young Roman was not
educated in the constant companionship of youths of his own
age, under equal discipline: surrounded by his father's slaves
and parasites, and always accompanied by a slave when he went
out, he hardly received any other impressions than such as were
calculated to foster conceit, insolence, and pride in him. He
knew he was, one day or other, to become master of his teacher
and paedagogus, who, on his part, lost no opportunity of winning
and keeping favour and influence with his young master, taking
care to aid and abet him in the satisfaction of passions that
were all too early roused, or to lead him on to pleasures and
vices of which he had as yet no experience. The theatre and
circus formed the complement to the education which the slave
had begun and conducted.4
Thus the consideration of this state of things brings us neces-
sarily back again to the public spectacles, which formed one-half
of the existence of rich as well as poor. " Bread and the circus
games !" Now that the Romans had renounced the political life,
contemporaneously with the fall of the free republic, the games
only were equal to rousing them from their lethargy and indo-
lence. The circus, the theatre, and the arena, were the places
1 Suet. Oct. 24; Tib. 8.
2 Tacit, de Causis Corr. Eloq. c. 29. 3 Val. Max. vi. ] . 3.
4 Compare the scene in Plautus, Bacchid. ii. 1. 10, iii. 3. 405.
282 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
where public life concentred, and where the people still felt itself
in its strength. People roused themselves, and formed parties
in behalf of the pantomime or the chariot-driver. An armed
force was not always able to put down the fights of the theatre
factions : imprisonment and exile were the only processes avail-
able against the impetuosity of partisans of the different actors.1
No popular festival or pleasure-party was complete unless a gla-
diatorial combat, or a fight of wild-beasts, or a naval engage-
ment, formed part of the entertainment. Titus gave on one
and the same day a naval engagement and a fight of gladiators,
with a battue of wild-beasts, in which five thousand were de-
stroyed. So universal was the passion, and so exciting, that pa-
tricians, knights, and women rushed down into the arena, and
of their own accord joined in the fray with the gladiators. In
one of these combats there fell twenty-six Roman knights, who,
after squandering away all their fortune, were quite willing to
sacrifice their lives as well.2 In Nero's time, men of knightly
and senatorial rank came out as charioteers in the circus, and as
gladiators and fighters with beasts in the amphitheatre. Others,
including women too of the highest families, appeared on the
boards as players, singers, and dancers.3
By the side of such violent emotions as gladiatorial fights, in
which women and maidens, by a motion of the hand, surrendered
the wounded combatant, in the act of imploring mercy, to the
fatal blow, the ordinary tragedies, with their cut-and-dried cata-
strophes, proved insipid, and the sentiments they called forth all
too feeble and void of charm. Here also living realities were in
demand ; and accordingly the actor who played the robber-chief,
Laureolus, was actually nailed on the cross, before the specta-
tors' eyes, and torn in pieces besides by a bear.4 The emascu-
lation of Atys, and burning of Hercules on the pile on Mount
(Eta, were realised in the persons of condemned criminals.5 Plu-
tarch speaks of boys at the theatre full of admiration for, and
regarding as the happiest of mortals, the players whom they saw
coming on the stage in gilded vestments with purple mantles
and crowns, till they perished before their eyes by the sword or
the scourge, while the fire consumed their fine clothes.6
1 Tac. Ann. i. 77, ii. 13, xiii. 28. 2 Dio. Cass. lix. 9.
3 Ibid. lxi. 17. 4 Martial, Lib. de Spect. Ep. 7.
6 Tertull. Apol. 15 ; ad Nat. i. 10. 6 De Ser. Num. Vind. 9.
CONTEMPT OF LIFE —SUICIDE. 283
The theatres consequently were schools of barbarous cruelty
and voluptuousness, places to dull the edge of every finer feel-
ing in man, and to rouse and foster every animal principle in
him. Seneca says, " There is nothing so destructive of morality
as being a spectator at the plays, where vice insinuates itself
into us the easier under the veil of pleasure; and I return
from thence all the greedier, and more ambitious, more sensual,
more savage and inhuman, because I have been amongst men."
He then proceeds to mention his having gone to the theatre at
mid-day, and there lit upon, by way of interlude, a combat of
gladiators, all fighting exposed without armour, so that it was
a mere butchery; they were driven back with clubs into the bath
of blood to receive the strokes with their naked breasts. " The
morning's amusement," he adds, " is exposing men to lions and
bears, and again at mid-day to their spectators. The only end for
all engaged can be but death : they go to work with fire and sword,
and there is no respite till the arena is empty of combatants."1
Life became a mere drug in the market. People saw num-
bers put to death every day for mere pastime, dying courage-
ously in cold blood, uttering no prayer or cry to avert the final
blow. Life, on the other side, had no more to offer to thou-
sands who had emptied the intoxicating cup of pleasure to the
very dregs. Amid the facility with which the Roman could pro-
cure and exhaust every enjoyment, no charm any longer at-
tached to difficulties and dangers to be overcome ; and thus the
existence that had become a burden was thrown away right will-
ingly. It was not only under the yoke of despotic emperors,
but even under better government, that contempt of life and
suicide were the order of the day in Rome ; and the Stoic creed
contributed to the general inclination by setting up a theory
of suicide, and enumerating a variety of cases in which a man
should and ought to make away with his life, with honour to
himself and the approbation of the wise and good. Life, accord-
ing to this view, was one of the indifferent things ; if it became
a burden, it might be thrown aside unhesitatingly, like a cast-
off garment. Seneca was astonished that a greater number of
slaves did not make use of this simple means of emancipating
themselves. Freedom is so close at hand, he exclaims, and yet
there are slaves. He quotes the expression of a distinguished
1 Ep. 7.
284 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
Stoic, in which are strikingly blended contempt of slaves and of
life: " There is nothing great in living; all slaves live, and all
beasts too."1 Then Marcus Aurelius also recommended "retiring
from life," if a man did not feel himself strong enough to maintain
a certain moral elevation. Cato's example acted on the Romans
who succeeded him for long. Many ran to death instinctively,
in a kind of frenzy, as the younger Pliny expresses it ; but he
took it to be the act of a great soul to give itself the coup -de-
grace after a calm and thoughtful survey of the grounds.2
6. General Survey — Auguries of the Future.
It is the state of things in Rome with which we are principally
acquainted ; very fragmentary notices of life and doings in the
provinces and the other cities of the empire are furnished us.
Yet the Roman military roads ran eastward from the forum of
the world's metropolis as far as the Thebais and the borders of
Arabia, and to the west right up to Caledonia; Roman rulers
lorded it every where; the law and language and manners of
Rome prevailed throughout. Rome carried its own moral cor-
ruption into all lands, and they again poured back their own
into Rome, as into a vast reservoir. One can see from the
accounts of Tacitus how every spot occupied by the Roman exe-
cutive became a school of demoralisation, where insatiable rapa-
city and luxury indulged in every caprice.3 The great historian
confesses the Romans had more power over their subjects by
exciting and gratifying their sensual tastes than by their arms.4
The luxury of their baths and the splendour of their entertain-
ments, which were styled ways of civilising men and ennobling
their minds, were in reality but means of subj ugation ;5 and even
barbarians, as he tells us, allowed themselves to be won over by
the insinuating vices of their Roman conquerors.6
And thus, to use the words of a Roman poet, corruption had
attained its full tide at the commencement of the second cen-
tury.7 Vices gnawed at the marrow of nations, and, above all,
1 Epist. 77. 2 Plin. Epp. iii. 7.
3 Ann. xiii. 31, xvi. 23, iv. 72, xii. 33; Agr. 38.
4 Hist. iv. 64. * Agr. 21. 6 Ibid. 16. "' Juv. i. 149.
THE LATER STOICS AS MORALISTS. 285
of the Romans: their national existence was more than menaced;
the moral sickness had become a physical one in its effects, a
subtle poison penetrating into the vitals of the state ; and as
before in the sanguinary civil wars, so now the lords of the world
seemed minded to destroy themselves by their vices. True, the
marvellous fortune of the Roman empire still clung steadily to
her, and had not passed away ; but those who saw deeper be-
neath the surface could not blink the truth, that the alternative
was either a moral revolution and regeneration, or an entire dis-
solution and ruin. Men were denuded of all that was really
good, and, surrounded on all sides by the thick clouds of a
blinded conscience, they caught with wild eagerness at the
grossest sensual enjoyments, in the wild tumult of which they
plunged to intoxication.
The number of such as kept themselves free from the general
contamination and brutality, or at least endeavoured to do so,
was but small ; and of them the disciples of the Stoic school
were the most prominent. In the senate, a few Stoics, amid
universal deterioration and mean - spiritedness, were the only
ones to preserve the dignity of independent men, by their
speeches or an expressive silence; — and many of them had
to pay, by exile or death, for the declaration, or for being sus-
pected, of Stoicism. The Stoics of the imperial time ranked
high as moralists, their intellectual horizon had a wider and
freer expansion, and the notion of man as a great interdepend-
ent whole had developed itself among them. Marcus Aurelius
already speaks of a universal republic, where Roman and bar-
barian, slave and infirm, were all to have the rights of citizens,
and equality was to be dominant.1 Just as physicians acquire
most knowledge in times of great pestilence, the Stoics sharp-
ened their moral vision amid the general corruption of morals.
Strict censors they were, and telling advice they could give upon
the methods of moral reforms and amelioration. How trenchant,
lively, and brilliant, how full of profound acquaintance with the
human heart, its weaknesses and malice, is Seneca ! how solemn,
how sorrowfully pathetic, Marcus Aurelius ! How confidently
and irresistibly do Epictetus and his interpreter Arrian carry
away the reader, when they preach patience and self-denial, and
bring him to the point of desiring nothing passionately, and,
1 Marc. Aur. iv. 5.
286 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
while he always keeps a steadfast eye on his own intellectual
freedom, of being in dread of nothing in the path of virtue !
And yet their influence was, on the whole, more inconsiderable,
and their schools sooner extinct, than one would have expected.
Their system was intrinsically beset with internal contradictions
amounting to actual annihilation, and men felt no comfort, no
moral strength, from this ostentation of virtue enamoured with
herself, that would be indebted to nothing but itself, and, while
she put herself on a par with the Deity, advanced her pretensions
as far as a divine security and steadfastness in the midst of hu-
man frailty.1 Quite a different lever was requisite to lift man-
kind generally from their fallen state. No one, says Seneca, is
in a position to help himself; he needs another's hand to raise
him up;2 — and this hand of help and rescue was never and
nowhere to be seen.
There were but a few to flatter themselves with the hope of
finding an answer to their questions, repose to their spirit and
their conscience, and full relief of their necessities, in a system
of philosophy. As the product of the human mind left to its
own resources, philosophy had travelled through, and exhausted,
every conceivable system, at an astonishing outlay of acuteness
and speculative power; and still there was no appearance any
where of a site upon which to found, or a creative spirit and fer-
tile imagination with which to construct, the new edifice. Indi-
vidual schools had run through and consumed their patrimony ;
none had been able to maintain themselves, all were approach-
ing dissolution. Men became more and more conscious of their
own deepening aspirations after a God who was absolutely ele-
vated above every thing earthly and mundane. A God they
must have and they coveted, whom they could in all sincerity
address in prayer, who, as all-ruling lord and judge, would be
the object of dread and fear, and, as all holy and merciful, the
cynosure of homage and love, satisfying every want of the trou-
bled and longing heart. But the Stoics, though still the highest
in repute among philosophers, had nothing to tender to men in
this need of God, but their nature-power, bound up in matter,
and only manifesting itself in the development of the universe,
much as they laboured to attribute intelligence and bliss to this
world's soul of theirs, that contained every vital principle in it-
1 Sen. Ep. 53. 2 Ibid. 52.
HELPLESSNESS OF PAGAN WORSHIP. 287
self, this god of the ether, ruling in the world with the arm of
necessity. And then, as regarded conscience, they could do no-
thing but refer man, who had God within himself, was himself
divine, and yet was wearied and woe-begone of his own godship,
back to himself again and his own dignity. He was to pass
judgment on his own actions, and to be summoned to answer for
them, not before God's tribunal, but his own ; to blush for him-
self and to himself, and to look on the moral law as one given
by himself to himself alone. But a self-imposed law not being
absolutely inviolable and holy; the question of the transgression
of it would always revert, in the last instance, to the court of a
man's own judgment, who would acknowledge no higher autho-
rity, and no lawgiver external to and above himself; and this
process might perhaps engender in him a confounding conscious-
ness of his own malice and infirmity, but never that of sin.
Besides, there were many now who no longer found any con-
tentment in the hereditary worship of state or popular deities.
With what eagerness did the Roman world hurry to invoke the
deified Augustus ! And in this rivalry, common to cities and
individuals, there was not merely Idche flattery involved, but also
the desire of having in heaven a mediator and protector for the
Empire, a god who had been himself man, and had, but a short
time before, been in visible converse with man: he was, like
Dionysos of old, the youngest of those who had become deities;
the world, in its decrepitude, had once again produced a god;
and his worship was, in principle, the only one spread throughout
the whole empire, and really a universal one. But when all his
successors and their wives had trod the same imperial road of
apotheosis (and what despicable beings, what monsters of moral
iniquity the most of them were !), this resource was worked out
too, and the god Augustus fell into the same disrepute as the
others. Numbers followed the example of the emperor Hadrian,
and went the round of all religions, practised every worship, and
were initiated as often as they could, to finish their career, helpless
and perplexed, at the gates of eternity, or to sit themselves down
on the sandbank of a vague and comfortless hylozoic pantheism.
All these popular religions exhibited but the produce of an ex-
clusive nationality, morally powerless, and presenting the gross-
est contradictions. The gods were made-up creatures, stamped
with the indelible characters of those to whom they owed their
288 ROME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
origination, its partialities and vices ; and were exalted by their
makers over their own heads more to minister to their lusts,
and to be tools of their selfishness, than to be really their lords
and masters. And now that the consciousness of a unity in the
human race was aroused, men were logically led further to seek
and inquire for a God raised high above all nationalities, and
c*ommon to all. There were so many people now externally
united to one great empire, and the sword of Roman dominion
had so beaten down all the bulwarks under the shelter of which
the nations had hitherto reposed in their exclusiveness, and fan-
cied themselves secure, that there was but one single thing left
to sustain the old separation, namely, the opposition of god to
god, worship to worship. Two languages had gained the day, to
the exclusion of all others, and now served alone for every pur-
pose of communication of thought ; and yet these organs, form-
ing as they did a kind of intellectual chain between all people,
were wanting in the capacity for ideas, principles, and doctrines,
of a genuine universalism that would embrace every nationality,
every order of intellect, and people of all ranks. The vessel was
ready, and waited for the wine of the new doctrine which it was
destined to receive.
And the men in Rome who were above their age — men like
Tacitus, for instance — were oppressed with a profound sentiment
of disheartenment and sorrow. Recognising the futility of the
resistance to the tide of corruption, and the impotence of law,
they were unable to discern any where the germ of a new life,
of a great moral and political regeneration. Tacitus was fully
persuaded that Rome and the state lay under the lash of divine
displeasure j1 and thus they were driven to the conclusion that
every thing of this world was void and empty, and human life a
huge imposture.2 Cicero in his time had characterised a con-
tempt for all human things as a sign of greatness of mind;3
under the Empire, when individual men generally were denied
any political activity, this view of the emptiness of existence be-
came more frequent, and all relation to a higher and better life
beyond the grave was utterly wanting. This contempt of earthly
1 Ann. iv. 1, xvi. 16 ; Hist. iii. 72.
2 Ann. iii. 18, — " Ludibria rerum hurnanarum cunctis in negotiis," — and fre-
quently.
3 De Off. i. 4, 18.
LONGINGS AND HOPES. 289
things and of life could only be properly adjusted, and value be
again attached to life, when mankind should recognise Him who
unites as with a golden chain this transitory existence to an eter-
nal one, for which it is to be the preparation, and who therewith
imparts to life its true scope and its highest significance.
The Stoic creed had seen itself forced to declare, that the
truly wise man, the ideal of virtue and moral heroism, had not
yet appeared on this earth, though Cicero had already described
the delight that men would experience if they were ever so fortu-
nate as to see perfect virtue alive and in the flesh.1 And thus on
all sides there was a diffusion of this sentiment of moral and in-
tellectual wants unsatisfied. As the better kind of people longed
for the light of a visible exemplar of human virtue by which con-
tinually to steer their moral conscience, they had also aspirations
after a steadfast divine doctrine, to extricate them from the la-
byrinth of opinion, conjecture, and doubt as to the real end of
their being, and the state of man after death. They sighed for
a rule of life and discipline, which, leaving no choice to the
fluctuating caprice of self-will, would lend consistency and con-
fidence to their moral conduct ; and the sight of the Roman em-
pire might well kindle a presentiment of another, which uniting
the people of the earth in free and spontaneous obedience, would
have the promise of permanence, and which would not, like the
lloman, have an avenging God threatening it with destruction.
And such hopes and aspirations were not, in fact, without their
foundation. In the Erythraean collection of Sibylline prophecies,
as known in Rome, there was one promising the birth of a di-
vine child ; and on his descent from heaven and appearing upon
earth, a new period of the world, a new order of things, a better
and golden age, was to begin.2 The Romans expected the dawn
of this halcyon age after the horrors of the civil wars. If flat-
tery led Virgil into the mistake of referring the fulfilment of this
expectation to a son of Pollio, as others, somewhat later, inter-
preted of Vespasian the prophecy about a ruler of the world,
who was at that time to arise in the East, there were certainly
not a few above such weakness, or at a sufficient distance from
those in power, who had a presentiment of the fulfilment of a
purer hope, and the contentment of a deeper-rooted necessity.
It was on the 19th of December in the year of grace 69,
1 De Fin. v. 24. 69. a Virg. Eel. 4.
VOL. II. U
290 EOME : SOCIAL AND MORAL.
during the civil war between the Yitellianists and the Vespa-
sianists, that the Capitol, including the Temple of Jupiter and
the sanctuaries of Juno and Minerva, were consumed by a fire
kindled by Roman hands. Tacitus calls this event the saddest
and most shameful blow which the Ptoman state had met with
since the foundation of the city ;l and he could only explain its
being permitted to take place by the anger of the gods against
sinful Rome. Eight months afterwards, on the 10th of August
a.d. 70, a Roman soldier threw a brand into the Temple of Jeru-
salem, which reduced it to ashes. And thus within a few months
the national sanctuary of Rome and religious centre of the em-
pire, as well as the temple of the true God, the two most impor-
tant places of worship in the old world, owed their destruction
to Roman soldiers, thoughtless instruments of the decrees and
judgment of a higher Power. Ground was to be cleared for the
worship of God iu spirit and in truth. The heirs of the two
temples, the Capitoline and that of Jerusalem, — a handful of
artisans, beggars, slaves, and women, — were dwelling at the
time in some of the obscure lanes and alleys of Rome ; and only
two years ago, when for the first time they had drawn the public
attention on themselves, a number of them were sentenced to be
burnt alive in the imperial gardens, and others to be torn in
pieces by wild-beasts.
1 Hist. iii. 72.
PART II.
THE JEW.
Book X.
Sed obtusi sunt sensus eorum . . . . sed usque in hodiernum diem, cum legitur Moyscs
vclamcu positurn est super cor eorum.
2 Ep. ad Corinth, c. 3.
BOOK X,
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
1. Until the Elevation of the Asmonean Dynasty.
Far off, iu the south-eastern corner of the Roman empire, dwelt
a people, not only the most widely-spread among all the nations
then subjected to the Roman sceptre, but also the most tho-
roughly hated. This people sprang from the single family of
the Abramidse, who went into Egypt barely seventy in number,
but multiplied exceedingly in the space of 430 years, the latter
portion of which period was spent in oppression and slavery.
Up to this time, the Israelites had dwelt in Egypt as strangers,
united together only by the bond of family and race, yet without
any national existence; the man elected to be their deliverer
was also, as their lawgiver, to give them the form and organisa-
tion of a people and a state. This task Moses completed during
the forty years* wandering in the country between Egypt and
south Canaan. By the strict discipline of this long sojourn in
the desert, he strengthened and purified his people, who had
been enervated by their Egyptian bondage. The basis of the
legislation which Moses gave in God's name was, His having
chosen the people from amongst all the nations of the earth to
be His own as a priestly kingdom, and to be a people1 conse-
crated to Himself. The fundamental law of this kingdom was,
the belief in one God, the creator of heaven and earth and all
men, and the father and guide of all nations,, — no national
god, in the sense entertained by others, but one to whom the
1 Exod. xix. 5, 6 : cf. Deuteron. vii. 6-14.
292 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
Israelites stood in a relation in which no other people were to
be found. For they were fashioned by Himself, to be the instru-
ments of His decrees, their whole existence and history was to
bear witness of Him, while the barrier of His law was to cut
them off completely from all polytheistic nations. Without this
barrier, the people would have soon given entire way to their
inclination to heathenism, for long so powerful.
The land of Canaan was conquered under Josue ; but the
Canaanite nations there domiciled, and who were sunk in a hor-
rible religion of child-sacrifice and impurity, though subdued,
were not completely extirpated. The Israelites even lived along
with them in some of the towns, and thus began to intermarry
with them, and hence their frequent relapses into idolatry. It
was a fundamental point of the Mosaic law, that God was the
real lord and owner of the land given to the Jews, they them-
selves being only as stewards, having a temporary usufruct of
the soil. No one, as was said in the law, can sell his field in
perpetuity, because he is not the proprietor thereof.
For four hundred and fifty years the Israelites formed a
theocratic republic of no very strict sort, and ruled by judges.
This period was preparatory to their erection into a kingdom.
The judges were individual men, raised up by God, and only
appearing at certain intervals, and in times of necessity. The
tabernacle and the ark of the covenant formed their centre and
rallying-point, and were generally stationed at Silo. The nation
solicited Samuel, their last judge, to erect them into a kingdom,
as the only means of preserving their integrity, and saving them
from the imminent danger of subjugation to the heathen. In
the year 1099 b.c they received their first king in the person of
Saul, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. His successor, David,
of the tribe of Judah, set in order and consolidated the kingdom.
He first conquered Jerusalem, and then converted it into the
seat of power and capital of the state. Thither he brought the
ark of the covenant, and by successful wars extended his king-
dom as far out as the Euphrates and the borders of Egypt.
Under Solomon, the builder of the temple, the kingdom reached
its highest political prosperity, as far as inwrard strength, extent,
and consideration in the eyes of the neighbouring states went.
But from this time it began to decline ; for Solomon, by forming
polygamous alliances with the daughters of heathen princes his
JUDAH— EXILE. 293
neighbours, was led astray into the nature-worship of the Syro-
Phoenician nations : he exhausted his people by compulsory la-
bour, and tributes; and the succession of his son Rehoboam
(975 b.c.) was followed by the division of the but recently united
kingdom. Solomon's son only retained dominion over the tribe
to which he belonged, and that of Benjamin; the remaining ten,
who were settled in the parts of the country more remote from
Jerusalem, united themselves into the kingdom of Israel, or
Ephraim, and chose Jeroboam for their king; and thus was
consummated their severance both from the temple at Jerusalem
and the Levitical priesthood. A new cultus with an Egyptian
idolatry was established in the new kingdom ; priests were made
who were not of the tribe of Levi, and soon the worship of Baal
crept in. Samaria became afterwards the capital of the king-
dom, and the greater number of its princes died violent deaths,
so that nine different dynasties soon followed each other. In
spite of the sanguinary reaction against Baal -worship under
Jehu, heathenism gained the upper hand in the religion and
morals of the Israelites, and after 253 years this monarchy fell.
Salmanasar, king of Assyria, conquered Samaria 722 b.c, car-
ried the Israelitish king Osee and his people into exile, and
planted in their stead Assyrian colonists. Ten members were
cut off from the parent stock of the chosen people.
And Judah, the smaller moiety of the nation, where the
house of David remained in possession of the throne, in conse-
quence of the marriages contracted by its royal family with the
princes of Tyre, fell more and more into Phoenician idolatry, the
licentious rites of which suited the tastes of the court, although
Ezechias and Josias restored the true belief and worship as well
as they were able. On occasion of some temple-repairs in the
time of Josias, the forgotten, and till then mislaid, law of Moses
was discovered and read aloud to the people. Placed between
the more powerful kingdoms of Babylon and Egypt, and by turns
dependent on, or conquered by, one or other, the kingdom of
Judah was at length brought to an end in the year 588 b.c, 134
years after the fall of Israel. Nabuchodouosor, king of Babylon,
destroyed Jerusalem, with the temple, all the holy vessels of
which he carried off to Babylon, while the kernel of the nation
was transported to Chaldsea.
Thus it appeared as if the career of the Jewish people were
294 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
closed, and their part in history played out. On coming forth
from Egyptian bondage, it had commenced its existence as a
state and nation, and now again, externally broken up, and rent
as it were into pieces, it was found in bondage among strange
nations. This was but so in appearance, however; Israel, in-
deed, was for ever annihilated as a state and nation ; the mea-
sure of its iniquity had been filled to the brim ; idolatry had
completely loosened its naturally licentious people from all ties
of shame and restraint, and with it lusts of every kind made
their appearance without disguise. The ten tribes had actually
surrendered their nationality in spirit, before they were carried
away. Without law and sacrifice, or a Levitical priesthood, they
were thoroughly leavened with pagan customs, and they lacked
in exile the institutions and ordinances which would have sup-
ported and strengthened their religion and nationality. They
therefore dissolved, and were all but entirely lost among the
heathen inhabitants of Assyria, Media, and Mesopotamia. And
yet in later centuries numerous Jewish colonies were to be found
in the Medo-Babylonish provinces, of which the descendants of
the ten tribes may have been the founders. On the other hand,
only a portion of the population of the kingdom of Judah, con-
sisting of the principal families with the kingly house, were
carried to Babylon and the banks of the Chaboras. Others had
taken refuge in Egypt. The country people remained in their
homes, and Jerusalem, though in ruins, still continued through-
out their religious centre; but those sons of captivity had the
priesthood and the book of the law with them as their rule of
life, and on the whole remained true to their belief. They
were held together by this bond of religion, and prophets rose
up among them who promised them the restoration of their
kingdom.
In the year 536 b.c, after the fall of the Babylonian empire,
Cyrus, king of Persia, granted the exiles permission to return ;
and 43,360 souls, of whom 4280 were priests, together with
7000 slaves, set out on their journey back. Being almost all
of them of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, the name of Israel
was gradually lost sight of, and the resuscitated people were
called after Judah, the leading tribe. The greater portion re-
mained behind, scattered through the provinces of the great
Persian empire. The leaders of those who returned home were
SAMARITANS. 295
Zorobabel, a descendant of the house of David, and Josuc the
high-priest; and at their instance the rebuilding of the temple
on the old site was commenced, and completed in 516 b.c. The
rule of the Persians over the Jews was a very mild one, and
placed no hindrances in the way of their religious or national
development, the religion appearing to them to bear an affinity
to their own, and the God of Judah to be their own Ormuzd.
To the north of the country lived a mixed people, the Sa-
maritans, sprung from the remnants of the Israelites who were
left behind when the ten tribes were carried away, and from
the heathen colonists settled in the towns. Their religion was
a medley, like themselves. They prayed to Jehovah, but to
heathen gods also, Phoenician and others, brought with them
from home. They were therefore repulsed by Zorobabel and
Josue when they offered to share in the building of the temple.
From that time there was enmity between them and the Jews,
who no longer acknowledged any relationship with them, and
would only consider them as heathen. Later on, either in 410,
or perhaps not till 33.2,1 the Samaritans had their own temple
dedicated to Jehovah on Mount Gerizim, near Sichem, when
Manasses, the grandson of a Jewish high-priest, rejected by his
own people, on account of his marriage with the daughter of
the Samaritan viceroy Sanballat, undertook the office of high-
priest to the Samaritans.
The Jews returned home sobered and improved by their suf-
ferings in exile, and entirely cured of their early hankering after
idolatry. Having no political independence, and living under a
governor, they devoted themselves all the more to religion, the
only source and support of their nationality, and became zealots
for the law, and for a devout carrying out of all its precepts as
far as practicable. All, indeed, could not be again restored. The
most holy of the new temple was empty, for it was without the
lost and irreplaceable ark of the covenant; the oracular orna-
ments of the high-priest had disappeared. As Jerusalem was
now, far more than formerly, the head and heart of the nation,
the high-priesthood, continuing hereditary in the house of the
before-named Josue, was the authority to which the nation will-
ingly submitted; it served as the representative and pillar of
unity, and the sons of David were forgotten. Another of the
1 Joseph. Antiq. xii. 1.1.
296 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
abiding consequences of their exile was, the altered mode of life
which the nation led. At first they had been exclusively de-
voted to agriculture; but after mixing with strangers they learnt
to engage in trade, and this inclination went on always in-
creasing ; it contributed essentially to their being spread far be-
yond the borders of Palestine, and to their multiplying their
settlements in foreign lands.
In consequence of the breaking-up of the Persian empire,
Judea, situated between the kingdoms of Syria and Egypt, was
forced to submit at times to the Egyptian Ptolemy s, and at
others to the Seleucidse in Syria, and formed the battle-field on
which both powers contended against each other. At length it
became an integral portion of the Syrian empire, under Seleucus
Philopator and Antiochus (180-167). These kings promoted
the settlement of Greeks and Syrians in Palestine, so that it
was by degrees all covered with cities and towns of Grecian no-
menclature. The narrow territory of Judea alone kept free of
them, but was surrounded with settlers whose speech, customs,
and creed were Greek. On the other hand, the Jews went on
spreading in lands where Greek was spoken. A good many of
these were planted in Egypt, in the newly-founded capital An-
tioch, in Lydia and Phrygia.1 Led on by their love of trade,
they soon became numerous in the commercial cities of western
Asia, Ephesus, Pergamus, Miletus, Sardis, &c. From Egypt
and Alexandria, in which city, at a later period, they formed
two-fifths of the inhabitants, they drew along the coast of Africa
to Cyrene and the towns of the Pentapolis, and from Asia An-
terior to the Macedonian and Greek marts ; for the national love
of commerce became more and more developed, till it absorbed
all other occupations, and to this certainly the general inclina-
tion for commercial intercourse, prevalent at that period, greatly
contributed. Thus it happened that two movements, identical
in their operation, crossed each other, viz. an influx of Greek, or
of Asiatic but hellenised, settlers into Palestine, and an out-
pouring of Jews and Samaritans into the cities speaking the
Greek tongue.
In olden times, while the Israelites still possessed a national
kingdom, they felt their isolation from other people as a bur-
den. It was as an oppressive yoke to them, which they bore
1 Joseph. Antiq. iii. 1-L
HELLENISM IN JUDEA. 297
impatiently, and were always trying to shake off. They wanted
to live like other nations, to eat, drink, and intermarry with
them, and, together with their own God, to honour the gods of
the stranger also; for many raw and carnally-minded Jews only
looked upon the one special God and protector of their nation as
one god amongst many. But now there was a complete change
in this respect. The Jews every where lived and acted upon the
fundamental principle, that between them and all other nations
there was an insurmountable barrier ; they shut themselves off,
and formed in every town separate corporations, with officers of
their own; while at the same time they kept up a constant con-
nexion with the sanctuary at Jerusalem. They paid a tribute to
the temple there, which was carefully collected every where, and
from time to time conveyed in solemn procession to Jerusalem.
There alone, too, could the sacrifices and gifts which were de-
manded by the law be offered. In this wise they preserved a
centre and a metropolis.
And yet there followed from all this an event, which in its
consequences was one of the most important in history, namely,
the hellenising of the Jews who were living out of Judea, and
even, in a degree, of those who remained in their own land.
They were a people too gifted intellectually to resist the mag-
netic power by which the Hellenistic tongue and modes of
thought and action worked even upon such as were disposed to
resist them on principle. The Jews in the commercial towns
readily acquired the Greek, and soon forgot their mother tongue;
and as the younger generation already in their domestic circle
were not taught Greek by natives, as might be supposed, this
. Jewish Greek grew into a peculiar idiom, the Hellenistic. During
the reign of the second Ptolemy, 284-247 B.C., the law of Moses
was translated at Alexandria into Greek, probably more to meet
the religious wants of the Jews of the dispersion than to gratify
the desire of the king. The necessity of a knowledge of Hebrew
for the use of the holy Scriptures was thereby done away with,
and Greek language and customs became more and more preva-
lent. Individuals began to join this or that school of philosophy,
according to predilection and intellectual bias. The Platonic
philosophy had necessarily most attractions for the disciples of
Moses.
The intrusion of Hellenism into Judea itself met with a much
298 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
more considerable resistance from the old believing and conser-
vative Jews. Those of the heathen dispersion were obliged to
be satisfied with mere prayer, Bible readings and expositions, in
their proseuchse and synagogues, and to do without the solemn
worship and sacrifices of the temple ; but in Jerusalem the tem-
ple-worship was carried out with all its ancient usages and sym-
bols. There presided the Sopherim, the Scribes or skilled ex-
pounders of the law, a title first appropriated to Esdras (about
450 b.c). He was one of the founders of the new arrangements
in the restored state, and was a priest, and at the same time a
judge appointed by the king of Persia. He made it the object
of his life to investigate the law and to act as its expositor, and
from the time of his appointment was the model of a priest
learned in the Scriptures. He and his scholars and successors
attained a powerful and abiding influence over the spirit and
character of the people. They preached and set forth the un-
conditional authority of the law as a rule for every relation and
circumstance of daily life. From that time forth dependence on
the law, pride in its possession as the pledge of divine election,
and the careful custody of this wall of partition, sank deep into
the character of the nation, and became the source of many ad-
vantages as well as of serious faults. This zeal for the law,
however, was the main bulwark under which the nation was
strengthened into freshness and individuality of life.
The later Jewish tradition makes much mention of the- great
synagogue believed to have existed already in the time of Esdras,
or to have been founded by him. It is supposed to have mus-
tered 120 members, and, under the presidency of the high-priest,
was to be the guardian of the law and doctrine. One of its last
rulers was Simon the Just, who was high-priest, and the most
distinguished doctor of his time (that of the first Ptolemys).
Afterwards this threefold dignity or function of high-priest,
scribe or rabbi, and of Nasi or prince of the synagogue, were
never united in one person. There is no doubt that a tribunal
with definitive jurisdiction, watching over doctrine and morals,
existed in the Persian and early Grecian period, which appears
to have turned by degrees into a merely judicial and governing
body, while authoritative exposition of the law passed into the
hands of some Scribes of distinction, and of the schools which
they founded. A leading maxim of the great synagogue, given
PROGRESS OF HELLENISM. 299
as a precept to the people, was, " Make ye a hedge about the
law/' wherein the principle is expressed, that, in order to be sure
to avoid every injury to or unfulfilment of the letter of the law,
it was necessary to do more than this letter demanded. The
consequence of this necessarily was, that new principles, new
decisions, and extensions of the old, were always being pro-
duced, laws were heaped upon laws, and the original purpose of
the law was overlooked, as either indifferent or not certainly
known ; while, on the other hand, the outward adherence to its
smallest and most trivial letter was regarded as the climax of
religious observance.
On this growing bias to extension and glorification of max-
ims, the increasing respect paid to the Sopherim, the teachers of
the law, or " Scribes," acted both as cause and effect. The Le-
vites specially belonged to them, but so also did any one of the
lower orders whose zeal led him to choose the study of the law
and its exposition as his vocation or favourite pursuit. With
this period originated the rabbinical axiom, that the crown of
the kingdom was deposited in Judah, and the crown of the priest-
hood in the seed of Aaron, but the crown of the law was com-
mon to all Israel. The high-priesthood fell into contempt, the
more it served foreign rulers as the venal instrument of their
caprice; but the Scribes flourished as being the preservers of all
theological and juridical knowledge, and were supported by the
respect and confidence of the people. They had their tradition,
that is to say, certain precepts and maxims, founded partly on
the decisions of celebrated teachers, partly on scientific exposi-
tion of the Scriptures, which was gradually established, and the
precepts accumulating by degrees to form a hedge about the law.
The consideration paid to the Levites now also abated, and the
Sopherim became the object of all the national veneration which
they had formerly enjoyed. This ascendency of the Scribes
caused a division among the Levites into two parts; the one
class joined the Scribes, and now enjoyed, respect and influence,
not as members of the tribe of Levi, but of the learned body of
the legal professors ; the others were merely ecclesiastical min-
isters and performers of ceremonies.
By the year 170 b.c, Hellenism had undoubtedly made such
progress among the Jews, in Palestine even, that the Assyrian
king, Antiochus Epiphanes, was able to plan the extirpation of
300 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
the Jewish religion, and the conversion of the temple at Jerusa-
lem into a temple of Jupiter Olympius. The richer and nobler
among them had made acquaintance with Greek manners and
Greek luxuries of art and life in the courts of Antioch and Alex-
andria. The law, with its developments and restraints, pro-
bably was anyhow a heavy yoke in their eyes, and the proud
rule of the Scribes a hateful tyranny. In face of the refinement
of the Greeks and their ridicule, they grew ashamed of their
"barbarous" law, which denied them all participation in the
pleasures of the Grecian symposia ; they would gladly have had
gymnasia, theatres, and the contests of the arena in Jerusalem
itself. But the two ends of emancipation from the yoke of the
law and of hellenising Jewish life could only be compassed for
them through the powerful aid of the Syrian sovereign, for the
people rejected them with horror as "apostates from the holy
covenant, lawless and godless men."1
It was Jesus, or Jason (the Hellenistic form of name that
he adopted), brother of the high-priest, Onias III., who bought
the office of high-priest from the king, and who began the work
by setting up a gymnasium on the Greek model. There were so
many of the same way of thinking, that even priests deserted the
temple service, and many Jews assumed an artificial foreskin, so
as to appear naked at the arena, without exhibiting to the Greeks
a characteristic token of their creed. Jason already sent am-
bassadors (theoroi) to the feasts of Hercules at Tyre, with sa-
crificial presents ; he was outbid, however, in zeal for Hellenism
and in bribes at court, by Menelaus, who was named high-priest
by the king; and then Jerusalem was converted into a regular
heathen city, out of which the faithful and strict observers of the
law fled. Royal edicts soon appeared, forbidding, throughout
Judea, circumcision, the keeping of the Sabbath, and the use of
the book of the law. The sacrifices of the temple ceased, and
a smaller altar was built over the large altar of sacrifice, on which
thenceforth sacrifice was offered to Jupiter Olympius, and swine
were actually slain in scorn of the Jewish law. A party of apos-
tates supported him. Thus were the words of Daniel fulfilled —
the sanctuary profaned, the daily sacrifice done away with, and
the abomination of desolation set up.
In the midst of the bloody persecution raised against the
1 1 Mace. i. 12, vii. 5.
THE CHASIDIM. 301
faithful, Mattathias, of the priestly family of the Asmoneans,
gave the signal for a rising. His son, Judas Maccabeus (the
hammer), gloriously continued the fight, after the death of his
father ; he went up to Jerusalem, purified the temple in the year
164 b.c, notwithstanding the Syrian garrison on Mount Zion,
and restored the true worship. These successes, however, were
but transitory. Judas fell on the field of battle; Jerusalem again
passed into the hands of the Syrians, whose Jewish adherents
recognised Alcimus as high-priest, on the institution of king
Demetrius. This man was of the family of Aaron, and came
forward as the head of the Grseco-heathen party. As he was
planning to pull down even the wall of the temple which sepa-
rated the heathen court from the Israelites, he died suddenly,
b.c 159. Meanwhile Jonathan, and after him Simon, brothers
of the deceased Judas, managed to maintain themselves at the
head of a small band of patriots and believers. The Syrian
power soon afterwards became weakened and divided by conten-
tions for the throne; till Simon succeeded in taking the Zion
fort in Jerusalem, b.c 141, upon which the grateful people made
over to him and his family the highest spiritual and temporal
power, the hereditary dignity of prince and high-priest, till God
should send them a ' ' true prophet,"1 for Simon was neither of
the family of David nor of Aaron. From this time the Hellen-
istic party ceased to exist.
2. The Chasidim — Sadducees — Pharisees — Essenes —
Therapeut^:.
During the wars of the Maccabees, there was a school or party
among the Jews called the Chasidim, the pious or fearers of God,
who were not essentially different from the Sopherim or Scribes,
but were remarkable for their excessive strictness in the observ-
ance of the law and all that was included therein. They had
joined in the revolt of Mattathias on the occasion of the Syrian
general Bacchides executing sixty of their number, but after-
wards they supported the traitor high-priest Alcimus, on account
of his descent. They play no further part in public events under
Jonathan and Simon.
1 1 Mace. xiv. 41.
302 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
The antipodes of these Chasidim were the Sadducees. Ac-
cording to one tradition, this party was originated by Sadoc, a
disciple of the celebrated teacher of the law, Antigonus of Socho
(291-260 b.c). Their rise is undoubtedly to be traced to the
influences which the Greeks exercised on Judaism philosophi-
cally, as well as morally and socially. At the time when we
first meet with them in history, that is to say, under Jonathan
the Asmonean (159-144), they were, though in a modified form,
the heirs and successors of the Hellenists, who had now for long
been in existence ; they were far removed from actual apostasy ;
nor did they endeavour, like the earlier Hellenists, to manifest
their Greek spirit by an imitation of foreign customs. Hellen-
ism was conquered under the Asmoneans, and beaten out of the
field, and a new gush of Jewish patriotism and zeal for the law
had taken its place. The Sadducees, who from the first appear
as a school suited for the times, including the rich and educated
statesmen, adopted the prevailing tone among the people. They
took part in the services and sacrifices of the temple, practised
circumcision, observed the Sabbath, and so professed to be real
Jews and followers of the law, but the law rightly understood,
and restored to its simple text and literal sense. They repu-
diated, they said, the authority of the new teachers of the law
(now the Pharisees), and of the body of tradition with which
they had encircled the law. In this tradition they of course
included all that was burdensome to themselves. With the
letter of the law, the few principal points of circumcision, the
Sabbath, and sacrifice excepted, it was easier to deal; and the
Sadducees knew how to lighten its yoke and to simplify and
keep it within its narrowest limits. The way that they appeal
to the Thora alone has been interpreted as if they rejected all
the other sacred books in the prophetical collection, and only
recognised the five books of Moses as Scripture; but evidence
and fact testify the contrary, especially the assertion of Jose-
phus, that the twenty-two books of the Old Testament were re-
ceived by all Jews without exception as the divine word.1 It is
plain, however, that the Thora, as being the law, was of higher
estimation among them than the prophetical scriptures and ha-
giographa.
The peculiar doctrines of the Sadducees obviously arose from
1 Contra Apion. i. 8.
THE SADDUCEES. 303
the workings of the Epicurean philosophy, which had found spe-
cial acceptance in Syria. They admitted indeed the creation, as
it seems, but denied all continuous operation of God in the world.
He, it is true, had given the law to His people, once for all, but
then had withdrawn Himself, and had left the people and every
individual person entire freedom, so that good and evil depended
only on the free will of man. They said, there was no such
thing as destiny, for that must be a thing established by God,
whereas He takes no part in earthly matters; man is master
and author of his own destiny, and the evil affecting him he has
brought on himself, without the participation of God.1
The Sadducees proved they were real followers of Epicurus,
by denying the life of the soul after death. The soul, they said,
passes away with the body. They consequently denied the re-
surrection.2 Furthermore, they disbelieved in the existence of
angels. We know not how they interpreted the frequent men-
tion of them in the Pentateuch. The peculiarly negative cha-
racter of the Sadducee school made it easy for persons of very
different views to join it; — as all were interested in common to
extricate themselves from a double yoke, that of the more com-
plete body of doctrine as imposed by the dominant teaching
body of the law-learned, which hampered the free will of indi-
viduals, and of those stricter and more extended requirements
of the law to be found in the explanations of the Sopherim, or
in the ordinances of later times. It happened, however, that the
Sadducee principle of carrying out the dry letter of the written
law, led sometimes to great harshness, as, for instance, in the
case of punishments for bodily injuries ; "an eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth ;" while the Pharisees, following a milder and
traditional interpretation, allowed the guilty person to buy him-
self off by a pecuniary compensation.
The mass of the people stood aloof from the Sadducees, whom
they regarded with mistrust and aversion. Since Hellenism had
brought such incalculable evil on the nation, and exposed the
faithful to so bloody a persecution, zeal for the law, and a strin-
gent severance from all that was heathen or foreign, was the
prevailing feeling of the Jews, or at any rate the only one by
which a school or party could recommend itself to the people.
Hence the Sadducees, as a rule, only accepted public offices un-
1 Jos. Bell. Jud. ii. 8, 14 ; Antiq. xiii. 5, 9. 2 Antiq. xviii. 1-4.
304 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
willingly, partly from love of ease, when there was more trouble
than profit attached to them ; partly because the popular feeling
forced them to administer the law according to the principles
and custom of the Pharisees.1 Josephus remarked that they
were rude and unkind, not only to those who disagreed with
them, but even towards each other. Every thing tends to show
they did not form in reality a compact and organised sect, nor
had they probably any established body of teachers of their own;
rather it was the loose bond of a mode of thought, that harmo-
nised in denying more than in affirming, which allowed of their
being designated as a united school. To be specially active in
making proselytes, or expanding the circle of their opinions, was
no concern of theirs. No Sadducee writings probably ever ex-
isted which laid down a system or set up a confession. It did
not occur to them, even when it was in their power, to indoctri-
nate, to perplex the people in their belief and life according to
the law. They were the enlightened and cultivated of their day
and nation, who made religion easy to themselves, and only held
to as much as was needful for appearance-sake, and to maintain
their position as Jewish citizens ; about as much, in fact, as any
enlightened Greek, who never withdrew himself from the parti-
cipation in the religious festivities and sacrifices of his people,
would have deemed necessary. As a political party they were
averse to all democratic and republican tendencies, and were
friends and supporters of the sovereign authority, both under
the later Asmoneans and under the Romans.
It is the custom to contrast the Pharisees with the Saddu-
cees, as if they were two opposite sects, existing in the midst of
the Jewish nation, and separated from the body of the Jews.
