Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/49

Rh s number of secondary or accidental societies, established for the promotion of some common object ; and a wise and strong Government usually protects and encourages them as a most important condition of human progress. They may be roughly divided into four different classes, according to their several objects; they may be either religious, poli tical, commercial, or merely social ; and an attempt has been sometimes made to assign these to different periods of national development. Such a distinction, however, cannot be successfully maintained, since the various elements were often most closely united in the same clubs, almost (or quite) from their very foundation. Thus, tho corporations in Rome whose foundation was attributed to Numa would seem at first sight to have been merely for convenience of traclj. But we are told that they had also a social or poli tical purpose, viz., to break down the barriers which sepa rated Romans from Sabines in the infant state. Moreover, Plutarch introduces a religious element into them also, saying that Numa &quot; fixed certain times of meeting for these companies, and certain honours to the gods, assigning to each what was suitable for them.&quot; So again in Greece we have the testimony of Aristotle that members of the same tribe or borough used to club together, men follow ing the same occupations, as soldiers or sailors, and others again for mere social amusement ; yet he immediately adds &quot; these meet together for the sake of one another s company, and to offer sacrifices ; when they meet they both pay certain honours to the gods, and at the same time take pleasurable relaxation among themselves. It is clear, then, that whatever may have been the precise object with which each private club or association was originally formed in pagan times, these distinctive marks were very soon blurred, and finally, in the lapse of time, altogether obliterated. We need not say anything of the religious sodalities which were appointed in a regular way both in Greece and Home for the worship of the gods recognized by the state. It is the history of secret confraternities for the exercise of foreign religious rites unknown to the stat3 and strictly forbidden that is more curious and attractive. In Athens the penalty of death stood enacted in the statute book against those who should introduce the worship of strange gods ; but it is only on very rare and scandalous occasions that we hear of this statute in real life. There was a great invasion of foreign gods into Attica after tha Persian war, and they were not so easily driven out as were the hosts of Xerxes who had imported them. Moreover, inde pendently of foreign armies, the mere commercial activity of Athens herself did much to promote the same evil. Her sailors and soldiers, colonists and merchants, had explored the coasts of the ^EgeanSea, and had brought home from Thrace, from Phrygia, from Cyprus, and elsewhere, a whole host of deities, not more false indeed, but certainly more dangerous, than those whom they had been wont to worship at home. These gods and goddesses soon found little knots of devotees, who were led to form a kind of confraternity among themselves, for the support of the forbidden worship. Fragments both of tragic and comic poets have preserved to us some notice of the kind of worship that was offered, and it was obviously in every way less respectable than the worship sanctioned by the state. In the state temples the priests and other officers were obliged to be freemen, citizens, and the sons of citizens ; any taint of servile or foreign blood was a fatal disquali fication. But here slaves, foreigners, and women were admitted indiscriminately. Indeed, if we may judge from monuments that have recently come to light, these secret confraternities found their principal support among these classes. At Rhodes there was one consisting exclusively of the lowest class of slaves, the public slaves of the town ; at Salamis, one exclusively of women ; in that of Cnidus eleven members out of twelve were foreigners. All these monuments come from islands ; and of course it was there, and in the seaport towns of the peninsula, that such illicit corporations were likely to be first introduced and to take deepest root. By-and-by it became necessary even to give an official recognition to some of them, e.g., in the Piraeus, for the convenience of foreigners who were either detained there for a considerable time by business, or perhaps had even taken up their permanent abode there. Excavations made within the last twenty years in the Piraeus, and still more recently in the neighbourhood of the silver mines of Laurium, enable us to assist at the birth and early growth of some of these illicit clubs, but there is nothing in the history specially inviting. In Rome the general policy of the state towards foreign religions was more tolerant than in Greece. Nevertheless here also the practice of certain religions was forbidden, and the prohibition naturally produced certain secret societies amongst those who were attached to them. The law indeed forbade the worship of any deity that had not been approved by the senate, but then the senate was by no means illiberal in granting its diploma of approbation, and as often as a new deity was introduced, or even a new temple built to an old deity, a new sodality seems to have sprung up, or to have been officially appointed, to look after its interests. It is disputed whether the prohibition of the worship of unknown, unrecognized gods, applied only to acts of public worship, or extended even to the innermost secrecy of private life. Cicero may be quoted in defence of the latter view, Livy of the former. Probably the letter of the law favoured the stricter side and spoke universally, but traditional practice ruled differently. Certainly tho Romans had a scruple about interfering with anything which even pretended to lay claim to a religious character. Even when they repressed with such severity the secret meetings of the Bacchanalians, this was done not so much in the interest of the other gods, as of public order and morality and the security of the state. They even continued to tolerate such foul associations as these, only they imposed the condition that not more than five worshippers should meet together at once ; and under cover of this permission the number of thiasi was much multiplied in the city, and these exercised a powerful attraction over women by the promise which they made of effecting a real purification of the soul. At a later period, when Augustus destroyed all the temples of Serapis which had been erected in Rome during his absence, he was careful to assign a politi cal motive for this unusual interference with religious liberty. If we turn from these religious associations to consider the craft-gilds in ancient Rome, the first thing that strikes us is their extraordinary number. In the days of Numa we are told that there were only eight ; but as time went on they so multiplied that in the imperial period we count more than fourscore of them, including almost every profession and handicraft one can think of, from bankers and doctors down to donkey-drivers and muleteers. Nor does the mere enumeration of the different trades and professions give us at all an adequate idea of their number ; for when a club became very large, it was first subdivided into centuries, and then these again broke off into separate clubs. Again, there was one club or company of the watermen who plied their trade on the Saone, and another of the watermen on the Rhone, though both these companies had their headquarters at Lyons. The other navigable rivers, too, each had its own company. Thus, the most ancient notice we have of Paris is derived from a monument which has come down to us of the water men on the Seine. We find mention, also, of more craft- gilds than one even in a single street of Rome ; nay, further 