The Religion of Ancient Rome

The Religion of Ancient Rome

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Title: The Religion of Ancient Rome
Author: Cyril Bailey
Release Date: June 12, 2006 [EBook #18564]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT ROME
By CYRIL BAILEY, M.A. FELLOW AND TUTOR OF BALLIOL
COLLEGE, OXFORD
LONDON ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO LTD
1907

I wish to express my warm thanks to Mr. W. Warde Fowler for his
kindness in reading my proofs, and for many valuable hints and
suggestions.
C.B.
BALLIOL COLLEGE, Jan 25th, 1907.

CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION--SOURCES AND SCOPE 1
II. THE 'ANTECEDENTS' OF ROMAN RELIGION 4
III. MAIN FEATURES OF THE RELIGION OF NUMA 12
IV. EARLY HISTORY OF ROME--THE AGRICULTURAL
COMMUNITY 31
V. WORSHIP OF THE HOUSEHOLD 36
VI. WORSHIP OF THE FIELDS 58

VII. WORSHIP OF THE STATE 75
VIII. AUGURIES AND AUSPICES 96
IX. RELIGION AND MORALITY--CONCLUSION 103

THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT ROME
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION--SOURCES AND SCOPE
The conditions of our knowledge of the native religion of early Rome
may perhaps be best illustrated by a parallel from Roman archæology.
The visitor to the Roman Forum at the present day, if he wishes to
reconstruct in imagination the Forum of the early Republic, must not
merely 'think away' many strata of later buildings, but, we are told,
must picture to himself a totally different orientation of the whole: the
upper layer of remains, which he sees before him, is for his purpose in
most cases not merely useless, but positively misleading. In the same
way, if we wish to form a picture of the genuine Roman religion, we
cannot find it immediately in classical literature; we must banish from
our minds all that is due to the contact with the East and Egypt, and
even with the other races of Italy, and we must imagine, so to speak, a
totally different mental orientation before the great influx of Greek
literature and Greek thought, which gave an entirely new turn to
Roman ideas in general, and in particular revolutionised religion by the
introduction of anthropomorphic notions and sensuous representations.
But in this difficult search we are not left without indications to guide
us. In the writings of the savants of the late Republic and of the Empire,
and in the Augustan poets, biassed though they are in their
interpretations by Greek tendencies, there is embodied a great wealth of
ancient custom and ritual, which becomes significant when we have
once got the clue to its meaning. More direct evidence is afforded by a
large body of inscriptions and monuments, and above all by the
surviving Calendars of the Roman festival year, which give us the true

outline of the ceremonial observances of the early religion.
It is not within the scope of this sketch to enter, except by way of
occasional illustration, into the process of interpretation by which the
patient work of scholars has disentangled the form and spirit of the
native religion from the mass of foreign accretions. I intend rather to
assume the process, and deal, as far as it is possible in so controversial
a subject, with results upon which authorities are generally agreed.
Neither will any attempt be made to follow the development which the
early religion underwent in later periods, when foreign elements were
added and foreign ideas altered and remoulded the old tradition. We
must confine ourselves to a single epoch, in which the native Roman
spirit worked out unaided the ideas inherited from half-civilised
ancestors, and formed that body of belief and ritual, which was always,
at least officially, the kernel of Roman religion, and constituted what
the Romans themselves--staunch believers in their own traditional
history--loved to describe as the 'Religion of Numa.' We must discover,
as far as we can, how far its inherited notions ran parallel with those of
other primitive religions, but more especially we must try to note what
is characteristically Roman alike in custom and ritual and in the
motives and spirit which prompted them.
CHAPTER II
THE 'ANTECEDENTS' OF