But neither the Sadducees nor the Pharisees were sects in the
common acceptation of the word, least of all the latter. Taken at
bottom, the nation were for the most part pharisaically minded ;
in other words, the Pharisees were only the more important and
religiously inclined men of the nation, who gave the most de-
cided expression to the prevailing belief, and strove to establish
and enforce it by a definite system of teaching and interpretation
of the sacred books. All the priests, who were not mere blunt
senseless instruments, clung to the pharisaical belief. All the So-
pherim, or Scribes, were at the same time Pharisees, and, when
1 Jos. Antiq. xviii. 1-4.
\
THE PHARISEES. 305
they are spoken of side by side as two different classes, by the lat-
ter must be understood those who, without belonging by calling
or position to the body of the learned, yet were zealous in setting
forth its principles, teaching, and practices, and surpassed others
in the example they gave of the most exact observance of the
law. Thus Josephus could speak on one occasion of more than
6000 Pharisees in Herod's time. This numerical calculation is
only arrived at, however, from the fact of there being 6000 who
refused to swear fidelity to the king and the Romans, and were
fined in consequence.1 And when he speaks of three heresies, or
philosophies, among the Jews, it is only, as usual with him, an
accommodation to Greek ideas. Neither the Greeks nor Ro-
mans had ever met with any thing like the Pharisees in all their
history, to wit, such a union of religious zeal, national pride,
and patriotic sentiment. Hence they could only be supplied
with an approximate idea of the peculiar position and character
of the Pharisees by a comparison of them with the Grecian philo-
sophical schools of the Pythagoreans, or perhaps Stoics. Besides,
the Sadducees had the strongest interest to designate their most
determined adversaries as a mere party, and to invent a party
name for them, in order to disguise the fact that these men in
reality only followed the common traditional belief and religious
practice of the nation. This, in fine, was coupled with a political
and religious opposition against all foreign sovereignty or do-
minion exercised by rulers of foreign descent, unavoidable among
the Jews in Judea, unless they were Hellenists, or indifferent to
religion. For the people of God had an imprescriptible right to
be free from all foreign rule ; any thiug of the sort was but a
passing punishment for their national sins and breaches of the
law. And now that the nation had taken a religious bias, and
strove so earnestly after an observance of the law to its fullest
extent, the continued duresse of a foreign yoke appeared to the
Jews a kind of injustice and an inexplicable misfortune, which
they bore with angry impatience, resolved to seize the first op-
portunity of shaking it off. The Pharisees were obliged to take
the initiative in this too, on account of their consideration with
the people, and when allegiance to God or the law seemed to
require the example of opposition to the government : and thus
they were generally the first victims of kingly vengeance.2
1 Jos. Antiq. xvii. 2.4. 2 Ibid. xvii. 24.
VOL. II. X
306 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
The Pharisees accordingly were in the eyes of the nation a
guard set over all the spiritual goods of Israel, over purity of
doctrine and maxims, faithfulness in conduct to the law, and
national dignity and freedom ; and to this post some were sum-
moned by their vocation, some offered themselves of their own
free will. They were spokesmen and representatives of the
people whenever any question connected with religion arose;
and with the Jews, whose whole public and private life was over-
spread by the law as by a mighty net, every thing that occurred
assumed at once a religious signification. On the one hand, they
were as a faithful mirror reflecting the inclinations and views
astir among the people ; on the other, their authority reacted on
the people, and gave the direction to their minds. The light as
well as the dark side of the national character, and the prevalent
mode of thought, were potentially represented in them. The
aristocracy of Jewish blood was to be found amongst them, such
as had kept free from the taint of Greek and Syrian infusion, the
Hebrews of the Hebrews, who gloried in being true-born issue of
the Covenant.
If the term u Pharisees" was undoubtedly derived from a
word signifying " separation" or " exclusion/' it certainly does
not imply, as has frequently been asserted, that they received
this name because they separated themselves from the people as
claimants to a devotion of a special character ; for such a sever-
ance from the mass, as if impure, and as if intercourse with them
was contaminating, could never have been suggested to the Pha-
risees by the spirit or letter of the law, and would assuredly
have brought down on them the hatred and aversion of the
people, instead of the confidence which they possessed in so high
a degree. They acquired the name, because at the time of its
origination the great battle with Hellenism and its disturbing
influences had to be carried on, and the pious, or Chasidim, now
practised and preached a careful avoidance of all that was Hel-
lenistic. This name, therefore, was perhaps first given them by
their adversaries, the Hellenists, while they received it willingly
as a title of honour : and thus the Jewish tradition is historically
probable that the origin of the Pharisees may date as far back as
Antigonus of Socho, for he is named as the first to maintain that
the " gader," or hedge of the law, was a part, and as binding
as the rest, of the divine law itself; and his disciples and fol-
THE PHARISEES THE TEACHING CLASS. 307
lowers would acquire the name of Pharisees, because they strove
to separate themselves from all strangers, heathen, and conta-
minating folk, by this " hedge of the law." It was natural, in
the great danger from Hellenism, which was insinuating itself
through a vast variety of channels, corrupting the Jews by every
kind of allurement, and enticing them more and more from their
belief and their law, that they should have felt the inadequacy
of their old ordinances. These statutes were given several cen-
turies back, under a far simpler state of things, and for persons
living in very different circumstances ; and therefore, when ap-
peal was made to the complications which had arisen in later
days and the very different situation, they might easily be evaded,
or be rendered impracticable for present needs, by interpretation :
many cases which were daily occurring were unprovided for alto-
gether. A reference to the spirit and object of the law would
of course be useless when the mass of people were longing for
Hellenistic enjoyments. Thus amplifications and sometimes also
limitations of the law had to be introduced, and its prescriptions
extended, by an interpretation, often artificial and arbitrary, to
things and actions which now seemed dangerous or to be re-
jected; and to these "hedges" drawn around the law, the same
binding power had, as they fancied, to be attributed as to its
written letter. Now, it was not easy to stop in such a course
when once entered on : and hence a species of legal casuistry
arose, whereby small matters of no moment were weighed with a
painful scrupulousness, and raised to the same level and import-
ance as the first duties of life.
Since the times of Esdras, Hebrew had become a dead lan-
guage to the mass of the people :l the holy books were therefore
incomprehensible to the generality, though detached portions were
read in the synagogues in Hebrew, and expounded. The learned
alone, who from their youth had been regularly instructed in the
law, and made it their study, were able to explain and apply it.
The Scribes, i. e. the Pharisees, were accordingly the guardians
of the people, and preservers of an indispensable science and tra-
1 Esdras and Nehemias were zealous in trying to preserve the Hebrew tongue
in its purity, 2 Esd. viii. 13, xiii. 1 and 23 sqq.; but the Maccabee princes having
coins struck in the second century with Hebrew legends proves no more, as regards
its national use, than the Latin inscriptions on our coins prove that the people
are familiar with Latin.
308 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
dition, as well as the living exemplars and mirrors, in which the
true mode of a life according to the law was represented. They
were, in short, counsellors in doubtful cases. A peculiar doctrine
they neither had nor could have, as they formed no particular
school, still less a sect, but were spread throughout the land as
the ruling and teaching body of the nation, " who sat in the seat
of Moses ;" so that even the Sadducees had to conform to them
in word and deed, when once chosen to fill public offices con-
nected with religion. Nothing but the opposition between them
and the Sadducees could have led to the idea that the Pharisees,
too, were a distinct school or " heresy."
The Pharisaical explanation of the law was a traditionary
one ; and if the Sadducees rejected the tradition of the Scribes,
and pretended to hold only to the letter of Biblical prescript,
they rejected at the same time not only the various additions
and new ordinances of the Pharisaical school tradition, but also
the whole current interpretation of the law, leaving this to the
private opinion of each man, who in this matter (they said) was
bound by no authority. It was with them a mere matter of
ceremonial and civil law ; the " Deuteroseis," or glosses on the
law, for which Christ reproached the Pharisees, saying that by
such human traditions they rendered the law of no avail, and
weakened and injured its true sense,1 belonged chiefly to this
category. Their anxiety was about such things as washing of
hands before meals,2 and bathing the body when on their return
from market they believed themselves made unclean by contact
with a variety of unclean things or persons ; the washing of
dishes, flagons, and pots, as well as of the couches on which they
reposed when at table ; if, for instance, a dead fly fell into an
earthen pitcher, it had to be broken. Further, these traditions
involved a troublesome extension of, and severity in regard to,
the law of the Sabbath. No one was allowed to go more than a
thousand steps from home on that day : all marketing, carrying
of burdens, plucking ears of corn, or healing the sick, was called
Sabbath-breaking. In the Deuteroseis, or Mishna, thirty-nine
occupations were enumerated, to which are to be added many
other things of a similar kind, all equally forbidden on the Sab-
bath. Besides, the Sabbath was lengthened, as it was made to
begin before sunset, on the " hedge" principle of insuring no
1 Matt. xv. 3 ; Mark vii. 0. 2 Matt. xv. 1 sq. ; Mark vii. 2 sq. ; Luke xi. 38.
VIEWS OF FREE WILL AND PROVIDENCE. 309
desecration of the holy time. The law of tithes was in like man-
ner extended. In the Mosaic law they were not to be taken
from every kind of produce, but the Pharisees paid a tithe of
mint, anise, and cummin.1 Later on, the Pharisaical priests and
Levites gave, it appears, an additional tenth upon the tithe paid.
As most insects belonged to the class of unclean creatures, and,
in drinking, a gnat might easily be swallowed, the zealots used
to strain what they drank, and this is what our Lord referred to
in speaking of " straining '«fe gnats." In addition to the fast
prescribed by Moses for the day of atonement, other fasting
times were added to commemorate national misfortunes, such as
the taking of Jerusalem by the Chaldees. Many fasted twice
a- week in memory of Moses ascending Mount Sinai. A Phari-
see was easily recognised by his loud prayers in public places,
ostentatious almsgiving, large fringes on his clothes, broad phy-
lacteries,— or pieces of parchment with the commandments writ-
ten on them, and tied on the forehead and left hand.
Josephus, a Pharisee himself, reveals what the Pharisees
thought of themselves : " in their own idea, they are the flower
of the nation, and the most accurate observers and expounders
of the law." That mutual love and concord which according
to him is a distinction of the nation, and one marvelled at and
envied by the heathens, he accords as a special characteristic
to the Pharisees.2 ' ' Through their intercourse with God, many
of them possess the gift of prophecy."3 "They are proud of
their literal and strict exposition of the law, and convinced of
their being the prime favourites of God."
By his method of adapting what he said to the Grecian
mode of expression, Josephus has given ground for the asser-
tion, that not only among the Essenes, but, in a degree at least,
among the Pharisees, a fatalistic theory of the world prevailed.
The Essenes, he says, viewed destiny as all -dominating, so that
nothing happens to man which is not decreed to him by fate.
The Pharisees, it is true, also maintained that every thing came
to pass through destiny, but still that man had free will to do
good or evil, and hence a mixture of freedom and fatalism re-
sults. In most cases it is in the power of man to act rightly or
wrongly, but destiny cooperates in every thing.4 It is obvious
1 Matt, xxiii. 23. 2 Bell. Jud. ii. 8. 14; cf. adv. Apion, ii. 19 sqq.
3 Antiq. xvii. 24. 4 Ibid, xviii. 1 . 3.
310 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
here that, in the sense of the Essenes and Pharisees as well, di-
vine providence, or predestination, ought to he substituted for
destiny. The Essenes taught that all is in the hands of God ;
whatever man does or meets with, that he does and meets with
through the will of God. In contradiction to this doctrine, de-
structive of human freedom, and also to the opposite extreme of
the Sadducee view, making God withdraw himself entirely from
human life, and all will and deed to rest with man alone, the
Pharisee taught that man's freedom and God's providence and
guidance are so interwoven that generally both factors are to be
conceived as working together, yet without disparagement to
human power of choice; and that, on the whole, divine govern-
ment of the world attains its end in the long-run, undisturbed
by the exercise of man's freedom. According to later accounts,
many of the Pharisees were engaged in astrology, and thus were
led to adopt a sort of fatalism1 dependent on the course of the
stars. Philo says that many Jews, from the time of the Baby-
lonian captivity, believed in the influence of the stars, interpret-
ing the seven higher angels of the Presence as the spirits of
the seven planets, and that they occupied themselves with astro-
logy.2
The Hellenistic predilections of Josephus have also led to a
misunderstanding on the belief of the Pharisees regarding the
state after death. He shrank from speaking of a subject so
offensive to the Greek mind as the resurrection of the body,
and therefore said that the souls of the just passed into another
body,3 or that, in the revolution of the cosmical periods, they
received again pure bodies to dwell in. His words are, I think,
purposely so chosen that the Greek might gather the doctrine of
a metempsychosis from them, and the Jew his well-known one
of the resurrection, which made so sharp a distinction between
the Pharisees and Sadducees. That a belief in the transmigra-
tion of souls did exist among the Jews from the times of the
Maccabees, and in consequence of Greek and Oriental influences,
there is abundant proof; but it was not the dominant belief, nor
was it a doctrine of the Pharisees.
The sect of the Essenes arose during the troublous times
shortly before the first Asmoneans, when Hellenism obtruded
1 Epiph. Haer. xvi. 2. 2 De Migr. Abr. p. 415.
3 Antiq. xviii. 2. 3 ; Bell. Jud. ii. 7. 14, iii. 8. 5 and 7.
THE ESSENES. 311
itself on Judaism in such force, with intellectual and material
weapons, and caused such a ferment of spirits amongst the Jews*
The school of the Sadducees appeared at this crisis, and that of
the Essenes seems to have formed simultaneously; for Josephus
mentions the three parties of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes
for the first time in the days of Jonathan (161-143), and after-
wards informs us that Judas, an old Essene, prophesied the
murder of Antigonus hy Aristobulus (107 b.c).1 Their num-
bers in Palestine amounted to four thousand in the time of
Josephus. Some part of them were dispersed about in the
towns, carrying on trades ; others were united together in com-
munities in the country, where they were employed in agricul-
ture. Pliny says that in his time they dwelt on the western
side of the Dead Sea ; if so, they must have gone there first in
consequence of the catastrophe which befell Judea in the great
Roman war. They themselves appear to have laid claim to a
high antiquity, and to have attributed the foundation of their
community to Moses : hence Philo's expression, that the law-
giver himself urged an immense number of his most trusted
followers to form a community, which was called that of the
Essenes.2
The Essenes were a body of ascetics, but their asceticism
rested more on Greek (Orphico-Pythagorean) views than on
purely Jewish ones. They did not spring out of the Chasidim, or
from Nazaritism, nor could any one say that an Essene was no-
thing but a Nazarite for life.3 For the very points which were
distinctive of a Nazarite — viz. abstinence from wine and all in-
toxicating drinks, and the letting the hair grow — are not spoken
of as being Essene; while no Nazarite ever led such an un-
Jewish life as that of the Essenes was. In a general way, it
is quite clear that the Essenes could not have developed out
of Judaism spontaneously, and without the help of external
influences (as, for instance, has been recently maintained),4
through their effort to realise the character of the sacerdotal
monarchy, and on the basis of the general rights of Israel to the
priesthood to form a sacerdotal community. On such an hypo-
1 Antiq. xiii. 2 ; Bell. Jud. i. 3. 5. 2 Fragm. ed. Mangey, ii. 635.
3 As Gratz mentions in his " History of the Jews from the Death of Judas
Maccabeus," Leip. 1856, p. 97.
4 Ritschl, in Zeller's Theol. Jahrbuchern, 1855, p. 315.
312 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
thesis, there would be no satisfactory explanation of the hetero-
geneous un-Jewish asceticism, nor of the rejection of animal
sacrifices, nor of the election of particular priests. Finally, the
Essenes could not be a product of the Jewish Alexandrian reli-
gious philosophy,1 for in it Platonism predominated, while we
find nothing of the sort in the Essenes, but, on the contrary, a
large infusion of Orphic Pythagoreanism. The numerous sal-
lies and jests occurring in the comic poets of the Alexandrine
period show that the ethical doctrine of the followers of Orpheus
and Pythagoras, and the mode of life corresponding thereto,
still lasted in the form of an order or free community without
speculative activity in the time of Alexander, even though the
philosophical schools of the Pythagoreans were extinct as early
as the middle of the fourth century b.c. In this school or sect
we find specifically the rejection of animal sacrifice, and the ab-
stinence from flesh-meat, which had been already noted by Plato
in the Orphici;2 the worship of God in white linen vestments; and
the like. It was natural that these Orphic Pythagoreans should
spread into Syria, and come into contact with the Jews when
Palestine became hellenised.
In spite, therefore, of this admixture of Jewish and heathen
elements to be found in the Essenes (without injury, however, to
their strict monotheism), they were unquestionably real disciples
of Moses in their own estimation, and, indeed, the only genuine
ones ; and they were zealots for the law, as they understood and
explained it. Their veneration for the great lawgiver went so
far, according to Josephus, that they reverenced his name next
to that of God, and punished any disrespect towards it with
death. They rivalled the Pharisees in their strict interpretation
and amplification of some points of the law, and carried the
burdensome observance of the Sabbath even further, not only
preparing their food the day before, to avoid lighting a fire on
the Sabbath, but not even allowing any vessel to be moved from
its place, or any of their own natural wants to be satisfied.3 How
they could reconcile such zeal for a portion of the law with the
setting aside of another, very weighty and comprehensive, — viz.
1 Dahne (article 'Essaen' in derHallc'sclien Encyklop. no. xxxviii. p. 183) lays
this clown as quite indisputable.
2 Legg. vi. 782.
3 Jos. Bell. Jud. ii. 8. 9; Porphyr. de Abst. iv. 13, p. 341.
THE ESSENES : THEIR VIEWS OF PURITY. 313
that of animal sacrifice, thereby excluding themselves from the
Temple worship, and from religious communion with the whole
nation, — would be incomprehensible, unless the Grseco-Pythago-
rean leaven had exercised an overpowering influence upon them
in this matter. They must have either taken some deprecatory
expressions of the later prophets as a formal abrogation of the
animal sacrifices before ordained, or, by a most arbitrary and
strained allegorical interpretation, have volatilised the clear com-
mands of the law.
Ideas about the purity or impurity of material things swayed
the whole life of the Essenes, to a degree seldom equalled by any
other creed, and rendered their intercourse with others far more
difficult than that of the Jews with the heathens. Mere contact
with one who was not an Essene, or with even one of their own
people of a lower grade, was considered contaminating, and
required ceremonies of purification. Oil was also held to be
defiling; so if any one had been anointed against his will, he
had to wash his body immediately. Meals in common were
looked upon quite as religious actions : every one washed his
whole body beforehand, and put on a clean linen garment, which
he took off again as soon as the meal was ended. The baker
placed the bread before each guest, and the cook in like man-
ner a plate with one mess ; the priest blessed the victuals, and
no one dared to taste any thing before the prayer was said.1
Thus we see each meal was a sacrificial one ; and it is of these
sacrifices that Josephus speaks when he says that, although ex-
cluded from the common sanctuary of the Jews, the Essenes never-
theless performed the same sacrifices in their own domestic circle.2
The Essenes had a complete theory of demons or angels.
One of the solemn obligations undertaken by a person entering
1 Here Eitschl is right in what he maintains against Zeller, that Ugus Sta iroir)-
aiv airov re kcu fSpwfjidTccv means, " priests (are chosen) for the offerings of bread
and victuals ;" not, as Zeller (Jahrbiicher, 1856, p. 414) thinks, " for the prepara-
tion of bread and victuals ;" for it would have been strange, and little in keeping
with the general character of the Essenes, if they had chosen priests merely to
turn them into bakers and cooks : and moreover Josephus expressly distinguishes,
in the description of their meal- times, the airoiroiSs, who portions out the bread,
from the /xdyeipos, who brings the plates with the meats, and the tepeuy, who says
the prayer. In order to attend carefully to the requisite purity in preparing the
food, it was not necessary to have any priest, every Essene of the highest class
being competent for that, as perfectly clean.
2 Jos. Antiq. xviii. 1. 15.
314 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
their order was that of keeping secret the name of the angel
then communicated to him. Apparently this is connected with
the veneration which they showed to the sun. They durst not
utter a word on profane matters before sunrise, but addressed
certain prayers to the sun, which had descended to them from
their fathers, calling on him to arise. In their estimation, as
well as in that of Philo, the sun was a living intelligent being,
and without doubt had a name to be kept secret. One feature
of the worship consisted in keeping out of sight whatever would
be offensive to the sun, as the private parts of the person and all
evacuations of the body. Accordingly, every Essene was pre-
sented, on his reception, with a hatchet to be used as a spade,
and with which he dug a hole a foot deep every day. There he
satisfied the necessities of nature, taking care to cover himself
with his garment, so as not to desecrate the rays of the deity ;
the hole was filled up with the earth afterwards. He had also an
apron given him, with orders not to perform an ablution with-
out it, so that the sun should not be deprived of due respect.
A community of goods existed among the Essenes. All pro-
fit from labour was thrown into a common chest, under the
supervision of certain stewards chosen for the purpose ; and no
individual possessed any thing of his own. He handed over to
the community whatever he had before his entrance : thus there
was neither buying nor selling amongst them. Marriage was
forbidden; hence Pliny calls them the "everlasting" people,
amongst whom no one was born.1 They limited themselves to
bare necessaries in food and clothing, and they were not allowed
to change their clothes or shoes until quite worn out. Their
sick who were unable to work, as also the stranger and traveller
belonging to the sect, were liberally provided for out of their
funds. The aged were honoured as fathers. They would not
tolerate slavery, nor allow arms or warlike implements to be
made by their workmen. The duty of obedience was carefully
observed. No Essene did any thing without the command of
his superior. Only two things, Josephus says, were left to their
free will, viz. helping their neighbours and mercy. They were
forbidden to take an oath. A solemn repose reigned during
their assemblies and meals, such as gave those not yet asso-
ciated the impression of the society being possessed of some
» Plin. H. N. v. 15 ; Philo, Fragm. vol. ii. p. 633.
INSTITUTIONS OF THE ESSENES. 315
awful mystery. In judicial decisions, a congregation of at least
a hundred was requisite.
The Essenes only received persons of mature age, and these
not till after a year of probation. The admission was a gradual
one. After the expiration of the year, the novice was only ad-
mitted to the holy purifications by water, but not to the meals.
Then followed a further period of trial two years long, during
which, if they evinced sufficient proofs of strength of character
and endurance, the complete reception ensued, upon which they
took a solemn oath, the last permitted to them. The oath en-
joined, besides the rules of strict morality, secrecy as to all the
concerns of the society, even if they were tortured to death for
it. The fate of those expelled from their body for any offence
was pitiable : being bound by their vows, they could not receive
any food from others, and were therefore obliged to eat nothing
but herbs till they slowly wasted away, and were only read-
mitted from compassion, when at the last extremity, to save
their dying of starvation. The Essenes were divided into four
classes, according to the date of their admission ; and an Es-
sene of a higher class was obliged to purify himself if touched
by a brother of inferior rank. They were thoroughly Pythago-
rean in teaching that the soul, which emanated from the finest
ether, was girt by the chain of the body, into which it was
plunged by some natural power of attraction : when once freed
from this bodily chain, as out of a long captivity, it would re-
joice and take flight to heaven. Yet they taught besides an
earthly paradise for the good, a country beyond the ocean, where
the weather was always genial ; while the wicked dwelt in a cold
and gloomy place, and there were tormented.
The Essenes, as Philo remarks,1 quite set aside logic and
physics, and devoted themselves to ethics, which with them
abounded in asceticism, and were directed to the mortification
of sensuality. They abhorred pleasure as sin; temperance was
their first and highest virtue, and the foundation of all the
others ; and through it they generally lived to an advanced age,
often above a hundred years. Their constancy in enduring tor-
ture was wonderful. Many were supposed to have the gift of
prophecy. One branch of them differed from the main body in
permitting marriage. The men put their betrothed through a
1 Quod omnis prob. lib., p. 458, Mang.
316 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
probation of three years, and married them only after three
menstrual purgations, as a proof of their ability to bear children.
Thus a strange compound of heathenism was exhibited in
this remarkable body, in union with an apparently exaggerated
Pharisaism in some of its observances of the law. The worship
which they paid the sun was borrowed from heathendom, and is
a feature proving their Pythagorean colouring, with which they
assuredly did not imagine that they did prejudice to the mono-
theism of the Mosaic law. That, indeed, expressly prohibited
the worship of the sun j1 but the exegesis which set aside animal
sacrifice came to their aid here too ; many expressions of the
Bible concerning the sun and its relation to God were inter-
preted in apparent proof that, if an inferior, it was still a godlike
being, somewhat in the same relation that the Persian creed in-
dicated as existing between it and Ormuzd. The Jews of that
period must have rejected them as a foreign growth, and refused
religious communion with them, although the Essenes sent their
gifts to the Temple in due course. After the fall of the Temple,
indeed, their rejection of animal sacrifices lost its immediate
practical import, while their extraordinary constancy and ad-
herence to the law during the Jewish wars won them the hearts
of many of the orthodox ; and this explains how Josephus came
to speak of them with such evident partiality.
Whilst the Essenes led an active and laborious life, without
absolutely separating themselves from the other Jews, the Thera-
peutse devoted themselves to one of contemplation, and kept apart
from towns in the neighbourhood of Alexandria. They lived iso-
lated in small mean buildings, following no trade, and occupied
only in reading the Scriptures (which they interpreted allegori-
cally) and in holy meditation j each house had its holy place,
called the semneon, or monasterion, where, according to Philo,
they carried out the mysteries of their holy life in complete seclu-
sion. They only met together in one common sanctuary on the
Sabbath ; here the men and women were placed in two divisions,
and listened while an elder discoursed. On this day they allowed
themselves a more generous diet, but during the week they ob-
served a strict regimen and constant fasts. Meat and wine were
entirely prohibited. They met every seven weeks at a solemn
meal, dressed in white, when they had prayer, religious dis-
» Deut. iv. ID; xvii. 3.
THE THERAPEUTVE. 317
courses, and hymns. On this followed the holy night solemnity,
in which men and women, at first in two choirs apart, com-
menced dances, accompanied by singing, during which the two
choirs mingled together. The dance was kept up all night until
daybreak.1
There is no evidence to prove that the Egyptian Therapeutic
were allied to the Essenes in Palestine. The latter were an here-
tical sect. Philo, who is the only authority on the matter, says
nothing to imply that the Therapeutae were cut off from religious
communion with the other Jews, while it may be gathered from
his silence, and from the custom of religious dances, that they
did not join the Essenes in their exalted notions about what was
clean and what unclean. The Orphico-Pythagorean doctrines
and customs, which strike us in the Essenes, are not mentioned
as existing among the Therapeutae, e.g. the rejection of animal
sacrifice, the worship of the sun, the doctrine of the etherial soul
in its prison, and the prohibition of oaths. There is no reason
at all to imagine that the Therapeutae were under the influence
of Greek philosophy, because of their habit of interpreting the
Bible allegorically. They were nothing more than a body of
Jewish ascetics, who neither wished to separate themselves from
religious communion with the rest of their brethren, nor were
expelled by them from its pale.
3. The Times of the Asmoneans, and Family of Herod —
The Roman Government.
Simon was treacherously murdered 135 B.C., and was succeeded
by John Hyrcanus, the Asmonean. The thirty years' rule of
this able and aspiring prince, prudent as he was warlike, and
who always wore a coat of mail under his priestly habit, was out-
wardly brilliant and victorious.
The Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim was destroyed.
The Idumeans, those ancient step-brothers, next, faithless sub-
jects and constant enemies of Judah, were conquered, and com-
pelled to adopt circumcision and the Jewish religion, and incor-
porated into the Jewish state. Hyrcanus had no presentiment
1 Quod omnis prob. lib., p. 458 sqq., Maug.
318 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
that an Idumean family would bring destruction on his house
and supplant it. In the mean while, the sea-coasts too were con-
quered, and the Jews in Palestine gave themselves up to com-
merce with an undiminishing ardour, and in this their brethren
of the Dispersion had anticipated them. At the same time they
also sought to form a closer alliance with the mighty and pro-
tecting power of Rome.
The interior intellectual disruption already began in the
bosom of the nation to assume an alarming aspect, and the
Jews had to learn, at the price of their ruin, what it was to to-
lerate a party like the Sadducees in the midst of them, and that
just in the highest and most influential positions. A Pharisee,
Eleazar, had exacted of Hyrcanus to resign the priesthood, on
the pretext of his mother having once been a captive, and to
content himself with the princely dignity. The other Pharisees
had assigned the calumnious offender too mild a punishment in
the eyes of the exasperated prince. He therefore turned from
them, who had hitherto been the firmest supporters of the As-
monean house, deposed them from high offices, and filled up
their places with partisans of the Sadducees.1 The people were
for the first time constrained to acknowledge these men, who
were estranged from them and their most precious privileges,
and who would gladly have made Judea as like as possible to the
heathen and Hellenistic states, as the representatives and ex-
pounders of their law.
The horrors of the Asmonean dynasty now began. Aristo-
bulus, the eldest son of Hyrcanus, was not contented with the
dignity of high-priest, but was the first of his house to assume
the kingly title. He made his mother perish of hunger in prison,
executed his brother, and died in torments of remorse of con-
science after a year. Under his brother and successor, Alex-
ander Jannseus, the Pharisees, favoured by the princess, appear
to have been restored for a time to considerable influence; for
Jewish traditions say that Simon-ben- Schetach, the Scribe, suc-
ceeded in expelling the' Sadducees by degrees from the Sanhe-
drim, and making it once more the absolute organ of the teaching
of the Pharisees ; so much so, that the day on which the supreme
council was entirely purged of Sadducee members (about b.c
100) was raised into an annual memorial day.2
1 Jos. Antiq. xiii. 10. 0. a Gratz, pp. 134-471.
FALL OF THE ASMONEAN DYNASTY. 319
But Jannaeus was soon incited by his favourite, Diogenes, to
join the Sadducees ; as high-priest, he treated the Pharisaical rite
with such contempt, during the Feast of the Tabernacles, that the
people pelted him with lemons in the Temple, and insulted him
by calling him the son of a slave ; whereupon he charged them
with his body-guard, and 6000 men were killed (b.c. 95). The
Pharisee party excited a civil war, which in six years cost the lives
of 50,000 men. Jannseus was at length victorious, and caused
800 Pharisee prisoners to be crucified, and their wives and chil-
dren to be massacred before their eyes, while he gave a great
entertainment to his concubines. The same night, more than
8000 Pharisees fled abroad, some to Syria, and some to Egypt.
After such a deed, Jannaeus dared to enter the Holy of Holies
as high-priest, and, with hands dripping with the blood of his
people, to offer sacrifice for his own sins and those of the nation.
Nevertheless, on his death-bed, he recommended his wife, whom
he appointed to be regent, to give herself up entirely to the
counsels and guidance of the Pharisees, perceiving that the Sad-
ducees were too much hated by the people to be a secure sup-
port for a dynasty. Thus the succession to power of Salome
Alexandra was a complete victory of the returned Pharisees
over the Sadducees; and according to Jewish accounts, this was
the epoch at which, with the two heads of the Sanhedrim, Juda-
ben-Tabbai and Simon-ben-Schetach, began the administration
of legal Judaism in the Pharisaical sense. They were, therefore,
designated as the restorers, who had brought back the " crown"
(of the law) to its former splendour. Memorial days were after-
wards fixed for the annual celebration of the victory then gained,
of the abolition of the penal code of the Sadducees, and the
introduction of Pharisaical decrees of rites,1 and a heavy venge-
ance befel several of the Sadducees.
On the death of Queen Salome Alexandra, in the year 70 b.c,
the bloody conflict broke out between the brothers Hyrcanus II.
and Aristobulus, her sons. Both parties called in the aid of the
Romans, and from that time the freedom and independence of
Judea was at an end. Pompey made himself master of Jeru-
salem and the Temple in the year 63, when 12,000 Jews were
killed. He entered with his staff into the interior of the Temple,
where no heathen hitherto had been able to set foot ; and to the
1 Gratz, pp. 1 43-412.
320 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
profound grief of the Jews at the unheard-of desecration, he even
penetrated into the Holy of Holies, where he was astonished to
find no image of a deity. In the year of the birth of Augustus
the Maccabean kingdom ended, after the independence of the
nation had lasted a century.
A double yoke was now laid on a nation which, above all
others, bore a foreign sway impatiently, as an aggression on their
religion. Antipater, an Idumean, through the weakness of Hyr-
canus, who required leading, and by his prudence in obtaining
and using Roman favour, paved the way for his own elevation
and that of his son Herod to the kingdom. The real rulers,
however, were the Romans. Before them the two Idumeans
cringed, and to them Herod sacrificed the wealth of the people
by constant and costly presents, procured by heavy general ex-
actions of money contributions. If Judea had become a Roman
province at once upon its subjugation by Pompey, its condition,
at least from the time of Augustus, would have been more toler-
able, and under a well-regulated though strict government it
would have been able, like other provinces, to regain some mea-
sure of prosperity. But the intermediate state of a dependent
kingdom, a prey alike to the despotic cruelty of a Herod and the
cupidity and arbitrariness of Roman rulers, proved an almost
unbearable accumulation of misery. The last descendant of the
Asmonean house perished either in a futile attempt to obtain
possession of the crown of Judah, or by assassination at Herod's
command. For a short period only, Antigonus, the son of
Aristobulus, under Parthian protection, was enabled to play the
king ; and he had the ears of his uncle Hyrcanus cut off, who
was weak to imbecility, to render him unfit for the high-priest-
hood. Meanwhile, however, Herod the Idumean was named
and crowned as king of Judea at Rome, where he had arrived
an almost despairing fugitive but eight days before. He was
brought back by Roman legions; and for the second time, and
on the same day on which, twenty-seven years before, Pompey
conquered the city, Jerusalem* fell, after a siege of five months,
into the power of a Roman army exasperated by the long resist-
ance. The inhabitants were murdered in the streets and houses ;
and Herod, who had no desire to reign amid ruins, only suc-
ceeded in preventing the town from being burnt to ashes by
lavishing large sums of money upon individual soldiers. Anti-
LOSS OF INDEPENDENCE. 321
gonus, the last of the eight princely high-priests of the Asmonean
family, was beheaded at the instigation of Herod and the com-
mand of Antony.
As monarch of a kingdom now considerably extended through
favour of Rome and by his own conquests, the productive re-
sources and taxes of which he indeed stretched to the uttermost,
Herod was enabled to display a pomp and sumptuousness that
must have astonished even the Romans. By the nation he was
deeply hated as an Idumean and usurper, the murderer of the
Asmonean house, and the executioner of so many thousands, in-
cluding the best and most zealous observers of the law amongst
the Jews. They beheld with the deepest sorrow the national
kingdom polluted by this blood-stained tyrant of foreign origin,
who bent subserviently before each successive Roman general and
potentate, and the profanation of the high-priesthood, the bearers
of which dignity he invested and deprived of it according to his
fancy, and converted into mere tools of his caprice or his in-
terest. But the people were tired and exhausted by the preced-
ing thirty years of confusion and civil war, and their power of
resistance was broken down. There were, indeed, plenty of
conspiracies and desperate attempts; but the good fortune and
prudence of Herod weathered all dangers, and each time he took
a terrible revenge, so that the hatred of him was coupled with an
equal proportion of fear and desponding belief in his lucky star.
Accordingly they now put up with many heathen innovations
which had kindled the desperate struggle of the Maccabees a
century and a half ago, and this although the Hellenistic party
amongst the people had much decreased, and the unanimous sen-
timent of abhorrence for every thing heathen had grown far more
strong and general throughout the nation than it was then.
Herod went great lengths in this direction ; he built theatres
and gymnasia, and solemnised heathen games in honour of the
emperors. He even had the Olympic games celebrated with
Jewish money, and rich presents went to foreign pagan cities,
temples, and worships. At an enormous outlay he finished the
city of Cassarea (Strata's tower), intended as a harbour for Judea,
quite like a pagan town. This city, which was in reality the
capital of Judea, arose with threatening aspect against Jeru-
salem ; and the Jews must have felt that the polytheistic Csesa-
rea and the monotheistic Jerusalem were like the two buckets
VOL. II. y
322 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
of a well, of which one must sink while the other rises. And
every where now Judaism seemed flooded over with paganism ;
the whole thirty -seven years' reign of Herod was calculated
to make the people feel that it only existed to do compulsory
service for heathen masters and their semi-heathen adherents,
and to suffer extortion.
Herod may have remembered that his forefathers had only
adopted the Jewish religion on compulsion, and seen in Jehovah
a national God, whose worship was quite compatible with the
service of other gods; this a# least might explain his rebuilding
the Pythian temple at Rhodes (which had been burnt down) at
his own expense (that is to say, with Jewish money), and the
many occasions of his manifesting a predilection for heathen ob-
servances and foreign customs, inexplicable in a Jew. In fact,
he probably remained a Jew, only because he was wise enough
to see that if he openly declared himself a heathen, every Jewish
member of his family would have been more welcome and toler-
able to the people, and, in the end, to the Romans also, than
himself. But Herod manifested zeal for the Jewish religion too
in his own way; for he rebuilt the temple of Zerubabel, now 500
years old, and small and unsightly, on a much larger and more
magnificent scale, in which, in accordance with the demands of
the Scribes, he caused the materials collected and prepared to be
put together by a thousand priests clad in priestly vestments,
instructed in building, so that the whole seemed to be erected
by consecrated hands. The temple was consecrated with much
rejoicing after eight years, and by degrees the large outer courts
and colonnades, and the countless cells and chambers around
the temple, were also finished.
Meanwhile Herod waxed furious against his own family ; he
had allied himself to the Asmonean house by his marriage with
Mariamne, the granddaughter of Hyrcanus, yet he caused her
father and grandfather to be executed, and her brother to be
drowned in a bath. After that, she and her mother Alexandra
fell victims to his suspicions, as well as the two sons he had by
her. Finally, when he was on the brink of the grave, and his
body was becoming putrid while yet alive, he caused his eldest
son Antipater, the prime mover in all these horrors, to be exe-
cuted. Up to his dying breath he continued to persecute every
symptom of resistance, founded on religious motives, with im-
THE JEWS UNDER ROMAN DOMINATION. 323
placable cruelty. In homage to the Roman supremacy, he caused
a golden Roman eagle to be set up over the principal entrance to
the temple. This eagle seemed to the Jews in mockery of the
prohibition of images, so they threw it down. Upon this Herod
caused Matthias the Scribe, and his friends, who had either in-
stigated or done the deed, to be burned alive.
A frightful incubus, which had oppressed the nation for
thirty- seven years, seemed to be removed by his death : people
dared to breathe again; many dreamed already the national
freedom might be restored, and re volts and insurrections arose
throughout the whole country. With a judicious estimate of
their position, a large embassy was deputed from Jerusalem to
Augustus, which was supported by the 8000 Jews then dwelling
in Rome, to petition the emperor to deliver them from the family
of Herod, and to declare Judea to be a Roman province united
with Syria. But in vain: Augustus divided the kingdom of
Herod amongst his sons. Archelaus ruled over Judea, Samaria,
and Idumea, with the title of ethnarch, not of king. Antipas
received Galilee. After ten years of misrule, however, the Jews
at length obtained their wish. Archelaus, who walked in the
footsteps of his father, was banished by Augustus to Vienne in
Gaul, on fresh complaints made against him by his subjects.
The country was now united to Syria, and governed by a Roman
procurator, who lived in Csesarea, and only came to Jerusalem
to the great feasts. This order of things was interrupted for
a short time when Claudius made Herod Agrippa, the grand-
son of the old Herod, king over all Palestine, a.d. 41. On
his death, in the year 44, the government by procurators was
resumed.
Thus Romans and Jews, the two proudest nations of the
earth, met together in immediate contact, both convinced that
they were the favoured children of the Deity. For 500 years
indeed the Jews had had to learn to serve foreign masters, with
all their consciousness of their own high privileges and destiny ;
but they now had a ruler who was not contented with such
marks and forms of servitude as had formerly satisfied their
Persian lords and most of their Syrian ones. The Romans
would suffer no distinction among the subjected nations; all
were alike obliged to bend beneath their iron sway ; the Jews
were exempted from no one mark of bondage, and Roman co-
324
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
horts were quartered in their country. How any attempt at
resistance would be treated was shown to them by Varus, when,
shortly after the death of Herod, he set Sabinus free from be-
leaguerment in Jerusalem, and caused two thousand Jews to be
nailed to the cross. Still the Jews were deeply impressed with
a sense of their dignity and privileges as the only people of the
true God, and of a special call to rule over all other people, and
receive tribute from them. They were convinced that the pro-
mised one, who was to deliver them, and raise them by victory
on victory to the summit of earthly power and glory, could not
tarry long ere he appeared. They fancied that at no period of
their history had they been so faithful to the law, and zealous
for the service and honour of Jehovah, as just now. In the old
prophets they met on nearly every page with pictures of relapses
into idolatry; their forefathers had been ever contemptuously
trampling under foot their own crown, and dallying with the
heathens and their idols. Hence the chastisement of the Assy-
rian and Babylonish captivity was merited and explicable. But
in what way had they now— they, the far better descendants of
those guilty ancestors— deserved such a fate as to fall under the
power of Rome, that beast with great iron teeth, devouring and
breaking in pieces, and treading down all that was left?1 And
how far below the Jews stood the Roman, the unclean being
whose very touch was contaminating ! Were he even a prose-
lyte, the real Jew thought lightly of him, and he could not put
himself at all on a level with a born Israelite. How readily,
therefore, was any one listened to, who told the people that the
children of Abraham ought not to serve strangers and worshipers
of false gods, and that the moment had come to shake off the
yoke, and that God would bless their arms. Even when this did
not happen, and when the Jews remained tranquil from a sense
of their weakness, as in the dispersion, they did not conceal
their haughty spirit. In the midst of the heathen world, the
Jew was the Ismael of the desert; his hand was against every
man, and every man's hand was against him; he was looked
upon as an enemy to mankind, despising every one, and hated
by all. Thousands waited eagerly for the first opportunity of
falling upon the Jews, and washing out the long-cherished en-
mity in their blood. Thus the Jews were every where standing
1 Dan. vii. 7.
THE ZEALOTS. 325
as if on a mine of gunpowder, that only required a spark to
ignite it.
The procurator was now inheritor of the kingly power in
Judea. The Sanhedrim was at liberty as before to discuss and
decide upon religious matters, but the ratification of the sentence
of death rested with the Roman governor ; even the sacred vest-
ments which the high-priest wore on the three great festivals of
the year and on the annual fast were in his custody, and only
given out by him for use on these occasions, after which they
were again locked up : this already put the high-priesthood in
his power, and he could compel any high-priest to resign who
displeased him.
As the Romans had all their subjects registered and their
property valued for purposes of taxation, their direct dominion
was made in the most painful way perceptible to every Jew
throughout the land. Under the Herod family, there was still
a semblance of a national rule, exercised by believing worshipers
of Jehovah. But now, the fact of their serving and paying
heathen masters, and that the holy land had become the pro-
perty of idolaters, met the sight of an Israelite in all its repul-
sive nakedness. The law only acknowledged taxes for the use
of the sanctuary, and thus, to the mind of a zealot, it was an
exaction injurious to their holy law that they should now pay
tax to heathen potentates. And to whom were these imposts
to be paid ? To the emperor ? while the law bid them to set
over themselves a king from amongst their brethren, not a
stranger who was not of their brethren.1 Htrnce arose a party
and a doctrine which Josephus calls the fourth philosophy of the
Jews,2 as if they had formed a special faction alongside of the
Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. Judas the Gaulonite, and
Sadoc the Pharisee, were at the head of these zealots. " Be
zealous for the law, and give your life for it," were the words
of the dying Mattathias, the father of the Asmonean dynasty, to
his own family ; and such zealots the founders and adherents of
the new religious republican party meant to be. God alone
should be the lord of the holy people ; and the Jewish theocracy
ought to admit no other constitution than that of the law of
Moses. Hence they were to fight against the Roman usurpation,
sacrificing possessions, family, life, and all ; and as the theory and
i Dcut. xvii. 15. 2 Antiq. xviii. 1. 1.
326
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT,
practice of this party soon developed, the lives of others were as
little to be spared as their own to obtain the one great object.
The levies made upon them were in truth heavy, and loud
complaints about them were carried to Rome from Syria and
Judea. Those who cooperated in this infliction as farmers of
these taxes, or publicans, were hated by the people as blood-
suckers, and despised as functionaries of a heathen government j
people shunned them, and would not allow them to be witnesses
in courts of justice. The Romans were aware of this state of
feeling, but it did not alarm them. A couple of legions, in their
opinion, was equal to crush any attempt at rebellion thoroughly
and for ever. But, in spite of all the weakness and interior
divisions of the nation, which made any grand effort impossible,
the Jews had one characteristic which rendered them terrible
even to the Romans, i.e. their daring contempt of death when
religion was concerned, and their unflinching fortitude in the
endurance of torture. Every outrage now assumed the colour
of religious zeal; all open disturbances and rebellion sprang from
a religious motive, or sought to pass for a venture undertaken in
the name of God and the law. The nature of the country, and
the multitude of hiding-places, favoured the assemblage of large
bands of brigands, who now professed to be patriots and cham-
pions of Jewish national independence against heathen oppres-
sion. Every rising ended, usually after a short struggle, in the de-
feat of the rebels j but so great was their contempt for death, and
so ardent their enthusiasm for the law and for freedom, that thou-
sands were alwaysready to rush in turn to certain destruction.
Mere trifles sufficed to kindle the blind rage of a people full
of profound hatred. A soldier of the procurator Cumanus, on
guard at the temple, by an unseemly gesture insulted the Jews
as they were entering for the Paschal feast : at once a tumult
arose. The cry was for the soldier's head; and in the melee
which ensued, ten thousand men were killed or squeezed to
death. Shortly after this a soldier tore up and burnt a copy
of the Pentateuch which had fallen into his hands. The exas-
perated Jews fiercely demanded the execution of the soldier from
Cumanus. He consented, but with the intention to take his
revenge ; and soon afterwards an attack of the Jews on the Sa-
maritans gave him the welcome opportunity to massacre them.
A gloomy conviction prevailed amongst the people that under
DISHONOUR OF THE HIGH-PRIESTHOOD. 327
the iron sway of the Romans, which absorbed and levelled gra-
dually all national peculiarities, their religion, and their na-
tionality conditional on it, could not be secured. Events had
already occurred which must have appeared to the Jews as fore-
casts of projects entertained by the Romans against all that
they valued most. In spite of their most urgent solicitations,
Pilate wanted some shields dedicated to Tiberius as a god, to be
hung up in the temple at Jerusalem. They were forced to send
ambassadors to Rome on the matter, who so far succeeded that
the shields were, by order of the emperor, placed in a temple
dedicated to him at Csesarea. It was a more serious matter still
when Caligula ordered a whole army to be set in motion to erect
his statue in the temple, thereby turning the national sanctuary
into an idolatrous temple. Nothing but his death prevented
his injunction from being carried into effect, which would have
inevitably resulted in a civil war, and one probably that would
have been undertaken with greater national unanimity than the
one afterwards under Nero and Vespasian.
It was precisely the dignity of the high-priesthood, which
in earlier times had served the nation and commonwealth as a
living point of union, and had often turned the scale in difficult
positions ; this had now for a long time been enfeebled and dis-
honoured, partly through the guilt of the later Asmoneans, and
partly through the arbitrariness of the Herod dynasty, and now
of the Romans; and the confidence of the people in their high-
priests was thereby destroyed, or at least much shaken. During
many centuries the Jewish church only witnessed the deposition
of one single high-priest : now, since the conquest of Jerusalem
by Herod till its destruction under Titus, a period of 108 years,
twenty-eight high -priests had been nominated, — so that each
could have been in possession of the dignity about four years
only on an average, and depositions had become the order of the
day. No respect was any longer paid to descent or personal
merit. Herod Agrippa, and his nephew Agrippa Second, the last
descendant of the Asmonean line and that of Herod, had ob-
tained powers from the emperor Claudius to nominate the high-
priest, and they preferred Sadducees, as submitting more readily
to the demands of the Romans. So in the year 52, Ananias,
and in 61, his son Ananus, both Sadducees, were raised to the
highest spiritual dignity. At length open discord broke out be-
328 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
tween the high-priests and the other members of the priesthood
on the question of the appropriation of tithes; as the high-priests
claimed them for themselves (by reason of the frequency of de-
positions there were several of them), the inferior clergy were
thus exposed to the risk of starvation, and many of the priests
and Levites put an end to their lives in despair. Both sides sur-
rounded themselves with armed adherents, and it came to open
fight between them in the streets. Shortly after this, and before
the breaking out of the Roman war, a regular battle for the
high- priesthood took place in Jerusalem between the three can-
didates, Josua the son of Darnnseus, Josua the son of Gamaliel
(both nominees of Agrippa the Second), and the old Ananias,
who all strove to obtain the dignity, each supporting his own
pretensions by hired troops.
