The Religious Experience of the Roman People | Page 7

as
Roman law was, the one great contribution of the Roman genius to the
evolution of humanity. But Roman law and Roman religion sprang
from the same root; they were indeed in origin one and the same thing.
Religious law was a part of the ius civile, and both were originally
administered by the same authority, the Rex. Following the course of
the two side by side for a few centuries, we come upon an astonishing
phenomenon, which I will mention now (it will meet us again) as
showing how far more interest can be aroused in our subject if we are
fully equipped as Roman historians than if we were to study the

religion alone, torn from the living body of the State, and placed on the
dissecting-board by itself. As the State grew in population and
importance, and came into contact, friendly or hostile, with other
peoples, both the religion and the law of the State were called upon to
expand, and they did so. But they did so in different ways; Roman law
expanded organically and intensively, absorbing into its own body the
experience and practice of other peoples, while Roman religion
expanded mechanically and extensively, by taking on the deities and
worship of others without any organic change of its own being. Just as
the English language has been able to absorb words of Latin origin,
through its early contact with French, into the very tissue and fibre of
its being, while German has for certain reasons never been able to do
this, but has adopted them as strangers only, without making them its
very own: so Roman law contrived to take into its own being the rules
and practices of strangers, while Roman religion, though it eventually
admitted the ideas and cults of Greeks and others, did so without taking
them by a digestive process into its own system. Had the law of Rome
remained as inelastic as the religion, the Roman people would have
advanced as little in civilisation as those races which embraced the faith
of Islam, with its law and religion alike impermeable to any change.[3]
Here is a phenomenon that at once attracts attention and suggests
questions not easy to answer. Why is it that the Roman religion can
never have the same interest and value for mankind as Roman law? I
hope that we shall find an answer to this question in the course of our
studies: at this moment I only propose it as an example of the
advantage gained for the study of one department of Roman life and
thought by a pretty complete equipment in the knowledge of others.
At the same time we must remember that the religion of the Romans is
a highly technical subject, like Roman law, the Roman constitution,
and almost everything else Roman; it calls for special knowledge as
well as a sufficient training in Roman institutions generally. Each of
these Roman subjects is like a language with a delicate accidence,
which is always presenting the unwary with pitfalls into which they are
sure to blunder unless they have a thorough mastery of it. I could
mention a book full of valuable thoughts about the relation to Paganism
of the early Christian Church, by a scholar at once learned and

sympathetic;[4] who when he happens to deal for a moment with the
old Roman religion, is inaccurate and misleading at every point. He
knew, for example, that this religion is built on the foundation of the
worship of the family, but he yielded to the temptation to assume that
the family in heaven was a counterpart of the family on earth, "as it
might be seen in any palace of the Roman nobility." "Jupiter and Juno,"
he says, "were the lord and lady, and beneath them was an army of
officers, attendants, ministers, of every rank and degree." Such a
description of the pantheon of his religion would have utterly puzzled a
Roman, even in the later days of theological syncretism. Again he says
that this religion was strongly moral; that "the gods gave every man his
duty, and expected him to perform it." Here again no Roman of
historical times, or indeed of any age, could have allowed this to be his
creed. Had it really been so, not only the history of the Roman religion,
but that of the Roman state, would have been very different from what
it actually was.
The principles then on which I wish to proceed in these lectures are--(1)
to keep the subject in continual touch with Roman history and the
development of the Roman state; (2) to exercise all possible care and
accuracy in dealing with the technical matters of the religion itself. I
may now go on to explain more exactly the plan I propose