CHAPTER I - "THE RELIGION OF NUMA"

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER I - "THE RELIGION OF NUMA", MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater

[3] As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered
latest in the country, and died out at last as but paganism--the
religion of the villagers, before the advance of the Christian
Church; so, in an earlier century, it was in places remote from town-
life that the older and purer forms of paganism itself had survived
the longest. While, in Rome, new religions had arisen with
bewildering complexity around the dying old one, the earlier and
simpler patriarchal religion, "the religion of Numa," as people loved
to fancy, lingered on with little change amid the pastoral life, out
of the habits and sentiment of which so much of it had grown.
Glimpses of such a survival we may catch below the merely artificial
attitudes of Latin pastoral poetry; in Tibullus especially, who has
preserved for us many poetic details of old Roman religious usage.

At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates,
Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari:

[4] --he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something liturgical,
with repetitions of a consecrated form of words, is traceable in one
of his elegies, as part of the order of a birthday sacrifice. The
hearth, from a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, the
child Romulus had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar;
and the worthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical sanity
of the young men and women, which the scrupulous ways of that
religion of the hearth had tended to maintain. A religion of usages
and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very
definite things and places--the oak of immemorial age, the rock on
the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim human art, the
shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed
involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen
Inest!--it was in natural harmony with the temper of a quiet people
amid the spectacle of rural life, like that simpler faith between man
and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with the period when, with
an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed
for room in their homely little shrines.

And about the time when the dying Antoninus Pius ordered his golden
image of Fortune to be carried into the chamber of his successor (now
about to test the truth of the old Platonic contention, that the
world would at last find itself [5] happy, could it detach some
reluctant philosophic student from the more desirable life of
celestial contemplation, and compel him to rule it), there was a boy
living in an old country-house, half farm, half villa, who, for
himself, recruited that body of antique traditions by a spontaneous
force of religious veneration such as had originally called them into
being. More than a century and a half had past since Tibullus had
written; but the restoration of religious usages, and their retention
where they still survived, was meantime come to be the fashion
through the influence of imperial example; and what had been in the
main a matter of family pride with his father, was sustained by a
native instinct of devotion in the young Marius. A sense of
conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or displeased by the
right or wrong conduct of every circumstance of daily life--that
conscience, of which the old Roman religion was a formal, habitual
recognition, was become in him a powerful current of feeling and
observance. The old-fashioned, partly puritanic awe, the power of
which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern peasantry,
had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed the
spot, "touched of heaven," where the lightning had struck dead an
aged labourer in the field: an upright stone, still with mouldering
garlands about it, marked the place. He brought to that system of
symbolic [6] usages, and they in turn developed in him further, a
great seriousness--an impressibility to the sacredness of time, of
life and its events, and the circumstances of family fellowship; of
such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth, from labour on which
they live, really understood by him as gifts--a sense of religious
responsibility in the reception of them. It was a religion for the
most part of fear, of multitudinous scruples, of a year-long burden
of forms; yet rarely (on clear summer mornings, for instance) the
thought of those heavenly powers afforded a welcome channel for the
almost stifling sense of health and delight in him, and relieved it
as gratitude to the gods.

The day of the "little" or private Ambarvalia was come, to be
celebrated by a single family for the welfare of all belonging to it,
as the great college of the Arval Brothers officiated at Rome in the
interest of the whole state. At the appointed time all work ceases;
the instruments of labour lie untouched, hung with wreaths of
flowers, while masters and servants together go in solemn procession
along the dry paths of vineyard and cornfield, conducting the victims
whose blood is presently to be shed for the purification from all
natural or supernatural taint of the lands they have "gone about."
The old Latin words of the liturgy, to be said as the procession
moved on its way, though their precise meaning was long [7] since
become unintelligible, were recited from an ancient illuminated roll,
kept in the painted chest in the hall, together with the family
records. Early on that day the girls of the farm had been busy in
the great portico, filling large baskets with flowers plucked short
from branches of apple and cherry, then in spacious bloom, to strew
before the quaint images of the gods--Ceres and Bacchus and the yet
more mysterious Dea Dia--as they passed through the fields, carried
in their little houses on the shoulders of white-clad youths, who
were understood to proceed to this office in perfect temperance, as
pure in soul and body as the air they breathed in the firm weather of
that early summer-time. The clean lustral water and the full
incense-box were carried after them. The altars were gay with
garlands of wool and the more sumptuous sort of blossom and green
herbs to be thrown into the sacrificial fire, fresh-gathered this
morning from a particular plot in the old garden, set apart for the
purpose. Just then the young leaves were almost as fragrant as
flowers, and the scent of the bean-fields mingled pleasantly with the
cloud of incense. But for the monotonous intonation of the liturgy
by the priests, clad in their strange, stiff, antique vestments, and
bearing ears of green corn upon their heads, secured by flowing bands
of white, the procession moved in absolute stillness, all persons,
even the children, abstaining from [8] speech after the utterance of
the pontifical formula, Favete linguis!--Silence! Propitious
Silence!--lest any words save those proper to the occasion should
hinder the religious efficacy of the rite.