One great hope, however, filled the hearts of all the nation,
and that was the expectation of the Messias, in whom their fa-
thers had believed, and whose coming the prophets had announced
in manifold ways, and in terms of progressive clearness. But this
hope was coloured by the fancies and passions which the mass of
people were filled with ; the past and present state of the nation
were reflected in their representations of the Messias. As to the
present, it was their sense of the intolerable oppression with which
the Roman dominion weighed upon them, and the degradation
which they experienced in this bondage ; the thought that, con-
sidering their moral and religious worth, they ought to take a
very different place amongst nations, and were called to rule and
not to serve, which gave form and tone to these ideas about the
Messias. They longed for an avenger, who, with a strong arm,
would make an ample retaliation for all the vexations and indig-
nities that they had been daily subjected to by the presumptuous
heathen. The Jews were bitter enemies to all who lived within
their territory or on its borders; with the Samaritan on the
north, the Arabian to the south, the Greeks and Syrians in the
cities : even the powerful arm of the Romans was unable to con-
trol the bloody outbursts of this reciprocal hatred, and the heavy
punishments consequent on them were equally unavailing. The
Messias was, therefore, above all, to enable his people to triumph
over these their nearest enemies.
Looking back to the earlier history of his people, the Jew
exulted in pictures of a glorious past of national greatness and
CLAIMS UPON THE MESS1AS. 329
independence, which the expected Messias would again restore.
He was to be a son of David ; the father had been the most
powerful king whom the Jews ever had, and had conquered the
Syrians and Ammonites : could the son do less ? A new Elias
was to go before him to prepare his way. The Jew dreamed
of a vigorous and terrible prophet of wrath, who, like the first,
should strike the priests of Baal with the edge of the sword, and
openly announce to the potentates their sentence of death. So
long as this Elias did not appear accompanied by palpable pun-
ishments of all sorts against idolatry, no one could be believed
to be the Messias. And if the Messias really came, how else
could he enter on his high office than by breaking the Roman
yoke asunder? Above all, an end must be put to this state of
compulsion, and this continual profanation of the law, the peo-
ple of God serving heathen rulers and paying taxes ; to the na-
tional sanctuary being in the hands of the Romans, and also the
sons of such a people being pressed into the legions, and forced
as soldiers into daily breaches of the law, defilements, and parti-
cipations in heathen enormities. The Messias must restore the
true kingdom, the throne of his father David, and, ruling over the
nations afar, establish a new world-empire in which the sons of
Abraham would be the dominant class. He who did not present
himself as a mighty conqueror, at the head of a victorious army,
could not be the true Messias of the promise, for in the prophets
it was said that his kingdom should extend from sea to sea.
Abraham had received the promise of all the nations of the
earth being blessed in his seed. How, then, could this blessing
be fulfilled but by the nations being previously conquered and
placed under the sway of the Jews, delivered from idolatry, and
led by their Jewish masters to the knowledge and worship of
the true God ? Was it not Jerusalem that was so clearly desig-
nated as the seat and capital of the new kingdom of the Messias,
where his throne was to be erected, and whither the costly offer-
ings of all nations, their silver and gold, were to flow together?1
Had not the greatest of their prophets promised that they should
eat the good things of the Gentiles, and pride themselves on their
glory ;2 that they should suck the milk of the Gentiles, and be
nursed with the breasts of kings ;3 that strangers should build
up their walls, and that their kings should minister unto them?4
» Isaias lx. 9. 2 lb. lxi. 6. 3 lb. lx. 10. 4 lb. lx. 10.
330
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
" Bowing down," Isaias says, " shall they come to thee that
afflicted thee, and all that slandered thee shall worship the steps
of thy feet."1 Nay further, the house of Israel were to hold in
captivity those who had held them in bondage; they were to
rule over their taskmasters, and to possess the strangers in the
land of the Lord as servants and bondmaids. And was not a
time foretold wherein ten men of different languages of the Gen-
tiles should take hold of the skirt of one man that was a Jew,
saying, " We will go with you, for we have heard that God is
with you"?2 And their teachers taught the people that all this
was to be fulfilled to the letter.
Greedily did they swallow the sweet and intoxicating drink
of such promises, only attending to whatever flattered their own
wishes and gratified their national prejudices, overlooking the
conditions to which their fulfilment was attached. All that was
required on their side as a condition of the appearance of the
Messias and the erection of his kingdom was, their teachers
daily told them, scrupulous observance of the law ; and that
they were not wanting therein was a testimony, they were con-
vinced, which they dared to give for themselves. This national
fidelity was a merit which, they thought, gave them a formal
claim to the favour of God, and, above all, to the greatest ful-
filment of the promises regarding the Messias; and besides,
there were the inherited merits of the patriarchs.
Hence the Jewish logic : whoever declares himself to be the
Messias, by this declares himself to be the king of the Jews; but
whoever does this puts himself in opposition to the dominion
of the emperor, and whoever acknowledges such a one as the
Messias already, becomes guilty of high treason.3 It was no use
for the accused to draw a distinction between the kingdom of
the Messias and an earthly kingdom, and expressly to decline all
claim to the latter. The Jews had once for all settled the ques-
tion, and the nation was unanimous that no one could be their
Messias who was not also their king, and would not overthrow
the dominion of the Romans. Had he entered Jerusalem at the
head of an army, and a victor over a few Roman legions, those
very priests and Pharisees, who now desired that he might be
crucified, would have joyfully thrown themselves down in the
dust before him.
1 lx. 14. 2 Zach. viii. 23. » St. John xix. 12 ; Acts xvii. 7.
WHAT PH1L0 EXPECTED OF THE MESSIAS.
331
All, at the same time, who were zealous for the law, and they
then included nine-tenths of the nation, were resolved to recog-
nise no one as the true Messias unless he equalled and surpassed
themselves in its observance with all its definitions, and in all its
minutise, and with the whole " hedge" of interpretation around
it, setting a bright example of faultless fidelity to the law in
keeping the Sabbath of rest, and carefully shunning all contact
with unclean people and things. If he healed a sick man on the
Sabbath, or allowed publicans to associate with him, it was clear
that he could not be the promised Messias. If they remarked
that he had also a mission to the heathen, except it were a com-
mand of submission to the chosen people, he must necessarily
be destroyed.1 If he appeared as a sharp censurer, accusing the
whole nation, and especially the flower and intelligence of the
people, the Scribes and Pharisees, of heavy guilt, he must rather
be a Samaritan in disguise than a genuine Jew ; for at no time
had the law been so carefully observed by the nation as a whole,
had the sanctuary been more visited, or the sacrificial services
so accurately directed. And now it was the time to inspire the
people with courage and boldness, not to humble and fill them
with images of penance and compunction.
Many thought that if the sword were but once drawn, the
nation engaged in a warfare of life and death with the Romans,
and the holy city and temple menaced, the Messias would in-
fallibly appear as a deliverer and avenger. Even during the siege
they confidently expected this aid f and when all hope from man
was at an end, this delusion nerved their arms and caused them
to fight with admirable bravery. We may imagine how carnal
the expectations in Palestine were, when we hear those which, in
spite of all his Platonism, a Philo cherished in Alexandria but a
few years before the great war broke out. " The war shall not ex-
tend to the territories of the godly (the Jews) ; and even if their
enemies were mad enough to meet in battle array against them,
five of them shall chase a hundred, and a hundred put to flight
ten thousand, and they who came by one way shall be scattered
asunder through many. For there is a prophecy that a man
shall arise who will fight against and conquer great and powerful
nations j for God will send his saints the help needed, and he
i Acts xxii. 22. a Jos. Bell. Jud. iii. 27. yi. 35, vii. 4.
332 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
shall be the head over all the children of men."1 Philo indeed
attached to these hopes concerning the Messias the condition
that the Jews should subdue their passions ; but he also expects
that his people, who had met with nothing but misfortune for
long, would live to be triumphant, and that their adversaries
would give up their own laws and customs, and adopt those of
the Jews.2 By means of this law he believed all true happiness
would accrue to mankind : heretofore this had been but a barren
wish; but he was now convinced that it would be realised so
soon as perfect virtue should, by God's aid, be manifested : " and
if we should not live to see it," he adds, " yet we have felt an
ardent longing for it from childhood."3
Fidelity to the law, and steadfastness in the knowledge and
service of Jehovah, was at this time the strength of the Jewish
people, their noblest feature, and the source of all that was good
in them. When Pilate set up the Roman eagles, with the images
of the emperor in Jerusalem, the Jews crowded to Csesarea, and
remained for six days in supplication before the prsetorium ; on
the seventh day the procurator surrounded them with his troops,
and threatened to mow them all down ; but they threw them-
selves on the ground, bared their necks, and called on him to
kill them rather than impose on them a breach of their law.4
Such traits of heroic fidelity the Roman must needs have ad-
mired, however much he might be tempted to look down on this
people, otherwise so incomprehensible to him.
On the other hand, however, this tenacious adherence to the
law in its distortion acted as a heavy curse on the nation, and
rendered them obtuse to, and unsusceptible of, all higher spiritu-
ality, or any thing beyond the narrow boundary of their nation-
ality and ritual maxims. For, after all, it was in fact but the
skeleton of a law, adapted for the most part to other circumstances
and a different sort of men, to which the Jew clung so tightly.
The Scribes had done their work with it, and all life and spirit
had deserted the skeleton. Wherever the strict legal point of
view wins the day, a narrow system of interpretation also gains
ascendency, whose aim is to lower all that is high, and to com-
press it into the limits of a maxim easy of application ; while, on
the other hand, it exalts trifles, and laboriously distorts them into
1 De Praem. et Pcen. p. 924 sq., Paris, 1640. 2 De Vita Mos. p. 660.
3 Ibid. p. 929 ; cf. Vit. Mos. p. 096. 4 Jos. Antiq. xviii. 3. 1.
JEWISH JEALOUSY OF THE HEATHENS. 333
a network of entanglement for daily life. Thus, under the hands
of the Pharisees legal traditions thickened at length into a shell,
through the incrustations of which the true inner kernel of the
original law was no longer discernible. The Jew had reached
the point, only to use distinct and palpable commands and pro-
hibitions as rules and springs of conduct. His conscience was
dumb, if no such concrete command was to be found, or in cases
to which the casuistry of the Scribes had not expressly applied
the law. He was not guided and controlled by a moral con-
scientiousness, resting on general principles, but by the letter of
an isolated statute ; and the principle of obedience was rather
dulled than sharpened in him through the burden and multitude
of the precepts.
No thought was so unbearable to this legal people as that of
the heathens ever being on a par with themselves in religious
matters. If a pagan submitted himself to circumcision and the
whole burden of the law, and became a proselyte of justice, a
gulf always separated him from the noble Israelitic stock, and
he remained as a mere citizen in the earthly kingdom of grace.
No heathen could ever become a true son of Abraham, or a par-
ticipator in his full privileges. Zealous as the Pharisees were in
making proselytes, they did not wish their sacred law to be ac-
cessible to the heathen, or that the doctrines it contained should
be spread abroad by translation into other languages. A legiti-
mate conviction also did certainly actuate them in this respect,
viz. that the holy Book, if severed from the living commentary
furnished by the Jewish people themselves in their rites and
customs and traditional belief, would inevitably be misunder-
stood ; and that in general a religion was not to be propagated
by the dead letter of a book, but by the living word of an or-
dained teaching class; but at the same time the jealousy regard-
ing the possessions and privileges of the nation discovers itself
in the notion that what had been confided to themselves alone
should not be imparted to others. In this sense the Jewish
legends designated the day of the Alexandrian translation as an
evil day, like that whereon the golden calf was made, from which
to the third day darkness overspread the world.1 Even Jose-
phus, who wrote his history chiefly for Romans and Greeks,
mentions, like a true Pharisee, how Jehovah had punished Theo-
1 Tract. Sopher. 1 ; Meg. Taquith, f. 50, c. 2.
334
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.
pompus the historian, and Theodectes the tragedian. The former
had given an account of the Jewish belief in his work, and in
consequence lost his senses for thirty days. On being warned
in a dream of the cause of his malady, viz. that he had dared to
spread the knowledge of divine things among profane men, he
destroyed what he had written, and was restored to the use of
reason. Theodectes was struck blind for having interwoven
some passages of the holy Scriptures in a tragedy of his ; and
on becoming sensible of the reason why, he made atonement to
Jehovah for his offence, and his sight was restored.1
During this very time of Roman oppression there lived two
celebrated teachers of the law in Jerusalem, Hillel and Sham-
mai, founders of two schools which had a marked effect on the
later developments of Judaism. Hillel migrated to Jerusalem
from Babylon, and became so highly thought of, that he was
looked upon, next to Esdras, as the chief restorer of the law, that
had heretofore fallen into decay. This condition of it, however,
must be only understood as referring to doctrine, in which there
were still many disputable points and arbitrary and contradictory
decisions ; for in practice there was greater zeal for the law then
than ever. The merits of Hillel, therefore, consisted in intro-
ducing greater solidity and uniformity into the construction of
statutes, and also in facilitating their observance by tempering
the interpretation. He is said to have brought many a tradition
with him from Babylon.2 HilleFs antagonist Shammai, on the
contrary, enforced the strictness of the law and the duty of literal
obedience. Characteristic anecdotes have been related of him :
he wanted to make his son, though but a little boy, observe the
laws of fasting on the day of atonement, so that his friends had
to compel him to spare the health of the child ; once also, when
his daughter-in-law happened to be confined on the feast of ta-
bernacles, he broke through the ceiling of the room where she
was, that his new-born grandson might also comply with the
precept of the law. His school, however, had the merit of coun-
teracting the corrupt doctrines of the Hillelites, which opposed
the most important moral duties. This school went so far as to
justify in principle the adulterous degeneracy of the Jews, who
then rivalled the Romans in the facility of divorce ; they inter-
1 Antiq. xii. 2. 13.
2 Giatz, p. 210; Biesenthal, im Lit. B. C. des Orients, 1848, § 083.
THE PRINCIPLE OF LOVE. 335
preting that "the shameful act" for which the Mosaic law per-
mitted a man to tender his wife a letter of divorce was to be
understood of all that might displease a man in a woman, so that
he could put away his wife because she had burnt the victuals in
cooking, or, as Akiba added, if he found another more handsome.
The school of Shammai, on the other hand, taught that he
could only send her away if he had discovered any real un-
chastity in her.1 But the rigorism of this school by no means
suited the later Jews. A bath-kol, or voice from on high, the
Rabbis assert, settled the controversy between the two parties in
favour of the Hillelites; the disciples of the two schools having
often gone so far as to testify their opposition to each other by
bloody combats. But it seems that it was not until later, after
the destruction of Jerusalem, that this became the prevalent view.
During the commotions before the final catastrophe, the Sham-
maite party was the more popular one, their hatred against the
Romans, and their severe interpretations of all maxims regarding
the uncircumcised, being better adapted to the dominant feeling.
II. THE LAW.
1. The Moral and Social Condition of the Jewish Nation
according to the law.
Holiness was designed as the highest scope of the entire law.
Israel was to be holy, as and because Jehovah is holy. In this
sanctity of Jehovah he was to be able to see the exemplar of his
own life, and therefore to strive that his whole conduct, in state
and family, should be a mirror for strange nations in which to
perceive the sublimity and holiness of the God whom Israel
adored. For to this people the high destiny was reserved of
being a blessing to all the nations of the earth ; and hence holi-
ness was an essential ; and this an Israelite only attained when
he comprehended the " inner side," so graphically brought out
in the last part of the Thora/ the spirit of the law, and strove to
fulfil it in the fear as well as in the love of God. Hence the
high requirement of loving God with his whole heart and all his
1 Biesenthal, p. 726. 2 Deut. vi.
336
THE LAW.
strength was the compendium of the entire law, being the condi-
tion by which Israel might become in reality a priestly kingdom,
the highest and noblest of people, and model of all others. As
the priest is the guardian and propagator of religious truth, and
a mediator of atonement with God, so Israel, amid the nations in
its loneliness and isolation, kept at a distance from the distract-
ing and seductive tumult of the world, was to be the priestly
people, the sheltering ark, in which the pledge intrusted to it of
the true knowledge of God was deposited and preserved, and
wherein the seed was sustained and propagated from which the
high-priest and saviour of all nations was to be born. The ful-
filment of this high destiny demanded the closest union of Israel
with God, a union of devoted love. Comprehended and carried
out in this spirit of the love of God, the law was, as is so beauti-
fully expressed at the close of the legislation, neither at a dis-
tance from them, nor dark, nor hard to be understood ; it had
not to be fetched from heaven above, nor from beyond the sea,
but was very nigh unto them, on their lips, and in their hearts.1
This precept of the love of God was to be inculcated on their
children, and spoken of always and on all occasions. Every
where the letter thereof, at least, was to be before the eyes of
the Israelite : he was to bind it upon his hand, and to write it
on the door-post of his house and the gates of his city.2 If at a
later period the mass of the people fell into a mechanical routine
way of caring only for the exterior part of the law, and setting
at naught purity and sanctification of the heart, that was not
the fault of the law.
From the theocratic nature of the Hebrew state, legislation
necessarily pervaded the whole of life in all its details, — family
and marriage, personal habits, care of the body, property, police,
and international law. All relations of life had to be viewed
in their religious aspect, and all main actions and centres of
human conduct to be sanctified in the service of Jehovah. The
first-fruits of the field, the first-born of each animal, the fairest
parcel of land, the beginning of a season, great occurrences and
decisive turning-points in the history of the race and people
acknowledged as being specially directed by providence, were
religiously consecrated. The state was also to be a church ; the
people, as a national and political body, were destined to be at
1 Deut. xxx. 11 sq. 2 Ibid. vi. 7-9.
POSITION OF KINGS. 337
the same time a holy possession to the Lord, a priestly king-
dom.
Law and morality were not definitively severed from each
other in this legislation. Precepts regarding food, the externals
of religion, public and private life, were mixed up with laws
upon the most important moral questions. Beneficence often
appears as a political duty. All, even to the relations of men
to nature, to the animal and vegetable kingdom, was accurately
marked out. Whilst the law took notice of a number of ap-
parently trifling and indifferent matters, it is surprising that the
political constitution should have been so slightly defined le-
gally. Israel might be made a monarchy or a republic without
detriment to the law, and could place itself under judges, kings,
or a supreme council. It cannot, however, be denied that a
kingly government was less adapted, on the whole, to the neces-
sities and peculiar circumstances of a theocratic state, founded on
such a comprehensive and stringent law ; and so it was that the
numerous bad kings of the Hebrews wrought more of evil and
ruin than their few good ones did of blessing. Hence also when
the people demanded a king from Samuel, it is said, "they have
not rejected thee, but me, that I should not reign over them."1
A kingdom had indeed become necessary on account of the pre-
valent anarchy ; but this itself was only a consequence of the
sins of the people, and their rebellion against Jehovah.
A veneration for kings, as habitual in other oriental nations,
was impossible on religious grounds to the Jews. Their kings
also never obtained the sovereign majesty in its plenitude : they
indeed represented the people in its relations to other nations ;
they concluded peace and waged war, and they exercised the
judicial power as a court of last instance, but were without
the highest and most important attributes of sovereignty ; they
could not originate any law ; they only wore the sword to pro-
tect the law. Legislation had been concluded once for all;
even the prophets never took upon themselves to proclaim new
laws in the name of God. God reigned in Israel through the
law, and its exposition did not rest with the kings, but with the
priesthood, and in later days with the Sanhedrim.
For, at a later period, there was a high court of justice,
spiritual and temporal, at Jerusalem, consisting of seventy-one
1 1 Kings viii. 7.
VOL. II. Z
338 THE LAW.
members, chosen from among the priests, elders, and scribes.
This was the Sanhedrim, usually presided over by the high-
priest. It has been attributed to Moses, but the seventy as-
sistants named by him in the desert were only of temporary
institution. The earlier history of the people contains nothing
as regards the existence of such a body. The Sanhedrim is first
mentioned in the time of Antipater and Herod,1 and may have
arisen during the time of the Syrian dynasty. In a letter ad-
dressed to Ptolemy, king Antiochus already promises the " Se-
nate" of Jerusalem,2 the priests, and scribes of the temple,
exemption from imposts. The members of the tribunal were
consecrated to their office by an imposition of hands, and as-
sembled daily to decide all weighty or difficult questions, reli-
gious or legal. They judged in trials for religious offences, such
as blasphemy or false prophecy, and decided matters touching
a whole tribe or the high -priesthood. According to Josephus,3
even the kings were bound by the decisions of the Sanhedrim,
the jurisdiction of which extended beyond the borders of Pales-
tine.4 By it sentence of death was passed according to the law ;
but when Judea was governed by Roman procurators, the sen-
tence had to be confirmed and its execution carried out by the
procurator.5
The family pedigree was of a special importance among the
Jews, as well on account of the peculiar law of inheritance,
as also because of their constitution. The groups of families
formed tribes with special rights; tribes constituted the state,
and the government of the state was a government of tribes.
The whole glory of an Israelite lay in his pedigree; and as the
childless were struck out of the genealogical tree of their tribe,
it was every thing to them to have a numerous offspring, and
thus to perpetuate their names in the register of their family.
In the genealogies, however, only the male children as a rule
were entered; any heiresses who succeeded to th% family pro-
perty were included, as were also individual women of any
special importance to the family.
The custom of paying a regular price for a wife was frequent
amongst the Hebrews as well as amongst other nations. In
early times a dowry is seldom found given with brides ; at a
1 Joseph. Antiq. xiv. 9. 4. 2 Yepovala, Antiq. xii. 3. 3.
8 Antiq. iv. 8. 17. 4 Ibid, xx. 9. 1. 5 Acts ix. 2.
MARRIAGE. 339
later period this became general. The Mosaic law settled no-
thing regarding either it or the rites to be observed at the con-
clusion of the marriage ; and the marriage contract was usually
arranged between the parents. The principle of monogamy, as
a spiritual and corporal unity of man and wife, a connexion
making of two persons one flesh, is so expressly declared in
Genesis, that we should have expected to find in the Mosaic law
also a prohibition against plurality of wives, which is positively
opposed to the true spirit of the Old-Testament religion. But
it is silent on the subject ; and so polygamy was tolerated, and
propounded as permitted by the law.1 The example of the pa-
triarchs may have contributed to this ; yet Isaac had but one
wife; and Abraham only took Hagar as his concubine at the
wish of Sarah ; and Jacob became the husband of two sisters
merely because of the deceit of Laban. It was the " hardness
of heart" and ill-restrained sensuality of the people, manifested
in their passion for the licentious idolatry of the Syrians, that
determined the lawgiver to permit polygamy or the keeping of
concubines as the lesser evil. The latter were chiefly taken
because of the sterility of the lawful wife, and from amongst the
prisoners of war or domestic slaves. Yet it must not be for-
gotten that the Jews are spoken of in their sacred books as a
stiffnecked, obstinate, carnal, and haughty people.2 Had mono-
gamy been strictly enjoined, the yoke of the law would have
been still oftener set aside ; attraction to the entire freedom of
heathenism would have become yet stronger, and many times
the life even of a wife who was childless, or no longer pleasing
to her husband, would have been endangered. Besides, it was
chiefly the example of the kings, who had complete harems, full
of wives and concubines, which reacted so injuriously on the
people, and yet the law of kings expressly forbade them a plu-
rality of wives.3 After their return from exile, when the people
were more earnest and religious, monogamy prevailed over poly-
gamy, and the Jews of later days appear to have kept free from
such plurality.
The Mosaic law retained divorce, which had come to be cus-
tomary, on account of the people's hardness of heart, as we learn
from the highest authority. It consisted in the formality of
> Deut. xxi. 15. 2 Ibid. ix. 7, 24; 1 Kings xii. ; Isaias i. 3, 1.
3 Deut. xvii. 17.
340 THE LAW.
putting a letter of repudiation into the hands of the wife, and her
being ordered out of the house. The grounds on which such
severance was permitted were contained in the expression, ad-
mitting a variety of interpretations, of " something shameful"
that the husband observed in his wife. The law specially pro-
hibited the husband from taking back a divorced wife after the
death of her second husband, or her subsequent repudiation by
him ; because by her second marriage she had become defiled in
the eyes of her first husband.1 Women were not allowed to
give a letter of divorce to, or to demand a divorce from, their
husbands. The progress made in facilitating divorce, at least
afterwards, has been previously mentioned in speaking of the
Hillelite glosses, and is further shown in the instance of Jose-
phus, who, being a priest, repudiated his first wife only because
her ways displeased him, and then proceeded to marry a second,
and even a third.2
Jewish marriage - legislation distinguished itself from the
moral and legal code of other people by a distinct and detailed
prohibition of marriage between near relations, thereby provid-
ing for an increased population, as well as for the morality of
families. Marriage was forbidden not only between blood rela-
tions of the first degree, but also with step-mother, mother-in-law,
aunt, widow of a brother, daughters-in-law and sisters-in-law,
as well as with daughters and sisters by marriage. Such unions
were partly threatened with the judicial punishment of death,
and partly with the divine and physical one of barrenness.
There was a peculiar ordinance established by ancient custom as
to the marriage of the brother of a deceased husband : if a man
died childless, his brother or the next of blood was bound to
marry his widow, and she was allowed by law to insult him on
his refusal of this obligation. This prescription aimed at raising
up seed to the dead, the eldest son of such marriage inheriting
the property and name of the departed, and transmitting it
down.
Adultery with the actual or espoused wife of a stranger was
punished with the death of both the guilty parties; yet it de-
pended on the husband whether he would denounce the offenders
judicially, or give his wife a bill of divorce out of compassion. If
the sin was committed in the fields, where the wife could not
1 Deut. xxiv. 1-4, a Vit. 75, 76.
SOCIAL POSITION OF WOMEN. 341
cry for help, the adulterer alone incurred the penalty. Where
there was strong ground for suspicion of adultery, the husband
took his wife before the priest, who gave her to drink the water
of cursing as a kind of divine ordeal. Whoever violated a free
and unespoused maiden was forced to marry her, and could
never put her away;1 if she were a slave, he offered a ram as an
atonement. A master was to take as wife or emancipate a slave
of Hebrew parents.
On the whole, the social status of the woman was a lower
one than among the Germans, and a higher one than among the
Greeks. The Hebrew maiden, even in her father's house, stood
in the position of a servant :2 her father could sell her if a
minor ; he, and after his death his son, disposed of daughter or
sister in marriage at their own will and pleasure. As a rule,
the daughter inherited nothing. The succession came to her
only in the case of there being no sons in esse, and of her thus
being deprived of the support of a brother. Not the adulteress
only, but the espoused virgin also, having fallen into sin be-
fore her espousal, was punished with death,3 while in the latter
instance the seducer escaped with a light sentence. The mo-
ther of a female child remained unclean twice as long as she did
for a male.4
Women were occupied in the house with preparation of stuffs
and clothing, and the cooking and baking, without being bur-
dened, as among barbarous nations, even the Germans, with
the harder kind of labour appropriated to men. They were also
visible to strangers, and not excluded from the society of men;
they took their meals with them. They contributed to the cele-
bration of festivals by singing and dancing to timbrels j and the
history of Israel records names of such as the heroic Deborah
and the prophetess Hulda. It is remarkable that the female
sex had no proper duties assigned to them as their share in re-
ligious acts; all were confined to men only; men only were
bound to visit the temple, or make offerings there on festivals ;
women could offer no sacrifice in their own person, i. e. could not
lay their hand on it. An exception, however, was made in the
case of the Nazarene woman, and those who were suspected of
adultery. The value and consequence of the female sex was
1 Deut. xxii. 28, 29. 2 Numbers xxx. 17.
3 Deut. xxii. 20. 4 Levit. xii. 1-5.
342 THE LAW.
wholly in marriage and maternity, there being no place proper
in the old covenant for the higher importance and dignity of
voluntary virginity; and yet there were women who willingly
devoted themselves to the service of the sanctuary, the taber-
nacle first, and doubtless to that of the temple afterwards ;l they
seem to have done manual labour, such as women do for the use
of the holy places. If servants of the sanctuary formed a com-
munity, young maidens might be educated there : and thence
the old tradition of Mary, the mother of Jesus, having been
brought up in the temple might derive confirmation.2
Child-murder and abortion were punishable with death ac-
cording to the law. A woman causing herself to miscarry was,
as Josephus tells us, considered doubly guilty, as causing her
child's death and impairing the family;3 and yet it was allowable
to destroy it if the life of the mother was endangered in confine-
ment and the head of the child was not yet visible.4 Abortion
and the exposition of infants were acts utterly at variance with
the popular ways of thinking and with the law, and were of very
rare occurrence.
The law sought in various ways to bring itself to bear by way
of restraint upon sexual connexion. Every act of nuptial inter-
course made both parties unclean till the evening;5 and if it took
place during the woman's menstrual discharge, both incurred
the forfeit of their lives, — an ordinance in its nature indicating
no more than the gravity of the transgression in conscience, a
juridical conviction being almost always impossible.6 Prostitutes
there were not to be in Israel ; prostitution at least was inter-
dicted to the Israelite women under severe penalties, and the
dread of the contagion of Syro-Phenician abominations pro-
duced a like special denunciation against male prostitution.
The priests were forbidden to receive the wages of sin, i. e. the
piece of money or kid offered by prostitutes at heathen sanc-
tuaries to sanctify their wanton trade.7 Immorality, however,
was stronger than the law, as might be expected in a people
so sensual as the Hebrews; and there were always prostitutes
among them ; but a marriage with one of them was contrary to
1 Exod. xxxiii. 8 ; 1 Kings ii. 22. 2 Greg. Nyss. in Nat. Ch. Opp. iii. 546.
3 Adv. Apion. ii. 24. 4 Tertull. de Anim. 25.
5 Levit. xv. 10-18; Joseph, contra Ap. ii. 24. 6 Levit. xx. 18.
7 Deut. xxiii. 18.
SLAVES.
343
law,1 and the sons of such women were denied for ever the po-
litical and religious privileges of a citizen of the state.2
The slaves, who were generally aliens, although compelled
to receive circumcision, were partly captured in war, partly pur-
chased in peace, or born as such in the house. An Israelite
only became a bondsman when he sold himself from poverty, or
when he had committed a theft which he was unable to replace,
and was sold in compensation.3 A father, indeed, could sell his
children and himself; but, on account of the high value attached
to the possession of children, this only happened in cases of ex-
treme distress. He who was reduced to slavery through poverty
was always capable of redemption ; and if he found no relation
or friend to set him free, he and his children with him became
so without fail in the jubilee year. According to the law, an
Israelite who was in a state of bondage was not treated as a
slave, but as a hired servant and guest.4 The soil, in fact, being
so tied up and exclusively divided, such transient bond -service
was the mildest form under which the pauper and his offspring
could be preserved from utter misery ; and, on the other hand,
the agrarian arrangement of the country precluding all free dis-
position of labour, slavery was indispensable. If a Jew became
enslaved to a stranger, the law urgently recommended the re-
purchase of his liberty.5 There was a possibility of a hard-
hearted creditor making an insolvent debtor into a slave, but
this was not legal.
The lot of the slaves was, on the whole, better than among
other nations, and their existence and dignity as men was more
secured. The runaway slave was not to be delivered up, but to
be protected from the revenge of his master.6 The repose of
the Sabbath was a boon to the slave ; he shared in the solemn
feast of sacrifice with the rest of the family.7 If the master had
struck out the eye or the tooth of his slave, or otherwise injured
him, he was obliged to set him free ; if the slave died under
punishment, his master was punished judicially.8 Suppose the
master gave the slave a wife, she and her children remained in
his possession after the husband was released.^ A female slave
> Jos. Antiq. iv. 28. 23. 2 Dent, xxiii. 2.
3 Levit. xxv. 39; Exodus xxii. 3. 4 Levit. xxv. 35, 39, 40.
» Ibid. xxv. 47-55. 6 I>eut- xxiii- 15' 1(i'
i Ibid. xii. 12, 18. 8 Exodus xxi. 20. 9 Ibid. xxi. 4.
344 THE LAW.
whom her master had given for wife to his son stept into the
rights of a daughter. It also happened that slaves married
their masters' daughters1 when the masters had no sons.2 If a
slave declined taking advantage of the legal manumission of the
seventh year, and preferred always remaining in the house of his
master, he was received through the symbolic action of piercing
one of his ears.3
In the prevalent disgraceful practice of the East, to make
use of eunuchs at court and in harems, so that there were even
eunuch-markets in various places, the Mosaic enactment for-
bidding such mutilation of man or beast was a veritable boon ;4
and so every injury inflicted on the body given a man by his
Maker, was regarded as a sin. If eunuchs were kept at the
courts of several of the Jewish kings, they were brought into
the country from abroad.
" Love thy neighbour as thyself " is a command of the law
following one that forbids all hatred and revenge. ' ' Thou shalt
not be revengeful nor spiteful against the sons of thy people ;"
a duty this which was mentioned in connexion with the ad-
ministration of justice, to warn the Israelite that, though he
might appear as a complainant before the judgment-seat, he was
to bear no malice or hatred against the offender.5 Under the
title " neighbour" who should be loved, only those of their own
people are to be understood according to the context. Besides
this, strangers who took shelter with the Israelites were in-
cluded in this love of neighbour. The command in itself could
not, in the then condition of the Jews, be extended to those of
strange and idolatrous nations, who appear throughout the law
too thoroughly enemies of Jehovah and his people for this. The
precept of universal love of mankind was reserved for a higher
development of religion.*'
No legislation of ancient times had so well guarded against
the pauperism of part of the nation, and the rise of a proletarian
class, as that of the Hebrews. There were no real beggars in
Judea, and no Hebrew word for begging. After the conquest of
the country, its acreage was equally divided amongst the Israel-
ites, and the land then assigned was intended to remain in the
possession of the descendants of the first possessor for ever ; the
1 Exodus xxi. 9. 2 1 Paralip. ii. '55. 3 Exodus xxi. 6.
4 Levit. xxii. 24; Deut. xxiii. 1. * Levit. xix. 18. 6 Matt. v. 43 sq.
PROVISIONS AGAINST PAUPERISM. 345
year of jubilee making provision for the ultimate reversion of
property to the original owner, even when he had sold it out-
right. Thus continual and hopeless beggary in whole families
was prevented. During harvest -time the poorer people were
allowed to glean what was left in the fields and olive- and vine-
yards ; a reservation which required that the owner should not
gather up his harvest too closely.1 Besides this, they were at
liberty to appropriate all that grew of itself in the sabbatical
year, and were to be invited to the entertainments provided on
the feasts of the second tithes, with a view to supply which
feasts in the temple this special tithe was enjoined. Even per-
sonal slavery was to many, no doubt, a much-coveted refuge,
as, for a child of the soil, it could never last longer than a few
years.
Thus the law could truly say, " There shall be no poor man
among you, if you only hearken to God's voice and keep all
his commandments."2 The law afforded every possible security
against unmerited misfortune, but, naturally enough, it was im-
possible that it should come within the scope of any lawgiver
to provide for the prosperity of the individual, if he frustrated
what was done for him by his own moral depravity, or to guard
against the consequences of a great apostasy or general dege-
neracy and neglect of the law in the nation. The poor were
also greatly aided by the manner in which the law inculcated
the equality of high and low in the sight of Jehovah, and their
union as brethren, and the duty of brotherly love, warning them
of the " baseness" of heart that would turn them aside from the
poor.3
The law willed that the Israelite should be ready to help his
necessitous brother by a loan, and to take interest thereon was
forbidden. " Lend without usury, that the Lord thy God may
bless thee in all thy works."4 It was also forbidden to enhance
the price of natural products lent ; but it was allowable to take
pledges under certain restrictions. On the other hand, the law
expressly permitted interest to be taken from strangers ; as was
but natural under their circumstances, — loans without interest
would imply closer and more intimate relations than could exist
between a Jew and a stranger. It is well known, however,
i Levit. xix. 9 ; Deut. xxiv. 19 sq. 2 Deut. xv. 4, 5,
3 ibid. xv. 7-11. 4 Ibid, xxiii. 20.
346 THE LAW.
what interpretation was in process of time pnt by the Jews upon
this distinction between the stranger and the Israelite, and how
they thought usury, even to the most shameful extent, allowable
from all who were not Jews. In olden times, when the Jews
lived apart as a nation, and held but little intercourse with their
neighbours, this disgraceful trait in their character was not yet
brought to light.
Although the law aimed at cutting off or hindering any
close union between Israel and other nations, it offered full
protection to the stranger dwelling in the land. We may say
the Jewish legislation was more favourable to strangers than
that of all other nations. " There shall be one law," it is writ-
ten, "for the stranger that dwells and those that are born in
the land;"1 and yet further, "the stranger shall be unto thee
as one of thy own people, and thou shalt love him as thyself,
for ye also were strangers in Egypt."2 Strangers were there-
fore permitted to partake in the festival and tithe feastings, in
the gleanings of fields and vineyards, and the harvest of the
year of jubilee. They were to be on an equality with the Is-
raelites in matters of justice; only they were compelled to con-
formity with the laws of the land so far as to avoid what was
an abomination to the Israelites, and therefore all open acts of
heathen worship. Gifts and sacrifices, sent by heathens dwell-
ing without the land, were received in the temple; they were
not permitted to enter the courts of the temple of the Israelites,
but might offer up prayer to Jehovah in the outermost court,
called the " court of the Gentiles."
The law was specially careful about the welfare of animals ;
they were to be treated with compassion and kindness. Do-
mestic animals were to be well fed, and to enjoy the rest of the
Sabbath. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out
the corn." They were to help to lift up the ass which had
fallen beneath its burden, and to bring back the beast that had
gone astray.3 The harnessing of animals of different species, or
yoking them to the plough, was prohibited. The young was
not to be taken from its mother before the seventh day ; it was
not to be killed on the same day with its mother, or seethed in
its mother's milk. From these and similar ordinances, — such,
1 Numbers xv. 15. 2 Deut. x. 1!).
3 Exodus xxiii. 5, 12; Deut. xxv. 4.
VENGEANCE OF BLOOD. 347
for instance, as about the least painful method of killing ani-
mals,— it is plain that the law tried to subdue that coarse turn
of mind and unfeeling cruelty which are engendered by the mal-
treatment of animals.
In the punishments enjoined by the law, the principle of
equality of indemnification (and sometimes more than indemni-
fication) is chiefly visible. Bodily injuries, if wilful, were to be
repaid by the like infliction on the corresponding member. It
seems, however, this punishment was seldom really carried out ;
the judges were almost always satisfied with compensation in
money. The penalty of death, " the being cut off from among
the people," was of frequent occurrence, for various religious
offences, by the sword or by stoning;1 and herein the full se-
verity of a law of fear came prominently forth. He who struck
or cursed his parents, or was guilty of sodomy, of kidnapping
bodies, or of selling souls, forfeited his life equally with the mur-
derer. But, on the whole, the penal code was a mild one. Bodily
chastisements were carefully and strictly limited, with compas-
sionate regard to the health of the victim • of ignominious pun-
ishments there were none. The only penalty for theft was the
restitution of more than the amount stolen.2
Judicial proceedings in criminal cases were humane and con-
siderate. Two witnesses were requisite for sentence to pass ; in
default, the deponent was put on oath. The use of torture was
unknown to the Israelites and their laws, and was first intro-
duced under the Herods.3 The judges were the "Elders,"
representatives of the community, who discussed and regulated
matters concerning the city and country ; and then the kings,
who also constituted the final court of appeal, but often pro-
nounced arbitrary and unjust sentences. The holy Scriptures of
later date contain strong and frequent complaints of the venality
of the judges, and of the repeated employment of false wit-
nesses.
The vengeance of blood, an older custom, peculiar to all
races not yet fully developed into a complete polity, was recog-
nised by the Mosaic law, though with restrictions in conformity
with the spirit of the whole. The rooting out of the offender
from amidst the people was the necessary punishment for a
1 Lightfoot, Horse Hebr. p. 282. " Exodus xxii. 1 sq.
3 Jos. Bell. Jud. i. 30. 3.
348 THE LAW.
grievous crime committed on one made in the likeness of God,
and against God himself, the Creator and Lord of human life ;
it was a religious duty, and for the nearest relations of the mur-
dered man it was also a family duty; but it was only commanded
for intentional murder. To protect such as had inadvertently
or accidentally killed a man, six cities were appointed, to any of
which the man-slayer could flee from the avenger of blood, and
there he had to remain until the death of the high-priest in
whose time the homicide took place.1 After the Captivity, and
even before, the avenging of blood was extinct as a custom.
2. Religious Life — Circumcision — The Sabbath — The
Priesthood and Prophecy — The Temple — Images —
Proselytes — Sacrifice — Prayers and Festivals — The
Clean and Unclean.
The Jews had circumcision in common with the Egyptians;
and it is easy to believe that it was first introduced into the
land of the Nile, and from thence found its way into Palestine
through the patriarchs of the people of Israel. Herodotus at
least maintains, that the inhabitants of Palestine themselves
attributed the origin of the rite to Egypt. But it was not of
general usage there, being confined to the sacerdotal order and
military caste, while it was a mark of nationality with the Jews.
From Palestine it passed over to the Edomites, Moabites, and
Ammonites, doubtless through their relationship of race to the
Israelites, and by the same way it reached Arabia. Thus we
can only adopt the assertion of Josephus with considerable re-
serve, that the lawgiver intended to separate the Israelites by
this sign from all the other nations of the earth. According to
Herodotus, the Colchians, an Egyptian colony, and the Ethio-
pians, also had this rite. The physical and medical reasons by
which its origin has been explained, that it was an assistance to
being cleanly and prolific, and prevented particular maladies
common in the East, are not satisfactory. Probably its first
signification was that of a sacrifice of the human person, and
intended to counteract, at least in Syria and Palestine, the sacri-
1 Exodus xxi. 13; Numbers xxxv. sq. ; Deut. xix. I sq.
THE SABBATH. 349
fice of children, in use there. If we consider how the earlier
human sacrifices both in Rome and Gaul were replaced by a
slight wound, a simple scratch on the head, with the loss of a
few drops of blood, it is quite conceivable that circumcision too
was a similar substitutive sacrificial rite, standing in the same
relation to the Jewish usage as the pagan lustrations did to bap-
tism. And then afterwards was annexed the idea of sanctifying
the membrum virile and the act of propagation of the human
species.
According to the statement of the later Jews, circumcised
children were called the espoused of blood (i. e. by God) ;l a
child thus was specially consecrated to God by circumcision, and
then admitted into the community which was to form "a priestly
kingdom and a holy nation."2 Circumcision had been discon-
tinued during the wanderings in the desert; Josue, however,
entirely restored it, and from that time it was a disgrace to be
uncircumcised ;3 and the notion of an unclean and profane per-
son, contact with whom should be avoided, was implied in it.
Any Israelite might perform the rite, but it was generally done
by the father of the family on his son the eighth day after his
birth. Even servants, not of the posterity of Abraham, were to
be circumcised. Every one was threatened with being cut off
from among the people who remained uncircumcised, for " he
destroyed the covenant with God."
One of the institutions quite peculiar to the Hebrews is the
observance of the Sabbath introduced by Moses. This day, on
which God completed the work of creation, belonged to Him in
a special manner, and was to be sanctified principally by entire
repose, not only on the part of men but also of beast, from all
work. On this day the Israelite was to participate in the rest
of God, and give a visible token of his veneration for the Creator
and Lord of the world ; it was the day of covenant, and its ob-
servance was to be a perpetual sign of the covenant still in exist-
ence between God and Israel.4 On the Sabbath no fire was to
be lighted even for cooking; cold meats were eaten, and the
evening meal was prepared after sunset (between five and seven) .
Beyond this, the law exacted no positive obligations from the
Israelites in regard to the Sabbath ; no form of religious worship
1 Cf. Exod. iv. 20. 2 Ibid. xix. 6.
3 Ezech. xxxii. 19, 21. 4 Exod. xxxi. 13-17; Ezech. xx. 20-22.
350 THE LAW.
was prescribed; complete rest sufficed to satisfy the precept.
The ordinances regarding the sacrifice of the Sabbath and the
change of the showbread only concerned the priests in the
temple.
It was not till later times that all that was to be left undone
on the Sabbath was accurately laid down. Travelling was pro-
hibited on this day, and the length of the distance which a man
might journey (2000 furlongs) was settled. The Sabbath rest
extended, Philo tells us, even to the vegetable creation. No
sprout or twig could be pruned on that day, nor fruit be plucked.
Josephus is the first to remark that it was considered a duty, or
at least advisable, to devote the Sabbath to religious employ-
ments.1 In the days of our Lord, the Sabbath was celebrated
in the synagogues with prayer, reading, and exposition of the
Scriptures. People put on their holiday clothes and assembled
at social meals, and there was no fasting on this day.
As religion had sanctified the relations between an Israelite
and the land promised and given him by God, it also had its
corresponding Sabbath and its share in the rest of God.2 Every
seventh year the fields were not sown, nor the vineyards pruned;
what the ground brought forth of itself was not to be reaped,
nor were the grapes to be gathered. The produce of the year
belonged to all the living ; and therefore, too, no debts were to
be demanded. Thus the sabbatical year answered the double
purpose of a fallowing to increase the productions of the fields,
and of a longer time of repose to man and beast. The land-
owners lost the produce of a year, while the people, as a whole,
especially the poor, were gainers, and the loss of the proprietor
was made up by the richer growth of the six following years.
A similar sabbatical year, but of far more extended opera-
tion, was held every seven times seven years, or fiftieth year.
In this year of jubilee, field-work ceased in like manner. All
slaves of Jewish descent were set free. Each one reentered on
his old property. Sales of property, therefore, were, properly
speaking, only departures with the right to the usufruct thereof,
and were made under the condition of reversion to the owner ;
and therefore the purchase-money was but a rent, varying con-
siderably in amount according as the year of jubilee was further
1 Antiq. xvi. 2. 4.
2 Exodus xxiii. 11; Levit. xxv. 2-8; Jos. Antiq. iii. 12. 3.
THE LEVITES. 351
off or nearer at hand. This regulation, unique of its kind,
aimed at producing a constant social regeneration, and restoring
the old conditions of property. Those excessive inequalities
caused by the otherwise unavoidable accumulation of real pro-
perty in the hands of a few, the eviction of the poor by the rich,
or their degrading into mere tenants or hirelings, were thus
avoided.
The Levites, in fact, took the place of the first-born in Israel,
for according to the law these were to be holy unto the Lord ;
and Jewish tradition asserts that, in the beginning, all the first-
born sons of all the tribes of Israel were called to sacrificial
service. From the time of the vocation of the sons of Levi,
the first-born of the other tribes were only carried up to the
temple a month after their birth, and redeemed by paying a
tax according to the valuation of the priests, which, however,
was not to exceed five shekels.1 The Levites were now specially
the possession of the Lord, and he was their inheritance.2 When
they were separated for the first time from the rest of the Is-
raelites, and placed before Aaron and his sons, the children of
Israel, that is to say, the elders as their representatives, put
their hands on the heads of the Levites,3 as a gift consecrated to
God from the whole nation, and they were like the first sacrifice
of the people.
