Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 341 pages of information about Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero.

Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 341 pages of information about Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero.
in which Cicero attributes to this deity the sanction for individual goodness, though there are many that assert the belief that justice and the whole system of social life depend on the gods and our belief in them.[568] But the Roman had never been conscious of individual duty, except in relation to his State, or to the family, which was a living cell in the organism of the State.  In his eyes law was rather the source of morality than morality the cause and the reason of law; and as his religion was a part of the law of his State, and thus had but an indirect connection with morality, it would not naturally occur to him that even the great Jupiter himself, thus glorified as the Reason in the universe, could really help him in the conduct of his life qua individual.  It is only as the source of legalised morality that we can think of Varro’s Jupiter as “making for righteousness.”

Less than twenty-five years after Cicero’s death, in the imagination of the greatest of Roman poets, Jupiter was once more brought before the Roman world, and now in a form comprehensible by all educated men, whether or no they had dabbled in philosophy.  What are we to say of the Jupiter of the Aeneid?  We do not need to read far in the first book of the poem to find him spoken of in terms which remind us of Varro:  “O qui res hominumque deumque Aeternis regis imperiis,” are the opening words of the address of Venus; and when she has finished,

  Olli subridens hominum sator atque deorum
  Vultu, quo caelum tempestatesque serenat,
  Oscula libavit natae, dehine talia fatur;
  “Parce metu, Cytherea, manent immota tuorum
  Fata tibi.”

Jupiter is here, as in Varro’s system, the prime cause and ruler of all things, and he also holds in his hand the destiny of Rome and the fortunes of the hero who was to lay the first foundation of Rome’s dominion.  It is in the knowledge of his will that Aeneas walks, with hesitating steps, in the earlier books, in the later ones with assured confidence, towards the goal that is set before him.  But the lines just quoted serve well to show how different is the Jupiter of Virgil from the universal deity of the Roman Stoic.  Beyond doubt Virgil had felt the power of the Stoic creed; but he was essaying an epic poem, and he could not possibly dispense with the divine machinery as it stood in his great Homeric model.  His Jupiter is indeed, as has been lately said,[569] “a great and wise god, free from the tyrannical and sensuous characteristics of the Homeric Zeus,” in other words, he is a Roman deity, and sometimes acts and speaks like a grave Roman consul of the olden time.  But still he is an anthropomorphic deity, a purely human conception of a personal god-king; in these lines he smiles on his daughter Venus and kisses her.  This is the reason why Virgil has throughout his poem placed the Fates, or Destiny, in close relation to him, without definitely explaining that relation.  Fate, as it appears in the Aeneid,

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Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.