With the lad Marius, who, as the head of his house, took a leading
part in the ceremonies of the day, there was a devout effort to
complete this impressive outward silence by that inward tacitness of
mind, esteemed so important by religious Romans in the performance of
these sacred functions. To him the sustained stillness without
seemed really but to be waiting upon that interior, mental condition
of preparation or expectancy, for which he was just then intently
striving. The persons about him, certainly, had never been
challenged by those prayers and ceremonies to any ponderings on the
divine nature: they conceived them rather to be the appointed means
of setting such troublesome movements at rest. By them, "the
religion of Numa," so staid, ideal and comely, the object of so much
jealous conservatism, though of direct service as lending sanction to
a sort of high scrupulosity, especially in the chief points of
domestic conduct, was mainly prized as being, through its hereditary
character, something like a personal distinction--as contributing,
among the other accessories of an ancient house, to the production of
that aristocratic atmosphere which separated them from newly-made
people. But [9] in the young Marius, the very absence from those
venerable usages of all definite history and dogmatic interpretation,
had already awakened much speculative activity; and to-day, starting
from the actual details of the divine service, some very lively
surmises, though scarcely distinct enough to be thoughts, were moving
backwards and forwards in his mind, as the stirring wind had done all
day among the trees, and were like the passing of some mysterious
influence over all the elements of his nature and experience. One
thing only distracted him--a certain pity at the bottom of his heart,
and almost on his lips, for the sacrificial victims and their looks
of terror, rising almost to disgust at the central act of the
sacrifice itself, a piece of everyday butcher's work, such as we
decorously hide out of sight; though some then present certainly
displayed a frank curiosity in the spectacle thus permitted them on a
religious pretext. The old sculptors of the great procession on the
frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, have delineated the placid heads
of the victims led in it to sacrifice, with a perfect feeling for
animals in forcible contrast with any indifference as to their
sufferings. It was this contrast that distracted Marius now in the
blessing of his fields, and qualified his devout absorption upon the
scrupulous fulfilment of all the details of the ceremonial, as the
procession approached the altars.

[10] The names of that great populace of "little gods," dear to the
Roman home, which the pontiffs had placed on the sacred list of the
Indigitamenta, to be invoked, because they can help, on special
occasions, were not forgotten in the long litany--Vatican who causes
the infant to utter his first cry, Fabulinus who prompts his first
word, Cuba who keeps him quiet in his cot, Domiduca especially, for
whom Marius had through life a particular memory and devotion, the
goddess who watches over one's safe coming home. The urns of the
dead in the family chapel received their due service. They also were
now become something divine, a goodly company of friendly and
protecting spirits, encamped about the place of their former abode--
above all others, the father, dead ten years before, of whom,
remembering but a tall, grave figure above him in early childhood,
Marius habitually thought as a genius a little cold and severe.

Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi,
Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera.--

Perhaps!--but certainly needs his altar here below, and garlands to-
day upon his urn. But the dead genii were satisfied with little--a
few violets, a cake dipped in wine, or a morsel of honeycomb. Daily,
from the time when his childish footsteps were still uncertain, had
Marius taken them their portion of the family meal, at the second
course, amidst the silence [11] of the company. They loved those who
brought them their sustenance; but, deprived of these services, would
be heard wandering through the house, crying sorrowfully in the
stillness of the night.

And those simple gifts, like other objects as trivial--bread, oil,
wine, milk--had regained for him, by their use in such religious
service, that poetic and as it were moral significance, which surely
belongs to all the means of daily life, could we but break through
the veil of our familiarity with things by no means vulgar in
themselves. A hymn followed, while the whole assembly stood with
veiled faces. The fire rose up readily from the altars, in clean,
bright flame--a favourable omen, making it a duty to render the mirth
of the evening complete. Old wine was poured out freely for the
servants at supper in the great kitchen, where they had worked in the
imperfect light through the long evenings of winter. The young
Marius himself took but a very sober part in the noisy feasting. A
devout, regretful after-taste of what had been really beautiful in
the ritual he had accomplished took him early away, that he might the
better recall in reverie all the circumstances of the celebration of
the day. As he sank into a sleep, pleasant with all the influences
of long hours in the open air, he seemed still to be moving in
procession through the fields, with a kind of pleasurable awe. That
feeling was still upon him as he [12] awoke amid the beating of
violent rain on the shutters, in the first storm of the season. The
thunder which startled him from sleep seemed to make the solitude of
his chamber almost painfully complete, as if the nearness of those
angry clouds shut him up in a close place alone in the world. Then
he thought of the sort of protection which that day's ceremonies
assured. To procure an agreement with the gods--Pacem deorum
exposcere: that was the meaning of what they had all day been busy
upon. In a faith, sincere but half-suspicious, he would fain have
those Powers at least not against him. His own nearer household gods
were all around his bed. The spell of his religion as a part of the
very essence of home, its intimacy, its dignity and security, was
forcible at that moment; only, it seemed to involve certain heavy
demands upon him.