The tribe of Levi had no territorial possessions, and there-
fore the tithes belonged to them. But they thereby forfeited the
basis of any considerable power or influential position. Their
dwelling-places were scattered among the whole nation, and con-
sisted of forty-eight cities, with allotments round them for their
cattle and other necessaries of life. They Avere divided into four
classes, consisting of servants of the priest (hierodouloi), who
were 24,000 before the Exile ; door-keepers, 4,000 ; singers and
musicians, 4,000 ; and judges and officials, 6,000.4 The singers
and musicians were subdivided again into twenty-four classes,
who were on duty successively a week each. The Levitical
period of service extended from the thirtieth until their fiftieth
year; but in consequence of a decree of David they began to
serve from their twentieth year. The occupations of the Levites
in the temple consisted of opening, shutting, and cleaning it, and
1 Exodus xiii. 13. 2 Josue xiii. 33.
3 Numbers viii. 5 sq. 4 1 Paralip. xxiii. 4, 5.
352
THE LAW.
the custody of its treasures and provisions ; they had also to col-
lect the tithes and firstlings, and to provide all that was required
in the way of libations, incense, sacrifices, and feasts. They had
to assist the priests in the killing and flaying of the victim, but
could not approach the altar. The most menial offices of the
temple, that of the hewers of wood and drawers of water,1 was
not performed by the Levites, but by temple slaves, who were
the descendants of conquered races. In fine, the Levites wore no
particular dress, and were free from military service and taxation
even under foreign rulers ; the administration of justice and
municipal duties did not exclusively belong to them, but from
the time of David they filled such posts repeatedly.
As the whole people were holy, and elected by Jehovah to be
a priestly people peculiar to himself, so the priestly office, at-
tached to the descendants of the one family of Aaron, formed
the part of the nation in which the religious dignity and obliga-
tions of the whole came out most prominently as dominant over
the rest, or as the means used for realising that position. The
priest was the representative of and substitute for the people
before God, considered as a moral personality. This fact of se-
lection was intended to be particularly prominent through its
hereditary nature, in its being confined to one certain priestly
family selected by God. The priesthood, requiring no particular
mental culture or special accomplishments, was to be no matter
of free choice, but a vocation manifested through birth, and
therefore by a higher power. Whoever exercised priestly offices
without belonging to the priesthood was threatened with death.
The isolation of the Jewish priesthood, however, was not the
strict severance of a caste ; the priests were at liberty to marry
women of other tribes.
The priests called to approach the Holy One, and to go up to
the altar, were obliged to be free from bodily defects ; a blemish
did not, indeed, lessen his maintenance, but necessitated his keep-
ing at a distance from the altar, for his exterior was not, as it
ought to be by its faultlessness, a reflexion of the perfections of
the Godhead and the holiness of the service.2 For the same
reason, he was forbidden to marry a concubine, or one who had
been put away by her husband ; and if the daughter of a priest
fell into impurity, she was to be burnt, for having dishonoured
1 Jos. ix. 23 ; 1 Esdras ii. 58, viii. 20. 2 Levit. xxi. 22.
CONSECRATION. 353
the sacerdotal dignity of her father. No priest was permitted to
perform ritual observances till his twentieth year. As in the
latter times, after the Captivity, a priest was obliged to make
good his claim to the priesthood by proving his descent, the
family registers1 had to be kept with great exactness. Their
chief duty was that of sacrifice ; hence also their consecration
was a sort of sacrificial act, completely interwoven with the sacri-
fice. The person to be consecrated was first freed from sin by
the offering of a bull as an atonement; for sins, as causing a
perpetual division between God and man, must be first removed
from one who would be entirely devoted to the service of God.
Then followed the burnt-offering of one ram, while with the
blood of a second the ears, thumbs, and big toes of the postu-
lant were anointed, thus consecrating hearing, hands, and feet to
the service of the altar.2 The remaining blood was poured forth
around the altar, and at the same time the person of the conse-
crated and his vestments were sprinkled with a mixture of it and
the oil of unction. The quarters of the ram, with some cakes of
unleavened bread, were placed in the hands of the new priest,
and then consumed on the altar. In this consecration all the
three kinds of sacrifice were thus made use of, — the sin-offer-
ing, the burnt and peace offering, and the thank and meal
offering.
The priests alone could minister at the altar ; they kept up
the perpetual fire on the altar of sacrifice ; they laid the sacrifice
on the altar; undertook the various sprinklings of blood; set
fire to what was to be burnt ; entered the holy place ; took care
of the lights on the golden candlestick, and performed the public
devotions. They were appointed to set forth the law to the
people,3 especially on the three great feasts, and to expound it
judicially in all private matters. King Josaphat appointed a re-
gular court of justice in Jerusalem formed of priests and Levites.4
The priests even went to battle with the rest, and received their
share of the spoil, and the priesthood was compatible with mili-
tary appointments ; thus, Benaias, the priest, was commander of
the bodyguard of king Solomon and general of his army. Sadoc
and Joiada, both descendants of Aaron, belonged to the staff of
1 1 Esdras ii. 62 ; 2 Esdras vii. 64 ; Joseph, contra Apion. i. 7.
2 Exodus xxix. 15-20. 3 Deut. xvii. 8 sq., xix. 17, xxi. 5; 2 Paral. xvii. 9.
4 2 Paral. xix. 8 ; Joseph, contr. Apion. ii, 21.
VOL. II. A. A
354 THE LAW.
David's army. It is well known that the Maccabees were of the
priestly race.
The maintenance of the priests was provided for by the first-
lings— which were offered three times a year — of the corn, bread,
fruits, and animals ; by the showbread, and the gifts or heave-
offering, and the ransom-money of the first-born. The remains
of the sin-offerings, the breast and right shoulder of the peace-
offerings, also belonged to the priests, and the right of partaking
in the sacrificial repast extended to the members of their family.
This participation in the meats of sacrifice was coupled with the
condition that all ritual uncleanness was to be most carefully
avoided. Hence they could not approach a corpse unless that of
a very near relative ; and whilst they were serving in the temple
they had to abstain from all intoxicating drinks1 and conjugal
intercourse. Before they approached the tabernacle of the testi-
mony, or altar of incense, they had to wash their hands and feet.2
Like the Levites, the priests had several cities, thirteen in all,
for their especial residence ; they were situated near Jerusalem,
and in the territory of the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and Simeon.
It was not till after the Captivity that some of the priestly families
lived in Jerusalem itself. Whilst they were in attendance at the
temple, they inhabited rooms within its precincts. The priests
received a tenth from the tithes of the Levites. They formed a
closely united body, occupying in some degree the position of an
aristocracy, and were on the whole much respected by the people.
They wore the ordinary national dress when not in the temple,
and when there a white linen one ; but they only stepped bare-
foot on the holy places. They were divided into twenty-four
classes, and took the services of the temple in rotation : con-
stantly recurring celebrations were apportioned to individuals by
lot. The custody and exposition of the book of the law, com-
mitted to them or to all the elders of the people, also formed
part of their office ; but the knowledge of the law was indispens-
able for all who had a right to administer justice, and every king
received a copy when he commenced his reign. A female priest-
hood was impossible amongst the Hebrews, as they not only had
no worship of nature, but their religion was expressly calculated
to exclude and suppress any attempt or disposition to develop its
cultus.
1 Levit. x. 8-11. 2 Exodus xxx. 19 sq.
VESTMENTS OF THE HIGH-PRIEST. 355
The high-priest formed the apex of the whole priesthood. In
his person the nation was collectively, as a priestly people, conse-
crated to God. He was the mediator between Jehovah and the
people, and supreme head of the Jewish church. Hence the
greatest purity and holiness (in the Old-Testament sense of the
words) was demanded of him as befitting one who had to appear
before Jehovah in the name of the people, to bring the unholy
people into his presence, and whose holiness was to overflow
upon others so as in a certain sense to supply the want of purity
in the mass. But it was also well known to all that this their
sacerdotal head and representative before God was but a sinful
man, himself requiring the atonement and purification of the
blood of sacrifice, and indeed through the very same oblation as
that offered up for the whole people. Yet stricter ritual purity
was required of him ; only a pure virgin could be his wife ; every
sign of mourning was forbidden to him, and he durst not even
touch the corpses of his parents. He had to absent himself from
his own house seven days before the day of atonement, that the
purity demanded by the sacrifice of this day might not be sullied
by approaching his wife.
The dress of the high-priest was exquisitely splendid and
significant: Moses had consecrated the first high-priest, by
vesting him therein and anointing him before the assembled con-
gregation.1 The close-fitting ephod, or short tunic, was fastened
on the shoulder by onyx-stones, on which were engraved the
names of the twelve tribes. Over the ephod on the breast was
the square Rational of judgment, of the same material, with
twelve stones, each bearing one of the names of the twelve tribes.
On this square-shaped breastplate, open at top, was placed the
holy oracle, the Urim and Thummim (that is to say, ' light and
salvation ;' or, according to Philo, ' manifestation and truth'). It
is matter of dispute in what the oracle consisted. The testimony
of Josephus, however, is clear and decisive, and in nowise con-
tradicts the assertions of Philo. From the greater or less, entire
or partial, illumination in the stones and play of colour thereon,
the high-priest prophesied ; in order to bring out this light he
made use of the urim and thummim, for that these were distinct
from the stones in the breastplate is evident from the words,
" Put the urim on the breastplate," &c. It is plain something
1 Levit. viii. 4-12.
356 THE LAW.
must have taken place when the oracle was consulted, to make
the stones change their ordinary condition into an extraordinary-
one, and to produce any effect out of them. Now it is clear,
from the expression of the law,1 that the urim and thummim
was a different object from the twelve stones, and was laid or
fastened in the breastplate. According to Philo, the " logion"
or " oracle" was double ; that is to say, it consisted of two tis-
sues, so that the stones were separated from the urim by a cover-
ing placed between.2 If the oracle had to be consulted, this
covering or tissue had to be removed, and the urim playing on
the gems brought a light out of them. There was something,
however, out of the common way in this matter, as is shown by
the statement of Josephus, that for two hundred years the light
of the breastplate had ceased, by reason of God's anger on ac-
count of the transgressions of the law. Thus it was not a matter
dependent on human volition; for had it been so, its duration
would have been undoubtedly secured, as there was nothing
similar to take the place of the oracle.
What the urim really was, is, nevertheless, quite uncertain.
According to Jewish tradition, it consisted of two stones with
the two sacred names of God, which produced an illuminating
effect on the gems. The account given by the rabbis, that the
high-priest, from the particular way in which the letters forming
the names of the different tribes shone, was able to read the
divine will, or to prophesy, is probably an illustration of later
days. The Greek fathers, St. Cyril, for instance, are undecided
whether the urim and thummim was a golden tablet, or if it
was formed by two stones, one of which was called urim and
the other thummim, or on which these two words were engraved.3
So much is certain, that it was not a mere symbol in the sen-
tences flowing solely from the inspiration of the high-priest,4
and that it was not a purely internal inspiration that took place,
1 Exod. xxviii. 30.
2 One time he says (Vit. Mos. 3. ii. 1 52) , rb \6yiov rerpdyuvov BiwXovv kutg-
ffKcvdfcro ; at another (Monarch, q. ii. 226), iir\ tov \oyeiov Sirra ixpaafiara Kara-
irotKiWei. Here one passage explains the other, and confirms Josephus, who
does not say that the twelve precious stones were the \6yiov, hut rather distin-
guishes between the two (Antiq. viii. 3. 8), avv iroH-ftpta-iv eVayu'tn ko\ Aoyicp /cat \l6ois ;
and (ib. hi 8, 9) he says the breastplate was called \6yiov, just as Philo does.
3 See the passages collated in Bernard's long note to Josephus (ed. Haver-
camp, i. 165). 4 As Bahr thinks, Symb. des Mos. Cult. ii. 136 sqq.
VESTMENTS OF THE HIGH-PRIEST. 357
as in the case of the prophets.1 The high-priest may have found
himself in a state of spiritual excitement, the effect perhaps of a
special ascetic preparation ; but he was bound by what he per-
ceived on the stones of the breastplate. Had it not been so,
Josephus, who must unquestionably have been well informed on
this point, as he was of priestly descent, would have said, for
two hundred years the prophetical inspiration of the high-priest
was extinct, as prophecy generally was. Instead of this, he says
the light of the stones has ceased ; not only that of the twelve
stones on the breastplate, but also that of the onyx-stones on
the shoulder.
The high-priest wore a mitre on his head, which had a golden
plate on the front, bearing the inscription, "Holy unto the Lord."
He was consecrated by the pouring of the anointing oil on his
head, symbol of the imparting of the Holy Spirit ; after which
act, according to Jewish tradition, a cross was made on his fore-
head, in the form of that of St. Andrew j he thus was styled
emphatically the anointed priest. The Jews say this anointing
continued up to the time of Josias ; from which period, as the
holy anointing oil was lost, the high-priest was only consecrated
by investment.
In his highest function on the great day of atonement, when
he entered the holy of holies as representative of the repentant
people, the high-priest only wore a simple vesture of white linen.2
The whole sacrificial rite was specially his, "the ministry of
Aaron."3 The other priests acted in it as his deputies; yet he
only offered up sacrifice himself on the sabbaths, especially on
the great festivals.4 Of course the supervision of the divine
worship and temple treasures devolved wholly on him. Without
doubt the dignity was from the first given for life, and the eldest
son was to follow him in it. There were eighty-three high-priests
in all; thirteen from Aaron to Solomon, eighteen during the
continuance of the temple of Solomon, and fifty-two under the
second temple.5 Up to Eli the dignity remained in the line of
Eleazar, one of the sons of Aaron. With Eli it entered the
i So Bellerman, Urim and Thummim, the most Ancient Gems, p. 22. It is a
modern idea to say, as Ewald (Alterthiimer Isr. p. 339) and others do, that the
two stones were shaken in a purse, and one taken out; and it contradicts the
clear and consistent testimony of older writers.
2 Levit. xvi. 4. 3 Ecclesiasticus xlv. 16.
* Joseph. Jud. v. 5, 7. 5 Joseph. Antiq. xx. 10.
358 THE LAW.
family of Ithamar, another of the sons of Aaron. When Abia-
thar was deposed by Solomon, the priesthood recurred to Sadoc,
of the race of Eleazar. During the Syrian rule, from 160 till
153 b.c, the succession of the high-priesthood was interrupted.
With Jonathan, son of Mattathias, began the line of Asmonean
high-priests, who were descended from Eleazar. The period of
the Herods we have seen was one of the deepest degradation,
during which the high-priesthood was the puppet of foreign
potentates, and at last of the mob.
If there was no king or judge in Israel, the high-priest alone
possessed and exercised the supreme authority. Thus Heli, the
high-priest, judged Israel forty years; and so it was also under
the Asmoneans. The relation and division of power as between
high-priest and earthly head of the people (king or judge), was
not legally defined. The king certainly had no right to inter-
fere in the legitimate exercise of the sacerdotal power, inde-
pendent in its own sphere and derived from God, not from him ;
and if Solomon deposed the high-priest Abiathar (the only in-
stance of the kind before the Captivity), who, as the king looked
at it, had deserved death, on the other hand, Athaliah the queen,
after a reign of six years, was deposed by the high-priest Joiada
(who had secretly anointed her grandson king), and executed as
an idolatress and seducer of the people at his order; and Joiada
himself reigned for a long time in the name of his youthful
protege Joas.
Parallel to the priesthood were the Nazarites, who were the
Old-Testament ascetics or religious. There were Israelites of
both sexes specially " set apart" and consecrated to God. They
observed the general commands as to purifications with extreme
rigour; above all, they avoided defilement by corpses, and ab-
stained particularly from wine, all intoxicating beverages, and all
that came from the vine plant, as grapes and raisins.1 The Na-
zarite also let his hair grow. " No scissors were to come near
his head." This seems to have been so, partly because wearing
long thick hair in hot weather was a great penance, and partly
1 This shows that Bahr is quite incorrect in thinking this abstinence was
merely a means to an end, viz. that of being always in a state to discriminate
that which was clean and unclean (Sym. ii. 432). In Palestine it was certainly a
greater act of self-denial to abstain from grapes than from wine. Celibacy was
apparently not binding on the Nazarites in earlier times.
SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHETS. 359
because, as in circumcision the organ of generation, so in the
Nazarite vow the hair, was the part of the body specially con-
secrated to God. Accordingly when the vow was at an end, the
hair was cut off and burnt as a sort of sacrificial offering. There
were Nazarites who were consecrated to God for life by their
parents even before their birth, as Samson, Samuel, and St.
John the Baptist. Generally, however, the dedication took place
for a certain time only, and in order to the attainment of a
special end, e. g. the granting of a prayer, and such like. At the
expiration of the time vowed, the Nazarite brought a lamb as a
burnt- offering, a sheep as a sin-offering, and a ram as a thank-
offering, as well as a basket of unleavened oil-cakes. If he had
defiled himself during the time of his Nazariteship by coming
in contact with a corpse, he began the time afresh, after bringing
the triple sacrifice. In the time of Josephus many persons
were in the habit of vowing, especially in sickness and other
distresses, that they would abstain from wine for thirty days
before offering a sacrifice, and would pray and cut their hair.1
This was not a Nazarite vow proper, for in that, on the con-
trary, they promised to let the hair grow.
As the Hebrew nation were to be a standing mirror, a warn-
ing and a sign to other nations, so were the prophets to the
people. Times when the prophets did not appear were times of
corruption or death. If the words of the seer were not obeyed,
it was a proof of an unhappy lethargy, and of a heavy chastise-
ment weighing on Israel. There were examples of prophetical
agency before Samuel in Ehud and Deborah. Just before he
arose, coincidently with the general public degeneracy, the gift
of prophecy seemed to have ceased. But with him, 400 years
after the Exodus, and about 1100 years B.C., began that series of
prophets who continued with but few interruptions till the days
of Malachias, a period of nearly 700 years.
Samuel founded real schools of the prophets, of which later
on there were several to be found in Rama, Bethel, Jericho, and
Gilgal. In these schools lived together young men called the
" sons of the prophets," who were under the guidance and in-
struction of their elders and masters. Not indeed that prophetic
inspiration could be taught or artificially acquired, but young
men could be prepared beforehand by strict discipline, an ascetic
1 Bell. Jud. ii. 15.
360 THE LAW.
mode of life, and continual occupation with the Thora, and pene-
trating into the spirit of the sacred text, nay even by religious
music and dancing, so as to stand ready like vessels at hand, lit
for the outpouring of the prophetic spirit when vouchsafed. We
find that in these schools a sort of ecstatic condition was kept up
by artificial means, probably in the same manner as among the
therapeutse of later ages, so that strangers coming suddenly upon
a company of these sons of the prophets were seized with a similar
enthusiasm, and carried away to like gestures and acts.1 The
schools of Samuel were an attempt to realise the wish which
Moses once had cherished and expressed, that all the people
might prophesy, and to prepare a body of men, in the hope that
such an extensive outpouring of the prophetic spirit, as Jael had
foreseen in the far future, might arise in the succeeding gene-
ration.
How long these schools of the prophets subsisted cannot be
precisely determined ; they appear to have decayed after the days
of Elias ; the last traces of them are to be found in Amos. But
the weight of the prophetic office, an institution quite unique and
not comparable with any thing to be met with of the kind in his-
tory, from this time forth exercised a deep and powerful influence
upon the destiny of the nation and the course of the development
of the theocratic kingdom. Without any legal power or cre-
dentials the prophets arose from amidst the people, now priests or
Levites, and at other times simple Israelites of other tribes, inde-
pendent of family and position, and often impelled by an uncon-
trollable pressure in despite of all the revoltings of nature against
their mission. A prophet, in consciousness of and with the
auth ority of his immediate vocation, was at once the " mouth-
piece" or messenger of God, and the personified conscience of the
nation, who held up to all the reflection of their transgressions.
He was a demagogue and patriot in the noblest sense, who at
great and decisive moments came forth to face people, potentate,
and king, as preacher of penance, wamer or consoler, guardian
of the law, and expounder of the ancient promises of the cove-
nant. Within the bounds of the law, which the true prophet
never overstepped, he exercised unlimited freedom of speech,
often attended with peril and sacrifice of life. The law itself
had foreseen his position, and decreed that a true prophet should
1 1 Kiags x. 10-12, xix. 20-24.
INFLUENCE OF THE PROPHETS. 361
be at liberty to speak in the assembly or elsewhere to the people,
and that he should be unassailable, and accountable to God
alone.1 False prophets who spake in the name of strange gods,
or seduced the people to break the law, or to fall away from
Jehovah, were to be stoned to death.2
The prophets opposed and combated chiefly the prevailing
and fundamental sin of idolatry, and they raised their voice in
warning and denunciation against the immoralities which reci-
procated with the popular pagan inclinations and practices ; they
also set forth the fall into a mere mechanical holiness of works,
the degeneracy of the priests, and the venality of the judges.
They announced the divine vengeance ; but they also raised up
the broken-down people when dragged into captivity. Their
theme was not limited to the exaltation or depression of their
own people; their prophecies often extended to the fate of other,
even distant, nations. And as the prophets in their moments of
ecstatic elevation only beheld that which every Israelite possessed
in his creed, though more obscurely and vaguely pictured, they
clothed even their visions in images whose form and colour
were borrowed from ordinary life, and from the individual experi-
ence of the seer, his own immediate horizon.
The prophets directed their admonitions, and not unfrequently
their sharp reproofs, against kings themselves, entering fearlessly
into palaces and denouncing the false policy of theirs that formed
destructive alliances with foreign powers, and placed confidence
in the powerful heathen states. The kings also consulted them
in their distresses ; when, however, they joined with the people
in idolatry, the prophets were persecuted to blood. In the king-
dom of the ten tribes they were almost annihilated as early as
the days of Ahab f at a later period (in the time of Amos) they
were forbidden to speak publicly to the people.4 In the king-
dom of Juda, Manasses caused the warning prophets to be killed.
"Your sword hath devoured your prophets as a ravaging lion,"
said Jeremiah j5 at that time Isaias too is said to have fallen a
sacrifice to a king's vengeance. Under Joas and Joachim two
more prophets were slain for their frankness of speech.6 It was
a characteristic of Jerusalem, that it had killed the prophets and
1 Numbers xii. 6. 2 Deut. xiii. 1 sq.
3 3 Kings xviii. 4 Amos vii. 10 sq.
5 Jeremias ii. 30. 6 2 Paral. xxiv. 20, 21; Jerem.xxvi. 20-23.
362 THE LAW.
stoned them that were sent unto it.1 Afterwards, indeed, people
of Judea were zealous in searching for their graves and adorning
them.2
The mission appointed to the Israelites, and the position
which they occupied in the midst of heathen nations, made it
necessary to have but one holy place for the whole nation. As
the unity of the God of the Israelites was in contrast to the
multiplicity of the heathen deities, so his temple, the only one
in the nation, and, in a certain sense, in the world, stood opposed
to the multitude of heathen places of worship. If the heathen
could pray to and serve his idol gods, not in temples only, but
in chapels, groves, on heights, or under trees, for the Israelite
there was but one city where God could be lawfully honoured,
and where every temptation to and danger of the idolatrous wor-
ship of nature was cut off.
The temple was to be the dwelling of God amidst his people,
and a place of assembly; but the people only appeared before
the Lord in the holy of holies by their substitutes, the priests.
The temple-house itself, therefore, was not particularly large,
nor to be compared to many Christian churches. It consisted
of three parts : an outer court, the holy place, and the holy of
holies. It was surrounded by three tiers of rooms, intended
and used as treasure and provision chambers. The holy place
was lighted by lamps ; the windows only served to let out the
smoke of the incense and for ventilation. The holy of holies
(quite empty in the second temple) was separated from the holy
place by a door with a curtain. Next came the priest &' court,
entirely surrounding the temple ; on the eastern side there were
two other courts, those of the men and women, which were sepa-
rated from each other by a wall. The outermost enclosure was
the court of the heathen. It went all round the temple, as did
the priests' court, and was divided from the others by stone
grating, with inscriptions prohibiting under pain of death non-
Israelites from entering the inner parts of the temple, and espe-
cially the sanctuary.
In the sanctuary stood the golden seven-branched candlestick,
with its lights always burning ; the altar of incense, on which
the daily incense-offering was burnt; and the table with the
showbread, and the vessels filled with wine, the daily offering
i Matt, xxiii. 37. 2 Tb. ver. 29.
THE PROHIBITION OF IMAGES. 363
of bread and wine of the people. In the court attached was the
altar of burnt -offerings, often simply called the altar, for it was
the only one for all the animal sacrifices of the whole of Israel.
A perpetual fire burnt upon it, in token that the sacrifice as a
symbol of an offering of self to God, daily renewed on the part
of the people and each individual, ought to be an unbroken one.
A pipe at the side of the altar conveyed the blood of the sacrifices
by a subterranean channel into the brook Cedron. There was a
cavity under the altar into which the drink-offerings flowed.
The people were forbidden to enter either the holy place or
the holy of holies ; they could only see the priests in the sanc-
tuary performing their daily ministrations through the curtain,
which was drawn back. The most holy was closed for ever
against the foot and gaze of even the priests ; and when the high-
priest entered on the day of atonement, no one was allowed to
remain in the holy place.1 The high-priest, however, had to
enter at least twice on that day; once with the blood of the bull
slain for his own sins, and the other time with that of the ram
sacrificed for the sins of the people. On both occasions he had
to dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle the top of the ark of
the covenant with it seven times. According to Jewish tradi-
tion he went in twice more, first to incense the holy place, and
then to bring out the pan of coals and the incense-burner.2
Whoever had dared to enter the holy place either alone, or with
the high-priest, would have been punished with death, as would
the high-priest himself had he ventured in on any other day of
the year.3
In contrast with heathenism, which always reduced the
Deity to a level with nature, investing it with a body, and blend-
ing it with nature, the Jehovah of the Hebrews was ever to be
adored and known as the Unseen, having no tangible form ac-
cessible to the senses, and infinitely removed from the world
of matter. Hence the strict prohibition against making any
" likeness" of him, or honouring him by any pictorial or sym-
bolic representation. To their heathen neighbours an image or
picture was not only a memorial or intimation of the Godhead,
but an independent divine being and power. They were real
1 Lev. xvi. 17.
2 Mischnah, tr. Jomah, v. 1 sq., vii. 4; cf. Maimonid. de fest. exp. 4.
3 Phil. Leg. ad. Laic, xxxix. p. 1035.
364
THE LAW.
idols, dead and powerless gods, as the law calls them,1 — wood
and stone, the work of their own hands, which the idolaters and
apostate Israelites worshiped with a cultus directed to the image
itself. Hence all representations of human or animal forms
were forbidden to the servant of Jehovah. In contradistinction
to the heathen divinisation of nature, he was bound to leave
nature at her wide distance from the Creator, without an attempt
at approximation : thus, no grove was to surround the temple ;
neither monuments nor statues were to be erected;2 the altar
was only to consist of earth or rough stones, as the tool of the
carver would have desecrated it.3 For in the weak and diseased
sense of the people, heathen representations and rites clambered
and clung with a rank exuberance round all these objects. Art
had to be quite excluded from religious things, and it was there-
fore certainly better for the Hebrews to have no plastic art at all
than to have one entirely stripped of religious sentiment.
The interdiction of images went yet further, for every graven
thing in stone, wood, or metal, in the likeness of any object in
heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or of those things that
are in the waters under the earth, was forbidden ;4 even pictures,
which were not formally mentioned in the law, were included.
The worship of false gods and images were so indissolubly con-
nected, the one being only the manifestation and realisation of
the other, that the entire renouncement of all outward represen-
tations of men and beasts was necessary to withdraw from the
Israelites every possible aliment of their deeply - rooted inclina-
tion to heathenism. There is proof of this in the keeping of
teraphim, — a custom so hard to uproot. These were a sort of
household god in a human form, probably an inheritance from
their Aramean forefathers, which were consulted as domestic
oracles,5 and which were to be found in private houses until the
reform of religion under Josias. The representation of animals
was also obliged to be interdicted, for the Israelites on Mount
Sinai worshiped the Godhead under the form of a calf in Egyp-
tian fashion, and afterwards Jeroboam regularly set up the
worship of calves in the kingdom of Israel, in the two border
towns of Bethel and Dan.6
An exception was made to this universal and unconditional
1 Deut. xxxii. 37, 38. 2 Deut. xvi. 21, 22. 3 Exodus xx. 24, 25.
4 Exodus xx. 4. 5 Judges xviii. 14 sq. 6 3 Kings xii. 28 sq. .
EXTENT OF PROHIBITION. 365
prohibition against images, and that even in the time of Moses.
In the most holy both of the tabernacle and temple, at either
end of the ark of the covenant, were two winged cherubim.
These, it is true, however, were in a place where no Israelite,
except the high-priest, ever looked. The so-called brazen sea,
which was a large vessel for water in the outer court, was sup-
ported by twelve colossal cast bulls; but these were offensive
even to the stronger-minded Jews, as we perceive by the decided
dislike of Josephus, who saw in them a breach of the law.1 For
the Jews really understood the law to forbid absolutely every
representation of a living being : so that, according to Philo and
Origen, no painter or sculptor could live amongst them. Philo,
to whom the plastic arts appear to have seemed especially per-
nicious, remarks that no picture was tolerated either.2 The
Jews would not put up with the image of the emperor on the
standards of the Roman legions, and even thought it a breach of
the law and a profanation to have them carried through their
country. One of the palaces which Herod the tetrarch built in
Tiberias was burnt by order of the Sanhedrim because it was
ornamented with figures of animals, and this contrary to the
law.3
It is manifest, we must distinctly remember, it was not the
mere abstaining from all service of false gods, but positive en-
mity to and abhorrence of idolatry that was a fundamental part
of Judaism. For to the Jew, any honour paid to false gods was
a felony and rebellion against the one only Ruler and King of
his people and kingdom. Individual offenders were punished
with stoning for the crime; the nation, as a whole, with dis-
persion and extermination. Every prophet who prophesied in
the name of a strange god, perverted or led others astray to
serve him, was to be stoned to death ; any reticence or lenity in
this matter was criminal, even on the part of nearest relatives.
The Israelites were to destroy the idolatrous statues generally in
their campaigns, and not to suffer any idolaters to remain in the
land.4 Yet Israel had no mission or injunction to carry the
knowledge and worship of Jehovah beyond the bounds of his own
country by force of arms : on the contrary, they were not to be
a conquering people; it was only within the limits of the terri-
i Antiq. viii. 7. 5. 2 Opp. Mangey, i. 490 ; ii. 91, 205, 215.
3 Joseph. Vit. 12. 4 Exodus xxiii. 24-34.
366 THE LAW.
tory allotted to them that they had to suppress every species of
idolatry with the utmost rigour. It is well known that this was
not fully accomplished, but rather that a great part of the nation
yielded for centuries to the attractions which the nature-worship
of their heathen neighbours had for them, that Baal or Moloch,
Astarte, Chamos and Thammuz, with all the abominations of
their worship, were adored, and not unfrequently by Israelites
appointed for the purpose by the kings themselves. Therefore
the law forbad still more stringently all that was of heathen
original, the choice of certain days, the respect to the flight and
cries of birds, charms, and the evocation of the dead.
Those Gentiles who desired to be fully received into the
Jewish church, the " proselytes of justice," had to submit to be
circumcised, to which ceremony, in post- Christian times, an ab-
lution was added. Whether this washing or baptism existed as
early as the times of the Herods or not, is a much- contested
point ; neither Josephus nor Philo mention it. As the neophyte
also brought a sacrifice, and it was a universal custom amongst
the Jews to purify themselves by water before offering sacrifice,
this may have been the origin of the baptism of proselytes.
Women more frequently became such proselytes than men, as a
sacrifice was necessarily all that was required for their reception.
A proselyte of justice was treated as one newly born. Accord-
ingly, he broke all ties of parents and relatives, and his obliga-
tions towards them were at an end.1 The number of "proselytes
of the gate" was much greater. Their name was probably de-
rived from their being only allowed to come as far as the gate of
the temple porch. In earlier times these were heathen stran-
gers, who, on the condition of becoming such proselytes, were
allowed to domicile themselves amongst the Israelites in Pales-
tine. They were only enjoined to give up the worship of idols,
and to observe the seven precepts of Noah, — to wit, to renounce
blasphemy, worship of the stars, incest (including paiderastia) ,
murder, theft, rebellion against the Jewish authorities, and the
eating gobbets of raw meat with the blood in them.
Sacrifice, that relation which brings man close to the Deity,
forms the kernel and marrow of all true religion : all that he
desires to obtain from God of gifts and blessings are conveyed
to him through it. No religion, however, had a system of
1 Tac. Hist. v. 5.
SACRIFICE. 367
sacrifice carried out so far ; in none did it so thoroughly pene-
trate every situation of life, and embrace all human necessities,
as in that of the Hebrews. For the principal features of all
religious life, — the destruction of sin and effacing the guilt of it,
as the partition-wall between God and man, for thanksgiving to
God, worship and homage to him, the free sacrifice of self to
God, and, in fine, the closest union with him, — for all these
wants the law had provided by the sacrifices ordained for sin,
— the sacrifices of expiation, the burnt-offering, the meat and
drink offerings, and those of thanksgiving. Hence nothing was
so important in the eyes of the people as not to be slack in the
sacrifices of God, no misfortune was so sad as the compulsory
suspension of sacrificial worship, and the consequent impossi-
bility of maintaining the reciprocity of giving and receiving, of
supplication and its answer, through the medium of sacrifice.
"Thou shalt not appear before my face empty :m the Is-
raelite was not to present himself to God in the sanctuary
empty-handed, but with a gift of the labour of his hands, and of
the blessing which Jehovah had bestowed upon it ; he was also
to bring of the produce of the cattle or of the field, of the flocks
and herds, of the goats, of corn, oil, and wine. Only that which
was valuable and could be eaten or enjoyed by men, and espe-
cially that sort of food which was at once the produce of his toil,
and the preparation for and earning of which made his vocation,
was fit for the altar of God. All uneatable animals, and all
eatable but wild ones, were excluded from sacrifice. Even fruits
of trees were not employed in sacrifice proper, although they
were offered as first-fruits. The sacrificer, by laying his hand
on the head of the animal, testified to and realised the substitu-
tive relation which the animal occupied in his regard. He drew
the animal into the circle of humanity, and transferred to it his
meaning and purpose : if, for instance, it was a matter of atone-
ment for sin and guilt, he made a transfer of the sin to the
animal, which was to die in his stead, and at the same time a
practical acknowledgment of his own guiltiness. If he intended
through the sacrifice to give himself to God, by imposing his
hands on the animal it again became consecrated in his stead, as
a recipient and medium of this self-oblation.
The animals were not slain by the priests, but by the sacri-
1 Exodus xxiii. 15 ; Deut. xvi. 16.
368 THE LAW.
ficers ; the priest himself only killed his own sin-offering. He
who had wrought the cause oTf death, himself wrought the death
of the beast, his proxy. The blood of the victim was then col-
lected in a vessel by the priests, and was either sprinkled towards
the altar or the horns of the altar were anointed with it. This
was in reality the most important act of the sacrifice. " I have
given you," says the law, "the blood upon the altar for your
souPs expiation, because the life of the flesh is in the blood."1
The natural soul (nephesh) of the animals, or its vehicle, the
blood, typified and took the place here of the soul, the life of
man. The nephesh, the soul of the beast, was offered by the effu-
sion of blood for the redemption of that of man, indebted to the
justice of God through sin. Accordingly, this portion of the
animal was not put in the power of men, and they were bound
to abstain from eating blood, because of the exclusive rite of
atonement through the blood of sacrifice.
The principal and most common sacrifices was the burnt-
offering, for which a male animal was always taken ; this, after
it was slain, was divided, and the priests laid the pieces, after
they had been carefully washed, on the altar, where they were
consumed along with strong incense. Such sacrifices could be
offered alone, others requiring generally the accompaniment of a
burnt-offering. Besides the prescribed occasions, such sacrifices
were employed on all great occasions. Even heathens could
offer them in the outer court of the temple; and Augustus
ordered a daily burnt -offering of two lambs and a ram to be
made for him.2 To the Israelites such an entire sacrifice was a
sign and expression of complete resignation to Jehovah, a sur-
render of the body and all its powers and inclinations. The fire
represented the appropriating organ, being a kind of mouth-
piece of God, at the same time symbolising his purifying power,
by which he can convert the human body into a sacred instru-
ment well-pleasing to himself.
The trespass -offering was a compensative and restorative
sacrifice, in which the imposition of hands on the head of the
victim did not take place. The idea in this sacrifice was the
performance of an expiatory satisfaction, or the making good an
injury committed, and the payment of a debt. In the case of a
1 Levit. xvii. 11.
2 Philo. Opp. vi. 592 ; Joseph. Bell. Jud. ii. 17. 2 ; contra Apion. ii. 6.
PEACE-OFFERING. 369
neighbour any injury had to be made good by restoring more
than its amount ; to God, however, a ram was to be brought as
a trespass-offering.1 The cleansed leper also brought a trespass-
offering in return for his restoration to the rights and privileges
of the covenant. The flesh of this sacrifice belonged to the
priests, who consumed it in a holy place.
The sin-offering was for the removal and expiation of sin.
For sins of rebellion against God, arising from daring presump-
tion, there was neither sacrifice nor atonement : all other sins
of premeditation or not, and sins of frailty, could be atoned for
through sacrifice by the contrite. Whilst, however, the trespass-
offering regarded individuals only, the sin-offering was brought
for whole communities and for the people collectively. The
guilty obtained the desired reconciliation by the blood which
the priest sprinkled. In this case the blood was not merely
sprinkled round the altar, as in the other sacrifices, but with
part the horns of the altar were anointed, and part was poured
out at its foot. On solemn sacrifices of this kind it was sprinkled
on the curtain behind which was the ark of the covenant. The
fatty parts of the animal were then burnt at the altar ; all the
rest was consumed without the city if it were a standing sacrifice
for the sins of the priests and of the people, or the flesh was
given to be eaten by the priests in the court of the sanctuary.2
The eating of this flesh was no sacrificial meal; the sacrificer
and his family had no share in it ; even the relatives of the
priests might not partake of it with them; the priests alone were
to eat the meat burdened with sin, that so they might destroy
it. The red heifer belonged to the category of sin-offerings, and
was slain by the priest outside the city, and then entirely con-
sumed by fire ; after which, he sprinkled the blood towards the
most holy. The ashes, mingled with water, were reserved for
the aspersion of such as had, through direct or indirect contact
with a corpse, become unclean.3
If no part of the burnt-offerings was eaten, and if the priests
alone partook of the sin-offerings, and then only when the sacri-
fice was not offered at the same time for their own sins, the
peace- or thank-offering, on the contrary, was essentially a com-
munion feast. It was offered, in the name of the people, on
1 Levit. v. 15 ; Numbers v. 5 sq. 2 Levit. vi. 25 sq.
3 Numbers xix. 2 sq.
VOL. II.
BB
370 THE LAW.
certain festivals, e.g. on the election of a king, or after the
happy issue of some undertaking, and also on the feast of Pente-
cost. Generally speaking it was a spontaneous act on the part
of individuals, in gratitude to God for some benefit or fulfilment
of a vow. The fat pieces of the animals sacrificed were the only
ones consumed by the fire of the altar ; the rest were divided
between the priests and the sacrificer ; a repast was prepared out
of it, of which the sacrificer and the friends he had invited par-
took in joyful conviction of being at peace with God and ad-
mitted to the table of the Lord. None of the consecrated meat
could be taken home, or otherwise consumed without the sanc-
tuary ; all was to be finished the same, or at any rate the
following, day, in the fore court of the temple ; that which still
remained was burnt. Here, then, was a double communion : as
the whole sacrifice had become God's property by being conse-
crated to him in sacrifice, what man partook of was received
from his hand ; they were guests at the table of Jehovah, or, as
was also represented, Jehovah did not disdain to become the
guest of man through the priests, the ministers of his sanctuary,
who partook of the meal, whilst the guests, by participation in
the same food and meal, felt themselves united in a holy com-
munion with the priests and each other. It was only by greater
solemnity that the praise -offering differed from the thank-
offering. It seems that on such occasions people had hymns
sung by singers, as a choir of such was called " Toda," a name
also given to the praise-offering.1
A law, standing isolated, points to a period when every
killing of a domestic quadruped, whether slain for a sacrifice or
merely for home consumption, had to take place before the
tabernacle of Jehovah, and had to be made into a sacrifice, and
a sacrificial meal, by a sacerdotal sprinkling of blood on the
altar, and the burning of the fat.2 Hence the law against blood,
destined to serve as a sacrifice of expiation, being employed, or
perhaps consumed, contrary to its proper use, became a matter
of course. This was, however, only practicable while the Israel-
ites were living together in one camp. Later on, when they had
entered Chanaan, the ordinance was revoked; altars were, it
seems, erected at different places for this purpose, so that the
animals might be slain before them, and the blood poured forth.
1 Nehemias xii. 31-41. 2 Levit. xvii. 4-7.
MORNING AND EVENING SACRIFICE. 371
This probably explains an occurrence in the history of Saul :
once when the people were exhausted by pursuing their enemies
in war-time, they hastily began to eat the flesh with the blood in
it ; Saul, however, speedily had an altar erected of a great stone,
by which the blood might be legally disposed of.1 But this also
was changed again after the building of the temple, when the
altar at Jerusalem became the only rightful one in the land.
To the thank-offering belonged the peculiar ceremony of
waving ; a symbol of transfer to Jehovah, which the priest per-
formed when he put the breast of the victim on the hands of the
sacrificer, placing his hands under them, and thus moved them
backwards and forwards with the quarters of the victim upon
them.2 According to rabbinical accounts, it was a cruciform
motion towards the four quarters of the world, backwards and
forwards, right and left.
Unbloody offerings, " mincha," consisting of gifts of meal or
oil- cakes, were, in part, attributions to bloody sacrifices; no
burnt- or praise-offering could be made without the addition of
meat- and drink-offerings (wine) : in the former case a handful
of meal was put on the altar and consumed with the incense ; to
the latter, the praise-offerings, unleavened oil-cakes were added.
Leaven and honey were to be avoided in case of vegetable
offerings, as causing fermentation, and changing the purity
of the original substance ; while oil and incense, as typical of
prayer, and salt, as a preservative from corruption and putre-
faction, and symbolic of the bond between God and man,3 were
never allowed to be omitted.
The daily morning and evening sacrifice was offered in the
name of the whole people. In the morning a lamb was slain
and burnt, together with meal and wine, as a meat- and drink-
offering ; the same was repeated in the evening : for this pur-
pose there was a special chamber for lambs in the last temple.
The sacrifice was doubled on the Sabbath-day. On the days of
the new moon the festival sacrifice consisted of ten animals, with
the addition of the meat-offering, besides a sin-offering of a ram
for the expiation of the guilt of the community. A standing
oblation was the showbread, of which twelve cakes, correspond-
ing to the number of the tribes of Israel, were laid on a low
1 1 Kings xiv. 33 sq. 2 Exodus xxix. 24 sq. ; Levit. viii. 27 sq.
3 Levit. ii. 13.
372 THE LAW.
table, overlaid with gold, in the holy place of the temple, close
to the veil before the holy of holies ; it was renewed every week,
on the Sabbath. That which was taken away was eaten by the
priests in a sacred place.
The Mosaic law contained no ordinances respecting prayer;
only on the payment of tithes to the priests, and the domestic
solemnity of the presentation of the firstlings, was there a pre-
scribed formula of prayer and acknowledgment, in which the
father of the house, testifying his dependence on God, and his
obedience to the law, supplicated the Divine blessing on Israel as
a nation, and thus consecrated the religious act.1 By the law,
then, prayer was, on the whole, left to discretion ; but certainly
custom and tradition settled a great deal precisely that was
religiously observed, for the Israelites were, above all nations,
a people of prayer. It was in early times a universal custom
to turn in prayer towards the place where the temple and
holy of holies stood ; and without doubt there were traditional
formulae of prayer attached to the sacrifices. The daily morning
and evening sacrifice was certainly not unaccompanied by prayer
on the part of those present, if only made in silence ; and they
assisted at the divine worship of prayer and psalmody which
began to develop under David and Solomon, sometimes taking
part in it through antiphonal response. The courts of the
temple were the places where the inhabitants of Jerusalem prin-
cipally offered up their prayers, which were always said with
head covered. In order to be undisturbed, they often said them
on the flat roofs of their houses,2 or in the balconies there ;
they prayed three times a-day, at nine, twelve, and three o' clock.
If the hour of prayer came when they were in the streets or
fields, they stood still, and so said it. About the time of the
Captivity special prayers were said aloud by the Levites, in
which the people joined.3 People usually stood while they
prayed, only occasionally kneeling or throwing themselves pros-
trate on the ground. The phylacteries, or fringes with prayers
inscribed, were already in use in the time of Christ.
Among a people of such religious life as the Hebrews, vows
played a prominent part, were of very frequent occurrence, and
were manifold in form, and whether of promised performance or
1 Deut. xxvi. 12, 15. 2 Daniel vi. 10 ; Judith viii. 5 ; Tobias iii. 10.
3 I Paralip. xxiii. 30.
THE PASSOVER. 373
of imposed abstinence, their fulfilment was considered a most
sacred and binding duty. The law inculcated freedom in mak-
ing vows, as well as their obligation when made.1 "If thou
forbearest to promise, thou shalt be without sin." A vow once
taken was binding as an oath, and was to be performed without
fail, and to its full extent. But wives and daughters, as not
free agents, were not allowed to vow any thing contrary to the
wishes of their husbands or fathers.2 Every thing, however,
that was the subject of a vow, persons or landed property, with
the exception of animals for sacrifice, could be redeemed for a
certain sum, the amount of which was generally settled by the
priests. Sometimes persons were dedicated by vow to the ser-
vice of Jehovah in the sanctuary. Vows of abstinence usually
consisted of a fast.
The festivals, with the exception of the Sabbaths, had partly
an agrarian, partly an historical, signification, relating to the
divine guidance of the nation. There were fifty -nine in all
through the year, and they were all accompanied by special
public sacrifices : seven of these feast-days were solemnised by
abstinence from work, viz. the first and seventh day of un-
leavened bread, the day of pentecost, the seventh new moon, the
day of atonement, and the first and last day of the feast of
tabernacles; but the day of atonement alone resembled the
Sabbath in the prohibition of every kind of work, while the rest
enjoined on the other days did not exclude the more necessary
business and employments, such as the preparation of food. On
the days intervening between the longer feasts, all kinds of
work were allowed. Three feasts, the pasch, pentecost, and the
feast of tabernacles, were pilgrimage festivals, when it was in-
cumbent on all the males of the land to repair to the temple.
