Stylites; paschal arrd pentecostal hymns. The MS. of the hymns, written by his own hand, was said to have been preserved in the church of Cyrus, in which he was buried and celebrated as a saint on the 1st of October. Prof. C. Krumbacher, who has edited the works of Romanos from the best (the Patmos) MSS., regards him as the greatest poet of the Byzantine age, and perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical poet of any age.
Editions: J. B. Pitra, Analecta Sacra, i. (1876), containing 29 poems, and Sanctus Romanus Veterum Melodorum Princeps (1888), with three additional hymns from the monastery of St John in Patmos. See also Pitra’s Hymnographie de l’Église grecque (1867); C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897); and Hymns.
ROMANOV, the name of the Russian imperial dynasty, regnant in the male line from 1613 to 1730, and thenceforward in the female line. The Romanovs descended from Andrei, surnamed Kobyla, who is said to have come to Moscow from Prussia about 1341 to enter the service of the grand-duke Semen (d. 1353). His son Feodor, surnamed Koschka, was the ancestor of the families of Suchovo-Kobylin, Kalytschev and Scheremetjev, as well as of the Romanovs. Feodor’s grandson, Sakhariya Ivanovich, was a boyar of Vasilii V., grand-duke of Moscow at intervals between 1425 and 1462, and the family took its name from his grandson Roman, whose daughter Anastasia Romanovna married the tsar Ivan the Terrible. Her brother Nikita Romanovich married the princess Eudoxia Alexandrovna, a descendant of Andrei Jaroslavovich, grand-duke of Susdal-Vladimir (d. 1264), and in this way the Romanovs were linked up with the ancient royal house of Rurik. The Romanovs suffered heavily in the disorders following on the death of Ivan. Some were executed and others exiled. Nikita's son Feodor (the archimandrite Philaret) was banished, but was recalled by the false Demetrius. In 1610 he was imprisoned by the king of Poland, but his piety and virtues led to the election of his son, Mikhail Feodorovich Romanov, to the throne of the tsars in 1613. Philaret became patriarch of Moscow in 1619, and supported his son's government until his death in 1634. Mikhail was seventeen when he began his reign, and died in 1645. He was succeeded by his son Alexis, whose three sons, Feodor III., Ivan II. and Peter I. (the Great), inherited the throne. After the two years' reign of Peter's widow, Ekaterina Aleksievna Skavronska (Catherine I.), his grandson, Peter Aleksievich (Peter II.), succeeded. He died in 1730, and the succession devolved on the family of Ivan II., on his daughter Anna (1730–40) and his great-grandson Ivan III., and in 1741 on Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great. Peter's elder daughter, Anna, had married Charles Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, and with the accession of her son, Peter III., in 1762 begins the present reigning dynasty of Holstein-Gottorp or Oldenburg-Romanov.
See R. Nisbet Bain, The First Romanovs (1905); P. V. Dolgorukov, Notice sur les principales families de la Russie (2nd ed., Berlin, 1858).
ROMAN RELIGION. In tracing the history of the religion of the Roman people we are not, as in the case of Greece, dealing with separate, though interacting, developments in a number of independent communities, but with a single community which won its way to the headship first of Latium, then of Italy and finally of a European empire. But this very fact of its ever-extending influence, coupled with an absence of dogmatism in belief, which made it at all times ready and even anxious to adopt foreign customs and ideas, gave its religion a constantly shifting and broadening character, so that it is difficult to determine the original essentials. By the time when Latin literature begins, the genuine Roman religion had already been overlaid by foreign cults and modes of thought, by the classical period it was—except in formal observance—practically buried and to a large extent fossilized. But the comparative study of religions has suggested the lines of reconstitution and the careful analysis of survivals embedded in literature and the evidence of monumental remains, and in particular of the old calendars, has enabled modern scholars to make good progress in the task of separating the elements due to different periods and influences.
The Roman people were of Aryan stock, a section of a host of invaders from the north, who overran and settled in the Italian peninsula. They preserved traces of their original nationality not merely in the general cast of their religious thought, but in certain common features such as the worship of the hearth (Vesta) and of the sky-divinity (Jupiter) (see Greek Religion). But the development of their religion was arrested at an earlier stage than that of the Greeks: with them—at any rate in the genuine Roman period—Animism never passed into Anthropomorphism; they stopped at the conception of the “spirit” without reaching that of the “god.” Their belief might be described as a polydemonism rather than a polytheism, or more correctly, to avoid altogether the intrusion of foreign notions, as a “multinuminism.”
In the cult and ritual of Rome there are enshrined many survivals from a very early form of religious thought prior to the Fetishism. development of the characteristic Roman attitude of mind. Fetishism—the belief in the magic or divine power of inanimate objects—is seen in the cult of stones, such as the silex of Jupiter (Iuppiter), which plays a prominent part in the ceremonial of treaty-making, and the lapis used in the ritual of the aquaelicium, a process, probably magic in origin, designed to produce rain after a long drought. The boundary-stones between properties (termini) were also the objects of cult at the annual festival of the Terminalia, and the “god Terminus,” the symbolic boundary-stone, shares with Jupiter the great temple on the Capitol. Tree-worship (q.v.) again is a constantly recurring feature, seen, for instance, in the permanently sacred character of the ficus Ruminalis and the caprificus of the Campus Martius, and above all in the oak of Iuppiter Feretrius, on which the spolia opima were hung after a victory. Nor did Roman fetishism stop short at natural objects. The household was always the centre of religious cult, and certain objects in the house—the door, the hearth, the store—cupboard (penus)—seem always to have had a sacred significance, and so became the objects and later the sites of the domestic worship. Of the cult of animals there is just sufficient trace to show that it must formerly have had its place in religious rite; the animals, once the objects of worship, appear in later times as the attributes of divinities, for instance, the sacred wolf and woodpecker of Mars.
But Fetishism must very early have developed into Animism, the feeling of the sacredness of the object into the sense of an Animism. indwelling spirit. In the animistic attitude we have indeed the true background of the genuine Roman religion; but its characteristic and peculiar development is a kind of “higher Animism,” which can associate the “spirit” not merely with visible and tangible objects, but with states and actions in the life of the individual and the community. No doubt the later indigitamenta (“bidding-prayers”) which give us detailed lists of the spirits which preside over the various actions of the infant, or the stages in the marriage ceremony, or the agricultural operations of the farmer, are due in a large measure to deliberate pontifical elaboration, but they are a true indication of the Roman attitude of mind, which reveals itself continually in the analysis of the cults of the household or the festivals of the agricultural year.
The “powers” (numina, not dei), which thus become the objects of worship, are spirits specialized in function and limited in sphere. They are not conceived of in any anthropomorphic form, their sex even may often be indeterminate (“sive mas, sive femina” is the constantly recurring formula of prayer), but the sphere of action of each is clearly marked and an appeal to a spirit. Outside his own special sphere would never even be thought of. Locality thus becomes an important point in the conception of the numen: the household spirits must be worshipped at the door, the hearth, the store-cupboard, and the external spirits of the fields and countryside have their sacred hill-tops or groves. But the numen has no form of sensuous representation, nor does he need a house to dwell in: statue and temple are alien to the spirit of Roman religion. Nor are the numina, not being anthropomorphic, capable of relation
