The grave danger to the well-being of Rome which would surely result from the absence of all religious belief among the people, was perceived by several of the leading men in the period of transition which immediately followed the downfall of the Republic; but it was the genius of Octavius Caesar (Augustus) which recognized the imperative necessity of religion as the foundation storey of any permanent Government. The very name by which this greatest of the Emperors is known in history, and which he transmitted to a long line of Imperial successors as their proudest title—"Augustus"—was a term borrowed from the ancient Roman ritual language, where it is used as the designation of a temple consecrated with solemn rites. In assuming this semi-sacred title, he, as it were, anticipated the apotheosis which awaited him after death—and claimed, too, that while on earth the supreme master of the Roman world was the representative of the immortal gods. In the course of his reign the occupant of the office of Pontifex Maximus died. Augustus at once took upon himself the office, which carried with it the head-ship of religion in Rome. It was said with justice that the house where this great restorer of the ancient cult dwelt on the Palatine during his long, momentous reign, in some respects resembled a temple in its form and special adornment. It is no mere quaint fancy which traces to the work and claim of Augustus the semi-divine halo which has ever crowned the sacred heads of a long line of Christian Emperors and Kings, who more or less, in different lands, have succeeded to his power and position. They, like him, though many with a different and better title, claim to reign in some measure as the vicegerent of God on earth.
But it was not merely by the assumption of titles and dignities or by the peculiar adornments of his palace that Augustus played the part of a religious restorer and reformer. He found, when he became Emperor, most of the ancient temples falling into ruin and decay. In the restoration of the old shrines and in the erection and sumptuous adornment of new temples he spent vast sums, and persuaded the representatives of the great houses to follow his example in this generosity. And thus, as the years of his prosperous reign rolled on, the old worship was gradually restored to far more than its ancient splendor. He neglected nothing which might throw luster upon the restored religious rites. On the priests and vestals he conferred, many privileges and an exalted rank, requiring from senators and other distinguished persons the same minute attention to all points of ritual observance which he was ever careful to show himself. It is indisputable that the work of Augustus in a marvelous way infused new life into a religion which in the last period of the Republic seemed to be a dying and worn-out cult; nor did he, in his care for the shattered fanes and broken altars and neglected rites of the discredited gods of Rome, forget to legislate for the improvement of the moral life of his city and Empire. Augustus, as we have said, felt that the basis of all stable government must be laid upon the sound foundation of religion, and upon laws which aim at morality and purity. The great Emperor was emphatically a great legislator as well as a restorer of the ancient religion.
A singularly brilliant group of writers adorned the court of Augustus. The historian, the poet, and the philosopher, each was represented; and the works produced under the shadow of the Emperor are among the most famous of the writings of antiquity. Livy, Propertius, Horace, Ovid, Virgil, to take the most conspicuous examples, are names which apparently will never die while the world endures.
Historians and poets all struck more or less the same note, the note their Imperial master loved: the glorification of the old simple Roman life, and the old simple Roman faith in the gods. It was to these that the present surpassing grandeur of Rome was owing. The burden of the song of the brilliant writers of the court of Augustus was "O that the present generation of Romans who have entered into the fruit of their ancestors' toils, would follow them in their life, and imitate them in their worship."
AUGUSTUS in the British Museum.
In the case of two of these, not, perhaps, the very greatest of that illustrious group, Ovid and Horace, we have some doubt as to their sincerity in really desiring the reforms which they advocated; undoubtedly their writings are more severe than were their lives, and even in these writings a terrible picture of the society in which they lived, and in the extravagance of which they shared and evidently delighted, is painted by them. The one—Ovid—gives us sketches of the life of the immortals; but his evil pictures of the life led by the dwellers on Olympus are evidently based on his too faithful memories of the life led by his contemporaries and associates at Rome. The other—Horace—without the thin veil with which Ovid has covered his sketches, openly draws pictures of Roman life, Roman aims and hopes; and they are too often degrading, at times aimless, even hopeless. Their advice, it must be confessed, has ever an insincere ring, and their words were evidently not sufficient seriously to influence society for good. Indeed, had we only the writings of the popular poets, Ovid and Horace, we should scarcely hesitate in coming to the conclusion that the attempts of Augustus at reformation in morals, and his efforts to restore the ancient worship, were barren of definite results.
