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mere copy of that of Greece, and has therefore been confounded with it, as very nearly the same system. No doubt the Romans were imitators; they had no creative imagination. They borrowed and begged their stories about the gods, from Greece or elsewhere. But Hegel has long ago remarked that the resemblance between the two religions is superficial. The gods of Rome, he says, are practical gods, not theoretic; prosaic, not poetic. The religion of Rome is serious and earnest, while that of Greece is gay. Dionysius of Halicarnassus thinks the Roman religion the better of the two, because it rejected the blasphemous myths concerning the loves and quarrels of the heavenly powers. But, on the other hand, the deities of Greece were more living and real persons, with characters of their own. The deities of Rome were working gods, who had each a task assigned to him. They all had some official duty to perform; while the gods of Olympus could amuse themselves as they pleased. While the Zeus of Greece spent his time in adventures, many of which were disreputable, the Jupiter Capitolinus remained at home, attending to his sole business, which was to make Rome the mistress of the world. The gods of Rome, says Hegel, are not human beings, like those of Greece, but soulless machines, gods made by the understanding, even when borrowed from Greek story. They were worshipped also in the interest of the practical understanding, as givers of earthly fortune. The Romans had no real reverence for their gods; they worshipped them in no spirit of adoring love, but always for some useful object. It was a utilitarian worship. Accordingly the practical faculties, engaged in useful arts, were deified. There was a Jupiter Pistor, presiding over bakers. There was a goddess of ovens ; and a Juno Moneta, who took care of the coin. There was a goddess who presided over doing nothing, Tranquillitas Vacuna; and even the plague had an altar erected to it. But, after all, no deities were so great, in the opinion of the Romans, as Rome itself. The chief distinction of these deities was that they belonged to the Roman state.*

*Hegel's Philosophie in Wörtlichen Ausüzgen. Berlin, 1843.

Cicero considers the Romans to be the most religious of all nations, because they carried their religion into all the details of life. This is true; but one might as well consider himself a devout worshipper of iron or of wood, because he is always using these materials, in doors and out, in his parlor, kitchen, and stable.

As the religion of Rome had no doctrinal system, its truths were communicated mostly by spectacles and ceremonies, which chiefly consisted in the wholesale slaughter of men and animals. There was something frightful in the extent to which this was carried; for when cruelty proceeds from a principle and purpose, it is far worse than when arising from brutal passion. An angry man may beat his wife; but the deliberate, repeated, and ingenious torments of the Inquisition, the massacre of thousands of gladiators in a Roman amphitheatre, or the torture of prisoners by the North American Indians, are all parts of a system, and reinforced by considerations of propriety, duty, and religious reverence.

Mommsen remarks,* that the Roman religion in all its details was a reflection of the Roman state. When the constitution and institutions of Rome changed, their religion changed with them. One illustration of this correspondence he finds in the fact that when the Romans. admitted the people of a conquered state to become citizens of Rome, their gods were admitted with them; but in both cases the new citizens (novensides) occupied a subordinate position to the old settlers (indigites).†

That the races of Italy, among whom the Latin language originated, were of the same great Asiatic stock as the Greeks, Germans, Kelts, and Slavic tribes, is sufficiently proved by the unimpeachable evidence of language. The old Latin roots and grammatic forms all retain the analogies of the Aryan families. Their gods and their religion bear marks of the same origin, yet with a special and marked development. For the Roman nation was derived from at least three secondary sources, — the

* Römische Geschichte, von Theodor Mommsen, Kap. XII. Janus, Picus, Faunus, Romulus, were indigites. Funke, Real Lexi

son.

Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans. To these may be added. the Pelasgian settlers on the western coast (unless these are included in the Etruscan element), and the very ancient race of Siculi or Sikels, whose name suggests, by its phonetic analogy, a branch of that widely wandering race, the Kelts.* But the obscure and confused traditions of these Italian races help us very little in our present inquiry. That some of the oldest Roman deities were Latin, others Sabine, and others Etruscan, is, however, well ascertained. From the Latin towns Alba and Lavinium came the worship of Vesta, Jupiter, Juno, Saturn and Tellus, Diana and Mars. Niebuhr thinks that the Sabine ritual was adopted by the Romans, and that Varro found the real remains of Sabine chapels on the Quirinal. From Etruria came the system of divination. Some of the oldest portions of the Roman religion were derived from agriculture. The god Saturn took his name from sowing. Picus and Faunus were agricultural gods. Pales, the goddess of herbage, had offerings of milk on her festivals. The Romans, says Döllinger, had no cosmogony of their own; a practical people, they took the world as they found it, and did not trouble themselves about its origin. Nor had they any favorite deities; they worshipped according to what was proper, every one in turn at the right time. Though the most polytheistic of religions, there ran through their system an obscure conception of one supreme being, Jupiter Optimus-Maximus, of whom all the other deities were but qualities and attri

