Course XXVII - Teaching 17: The Romans
The Black Forest was inhabited by a nomadic tribe of early Aryans; attracted by mild weather of western lands, they came down through the present Brenner until Venetian countries, and from there went into the centre of the ancient Saturnia.
There they founded a flourishing community that consisted of clans, and lived by grazing, hunting and fishing.
Their religion was like that of any Aryan: purely natural.
They worshipped elements and their manifestations; their priests foretold the future by the flight of birds, by the sound of the wind through branches of the tress and by the form of flames in the holy fire.
From there the powerful people of the Racenes –later called Etruscans– came into being; the high level of their civilization can be ascertained today by remnants of monuments discovered in excavations of those missing cities.
But other peoples, of Semitic origin, and particularly those tribes later called Ligures, invaded the Italic peninsula, killed their old inhabitants and imposed their laws and religion of Egyptian and divine origin.
Since then the worship of ancestors begins, and also the transformation of a hero or dead chief of the tribe into God.
The origin of the ancient Romans is entirely mythological and based on beliefs of every ancient Aryan religion; a god made man.
Rhea Silvia, a priestess of the fiery or solar worship, secretly married to the God Mars, becomes Romulus’ and Remus’ mother. These two children consist of a human and divine manifestation. Abandoned in the river by a shepherd and suckled by a she-wolf, they symbolize the descent of the pure souls to the lower worlds in order to conquer them.
After he killed his brother, Romulus founded a people of outlaws, and they forged a kingdom by means of work and efforts.
So, like the Assyrians, their religion is based on strength, power, war, order, law and militarism.
The supreme religion of the Romans consists of courage, victory in combat and grandeur of the people.
Their only God, their only king is the king that rules, or a dictator or emperor. They have no other god, except for an indomitable pride that never stops them or lets them rest.
Certainly, the Eagle was the first religious image of the Romans because they wanted always to fly upper and upper like an eagle.
After they become great and extend extraordinarily their domains, by coming into contact with the Greeks, who had an inborn sense of religion and mythology, they choose gods.
The Romans never had their own gods, because these were carried away or copied from the Hellenic Olympus. Jupiter, king of heaven, is Zeus in Athens; Venus is Aphrodite; Mars is Ares; Apollo is Phoebus; Vulcan is Hephaestus; and so on.
But the concept of family worship or early worship declined because by imitating the Greeks, Romans undermined the greatness of Rome.
The Romans were particularly very superstitious or very skeptic, and because of their enormous power and splendor, they attracted any worship coming from other extant religions.
In the times of the empire there were countless sects in Rome, sometimes in detriment and belittlement of their own gods and worship. Therefore, it was to be expected certain reaction like that in the times of the Christians.
The Roman Empire had tolerated all and had admitted any god in its pantheon, but could not renounce to deify their ruler because the support and structure of the entire empire rested on the almost divine power of the soldiers in the control. Thence the violent persecution against those Christians that denied this basic divinity of the empire.
Romans were not rich in science or philosophy because they adapted Greek philosophers and foreign sciences, and in their view, war was the supreme interest and only desire of man.
The Roman religious worship can be divided into three stages:
- Period of natural and family worship of a warlike people, that of its highest flourishing.
- Period of adopting Greek gods, that of settlement of the empire.
- Christian period; quick decline in the great empire of eagles.