The birthday of the nation was the pasch or feast of the pass-
over, solemnised in memory of their deliverance out of Egypt,
and the sparing of the firstborn of the Hebrews during the last
plague the Egyptians were smitten with. On the evening of the
fourteenth day of the spring month, the first of the year, the
whole nation had to kill the victim for sacrifice, to sprinkle its
blood, and to observe the sacrificial meal by eating the lamb
which was slain. In this, then, all alike had priestly rights, as
already Philo brings out.3 The lamb was slain in the court of
1 Deut. xxiii. 22. 2 Numbers xxx. 4 sq. 3 De Vit. Mos. 3.
374
THE LAW.
the sanctuary, and then so consumed by the father of each house
and his family, with the addition of unleavened bread and bitter
herbs, as that nothing was left. Whatever happened not to be
eaten was to be burnt, but no part of the sacrifice ever came on
the altar. The blood of the sacrifice was to be sprinkled on the
door-posts of every house. In this case, therefore, it was the
individual families, who, by each partaking of the lamb (which
was not to be divided into pieces), realised communion and
religious fellowship among one another and with God, to whom
the sacrifice was offered. By all the men in the land being
obliged to repair to the temple to slay their lamb, the conscious-
ness of a national unity, compacted through God and his temple,
was strengthened, and the brotherly feeling nourished of the
hundreds of thousands who all joined in offering the same sacri-
fice, and in partaking of the same sacrament. The festival was
also called that of unleavened bread, because the people ate
bread of that sort for seven days, in memory of their former
bondage, and the hasty flight, which had prevented their fore-
fathers from leavening the dough.1
On the fiftieth day after Easter Sunday the harvest-feast of
pentecost was solemnised, for the seven weeks between pasch and
pentecost were harvest-time. On that day after the Easter Sab-
bath, the first ears of corn had been brought ; now, after fifty
days, the first fruits of the bread itself were offered to God as a
thank-offering, together with two lambs and several other beasts
of sacrifice. In autumn the feast of tabernacles was held for seven
days, in memory of the Israelites having lived in tents in their
journey through the Arabian desert, and as a thanksgiving festi-
val for the close of the fruit-harvest. At this time they lived in
huts made of green boughs, which were erected on the roofs, in
the streets, squares, and courts, and special victims were slain
daily in the temple. Those who partook in this festival carried
a lemon in one hand, and in the other a palm-branch entwined
with sprigs of myrtle and willow. Every morning water from
the pool of Siloah, mixed with wine, was poured into two per-
forated vessels close by the altar. On the eve of the first day of
the feast, the large candelabra in the court of the temple were
lighted ; their brightness illuminated the whole city, and a torch-
dance took place before them, with music and singing. This
1 Exocl. xii. 19 sq.
FEAST OF PTJRIM. 375
characteristic of the feast caused the Greeks to imagine it was
nothing but a Jewish appropriation of their Dionysos feast.1
Of all the days consecrated to religion, the great day of
atonement was the principal one ; and it was also the only fast-
day prescribed by the law. The Jews called it simply "the
day." It was a day of universal expiation of the great number
of those sins of the people, which were either unknown or left
unredeemed, for which no special sin-offering had been brought.
Thus it was a day of profound sorrow for common guilt and
sinfulness, in which all had share, high-priest, priests, and peo-
ple, and for which all stood in need of expiation. Twice on
this day did the high-priest enter the holy of holies, which was
at other times closed to him as well as to the people. He was
then to take of the blood of the two victims, the bull appointed
to be offered for himself, and the he-goat slain for the people,
and each time to dip his finger therein and sprinkle it seven
times against the mercy -seat, the top of the ark of the cove-
nant. As there was no ark of the covenant in the holy of
holies of the second temple, he sprinkled the blood towards the
roof and the floor ; he also filled the holy place with the smoke
of incense. The high-priest laid his hands on the head of a
second he-goat, and transferring to it the sins of the people, had
it led away to the desert, where it was let loose. The flesh of
the sin-offering was burnt without the city.
Among the festivals of later introduction the feast of Purim
ranks first ; instituted in thankful remembrance of the deliver-
ance from the murderous intentions of Haman, wrought by
Esther for the Jews in the kingdom of Persia. Although of
universal observance as early as the time of Josephus, it was no
temple feast, but was kept in the synagogues by reading the
book of Esther, and in the houses by joyous entertainments and
almsgivings. The feast of the dedication of the temple, or of
"lights," was instituted by Judas Macchabeus, in memory of the
purification of the temple by himself, b.c 164, and of the resto-
ration of divine worship according to the law.2 It was solem-
nised for eight days by illuminating the synagogues and houses
(in reference to the re-lighting of the temple lights). Then fol-
lowed some days of mourning, in remembrance of Jerusalem
having been taken by the Chaldeans, of the destruction of the
1 Plut. Sympos. iv. 6. 2. 2 1 Mace. iv. 59 ; cf. Joseph. Antiq. xii. 7. 7.
376 THE LAW.
city and of the temple, and of the murder of Gedalia,1 whereby
the flight of the remnant of the Jews to Egypt was brought
about, and their utter banishment consummated.
The Mosaic law only enjoined one general and strict fast-
day, the great day of atonement. But later on, the days of
mourning just mentioned were accompanied by fasting. Extra-
ordinary fasts frequently occur in Hebrew history. On these
the people desired to humble themselves before God to testify
their penitent spirit, and to avert some misfortune. Public cala-
mities of the country, or defeats in battle, were occasions of
such fasts. In case of continued drought, for instance, the San-
hedrim usually appointed a fast. A Jewish fast was commonly
observed by total abstinence from food from one evening until
the next.
From the time of Esdras, synagogues were to be found in
Judea for the reading of the law and prayer in common. By
degrees they were erected in all the towns and villages, and the
notion became prevalent that it was the duty of every one to
visit them regularly. The larger cities had several of them. In
Jerusalem each Jewish provincial corporation had its own syna-
gogue, and their number in the city is said to have amounted to
460. People assembled there on the Sabbaths and feast-days.
Portions of the Thora, and the prophets, and other holy books
(Megilloth), were read aloud and explained. They were dis-
missed by the blessing of a priest, the congregation answering
Amen. As places for instruction and edification, the synagogues
were under the superintendence of the Sanhedrim and Scribes.
There were also recognised interpreters in the synagogues, who
translated what was read out of the holy Scriptures into the
vernacular.
If we glance, in conclusion, at the decrees of the law as to
what made persons unclean, and the unclean animals and kinds
of food, much obscurity will be found, as the causes for such
prohibitions and distinctions, based upon reasons of climate or
other deep principles of physics, are unknown. It is only cer-
tain, that the Zoroastro-Persian view of there being a contending
good and evil creation, each with its own author, had no influ-
ence on the Mosaic ordinances; for the notion of an Ahriman
was quite unknown to the Israelites. The tasting blood, or meat
1 Jos. Antiq. x. 9. 3-5.
SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION. 377
with the blood in it, was forbidden, partly because the blood is
the seat of animal life,1 partly and specially on account of the
religious signification which the blood of animals had in sacrifice;
for it belonged to Jehovah as an " atonement."2 On the same
grounds, i. e. their sacrificial import, certain fat parts of the
heifer, goat, and sheep were not eaten. Hares, camels, swine,
and all serpents and lizards, aquatic animals not squamous,
about twenty sorts of birds, chiefly, of course, birds of prey,
were considered unclean, and were prohibited as food. These
restrictions were very strictly observed by the Jews. In the time
of the Syrian persecution, many of them endured the rack and
death rather than eat swine's flesh.3 Unclean animals were not al-
lowed to be kept in Jerusalem, nor their flesh to be brought there.
Besides these, there were certain legal uncleannesses arising
from fluid secretions of the human body, diseases such as the
leprosy, or contact with a corpse. Such defilements lasted some-
times all day until the evening, sometimes a whole week, and
entailed washing the clothes or bathing in spring water. Cer-
tain natural impurities of longer duration required a sacrifice of
purification. Thus much is plain, that death was looked upon
as the consequence of sin, and that the cadaverousness, the
corruption, and decomposition which takes place in diseases like
leprosy, as well as all the symptoms of death and dissolution of
the human frame, formed the groundwork of these legal un-
cleannesses.
III. THE RELIGIOUS DOCTRINES OF THE JEWISH
PEOPLE.
1. Scripture and Tradition.
The Thora, or five books of Moses, were held in high esteem by
all as a divine revelation, the national law-book, and the magna
charta of the Jewish state and people. How long before the
days of Josephus another and larger collection of holy writings
was generally acknowledged, is not known. We are told, how-
ever, that Nehemias (about 430 b.c) formed a library, contain-
ing the history of kings and prophets, and letters of the kings
« Levit. xvii. 11-14; Deut. xii. 23 ; Jos. Antiq. in. 11. 2.
2 Levit. xvii. 11. 3 1 Mace. i. 65 ; 2 Mace. vi. 18, 19.
378 RELIGIOUS DOCTRINES OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE.
concerning the temple-gifts. Josephus is the first to speak of a
collection of twenty-two books, which all the Jews looked upon
as divine admonitions. Among these he reckoned, in addition
to the Thora, thirteen books, in which the prophets who lived
after Moses wrote what had happened in their day. To these
were added four more books (the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,
and Canticles), which contained hymns of praise to God, and
rules of life for man.1 What books these thirteen of the prophets
were, remains in uncertainty.2 It is certain, however, that at a
yet later period the book of Esther was not considered canonical
by a great number of the Jews. In the Talmud we find expres-
sions and evidence that still, after the days of Josephus, the
place of certain books in the canon, especially Ecclesiastes and
the Canticles, was matter of dispute. So the canon of the He-
brew Scriptures was only settled in the schools of the Scribes
after the destruction of Jerusalem. In the canon of the Alexan-
drine Jews were further included the deutero- canonical books
of Baruch, Sirach, Wisdom, with Judith, Tobias, and the books
of Macchabees, which the Jews in Palestine did not receive into
their canon, because they were partly written in Greek, or be-
cause the Hebrew or Chaldean originals no longer existed.
The Jewish nation moved in a circle of religious ideas which
had found only a partial expression in their sacred writings.
Little, in fact, was taught in these books, and that only by
descriptions of facts, or representations of events. The Thora,
the principal source, contained no directly instructive element,
except its historical and legal contents. The other books and
collections contained as little direct teaching and definite dogma,
if we except, perhaps, the book of Wisdom : they imply and make
allusion to doctrine in various places, but convey no teaching
proper. Now, from the days of their forefathers the Jews had a
body of oral tradition, which in early ages undoubtedly consisted
of but a few simple fundamental maxims; yet even these already
1 Contr. Apion, i. 8.
2 Conf. Movers, Loci quidam Hist. Canon. V. T. illustr. Vratisl. 1842, p. 9 sq.
Haneberg, History of the Biblical Kevelation, 1850, p. 696. It enumerates the
thirteen books of Josephus thus : (1) Josue; (2) Judges; (3)Euth; (4) 1st Book
of Kings ; (5) 2d Book of Kings ; (6) 3d Book of Kings ; (7) 4th Book of Kings ;
(8) Isaias; (9) Jeremias, with the Lamentations ; (10) Ezechiel; (11) The twelve
minor Prophets ; (12) Job; (13) Daniel. Therefore the two Books of Chronicles,
Esdras, Nehemias, and Esther, were not included.
INSTANCES OF TRADITION. 379
included certain points not taught in the Pentateuch, but which
in part were either entirely passed over, we might almost be-
lieve on purpose, — for instance, the state after death, — or were
partly taken for granted. This tradition was not a dead de-
posit in the hands of a spiritually stagnant people, but, on the
contrary, it possessed strength and inclination to develop itself
and to grow organically. It had a lively action, and was reacted
on by the religious state of the nation, whose whole history and
whose relations with foreigners, whether by way of contrast and
antagonism or of affinity to their doctrines, contributed to keep
and swell the body of tradition in a continuous stream. People
became more and more alive to the consequences to be deduced
from their dogmas. Much that is contained in the post-Mosaic
books is drawn from tradition, and is only to be understood
on this hypothesis. It is obvious, of course, that the tradition
was always dependent on the text of the Thora ; but how little
they adhered to a rule of strict and verbal exposition, and how
much they went beyond the biblical text, while founding tradi-
tion upon it professedly, is clearly shown by the comments of our
Lord and of St. Paul.
In the times after the Babylonish captivity, when religious
zeal was revived in Israel, and the schools of the law were sedu-
lously frequented, a corresponding activity was manifested as to
dogmatic requirements, and people did not any longer give them-
selves up exclusively to the study of the ritual and politico -moral
law. The struggle with Hellenism and the rise of the Sadducees
stirred up spiritual activity ; and assuredly every Israelite, with
the exception of the Sadducees, would have looked upon any one
as a fool or a teacher of error who had professed he would be-
lieve nothing but what could be clearly proved from the letter of
the Pentateuch or other books of Scripture, and who in the in-
terpretation of the text would only follow his own judgment, and
not the traditional exposition of the synagogue.
The mixing of the blood which was used for aspersion at the
passover with water, and also the sprinkling of the book of the
law with it,1 were matters of tradition, the Pentateuch saying
nothing about either. The duty of visiting the Prosenchse or
synagogues on the Sabbath and on festivals, was purely tradi-
tional. The doctrine, so important in regard to the whole eco-
i Hebrews ix. 19.
380 RELIGIOUS DOCTRINES OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE.
nomy of the Jewish religion, that the law had been given through
the interposition of angels, is not to be found in the written re-
cords, and is a tradition, but a tradition inserted in the text of
the Alexandrine translation of the Scriptures, and which Jose-
phus and the Apostles have confirmed and adopted.1 From the
Jewish tradition of his time St. Paul derived his assertion that
the rock which gave forth water accompanied the Israelites in
their march through the desert.2 From the same source he de-
rived his belief about the several regions in heaven.3 The whole
doctrine of rewards, of punishments, of the state after death, the
distinction between a gehenna as a place of torment for the bad,
and a paradise, as a part of Hades, in which the souls of the just
were to abide after death until the resurrection, a doctrine sanc-
tioned by our Lord himself,4 is founded not on the text of the
Old Testament, but solely on oral tradition.
2. God and the Angels.
That God cannot be thoroughly known, was a truth deeply
felt by the Hebrews : God manifests himself to man by lowering
himself to him, but he does not show himself as he is ; even the
prophets only saw God under a symbol ; man could not endure
the sight of God : " Man seeth me not and liveth."5 The He-
brew Scriptures treat atheists simply as fools : not a word of
proof of God's Being is there ; and it is but practical infidelity,
the not recognising of God's justice and his conduct of human
affairs, which is before the eyes of their writers.6
The two principal names of God, Elohim and Jehovah, are
primeval ones, and did not reach the Hebrews from without,
appearing at the cradle of the people, so to speak. God himself
has declared the signification of the name Jehovah, " I will be
that I will be."7 Here the future time indicates the enduring
continuance of this existence. God attributes this name to him-
self as to a personal self-conscious being, immutably the same in
i Deut. xxxii. 2, according to the Sept.; Joseph. Antiq. xv. 5. 3; Acts vii. 53;
Gal. iii. 19; Heb. ii. 2.
8 1 Cor. x. 4 ; cf. Wetstein, N. T. p. 139, and Schottgen, p. 623.
3 2 Cor. xh. 2. 4 Luke xvi. 22 sq. ; xxiii. 43. 5 Exod. xxxiii. 20.
6 Psalm x. 4-14. 7 Exod. iii. 14.
ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 381
itself. Afterwards it is said, that it was he who appeared to the
three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as the Almighty
God1 (El Shaddai), but by his name Jehovah he did not yet
make himself known ; that is to say, the meaning of this name
was not disclosed to them, until the covenanted promise of
giving them the land of Chanaan was about being fulfilled. The
Jews were afraid to pronounce "the great and only" name of
Jehovah. It was frequently made use of in the earlier books of
the Bible, but occurs far less so in the latter ones. The Septua-
gint always uses "the Lord" in its stead. Josephus declares he
is not allowed to speak about the name.2 Philo, however, asserts
that the initiated in the sanctuary might hear and pronounce it.3
According to Jewish tradition, it was changed after the death of
Simon the Just into Adonai, even in the temple. After the
destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews lost even the knowledge how
to pronounce it. Jehovah is the self- determining One who re-
mains ever like to himself in his ways ; who, steadfast through
all the vicissitudes of time in his eternal truth, forms the strong
foundation of the hope of Israel, who hears the prayers of his
people, and manifests himself in the guidance of his covenanted
people.4 The name Elohim was in general used of beings of a
prater- or supernatural order, of heathen gods, of the good
angels, and. even men who had power over others as princes or
rulers.5 The word, in its signification, " strong, mighty spirits,"
appertains to a period when the people's forefathers still served
idols f it grew into the national language ; and so, when mono-
theism prevailed, it retained its plural form, though serving to
designate the one God. The term Elohim is mostly employed
when the general cosmical activity of God is spoken of, and
Jehovah, when his relations to his chosen people are in question.
The grand distinctive fundamental view of Judaism was, the
complete severance between God and the world; God, pure
spirit and creator, brought forth the world, both as to matter
and form, through the almighty power of his will, all nature
containing nothing which could be looked upon as his image
and likeness. The Hebrew language, however, was too little
abstract to furnish the requisite terms for metaphysical expla-
i Exod. vi. 3. 2 Antiq. ii. 12. 4. 3 Vit. Mos. ii. p. 152.
* Exod. iii. 13 sq. ; vi. 2 sq. ; Mai. iii. 6.
* Psalm lxxxi. 1 ; xcvi. 7 ; cxxxvii. 1. 6 Jos. xxiv. 2, 14 sq.
382 RELIGIOUS DOCTRINES OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE.
nations of the being of God ; while the holy Scriptures aim so
decidedly at practical ends, that though they speak of all that is
calculated to set forth the majesty of God and the lowliness of
man, and to awaken the feeling of unbounded dependence on
God, they are deficient in more precise and sharp-cut definitions
of the divine nature. Of God's eternity it is said, " The hea-
vens, the work of his hands, shall pass away and wax old as a
vestment, but of his years there shall be no end."1 His omni-
presence is testified by the expression that he fills heaven and
earth,2 and finds man wherever he may be, so that it is in vain
that he seeks to hide himself from him.3 The idea of the provi-
dence and omniscience of God is turned into the consciousness of
being completely seen through by God, who observes our thoughts
from afar, and is acquainted with all our ways. " Thine eyes
saw me in embryo ; in thy book were all my days written, that
were fixed ere as yet any of them were."4 Thus the prophet
knew that he was in the hand of God even before he was born
into the world, for he it is who fashions man in his mother's
womb,5 and takes care his image fulfils its destination.6 The
ideas of accident and fate were foreign to the Israelite ; all was
referred to the decrees of God ; and in every thing that occurred,
the wisdom, goodness, justice, and power of God were recognised.
Accident with him was God's providence.
That the Hebrew Scriptures very often use anthropomorphic
and anthropopathic expressions of God is not wonderful, consider-
ing what the relations between Jehovah and Israel were. The
active reciprocal intercourse between the two, and the way in
which Jehovah was interwoven with the whole history of the na-
tion, brought this about. Such expressions and representations
were partly a symbolical veil, easy to see through, of which the
sacred books themselves afforded the corrective, as they repudi-
ate any representation of low and human passion in God. God's
vengeance is but the sternness of his justice. If he is depicted as
sometimes rejoicing, and at other times sorrowing, over the des-
truction which the guilt of man brings on him, or if repentance is
attributed to himself, it is only meant to show that diversity of his
dealings with man, which results from the unchangeableness of
his being. "He is not a man that he should repent," said Samuel.7
1 Ps. ci. 20 sq. 2 Jer. xxiii. 24. 3 Amos ix. 2-4. 4 Ps. cxxxviii. 16.
5 Ps. cxxxviii. 13 ; Job x. 8. 6 Jer. i. 5. 7 1 Kings xv. 29 ; Numb, xxiii. 19.
THE WISDOM OF GOD. 383
If the anger of God against evil-doers be so strongly expressed,
and if hatred and wrath be ascribed to him, it is but the neces-
sary manifestation of the holiness and justice of God against
what is wicked. The light of Israel shall become fire, and its
holy one a flame ;l behind the clouds of wrath the compassion
of God and the healing discipline of his mercy were displayed.2
God punishes, whether the amendment of the sinner follows or
not. In the latter event the chastisement is but the working
of his holiness, it becomes the " being blotted out from the face
of God."3 Whilst the prophets announced a proximate temporal
punishment to fall on Israel, to wit, that of exile, they also pointed
to another, which was to terminate the whole course of earthly
things, to wit, the general judgment, when Jehovah would judge
those who would not accept the salvation of the Messias.4
We meet with a theory in the Hebrew Scriptures which is
of kin to the Platonic doctrine of ideas, and yet is of an essen-
tially different aspect. It is that of the Chokma, or wisdom, as
containing that eternal ideal or archetype which is in God, and
according to which he created finite beings and determined their
destiny. Wisdom is not a mere attribute of God like the others,
but it is the ground-plan and scheme of the world, into which
God looks as in a mirror. Thus, in the book of Job it is said that
when God gave the rain its laws, and appointed the lightning
its path, he looked on Wisdom and revealed her, and assigned
to man the fear of God as his allotted portion of wisdom.5 Wis-
dom says more distinctly in the Proverbs of herself, that God
brought her forth before all creatures, as the beginning of his
ways, and anointed her as a queen, that she was co-agent with
him in the creation of the world as an apt workwoman, and that
she took her delight every day, playing before him at all times.6
This doctrine is more fully set forth in the Book of Wisdom :
there she is described as the breath of God's power, a pure ema-
nation of his glory, the reflection of eternal light, the spotless
mirror of his operations, and the image of his goodness.7 She is
instructed in the secrets of God, the counsellor of his works, and
the assessor of his throne. The son of Sirac says of Wisdom,
" She is shed forth over the world ;" so is she here identical with
1 Isaiah x. 17. 2 Psalm cii. 9 ; lxxvii. 38 ; Isaiah x. 25.
3 Psalm xxvi. 9. 4 Isaiaa xxxiv. 1 sq. ; lxvi. 15 sq. ; Daniel vii. 22 sq.
5 Job xxviii. 24-28. 6 Proverbs viii. 22-31. 7 Wisdom vii. 25 sq.
384 RELIGIOUS DOCTRINES OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE.
the " spirit of the Lord," filling or encompassing the world.
Finally, God is implored to send her down from his throne, " to
stand by me and teach me all, to be my companion and my
bride."1 She is therefore by no means a person in God, or hy-
postasis, but the personified idea of the mind of God in creation,
to which she stands in the relation of a mirror, in which the
world and mankind are ever present to him.
The gods of the heathen appear in two different points of
view among the Hebrews. At one time they are designated as
being naught, ' ( Elilim," having no real godlike being or power,2
in contradistinction to Jehovah; and then again a kind of reality
is ascribed to them, and Jehovah is styled, in reference to them,
God of gods, and Lord of lords.3 We read accordingly of an
execution of judgment against the gods of Egypt;4 and thus
see in them not merely semblance and empty nothingness, but
real existence, personal beings, though of a very different sort to
what they were supposed to be by their adorers. When Jehovah
and these gods are contrasted, he is the victor, and they the
crushed and vanquished, who will one day be entirely subdued.
Jehovah is the Lord of the heavenly hosts. Angels are fre-
quently mentioned as ministering spirits, beings who stand around
his throne, and whom he makes use of in the government of the
world. It is nowhere said that they were created ; they were in
fact taken for granted on tradition. They are highly favoured
beings ; but there are limits where their wisdom and perfection
have an end.5 They form different orders, in which there is a
gradation from lower to higher. They never appear as working
independently or for themselves, but are always mere instru-
ments to execute the divine mandates. They stand before God,
and hence are called the angels of his presence.6 It is part of
their duty to protect the worshipers of Jehovah. " The angel of
the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and de-
livereth them."7 In Job an angel is spoken of as an interpreter,
one of a thousand, standing by the sick man, and listening to his
penitent entreaties for forgiveness ; interpreting them, that is,
bringing them before God, as his intercessor.8 "To which of
the saints (angels) wilt thou turn?" said Eliphaz to Job.9
i Wisdom ix. 9, 10. 2 Exod. xx. 20.
3 Deut. x. 17; Psalm cxxxv. 2, 3 ; cxxxiv. 5; xcvi. 9. 4 Exod. xii. 12.
5 Job. iv. 18. Isaias lxiii. 9. 7 Psalm xxxiii. 8. 8 Job xxxiii. 23.
9 Job v. 1.
SATAN. 385
Seven angels, as the highest, surround the throne of God,
and lay before him the prayers of the faithful.1 In the vision of
Isaias, God is surrounded by the seraphim, who sing in chorus
the hymn of the Trisagion.2 They were cherubim who kept the
entrance to Paradise after Adam was driven out.3 The placing
of the figures of cherubim on the top of the ark of the covenant
probably had its ground in the typical relation of the holy of
holies in the tabernacle and temple to Paradise. The expressions
" man," " son of God," were often used in reference to the angels.
The worship which was due to Jehovah alone was not to be
shown them : and they themselves rejected it.4 Nations also had
severally their guardian- angel, who mediated for them before
God. St. Michael was the special patron of the Jewish nation.
The Hebrew writings speak nowhere distinctly of a fall having
occurred in the world of spirits, nor how Satan became what he
was on first coming in contact with man. We have here, again,
another of those many facts so numerous in the Old Testament,
only intelligible from oral tradition. The serpent who seduced
the first of the human race into sin is not only an animal, but
also a spiritual being. The whole demeanour of the serpent is
symbolic, through the veil of which we perceive the action and
being of a wily and tempting spirit ; and the warfare which the
seed of the woman, the whole human race, were to wage against
the seed of the serpent, is a warfare of spiritual principles. The
book of Wisdom expressly says it was Satan through whose envy
death came into the world.5
For a long time, then, though perhaps not without design,
there is no mention made of Satan. He reappears for the first
time in the Chronicles, as inciting David to a sinful act.6 In the
book of Job he dares to appear before the throne of God with the
other angels, although then an evil spirit, and author of the mis-
fortunes that had befallen that pious man;7 but he is throughout
represented as an impotent tool of the divine decrees. Every
where, as in Zacharias, he is spoken of as the adversary, the
accuser, and persecutor of man ; especially of the pious and just.8
He tries to make of no effect the expiatory acts of the high-
priest. This evil spirit is never coupled in Hebrew literature
i Tobias xii. 15. 2 Isaias vi. 2, 3. 3 Genesis iii. 24.
« Judges xiii. 16. 5 Wisdom ii. 24. 6 1 Paral. xxi. 1.
7 Jobi. 6; ii. 1. 8 Zach. iii. 1, 2.
VOL. II. C C
386 RELIGIOUS DOCTRINES OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE.
with any divinity of the neighbouring nations : it is not said that
he who worships Baal or Moloch has in truth done homage to
Satan; but of the other evil spirits or demons it is said they are
identical with the heathen gods. Accordingly, in the Septuagint
the word " demons" is used instead of the Elilim1 and the She-
dim, to whom the apostate Israelites sacrificed their sons and
daughters f instead of Gad, to whom they offered a banquet.3
The opinion of Josephus, who imagined the demons to be the
souls of deceased evil-doers, who disquiet the living as torment-
ing spirits, seems not to have been general amongst the Jews,
and to have been derived from heathen sources.4
3. Creation — Man and his Fall — God's Eequirements of
him — Penance — Death, and a Future State.
According to the Hebrew account, God began creation by
forming the heavens and the earth of one substance, embracing
both in common, — a chaotic and fluid primal element wrapped
up in darkness. Out of this originally formless mass, this chaos,
still incorporating the matter of all bodies, came the planetary
system, dry land and sea, in six degrees (days' works), through
the separation of the heaven and the earth. The whole creation
was completed by God making use of the lower stages of being,
already in existence, as the foundation of the higher.
If all other creatures were called into being by the power of
God's word, man, on the contrary, in whose creation the world
had its culminating point, and received its lord, was formed by
God in person. He, as the proper object of the creative energy
of God, and for whom all nature was brought forth, was formed
of the dust of the earth, quickened by an immediate inspiration
of the breath of divine life, and thus was a being composed of
earthly matter and of the breath of God, the seal of his divine
relationship. Out of the human substance, made primarily for,
and wrought into, the male man, God, who had first elicited in
Adam a feeling of loneliness, framed the woman. This first
1 Psalm xcv. 5. 2 psalm cv. 37; Deut. xxxii. 17.
3 Isaias lxv. 11. 4 BeU> Jud> ^ 6 3>
DEMANDS OF GOD ON MAN. 387
human pair virtually comprised the whole human race in itself.
Man, viewed in his personality and with his lordship over
nature, is God's likeness. His first teacher was God, and even
his speech is the echo of that instruction. Before man spoke,
God had spoken to him.1
Through their not standing firm in the decisive moment of
probation, and their transgression of the divine command, men
fell under the law of death ; banishment out of Eden, the garden
that had been given to man to cultivate and keep, and a total
change in his relations with God and nature were further conse-
quences. To till the earth in labour and toil became now man's
lot, while it was the woman's to people it in pain and sorrow.
Sin is now universal ; it is a something innate in the nature
of man from his birth : " The thought of man's heart is evil
from his youth."2 The greatest persons, the very heroes and
favourites of God, are not represented as free from sin, but as
fighting against, and sometimes as falling a prey to it.3 At the
same time, however, individual sin appears the product of human
freedom, and man is guilty and responsible for it. That the
common sinfulness descends from father to son is shown by the
longing aspiration of Job for that which he also describes as
an impossibility, — for a pure one to be born of the impure.4
The fact that, apart from original guilt, particular and single
sins are so frequently transmitted from father to son, gives cause
to the threat that God will visit the iniquities of the fathers
upon the children.5 There are sins that are propagated through
whole races ; and yet the law declares that each one shall only
die for his own sin.6
What, then, does God require from fallen man, according to
Hebrew teaching ? Above all, to be holy, because he is holy ; to
love God with all his heart, and all his strength ;7 that he should
turn from evil, and follow good and walk humbly before God.8
God desires love and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God
more than burnt-offerings.9 To praise God, and to spread his
honour over the whole earth, is the highest of all acts.10 Such
high requirements, united to the strict observance of the law,
i Genesis ii. 7-25. 2 Gen. viii. 21.
3 Ps. xiii. 1-3 ; cxlii. 2 ; 3 Kings viii. 46. 4 Job xiv. 4.
5 Exod. xx. 5. 6 Deut. xxiv. 16. 7 Deut. vi. 5.
8 Micheas vi. 8. 9 Osee vi. 6. 10 Ps. viii. 9.
388 RELIGIOUS DOCTRINES OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE.
would only have had a discouraging and depressing effect on the
Israelite, conscious of his own moral weakness, if he had not
also been in possession of the doctrine of the mercy of God.
This, the leading feature of the whole religious system of the
Hebrews, made the wide gulf between that and all heathen re-
ligions perfectly discernible. Deeply the Israelites felt the
great and infinite superiority of their religion and their God,
for theirs was a merciful and sin-forgiving God. " Where," says
the prophet, "is there a god who forgives sins as thou dost?
God will not keep his anger for ever, because he delighteth in
mercy. He will spare us again ; in his mercy he will trample
our iniquities under foot, and will cast all our sins into the depths
of the sea."1 " God will not always be angry, else would the
souls which he created pine away before his face."2
The conditions of God's forgiving mercy are, however, re-
pentance, penance, and the humble acknowledgment of sin.
" The Lord is nigh unto them that are contrite of heart ; and
helpeth the humble in spirit."3 He dwells in the man of a
broken and abased spirit, and in him he works the work of
healing, consolation, and regeneration.4 The acknowledgment of
sin to God is so necessary, that he who does not confess is a
hypocrite in his eyes.5 The further condition of mercy, then,
is, a real and interior conversion for the better. God hath no
pleasure in the death of the sinner, but rather that he should
turn and live.6 Works of compassion and love are specially
required. Penance implies the breaking of bread to -the hungry,
the clothing of the naked, and the harbouring of the homeless ;7
then shall his healing prosper ; by mercy to the poor he shall
cast away his own guilt,8 and by love and faithfulness make
atonement for his iniquities.
If the Israelite gave way to the illusion that he could blot
out his trespasses against Jehovah by external penances, fasts,
rending of his garments, sprinkling his head with ashes, or offer-
ing up beasts for sacrifice, he did so in spite of the admonitions
of the prophets. In the fiftieth Psalm, the type of genuine peni-
tence, the crushed and sorrowful spirit, is contrasted, as an
atonement for sin, with the mere outward sacrifice of beasts;
1 Micheas vii. 18, 19. 2 Isaias lvii. 15, L6. 3 Ps. xxxiii. 19.
4 Isaias lvii. 18. 5 Ps. xxxi. and 1.; Dan. ix. 6 Ezec. xxxiii. 11.
Isaias lviii. 7, 8. 8 Daniel iv. 24; Tob. iv. 7.
SHEOL. 389
and God is supplicated to create a clean heart in man, and to
renew his spirit.1 The restoration of what has been stolen, and
the making good an injustice committed, was also demanded.2
Outward signs of penance were only, however, declared to be
useless when the interior feeling and earnest wish for amend-
ment were absent ; else, as signs of humiliation before God and
man, they were of great value, as in the case of David,3 Achab,4
and those who returned from the Captivity. All these strewed
ashes on their heads, rent their garments, clothed themselves in
sackcloth, went barefoot, prostrated themselves on the ground,
and made public confession of their sins.
Sacrifice was especially open to the abuse of a blind impeni-
tent confidence, and a mechanical spirit of ceremony. It was
so natural for this hard-hearted people to try and make up for
the omission of moral duties by burnt -offerings and sacrifices.
Hence the strong expressions of the prophets against animal
sacrifice as often practised. God had spoken to their fathers,
not of burnt-offerings, but of obedience. He had enough of
sacrifice, and no more desire for the blood of oxen and lambs
and goats.5 God abhors the sacrifice of the wicked; but the
prayers of the just are well-pleasing to him.6 The sacrifice he
desires is that of a contrite and obedient heart.7 Where this is
wanting, no burnt-offerings can be acceptable to him.8
The Hebrew descriptions of Sheol, the common sojourn for
departed souls, whether of the just or unjust, somewhat re-
sembled those of the heathen concerning Hades.9 Sheol is a
still, gloomy spot in the bowels of the earth, where souls are in-
deed at rest from the troubles of the world above, but lead, while
there, a dull, inactive, and comfortless existence as "shades/'
In sheol man can no longer praise God, or remember his loving-
kindnesses.10 The description given in Job of the desolate
lethargic sadness of this shadow-realm is singularly strong and
striking; where the dead know nothing of those who were dearest
to them, and have also ceased to care for them, mourning only
over their own condition, with a painful, heavy feeling of their
own sufferings.11 But after this dark and almost despairing pic-
i ps> 1. 19. 2 Ezec. xxxiii. 15. 3 2 Kings xii. 16.
4 3 Kings xxi. 27 ; Nehem. ix. 2, 3. s Jer. vii. 22, 23 ; Isaias i. 11-13 ; lxvi. 3.
6 prov# xv# 8. 7 Ps. 1. 19. 8 Osee vi. G ; Amos v. 22.
9 Ps. lxxxvii. 11 ; Ixxxviii. 49. 10 Ps. vi. 6. " Job xiv. 22.
390 RELIGIOUS DOCTRINES OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE.
ture, Job turns his glance joyfully and hopefully to the life after
death : " I know that my Redeemer (Goel, avenger of blood)
liveth; he will stand (as) the last one on the dust (of my grave);"
that is to say, Though I sink under my sufferings, and die, and
be cast out miserably, my Redeemer will arise victoriously over
my grave ; and though I be dead, and freed from my flesh, I
shall see God. " My eyes shall behold him, and no stranger ;"
that is to say, Not only shall other persons be witnesses of my
justification through God after my death ; but I myself, living
on after death, in proper personal existence, expect this blissful
consummation.1 Parallel with the faith of Job is the hearty
confidence of the Psalmist, to whom his God is the highest
in heaven and on earth • and " even if my flesh and my heart
pass away, God is my rock and my portion for evermore ;. and
( ' though I wander in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear
no evil, for thou art with me."2
The resurrection of the dead, the just as well as the unjust,
is proclaimed quite distinctly and unequivocally in the book of
Daniel. " Many that lie and sleep in the dust of the earth shall
awake; some to life everlasting, some to everlasting shame."3
From thenceforward the resurrection became a fundamental
point in the religion of the nation, though not without oppo-
sition from the Hellenisers and Sadducees. The mother of the
Macchabees, and her sons, were put to death with the confession
of the resurrection on their lips.4
Prayers, also, and sacrifices for the dead were already in use
in the Macchabean period. When the Jews after a victory found
in the clothes of their soldiers who were slain some gold that had
been taken from idols, Judas caused prayers and sacrifices to be
offered up in Jerusalem for those who had fallen, that they might
be loosed from their sins ; for, as the narrator adds, ' ' if he had
not believed that the dead would rise again, it would have been
superfluous and vain to pray for the dead."5 It was, therefore, a
custom that had then existed some time, though not mentioned
in the written law, for prayers and sacrifices to be offered for
the dead whose life and death gave ground to hope for forgive-
ness being secured for them ; and sheol was a middle state, in
1 Job xix. 25-27. 2 Ps. lxxii. 25, 26 ; xxii. 4.
3 Dan. xii. 1-3. 4 2 Mace. vii. 9, 14, 23.
5 2 Mace. xii. 40-45.
THE EXPECTED MESSIAS. 391
which the prayers and offerings of the living took effect in bring-
ing about the purification and forgiveness of such departed souls.
IV. PROPHECIES OF THE MESSIAS.
If the religious feelings of the Jews did not strike out into an
egotistic haughtiness, the people must ever have had the thought
before them, that they were only the chosen people to enable
them to serve in the hands of God as instruments for the salva-
tion of other nations; that their present state was a transient
one, and that it was no part of their destiny to remain for ever so
isolated from the rest of mankind, collectively and individually,
as if in prison. Every Israelite must have looked forward to
a time for the partition- wall to tumble; and here came in the
doctrine of the great Prophet and Saviour of the nation to be
expected, towards which every thing in the end converged, and
from which all in law and ritual borrowed its colouring, true
position, and importance. Do you hope for a Messias ? — whom
and what kind of person ? On this question hinged the des-
tinies of the nation. Their idea of a Messias was the salt which
should have preserved their whole religious life from destruc-
tion and decay. If it was true to say of the heathen, " like
people, like gods," so might it be said of the Israelites ; that
whatever the people, in the mass, should be at the great crisis,
such the Messias would be whom they longed for and trusted
in. He was certain to be the genuine reflection of their own
tone of mind. The prophetical writings, indeed, contained many
features of the portrait of that man of salvation, through whom
the fathers trusted God would have mercy on his people; but
these were scattered about here and there, and their poetical
obscurity and apparent contradictions, not yet cleared up by
their fulfilment, left wide room for arbitrary interpretation. The
conceit of the carnally- minded Jew had no difficulty, if he only
set aside all that was unpleasant and repulsive to him in detail
and intimations, in composing an ideal picture of the Messias to
his heart's content out of other passages. We cannot escape
this conclusion, if we compare the state of the Jews after
Pompey with the ideas and hopes regarding the Messias as
developed step by step in the holy Scriptures.
392 PROPHECIES OF THE MESS1AS.
Five times was the promise given to the patriarchs, Abraham
and his grandson Jacob, that in their seed all the nations of the
earth should be blessed/ that the knowledge and possession of
God should extend to all nations through their posterity, and
that they should wish for no higher happiness than that of
belonging to the descendants of Abraham.
In the prophecy to Jacob, the tribe of Judah was first indi-
cated as the chief instrument and helper in the divine economy :
" The sceptre shall not be taken away from Judah, nor a ruler
cease between his feet, till Shilo (the peace or the rest), i.e. the
great descendant of Judah, who was to bring the blessings of
peace, shall come; to him shall the homage of the people be
paid."2
From the time that David received the promise that his seed
and his kingdom were to endure for ever, it was the house of
David on which the prophets hung their hopes and predictions.
David's kingdom was to be an everlasting one, and God himself
is always with him and his posterity.3 David himself knew that
God had made an everlasting covenant with him.4 " His name,"
he says, " shall continue for ever ; as long as the sun endureth,
it shall flourish and be blest."5 This eternal Ruler, who rules
unto the ends of the earth, was to permit all nations to share in
the blessedness of his kingdom : the lot of the lowly, the poor,
and the suffering, was to be one of special happiness under him.6
The priestly and kingly power were to be united in him ; but a
priesthood of a different kind from that of Aaron was to endure
for ever.7 All nations were to be subject to him, and all kings
of the earth to serve him. His name was to endure for ever;
and as long as the sun continues, his youth was to be renewed
in a succession of generations.8
Thus hope was centered in a descendant of David's house,
who should found and rule over a prosperous kingdom, bringing
all the people of the earth to the knowledge and service of
Jehovah, so that all nations should come to Jerusalem with their
treasures to do homage to the Lord. Bethlehem, the birthplace
of the future Saviour, had been already even mentioned by name.9
1 Genesis xii. 2, 3; xviii. 18; xxii. 16-18; xxvi. 4 ; xxviii. 14.
2 Ibid. xlix. 10. 3 Ps. xvii. 51. 4 2 Kings xxiii. 5 ; vii. 12 sq.
3 Ps. lxxi. 17. 6 Ibid. xx. Ixxi. 1-14. 7 Ibid. cix. 4.
8 Ibid. lxxi. 17. 9 Mich. v. 2.
THE MESSIAS SUFFERING. 393
Zemach, the divinely given "shoot," now became the designa-
tion of the expected one ; at one time he is described as the
invincible conqueror, overcoming all resistance to, and rebellion
against, his majesty, and whose empire outlasts and humbles all
his enemies, who are also the enemies of God. Then, again, and
whilst for the first time is announced the dominion of the
Messias over the whole world, " from sea to sea, and from the
river to the ends of the earth," his influence appears chiefly a
spiritual one, blessing with the mild words of peace.1 From
this period pictures multiply, which awakened in the sons of
Abraham representations flattering to their minds, that the king-
dom of the Messias was to appear under the form of a Jewish
monarchy of the world, wherein they and their king were to
rule in never-ending majesty. But as a wholesome counterpoise
to these brilliant prospects, and apparently in the most harsh
opposition to them, there also appeared pictures of a suffering
Messias, overwhelmed with every species of obloquy.
In the Psalms we meet with the just man visited by sore
affliction, more than any other mortal ; whom his enemies deride
as one already lost, as one tormented and suffering in every limb,
and entirely rejected by his people.2 Looking at his dying body,
he can count each of his bones, while his enemies surround him
and feast on his torments, divide his clothes amongst them, and
cast lots for his vesture. And these unexampled sufferings of
one man were to bring about the conversion of the heathen,
and to cause all the kindreds of the Gentiles to adore the true
God.3
This portrait of Messias in suffering is far more minutely
touched by the hand of Isaias. The servant of God, Immanuel,
the offshoot (Zemach), is called by God from his mother's
womb ;4 God has given him his spirit,5 and put his words in his
mouth.6 He was to open the eyes of the blind, to heal the
contrite, and to preach release to the captive.7 He was to be a
saviour to such as should turn from their iniquity in Jacob, as
well as a light to all nations ;8 to extend the salvation of God to
the utmost parts of the earth.9 This servant of God was to be
himself the covenant between God and his people, and the
i Zach. ix. 9, 10. a Ps. xxi. 3 Ibid. xxi. 28, 29.
^ Isaias xlix. 1. 5 Ibid. xlii. 1. 6 Ibid. H. 16.
7 Ibid. lxi. 1-3. 8 Ibid. lix. 20; xlii. 1, 4, 6. 9 Ibid. xlix. 6.
394 PROPHECIES OF THE ME SSI AS.
mediator between God and them.1 From him was the new law
of the new covenant to proceed. Subsequently the prophet de-
scribes the sufferings of this servant : despised, forsaken, laden
with grief as he is, his sorrows excite only the aversion of men,
who regard them as a punishment for his guilt; while he, the
innocent one, of his own free will, bears what we, the guilty
ones, have deserved. He bears our infirmities, and carries our
sorrows; he is wounded for our iniquities, and by his wounds
we are healed. Dumb as a lamb led to the slaughter, he suffers
and dies for our sins.2 His sufferings and death are a trespass-
offering;3 and therefore will God glorify him. He shall lead
many by his wisdom to justice, and God will make him a leader
to the people.4 Thus this servant of Jehovah is at once a king,
to whom kings do homage; he passes through shame to glory,
through death to life; he conquers by yielding, and completes
his work at the moment of his apparent annihilation.
According to the representation of Daniel, the Messias is an
envoy of God from heaven, to be monarch of a kingdom to be
founded on earth, embracing all nations, and to endure for ever.
The succession of the powers of the kingdoms of the world, the
Assyrian, Babylonish, Persian, Grecian, and Roman empires,
was pointed out ; and on their ruins, destroying and inde-
structible, rises the eternal kingdom of the Son of Man, throned
in heaven on a divine throne, a kingdom never to be given to
another people.5
The prophet Zacharias recurs to the Son of David, the
Zemach, to whom the longing gaze of the people was directed.
In peaceful union of the twin dignities of priest and king, he
builds the temple of the Lord with them that come thereto from
afar.6 His word extends to heathendom, and his dominion
beyond the boundaries of the earth. Then he appears under the
semblance of a good shepherd, who gently and tenderly takes
pity on the people who have been ill-treated by selfish shepherds;
but when scornfully and ungratefully denied by the apostate herd
(valued at thirty pieces of silver), mildly breaks his staff, lays
down his office of shepherd,7 and leaves the people to their inte-
rior disunion. And now it appears that the shepherd, rejected
1 Isaias xlii. 6 ; xlix. 8. 2 Ibid. liii. 7, 8. 3 Ibid. liii. 12.
4 Ibid. lv. 4. 5 Daniel ii. 44, 45. 6 Zach. vi. 13-15.
7 Zach. xi.
THE NEW COVENANT. 395
by the nation, is the Lord himself; when he pours forth the
spirit of mercy and prayer, then the Jews, seized with bitter
repentance and deep sorrow on account of him they had pierced,
will look up to him longingly. The prophet sees how, after the
shepherd is killed, the flock will be dispersed, and only a third
part remain, who will be refined as silver and gold in the fire of
tribulation, whom the Lord will acknowledge as his true people,
while they will joyfully recognise him as their God.1
Malachias, the last of the prophets, foresees in the distant
future a purified priesthood. These purified children of Levi
will then belong to the Lord, and by them a clean oblation will
be offered to the Lord in every place; from east to west the
heathen, now worshipers of the true God, will come to offer sacri-
fice.2 This prophecy was the confirmation and complement of
that of Isaias, who had already foretold that God would select
priests and Levites for himself, even from the heathen, not for
the old legal service, but to offer up a new and clean oblation.3
Malachias puts the last prophetic touches to the picture of the
Messias. He announces the " angel," the messenger sent from
God to prepare the way of the Lord ; this angel he designates as
a second Elias, a preacher and exemplar of penance, uniting old
and young together in a new life.
Jeremias had long since uttered those memorable words,
which of themselves ought to have opened the eyes of the Jews
of later days, and quenched their blind zeal for the law; the
time will come when there shall be no thought more of " the ark
of the covenant of the Lord," neither shall it be missed nor made
again; and that shall be the time when the heathen shall be
gathered together to the throne of the Lord and to the new
Jerusalem.4 At the same time, a change of the whole typical
and legal service of God was pointed out, together with which
the same prophet announced a new covenant which God would
make with Israel by writing his law on their heart.5 Ezechiel
had promised in confirmation, that God, in order to be able to
forgive his people their sins, would give them a new heart and a
new spirit ; would take away the heart of stone out of their
body, and give them one of flesh.6 Thus the Israelites had a
1 Zach. xiii. 8, 9. 2 Mai. iii. 3; i. 11.
3 Isaias lxvi. 20. 4 Jer. iii. 16-18.
5 Jer. xxxi. 33, 34. 6 Ezech. xi. 19 ; xxxix. 26 ; xxxvi. 2G.
396 ALEXANDRINE JUDAISM.
prophetic mirror, which not only presented them with a picture
of the Messias and of his age, but also warned them against that
one crowning national sin which led them as a nation to their
fall ; that spirit which accompanied them even in their banish-
ment, and which turned those who were destined to be a blessing
to other people so often into their scourge, — hardness of heart,
whose root was in pride.