But there was a yet greater writer standing at Augustus' right hand, who leaves a very different impression on the student. No one, statesman or poet, helped the noble project of Augustus like Virgil; if others, more or less courtier-like, took their cue from that all-powerful Emperor, and colored their works with aims and aspirations borrowed from him, Virgil was at least in earnest. With his whole heart and soul he longed to see the people return to the old religion; he believed with an intense belief that the grandeur of his country was based upon the simple, pure life led by the early makers of the Roman power.
In the "Georgics"—the great epic of rural life—we meet with expressions which evidently came from the heart of the great poet. He paints as none before him had painted, perhaps none will ever paint again, how the strength of a land lay in its peasants, how the old rural life of Italy produced that race of hardy soldiers which had made Rome the mistress of the world. The country life had ever strengthened the real religious feeling which was the true foundation of Roman greatness. It was no soft, dreamy existence in which the Roman conquerors were nurtured, but a hard, laborious, life, and in this the gods had ordered that men should live. But the stem life of rural toil was sweetened and ennobled by prayer. "Work and pray" was the conclusion of the great poem; "above all things worship the gods" was the solemn charge of the "Georgics," "in primis venerare Deos." It was a sad day for Rome when the city life with the artificial pleasures of the theatre and circus was substituted for the pure, healthy joys of the woods and the fields. The city life produced an enfeebled and debauched race of lazy, useless men, who believed in nothing. The old rural life, on the other hand, was the mother of a hardy race of men who were ready to fight and die for their country, who feared the gods and believed in the rewards and punishments of the immortals. These men were the makers of Rome.
But it was in the "Aeneid" that Virgil especially helped Augustus in his effort to bring men back to the old faith. The famous epic is before all things a religious poem. The "Aeneid" was for the Italians of the first years of the Empire what the religious epic of Dante was for the men who lived thirteen or fourteen hundred years later.
Even more than the "Georgics" the "Aeneid" led men to love and to reverence the old simple manners and customs, with their all-pervading religious coloring, which Augustus so longed to re-introduce into the artificial and evil society of his time. Never was a more enchanting picture drawn than Virgil's sketch of the old King Evander, living his homely life, with his brave, simple, manly ideas.
We must not linger unduly over the great poem which so powerfully aided the Emperor in his plans to make his Empire better, purer, more religious; one page, however, must be given to the special religious coloring of the great patriotic epic. While the Roman poet largely bases his theology upon the scenery and legendary notices of the Homeric poem, the gods of Homer are presented in the Roman poem under very different aspects. Virgil gives us a somewhat more reverent idea of the divinities whose worship he would fain restore. They interfere less openly in human affairs, they dwell in a more mysterious atmosphere. They pity rather than share in mortal passions. The Roman poet shrank from attributing to the gods anger, passion, jealousy, and the like. The childish and frivolous, coarse and fleshly, legends which Ovid, for instance, delights in re-telling in his own winning and attractive manner, never appear in Virgil's great epic. The estimate of divinity which Virgil pressed upon his readers was a lofty one. The gods were the supreme refuge, for instance, of the unhappy, the sad-hearted, the oppressed. His hero, a child of the gods, so resigned, so distrustful of himself, so ready for sacrifice of self, so submissive to the will of heaven, is almost in character a Christian hero. Indeed, in all the Christian ages, Virgil has been admired by not a few saintly followers of Jesus of Nazareth, almost as a pioneer of the nobler and purer faith. Dante well compares him to one walking in the dark night and carrying, but holding all the while behind him, a burning torch, which served as a light, not for himself but for those who followed in his wake.
As early as A. D. 325, Constantine quoted at considerable length Virgil's "Fourth Epilogue" as a very early testimony to the divinity of Christ. From that period, all through the Middle Ages, the great Latin poet was regarded in the Christian Church as a seer and a preacher, though perhaps unconsciously, of Christ. It was even the habit in some countries, in the dramatic representations which were customary in the ritual of the Christian festival in the naves of great churches, to introduce the more prominent prophets of the Old Testament, who recited before the congregation their most famous prophetic testimonies to the coming Messiah; among whom, after Moses, David, Isaiah, Micah, and others of the prophets had been introduced, Virgil came forward, and was invited as Prophet of the Gentiles to rehearse his witness to the Christ in the language of the well-known "Epilogue." A famous mediaeval legend relates how Paul, passing by Naples in the course of his travels, visited the tomb of Virgil, and weeping over the grave, thus addressed the dead: What would I not have made Virgil may be taken as a typical Roman of the more serious class, who, from patriotic reasons, if not on deeper and more earnest grounds, looked with regret on the past, with its more austere life, and its belief in the rule of the gods; who gladly welcomed the measures which Augustus took to bring about a new state of things in Rome, especially in its moral and religious life. The Emperor had no ally in his patriotic work so influential as the universally admired poet.
