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Title: The Religious Experience of the Roman People
From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus
Author: W. Warde Fowler
Release Date: November 6, 2007 [EBook #23349]
Language: English
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THE
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
OF THE
ROMAN PEOPLE
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE
AGE OF AUGUSTUS
THE GIFFORD LECTURES FOR 1909-10
DELIVERED IN EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY
BY
W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A.
FELLOW AND LATE SUB-RECTOR OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD
HON. D.LITT. UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
AUTHOR OF 'THE ROMAN FESTIVALS OF THE PERIOD OF THE REPUBLIC,' ETC.
"Sanctos ausus recludere fontes"
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1911
TO
PROFESSOR W.R. HARDIE
AND
MY MANY OTHER KIND FRIENDS AND FRIENDLY HEARERS
IN EDINBURGH
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vii
PREFACE
Lord Gifford in founding his lectureship directed that the lectures should be public and popular, i.e. not restricted to members of a University. Accordingly in lecturing I endeavoured to make myself intelligible to a general audience by avoiding much technical discussion and controversial matter, and by keeping to the plan of describing in outline the development and decay of the religion of the Roman City-state. And on the whole I have thought it better to keep to this principle in publishing the lectures; they are printed for the most part much as they were delivered, and without footnotes, but at the end of each lecture students of the subject will find the notes referred to by the numbers in the text, containing such further information or discussion as has seemed desirable. My model in this method has been the admirable lectures of Prof. Cumont on "les Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain."
I wish to make two remarks about the subject-matter of the lectures. First, the idea running through them is that the primitive religious (or magico-religious) instinct, which was the germ of the religion of the historical Romans, was gradually atrophied by over-elaboration of ritual, but showed itself again in strange forms from the period of the Punic wars onwards. For this religious instinct I have used the Latin word religio, as I haveviii explained in the Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religions, vol. ii. p. 169 foll. I am, however, well aware that some scholars take a different view of the original meaning of this famous word, which has been much discussed since I formed my plan of lecturing. But I do not think that those who differ from me on this point will find that my general argument is seriously affected one way or another by my use of the word.
Secondly, while I have been at work on the lectures, the idea seems to have been slowly gaining ground that the patrician religion of the early City-state, which became so highly formalised, so clean and austere, and eventually so political, was really the religion of an invading race, like that of the Achaeans in Greece, engrafted on the religion of a primitive and less civilised population. I have not definitely adopted this idea; but I am inclined to think that a good deal of what I have said in the earlier lectures may be found to support it. Once only, in Lecture XVII., I have used it myself to support a hypothesis there advanced.
I have retained the familiar English spelling of certain divine names, e.g. Jupiter (instead of Iuppiter), as less startling to British readers.
I wish to express my very deep obligations to the works of Prof. Wissowa and Dr. J. G. Frazer, and also to Mr. R. R. Marett, who gave me useful personal help in my second and third lectures. From Prof. Wissowa and Dr. Frazer I have had the misfortune to differ on one or two points; but "difference of opinion is the salt of life," as a great scholar said to me not long ago. In reading the proofs I have had much kind and valuable help from my Oxford friends Mr. Cyril Bailey and Mr. A. S. L. Farquharson, who have read certain parts of the work, andix to whose suggestions I am greatly indebted. The whole has been read through by my old pupil Mr. Hugh Parr, now of Clifton College, to whom my best thanks are due for his timely discovery of many misprints and awkward expressions. The loyalty and goodwill of my old Oxford pupils never seem to fail me.
W. W. F.
Kingham, Oxon,
3rd March 1911.
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x-xi
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
INTRODUCTORY
page
Accounts of the Roman religion in recent standard works; a hard and highly formalised system. Its interest lies partly in this fact. How did it come to be so? This the main question of the first epoch of Roman religious experience. Roman religion and Roman law compared. Roman religion a technical subject. What we mean by religion. A useful definition applied to the plan of Lectures I.-X.; including (1) survivals of primitive or quasi-magical religion; (2) the religion of the agricultural family; (3) that of the City-state, in its simplest form, and in its first period of expansion. Difficulties of the subject; present position of knowledge and criticism. Help obtainable from (1) archaeology, (2) anthropology . . .