V. ALEXANDRINE JUDAISM. PHILO.
The contact of the Jews of Palestine with Grecian life and
modes of thought during the time of the Syrian dominion had,
as we have seen, brought forth its evil fruit in giving birth to
Sadduceism ; on the whole, however, the Jews there carefully
excluded themselves from a literature and teaching associated to
them with the most painful recollections. It was otherwise in
Egypt, where the Jews had been drawn into the great movement
of the philosophico-religious school of Alexandria ; and partly by
way of apology, and partly because they really were profoundly
impressed with Greek philosophy, they, for the first time, endea-
voured to found and carry out a Mosaic theology, wherein the
forms of Greek thought were blended with the substance of
Jewish belief. One might naturally conclude, as was the case,
that Greek philosophical problems exercised a strong and mate-
rial influence in this fusion, and sometimes imparted not the
forms only, but also the body of the doctrine.
The Jews in Egypt were in a comparatively favourable and
thriving position. They formed perhaps a seventh part of the
population of the country, had quarters of their own in Alex-
andria, and even a temple as a religious centre. Onias, a son
of Onias III., the high-priest who was deposed and murdered in
Jerusalem during the time when the temple in Jerusalem was
given up to heathen desecration, had obtained permission from
Ptolemy Philometor, the benefactor of the Egyptian Jews, to
rebuild a ruinous heathen temple at Leontopolis in the Nomos
of Heliopolis, and to convert it to Jewish uses as a sanctuary
of Jehovah. This took place 152 b.c It was not intended to
erect a temple of similar pretensions to that in Jerusalem, nor
AltlSTOBULUS. 397
in opposition to it, nor to draw away the visitors and sacrificial
gifts from there, bnt only to set up a place of worship to meet
the exigency of the true temple being in the hands of enemies,
and free access to it precluded. The prophecy of Isaias, that
God would bless Egypt, and that he should be served there with
sacrifices and oblations, was made use of to justify an under-
taking otherwise not very easily reconcilable with the law. This
temple was endowed with landed property, and continued up to
the time of Vespasian with a regular service, performed by its
own priests and Levites. The Jews of Palestine tolerated it ;
and if they looked on it with no complacence, they did not
therefore give up religious communion with their brethren in
Egypt.
As early as the first half of the second century before Christ,
Aristobulus the Peripatetic was living at Alexandria. He was
of a sacerdotal family, and was preceptor to King Ptolemy Phi-
lometor. In a Greek work, composed in a very good style, he
attempted to prove that the oldest and greatest poets and phi-
losophers of the Greeks were acquainted with the teaching of
Moses, and confirmed the truths of the Holy Scriptures by dicta
of their own to the like effect ; thus Plato, he says, met with
the Pentateuch in an old Greek translation, and drew from it.
It appears that already, before the time of Aristobulus, well-
informed Hellenistic Jews had written much to the same pur-
port ; as of the numerous pretended verses from Homer, Hesiod,
or Orpheus, which he cites, only one here and there was pro-
bably composed by himself; the greater part he found already
in existence; and Orphic fragments, as vehicles of novel reli-
gious ideas, were frequently composed amongst the Greeks from
the days of Onomacritus. Later on, and with the same view,
Sibylline oracles were concocted to praise the Jewish people
and their belief, and to combat Hellenistic heathenism. Aris-
tobulus accounts for the Mosaico-Judaistic purport of his frag-
ments from the Greek poets by the hypothesis that Orpheus
met with Moses in Egypt, and that the latter was identical with
Mus<eus, the Greek sage, and that Pythagoras himself was in-
structed by the disciples or successors of Jeremias. What is
known, however, of the theology of Aristobulus by no means
suffices to make him into a predecessor or founder of the school
of Philo ; all we can say is, that he made use of Greek doctrines
398 philo.
without binding himself to any one of the peculiar systems. H1
aim was to set aside the anthropomorphisms in the expressio.
and amplifications of the Bible, to make way for notions and
ideas more consonant with the spiritual nature of God.
The Alexandrian Jew Philo was well advanced in years when
he appeared in Rome before Caligula, a.d. 40, at the head of a
Jewish embassy ; he may therefore be supposed to have been
born about 25 B.C. He belonged to one of the principal
families of his people, and, with the exception of the apostolic
circle, was the man most distinguished for intellectual attain-
ments whom the Jews then possessed. He was a man of
rare endowments and high cultivation, from his comprehensive
studies and intimate acquaintance with Greek literature; his
piety was earnest, and his faith firm. His writings breathe a
fiery enthusiasm, and an impetuosity of thought, which, it is
true, have often to contend against a deficiency of expression,
and at times betray an absence of definite perception and of
lucidity of thought.
Convinced that the Jewish religion rested on divine revela-
tion, and at the same time mentally swayed by Greek specula-
tion, and specially following Platonic and Stoic views in leading
philosophical questions, Philo candidly started on the idea that
every system of philosophy in which he recognised truth was
contained in the Hebrew religion, even though it were so in a
way that was hidden from the great multitude of men. Not
unfrequently he remained unconsciously true to his own Hebrew
belief, though himself under the notion that he was following
the Greek philosophy. Moses is, with him, the greatest of all
philosophers : all philosophy emanates from him, and is identical
with the revealed religion ; where it did not fully accord with
this, it is only the handmaiden of wisdom, that is to say, of the
highest knowledge of God, only to be arrived at by the way of
ascetic contemplation.1
The never-failing instrument Philo made use of to support
his biblical and speculative theory was, the allegorical interpre-
tation of the Pentateuch ; and he used it with the more freedom
as he had already received it in a traditional way from the earlier
Alexandrian Jews, and was in the habit of seeing it generally
applied by the Greeks as a key to their myths. He appears not
1 De congr. queer, erud. grati, ed. Paris, 1640, p. 4o5.
POSITION OF PHILO. 399
i have had a doubt but that he was really unfolding the hidden
;eaning of the lawgiver by his allegorical explanations. In the
sacred books, all is of divine inspiration ; an inexhaustible trea-
sure of divine thought is contained in the husk of the letter ;
the obvious and literal meaning of the words is of no import-
ance,— that is often false and deceiving; on the contrary, the
kernel of religious truth must be extracted from its shell of
history or parable. The rabbis of later days were in the habit
of saying that whole mountains of instruction hung on every iota
of the Scriptures. Philo gave out these interpretations of his as
mysteries not fit for every one, but only for such as were worthy
to be initiated into such high things.1 He goes so far, in a
series of writings in which he treats of the lives of the Patri-
archs, as to represent each of them as being a type of a peculiar
state of soul ; and on this every circumstance related of them
is brought to bear. As all immediate contact of God with the
world ran counter to his ideas of the Divinity, all representa-
tions or accounts in the Bible to that effect had to be set aside
through allegory. The fact of a boundless field being thus opened
to caprice gave him no scruple, as he was often in a state which
he describes as a theoleptic one, in which high inspirations were
lavished upon him. " The most excellent and perfect," he said,
" is that which God himself pours out on the soul. I do not
shrink, however, from owning that this is a state which I have
myself experienced numbers of times."2
Philo lived in a totally different atmosphere from his brother
Jews in Palestine, and hence he read the sacred books with
other eyes than theirs. Being of Alexandria, and having grown
up under the influence of the Greek language, speech, turn of
thought, and literature, he interpreted Scripture according to
ideas imbibed from the mode of life and tone of mind adopted
by all around him. He shared with the other Jews the notion
of the inexhaustible many-sidedness of the Scriptures being their
highest advantage. He had not to endure opposition from
adversaries who might press upon him contradictory interpreta-
tions, whether good or bad, yet as justifiable as his own ; in his
ecstatic states, he was possessed by the same set of ideas as in
the sober realities of every-day life; the only difference was, that
i De Cherub, p. 135.
2 De Migr. Abr. vii. 395 ; cf. De Cherub. 9.
400 PHILO.
these ideas became more lively, more highly coloured, and inde-
pendent of discursive contemplation ; herein, too, he found a
fancied security for the truth of his views. Philo repeatedly
expressed disapprobation of the admission of myths into Bible
history, as they relate only to heathen gods and their genea-
logies.1 Yet he says there are things recounted in the Penta-
teuch which are more incredible than myths • but still they are
no myths, but allegories, by which he means, true ideas clothed
by the writer in a figurative or historical dress.2
The people of Israel, " the men in the true sense of the
word," Philo teaches, were chosen by God out of the whole
human race, and placed under his special guidance, with the
intention that the Jews should serve the rest of mankind as
priests and prophets of the pure knowledge of God. God never
forsakes this people, although they appear like orphans in their
isolation and inability of ever reckoning on the help of other
nations; who, being given up to the enjoyment of the senses,
feel repelled by the strictness of the Mosaic law. God, however,
will reward them in the expected advent of the Messias for their
sufferings and steadfastness, by the gathering together and
bringing back of the dispersed. Philo honours Moses as the
" greatest and most perfect of men in every respect," and the
" highest saint." In the Mosaic law he sees the most complete
picture of the divine government of the world.
Philo' s admiration and love for his people and his creed did
not, however, interfere with his acknowledgment of the benefits
of Hellenism. Plato is great, and even holy, in his estimation :
he speaks of the holy community of the Pythagoreans, and of
the holy union of godlike men ; of a Parmenides, an Empe-
docles, a Zeno, and a Cleanthes. In Hellas he sees the cradle
of knowledge, and a genuine civilisation of man; but in the
background here there is always the idea that the best of their
views were derived from a Hebrew source. Thus Heraclitus is
referred to Moses ;3 Zeno is a nursling of Jewish wisdom ;4 even
in the laws of the Greeks there is much that is Jewish.5 Philo
does not hesitate to coincide with the Greek philosophers in their
view of the stars; he, too, believes them to be animate beings,
» De Monarch, i. 814, 818. 2 pe Mose, iii. 691.
3 Quis rer. div. heer. p. 510. 4 Quod omn. prob. lib. p. 873.
5 De Mose, ii.
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS. 401
and considers these astral souls as pure spirits of a higher order.1
He unites with Plato in calling them the visible gods, although
he uses the expression in an improper sense ; nevertheless, they
are to him the vicegerents of God, though not to be divinely
honoured.
Philo starts from the opposition, the infinite distance between
God and the world. God and creatures, even so far as these lat-
ter are good or perfect, are at such a distance apart that one is
obliged to say, God is better than the good and the beautiful ;
purer than unity; more primeval than the monad, and more
blissful than blessedness.2 He is without qualities, and therefore
no name can properly be attributed to him. We only know
that he exists, not what he is : the name of the " I am"
(Jehovah) is the only one that expresses his essence.3 Philo
does not, however, carry the doctrine that God is without
qualities so far as to deny his personality, and to subtilise him
into mere abstract being. On the contrary, he holds firmly to
the belief in God's personality. God is the absolutely blessed,
and ever operating; to him action is as essential and natural
as burning is to fire.4
Thus there was an active cause and a passive matter;5 to
wit, the soul, and qualitiless matter, of itself merely immovable,
but plastic, which, as long as its portioning out into different
forms had not yet ensued, can only be predicated of as the con-
fusion, as dead, as the void and needy, darkness, aye, and the non-
entity.6 Philo thus admits a preexistence of matter, and no crea-
tion out of nothing, although he often designates God as the first
cause of all being.7 Indeed, the idea of a material substratum
1 De Mundi Opif. 6; de Confus. Ling. 345.
2 Fragm. ap. Eus. Prsep. Ev. vii. 15. 2. 3 Quod D. immut. 302.
4 Leg. Alleg. 41. 5 De Mundi Opif. 2. 6 Ibid. 4.
7 The passage of Philo de Somn. i. p. 577, — us 6 ??Aios to, KeKpv/.iixeua twc
<r<afJ.dT(av emSeiKvvTai, ovtu nau 6 debs to, irdura yevvrfaas, ov fx6vop els rou,u<paves
riyayev, ciAAa Kcd a irporepov ovk ?jv e-Koi-qaey, ov Sr]iJ.iovpybs n6vov, aAAa K<zl kthtttjs
uvrbs u>u, — appears at first sight quite clearly to speak of God as the creator of
matter; and Keferstein (Philo's Lehre von den Mittelwesen, 1840, p. 5) says
" 8r)ixiovpy6s can only here refer to the fashioner, ktjo-ttjs to the creator, of matter.
This is also confirmed by the context, where God compares himself to light, and
shows his preeminence, as not only bringing things before the eyes of man as the
sun does, but also as having given him being, and brought him forth out of the
darkness of nothingness, and placed him before the eye of the beholder."
If this were so, one must. say, that for once the Jewish conscience of Philo
VOL, II, D D
402 PH1LO.
was indispensable to enable him to account for the deficiencies of
that which is finite, and not to be obliged to look npon God as
its cause; he considered, however, physical ills, which did not
exist before the fall of man, merely as powerful means of dis-
cipline in the hand of God, and therefore distinguishes them
from such deficiencies. Philo contradicted the idea of the eter-
nity of the world, on the plea that Providence was thus done
away with, and the entire inactivity of God asserted. True, he
thinks that God is removed from all contest with the world and
with matter, if we contemplate him in his proper essence ; but he
rejects the belief in an unenergising God, as a gross error.1 The
Platonic doctrine of ideas is one of those which was fundamental
with Philo, not only because it was so completely in accordance
with his own way of thinking, but also because it already pre-
vailed amongst the Alexandrine Jews. He appealed to the
Jewish commentators, as having proved this doctrine of ideas
from the Scriptures.2 " The blessed one," says he, " could not
touch fermenting matter ; he made use of his immaterial powers,
ideas, to admit of each species attaining their proper form."3
Ideas, therefore, moulded matter, and stamped their impress on
it. These ideas are devoid of attributes in and for themselves ;
but when they enter into active relationship to matter, which is
also without qualities, they mingle together and give birth to
qualities in the latter.4
All ideas stand in connexion with, and mould, the intelligi-
ble world, which was at first brought into being by God, as a
must have been stronger than the mode of viewing things he had learnt from the
Grecian philosophy ; for his admission of the preexistence of matter recurs so
often and so clearly, that there can be no doubt of his ordinary opinion on the
point. Eightly viewed, however, these words by no means contradict the numer-
ous passages in his writings.
Philo distinguishes two sorts of action in God : the one whereby he fashions
things into what they are and before were not (but out of preexisting matter) ; the
other whereby he makes them manifest, like the sun, for non-matter as such is
not perceptible to the senses. When speaking of him with reference to this latter,
he calls him demiurge ; with reference to the former, he uses the word ktkttt]s,
which does not in itself involve the speculative idea of creation out of notbing.
With regard to the other passages cited by Grossman, Qucestion.es Philonea,
i. p. 19, J. G. Miiller has already shown that they do not contradict the idea of
the preexistence of matter, in his work entitled Des Juden Philo Buch von der
Weltschopfung, herausgeg. und erklart, 1841, pp. 129, 130.
1 Legg. Alleg. i. 41. 2 Quis rer. div. 520.
3 De Victimas offerentibus, 857. 4 Ibid. 858.
THE MINISTERING POWERS. 403
type of the physical world. Philo, however, with whom this
representation of the ideal world is not so much developed as
in Plato, considers it to have been produced on the first day
of the biblical creation. It has no existence in space, but is
only the contemplated draught of the physical creation. Just as
the architect projects in his mind a plan of a town, and then
produces the real town according to this ideal, so God acted
when he created the world, this megalopolis.1 The author of this
ideal world is the divine Logos, although it is itself again nothing
else but the Logos.
Ideas are not only, however, the models after which God
works, or the seal which he impresses on things ; they are, at
the same time, also the working causes or ministering powers by
which he carried out his plan of creation. These powers, which
belong, according to Philo, to a middle state of being, are di-
vine operations or manifestations of God to the world, to which
a certain independence attaches.2 They stand half-way between
the Logos and ideas, yet so that the Logos is the concentration or
compendium of the powers. God who is, in and for himself, as
the abstract, without relations or attributes, that is to say, in
whom all virtually repose, and who, from his exceeding exalta-
tion, cannot enter into any immediate contact with the world,
acts through these powers, who are his servants, his vicegerents,
his ambassadors. They form a radiance which surrounds God,
and is imperceptible to mortal eye,3 and which emanates from
God himself; like sunbeams, they go forth from him, and
revert to him again. They extend every where by means of
their elasticity ; or through a self-manifestation of God, an ex-
tension outwardly from within, an intervention of God with the
world is brought about. Philo styles these powers immortal
souls, and looks on them as the angels of the Bible.4 Personal
as he generally makes them, he does not cling firmly to the idea
of their hypostasis; and he puts them so near God, actually
locating them almost in his very being, that to him their per-
sonal subsistence and distinction from God often melt away, as it
were, from his grasp. And yet his principle of the impossibility
of God's direct dealing with the finite, necessitated his adopting
such beings, distinct from God, as his agents.
i De Opif. p. 5. 2 De Abr. 366 ; Migr. Abr. 416.
3 De Monarch, i. 817. 4 Confus. Ling. 324, 345.
404 PHILO.
The Logos is, with Philo, the divine intelligence, sometimes
contemplated as a purely impersonal quality included in the
divine Being ; but more frequently, and by preference, it appears
as emanating through the divine word from the bosom of the
godhead, and continuing in a self-subsistence and personal dis-
tinction from God. " What God speaks are no words, but
works," says Philo.1 In the Logos, God expresses his being. He
is the complete manifestation of God, the oldest of all intelligent
beings, comprising all divine powers, attributes, and expressions.
He is at the same time the chief mediator between God and the
world, the immediate image of the father, the divine world of
thought, the band by which all things are held together.
Philo not only calls the Logos the Son of God, but also
directly a second God, with the limitation, however, that this is
only so said by catachresis ; for as a Jew he could not possibly
maintain in earnest the idea of two Gods. His whole system
drove him to hold fast to the personality of the Logos ; he re-
quired it ; but the difficulty of choosing between the alternative
of a lapse into polytheism, or of lowering the Logos into a mere
angel, was too much for him ; so he wavered repeatedly, and left
his Logos to be volatilised either into an impersonal quality, or
a mere collection of divine ideas. For we do not find that he
made a distinction between a Logos internal and one external to
God, and yet he has got hold of the idea of a real personal me-
diator between God and man, and united it to the Logos ; he
designates him a high-priest and intercessor for man. The
Logos bears, he says, to God the assurance that the human race
never quite fell away from him, and also gives the assurance to
man that he never will be forsaken by God.2 He here styles
him the archangel, and yet he also says he was neither uncreate,
as God is, nor created as man ; and he anticipates that relation-
ship between the Logos and the Father, which was afterwards
expressed by the idea of generation.
It is accordingly through the Logos that all communication
between God and the world is effected ; for he, as penetrating all
things, conveys the divine essence thither. As the spiritual
nature of man is derived from him, he also manifests himself to
this nature. " He appears as he is to the immaterial souls who
serve him, and speaks to them as one friend does to another;
1 De Decal. 750. - Quis rer. div. bter. 509.
DOCTRINE CONCERNING SOULS. 405
while to such as are yet in the body he appears in the form of
an angel, without altering his nature."1 This is based on the
Bible theophany. As far as his action on the soul of man is
concerned, the Logos is identical with Sophia, the divine wis-
dom ; and Philo appears here to have put together the descrip-
tions of wisdom in the later books of the Bible. His Logos is
at bottom Sophia advanced a step further in personalisation, and
transformed into a male being. Philo indeed has once made a
distinction between the Logos and the divine wisdom as his
mother :2 he represents her gladly as " mother of the universe,"
of which God is the father;3 she has from the seed received
from God given birth to the world, his only and beloved Son.4
But if we put all his expressions together, it is plain enough that
the Sophia and the Logos are not essentially different in his
mind, but are two ways of indicating the same divine mediate
being, which, according to the context, he sometimes represented
as the material recipient, and at others as the procreating and
active principle. If we also meet with an hypostasis similar to
that of the Logos of Philo in the " Memra" of the Targum, the
contemporary Chaldean paraphrase of Onkelos and Jonathan
Ben Uziel, we must, on the other hand, observe that with them
Memra is only a descriptive word used to indicate the subject,
as " God, man, angel," and is resorted to by the commentator in
passages where in the Hebrew " the name, the spirit, the glory
of God," are found.
Philo's platonism comes out most strongly in his doctrine
concerning souls; angels, demons, and souls are only different
names for one and the same being. They are countless as the
stars ; their abode is the air, which, as being the best of earthly
substances, is also provided with the most perfect organisation
of living beings.5 Some of these souls descend here below and
unite themselves to mortal frames, being smitten with desire for
the earth and for bodies. Many of these are carried away here
by the whirlpool of sensuality, and are swallowed up in it; while
others, who by striving after higher knowledge strongly enough
to resist the pressure, aim from first to last ^ to die to their
earthly being, in order to gain the higher life.6 These return
after death to the heavenly dwelling-place, all the more certainly
i De Sornn. i. 599. 2 De Profug. 466. 3 Alleg. iii. 1096.
< De Temul. 244. 5 De Somn. i. p. 585. 6 De Gigant. 284, 285.
406 PHILO.
as some of them, the souls of the wise, only undertook their
wanderings on earth out of thirst for knowledge.1 The vicious,
Philo represents as perishing with the dissolution of their bodies.
Some of the returned souls are led by earthly longings to visit
earth a second time : other souls, on the contrary, who deem in-
tercourse with earthly things to be unworthy of them, the angels
of the Bible, the heroes of the Greeks, who dwell in the ether
above the regions of air, are employed by God as his messengers
and servants, and guardians of mortal men. According to Philo,
also, there are certainly bad angels; but he speaks of them as
bad men. Moreover, considering, as he does, all evil to consist
in sensuality only, he makes the fall and the degeneracy of the
spirits coincident with their yielding to sensuality, their union
with bodies, or perhaps to be engendered by this union in the
course of time.
In this same class of heavenly souls Philo also places the
souls of the stars : the most distinguished are rulers of the world
state ; those who are under the moon, in the regions of the air,
are the servants.2 It is difficult, however, to state precisely
what idea he had of the nature of souls or of angels, or of their
relation to God. He calls the human " nous" a portion, but an
inseparable one, of the universal soul of God (the Logos),3 from
which nothing is detached, and which only is extended. Every
man is related to the divine Logos as regards his understanding,
and is a copy, a fragment, a reflection of this blessed being.4 He
discriminates, therefore, the nutritive and sensitive soul in man,
which he supposes to arise from the airlike elements of the seed,
from the intelligence, the nous, that which is akin to God and
imperishable, according to which the man is an image of the
divine Logos.5 Whether this intelligent spirit is only an image,
or also a portion of the substance of the Logos, Philo does not
distinctly say. Here again we see that there were in Philo, as
it were, two souls at work at the same time, one Hellenistic, and
the other Jewish, and they not unfrequently came into collision.
He moved in a sphere of Platonic and Stoic ideas ; but his He-
1 Confus. Ling. 331. 2 De Monarch, i. 812.
3 ,Air6a7ra(Tfj.a ov StcupeTSv. Quod det pot. insid. 172.
4 De Mundi Opif. 33.
5 Ibid. 31, 33. Philo also ascribes to the $vxr) similarity to God. Quod
Deus immut. 300, he only uses this word in opposition to bodies ; elsewhere he
also uses m/ed/ma.
ETHICS. 407
brew conscience reacted on them, and that gave birth to a waver-
ing and unsteadiness in him, which is very manifest in the most
important questions. Thus he also asserts that the spirit of
man is an effluence of that ether or fifth element, out of which
the heavens and stars are formed,1 and to which it will return
as to its father, when the spirit is severed from the body ; a view
which, as he himself observes, is borrowed from the ancients
(the Pythagoreans).
Philo assumes a primal or ideal man, who, as yet undivided
into the two sexes, was a man-woman.2 He finds a double
meaning in the Bible account of the fall ; the obvious and real
one being that sin arose through the woman's seducing the man
to sexual intercourse; and thus voluptuousness, the beginning
of all iniquity and sin, was developed. According to the alle-
gorical meaning, the sense is to be understood under the term
woman, and sensuality under the serpent. His fundamental
thought, then, is, that voluptuousness is the origin and seat of
sin; the woman its originatrix, from the pleasure she first
gave and experienced in it. Pleasure in its two offshoots, the
love of eating and drinking, and lust, is with Philo the source of
all vice, and is in itself evil;3 and as it is sure to develop itself in
a being composed of body and mind, so all men are born in sin,
which consists precisely in the dominion of sensual pleasure over
the soul.4 No one ever kept himself, from birth till death,
wholly free from sin, although there is a possibility of a godly
man remaining spotless.5 Evil, therefore, comes from the earthly
shell, the body, this hateful dungeon of the spirit, out of which
it longs to escape, as Israel out of Egypt,6 to enter on that true
life which is only attainable after death.
Philo's ethics required the keeping down and greatest possi-
ble restraint of sensual inclinations, of the wants and feelings;
and here, as well as in his picture of the true and only free and
ruling sage, he leans greatly to the doctrines of the Stoics;7
but he entirely differs from them, and follows his own biblical
course, in the prominence he gives to the divine mercy, its might
and necessity, and the moral impotence of man without it.8 To
i Quis rer. cliv. b*r. 521. 2 Quis rer. div. 503 ; Legg. Alleg. iii. 1089.
3 Legg. Alleg. ii. 73 ; cf. 106. 4 De Mundi Opif. 37 ; Vita Mosis, iii. 675.
* De Pcenit. 716. 6 Q^s rer- div' haer' 518'
* Quod omnes probus liber. 867. 8 Legg- Alleg. i. 48, 55, 101.
408 THILO.
plant virtue in the soul belongs to God only/ and faith is the
true wisdom. Human will and thought must recognise and seek
for in God the source of all that is good and true.
Strongly as Philo otherwise descants on the unattainableness
and intangibility of God, he also teaches that there is a state or
way for man, that of ecstasy, in which his spirit, rising above all
sensible things, and transcending even ideas and the Logos, be-
comes enveloped in the glory of God, and contemplates them in
his essence. In this state of extern ation from self, and of pain-
ful yielding to the inward operation of God, " man, as a child
without speech or consciousness, seized by a divine frenzy, is
moved only by the spirit of God, like the strings of a musical
instrument, and from a son of the Logos becomes a son of God,
and equal in rank to the Logos, who has hitherto been his guide.
This is, indeed," says Philo, " an incomprehensible mystery to
the multitude, and to be imparted to the instructed only."2
There is a certain analogy between this ecstatic condition of
individuals, and Philo' s hopes, already referred to above, as to
the expected Messias producing a kind of national ecstasy. In
the days of the Messias the enemies of the Jews were to be
seized with astonishment at their virtues, and filled with shame
at ruling over a people so much better than themselves, and thus
the dispersed were to have their freedom restored them. Upon
this they were to come forth from all lands, and to return to
their own.3 The Jews were then to have three paracletes of
reconciliation before God : the mildness and goodness of God
himself, ever preferring pardon to punishment; the holiness of
their forefathers, which would plead efficaciously in behalf of
their children; and the genuine amendment of the penitent.
Then would the earth spontaneously bring forth its fruits in
abundance, so as to prevent their being hindered by temporal
cares from employing themselves in higher things ; and a long
life, almost approaching immortality, together with a numerous
offspring, would be the portion of every one. Such millennary
representations did not certainly originate with Philo, but were
found ready at hand by him among the circle of his compatriots.
: Legg. Alleg. i. 103.
2 Quis rer. div. haer. 490 sq. ; Legg. Alleg. iii. 79, 93 ; De Somn. 587 sq.
3 De Execr. 937.
[ 409 ]
VI. THE LAST DAYS OF THE JEWISH STATE, AND
CHUBCH POLITY.
There were four causes cooperating to that catastrophe by
which the state, city, and temple of the Jews were destroyed:
the conduct of the Roman governors, the hatred of the heathen,
the corruption of the Jews, and their blind confidence in false
prophets and in counterfeits of the Messias. The insatiable
avarice, and systematic severity and cruelty, of the Roman go-
vernors drove the nation to despair. The riches of the temple
treasury, which, though often robbed, was always being replen-
ished, and quickly, by yearly contributions from all parts of the
world, was an incitement to forcible seizures and arbitrary ex-
penditure ; but the exasperation of the people was thereby carried
to the highest pitch, as they considered such conduct as sacrile-
gious, and a crime against their religion. Felix the governor
exceeded his predecessors in severity and the shedding of blood j
the juster administration of Porcius Festus was succeeded by
that of Albinus, who looked on his office only as a source of
gain, and even sold the administration of justice to the highest
bidder. But all were surpassed by Gessius Florus, Nero's wor-
thy favourite, who treated the unfortunate people as if he were
an executioner placed over a multitude of sentenced criminals,
and with premeditated malice kindled the flames of anger and
revenge.
With the exception of the proselytes, the Jews had no friends
amongst the heathen. Hatred and malice were the prevalent
feelings towards them all about. The grounds for this bitter-
ness, and the mixture of hatred and contempt with which they
were looked upon by the Romans in particular, are revealed in
the words of Tacitus. "All that we consider sacred, they look
upon as godless; and on the other hand, they are permitted to do
whatever seems unclean to us. Their antiquity protects certain
customs (such as the Sabbath and the sabbatical year) ; other
preposterous regulations have found value from their odious
perversity. For the worst men from all places bring gifts and
contributions there, though they neglect the religion of their
fathers; thus the strength of the Jews waxes. They always keep
their word, and are ready to show mercy, to each other, but to
410 THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAISM.
every one else they are full of hostility and hatred ; they keep
separate from all strangers in eating, sleeping, and matrimonial
connexions, while every thing is allowable among themselves.
Thus they have introduced circumcision to distinguish them from
the rest of the world ; they who join them submit to this cus-
tom; and the first thing they learn is to despise the gods, to
abandon their country, and to disown their parents, children,
and brethren/-'1
The strong arm of the Roman dominion alone held back the
numberless enemies of the Jews. As soon as their rulers them-
selves, Caligula, for instance, appeared to partake in the universal
antipathy, and to promise immunity for its exercise, the long-felt
rage against these " enemies of the human race" broke out fear-
fully. Thus it was in Alexandria, where the heathen populace,
excited by the behaviour of Flaccus the governor, set up idols in
the Jewish synagogues, plundered and denied the dwellings of
the Jews, and tortured many of them to death. The death of
Caligula gave the sufferers some little relief, and for twenty-five
years they were at rest. But what happened under Nero gave
occasion for fresh persecutions. Soon afterwards Csesarea, Da-
mascus, and many other cities containing a mixed population of
Jews and Greeks, became the theatre of a warfare which was
almost always kindled by trifling provocations, and in which the
Jews succumbed to their more numerous enemies, and many
thousands were slain.
Immorality, and an infamous tone of feeling, with all their ad-
herence to the skeleton of the law, had mounted to such a height
amongst the Jews, that there was no longer any moral counter-
poise in the nation able to keep up social order amid the bad go-
vernment of the Roman rulers. As there was no aristocracy, no
distinction of classes, no body of citizens properly so called, the
government of the people was in the hands of the Pharisees, and
of the priests, who were in league with them. But there was
now a split even amongst them : the one part, agreeing in their
heart of hearts with the Zealots, were persuaded that the heathen
rule and imposts were illegal ; the other wished for peace and
security, and therefore for submission. The high-priesthood had
become purchasable : five families intrigued for it, with every art
of bribery and corruption. Every new high-priest, being assured
' Hist. v. 5.
CREDULITY. 41 1
of the short duration of his power, strove to make the most he
could of it, and as rapidly as possible, for the benefit of himself
and his relations. Bands of armed men, levied from the Zealots,
went about the country, living by robbery and plunder, who
excused their misdeeds by the plea of zeal for the law, and jus-
tified their robbing and killing all peaceful subjects of the Roman
dominion as adherents of Rome. The worst of all were the
Sicarii, who, by concealing short daggers under their clothes,
slew their victims even in public places and amid groups of
people; and as they were usually undiscovered, the terror they
caused was so much the greater.1 They were afterwards organ-
ised by Manahem and Eleazar, the grandsons of Judas the
Gaulonite, into bands of Zealots. Murders were of such every-
day occurrence, that the Scribes did away with the trespass-
offering for blood innocently shed f it was impossible to kill as
many animals as there were human victims slain by their fellow-
men. A desecration of the temple was thought far more serious
than a murder.3
The expectation of the promised deliverer and saviour was
so universal and overstrained, that the people readily and blindly
followed every agitator who professed either to be a prophet, the
forerunner of the Messias, or even the Messias himself. Most
of these " goetse" and false prophets were not, properly speaking,
impostors ; carried away by the general infatuation, they be-
lieved themselves called to be the instruments of God, and were
the first to put faith in the wonders and signs God would work
through them. Thus the well-known Theudas (45 a.d.) per-
suaded multitudes of people to follow him to the Jordan, which
would at his bidding divide and. let them pass over dryfoot.4 In
the year 55 a.d., under Nero, a new prophet came out of Egypt,
who aimed at overthrowing the Roman dominion, and led the
numerous followers he had collected in the desert to the Mount
of Olives, from whence they were to see the walls of the capital
fall down.5 In the time of Festus the governor, about 60 a.d.,
another prophet, whom Josephus calls a deceiver, enticed nu-
merous bodies of men into the desert, by the promise of freeing
them from all oppression.6 Even whilst the temple was burning,
i Jos. Bell. Jud. ii. 13. 3. 2 Sota, 47 a. ; Gratz, 350.
3 Joma, 23 a. 4 Jos. Antiq. xx. 5. 1.
5 Jos. Bell. Jud. ii. 13. 5. 6 Antiq. xx. 8. 10.
412 THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAISM.
6000 men followed a prophet of this sort, who promised them
deliverance, and led them to a cloister of the temple. The Ro-
mans set fire to this passage, and they all perished.
When Eleazar, the commander of the temple -watch, per-
suaded the priests who were ministering to reject the imperial
offerings, and to determine that no stranger should again be
admitted to sacrifice in the temple, the signal for war was given,
and the revolt was consummated. In most of the cities of Gali-
lee and Judea the greater part of the inhabitants would have
preferred peace, and with it the Roman rule, as the lesser evil ;
but they were without leaders, without organisation, isolated, and
more inclined to be quiet and look on. The Zealots, on the
other hand, ruled over the open country, drew together all who
had nothing to lose, overruled the passive friends of peace by
their energy, and carried along with them those who were unde-
cided and lukewarm.
After the repulse and retreat of Gallus, the chief counsellors
at Jerusalem succeeded but for a short time in defending them-
selves from the Zealots, and in ordering and guiding the revolt.
But soon the "warriors for Jehovah, law, and freedom" tri-
umphed, and the reign of terror began. The most eminent men
were executed as traitors, or as being inclined to treason and
subjection to the Roman sway. The rabbinical writings men-
tion a meeting of the Scribes which took place at this time, and
which Eleazar, the head of the Zealots, held in his own house.
It was there resolved, through the preponderance of the Sham-
maites over the intimidated Hillelites, that no Jew was in future
to buy wine, oil, bread, or any thing eatable from the heathen.
No one was any more to learn a. heathen language, no faith was
to be attached to the testimony of a heathen, no gift for the
temple was to be taken from them, and no intercourse with
heathen youths or maidens was to be held. Eleazar had sur-
rounded his house with his Zealots, with instructions to let any
one in, but no one out. Some of the recusant Hillelites lost
their lives, certainly by the sword of the Zealots. According
to Josephus, the Jews throughout Syria refused to use heathen
oil from this time.1 The day of these " eighteen resolutions"
was afterwards looked upon by the Hillelites as a calamitous
1 Bell. Jud. ii. 21.2; vii. 3. 1.
FALL OF JERUSALEM. 413
day ; but they were never revoked, " as having been sealed with
blood."1
Shammaites and Zealots thus went hand in hand, and the
latter carried out the principles of the Shammaites. The Zea-
lots, according to Josephus,2 were particularly strict in the ob-
servance of the Sabbath, although they were far from sharing in
the scruples of the Macchabees of earlier times regarding it, for
they even originated attacks on the Romans on the Sabbath.
Now in this we recognise the fruits of the doctrines of the
Shammaites, for they taught that it was unlawful to apportion
alms on the Sabbath, even for the dower of an orphan, or to
offer a prayer for a sick man's relief. Yet they allowed, and
even made it of obligation, to attack in battle on that day, or to
besiege a town.3 It was quite another thing in the time of
Pompey, whose successful assault on Jerusalem was facilitated
by the Jews abstaining from all resistance on the Sabbath.
The steadfast endurance, resignation, and bravery with which
this people undertook and carried on the unequal combat against
the mighty power of Rome, cannot fail to call forth admira-
tion. The Jews had nothing approaching to an orderly or dis-
ciplined army ; they had no treasure to meet a long war, and no
experienced leaders and generals ; they never hit off any united,
firm, and comprehensive plan of action j their best strength was
wasted in isolated resistance, and undertakings without object,
so that the strongest ally of the Romans was to be found in the
disunion of their factions. After the disarming of Galilee, all
who were disposed for war had assembled in the capital. The
Zealots had deposed the high -priest chosen by Agrippa, and
elected by lot in his stead a rough man called Samuel, who was
a stonemason. In consequence of this, most sanguinary con-
flicts took place between the more moderate citizens under the
guidance of Ananus, and the Zealots, whose party was strength-
ened by the Idumeans. Thousands of corpses lay in the streets;
the chiefs of the conquered citizen-party were executed or mur-
dered. Four factions from this time began tearing each other to
pieces in a frenzy of exasperation ; the Jerusalem Zealots under
Eleazar, the Galilean Zealots under John of Giscala, the Si-
monites, together with the Idumean and the Sicarian bandits.
1 Jeruschalmi in Gratz, p. 558.
2 Bell. JucL ii. 19.-2. 3 Gratz. p. 545.
414 THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAISM.
The Romans were otherwise occupied, and prudently left Jeru-
salem a prey to these different parties for three years, and they
meanwhile did the work of the enemy, destroying each other
and consuming the stores of provisions.
At length the Romans, under Titus, stormed the town step
by step, and a war of extermination began. The assertion of
Josephus may be an exaggeration, that the number of those who
perished during the siege by hunger and the sword amounted to
a million; but it is certain that a great part of the population of
Galilee and Judea were destroyed, for just before the blockade
they had come up to the capital to celebrate the passover. Of
the prisoners, the Zealots were put to death, and the younger
captives reserved for the triumph ; some were sent to the Egyp-
tian mines, and the rest divided amongst the provinces, where
they were employed in the amphitheatres as gladiators or in
fighting wild-beasts, and many were sold as slaves. Those who
were sold while the war lasted must have amounted to ninety
thousand. On one day of the public games at Csesarea, Titus
made two thousand five hundred Jews kill each other. The
vessels of the temple, the golden table, the candlestick, and the
roll of the law, were also borne in his triumphal procession at
Rome.
Jerusalem and the temple lay in ruins; but the desperate
strife of the Zealots was not yet at an end. In Palestine, indeed,
the drama was concluded by the suicide of the garrison at Ma-
sada two years after the taking of Jerusalem ; but a number of
Sicarii escaped to Egypt, where they endeavoured to stir up
another Jewish rebellion. Six hundred of them were delivered
up to the Roman cohorts by the Jews themselves, and endured
the most frightful torments rather than acknowledge the em-
peror as their lord.1 Vespasian then commanded the Onias
temple at Heliopolis to be closed, and the Jews thus lost their
last religious rallying -point. The offerings belonging to this
temple were transferred to the imperial treasury. A revolt was
stirred up in the district of Cyrene by Jonathan the Zealot, and
it was promised that prodigies should ensue; the only result,
however, was a great massacre by the Romans. Jonathan him-
self was burnt alive in Rome.
Israel was now without "king, princes, sacrifice, altar, ephod,
1 Jos. Bell. Jud. vii. 10. 1-4.
HOPES OF ISRAEL. 415
or sanctuary." The performance of sacrificial worship had be-
come an impossibility, so closely was it bound up with the temple
and its altar; for, according to the universal teaching of the
rabbis, all private sacrifices were for ever illegal, from the time
Solomon's temple was dedicated. Later on, too, teachers of note
declared that every one who sacrificed without the temple ought
to be punished with " cutting off."1 Even the use of serving
roasted meat on the evening of the passover, as a feeble remem-
brance of the former sacrificial repast on that day, was repro-
bated by the more scrupulous Jews. Hence they said, as long as
it was impossible to offer sacrifice, prayer must take its place;
and by degrees the characteristics of sacrifice were transferred to
prayer in the Talmud literature ; but the study and exposition
of the laws of the temple and of sacrifice were the principal com-
pensations, as these laws were speedily to become available again ;
for the Scribes and the people continued to cling with confidence
to the hopes of a speedy and miraculous restoration of the tem-
ple. God could not really intend his sanctuary, the only one on
earth, to continue in ruins. He had only permitted it to be-
come so, that by its sudden and wonderful restoration his power
and glory might be more strikingly manifested, and his true
people justified before the heathen. Almost from hour to hour
the expectant Jew was anticipating the restoration of the temple.
Was it not said in the triumphal canticle of Moses and Miriam,
that the temple-mount was the inheritance God had made his
habitation, the sanctuary which his hands had prepared ?2 Was
this hand not to restore it again? He must do so, the Jews
thought; for it was said there immediately afterwards, that
" the Lord should be king for ever and ever."
It was therefore decreed that a priest was not to drink wine
on the day he would have been on duty at the temple, had its re-
gulations still continued in force ;3 for the miracle of the restora-
tion might take place on that very day, and according to the law
the priest ought to be fasting then. Proselytes were to deposit
a sum of money, that the legal sacrifice might be bought with it,
in case of the restoration of the temple. It was only in later
times, when weary of waiting in vain, and in some degree recon-
1 The proofs of this are to be found in the article of Friedmann and Gratz,
Theol. Jahrbiicher von Baur und Zeller, 1848, p. 344.
2 Exod. xv. 17. 3 Friedmann in Orient, 1849, p. 549.
416 THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAISM.
ciled by habit to their situation, that they deferred this miracu-
lous restoration of the temple to a far-off age of the Messias, and
then the Scribes allowed those who were of priestly race to drink
wine on the day appointed them. There were Jewish ascetics,
who, in memory of the sacrificial import of partaking of meat
and wine, wholly abstained from both after the destruction of
the temple of Jerusalem. " Shall we eat flesh," said they,
" which was once offered in the sacrifice that now has ceased ?
Shall we drink wine, of which drink - offerings used to be pre-
pared, but is now no longer?"1 Their fasts were also lamenta-
tions for the sad condition of the people; because, as proof that
the God of the Romans had conquered the God of the Jews, all
the Jews were compelled to pay a tribute of two drachms, which
they used to pay to the temple, to that of Jupiter Capitolinus in
Rome.2 They were forced to do this with wanton severity ; so
that Suetonius was eye-witness to an old man of ninety being
examined to see if he were circumcised or not.
Palestine was not yet depopulated, however; many of the
Jews remained in their homes, as friends of the Romans ; others
were gradually redeemed from slavery, and returned to the land
of their fathers, or else ventured to emerge out of caves, woods,
and deserts ; great tracts of country, especially to the east of the
Jordan, were scarcely affected by the war. Jamnia and Csesarea
on the sea-coast, and Tiberias and Sephoris in Galilee, remained
or became schools of Jewish scribe-learning. Jamnia and its
school surpassed the rest in renown, and took the place of Jeru-
salem as a national and religious centre. Here a Sanhedrim
again assembled, headed by a rabbi or public doctor, a kind of
patriarch in fact. Priests and Levites had become for the most
part insignificant ; but they clung to the hope of the renewal of
the temple, and the restoration of the sacred services in their full
splendour ; and in individual families there still existed vague
traditions of a descent from Aaron. There was no more talk
now, however, of a body of priests. Rabbinism, on the contrary,
flourished unimpaired, continued on the succession of Phari-
saism and the traditions of the old Scribes ; and in them were
centered all the intellectual and religious aspirations and efforts
of the nation. This learned oligarchy was held together by a
1 Friedmann, ubi supra, after Batra, 00 b.
2 Jos. Bell. Jud. vii. 6. 6.
A NEW RISING UNDER TRAJAN. 417
tenacious corporate spirit, by similarity of interests and princi-
ples, and consisted of men who, both as theologians and priests,
laid claim to the guidance of consciences. They replaced to
the people all other institutions now broken up, and carefully
preserved the mummy of the now almost impracticable law ;
regulations about property, the temple-ritual sacrifice, and pe-
nal justice, impracticable as they had become, were profoundly
discussed, and spun out into an ever-widening web of casu-
istry. The more mutilated and fragmentary the structure of
the law had turned out in relation to the present state of the
people, and incapable of a living organisation as heretofore, the
more eagerly the rabbis strove to breathe an imaginary life into
the dry bones by their interpretations and additions. This
skeleton they enveloped in a complete covering of collateral
decisions and resolutions to meet all possible cases ; and where
custom and mode of life had stepped beyond the narrow legal
bounds, their school exercised its acuteness in finding out the
existence, if only a fictitious one, of a harmony with the letter
of the statutes.
The rebellious spirit of the Jews was not yet broken : after
a forty years5 rest, new and bloody wars followed, under Trajan
and Hadrian. The risings of the Jews in the Cyrenaic district,
in Egypt, and in Cyprus, must have originated in their bitter
hatred against the heathen ; for they were not at first nor im-
mediately directed against the Roman government. In Meso-
potamia, on the contrary, they only rebelled in order to shake
off the yoke which Trajan had laid on them. Perhaps, as many
have recently mentioned, a universal and deeply-laid plan was
at the bottom, though it is difficult to say what political end it
could have had but that of revenge. Dio Cassius says the Jews
had risen and banded together every where ; many other nations
had joined them for the sake of gain ; and the whole world was
in commotion.1 He also speaks of fearful cruelties and horrors
perpetrated by the Jews on some Greek prisoners. They com-
pelled Greeks and Romans to fight in the circus against each
other, and with wild-beasts. They were at length subdued every
where; in the last year of Trajan, a.d. 117, they were banished
outright from Cyprus, where they had destroyed the town of
1 Dio. Cass, lxviii. 32.
VOL. II. E E
418 THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAISM.
Salamis, and slaughtered great numbers. No Jew was after-
wards allowed to enter the island, on pain of death.
