Religion accepted the games as proper forms of religious celebration and inaugurated them with solemn processions. The Vestal Virgins and the priests occupied seats of honor in the theaters, at the circus, and before the arena. The emperor who presided was the high priest of the state religion.
Augustus and his successors had done everything they could to revitalize the old faith, except to live moral lives; even the declared atheists among them, like Caligula and Nero, had carried out all the ritual traditionally due the official gods. The Luperci priests still danced through the streets on their festival day; the Arval Brethren still mumbled prayers to Mars in old Latin that no one could understand. Divination and augury were assiduously practiced and widely trusted; all but a few philosophers believed in astrology, and the emperors who banished astrologers consulted them. Magic and sorcery, witchcraft and superstition, charms and incantations, “portents” and the interpretation of dreams were deeply woven into the tissue of Roman life. Augustus studied his dreams with the diligence of a modern psychologist; Seneca saw women sitting on the steps of the Capitol waiting the pleasure of Jupiter because their dreams had told them they were desired of the god.123 Every consul celebrated his inauguration by sacrificing steers; Juvenal, who could laugh at everything else, piously slit the throats of two lambs and a young ox in gratitude for the safe voyage of a friend. Temples were rich with gold and silver offerings; candles burned before the altars; the lips, hands, and feet of divine images were worn by the kisses of the devout. The old religion seemed still vigorous; it created new gods like Annona (gatherer of the world’s corn for Rome), put new life into the worship of Fortuna and Roma, and gave powerful support to law, order, and tyranny. If Augustus had returned a year after his death he might well have claimed that his religious revival had proved a happy success.
Despite these appearances the ancient faith was diseased at the bottom and at the top. The deification of the emperors revealed not how much the upper classes thought of their rulers, but how little they thought of their gods. Among educated men philosophy was whittling away belief even while patronizing it. Lucretius had not been without effect; men did not mention him, but merely because it was easier to practice epicureanism than to study Epicurus or his passionate expositor. The rich youths who went to Athens, Alexandria, and Rhodes for higher education found no sustenance there for the Roman creed. Greek poets made fun of the Roman pantheon, and Roman poets leaped to imitate them. The poems of Ovid assumed that the gods were fables; the epigrams of Martial assumed that they were jokes; and no one seems to have complained. Many of the mimes ridiculed the gods; one whipped Diana off the stage, another showed Jove making his will in expectation of death.124 Juvenal, like Plato five centuries before him and ourselves eighteen centuries after him, noted that the fear of a watchful deity had lost its power to discourage perjury.125 Even on the tombstones of the poor we note increasing skepticism, and some candid sensuality. Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo, reads one—“I was not, I was, I am not, I care not”; and another, Non fueram, non sum, nescio—“I had not been, I am not, I know not”; and another, “What I have eaten and drunk is my own; I have had my life.”126 “I believe in nothing beyond the grave,” says one tombstone; “There is no Hades, no Charon, no Cerberus,” asserts another. “Now,” a harassed soul wrote, “I need never fear hunger, need never pay rent, and am at least free from gout”; and a somber Lucretian writes of the buried flesh: “The elements out of which he was formed take possession of their own again. Life is only lent to man; he cannot keep it forever. By his death he pays his debt to Nature.”127
But doubt, however honest, cannot long take the place of belief. Amid all its pleasures this society had not found happiness. Its refinements wearied it, its debaucheries exhausted it; rich and poor were still subject to pain and grief and death. Philosophy—least of all so coldly superior a doctrine as Stoicism—could never give the common man a faith to grace his poverty, encourage his decency, solace his sorrows, and inspire his hopes. The old religion had fulfilled the first of these functions; it had failed in the rest. Men wanted revelation, and it gave them ritual; they wanted immortality, and it gave them games. Men who had come, enslaved or free, from other states felt excluded from this nationalistic worship; therefore they brought their own gods with them, built their own temples, practiced their own rites; in the very heart of the West they planted the religions of the East. Between the creeds of the conquerors and the faith of the defeated a war took form in which the weapons of the legions were useless; the needs of the heart would determine the victory.
