Pagans

THE GAMES OF THE CENTURY MADE FOR GREAT SPECTACLE, BUT did everyone really believe that the gods got high on barbecue smoke? That the thin high voices of chanting children reached divine ears? Surely there were skeptics and sages who knew better. For example, what would Cicero have said?

Augustus could not deny responsibility for Cicero’s murder. In the proscriptions that followed Caesar’s assassination, he went along with putting Cicero’s name on the death list, perhaps imagining the orator would escape Rome and Italy in time to evade execution. The killers caught up with him, though, on the seashore south of Rome in 43 and Augustus could have seen his head and hands hung up to ridicule in the Roman Forum shortly after.

Years later, though, Augustus, secure in his power, came upon one of his grandsons hurriedly trying to cover up the book of Cicero he was reading to avoid the first citizen’s displeasure. The princeps was reassuring: “He was an eloquent man, and he loved his country.”¹

Plutarch tells another story that need not be false or exaggerated.2 When Cicero was deciding whether or not to execute the imprisoned coconspirators of Catiline in 63 BCE—a delicate and weighty decision—he went to a neighbor’s house, for his own was taken over that night by his wife, other distinguished matrons, and the leading vestal virgins, all celebrating the Good Goddess, bona dea, whose rites only women could attend. While he was away, the women saw a sign. The fire had died down on the altar of sacrifice, but suddenly a great bright blaze flared up from it. They were all terrified, but the vestals told Cicero’s wife to hurry to her husband and tell him to act boldly, for the goddess was offering him a wonderful light on his road to safety and glory.

Cicero had the conspirators put to death, but his political career was irreparably damaged when the aristocrats who had found him usefully naive dropped him cold when complaints about peremptory political murder grew too sticky. Cicero was exiled, and his house was confiscated, torn down, and the land “rezoned” as a temple to prevent rebuilding there. When he returned from exile the next year, his two long speeches “On his house” and “On the responses of the haruspices” catch him seizing religion as an instrument of policy and arguing successfully to have the land deconsecrated and returned to him for building a new house. Not long after, he became an augur, which meant he accepted the occasional duty of performing a role in ritual.

So first, let the citizens be persuaded that the gods are the lords and governors of all things and that all that occurs is done with their approval and divine power. They well deserve the respect of men and they see and understand what each mortal man is like, what he does, what wrongs he commits, and with what spirit he performs his religious duties. They assuredly take into account the difference between those who perform their duties and those who do not.

This is religion for citizens, for the real Romans, the full participants in the work and responsibility of the Roman state. Others will have other gods and good luck to them.

These gods act by virtue of their innate character—the thing about a god that is godly, called numen in Latin.

Minds full of these things will not be strangers to what is useful and what is true. What is truer than this? That no one should be so foolish and arrogant as to think that he has mind and reason within him, but that the sky and the world do not… . The man who is not moved by the order he sees in the stars above and in the alternation of nights and days, in the moderation of the seasons and in all the things that are spun into being for our delight—well, who can really count him to be a man at all?

The obligation of gratitude is a starting point, in a divine economy which is very like the Roman human economy, where beneficiaries and dependents stand in perpetual obligation of gratitude to lords and masters. To a modern small-D democrat, this sounds imposing. To Cicero’s readers, it sounded natural.

Now we get to the “law” and he begins with old maxims.

Let men approach the gods in chastity, let them bring a spirit of loyalty, let them do without riches. If a man does otherwise, a god himself will punish him.

No one should have gods of his own, not new ones, not imported ones, unless they have been publicly invited in and accepted. Private worship should only be for those approved by the fathers.

Respect temples.

Take care of country groves and the shrines of the household gods.

Observe the rites of family and fathers.

The gods who are regarded as heavenly—worship those, and those who have earned heaven by their deeds: Hercules, Liber, Aesculapius, Castor, Pollux, Quirinus; and worship those virtues by which men achieve ascent to heaven: Intelligence, Courage, Piety, Faithfulness.

Let no one attend rites in honor of the vices.

Let there be no quarrels on festal days, and let servants observe them when their work is done, for so they were placed on the annual calendar.

