The truth shall set you free > Religion

OUTLINES OP THE HISTORY OF RELIGION 1877 C.Tiele

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Prometheus:

RELIGION AMONG THE ROMANS.

more than a genius, remained entirely unknown in the
West.

The Taurobolia and Kriobolia must also have been
derived from the East, though their origin is unknown.

143.   It was natural that the policy of Augustus should
include the restoration of the national worship, but it was
only the outward institutions which he re-organised; he
could breathe no life into its dead forms. Two important
religious innovations characterise the age of the empire
—the deification of the emperors, and the growing power
of universalism. Not only was the emperor on the
Capitol made the centre of worship, which was to be ex-
pected in a state religion, but men now began to follow
also at Eome the example set centuries before by the
Egyptian princes, and in later days by the Ptolemies and
Seleucid.se, for which the worship of genii afforded the-
means of transition, and the prevailing Euhemerism which
explained the gods themselves as princes deified in ancient
times, supplied the justification. Even during his lifetime
Csesar was honoured as a deity, and after his death he was
enrolled among the gods by the Senate with great forma-
lity. All the emperors, with a few exceptions, followed
him in turn, although Augustus and Tiberius still offered
some resistance to the practice, and a Vespasian ridiculed
it. Men talked of their majesty and eternity; their head
was surrounded with a crown of rays and a nimbus;
sacrifice was offered to their images, and they had the
sacred fire carried before them. They were designated hy
the names of the gods—Hadrian was the Olympian, Nero
Zeus, the liberator, and even the saviour of the world. Em-
presses thought it not beneath them to serve as priestesses
WORSHIP OF THE EMPERORS.

247

in the temples of their dead consorts, in expectation that
they themselves would he deified, and cities esteemed
it an honour to be temple-guardians (properly “ temple-
sweepers,” veu/copoi) of the Imperator. Thus this new
cultus became a regular instrument of propaganda among’
the non-Boman nations, alike of the religion and of the
supremacy of Eome. For Augustus and Eoma were
placed side by side as symbols of the restored empire
with all its civilisation and its belief.

The second innovation was that Jupiter 0. M. was now
not only raised with the loftiest titles to be the chief of
all the deities in the world, but was also identified with
all the highest gods of other nations, and the provinces
witnessed everywhere the rise of imitations of the Capitol.
The relation was thus reversed. Men had begun by
honouring the foreign gods, as mysterious powers, above
their own; now that they knew them better, they saw
that they stood no higher, and were essentially the same;
each chief god was in fact a Jupiter, and the cultus of
this Jupiter in different forms, combined with that of his
incarnation upon earth—the emperor—now became the
universal religion for the great universal empire.

The deification of Caesar under the name divus Julius
had proceeded so far that his image was not allowed to be
carried in procession at family obsequies among the images
of the ancestors of the house. The cultus of the emperors
was pursued with such zeal that games were actually
instituted in their honour, temples were built, and spe-
cial priesthoods appointed; the Greek usage in the first
case, and the Egyptian in the second, supplying the
model. Even by the Christian Tertullian the emperors
243

RELIGION AMONG THE ROMANS.

were called, though in a modified sense, a Deo secundi, solo
Deo minores.

Jupiter now received the splendid titles of summus
excellentissimus, or exsuperantissimus, pacator or praeses orbis,
and others of the same kind. The inscriptions of the
period speak of a Jupiter 0. M. Heliopolitanus (Baalbek),
Damascenus, Dolichenus, and even of a Pceninus on the St.
Bernard, and a Culminalis in Styria. See Orell. Inscript,
lat. Collectio, No. 228 foil., and Henzen (vol. iii. Collect.
Orellianae), No. 5642. Cf. Grimm, Deutsche Myth. p. 154.

144.   The Greco-Roman civilisation was the most com-
posite, and consequently the highest, of antiquity. It
soon far outgrew the ancestral religion, and men sought
anxiously for the satisfaction of their religious wants.
Fresh elements, therefore, were constantly being added to
those which had already coalesced from Greece and Rome,
and the whole mass continued to seethe and ferment.
But an inspiring idea was necessary to draw forth from
this confusion a new form of religion which should answer
the needs of the civilised world. This idea was brought
by the Gospel, the latest and most precious gift of the
East to the West. But the West contributed its share,
for it was here that the Gospel found its way prepared;
here alone was it possible for it, though after long struggles,
to prevail. The Eastern nations had retrograded; the
Slavic and Germanic peoples were still backward. It
was not till later that the era of the Germans dawned.
The first form which Christianity assumed as an established
religion was Roman. The Roman Catholic Church is
simply the Roman universal empire modified and conse-
crated by Christian ideas. It left the old forms for the
RISE OF CHRISTIANITY.

249

most part standing, but it ennobled and elevated them by
tlie new spirit; its organisation and its efforts after unity
which controlled all its development were inherited from
the Romans, and it was by their means that it was
enabled to become the teacher of the still rude popula-
tions of the North, to preserve rather than to diffuse
the treasures which it had received from the Ancients
and from Jesus.

THE END.

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