Caesar and Christ (Story of Civilization)

Caesar and Christ: A background of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from Their Beginnings to A.D. 325 (Story of Civilization)

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While he left the home he stumbled on himself back and all around the presence of gods. The earth itself used to be a deity: occasionally Tellus, or Terra Mater—Mother Earth; occasionally Mars because the very soil he trod, and its divine fertility; occasionally Bona Dea, the great Goddess who gave wealthy wombs to girls and fields. at the farm there has been a assisting god for each activity or spot: Pomona for orchards, Faunus for farm animals, Pales for pasturage, Sterculus for manure lots, Saturn for sowing, Ceres for plants, Fornax for baking corn within the oven, Vulcan for making the hearth. Over the bounds presided the good god Terminus, imaged and worshiped within the stones or timber that marked the bounds of the farm. different religions can have seemed to the sky, and the Roman admitted that there too have been gods; yet his inner most piety and sincerest propitiations became to the earth because the resource and mom of his existence, the house of his lifeless and the magic nurse of the sprouting seed. each December the Lares of the soil have been worshiped within the pleased dinner party of the Crossroads, or Compitalia; each January wealthy presents sought the prefer of Tellus for all planted issues; each could the monks of the Arval (or Plowing) Brotherhood led a chanting procession alongside the limits of adjacent farms, garlanded the stones with flora, sprinkled them with the blood of sacrificial sufferers, and prayed to Mars (the earth) to endure beneficiant fruit. So faith sanctified estate, quieted disputes, ennobled the exertions of the fields with poetry and drama, and bolstered physique and soul with religion and desire. The Roman didn't, just like the Greek, consider his gods as having human shape; he referred to as them easily nurmna, or spirits; occasionally they have been abstractions like wellbeing and fitness, adolescence, reminiscence, Fortune, Honor, desire, worry, advantage, Chastity, harmony, Victory, or Rome. a few of them, just like the Lemures or Ghosts, have been spirits of disorder, challenging to propitiate. a few have been spirits of the season, like Maia, the soul of could; others have been water gods like Neptune, or forest sprites like Silvanus, or the gods that dwelt in bushes. a few lived in sacred animals, just like the sacrificed horse or bull, or within the sacred ducks playful piety preserved unhurt at the Capitol. a few have been spirits of procreation; Tutumus supervised belief, Lucina safe menstruation and supply. Priapus was once a Greek god of fertility quickly domiciled in Rome: maidens and matrons (if we may well think the offended Saint Augustine) sat at the male member of his statue as a method of making sure pregnancy;2 scandalous figures of him embellished many a backyard; little phallic pictures of him have been worn through uncomplicated individuals to deliver fertility or strong good fortune or to ward off the “evil eye. ”3 by no means had a faith such a lot of divinities. Varro reckoned them at 30,000, and Petronius complained that during a few cities of Italy there have been extra gods than males. yet deus, to the Roman, intended saint in addition to god. below those uncomplicated suggestions lurked a polymorphous mass of renowned ideals in animism, fetishism, totemism, magic, miracles, spells, superstitions, and taboos, such a lot of them going again to the prehistoric population of Italy, and maybe to Indo-European ancestors of their old Asiatic domestic.

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