Roman Religion

ROMAN RELIGION. The Roman people were in origin a small community of agricultural settlers, which gradually won its way to the headship first of Latium, then of Italy and finally of a European empire. Its religion, which was always marked by an absence of dogmatism and a readiness to adopt foreign ideas, has therefore a shifting and ever widening char acter, which tends to obscure the original essentials ; the genuine Roman religion becomes gradually buried or fossilized in formal observance. The careful analysis of survivals in literature and monumental remains, and in particular of the extant calendars, has enabled scholars, using the comparative method, to make good progress in separating the elements due to different periods and influences.

Survivals.—Broadly speaking, the religion of the early agri culture settlement was arrested at the stage of Animism. It had passed beyond the primitive stages of magic and Fetishism or "Animatism," which regards natural objects as themselves divine and the source of power, and had not yet entered the stage of Anthropomorphism, which recognizes "gods" (dei) as personal and independent beings ; it is in essence a worship of "spirits" (numina) which are thought of as dwelling in external objects or localities. But it is in a state of transition. There are still traces of the earlier attitude in the recognition of the sacredness of stones, such as the silex (flint) which played a prominent part in the ceremonial of treaty-making, the lapis used in the rain-making ritual and the boundary-stones (termini) which marked the limits of properties. The sacred character of trees again is seen in the ficus Ruminalis (fig tree) and the caprificus (wild fig) of the Campus Martius and in the oak of luppiter Feretrius, on which the spolia opima were hung after a victory; and the sacred animals, such as Mars' wolf, later regarded as the attributes of deities, may themselves have been originally the objects of worship. At the other end of the scale at least two of the numina seem already to have developed the character of anthropomorphic dei: Jupiter the sky-god, possibly an inheritance from the time before the Greek and Roman stocks had separated, and Mars, god alike of agriculture and war, and possibly in origin the "spirit" of growth in crops, cattle and the young warriors.

Animism.

But notwithstanding survivals and anticipation, Animism is the true background of the Roman religion, which might be described as a polydemonism or more exactly in Latin phraseology as a "multinuminism." The "spirits" worshipped were primarily local in character: in the house they had their focuses of activity at the door, the hearth and the store-cupboard, in the countryside on hill-tops, in groves, in streams and springs. To this conception Roman religion added a characteristic or peculiar development in a kind of "Higher Animism" which asso ciated the "spirit" not only with visible objects, but with states and actions in the life of the individual and the community: func tion is added to locality. Every "spirit" had thus in either a local or temporal sense or in both, its own sphere of action. The "spirits" were not conceived of in any anthropomorphic or theo morphic shape : their sex was often indeterminate (sive mas, sive femina, "whether male or female" was a frequent formula of prayer), they had no form of sensuous representation, nor did they need a home to dwell in : statue and temple were alien to the spirit of Roman religion. Nor could they have a personal history or relation to one another: there was no Roman mythology. But in their individual spheres they could influence the fortunes of men, and men could enter into relations with them. The primary attitude of men to the spirits was one of fear, expressed in the conception of religio, the sense of awe or "anxiety" in the pres ence of a superhuman power. But the practical mind of the Roman soon gave this relation a legal turn, and later the ius divinum, which regulated the dealings of men with the divine powers became a department of the ius publicum, the general body of civil law. The act of worship was a kind of contract: the "spirits," if they were given their due, were bound to make a return to man, and the object of worship and festival was to place them under this obligation and so to secure the pax deum (a state of peace between gods and men).