* See Niebuhr's Lectures on the History of Rome, for facts concerning the Siculi. The sound el appears in Keltic, Gael, Welsch, Welsh, Belgians, Gauls, Galatians, etc. M. Grotefend (as quoted by Guigniaut, in his notes to Creuzer) accepts this Keltic origin of the Siculi, believing that they entered Italy from the northwest, and were gradually driven farther south till they reached Sicily. Those who expelled them were the Pelasgic races, who passed from Asia, south of the Caspian and Black Seas, through Asia Minor and Greece, preceding the Hellenic races. This accounts for the statement of Herodotus that the Pelasgi came from Lydia in Asia Minor, without our being obliged to assume that they came by sea, a fact highly improbable. They were called Tyrrheanians, not from any city or king of Lydia, but, as M. Lepsius believes, from the Greek Túppis (Latin, turris), a tower, because of their Cyclopean masonry. The Roman state, on this supposition, may have owed its origin to the union of the two great Aryan races, the Kelts and Pelasgi.

butes. But they carried furthest of all nations this personifying and deifying of every separate power, this minute subdivision of the deity. Heffter * says this was carried to an extent which was almost comic. They had divinities who presided over talkativeness and silence, over beginnings and endings, over the manuring of the fields, and over all household transactions. And as the number increased, it became always more difficult to recollect which was the right god to appeal to under any special circumstances. So that often they were obliged to call on the gods in general, and, dismissing the whole polytheistic pantheon, to invoke some unknown god, or the supreme being. Sometimes, however, in these emergencies, new deities were created for the occasion. Thus they came to invoke the pestilence, defeat in battle, blight, etc., as dangerous beings whose hostility must be placated by sacrifices. A better part of their mythology was the worship of Modesty (Pudicitia), Faith or Fidelity (Fides), Concord (Concordia), and the gods of home. It was the business of the pontiffs to see to the creation of new divinities. So the Romans had a goddess Pecunia, money (from Pecus, cattle), dating from the time when the circulating medium consisted in cows and sheep. But when copper money came, a god of copper was added, Æsculanus; and when silver money was invented, a god Argentarius arrived.

§ 2. The Gods of Rome.

Creuzer, in speaking of the Italian worship, says that one fact which emerges more prominently than any other is the concourse of Oriental, Pelasgic, Samothracian, and Hellenic elements in the religion of Rome." In like manner the Roman deities bear traces of very different Sources. We have found reason to believe, in our previous chapters, that the religion of Egypt had a twofold origin, from Asiatic and African elements, and that the religion of Greece, in like manner, was derived from Egyptian and Pelasgic sources. So, too, we find the institutions

* Mythologie der Griechen und Romer, von Dr. M. W. Heffter. Leipzig, 1854.

and people of Rome partaking of a Keltic and Pelasgic origin. Let us now see what was the character of the Roman deities.

One of the oldest and also most original of the gods of Rome was the Sabine god JANUS. He was the deity who presided over beginnings and endings, over the act of opening and shutting. Hence the month which opened the year, January, received its name from this god, who also gave his name to Janua, a gate or door,* and probably to the hill Janiculum.+

The Romans laid great stress on all beginnings; believing that the commencement of any course of conduct determined, by a sort of magical necessity, its results. Bad success in an enterprise they attributed to a wrong beginning, and the only remedy, therefore, was to begin anew. Ovid (Fasti, I. 179) makes Janus say, “All depends on the beginning." When other gods were worshipped, Janus was invoked first of all. He was god of the year. His temple had four sides for the four seasons, and each side had three windows for the months. his temple was open in war, but closed in peace, indicated that the character of Rome in times of war was to attack and not to defend. She then opened her gates to send her troops forth against the enemy; while in seasons of peace she shut them in at home. This symbol accords well with the haughty courage of the Republic, which commanded victory, by not admitting the possibility of defeat. ‡

That

This deity is believed by Creuzer and others to have had an Indian origin, and his name to have been derived from the Sanskrit "Jan," to be born. He resembles no Greek god, and very probably travelled all the way from Bactria to Rome.

* And so our word "janitor" comes to us from this very old Italian deity.

+ Ampère, L'Histoire Romaine.

This seems to us more probable than Buttman's opinion, that the temple of Janus was originally by the gate of the city, which gate was open in war and closed in peace. In practice, it would probably be dif

ferent.

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