The rebellion broke out some years later in Palestine, in the
year 131 a.d., when Hadrian prohibited circumcision, and be-
gan to build a heathen city on the site of Jerusalem, under the
name of iElia Capitolina, with a temple of Jupiter on Mount
Moria.1 Both measures were calculated to drive the Jews to
desperate exertions. The prohibition of circumcision was un-
questionably intended to break through the wall of separation
between them and the heathen, and to render their amalga-
mation possible. The establishment of a heathen town, with a
foreign name, and the destination of places, which had been the
inalienable property of God's people, to the occupation of the
stranger, seemed to do away for ever with the possibility of the
restoration of the holy city, the Jerusalem of the Jews, and of
its temple. Then rang the tidings of the appearance of the long-
expected Messias, girt with the sword, as the Jews had longed
for him, to break off the Roman yoke. He styled himself, or
his compatriots did for him, Bar Cochba, that is, "the son of
the star f* for to him related the words of the ancient prophecy,
" A star shall rise out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall come forth
from Israel, and shall strike the princes of Moab."2 Rabbi
Akiba, the "second Moses/' considered the greatest light in
Israel of the day (the later rabbis gave him 24,000 disciples),
declared before the Sanhedrim publicly, Bar Cochba to be the
Messias. The only one who made any opposition was rabbi
Jochanan, who said, "Akiba, grass will grow out of thy jaws,
and yet the son of David not have come." St. Jerome says of
Bar Cochba, that he contrived to spout fire from his mouth by
a secret contrivance of lighted tow ;3 he did not require to do
this any more after Akiba's declaration. He was crowned and
anointed as king in the strong city of Bitther. The whole Jewish
population flew to arms, and joined his standard. It seems the
Jews actually obtained for a short time possession of Jerusalem,
the fortified head-quarters of the Roman garrison, as the Romans
were obliged to besiege and retake it a.d. 134, when for the first
time it was completely destroyed and levelled with the ground.
Bitther, their principal fortress, also fell, after a murderous war
1 Euseb. H. E. iv. 6. 2 Numbers xxiv. 17-19.
3 Apol. ii. adv. Kufin.
THE FINAL CATASTROPHE. 419
of three years. We know not what became of Bar Cochba, or
Bar Cosiba, the son of lying, as his deceived countrymen now
named him. Akiba, an old gray-headed man, was made prisoner
and executed. The whole land was laid desolate : about a thou-
sand villages, and fifty fortified towns, with four hundred and
eighty synagogues, were destroyed by the Romans. This second
war of extermination must have been still more ruinous to the
physical condition and culture of the land than the first ; in fact
Palestine has never recovered from it. The numbers of those
who perished on the field of battle were computed at 580,000;
the multitudes who perished by hunger, disease, and fire, must
have been far greater. Hosts of prisoners were dragged to Tere-
binthe, near Hebron, and there sold at the great mart for slaves
to the neighbouring nations resorting thither. Four men were
sold for a few bushels of barley, or one exchanged against a
horse. Others were carried to Egypt, and even as far as Spain.
The whole people were forced to pay a heavy poll-tax in ad-
dition to the tax paid to the Capitoline Jupiter.
The emperor's plan of placing the heathen city of vElia Capi-
tolina on the site of Jerusalem was now carried out. A theatre
was built, as well as public baths, and a temple of Jupiter, in
which the statue of the god and that of the emperor stood side by
side. The Jews were forbidden to set foot in the new city under
pain of death, or even to venture near it.1 They were at length
permitted to enter it once a year, and there to lament their mis-
fortunes, on the anniversary of the second destruction. " On the
day of the destruction," says an eye-witness of later days, " one
sees a weeping multitude drawing thither, feeble women, and
hoary old men, pouring in with rent garments to mourn over the
ruins of the temple. The soldiers demand a fee, if they wish to
weep longer."2 Hadrian's successor, Antoninus Pius, allowed
them to practise the rite of circumcision again. Even this fourth
blow to Jewish nationality, which followed the three catastrophes
under Nabuchodonosor, Antiochus, and Titus, was not adequate
to break the fast-cemented bond of their community. Only
fifty years after the war under Hadrian, Judaism appeared in the
form of two firmly- organised corporate bodies : the one under
the patriarch at Tiberias, embracing all the Jews in the Roman
1 Justin. Dial. c. Tryph. p. J 16; Apol. i. p. 71.
2 Hieron. in Zephan. c. 2.
420 THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAISM.
empire; the other, to which all the Israelites of the eastern
countries belonged, being under the prince of the captivity.
The fate of shattered nationalities, that of being absorbed into
the dominant population, was one not appointed to the Jews.
They were to remain a distinct and unmixed race, for witness to
the world, and as an instrument of Providence in the distant
future.
INDEX.
Ablutions, religious, among the Greeks,
i. 220, 232.
Abortion, common among the Romans,
ii. 272; forbidden among the Jews, ii.
342.
Abstinences, practised by the Eleusinian
hierophant, i. 192.
Acca Larentia, nurse of Romulus, ii. 56.
Achseans, an Hellenic race, their gods
and worship, i. 114.
Adam (Adonis Esmun), Samothracian
mystery -god, i. 163.
Adonis (Attes), mystery-god, i. 160; iden-
tical with Osiris, Korybas, Zagreus,
Adam, and Agdistis, i. 161.
Adultery among the Greeks, ii. 236 ; the
Romans, ii. 253, sq. ; the Jews, ii. 340.
Advtum, sanctuary of heathen temple, i.
239.
./Eacus, Greek judge of the dead, i. 175.
JEgina., mysteries of, i. 175.
^Elia Capitolina, ii. 418.
^Enesidemus, a sceptic philosopher, i. 368.
-^Eolians, Greek race, their leading deities,
i. 114.
./Eolus, Greek god of the winds, i. 98.
iEschylus, his myth of Prometheus, i. 297.
^Esculapius (Asclepios), Greek god, i. 94 ;
impostures practised in his temple, ii.
201.
Aerolites, rough stones fallen from hea-
ven, worshiped, i. 69.
Africa, northern, Roman province of, its
principal cities and their flourishing
condition, proconsular, i. 24.
Agatho- demon (Hor-Hat), Egyptian
deity, i. 448.
Age, golden, a Persian tradition, i. 397.
Agonalia, Roman festival, ii. 93.
Agrse, village near Athens, exhibition of
the lesser mysteries there, i. 183, 190.
Agriculture, its importance as an element
in the Roman religion, ii. 10.
Ahriman, Persian deity, the principle of
evil, i. 386 ; relation to Ormuzd and
Zervan, i. 387 ; his contest with light,
i. 394.
Aidoneus, Greek god of the world below,
i. 72.
Albania, in Caucasia, its population, i. 43.
Alcinous, one of the later Platonists, ii.
129.
Alexander, of Macedon, declared son of
Jupiter Amnion, i. 485 ; his supersti-
tion, ii. 172.
Alexander, Jannseus, the Asmonee, ii. 318.
Alexander, of Abonoteichos, religious im-
postor, ii. 198.
Alexandria, later capital of Egypt, its
general characteristics, i. 18.
Allat, Arabian goddess, i. 434.
Allegorical, interpretation of heathen po-
pular gods and myths, by philosophers,
i. 281 ; ii. 152, sq.
Altars, Roman, their position and form,
ii. 89.
Ammon, Egyptian deity, i. 440; oracle
of, in Libya, i. 214.
Amphitrite, Greek goddess, i. 80.
Amschaspands, the seven immortal Per-
sian saints, i. 390.
Anahita or Anaitis, Persian and Arme-
nian goddess of fecundity, i. 418.
Anaxagoras, his dualism, i. 267.
Anaximander, Greek philosopher, i. 250.
Anaximenes, Greek philosopher, i. 251.
Androgyne (see Hermaphrodite).
Angels, according to teaching of Old Tes-
tament, ii. 384.
Animals, see Beasts ; Mosaic law for
their protection, ii. 346 ; worship of, in
Egypt, i. 454 ; holy kinds, i. 456 ; wars
on account of, ib. ; care of them, i.
457.
Anna Perenna, Roman goddess, ii. 54.
Anthropomorphism, the, of the Old Tes-
tament, ii. 382.
Antigonus, the Asmonee, ii. 320.
Antinous, the, deified favourite of Ha-
drian, ii. 168.
Antioch, city of Syria, i. 432 ; worship of
Asiatic and Hellenic gods there, and at
Daphne, ib.
Antisthenes, Greek philosopher and
founder of the Cynic school, i. 306.
Antithei, demonic beings, ii. 216.
Auubis, Egyptian deity, and judge of the
dead, i. 461 ; genius of mummies, i.
463 ; in connection with the Osiris
worship, ii. 177.
Anuke, Egyptian goddess, i. 451.
Apathy, Stoic, i. 356 ; Epicurean, i. 363.
Aphrodite, Greek goddess, seat of her
worship at Paphos, i. 16 ; blending of
Cyprian and Pelasgian, extent and
character of her worship, Urania and
Pandemos, goddess of sensual love, i.
88-91 ; conf. Venus, ii. 50 ; impurity in
her worship, ii. 192.
Apis, the sacred bull of the Egyptians,
i. 458, sq.
Apollo, Greek god, his relation to Athene,
his surnames and nature, i 82 ; special
influence through his oracle, i. 83 ; lat-
terly identified with Helios the sun-
god, i. 83 ; connected with Artemis, i.
84 ; the Cretan A. distinct from the
Achseo-Dorian, with his relation to Dio-
nysos, i. 144 ; his worship among the
Romans, ii. 41.
422
INDEX.
Apollonius, Neo-Pythagorean philoso-
pher, ii. 143.
Apotheosis, among the Greeks, i. 343 ;
the Egyptians, i. 486 ; introduction into
Rome, ii. 32 ; of the Roman Emperors,
ii. 165, sq. ; of women of the imperial
family, ii. 167.
Apuleiiis, the Platonist, his views, ii. 151.
Aquitania, the Roman province of, in
Gaul, i. 32.
Aquitani, the, their settlement and cha-
racter in general, i. 28.
Arabians, their relations with Rome and
distinctive character, i. 47 ; their gods
and worships, i. 434.
Arcadia, in the Peloponnese, its principal
gods, i. 119.
Arduina, Celtish goddess, i. 112.
Arelate, Aries, i. 131.
Ares, war- god of the Greeks, his charac-
ter and cultus, i. 88.
Aristippus, Greek philosopher, originator
of the Cyrennic school and Hedonism,
i. 304.
Aristophanes, his position towards the
popular religion, i. 286.
Aristotle, his relation to Plato, i. 333 ;
doctrine concerning God, and God's
relation to the world of Providence,
334 ; his view of the stars, and link to
the popular religion, doctrine of souls,
336 ; immortality, 338 ; of freedom and
evil, his ethics, 340 ; theory of slavery,
ii. 226.
Armenia, Greater, general description of
the land and its population, i. 42.
Armenia, Lesser, Roman province, i. 12.
Armilustrium, a Roman festival, ii. 97.
Arnobius, on the public spectacles of
Rome, ii. 195.
Arsaces, founder of the empire of the
Arsacida?, i. 44.
Artemis, Greek goddess, the Icarian, i.
69 ; the Hellenic joined in worship with
Apollo, i. 84 ; her character and titles,
85 ; the Ephesian extent of her cultus,
her temple at Ephesus, 86.
Arvales, the Arvalian brothers, ii. 11, 69.
Asclepios, god of healing, i. 97.
Asebia, impiety, sin of irreligion, its pun-
ishment among the Greeks, i. 243.
Asia Anterior, condition of, as a Roman
province, i. 13.
Asia Minor, general features of, i. 11-16.
Asmoneans or Asmonees, the, their rise
and times, ii. 300, 317, sq. ; their cruel-
ties, ii. 318; their fall, ii. 320.
Assyria, fate of, i. 45; its religious sys-
tem, i. 420.
Astarte, the Syrian goddess, i. 428 ; her
worship at Carthage, i. 488.
Astrolatry, its origin for the most pai-t
Chaldean, i. 422.
Astrology, the Chaldean, its wide spread
and doctrines, ii. 423 ; finds its way
into Rome, ii. 208.
Astronomy, the Chaldean, in relation to
religion, i. 422.
Ataraxia, the, of the Stoics, i. 357 ; of
Epicurus, i. 363.
Atheism of the Greek sophists, i. 271, sq.'
Atheists, Greek, persecuted, i. 273.
Athene, Greek goddess, worshiped by
Pelasgi as a beam of wood, i. 69 ; Pal-
las A., her character, i. 81 ; her wor-
ship at Athens, i. 116.
Athens, capital of Greece, gods and wor-
ships, i. 116 ; political condition, domi-
nation of the poor, ii. 223.
Athrava's Persian priests, i. 403.
Atmu, Egyptian god, i. 440.
Atomism of Epicureans, i. 359.
Atomistic school, its cosmology, psycho-
logy, and theology, i. 266, sq.
Atonement by blood, ii. 179 ; great day
of, the Jewish fast, ii. 373, 376.
Attes, Attis, or Adonis, mystery-god, i.
160 ; his worship in Phrygia, in Bithy-
nia, and Lydia, i. 376.
Augurs, their powers and privileges, ii. 72.
Augury, Roman system of, ii. 102.
Augustales, Roman priests, ii. 69.
Augustalia, Roman festival, ii. 97.
Augustus, Octavianus, sole ruler of the
Roman empire, i. 4, sq. ; his deification,
ii. 32, 165 ; his high priesthood, ii. 33.
Auspicia, Roman divination by birds,
ceremonies in taking, ii. 103, sq. ; as
instrument of policy, ii. 22; as means
of inquiring into the will of the gods,
its kinds, ii. 103, sq. ; Greek method
of, i. 207.
Averrunci, a species of gods, ii. 207-
Axieros, Pelasgian deity, i. 73.
Axiokersos and Axiokersa, Pelasgian dei-
ties, i. 73.
Axumitic empire, i. 48.
Baal, extensive signification of the name,
i. 425 ; the Moloch of the Canaanites,
his worship of child-sacrifice, i. 426 ;
identical with the Dionysos Omestes of
Chios and Tenedos, i. 156.
Baal-Melkarth, city-god of Tyre, i. 427.
Baalbec (Heliopolis), city of Syria, i. 20.
Babylon, the metropolis of heathendom,
i. 421 ; its destruction, i. 460.
Babylonia, situation of the country and
its population, i. 46.
Bacchanalia, origin of among the Greeks,
translation of, to Italy, i. 157 ; their
suppression and corrupting influence,
ii. 28.
Bacchus - Dionysos, the Roman Liber, ii.
51.
Bactria, country and kingdom, i. 50.
Barbarians, in opposition to Greeks, ii.
218.
Bar Cochba, ii. 418.
Bards, the Gallic, religious minstrels, ii.
109.
Beasts, Mosaic law for protection of, ii.
346 ; clean and unclean, ii. 376.
Bel, principal god of Babylon, temple of,
i. 422.
Belenus, Celtic deity, ii. 112.
Belgians, a race of people, i. 28.
Belgica, the Roman province, its extent
and population, i. 32.
Belisana, Gallic goddess, ii. 112.
INDEX.
423
Bellona, Roman goddess, her fanatical
worship, ii. 174.
Bellonarii, priests of Bellona, ii. 174.
Berytus, city of Phoenicia (Beyrout), i.
21.
Birds, for divination, their division, &c.
among the Romans, ii. 103 ; Greek ob-
servation of, i. 207.
Bithynia, the Roman province of, i. 11.
Bliss in the next world, teaching of the
Eleusinian mysteries, i. 196, sq. ; ac-
cording to Pindar and the Orphici, i.
301 ; of the Persians, i. 409 ; Egyptians,
i. 465 ; Cicero, ii. 140, sq. ; Plutarch
and the later Greeks, ii. 145. (See
Soul.)
Blood considered as a means of expiation
for sin by the heathen, i. 226, ii. 179 ;
poured about the altar, i. 232 ; how
dealt with by the Jews, ii. 368.
Blood, vengeance of, in the Mosaic law,
ii. 347.
Bona Dea, her character and secret wor-
ship, ii. 44.
Books, the holy, of the Etruscans, ii. 4 ;
ritual ones of the Romans, ii. 18 ; spu-
rious ones of Numa, ii. 28 ; holy ones
of the Jews, ii. 377.
Bodies, dead (see Corpses).
Body, the human, only a prison of the
soul, according to Plato, i. 315 ; its re-
surrection according to Persian belief,
i. 411.
Boreas, Greek god, i. 98.
Brahminism, its contest with Buddhism,
i. 53.
Brahmins, Indian caste, i. 51.
Branchidse, oracle of, at Didymi, ii. 203.
Britain, its romanising, towns, popula-
tion, i. 33-35.
Britons, their character in general, i. 34.
Buddhism, doctrines of, and its relation
to Brahminism, i. 53 ; expulsion of,
from India, i. 54 ; penetrates into
China, i. 58.
Bull, the primeval, of the Persians, i. 396;
sacrifice of the Osiris-bull, i. 475; an
attribute of Mithras, i. 415.
Bulls, the four divine, of the Egyptians,
i. 458.
Burnt sacrifice among the Greeks, i. 231 ;
among the Jews, ii. 368.
Cabiri, pre-Hellenic gods of Phoenician
origin, i. 73 ; in the Samothracian mys-
teries, i. 166 ; meaning of the name, i.
166 ; their names, i. 169 ; Lemnian Ca-
biri, i. 170.
Cadmilos, Samothracian mystery-god, i.
167 ; Hermes Cadmilos, i. 73, 167,
169.
Caesars, the Roman, deification of, ii. 165,
sq. (see Emperors).
Csesar, Julius, conquers Gaul, i. 27; dei-
fied at Rome, ii. 32.
Csesarea, city of Judea, i. 23.
Camulus, Celtic war-god, ii. 112.
Candace, name of the Nubian queens, i.
48.
Capitoline Temple at Rome, building of,
^ ii. 19. s '
Cappadocia, the Roman province of, in-
habitants of cities of, i. 12 ; its cultus
i. 377.
Captivity, Assyrian and Babylonian, ii.
293 ; return from, ii. 294. *
Caria, Roman province, its cities, i. 14.
Carian idolatrj^, i. 374.
Carmenta, Roman goddess, ii. 57.
Carmentalia, Roman festival, ii. 93.
Carneades, sceptic philosopher, i. 367.
Carthage, site of old, accursed, i. 24; new,
i. 24.
Carthaginian religious system, i. 488.
Castes, Indian division into, i. 51.
Cave of Trophonius, the place of an ora-
cle, i. 215.
Celsus, platonising philosopher, i. 151.
Celtiberians, race of people in Spain, i.
26.
Celts, i. 27.
Cerealia, a Roman festival, ii. 95.
Ceremonial system of the Romans, ii. 15.
Ceres (Demeter), a Roman goddess, ii.
43.
Ceylon (Taprobane), i. 55.
Chaldeans, the, in Babylon, their religi-
ous system, i. 421, sq.
Charistia, a Roman festival, ii. 94.
Charites, Greek goddesses, i. 98.
Charrae (Haran), a city of Mesopotamia,
said to be the starting-point of Hea-
thenism, i. 45 ; its idolatrous system,
i. 433.
Charun, the Etruscan Charon, ii. 3.
Chasidim, a Jewish faction, ii. 301.
Chem, an Egyptian god, i. 443.
Cherubim, ii. 385.
Chests, the holy, in the mysteries, i. 188.
Child-murder punished with death by the
Jews, ii. 342.
Children, exposition of (chytrism), among
the Greeks, ii. 246; among the Ro-
mans, ii. 271 ; sacrifice of, as practised
by Canaanite's and Syrians, i. 426; by
Arabians, i. 434; by Carthaginians, i.
488; for magical purposes, ii. 214.
Chiliasm, Persian, i. 410.
China, history and population of, gene-
ral constitution of the empire, i. 55, sq.;
gloomy character of its religion helps
the spread of Buddhism, i. 58.
Chresmologoi, interpreters of oracles, i.
218
Chthonios, a title of Hermes, i. 167, 170 ;
of Dionysos, i. 147.
Chytrism, the exposition of children
among the Greeks, ii. 246.
Cicero, as philosopher, ii. 119 ; his scep-
tical eclecticism, ii. 120; his doctrine
concerning God, ii. 121 : his ethics, ii.
122 ; views upon state religion, ii. 123 ;
and immortality of the soul, ii. 141.
Cimri (or Kymri), their settlements, i. 27,
S3-
Cilicia, as a Roman province, i. lo.
Circumcision universal among the Egyp-
tians, i. 473 ; among the Jews, ii. 349.
Claros, a site of an oracle, ii. 202.
4^4
INDEX.
Clean and unclean beasts, according to
the law of Moses, i. 376.
Clusius, a surname of Janus, ii. 36.
Cneph, an Egyptian god, i. 441.
Colchis and the Colchians, i. 43.
Communion in the Eleusinian mysteries,
i. 188; among the Persians through
the Homa, i. 402 ; through the sacri-
fice of a child at Haran, i. 434.
Community of wives among the ancient
Britons, i. 34 ; in Sparta, ii. 235.
Compita, the parishes of Rome, ii. 21.
Compitalia, a Koman festival, ii. 21, 98.
Complices, Etruscan gods, ii. 2.
Confarreation, the solemn marriage-form
of the Eomans, ii. 254.
Cong-fu-tse, or Confucius, suppression of
bis doctrine and sect, i. 56.
Conscience, absence of the idea of, in
Pagan antiquity, ii. 221.
Consecrations (see Mysteries and Theo-
psea), ii. 184.
Conseutes, Etruscan gods, ii. 2.
Consivius, a surname of Janus, ii. 36.
Consualia, a Roman festival, ii. 97.
Census, a Roman god, ii. 52.
Continence of hierophant, i. 192.
Cora, a Samothracian mystery-goddess,
i. 167; an Eleusinian goddess, i. 129.
Corinth, mysteries of the isthmus of, i.
173.
Cornutus, a Roman philosopher, h. 127.
Corpses, considered as defiling, i. 220,
408, ii. 90 ; their treatment by the Per-
sians, i. 408 ; by the Egyptians, i. 463 ;
by the Romans, ii. 89.
Corsica, the Roman province of, i. 11.
Corybas, a Greek mystery-god, i. 161 ;
his mysteries at Lemnos, i. 165 ; the
Corybantes, i. 167.
Cosmogony, doctrine of the creation of
the world (which see).
Costi, the girdle of the Persians, i. 405.
Coiu-tesans in Greece, i. 91, ii. 237.
Creation (see World).
Crete, the principal deities of the island
of, i. 119 ; its inhabitants, i. 16.
Criobolium, a bloody rite of atonement,
ii. 179.
Critias, a Greek philosopher and states-
man, i. 271.
Cronidae, the, divide the world amongst
them, i. 77.
Cronos, a Greek god, i. 76.
Curetes, divine beings of the Greeks, con-
nected with the Cabiri, i. 167.
Curiones, ministers of l-eligion at Rome,
ii. 63.
Cybele, a Phrygian goddess, character
and seat of her worship, i. 102 ; her re-
lation to the mysteries of Samothrace,
i. 168 ; her famed symbolical represen-
tation at Phlya, i. 176 ; her worship in
Phx'ygia, i. 374 ; in Bithynia and Lydia,
i. 376 ; in Lycaonia, i. 377.
Cynics, a Greek philosophical school, i.
"306.
Cypra, name of the Etruscan Juno, ii. 3.
Cyprus, its population and principal
towns, i. 16; its deities, i. 120.
Cyrenaics, a Greek philosophical school,
i. 304.
Cyrene, a city of Africa, i. 24.
Daci, the Dacian race, i. 39.
Dadouchoi, or torch-bearers in the Eleu-
sinian mysteries, i. 177.
Dagon, chief god of the Philistines, i. 432.
Damascus, an ancient city of Coele-Syria,
i. 20.
Dardanos, one of the Cabiri, i. 169.
David, king of the Jews, ii. 292.
Days, lucky or unlucky according to Ro-
man superstition, ii. 92.
Dea-Dia, a Roman goddess, ii. 55.
Dead bodies (see Corpses).
Degrees, or steps in the Mithras mys-
teries, i. 416.
Deification (see Apotheosis).
Deisidaimonia (see Superstition).
Delphic oracle, i. 210.
Demeter, a Greek goddess, originally one
of the lower world, i. 73 ; goddess of
agriculture, i. 91 ; the Samothracian,
i. 168 ; the Eleusinian, i. 17S ; her myth
represented in the Eleusinian mysteries,
i. 185 ; her worship in the Thesmo-
phoria, i. 200, sq. ; her oracle at Patra3,
i. 215.
Demigods of the Greeks, i. 106, sq.
Demiurge, the creator of the world in
Plato's system, i. 308, 330.
Democritus, a Greek atomist, i. 266.
Demonologv of Plato, i. 314 ; Empedo-
cles, i. 264 ; the Persians, i. 391, 394 ;
Plutarch, ii. 134 ; Maximus of Tyre, ii.
150 ; Apuleius, ii. 151 ; Celsus, ii. 151 ;
its connection with magic, ii. 210,
212.
Demon, the, of Socrates, i. 278.
Demons, belief and doctrine of the Greeks
generally concerning, and the kinds of,
i. 103.
Derceto, a Philistine deity, i. 432.
Destinv or fate, according to the views of
the Greeks, i. 291 ; of the Stoics, i. 350 ;
deities of, among Greeks, i. 99 ; among
Romans, ii. 47, 57.
Determinism in Plato, i. 318 (compare
Freedom).
Dews, the, evil spirits of the Persians,
i. 390.
Diagoras, a Greek philosopher, perse-
cuted as an atheist, i. 273.
Diana, a Roman goddess, ii. 49.
Dicaearchus, a Greek philosopher who
denied immortality, i. 346.
Didymi, the seat of a famous oracle,
ii. 203.
Diocaesarea, capital of Galilee, i. 23.
Diogenes of Apollonia, Greek philosopher,
i. 251 ; of Sinope, a cynic, i. 306.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, his judgment
upon the Roman religion, ii. 135, 136.
Dionysos, a Greek god, origin and influ-
ence of his worship, i. 93, 342 ; D.
Omestes, i. 94, 156 ; his nature-cha-
racter in Asia, i. 95 ; D. Zagreus, a
god of the lower world, his cultus in
rivalry with that of Orpheus, i. 96, 139 ;
INDEX.
425
connected with that of Apollo, i. 142 ;
D. Helios, distinct from the god of
wine, i. 143 ; D. Zagreus, i. 146, sq. ;
as a centre of the Orphic teaching,
i. 158 ; general view of the forms of the
Dionysic worship and festivals in Greece,
i. 156 ; D. one with Adonis, Osiris,
Corybas, &c, i. 145, sq. ; not to be
confused with the Thracian god of wine,
i. 180 ; or with the Theban, i. 181 ; dif-
fusion of his worship, i. 94.
Dioscuri, Greek heroes, i. 109 ; their re-
lation with the Cabiri, i. 167 ; their
number and names, i. 169.
Diospolis (Thebes), a city of Egypt, i. 19.
Dis, the Roman god of the lower world,
ii. 52.
Divination, i. 206 ; by oracles, i. 209, sq. ;
favoured by Stoics, i. 354 ; media of,
among the Romans, ii. 99, sq. ; belief
in, ii. 204, sq. ; among the Jews, by
Urim and Thummim, ii. 355.
Divorce, among the Greeks, ii. 236 ; Ro-
mans, ii. 254 ; Jews, ii. 339.
Dodona, oracle of, i. 214.
Dog, the animal held in greatest venera-
tion by the Persians, i. 398.
Donar or Thunaer, a German god, ii. 115.
Dorians, a Greek race, their principal
deities, i. 114.
Dreams, prophetic, belief of antiquity in,
ii. 207.
Drink- offerings among the Jews, ii. 371-
Druidesses, priestesses of the Gauls, ii.
109.
Druids, Celtic priests, i. 28, 29 ; priests
of the Britons, i. 34 ; their dignity and
power in Gaul, ii. 108 ; their doctrine
of a future state, ii. 110 ; their sup-
pression by the Romans, ii. 113.
Dusares, an Arabian god, i. 434.
Ears of corn, a symbol of Adonis and
the resurrection, i. 188.
Earth, goddess of, worship paid to her by
the Pagans generally, i. 67 ; by the
Persians, i. 393 ; by the Pelasgians,
i. 70 ; by the Romans, ii. 43 ; by the
Germans (Nerthus), ii. 115.
Eclecticism at the fall of Greek philo-
sophy, i. 372 ; of Cicero, ii. 120.
Education, methods of, among Greeks,
ii. 231 ; and Romans, ii. 279.
Eetion, one of the Cabiri, i. 169.
Egeria, the nymph, Numa's counsellor,
ii. 57.
Egypt, general features of the country
and its inhabitants, i. 17 ; its system
of gods, and the origin of it, i. 437, sq. ;
particular deities, i. 440 ; animal wor-
ship, i. 454, sq. ; doctrine of a future
state, i. 460, sq. ; festivals, i. 467, sq. ;
priesthood, i. 470, sq. ; sacrificial sys-
tem, i. 474, sq. ; gloomy and exclusive
character (of system), i. 476 ; impres-
sion on strangers, i. 477 ; priestly dis-
ciplina arcani, i. 479 ; fate, destiuy,
and development of religion, i. 482, sq. ;
deification of her kings, i. 486.
Eilcithuia (or llithuia), goddess of birth,
i- 117, ii. 450 ; city of same name in
Egypt, ii. 450.
Elagabalus, a Syrian sun-god, i. 431.
Eleats, Greek philosophers, their doc-
trines, i. 259, sq.
Elements, worship of, among the heathen
generally, i. 66 ; among the Persians,
i. 391.
Eleusinian mysteries, their origin and
establishment, i. 176 ; relations with
the female Cereal deities, i. 178 ; with
Dionysos, i. 180 ; order and programme
of the solemnity, i. 184, sq. ; brilliant
scenic representations in, i. 187 ; mys-
tical symbols and formulae of, i. 188, sq. ;
degrees of initiation, and their neces-
sary purifications, i. 191, sq. ; exclusion
of non-Greeks, i. 194 ; obligation of si-
lence, i. 194 ; their charm, i. 196 ; ef-
fects produced by them, i. 197.
Elohim, a name of God, its meaning,
ii. 380.
Empedocles, a Greek philosopher, his
philosophico- didactic poem, i. 262;
pantheistic cosmology, i. 263 ; migra-
tion of souls, i. 264.
Empei-ors, deification of Roman, ii. 165.
Empiricism of the Epicureans, i. 358.
Ennius, a Roman poet, his attitude to-
wards the Roman religion, ii. 26.
Eos, a Greek goddess, i. 98.
Ephesus, a city of Asia Minor, i. 13; its
cultus and temple of Artemis, i. 86.
Epibomius, a minister of the altar at the
Eleusinia, i. 177.
Epicharmus, a Greek philosopher, i. 286.
Epictetus, a Roman Stoic philosopher,
practical tendency of his philosophy,
its echoes in Christianity, ii. 128.
Epicurean, ideal of the wise man, i. 364.
Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, venerated
by his disciples, his teaching, canonic,
and empirism, i. 358 ; his physics, i.
359 ; atomism, his material doctrine of
the sod, i. 360 ; of the gods, i. 360 ;
his ethics and adoption of liberty, i. 362 ;
teaching in regard to bliss, i. 363.
Epimenides, the oldest of the Orphici,
i. 151.
Epoptse, the initiated in the Eleusinia,
i. 187.
Epopteia, the third leading division of
the Eleusinia, i. 184, 187.
Epulones, Roman priests, ii. 63.
Erinyes, Greek goddesses, i. 99.
Eriunios, title of Hermes, i. 167.
Eros, the orderer of the universe, and god
of love, i. 96.
Esmun, a son of Baal, i. 167.
Essenes, their rise, ii. 310 ; ascetic dis-
cipline, ii. 311 ; zeal for the law, and
purity, ii. 312, sq. ; worship of the sun,
ii. 314 ; ordinances, ii. 314 ; their posi-
tion towards the prevalent Judaism,
ii. 316.
Ethics, the, of Socrates, i. 275 ; of the
Cyrenaics, i. 304; of the Cynic and
Megarian schools, i. 3J6 ; of Plato, i.
322 ; Aristotle, i. 340 ; of the Greek
Stoics, i. 355; of the Epicureans, i. 362 ;
426
INDEX.
of the Persians, i. 404 ; of the Roman
Stoics, Seneca, ii. 125 ; Epictetus, ii.
128; Cicero, ii. 120.
Ethiopia, its history and general state of
civilisation, i. 48.
Etrusci, their gods and religion, ii. 1, sq.
Euclides, a Greek mathematician and
philosopher, i. 306.
Eudaimonism, a doctrine of the Cyrenaic
school, i. 304.
Euhemerus, the philosopher, his explana-
tion of the origin of the gods, i. 345.
Eumenides, or Erinnyes, i. 100.
Eunuchs at the Jewish court, ii. 344.
Euripides, the Greek poet, his expi'essions
about the gods, i. 287, sq
Evil, Greek views of, i. 294 ; Plato's, i.
321 ; Aristotle's, i. 340 ; Stoical (Greek),
i. 351 ; Stoical (Roman), Seneca's, ii.
126 ; Plutarch's, ii. 133 ; the later Pla-
tonists', ii. 153 ; doctrine of, in Old
Testament, ii. 387.
Exoleti, impure youths among the Ro-
mans, ii. 274.
Expiations for sin, extraordinary, by
blood, ii. 179.
Exposition of children, in Greece, ii. 246 ; P
in Rome, ii. 271. '
Ezra (Esdras), restorer and legislator of
the Jewish state, ii. 298.
Factions (or parties) among the Jews,
ii. 325.
Fall, the, as represented by the Greeks,
i. 295 ; by the Persians, i. 397 ; by the
holy Scripture, ii. 387.
Family gods (Penates) of the Greeks, i.
241 ; of the Etruscans, ii. 3 ; of the
Romans, ii. 59.
Family pedigree, importance of among
the Jews, ii. 338.
Fanatici, priests and priestesses of Bel-
lona, ii. 174 ; other possessed persons,
ii. 182.
Fast, nine days, of the mystse in the
Eleusinia, i. 186 ; in worship of Isis,
ii. 177.
Fast-days of the Jews, ii. 376.
Fata Scribunda, a Roman goddess, ii. 57.
Fatalism (see Destiny and Liberty), views
of, among Pharisees and Essenes, ii.
309.
Fate (see Destiny).
Faunus, Roman wood-god, and the Fauns,
ii. 37.
Feasts or festivals of the Greeks, i. 235 ;
of the Persians, i. 402 ; of the Romans,
ii. 92 sq. ; of the Jews, ii. 373 ; games
at, i. 238.
Februatio, a Roman festival, ii. 94.
Feciales, Roman priests, their functions,
ii. 74.
Female sex, its position and occupations
among the Greeks, i. 233, sq. ; among
the Romans, ii. 253, sq. ; among the
Jews, ii. 341 ; its profound debasement,
ii. 276.
Feralia, Roman festival of the dead, ii. 90.
Feriae, Roman festival -times, ii. 92.
Ferwers, a kind of guardian angels in the
Persian religion, i. 391.
Fetishes, rude representations of gods
among the Pelasgians, i. 69 ; among
the Romans, ii. 18 ; among the Ger-
mans, ii. 114.
Finnish race, i. 63.
Fire, holy to the Persians, i. 391, sq. ; of
Vesta, ii. 45, 71 ; the great fire of puri-
fication at the end of the world, i. 412.
Fire-worship of Hestia among the Greeks,
i. 72 ; of Vesta among the Romans,
ii. 45 ; of the Cabiri, i. 73 ; in Cappa-
docia, i. 378 ; a leading feature in the
Persian religion, i. 392 ; tradition as to
its origin, i. 382.
Flamines, Roman priests, peculiar ordi-
nances for, ii. 66.
Flocks and gardens, Roman gods of, ii. 55.
Flora, a Roman goddess, her worship,
ii. 55.
Floralia, a Roman festival, ii. 96.
Floras, Gessius, governor of Judea, ii.
409.
Fontus, a Roman god, ii. 36.
Fordicidia, a Roman festival, ii. 95.
Forgiveness of sins, in the Old Testament,
ii. 388.
Fornacalia, a Roman festival, ii. 94.
Fortuna, a Roman goddess, her nature
and cultus, ii. 47.
Fowls, method of divination from, ii. 105.
Freedmen in Rome, their prevalence
there, ii. 268.
Freedom of the individual in regard to
the state, according to the Greek idea,
ii. 220 ; according to the Roman idea,
ii. 251.
Free-will (or liberty), man's, not admitted
by Plato, i. 318 ; by Aristotle, i. 340 ;
the Stoics, i. 351 (compare pp. 350 and
291, sq.).
Fulguratores, Roman observers of light-
ning, ii. 102.
G^eolatry, worship of the earth, in gene-
ral, i. 67 (see Earth).
Gaia, Ga, or Ge, i. 70 (see Earth).
Gaion, i. 70.
Galatia, the Roman province of, i. 15.
Galilee, its inhabitants and most impor-
tant cities, i. 22.
Galli, the, mutilated priests of Cybele,
i. 376, ii. 178.
Gallia, Gaul, the Roman province, its
mixed population, and their character,
division and towns of, i. 27, sq.
Games and public spectacles, their ob-
scenity, religious acts, ii. 195.
Gauls, the, their character, their roman-
ising, i. 29 ; their religion, Druidism,
ii. 108.
Genii of the Etruscans, ii. 3, 62 ; of the
Romans, ii. 62.
Genius, indefinite nature of the idea of,
ii. 61.
German confederations, i. 59 ; character
and civilisation, i. 61 ; religious system,
ii. 113.
INDEX.
427
Germans, the, their different races, their
settlements in the Roman period, dis-
tinct from the Celts, their division into
three great branches, i. 59, sq.
Germany, in the time of the Romans, ex-
tent, division, and towns of, i. 33.
Gladiatorial games, their connection with
human sacrifice, ii. 86 ; universal among
the Romans, ii. 195; their origin and
spread, ii. 265.
God, according to the Pythagoreans, i.
255 ; according to the Mosaic law, ii.
380, sq. ; of Socrates, i. 276 ; of Plato,
i. 308; of Aristotle, i. 334; of the
Stoics, i. 349.
Gods, mother of the, the Idsean, her wor-
ship, ii. 178 (see Cybele).
Gods, the heathen, nature-powers, i. 65,
sq. ; allegorical interpretations of, by
Greek philosophers, i. 281, sq. ; by the
later Platonists, ii. 152, 3 ; views of
poets and historians upon the popular
gods, i. 284 ; of Aristophanes, i. 286 ;
Euripides, i. 287; Sophocles, i. 290;
Euhemerus of Sicily, i. 345 ; jealousy
of gods, i. 291 ; their position in re-
gard to fate, i. 291 ; blending of their
worship (theocrasy), i. ] 64, 342 ; grand
distinction of Asiatic and Greek, i. 373;
Jewish view of the heathen gods, ii. 384 ;
images of, at first very rude, i. 69, 240 ;
latterly very artistic, i. 240 ; consecra-
tion of, or Theopsea, i. 241, ii. 184 ; the
Penates, i. 241 ; images prayed to im-
mediately, i. 241 ; ii. 185 ; degrading
effect of, from their obscenity, ii. 196 ;
images of, their prohibition in the law
of Moses, ground and extension of this,
ii. 363, sq.
Gods, the Greek, system of polytheism,
its origin, i. 74 ; the Olympic system
of, i. 77.
Goetse, religious impostors, ii. 198, sq.
Golden age, Persian belief in, i. 397.
Gorgias, the Greek sophist, i. 271.
Government of the Romans, its character,
i. 41.
Governors, cruelty of Roman, in Judea,
ii. 409.
Grace divine, in the Old Testament, n.
388.
Graces, the Charites, Greek goddesses,
i. 98.
Grave, its importance in the eyes of Egyp-
tians, i. 463.
Great goddess (see Cybele).
Greater Armenia (see Armenia).
Greece, fall of, under Roman conquest,
i. 7 ; social and moral state of, ii. 217,
sq. ; demoralisation of, ii. 247.
Greek citizenship, ii. 217, sq. ; party con-
tests in, ii. 220 ; idea of freedom in
Greek state, ii. 220.
Greek international law, ii. 219.
Greek language and civilisation, i. 40 ;
spread and influence of, on India, i. 49 ;
on Egypt, i. 485 ; on the Jews, ii. 297 ;
on the Romans, particularly on their
religious system, ii. 18, 20, 25.
Greek philosophy, i. 247, sq.
Greek religion, its gods and their wor-
ship, i. 65-123.
Greeks, their hostility to barbarians, ii.
218 ; their aversion to work, ii. 224.
Groves, sacred, of the Gauls and Germans,
ii. 116.
Guardian spirits of the Greeks, i. 103.
Hades, Greek god of the lower world, i.
72-93 ; the lower world itself, Greek
notions of, ii. 145 ; Hebrew notions of,
ii. 389 (compare Bliss and Soul).
Hapi-Mou, an Egyptian god, i. 449.
Haran, i. 433 (see Charrse).
Har-Horus, an Egyptian god, i. 447.
Harpocrates, an Egyptian god, i. 447.
Haruspices, Roman inspectors of sacri-
fices for soothsaying purposes, ii. 72,
99, sq. ; diviners also from lightning,
ii. 102.
Hathor, the Egyptian goddess Aphrodite,
i. 451.
Hatred borne by the Heathens to the
Jews, ii. 409.
Heathenism, originated in the deification
of nature, i. 65; assumes a variety of
forms, i. 66 ; element-worship, astrola-
try, i. 66; gajolatry, i. 67.
Heathens, longing of the, for a saviour,
ii. 289.
Hebe, a Greek goddess, i. 97.
Hecate, a Greek goddess, signification of
her name, i. 101 ; the principal goddess
of the iEginetan mysteries, i. 175 ; her
appearance evoked by religious impos-
tures, ii. 199.
Hecatombs, among the Greeks, i. 230 ;
among the Romans, ii. 80.
Hedge of the law, ii. 299, 331, &c.
Hedonism, the doctrine of the Cyrenaics
concerning virtue and happiness, i.
304.
Hegesias, a Greek philosopher, his teach-
ing, i. 305.
Heliopolis, a city of Egypt, i. 19 ; (Baal-
bec) a city of Syria, i. 20.
Hellas and Hellenes (see Greece and
Hellenism, in the Roman empire, i. 40,
ii. 18, 25 ; in Egypt, i. 485 ; among
the Jews, ii. 297.
Helots, their legal position, ii. 229.
Heph^stos, the Greek god, his worship at
Lemnos, i. 73 ; at Athens, i. 170 ; his
nature, i. 91.
Hera, a Greek goddess, worshiped by the
Pelasgi under the form of a log, i. 71 ;
originally a nature - goddess, becomes
later the wife of Zeus, i. 79.
Heracles, the Greek national hero, i. 107 ;
the Lydian sun-god, i. 379 ; the Roman,
ii. 58."
Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, his pan-
theistic teaching, his contempt for the
popular religion, and his school, i. 252,
sq.
Herald, the, in his liturgical character at
the Eleusinia, i. 177.
Hercules, the Roman demi-god (see He-
racles).
428
INDEX.
Hermse, their form and origin, i. 71.
Hermaphrodite deities, first conception
of, i. 67 ; how to be accounted for among
the Egyptians, i. 440.
Hermes, a Greek god, honoured by the
Pelasgi under the form of a phallus,
god of fructification, i. 71.
Hermes, Cadmilos, i. 73; the Greek, i.
167, 169; the Egyptian, i. 445, 446,
448 ; the Koman Mercury, ii. 43.
Herod Agrippa I. becomes king of Pales-
tine, i. 22, ii. 323.
Herodotus, his relation to the Greek reli-
gion, i. 285.
Herod the Great, his character, i. 22 ;
his nomination as king of Judea, ii.
320 ; his heathen innovations, his
building of the Temple, and cruelties,
ii. 321, sq.
Heroes, demi-gods, their multitude,
power, and worship among the Greeks,
i. 104; their worship originally un-
known to the Romans, ii. 12.
Hero of Alexandria, his instructions how
to practise religious impostures, ii. 200.
Hesiod, the Greek poet, his theogony, its
relation to the Homeric, i. 75, 76.
Hestia, the Greek fire and hearth god-
dess, i. 72, 87 (see Vesta, ii. 45).
Hesus, a Gallic deity, ii. 112.
Hetairai, courtesans, at Corinth, i. 91 ;
their position and importance in Greece,
ii. 237.
Hierapolis, a Syrian city, famed for its
cultus of Atargatis, i. 20.
Hierodouloi, priestesses of the goddess
Ma in Cappadocia, i. 377 ; of Anahita,
i. 419 ; of Ammon, i. 473.
Hierophant, the priest of the Eleusinia,
i. 177 ; bound to perpetual continence,
i. 192.
High-priest of the Jews, his vestments,
ii. 355 ; his power, ii. 358 ; his deposi-
tion from office, ii. 327.
High-priesthood, Jewish, its design and
importance, i. 355.
Hillel, a Jewish doctor, his school, ii.
334.
Holiness, the scope of the law, an essen-
tial in the Jewish people, ii. 335.
Holocausts, burnt sacrifices of the Greeks,
i. 231.
Horn a, a drink, its effects and meaning,
i. 400, sq. ; the juice a means of immor-
tality, i. 401 ; a kind of communion,
i. 402.
Homa-sacrifice, the Persian, i. 400.
Homer, his relation to the Greek religion,
i. 75, 76.
Honover, the creative word, according to
the Persian religion, i. 386.
Horace, his religious views, ii. 138.
Hor-hat, an Egyptian god, i. 447.
Horoscope, idea of, ii. 209.
Horoscopi, Egyptian astrologers, i. 472.
Horus, an Egyptian god, i. 447.
Hours, Greek deities, i. 98.
Household gods (Lares, Penates) of the
Greeks, i. 241 ; their worship, i. 242 ;
of the Romans, ii. 59.
Hubal, an Arabian god, i. 435.
Human race, the origin of, according to
Greek myth, i. 296; Persian, i. 396,
sq. ; Greek and Roman philosophers'
notion, ii. 144 ; to holy Scripture, ii.
386.
Human sacrifice, among the Greeks, in
the worship of Dionysos, i. 74 ; of Posei-
don, i. 80 ; of Artemis, i. 85 ; its mean-
ing, i. 226, sq. ; annual, i. 228 ; in Ara-
bia, i. 435 ; at Carthage, i. 488 ; in the
worship of Faunus, Jupiter, &c, ii. 37,
85, 91 ; afterwards replaced by an un-
bloody substitute among the Romans,
ii. 85 ; remains of, in later times, ii. 86 ;
among the Gauls, ii. 110 ; magical,
ii. 214.
Hjn-canus, John, the Asmonee, i. 317.
Iacchos (see Dionysos).
Iberia, the modern Georgia, i. 43.
Idsean mother of the gods, her cultus, ii.'
178.
Ideas, Plato's doctrine of, ii. 308.
Idolatry of the Greeks and Romans, ii.
185 ; paid to stones, ii. 186.
Idols (see Gods).
Illyria, the Roman province of, i. 36.
Images (see Gods).
Immortality of the soul (see Soul).
Imperial religion, idea of, ii. 160, sq. ;
how it grew up, and stood towards
others, ii. 162.
Impiety (see Religion).
Implications, Greek, i. 224.
Impurity, in association with the heathen
worship in the temples, i. 377, 428, v
431, 432 ; ii 197 (see Paiderastia).
Incubation, what, i. 215.
India, division of, and first acquaintance
with, i. 49 ; general characteristics of
the people of, i. 52 ; system of castes,
i. 51 ; Brahmiuism and Buddhism, i.
51, 53 ; influence of the Greeks, i. 54.
Indigitamenta, ritual books of the Ro-
mans, ii. 15.
Inspection of entrails of victims, or extis-
picium, Greek, i. 207 ; Roman, ii. 100.
Instruction, system of, Greek, ii. 232 ;
Roman, ii. 279.
Insurrections of the Jews, ii. 410.