The new deities came with war captives, returning soldiers, and merchants. Traders from Asia and Egypt set up temples in Puteoli, Ostia, and Rome for the cult of their traditional gods. The Roman government treated these alien faiths for the most part with toleration; since it would not admit foreigners to its own worship it preferred that they should practice their imported rites rather than have no religion at all. In return it required that each new faith should exercise a similar tolerance towards other creeds, and should include in its ritual some obeisance to the emperor’s “genius” and the goddess Roma, as an expression of loyalty to the state. Encouraged by this lenience, the Oriental faiths already domiciled in Rome became major religions of the populace. Hoping to civilize the cult, Claudius removed the restrictions that had harassed the worship of the Great Mother; he allowed Romans to become her ministrants, and established her feast around the vernal equinox, from March 15 to 27. Her chief rival in this first Christian century was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of motherhood, fertility, and trade. Again and again the government had forbidden the cult in Rome, but it always returned; the piety of the devotees overcame the power of the state, and Caligula marked the surrender by building with public funds an immense shrine to her in the Field of Mars. Otho and Domitian took part in the Isiac festivals; Commodus, with shaven head, walked humbly behind the priests, holding reverently in his arms a statue of Anubis, the Egyptian monkey god.
The divine invasion swelled from year to year. From southern Italy came the worship of Pythagoras—vegetarianism and reincarnation. From Hierapolis came Atargatis, known to the Romans as dea Syria, “the Syrian goddess,” Aziz the “Zeus of Doliche,” and other strange gods; their worship was spread by Syrian merchants and slaves; and at last a young priest of a Syrian Baal ascended the throne as Elagabalus—worshiper of the god of the sun. From hostile Parthia came the cult of another sun-god, Mithras; its devotees were enlisted as soldiers in the great cosmic war of Light against Darkness, of Good against Evil; it was a virile faith that won men rather than women, and pleased the Roman legions stationed on distant frontiers where they could hardly hear the voices of their native gods. From Judea came Yahweh, an uncompromising monotheist who commanded the most difficult life of piety and regulation, but gave his followers a moral code and courage that supported them well in tribulation, and clothed with a certain nobility the life of the humblest poor. Among the Roman Jews who prayed to him were some, as yet obscurely distinguished from the rest, who worshiped his incarnate and resurrected son.
I Sometimes, in the first century, girls or illegitimate children were exposed, usually at the base of the Columna Lactaria—so named because the state provided wet nurses to feed and save the infants found there.10 The abandonment of unwanted babies, however, is a custom to be found in all but the most uncivilized societies.
II In 1937 the population of Rome was 1,178,000.
III They supported Caesar consistently and were in turn protected by him. Augustus followed suit; but Tiberius, hostile to all foreign faiths, conscripted 4000 of them for almost suicidal soldiering in Sardinia, and expelled the rest from Rome (A.D. 19).16 Twelve years later, convinced that he had been misled in this matter by Sejanus, he withdrew his edict and ordered that the Jews should be unmolested in the practice of their religion and the pursuit of their customs.17 Caligula protected them in Rome and oppressed them abroad. Claudius exiled some because of riots, but by a general edict (42) confirmed the right of the Jews throughout the Empire to live by their own laws. In 94 Domitian banished the Jews of Rome to the valley of Egeria; in 96 Nerva brought them back, restored their civic rights, and allowed them a generation of peace.
IV Toys and games were much as today. Roman children played hopscotch, tug-of-war, pitch and toss, blindman’s buff, hide-and-seek; and with dolls, hoops, skipping ropes, hobbyhorses, and kites. Roman youth played five distinguishable games of ball. One resembled our football, except that (or in that) it was played rather with arms and hands than with legs and feet.29
V Apicius squandered a huge fortune in extravagant living; then, being reduced to 10,000,000 sesterces ($1,500,000), he committed suicide.89 Two hundred years later a classic of gastronomy—De re coquinaria—was attributed to him by a device permitted in antiquity.