The Religion of Numa | Page 9

adjective is in a condition of dependence on a
noun, while the abstract noun is independent and self-supporting. And
thus, just as in certain of the lower organisms a group of cells breaks
off and sets up an individual organism of its own, so in old Roman
religion some phase of a god's activity, expressed in an adjective, broke
off with the adjective from its original stock and set up for itself,
turning its name from the dependent adjective form into the
independent abstract noun. Thus Juppiter, worshipped as a god of good
faith in the dealings of men with one another, the god by whom oaths
were sworn under the open sky, was designated as "Juppiter,
guarding-good-faith," Juppiter Fidius. There were however many other
phases of Juppiter's work, and hence the adjective fidius became very
important as the means of distinguishing this activity from all the
others. Eventually it broke off from Juppiter and formed the abstract

noun Fides, the goddess of good faith, where the sex of the deity as a
goddess was entirely determined by the grammatical gender of abstract
nouns as feminine.
This is all strange enough but there is one more step in the development
even more curious yet. This abstract goddess Fides did not stay long in
the purely abstract sphere; she began very soon to be made concrete
again, as the Fides of this particular person or of that particular group
and as this Fides or that, until she became almost as concrete as
Juppiter himself had been, and hence we have a great many different
Fides in seeming contradiction to the old grammatical rule that abstract
nouns had no plural. Now all this development in the field of religion
throws light upon the character of the Roman mind and its instinctive
methods of thought, and we see why it is that the Romans were very
great lawyers and very mediocre philosophers. Both law and
philosophy require the ability for abstract thought; in both cases the
essential qualities of a thing must be separated from the thing itself. But
in the case of philosophic thought this abstraction, these qualities, do
not immediately seek reincarnation. They continue as abstractions and
do not immediately descend to earth again, whereas for law such a
descent is absolutely necessary because jurisprudence is interested not
so much in the abstraction by itself, but rather in the abstract as
presented in concrete cases. Hence a type of mind which found it
equally easy to make the concrete into the abstract and then to turn the
abstract so made into a kind of concrete again, is _par excellence_ the
legal mind, and no better proof of the instinctive tendency to
law-making on the part of the Romans can be found than in the fact that
the same habits of mind which make laws also governed the
development of their religion.
Unfortunately however it was not these abstract deities who could save
old Roman religion. They were merely the logical outcome of the
deities already existing, merely new offspring of the old breed. They
did not represent any new interests, but were merely the
individualisation of certain phases of the old deities, phases which had
always been present and were now at most merely emphasised by being
worshipped separately.

THE REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS
Like a lofty peak rising above the mists which cover the tops of the
lower-lying mountains, the figure of Servius Tullius towers above the
semi-legendary Tarquins on either side of him. We feel that we have to
do with a veritable character in history, and we find ourselves
wondering what sort of a man he was personally--a feeling that never
occurs to us with Romulus and the older kings, and comes to us only
faintly with the elder Tarquin, while the younger Tarquin has all the
marks of a wooden man, who was put up only to be thrown down,
whose whole raison d'être is to explain the transition from the kingdom
to the republic on the theory of a revolution. Eliminate the revolution,
suppose the change to have been a gradual and a constitutional one, and
you may discard the proud Tarquin without losing anything but a
lay-figure with its more or less gaudy trappings of later myths. But it is
not so with Servius; his wall and his constitution are very real and defy
all attempts to turn their maker into a legend. Yet on the other hand we
must be on our guard, for much of the definiteness which seems to
attach to him is rather the definiteness of a certain stage in Rome's
development, a certain well-bounded chronological and sociological
tract. It is dangerous to try to limit too strictly Servius's personal part in
this development; and far safer, though perhaps less fascinating, to use
his