Course XXVIII - Teaching 15: The Romans

The Racenians –who eventually after centuries were called Etruscans– were an extraordinary civilization; this is proven even today by remnants of monuments discovered in excavations made in those missing cities.
But other peoples, of Semitic origin, and particularly those tribes that letter were called Ligurians, invaded the Italic peninsula, destroy their ancient inhabitants and impose their laws and religion, of Egyptian and divine origin.
Since then, the worship of ancestors begins and the hero and dead chief of a tribe are transformed into God.
The origin of the ancient Romans is entirely mythological and based on beliefs of all ancient Aryan religions –a god made man.
Rea Silvia, a priestess of the worship of fire, or Solar, secretly marries the God Mars, and becomes mother of Romulus and Remus. The two children are the product of a divine and human manifestation. Abandoned in the river, a shepherd picks them up and a she-wolf suckles them; here is the symbol of the descent of the pure souls to the lower world to conquer them.
Romulus killed his brother and later founded a people of outlaws that established 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 highest religion of the Romans is courage, victory in combat, and grandeur of their people.
The only God, the only priest, is the king, or dictator, or emperor. Their only god is their indomitable and unstoppable pride that never allows them to rest.
The Eagle had to be the first religious image of the Romans because like the eagle they wanted to fly upper and upper.
They choose gods after becoming great and extending extraordinarily their domains by the contact of the Greeks, whose sense of religion and mythology was inborn.
The Romans never had their own gods; they copied them from the Hellenic Olympus. Jupiter, king of heaven, is Zeus of Athens; Venus is Aphrodite; Mars is Ares; Apollo is Phoebe; Vulcan is Hephaistos, and so on.
But along with the worship and imitation of Greek gods, there was a decline of the family worship, of the early worship, and so the grandeur of Rome was undermined.
Romans were particularly superstitious or skeptical, and their power and splendor were such that attracted all worships of other extant religions.
In the times of the empire there were numberless sects in Rome, which sometimes degraded and belittled their own gods and their own worship. Therefore, it was natural a reaction produced in time of the Christians.
The Roman Empire had tolerated everything and had admitted all gods in its pantheon; but could not renounce to deify its ruler because the support and structure of the entire Empire is the almost divine power of the soldiers that ruled over it. Thence, the violent persecution against the Christians that denied the basic divinity of the Empire.
The Romans were not rich as to science or philosophy because they adapted the Greek philosophers and foreign sciences, and to them, war was the supreme interest and the only desire of man.
The Roman religious period can be divided into three stages:
First: That of Nature and family worship of this warlike people, when they flourished to the utmost. Second: Period of adopting Greek gods, that of settlement of the Empire.
Third: Christian period, that of quick descent in the great Empire of the eagles.