. . . Let there be priests for the gods, pontiffs for all, and a priest for each.

Let the vestal virgins in the city look after the fire on the public hearth forever.

Let there be no night-time sacrifices by women except those done properly on behalf of the people.

Let there be no initiations except for the customary one for Ceres in the Greek way.

. . . At the public games, whatever there is of races and fights and singing and music, keep the popular celebration under control and connected to the honor shown the gods.

Cicero wrote The Laws when he was in political eclipse, but still fancied himself a player in Roman affairs, in the late 50s BCE. A few years later, under the rule and thumb of Julius Caesar, he found his voice as a philosopher and wrote a series of works that have never received the respect they deserve.

Two books he wrote in those late seasons speak to the matter of the gods in a different voice from The Laws. First was The Nature of the Gods, in which Cicero presents himself as a young man decades earlier listening to debate among a Stoic, an Epicurean, and an Academic, seeking to establish philosophically just what to make of gods. The work presents Epicurean and then Stoic views at some length, with critique from the Academic perspective. That last school was the descendant of the followers of Socrates and Plato. The high flights of Platonic imagination and the dazzling virtuosity of his dialogues had ripened gradually into an institutionalization of skepticism. The hard position of the Academics was that there was nothing that could be known with certainty but only probabilities to be established.

The great issue in The Nature of the Gods has little to do with the gods themselves and more to do with their relations with humankind. As often when we speak about the divine, it’s really all about us. Do they care about us or don’t they? The Stoics thought the gods knew and cared what we do, the Epicureans believed in gods but firmly believed as well that they were so high and lofty and remote, so wrapped in concerns of their own, that they had no time for meddling in human affairs or paying attention to human prayers.

Cicero ends the dialogue among them, finally, with his own still-tantalizing reaction. “When they’d said all this, we left it that the Epicurean Velleius thought the Academic Cotta had the truer argument, but I thought the Stoic Balbus’s argument came closer to something resembling the truth.” At first glance, that might mean that the Stoic had worsted the skeptic and the skeptic in turn worsted the Epicurean. “Something resembling the truth” was jargon from the Academic school that Cicero placed in the mouth of the younger version of himself appearing in the dialogue. The thing most like the truth was the best thing available to uncertain mortal minds in the Academic view: you could act on it as if it were true. What Cicero managed neatly to say was that even the Academic had no lock on the truth, but that it was still worth making a good case for a philosophical basis, however hesitant, for continuing in the ways of Roman piety.

Taken together, The Laws and The Nature of the Gods recommend respect for the conventional, seasoned with skepticism. The speakers in The Nature of the Gods had been men of standing in Roman life and religion, the Stoic Balbus a pontifex, the young Cicero a future augur. Even the skeptic Cotta would serve a few years after the date of the dialogue as consul, a role in which he necessarily performed many of the traditional offices of Roman religion. These men were imbued with the substance and flavor of life with the gods.

Then came Cicero’s On Divination (more or less, “On Fortune-telling”), written in 44 after Caesar’s death, to take on the question of how the gods can help humankind know the future. The dialogue has Cicero conversing with his brother Quintus, making it easier than in other works to see the author’s own position in the words he gives himself to speak.

The dialogue lets us into a Roman world where coincidence is unknown. Meaning and connection must be present in large events and small. Leave aside the arguments of The Nature of the Gods now, for this underlying belief in the meaningfulness of what seems random and arbitrary is fundamental, common, and in one way unquestionable. The history of Rome is a history of stories in which men, faced with perplexity and anomaly, have found in them a divine message. When a message turns out to be incorrect, it is simply forgotten and belief goes on as strong as ever.

Cicero’s stories here very rarely bring him into the living world of his own time, and the most notable contemporary case he has should give us caution. Twice in his last days, Julius Caesar performed sacrifice and found the animal on inspection defective. Once the animal implausibly had no heart, then the next day the victim’s liver had no “head.” In retrospect, Cicero turns these into signs of Caesar’s coming assassination.

Divination then is more history than present fact, and its successes are recorded in all the books of old. At every age and stage, accounts of the validity of divination must be accompanied or fringed with stories of doubt. This skepticism turns on the deepest fact about the gods—that no one has ever really seen them. They remain invisible and, in vital ways, unrevealed. Every belief about them faces skepticism.