The vivid representation of the life of the soul after death, with its living pictures of the rewards provided for the good, and of the punishment reserved for the evil, contained in the Sixth Book of the "Aeneid," read and re-read as it was by all sorts and conditions of men, strangely affected Roman society, and directed men's thoughts to the ever pressing questions connected with the hereafter.
In his lifetime Virgil had absolutely no rival. All serious persons, even if they differed from his conclusions, welcomed and read his verses. They were used almost at once as a text-book in the schools. So great was his popularity that it is even related how on one occasion, when he was noticed entering the theatre, the vast assemblage rose as one man and greeted him as it was the habit to greet Augustus himself. And his popularity was enduring. The influence of such poems so widely and generally read and studied as were the "Georgics" and the "Aeneid" must have been enormous, and contributed not a little to the restoration of the ancient faith.
One sorrowful fact, however, must be noticed in this, our brief sketch of the re-awakening of the worship of the old gods of Rome. In spite of Augustus' patriotic zeal for the reformation of morality, in the face of the admirable laws which were put out to this end in his reign, with all his apparently real love for the more austere and purer life of the primitive Roman people, it was an open secret that the private life of the great Emperor was terribly stained with grave moral irregularities; and later in his reign his own sin seems to have brought its punishment, when the disorders discovered in the Imperial family in the persons of his daughter and granddaughter were punished with exile, and even in the case of some of the guilty accomplices with death. And among his own immediate ministers, friends, and courtiers, there were many Sybarites in their way of living; many whose admiration of the old simple chaste life was confined to their words and expressions, but found little place in their daily life.
THE FORUM
There is no doubt how sadly these things, too well known in the city and Empire, militated against the complete success of the re-awakening of religion, of the reformation of morals in Rome and the provinces. But when due allowance for all these hindrances and drawbacks has been made, there is no doubt that the wishes of Augustus, so magnificently voiced by Virgil, especially in the question of the revival of religion, were in a large measure crowned with success; and before the long and brilliant reign of the first great Emperor was closed, the religion of Rome, partly based on primitive Italian traditions, partly upon the Homeric presentation of Greek religion, with certain modifications suggested by later philosophic thought, had become once more a power in the Empire. The great gods, such as the Jupiter of the Capitol, the Venus Genetrix, the Mars Ultor, the Apollo of the Palatine, whose splendid temples, rebuilt or restored, dominated the great city with their lordly magnificence, were no longer the objects of contempt and derision as in the latter years of the Republic; the rites performed in their shrines by the numerous priests and attendants were once more shared in by the people of all ranks and orders, from the senator to the slave; some following the gorgeous and striking ritual because it was the fashion of the day, set by the Emperor and his court, others without doubt sharing in the restored and revived worship with feelings of genuine devotion and unfeigned adoration.
After the death of the Emperor Augustus, the restorer of Paganism, the period covered by the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, with its unbridled tyranny, its cruelties, its reckless confiscations, its contempt for life on the part of the rulers of the Roman world, was on the whole favorable to the development of the newly-awakened faith in the gods; especially favorable to a deepened belief in the future life, in rewards and punishments after the fret and fever of this present existence were passed. For men are ever ready to turn to religion in times of stress and danger and sorrow. So the trend of events in those bloodstained reigns, when human life was held so cheap, tended to draw Roman society in the direction pointed out by the reforms of Augustus. Strangely enough, though from very different motives, the evil Emperors who immediately followed Augustus were solicitous for the prosperity of religion. Tiberius was learned in ancient customs, and watched over the old Pagan ritual and those who were in charge of the elaborate Pagan rites, conferring upon them additional rights and privileges. Claudius was superstitiously devout; Nero, who mocked at the work of Augustus and made light of the gods, in his way, too, was superstitious, and was in the habit of anxiously consulting the auspices. The nobler successors of Augustus were all of them anxious for the preservation of the ancient religion, believing that the prosperity of the Empire was closely linked with the maintenance of the worship of the gods whom their fathers, who laid the foundation of the world-Empire, served so zealously.