CHAPTER IX.

RELATIONS OF LIBERTY AND RELIGION IN ROME.

"Arrancar la soberanía del cielo y localizarla en la tierra.” —. DONOSO CORTÉS, Derecho Político, Lecc. II.

Two or three years after the last events recorded in the preceding chapter, Quintus and Cneius Ogulnius appear in the tribuneship, as zealous champions of the popular party against the combination of the highest and the lowest classes. Instead, however, of making any wild attack upon their adversaries, the Tribunes seem to have exerted themselves in the wiser view of detaching the populace from its Patrician leaders, in order to unite the severed forces of the Plebeians upon a common ground. Obtaining little support from the rest of their party, which was at no time minded to join in any hearty action with the common people, the Ogulnii made a new venture, as if to gain the means before they attempted the execution of their end. A bill to increase the number of the Pontiffs by four, and that of the Augurs

1 The passage in Livy (X. 6) is as follows: — -"Certamen injectum inter primores civitatis, patricios plebeiosque, ab tribunis plebis Q. et Cn. Ogulniis. Qui, undique criminandorum Patrum apud plebem occasionibus quæsitis, postquam alia

frustra tentata erant, eam actionem susceperunt, qua non infimam plebem accenderent, sed ipsa capita plebis, consulares triumphalesque plebeios; quorum honoribus nihil, præter sacerdotia, quæ nondum promiscua erant, deesset."

by five new incumbents, who should then, and, as was probably added, thenceforward, be chosen from the Plebeians, was proposed by the Tribunes. As they had undoubtedly expected, the bill aroused the interest and efforts of all the eminent men amongst their party; and, though some strenuous opposition was made to its passage, it became a law. The highest places of the priesthood, as well as of the civil magistracies, were opened to the Plebeians, whose name will no longer serve us as it has done, so entirely have the old distinctions of their estate from that of the Patricians been obliterated.

The Ogulnii did not follow up the success they had gained, and the alliance between the lower Plebeians and the higher Patricians was rather cemented than loosened by a law professedly devised to the advantage of the upper classes of the Plebeians. We may break off with all the better reason from the course of our history, to trace the connection between the liberty we have hitherto seen established and the religion of whose existence we are reminded by the Ogulnian law. To do this, it will be necessary neither to inquire into the sources of creeds and ceremonies, nor, still less, to repeat the names of deities or festivals, but simply, and much more briefly, to catch, if we may, the general outlines of a system, of which the particular features and the separate members are to be scanned only by eyes that have no tears.

The religion of the early and the middle ages of the Commonwealth was invested with no doubtful or trifling power over the lives of its votaries. Without it, the ardent nature of the Roman would again and again have broken through the moulds in which the character of his nation seemed to be unalterably formed and reformed. It was at once a severe, a searching, and an encroaching faith, that, not content with the seasons or the observances of its own ceremonies, obtruded itself into the midst of the occupations and the thoughts, the households and the public institutions, in which it claimed the first place and the highest authority. The strength it thus exerted, which would have been a holy influence, had the faith itself been true or even mild, was in fact the strength of a universal superstition.3

Of this the origin lay, of course, beyond the discovery even of those by whom it was most profoundly or most anxiously obeyed. None distinctly believed that the truth had been fully revealed; for there were none, not even those of greater sensitiveness and deeper earnestness, to whom the truth, as we conceive it, could be an inspiration or a perplexity. But, on the other hand, the traditions of the elder times, upon which thick grafts had been set by

3 of which Cicero's description is the best :- "Instat enim et urget et quo te cumque verteris persequitur; sive tu vatem, sive tu omen audieris; sive immolaris, sive avem adspexeris; si Chaldæum, si aruspicem videris; si fulserit, si tonue

rit, si tactum aliquid erit de cœlo; si ostenti simile natum factumve quippiam; quorum necesse est plerumque aliquid eveniat: ut numquam liceat quieta mente consistere." And so on. De Divin., II. 72.

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sober minds, and budding fancies forced by more ardent imaginations, were accepted, tended, and carefully conveyed as an inheritance from generation to generation. Yet the character of the theology, using the word in its widest sense, which was thus maintained amongst the Romans, is now, at least, seen to have been too complicated, too bulky, and too coarse to have kept its ground. Its complexity proceeded from the variety of authors and sources from which it, like the kindred system of the Greeks, had been, from century to century, compiled. The volume and the grossness of the Grecian were both surpassed in the Roman religion, which, as is well known, united the wildness, and, in many respects, the ferocity, of the Italian faiths with the sensuality and the ostentation which prevailed in Greece.

Such being the characteristics of a religion, with so much unwieldiness on the one side, and on the other so vast pretension to authority, there could be but one course down which it would be hurried. In truth, the religion of Rome was heathenism in its decline. It never rose, like the systems of Greece and the other nations of antiquity, to a culminating point from which it had to fall, but crept, as it were,

4 "Tria genera tradita deorum: unum a poetis, alterum a philosophis, tertium a principibus civitatis." S. August., Civit. Dei, IV. 27. "Tria genera theologiæ dicit [Varro] esse, id est rationis quæ de diis explicatur, eorumque unum mythicon appellari, alterum physicon,

tertium civile. . . . . . Deinde ait: Mythicon appellant, quo maxime utuntur poetæ; physicon, quo philosophi; civile, quo populi." Ibid., VI. 5. See also VI. 7. Compare Plut., De Plac. Phil., Tom. IX. p. 487, ed. Reiske.

on lower ground, and, as it grew feebler, into darker gloom. They who believed in it themselves may not have thought their sacrifices or their thanksgivings to lack any thing in abundance, or splendor, or solemnity; but it is apparent, since they passed away, that their religious fervor was apt to show itself only in extravagant ceremonies, at which the Greek might have sneered as vulgar and unstudied, or else in superstitious precepts, that even the Hindoo could, in many instances, have despised. Rome was to heathenism the beginning of its end.

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Like all other systems, however, the Roman struggled, or perhaps more securely resolved, to make itself eternal. Seeming to feel the instability of its own principles, it threw itself upon the political and social principles, that is, the laws and customs of the Commonwealth, of which it was conceived to be the ornament and the safeguard. The fact was otherwise; and it scarcely requires reflection to perceive that the religion which depended upon the secular institutions of a country was exposed to all the chances and changes of merely human laws.

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It followed, naturally, that the points of greatest importance in the religious practices of the Romans were the forms of prayer, or festival, or authority, which could be observed by men's lips or eyes, how

5 It is in this view only we can repeat with Herder, as with many another writer, that the religion of the Romans was a civil and military Ideas Philos. Hist., Book

one.

XIV. ch. 11.

6" Tatius et Numa," says Montesquieu, "asservirent les dieux à la politique." Diss. sur la Politique des Romains dans la Religion.