Intercourse, sexual, Jewish legislation
concerning, ii. 342.
Interest, Jewish law concerning, ii. 345.
Interpreters of oracles, i. 218 ; of the
Sibylline books, ii. 74.
Iris, a Greek goddess, ii. 98.
Isauria, the Roman province of, i. 15.
Isis, Egyptian goddess, her nature and
worship, i. 444 ; her festivals, i. 467, sq.;
her worship in Rome, ii. 174, 176.
Israel, kingdom of, its separation from
Judah, its fall, ii. 293.
Isthmian mysteries, i. 173.
Italy, its depopulation, i. 9 ; northern
favourably distinguished from middle
and southern, i. 10.
Izeds, the Persian genii, i. 390.
INDEX.
429
Jamnia, Sanhedrim and school there, ii.
416.
Jannseus, theAsmonee, ii. 318.
Janus, an Etruscan god, ii. 3 ; a Roman,
ii. 35 ; his temple, ii. 37.
Japan, civilised from China, i. 58.
Jasion, one of the Cabiri, i. 169.
Jason, or Jesus, buys the office of high-
priest, ii. 300.
Jehovah, a name of God, its meaning ii.
380.
Jealousy of the gods, i. 285.
Jerusalem in the Roman time, i. 23 ; de-
stroyed by Nabucodonosor, ii. 293 ; re-
built, ii. 295 ; factions in Jerusalem,
and their contests, ii. 412, sq.; conquest
of, by Titus, ii. 414.
Jewish law, ii. 335 ; priesthood, ii. 352,
sq. ; nazaritism, ii. 358 ; prophets, ii.
359 ; sacrifices, ii. 366 ; festivals, ii.
373 ; religious doctrines, ii. 377, sq.
Jewish state, its historical development,
ii. 291, sq.; parties and sects within it,
ii. 301, sq. ; the times of the Asmonees,
Hei-odians, and Roman supremacy, ii.
317, sq. ; corruption, ii. 410; decline
and fall, ii. 439, sq.
Jubilee. Jewish year of, ii. 350.
Judaea, or Palestine, i. 21 ; under the
Roman domination, i. 22 ; general de-
scription of the country, i. 22, 23.
Judah, the kingdom of, short sketch of
its history, ii. 291 ; kings of, their estab-
lishment, ii. 292 ; their position in re-
gard to the law, ii. 337.
Judaism among the pagans, ii. 181.
Judges of the dead, among the Greeks, i.
175 ; Egyptians, i. 461 ; Etruscan, ii. 3.
Juno, Etruscan goddess, ii. 2 ; Roman
goddess, ii. 48 ; her surnames, ii. 49.
Jupiter, Etruscan god, ii. 2 ; Roman god,
ii. 39.
Jurisprudence, Jurisprudents, wanting
among the Greeks, ii. 223.
Jus gentium, jus privatum (see Roman
law), ii. 251.
Kaiomorts, the first man according to
the Persian myth, i. 396 ; the first also
to rise again, i. 411.
Kings, their apotheosis in Egypt, i. 486.
Kymri (see Cimri).
Labour, aversion to, among the nations
of antiquity, and the Greeks in particu-
lar, ii. 224.
Lagida?, their relation to Egypt, i. 485 ;
their religion, their deification, i. 487.
Laodicea, a city of Syria, i. 20.
Lares, Etruscan genii, ii. 3 ; Roman genii
distinct from Penates, ii. 60 ; their dif-
ferent kinds, ii. 61.
Larentalia, a Roman festival, ii. 98.
Latin language, its spread and preva-
lence, i. 40.
Laureacum, a city of Noricum, i. 35.
Laverna, a Roman goddess, ii. 54.
Law, the Mosaic, the principle of love in
it, ii. 335 ; what it embraces, ii. 336,
sq. ; right of interpretation, ii. 337 ;
spirit of fidelity to the, ii. 332; esteem
for teachers of, ii. 299.
Lectisternia, banquets of the god3 arnon^-
the Romans, ii. 81.
Legends, the holy, in the mysteries, i.
Lemnian mysteries, i. 170.
Lemures and Lemuria among the Ro-
mans, ii. 91. j
Lernsean mysteries, i. 173.
Lesbos, the island of, L 17.
Letts and Lithuanians, i. 63.
Leucippus, a Greek atomist, i. 266.
Levana, a Roman goddess, ii. 53.
Levites, the Jewish, their designation,
privileges, and duties, ii. 351.
Liber and Libera, Roman deities, ii. 51.
Liberalia, Roman festival, ii. 94.
Liberty (see Free-will).
Libitina, a Roman goddess of the lower
world, ii. 52.
Lightning, a symbol of Zeus, i. 70 ; ac-
cording to Etruscan teaching, ii. 6 ; Ro-
man view of, ii. 105 ; observers of, ii.
102, 105.
Lithuanians, i. 63.
Liturgical personages of the Eleusinian
mysteries, i. 177.
Lua, the wife of Saturn, ii. 38.
Luceres, the, an element of the Roman
people, ii. 8.
Lucian on the future state, ii. 146 ; the
schools of philosophy, ii. 158 ; the im-
morality of the myths, ii. 185.
Lucretius, his philosophical didactic poem,
ii. 119.
Lucumones, the, an Etrurian noble fa-
mily, ii. 4.
Lugdunensis, the Roman province of, in
Gaul ; its capital, i. 31.
Lugdunum, Lyons, i. 31.
Luna, Roman goddess of the moon, ii.
41 ; her temple in Rome, distinct from
Diana, ii. 50.
Lupercalia, a Roman feast, ii. 37, 94.
Luperci, the most ancient of the Roman
priests, ii. 68.
Lupercus, a title of Faunus, ii. 37.
Lustrations, religious purifications among
the Romans, ii. 88.
Lutetia, Paris, i. 32.
Lycia, the Roman province of, its cities,
i. 14.
Lydia, the Roman province of, i. 13.
Lydians, their character debased by their
worship, i. 378.
Ma, the principal goddess in Cappadocia
and Pontus, i. 377 ; her worship by the
Romans, ii. 174.
Maccabees, the last, i. 22 ; their rise, ii.
301.
Macedon, the Roman province of, i. 37.
Magadha, the Indian kingdom of, i. 49.
Magic, its connexion with pagan state-
worships, ii. 210 ; with the Pythagorean
and Platonic philosophy, ii. 211 ; media
employed in, ii. 213 ; human sacrifice
in, ii. 214.
Magism, or Magianism, origin, and rela-
430
INDEX.
tion to Persian dualism, i. 382 ; com-
bated by Persian kings, i. 384 ; its
power and science, i. 404.
Magnetism, in connexion with the oracles,
i. 215.
Mamurus, probably Mars, and the pro-
cession of the Mamuralia, ii. 68.^
Maia, a Roman goddess of death, ii. 44.
Mana Geneta, a Roman goddess of birth,
ii. 57.
Manat, an Arabian god, i. 435.
Mania, a Roman goddess of death, ii. 53.
Manilius, a Roman poet, his pantheistic
teaching, ii. 136.
Mannus, god and progenitor of the Ger-
man race, ii. 115.
Mantic art, the (see Soothsaying). _
Mantus, a god of the lower world, ii. 3.
Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor
and philosopher, ii. 129 ; his supersti-
tion, ii. 175.
Marmarica, the Roman province of in
Africa, i. 24.
Mars, Roman god of war, ii. 41 .
Massilia, Marseilles, a seat of Greek civi-
lisation, i. 31.
Mater Matuta, a Latin goddess, ii. 54.
Materialism of the Atomists, i. 266 ; of the
Sophists, i. 271 ; of the Peripatetics, i.
346, 369 ; of the Stoics, i. 348, 369 ; of
the Epicureans, i. 359.
Mathematical philosophy of the Pytha-
goreans, i. 254.
Matralia, a Roman festival, ii. 96.
Matrons, Celtic cultus of, ii. 112.
Manubiae, kinds of lightning, ii. 6.
Marriage, its sanctity among the Ger-
mans, i. 61 ; position in the Persian
religion, i. 405 ; how celebrated by Ro-
mans, ii. 80, 253; monogamy among
the Greeks, ii. 233 ; and Romans, ii.
253 ; a duty, ii. 234 ; forbidden by the
Essenes, ii. 314 ; law of, lex Julia,
enacted by Augustus, ii. 25S ; among
Greeks, ii. 234, sq. ; among Romans,
ii. 253, sq. ; among Jews, ii. 339.
Mauritania, the Roman province of, i. 25.
Maximus of Tyre, a Platonic philosopher,
ii. 150.
Meat- and drink-offerings among the
Jews, ii. 371.
Meditrinalia, a Roman wine- festival, ii.
Megalesia, a Roman festival, ii. 95.
Megarian school of philosophy, i. 306.
Melicertes, a Corinthian mystery-god, i.
173.
Melissus, an Eleatic philosopher, i. 262.
Melkarth, a Tyrian god, i. 427.
Memphis, capital of lower Egypt, i. 438,
439, &c.
Men, a Phrygian deity, i. 160.
Mendes, an Egyptian deity, i. 443.
Mentu, an Egyptian deity, i. 440.
Mercury, his worship, ii. 43.
Meschia and Meschiane, the first human
pair according to the Persian myth, i.
396 ; their resurrection, i. 411.
Mesopotamia, its fate in general, i. 45.
Messenians, their chief deities, i. 121.
Messias, the claims of the Jews upon the,
ii. 328 ; expectation of, by Jews, ii. 328 ;
by Romans, ii. 289 ; prophecies of, ii.
391, sq.
Metoeci, metics, Greek domiciled settlers,
ii. 226, 227.
Michael the archangel, ii. 385.
Mimes, their demoralising influence among
the Greeks and Romans, ii. 194.
Minerva, a Roman goddess, her nature
and worship, her palladium, ii. 46.
Minos, a judge of the dead, i. 175.
Mistletoe, its high repute and use among
the Druids, ii. 111.
Mithra, or Mithras, one of the Persian
Izeds, his nature and office, i. 390 ; as
mediator, his relation to Ormuzd, i.
413 ; as sun-god, i. 413 ; his mysteries,
i. 415 ; conductor of souls, i. 416 ; de-
grees of initiation, for admission to his
mysteries, i. 416.
Mnevis, one of the sacred bulls of the
Egyptians, i. 458.
Moderatus, a Greek philosopher, ii. 149.
Moesia, the Roman province of, i. 38.
Moloch, his cultus of child-sacrifice among
the Syrians, i. 426 ; at Carthage, i.
488.
Moirai, the Greek goddesses of destiny, i.
99.
Moon, the, worshiped as a male god,
Lunus, i. 378.
Moon-goddess (see Luna).
Mother, the great, a Phrygian goddess,
i. 374 ; also a Lydian and Bithynian,
i. 376.
Mountain-peaks held sacred to Zeus, i.
70.
Mulciber, a surname of Vulcan, ii. 42.
Mummies, their treatment in Egypt, and
guardian-god Anubis, i. 463.
Mundus, a cavity dedicated to the gods
of the lower world, ii. 52.
Muses, i. 100.
Musonius, a Roman philosopher, ii. 127.
Mut, an Egyptian goddess, i. 450.
Mutilation, self, of heathen - priests, i.
376 ; ii. 178, &c.
Mutinus-Tutunus, a Roman phallus-god,
ii. 56.
Mylitta, a chief-goddess in Babylon, i.
422.
Mysia, the Roman province of, i. 13.
Mystagogues, their office, i. 127.
Mysteries, nature of, in Greece, i. 125,
sq.; how estimated by poets and phi-
losophers, i. 131, sq. ; by Christian
apologists, i. 136 ; their effects, i. 195,
197 ; in Persia, i. 415 ; in Egypt, i.
480 ; in Rome, ii. 44.
Mysteriousness in the Greek religious sys-
tem, i. 127.
Myths, allegorical interpretation of, by
Greeks, i. 282 ; demoralising influence
of, i. 283 ; obstinate clinging of people
to, ii. 192, 193 ; foreign to the original
Roman religious system, ii. 11 ; effect
of Greek myths on Roman religion, ii.
12 ; mimic representations of, ii. 194.
INDEX.
431
N.-ENIA, the personified death-wail, ii. 53.
Nausea, a goddess of war (West Asiatic ?),
i. 420.
Narbonensis, a Roman province in Gaul,
i. 30.
Nature, deification of, origin of heathen-
ism, i. 65.
Nazaritism, the Jewish order of monks,
ii. 358.
Neben (Saben ?), an Egyptian goddess of
births, i. 450.
Necromancy, ii. 213.
Neighbour, love of, in the Mosaic law, i.
344.
Neith, the Egyptian goddess, personified
matter, i. 439, 449 ; her inscription at
Lais, i. 439.
Nemesis, a Greek goddess, i. 99.
Neo-Csesarea, capital of Pontus, i. 12.
Neo-Pythagoreans, school of, ii. 148.
Nephtys, an Egyptian goddess, i. 451.
Neptune, ii. 43.
Nereids, i. 80.
Nei-eus, i. 80.
Nerthus, German goddess of earth, ii.
115.
New Carthage, i. 24.
Nicomachus, the philosopher, ii. 149.
Nicomedia, capital of Bithynia, i. 12.
Nile-god, i. 449.
Ninive, i. 45.
Nona and Decima, ii. 57.
Nonas Caprotinse, a Roman festival, ii. 96.
Noricum, the Roman province of, i. 35.
Novensiles, Etrurian deities, ii. 2.
Nub, a surname of Typhon, i. 452.
Nubia, the kingdom of, i. 48.
Nudipedalia, pilgrimages of Roman ma-
trons, ii. 78.
Numa, the Roman king and founder of
religion, ii. 16 ; his spurious books, ii.
28.
Numbers, doctrine of Pythagorean, ii. 254.
Numenius, the Platonist, ii. 130.
Numidia, the Roman province of, i. 24.
Obscene paintings and statues, ii. 196.
Oceanos, i. 80.
(Enomaus against the oracles, ii. 205.
Olympia, plain of, the religious centre of
Greece, i. 118.
Olympic games, i. 236 ; oracle, i. 215 ;
republic of twelve gods, i. 77.
Opalia, a Roman festival, part of Satur-
nalia, ii. 98.
Opeconsivia, a Roman festival, ii. 97.
Ops, wife of Saturn, ii. 38.
Oracle system of the Greeks, attempts to
explain their reputation, i. 209, sq.
Oracles in Asia-Minor, i. 214 ; revival of
several of them, ii. 202 ; fresh longing
after, ii. 205 ; explanations of their
decay, ii. 204 ; writings against, ii. 205.
Orgies in the cultus of Cybele, i. 375 ;
see the cultus of Dionysos in the Ro-
man mysteries, ii. 28 ; in the mystery-
worship of the Bona Dea, ii. 44 ; of
Bellona at Rome, ii. 174 ; of Aphro-
dite, ii. 192. .,
Ormuzd, god of the Arians, i. 384 ; his
names and nature, i. 385, sq. ; his rela-
tion to Zervan and Ahriman, i. 387, sq.
Orpheotelests, i. 150, 157.
Orpheus and the Orphic mysteries, i. 138.
sq.; the Orpheus of iEschvlus, i. 142,
144 ; Orphic worship of Dionysos, i'.
139, sq. ; Orphic mystery-school, i. 144,
sq.; Orphic mode of life, i. 151 ; con-
nexion with the Dionysos worship, i.
154 ; with the Essene rule of life, ii. 31].
Osiris, his relation to the Orphic Dionysos'
i. 144, sq.
Osiris, the Egyptian, i. 444, sq. ; their
judge of the dead, i. 461 ; his festivals,
i. 468.
Osiris-bull, sacrifice of the, i. 474.
Ovid, the Roman poet, his religious ideas,
ii. 137.
Paiderastia, a vice common to the
Greeks with most of the nations of an-
tiquity, ii. 238 ; its peculiarly national
form and extent among the Greeks, ii.
238 ; opinions of philosophers upon it, ii.
240 ; causes and effects of it, ii. 243 ; a
joint cause of the decay of Persia, i. 405 ;
its deep hold on Roman society, ii.
273.
Pales, a Roman god of the flocks, ii. 55.
Palestine, becomes a Roman province,
divisions of it, i. 21 .
Palilia, Roman festival of Pales, ii. 55, 95.
Palladium, the image of Minerva at Rome,
ii. 47.
Pallas (see Athene).
Pamphylia, the Roman province of, i. 14.
Pan, his form and cultus among the
Greeks, i. 97 ; resemblance to the Ro-
man Faunus, ii. 37.
Pannonia, the Roman province of, i. 36.
Pantomimes (see Mimes).
Paphlagonia, the Roman province of, i.
11.
Paphos, old, renowned for its worship of
Aphrodite, i. 16.
Paradise, belief of the Persians in, i. 397.
Parcaa, Roman goddesses of destiny, ii. 57.
Parentalia, Roman festival of the dead,
ii. 90.
Parmenides, the Eleatic philosopher, his
doctrine, i. 260.
Parthia, kingdom of, i. 44.
Parties in Jerusalem, and their contests,
ii. 412.
Paschal festival, the Jewish, ii. 373.
Pascht, the Egyptian Artemis, i. 450 ;
her festival at Bubastis, i. 469.
Patricians in Rome, their religious pre-
rogatives, ii. 10.
Patulcius, a surname of Janus, ii. 36.
Pelasgi, their settlements and gods, i. 68.
Penates, Etrurian house-gods (Lares), ii.
2 ; Roman house-gods, ii. 61.
Penance, in the Obi Testament, ii. 38S ;
works of, among the Persians, ii. 407.
Pentapolis, the Roman province in Africa,
i. 24.
Pentecost, the Jewish harvest-festival, ii.
374.
Pergamum, a city of Mysia, i. 13.
432
INDEX.
Peripatetic school, its materialistic bias,
i. 346, 369.
Persephone, a Greek goddess, i. 92 ; ori-
ginal meaning of her name, i. 73.
Persian domination, its attitude towards
the Egyptian religion, i. 484.
Persian religion, its founder, Zoroaster,
i. 380, sq. ; teaching about the gods,
i. 385 ; demonology, i. 390 ; element-
worship, i. 391 ; notions of world-his-
tory, i. 394 ; anthropology, i. 396 ; sa-
crificial system, i. 399 ; purifications,
i. 406 ; ethics and marriage, i. 404 ;
eschatology, i. 408 ; myth and worship
of Mithras, i. 412, sq.
Phallus, a symbol of Hermes and fructi-
fication, i. 69 ; of Dionysos, i. 95 ; ex-
hibition of it in the Eleusinia, i. 189;
in the festivals of Osiris, its meaning,
i. 482; at the Liberalia in Lavinium, ii.
51 ; a symbol of Priapus, ii. 56.
Pharaohs, Egyptian kings, their rich sa-
crificial offerings, i. 475 ; their deifica-
tion, i. 486.
Pharisees (Scribes), the representatives
and doctors of the Jewish nation, ii.
304, sq. ; extension of the law b}r, ii.
308 ; doctrine of, concerning free-will
and providence, ii. 310 ; their victory
over the Sadducees, ii. 319.
Pherecydes of Syros, author of a cos-
mogony, i. 248.
Philippi, city of, i. 37.
Philo, the Jewish philosopher, ii. 398, sq. ;
his expectation of a Messias, ii. 331 ; his
relation to pagan philosophy, his view
of heathendom, ii. 400; derivation of
Greek wisdom from Moses, ii. 400 ; his
doctrine of the Deity, ii. 401 ; matter,
ii. 401 ; dualism, ii. 401 ; the Logos,
ii. 403, sq. ; angels, and the souls of
men, state after death, composition of
the soul, ii. 405 ; the Fall, and original
sin, ii. 407 ; his ethics, ii. 407 ; teaching
about grace, ecstasies, his Messianic-
chiliastic views, &c. ii. 408.
Philosophers, schools of, their position
and influence, their decay, ii. 155-160.
Philosophy, Greek, i. 248, sq. ; its rise
from Hesiod's theogony, i. 249 ; its re-
lations to the popular religion, i. 346 ;
decay, i. 347, 370 ; Roman, ii. 118, sq.;
its impotence to check the corruption
of morals, ii. 286.
Phlya, the mysteries at, i. 176.
Phoenicia, the Roman province of, gene-
ral description of the country, i. 21.
Phoenician worship of the gods, i. 432.
Phrygia, Roman province of, its cities and
population, i. 14.
Phrygian gods and their cultus, i. 374.
Phthah, chief god at Memphis, i. 441.
Phuphluns, an Etrurian god, ii. 2.
Pindar, a Greek poet, his relations with
mythology, i. 284; his distinct notion
of a retributive state after death, i.
301.
Pisidia, a Roman province, i. 15.
Planets, astrological doctrine concerning
their influence, ii. 208.
Plato, his decision upon the myths, i. 282 ;
passes for a son of Apollo, i. 284 ; uni-
versality of his genius, i. 307 ; his phi-
losophy, on God, i. 308; on ideas, i.
308 ; on the world and the world-soul,
i. 310, sq. ; on the star-gods, i. 313 ;
anthropology of, i. 314 ; on the pre-
existence and immortality of the soul, i.
316 ; his determinism, i. 318 ; his proofs
of immortality, i. 319 ; his migration
of souls, i. 320; on the future state,
evil, i. 321 ; his ethics, their connexion
with the doctrine of ideas, i. 322 ; on
death, i. 323 ; his ideal republic, i. 323 ;
on exposition of children, i. 325 ; his
position towards the popular religion
and myths, i. 325 ; his relation to
Christianity, i. 328 ; on paiderastia,
ii. 240.
Platonism, the later, ii. 148 ; among the
Romans, ii. 129 ; of Plutarch, ii. 131.
Plebs, the Roman, their religious position
towards the patricians, ii. 9 ; their ad-
mission to the pontificate and augurate,
ii. 23.
Pliny, his pantheistic views of religion,
ii. 138.
Plutarch, his philosophy, ii. 131 ; on the
myths, ii. 132 ; on immortality, ii.
145.
Pluto, god of the lower world, Dis com-
pared to, ii. 52.
Poets, Greek, Homer and Hesiod, found-
ers of the Hellenic religion, i. 75 ; Ro-
man, their religious views, ii. 119, 136,
sq.
Politics, Roman, i. 39.
Polyandria, established by law in Sparta,
ii. 235.
Polvbius on the Roman religion, ii. 135,
136.
Polygamy among the Jews, ii. 339.
Polytheism, its origin, i. 65.
Pomona, Roman goddess, ii. 56.
Pompey conquers Jerusalem, ii. 319.
Pontifex Maximus, the heathen Roman,
ii. 64.
Pontifices, Roman priests, ii. 64 ; their
office, ii. 65.
Pontus, Roman province, its population,
i. 12 ; worship, i. 377.
Poor, their mastery over the rich in
Athens, ii. 223 ; condition among the
Jews, ii. 334 ; treatment by rich in
Rome, ii. 277, sq.
Populifugium, a Roman festival, ii. 96.
Portunalia, a Roman festival, ii. 97.
Poseidon, a god of the sea, seat of his
worship, i. 80.
Povei-ty overpowering in Rome, ii. 270.
Preexistence of the soul according to the
Pythagoreans, i. 258 ; according to
Plato, i. 316 ; according to Cicero, ii.
142, 143.
Priapus, the Greek god, i. 97; the Ro-
man god, ii. 56.
Priesthood, Eleusinian obliged to absti-
nence, i. 192 ; the Greek generally, i.
203 ; Persian, i. 405 ; Syro- Phoenician,
i. 425, sq. ; Egyptian, i. 470, sq. ; Ro-
INDEX.
433
man, ii. 63 ; Gallic, ii. 113 ; German,
ii. 116 ; Jewish, ii. 352.
Priestesses among- the Greeks, i. 204, 205.
Priests, impostures practised by, ii. 198 ;
consecration of, among the Jews, ii.
353 ; consecration of Jewish high-priest,
ii. 357.
Privatum jus, the Roman (civil law of
individuals), ii. 249.
Processions in the festivals of Dionysos,
i. 155.
Prodicus, of Ceos, on the gods, i. 271 ;
punished with death as an atheist, i.
273.
Prodigies, the means to expiate them
taken by the Romans, ii. 99.
Proletariate in Rome, ii. 270.
Prometheus, myth of, in vEschylus, i. 297.
Prophets, the Egyptian priests called, i.
471 ; the Jewish, their energy and zeal,
ii. 361 ; false, ii. 411.
Proselytes, two classes of, among the
Jews, ii. 366.
Proserpine, Roman goddess of the lower
world, ii. 52.
Prostitution, in connexion with heathen
worship, in Lydia, i. 380 ; in Armenia,
i. 418; in Babylonia, i. 422; in Syria,
i. 428 ; in Egypt, i. 473 ; in connexion
with paiderastia, ii. 238, sq.
Protagoras, the Greek sophist, i. 270;
persecuted as an atheist, i. 273.
Proteus, i. 80.
Provinces of the Roman empire, their
condition generally, i. 6, sq.
Psychagogues, or necromancers, i. 216.
Psychology (see Souls).
Psychomanteia, i. 216.
Ptolemies, their relation to the Egyptian
religion, i. 485 ; their deification, i.
486.
Public spectacles, ii. 281 .
Punishment, Jewish system of, ii. 347.
Punishments for religious crimes among
the Greeks, i. 243 ; in a future state,
according to Egyptians, i. 466 ; to Pin-
dar and the Orphici, i. 301 ; to Plut-
arch and the later Greeks, ii. 145, sq.
Purification and purity, religious, in the
Eleusinia, i. 191; in the Greek religion,
i. 219 ; in the Persian, i. 406 ; of the
Egyptian priests, i. 473 ; of the Romans,
ii. 82, 88, 179 ; media of purification to
the Persians, i. 404; theEssenes, ii. 313.
Purification, sacrifices of, among Romans,
ii 88 ; among Jews, ii. 369, 375.
Purim, Jewish festival of, ii. 375.
Pyrrho, a sceptic philosopher, i. 365.
Pythagoras, his initiation into the Orphic
mysteries, i. 151 ; his association, i.
254 ; his metempsychosis, i. 258.
Pythagoreans, their connexion with the
Orphici, i. 150 ; their manner of life,
i. 151 ; their philosophy, i. 254. _
Pythagoreans, new, ii. 148 ;* their con-
nexion with magic, ii. 211 ; with the
Essenes, ii. 316.
Pythia, the Delphic prophetess, i. 210.
Quietism of the Buddhists, i. 54.
VOL. II.
Quinquatria, a Roman festival, ii. 94.
Quirinus, a surname of Janus, ii. 37.
Quirites, a name of the Romans, ii. 7.
Ra, Egyptian sun-god, i. 138.
Rabbinism, ii. 416.
Ram, an attribute of the Egyptian god
Amnon, i. 441.
Ramnes, ii. 7.
Religion, imperial, the Roman, ii. 160-
162 (see Imperial).
Religion, its relation to philosophy among
the Greeks, i. 346, 369, sq. ; mixed up
with superstition, ii. 170 ; its decay
among the Romans, ii. 174 ; crimes
against, and their punishment, among
the Greeks, i. 243 ; among the Romans,
i. 163.
Religious tolerance of the Greeks, ii. 164 ;
of the Romans, ii. 162.
Religiousness of the Greek philosophers
and poets, i. 281 ; of the Roman poets
and historians, ii. 135.
Resolutions, the eighteen, drawn up in
the house of the Zealot Eleazar, ii. 412.
Resurrection, Persian doctrine of, i. 409,
411 ; Hebrew doctrine of, ii. 390.
Rhadamanthus, a judge of the dead, i.
175. -
Rhsetia, Roman province of, i. 35.
Rhea, Samothracian mystery - goddess,
i. 167.
Rhodes, island of, its population, i. 16.
Rites, sacrificial, in use among Greeks,
i. 232 ; among Romans, ii. 78.
Robigalia, a Roman festival, ii. 95.
Roman empire, its extent and population,
i. 1 ; army, i. 4 ; language (Latin), i. 40.
Romanising of different people, i. 39.
Roman law, of the citizen, ii. 249 ; of the
stranger, ii. 251 ; of families and of
marriage, ii. 252.
Roman national character, ii. 248, sq.
Roman philosophy, ii. 118, sq.
Roman religious system, historical deve-
lopment, ii. 7, sq. ; the several gods,
ii. 35, sq. ; the priesthood, ii. 63, sq. ;
forms of worship, ii. 75, sq. ; empire-
religion, ii. 160 ; apotheosis, ii. 165 ;
superstition, ii. 170 ; decay of, ii. 173,
sq.
Roman slavery, ii. 259, sq.
Rome, the city of, its splendour and
population, its social and moral state,
i. 5 ; ii. 248, sq. ; its influence, and the
gentle nature of its rule in the heart of
the empire, i. 41.
Sabazia, private mysteries of the Greeks,
i. 201.
Sabazius, his worship in Phrygia, i. 376.
Sabbath, law of Jewish, ii. 349.
Sabbatical year, ii. 350.
Sabines, an element of the Roman people,
ii. 7.
Sac*, kingdom of the, i. 50.
Sacsean festival in Persia, i. 419.
Sacrifice, system of Greek, i. 225, sq. ;
Persian, i. 399, sq. ; Egyptian, i. 474,
sq. ; Roman, ii. 78, sq. ; Gallic, ii. 110 ;
FF
434
INDEX.
German, ii. 116 ; Jewish, ii. 366 ; rites
of Greek, i. 233 ; Persian, i. 402 ; Egyp-
tian, i. 474 ; Eoman, ii. 80 ; Jewish, ii.
367; cessation of Jewish, ii. 415; in-
spection of victim at Greek, i. 207 ;
at Roman, ii. 100 ; banquets of, Greek,
i. 233 ; Persian, i. 402 ; Roman, ii. 84 ;
Jewish, ii. 370 ; cakes of, Roman, ii. 84 ;
king of, Roman, ii. 63, 66.
Sadducees, origin of, and doctrines, ii.
302 ; position towards people, ii. 303.
Sais, a city of Egypt, the famous inscrip-
tion of the goddess Neith at, i. 439.
Salii, Roman priests of Mars, ii. 63.
Samaria, country and city of, i. 23 ; sepa-
ration from Judah, and fall of, ii. 293.
Samaritans, their medley religion and en-
mity against the Jews, i. 23, ii. 295.
Samos, island of, i. 17.
Samothrace, mysteries on the island of,
i. 163, sq.
Samuel, prophet and founder of schools
of the prophets, ii. 359.
Sancus Fidius, a Roman god, ii. 58.
Sandon, Heracles, sun-god, his worship
in Lydia, i. 379.
Sardinia under Roman rule, i. 11.
Sarmatia, Sarmatians and their settle-
ments, i. 62. »
Satan, in the Old Testament, ii. 385.
Sate, an Egyptian goddess, i. 452.
Saturn, his nature and cultus, ii. 38.
Saturnalia, a Roman festival, ii. 97.
Saul, king of the Jews, ii. 292.
Schammai, a Jewish teacher, his doctrine
and school, ii. 334.
Scheol or Sheol, the under world, ii. 389.
School education among the Greeks, ii.
231 ; among the Romans, ii. 279.
Schools of philosophy (see Philosophy).
Scribes (see Pharisees).
Scriptures, the holy, of the Jews, ii. 377.
Seb, an Egyptian god, i. 452.
Sebaste, city of, earlier Samaria, i. 23.
Sects, religious, of the Brahmins, i. 51.
Seleucia, its greatness and flourishing con-
dition, i. 47.
Self-mutilation of Galli, i. 375.
Semiramis, i. 424.
Seneca, the Roman philosopher, of Spa-
nish descent, i. 27 ; his philosophy, ii.
125 ; on God and the world, on man,
ii. 126; on the popular religion, ii. 127.
Sephoris, a city in Galilee, i. 23.
Seraphim, ii. 385.
Serapis, an Egyptian god, introduction of
his worship there, i. 485 : into Rome,
ii. 178.
Scepticism, its aim, ataraxia, i. 365 ; its
definition according to Sextus, i. 366.
Sceptics, i. 365, 369.
Serpent, the, in Paradise, ii. 385.
Serpents, symbolical meaning of, in the
mysteries, i. 183 ; fed by the Vestals,
ii. 71 ; silver ones in the Isis worship,
ii. 177.
Serpent's-egg, the so-called, among the
( Druids, ii. 112.
Sethlans, the Vulcan of the Etruscans,
ii. 2.
Sex, double, of heathen deities, i. 70. 71,
400.
Sextius, Quintus, a Roman philosopher, ii.
123.
Sextus, a Greek philosopher, his defini-
tion of scepticism, i. 366.
Sibylline books, their appearance, and
their use, ii. 106 ; their interpretation,
ii. 23, 74.
Sichem, a city of Samaria, i. 23.
Sicily, condition of the island under the
Romans, i. 10.
Sigillaria, a Roman festival, ii. 98.
Silence adjoined on the mystse, i. 194.
Silvanus, a Roman god (same as jFau-
nus ?), ii. 37 ; god of the woods, ii. 53.
Sin (see Evil).
Sirmium, a city of Pannonia, i. 36.
Slaves and slavery among Greeks, ii. 226 ;
views of, and particularly Aristotle's,
ii. 227 ; their numbers, ii. 227 ; treat-
ment, ii. 230 ; morals, 230 ; disadvan-
tages of slavery, 231 ; among the Ro-
mans, slave-law, ii. 259, sq. ; number
of slaves, ii. 262 ; effects of" slavery on
the free population, ii. 267 ; their con-
dition among the Jews, ii. 343.
Slaves, dwellings and manner of life of
the Slave tribes, i. 62.
Smyrna, i. 13.
Socharis, an Egyptian god, i. 442.
Socrates, i. 273 ; his personal appear-
ance, (274 ; ethics, 275 ; psychology
and theology, 276 ; relation to the po-
pular religion, 277 ; attraction of his
teaching, 273 ; impeachment, 279 ;
death, 280; views of immortality, 303;
bearing towards paiderastia, ii. 240.
Socratic schools, i. 304.
Sol, the Roman god, ii. 40.
Solomon, king of the Jews, ii. 292.
Soothsaying (see Divination).
Somnambulism in connexion with the ora-
cles, i. 216.
Sopherim or Jewish teachers of the law,
ii. 209 ; their relation to the Pharisees,
ii. 304.
Sophists, their tendency blamed by Plato,
i. 270 ; their atheism and reaction
against, i. 271-73.
Sophocles, his relation to religion, i. 290-
293.
Sosiosch, the Persian redeemer and pro-
phet, i. 411.
Sotion. Seneca's master, ii. 123.
Soul, the human, its immortality and state
after death, the Pythagoreans, i 256 ;
the Eleusinia, i. 196 ; the Orphici and
Pindar, i. 301 ; Herodotus, i. 302; So-
crates, i. 303 ; Plato, i. 304, 318 ; Aris-
totle, i. 338; belief of the Persians,
i. 409 ; of the Egyptians, i. 462 ; of the
Druids, ii. 110 ; of Cicero, ii. 141 ; of
Plutarch, ii. 145 ; doctrine of its mate-
riality and dissolution, the Atomists,
i. 267, 301 ; Ionians, i. 301 ; Eleats, i.
302 ; the elder Stoics, i. 352 ; the later,
ii. 139 ; the Peripatetics, i. 346 ; the
Epicureans, i. 360 ; general unbelief,
ii. 143 ; comfortlessness, ii. 146.
INDEX.
435
Souls, festival of, among: the Persians,
i.403.
Spain, Eoman province of, i. 25.
Spanish-Eoman school, names of its poets
and philosophers, i. 27.
Spartan state, its constitution, ii. 222 ; its
legislation on marriage, ii. 235.
Spectacles, public Greek and Eoman, ii.
195.
Speusippus, Greek philosopher, i. 330.
Sramins, an Indian sect, i. 51.
Stars, the, divine and having souls, ac-
cording to the teaching of Plato, i. 313 ;
of the later Platonists and Pythago-
reans, ii. 150, sq. ; of Aristotle," i. 336;
have a purifying influence, according
to the Persians, i. 394 ; their worship
generally, i. 66 ; their worship by the
Chaldeans in particular, i. 422.
State, relation of individual to the, among
the Greeks, ii. 221 ; among the Eomans,
ii. 259 ; Plato's ideal, i. 323.
Stoicism, Greek, its founder, i. 348 ; ma-
terial tendency, i. 348, 369 ; its doc-
trines, i. 349 ; position towards the po-
pular religion, i. 353 ; ethics, i. 354 ;
errors in morals, self-esteem, i. 356 ;
suicide, i. 357 ; Eoman, ii. 123, sq. ; its
material pantheism, ii. 124 ; doctrine of
immortality, ii. 140, sq.
Stoics, the later, and Eoman moral cor-
ruption, ii. 284, sq.
Stolists, an oi-der in the Egyptian priest-
hood, i. 471.
Stones, worship of, among the Pelasgi, i.
69; among the later Greeks and Eo-
mans, ii. 186.
Strabo, his judgment upon the popular
religion, ii. 136.
Strato, the natural philosopher, i. 346.
Suevi, their settlements, i. 60.
Suicide, views of Stoics on, i. 357 ; its
prevalence in Eome, ii. 283.
Summanus, god of lightning, ii. 40.
Sun, origin of his worship, i. 67 ; his wor-
ship among the Pelasgi, i. 71 ; Persians,
i. 393 ; Eomans, ii. 40 ; Essenes, ii. 314.
Sun-god, in Lydia Heracles, or Sand on,
i. 379 ; in Syria Elagabal, i. 431 ; in
Egypt Ra, i. 438.
Superstition, of Greeks and Eomans,
blended with religiousness, ii. 170, sq. ;
examples of, Sylla, Augustus, Alexan-
der, ii. 172 ; Marcus Aurelius, ii. 175.
SuovetauriJia, a peculiar sacrifice of atone-
ment among the Eomans, ii. 81.
Sutech, a surname of Typhon, i. 452.
Symbols in the mysteries, i. 183, 188.
Synagogue, the great, its origin and ob-
ject, ii. 298.
Synagogues, or houses of prayer, ii. 376.
Synedrium, or Sanhedrim, the Jewish
court of justice, ii. 337 ; Sanhedrim and
school of Jamnia, ii. 416.
Syria, Eoman province of, its Greek cha-
racter, i. 19 ; cultus of Baal, i. 425.
Syrian goddess, the, her nature and
worship, i. 422.
Tacitus, what he asserts regarding the
Germans, i. 61 ; ii. 113 ; regarding the
^ves» i- 03; his religious views, ii.
lo9.
Tages, a genius of the Etruscans, ii. 3.
lagetic discipline, the, ii. 4.
Taranis, a Gallic deity, ii. 112.
Tarsus, capital of Cilicia, i. 15.'
Taurobolia, atonements made by blood,
Teletaa, the first degree of Eleusinian
initiation, i. 191.
Tellus, a Eoman goddess, her worship,
ii. 43.
Terminalia, a Eoman festival, ii. 94.
Terminus, Eoman god of boundaries, ii.
53.
Temple of Jerusalem and its parts, ii.
362; rebuilt by Herod, ii. 322 ; destruc-
tion of, under Titus, and its conse-
quences, ii. 414 ; hopes of its restora-
tion, ii. 415 ; dedication of the, a Jewish
festival, ii. 375.
Temple, Capitoline, ii. 19.
Temples, their destination and use among
the Greeks, i. 239, sq. ; haunts of im-
purity, ii. 197 ; of religious imposture,
198, sq. ° 1
Temple- scribes, the Egyptian, their office,
i. 471.
Terentius Varo, attempts to restore the
Eoman religion, ii. 34.
Teutates, a god of the Gauls, ii. 112.
Thales, an Ionic philosopher, i. 250.
Thammuz (Adonis), a Syro-Phoenician
deity, his worship, i. 431.
Thebes, city of Egypt, i. 19 ; of Greece,
with a secret worship, i. 172.
Themis, a Greek deity* i. 98 ; her cultus,
the thesmophoria, i. 200.
Theocrasy, the blending of gods, i. 84,
164, 342, sq.
Theodore of Cyrene, an atheist philoso-
pher, i. 305.
Theogony, the Greek, settled by Homer
and Hesiod, i. 75.
Theoleptics (Fanatici), possessed people,
ii. 182.
Theology, Egyptian, i. 479.
Theopsea, the consecration of the idols,
ii. 184.
Theophany, pretended, of the heathen
gods, ii. 201.
Theophrastus the peripatetic, i. 347.
Therapeutse, Jewish ascetics, their mode
of life, ii. 317.
Thesmophoria, a secret rite of Ceres, i.
200.
Thessalian gods, i. 118.
Thessalonica, a city of Macedonia, i. 37.
Thetis, a Greek goddess, i. 80 ; her tem-
ple in Pharsalos, i. 118.
Theurgy, the highest kind of magic, how
employed, ii. 215.
Thoth-Hermes, an Egyptian god, a judge
of the dead, i. 448.
Thrace, Eoman province of, i. 37.
Thracians, i. 38 ; their share in the reli-
gious civilisation of Greece, i. 68.
Threats used to Egyptian gods, i. 481.
Thucydides, his religious belief, i. 285.
436
INDEX.
Thunaer, a German god, ii. 115.
Tiberias, a city of Galilee, i. 23.
Tinia, the Jupiter of the Etruscans, ii. 2.
Titans, conquered by Zeus, i. 76.
Tities, an element of the Eoman people,
ii. 7.
Trade, left by Greeks to their slaves and
strangers, ii. 224 ; looked down upon in
Home, ii. 269.
Tradition, Jewish, ii. 378.
Trees, some, considered sacred by Gauls
and Germans, ii. 116.
Trinity, a, in the teaching of Plato (?),
i. 329.
Triptolemus, a Greek judge of the dead,
i. 175.
Triton, a Greek god, i. 80.
Trophonius, cave of, i. 215.
Tschinevad, Persian bridge to heaven,
i. 409.
Tuisco, god and progenitor of the Ger-
man race, ii. 116.
Turan, the Aphrodite of the Etruscans, ii.
3.
Turms, an Etruscan god, ii. 2.
Twelve, the, principal Greek gods, i. 77;
their worship in common, i. 120.
Typhseus, one of the giants, i. 76.
Typhon, an Egyptian deity, i. 445 ; his
character, i. 452 ; introduction of his
worship, i. 483.
Unbelief of the Greek philosophers (see
Scepticism); of the Roman philosophers,
ii. 143.
Unmarried state, discountenanced by the
Persians, i. 406 ; Greeks, ii. 235 ; Au-
gustus, ii. 258.
Uranos or Ouranos, a Greek god, i. 70,
77, 283.
Urim and Thummim, the oracle of the
Jews, ii. 355.
Usil, sun-god of the Etruscans, ii. 2.
Usury, Mosaic law of, ii. 345.
Utica, a city in Africa, i. 24.
Uzza, an Arabian god, i. 435.
Vabro, see Terentius, ii. 34.
Vaticanus, a Roman god, ii. 53.
Vedius, an Etruscan judge of the dead,
ii. 3.
Veiled gods of the Etruscans, ii. 1.
Vejovis or Vedius, a Roman god, ii. 40.
Venus, her cultus among the Romans,
ii. 50.
Vertumnus, an Etrurian god, ii. 2 ; an
old Latin god, ii. 56.
Vesta, Roman goddess, her worship, ii. 45.
Vestalia, a Roman festival, ii. 96.
Vestals, their office and privileges, ii. 69.
Vicramaditya, an Indian king, i. 50.
Viduus, a Roman god of the dead, ii. 53.
Vmalia, Roman festival, ii. 95, 97.
Vindelicia, a Roman province, i. 35.
Vindobona, Vienna, i. 36.
Virgil, his religious belief, ii. 137.
Virginity, considered a misfortune by the
Greeks, ii. 235 ; voluntary among the
Jews, i. 342.
Vows, Roman, ii. 77 ; Jewish, ii. 372.
Vulcan, an Etruscan god, ii. 2 ; a Roman,
ii. 42.
Vulcanalia, the Roman festival of Vul-
can, ii. 97.
Water, blest, in the temples, a means of
religious purification, i. 220; held sa-
cred by the Persians, i. 393.
Water-gods of the Greeks, i. 79.
Wisdom, the divine, or Chokma, in the
Old Testament, ii. 383.
Wives, communitv of, among the ancient
Britons, i. 34 ; the Spartans, ii. 235.
Wodan, god of the Germans, ii. 114, 116.
Women in child-birth regarded as caus-
ing defilement, i. 220 ; excessive reli-
giousness of Greek and Roman, ii. 183 ;
their licentiousness in Sparta, ii. 236.
World, doctrine of Pythagoreans con-
cerning, i. 255 ; of Empedocles, i. 263 ;
Plato, i. 311 ; of Aristotle, i. 334, sq. ;
of the Stoics, i. 349; succession of
worlds, i. 351 ; eternity of, according
to Aristotle, i. 334 ; to the book of the
world, i. 334 ; creation of, cosmogon}',
according to Pherecydes, i. 248 ; to
Thales and Anaximander, i. 250 ; to
Anaximenes and Diogenes, i. 251 ; to
Heraclitus, i. 252 ; to the Pythagoreans,
i. 255 ; to the Atomists, i. 266 ; to Plato,
i. 10 ; burning of, Persian, i. 412 ; burn-
ing of, Stoic, i. 351 ; judgment of, Per-
sian, i. 411.
World-soul, among the Ionians, i. 250,
sq. ; among the Pythagoreans, i. 256 ;
of Plato, i. 310 ; of the Stoics, i. 349.
World-year, world-periods, Persian, i. 394.
XenocraTES, the Platonic philosopher,
i. 331.
Xenophanes, the Eleat, his polemics
against the popular religion, and his
philosophy, i. 259.
Ygdrasil, the Scandinavian ash, i. 250.
Youth, their education and instruction
among the Greeks, i. 231 ; among the
Romans, i. 279 ; ruined by slaves, i.
281. '
Zagreus Dionysos, god of the Cretans,
i. 145 ; centre of the Orphic teaching,
i. 153; one with Osiris, Adonis, Corybas,
i. 161 ; his relation to the Eleusinian
Dionysos, i. 180 ; physical interpreta-
tion of his myth, i. 199.
Zaratus or Zarades, distinct from Zoro-
aster, i. 381.
Zealots, a Jewish faction against Roman
rule, then reign of terror, ii. 325.
Zendavesta, the Persian holy books, their
origin, i. 380.
Zeno, the Eleat, i. 262 ; the Stoic, i. 348.
Zerinthian grotto, the place of the mys-
teries of Hecate, i. 170.
Zervan Akarana, a god of the Persians,
originally a stranger to them, i. 387 ; his
relation to Ormuzd and Ahriman. i. 138.
INDEX.
437
Zeus, the Pelasgian primal god and
god of heaven, i. 70 ; his three-eyed
image of carved wood, i. 70 ; the Hel-
lenic, vanquisher of Chronos, i." 76 ;
king of the Olympic gods and ruler of
the world, i. 77 ; his wives, i. 79 ; his
cultus at Athens, i. 116 ; temple and
statue at Olympia, i. 118 ; Crete, the
pretended country of his birth, i. 119 ;
his relation to Prometheus, i. 293 • his
name m Asia Minor, the specific one
of the male deities, i. 374
486.°f ,Sin°Pe' tLe ESyPtian Serapis, i.
Zin, a god of the Germans, ii. 115
Zoroaster or Zarathustra, founder of re-
ligion, his probable era, he is not to be
confounded with Zaratus, i.380, 8q.
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