Quintus Cicero fills the first book of dialogue arguing that the old rituals of divination can help know the future. (Even Socrates supports credulity. He had his familiar spirit, his daimonion, who cautioned him against error, did he not?) The second book is dominated by Cicero himself and he speaks with blunt criticism. In this voice, Cicero knows well that many predictions of gut-reading haruspices simply did not turn out as foretold. He catches one king shamefacedly explaining that it’s all right that the birds told him to join what proved to be the losing side in the war between Caesar and Pompey because after all, Pompey’s side was the side of liberty and principle, despite the disaster of defeat.

There’s also humor here, as when he invokes the great Cato, insufferable paragon of all that was Roman, as saying that he didn’t understand why one haruspex didn’t laugh out loud when he laid eyes on another one. Can we not mock Marcus Marcellus, five times consul in the second Punic war, who traveled in a closed litter so he would not see unpropitious signs after he had decided on a course of action? He insisted on having any cattle he saw taken out from under their yokes, because it was unpropitious if two yoked cows relieved themselves at the same time. Or again, did all the Romans who died at the great battle against Hannibal at Cannae in that war have the same horoscope?

If we read only On Divination, in other words, we come to the conclusion that Cicero, our Cicero, surely didn’t believe in the claptrap he was forced to practice. Various modern strategies of interpretation intervene here. Straussians hold that ancient skeptics had to suppress their true views for public purposes and had to go along with common superstition as protection against the hostile obscurantism that had taken Socrates’s life. Or did Cicero’s views have to change over time as his hopes for Rome grew colder and colder? Did he work his way from credulity (The Laws) to skepticism (The Nature of the Gods) to outright disbelief (On Divination)? None of these interpretations is persuasive.

Other ancient readers were not deceived. Four hundred years later, the sternly traditional Roman historian Ammianus knew just what Cicero had stood for. “Wherefore Cicero has this fine saying, among others: ‘The gods,’ says he, ‘show signs of coming events. With regard to these if one err, it is not the nature of the gods that is at fault, but man’s interpretation.’” Ammianus had his quotation wrong, but not his Cicero.4

What we should see most of all in Cicero is an astonishment he speaks to briefly in one of his works on Academic skepticism.⁵ He had read a monumental work by his contemporary Marcus Terentius Varro. Varro was a marvel of the nations in several regards, for his long life (born in 116 BCE, he lived eighty-nine years, to die in the year Octavian took the title Augustus) and for his polymath gifts and prolific output of learned works in every domain of literature, culture, and history. He fought for Pompey in the civil war and was pardoned twice by Caesar. Then he earned his own “proscription” from the junta that killed Cicero, but survived to be patronized in great old age by Augustus. His Human and Divine Antiquities in perhaps forty-one books was effectively the first great compilation of Roman religious culture and lore that a curious senator could read.

Cicero makes clear that the work was a revelation to him. It brought to the fore a world of half-forgotten gods, cults, and rituals. Without exhaustive travel and investigation, no one could easily or naturally get to know the diversity of practices and ideas that flourished just in the old Latin towns of central Italy. Seeing Roman practices in a landscape had the effect for Cicero of reinventing “Roman religion”—that is, the religion of the city and its gods and its aristocrats.

We should perhaps better argue that Varro did not reinvent but invent. That is, Romans with their gods, until Varro showed them the diversity of their world, did not yet know they possessed a distinct and distinguishable and uniquely important set of gods and practices. They had never been able to think about the subject before. The Nature of the Gods is very much about that newfound religion, carefully singled out from the swamp of beliefs in which it quite naturally dwelled. This same old-seeming but newly invented “Roman religion” would be the object of Augustus’s attention as well. Embracing it was as easy for them as it was to nurture their skepticism.

Cicero was every bit the traditionalist and every bit the modern in matters of religion and got to have it both ways. His skepticism, which some have thought an invention, was the most traditional thing about him. His positive attachment to the old ways of Rome was the novelty.

Chapter 3

AN ELOQUENT MAN WHO LOVED HIS COUNTRY