1-23
LECTURE II
ON THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION: SURVIVALS
Survivals at Rome of previous eras of quasi-religious experience. Totemism not discernible. Taboo, and the means adopted of escaping from it; both survived at Rome into an age of real religion. Examples: impurity (or holiness) of new-born infants; of a corpse; of women in certain worships; of strangers; of criminals. Almost complete absence of blood-taboo. Iron. Strange taboos on the priest of Jupiter and his wife. Holy or tabooed places; holy or tabooed days; the word religiosus as applied to both of these
24-46
xii
LECTURE III
ON THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION: MAGIC
Magic; distinction between magic and religion. Religious authorities seek to exclude magic, and did so at Rome. Few survivals of magic in the State religion. The aquaelicium. Vestals and runaway slaves. The magical whipping at the Lupercalia. The throwing of puppets from the pons sublicius. Magical processes surviving in religious ritual with their meaning lost. Private magic: excantatio in the XII. Tables; other spells or carmina. Amulets: the bulla; oscilla
47-67
LECTURE IV
THE RELIGION OF THE FAMILY
Continuity of the religion of the Latin agricultural family. What the family was; its relation to the gens. The familia as settled on the land, an economic unit, embodied in a pagus. The house as the religious centre of the familia; its holy places. Vesta, Penates, Genius, and the spirit of the doorway. The Lar familiaris on the land. Festival of the Lar belongs to the religion of the pagus: other festivals of the pagus. Religio terminorum. Religion of the household: marriage, childbirth, burial and cult of the dead
68-91
LECTURE V
THE CALENDAR OF NUMA
Beginnings of the City-state: the oppidum. The earliest historical Rome, the city of the four regions; to this belongs the surviving religious calendar. This calendar described; the basis of our knowledge of early Roman religion. It expresses a life agricultural, political, and military. Days of gods distinguished from days of man. Agricultural life the real basis of the calendar; gradual effacement of it. Results of a fixed routine in calendar; discipline, religious confidence. Exclusion from it of the barbarous and grotesque. Decency and order under an organising priestly authority
92-113
xiii
LECTURE VI
THE DIVINE OBJECTS OF WORSHIP
Sources of knowledge about Roman deities. What did the Romans themselves know about them? No personal deity in the religion of the family. Those of the City-state are numina, marking a transition from animism to polytheism. Meaning of numen. Importance of names, which are chiefly adjectival, marking functional activity. Tellus an exception. Importance of priests in development of dei. The four great Roman gods and their priests: Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus. Characteristics of each of these in earliest Rome. Juno and the difficulties she presents. Vesta
114-144
LECTURE VII
THE DEITIES OF THE EARLIEST RELIGION:
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
No temples in the earliest Rome; meaning of fanum, ara, lucus, sacellum. No images of gods in these places, until end of regal period. Thus deities not conceived as persons. Though masculine and feminine they were not married pairs; Dr. Frazer's opinion on this point. Examination of his evidence derived from the libri sacerdotum; meaning of Nerio Martis. Such combinations of names suggest forms or manifestations of a deity's activity, not likely to grow into personal deities without Greek help. Meaning of pater and mater applied to deities; procreation not indicated by them. The deities of the Indigitamenta; priestly inventions of a later age. Usener's theory of Sondergötter criticised so far as it applies to Rome
145-168
LECTURE VIII
RITUAL OF THE IUS DIVINUM
Main object of ius divinum to keep up the pax deorum; meaning of pax in this phrase. Means towards the maintenance of the pax: sacrifice and prayer, fulfilment of vows, lustratio, divination. Meaning of sacrificium. Little trace of sacramental sacrifice. Typical sacrifice of ius divinum: both priest and victim must be acceptable to the deity; means taken to secure this. Ritual of slaughter: examination and porrectio of entrails. Prayer; the phrase Macte esto and its importance in explaining Roman sacrifice. Magical survivals in Roman and Italian prayers; yet they are essentially religious
169-199
xiv
LECTURE IX
RITUAL (continued)
Vota (vows) have suggested the idea that Roman worship was bargaining. Examination of private vows, which do not prove this; of public vows, which in some degree do so. Moral elements in both these. Other forms of vow: evocatio and devotio.
Lustratio: meaning of lustrare in successive stages of Roman experience. Lustratio of the farm and pagus; of the city; of the people (at Rome and Iguvium); of the army; of the arms and trumpets of the army: meaning of lustratio in these last cases, both before and after a campaign
200-222
LECTURE X
THE FIRST ARRIVAL OF NEW CULTS IN ROME
Recapitulation of foregoing lectures. Weak point of the organised State religion: it discouraged individual development. Its moral influence mainly a disciplinary one; and it hypnotised the religious instinct.
Growth of a new population at end of regal period, also of trade and industry. New deities from abroad represent these changes: Hercules of Ara Maxima; Castor and Pollux; Minerva. Diana of the Aventine reflects a new relation with Latium. Question as to the real religious influence of these deities. The Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, of Etruscan origin. Meaning of cult-titles Optimus Maximus, and significance of this great Jupiter in Roman religious experience
223-247
LECTURE XI
CONTACT OF THE OLD AND NEW IN RELIGION
Plan of this and following lectures. The formalised Roman religion meets with perils, material and moral, and ultimately proves inadequate. Subject of this lecture, the introduction of Greek deities and rites; but first a proof that the Romans were a really religious people; evidence from literature, from worship, from the practice of public life, and from Latin religious vocabulary.
Temple of Ceres, Liber, Libera (Demeter, Dionysus, Persephone); its importance for the date of Sibylline influence at Rome. Nature of this influence; how and when it reached Rome. The keepers of the "Sibylline books"; new cults introduced by them. New rites: lectisternia and supplicationes, their meaning and historical importance
248-269
xv
LECTURE XII
THE PONTIFICES AND THE SECULARISATION OF RELIGION
Historical facts about the Pontifices in this period; a powerful exclusive "collegium" taking charge of the ius divinum. The legal side of their work; they administered the oldest rules of law, which belonged to that ius. New ideas of law after Etruscan period; increasing social complexity and its effect on legal matters; result, publication of rules of law, civil and religious, in XII. Tables, and abolition of legal monopoly of Pontifices. But they keep control of (1) procedure, (2) interpretation, till end of fourth century b.c. Publication of Fasti and Legis actiones; the college opened to Plebeians. Work of Pontifices in third century: (1) admission of new deities, (2) compilation of annals, (3) collection of religious formulae. General result; formalisation of religion; and secularisation of pontifical influence
270-291
LECTURE XIII
THE AUGURS AND THE ART OF DIVINATION
Divination a universal practice: its relation to magic. Want of a comprehensive treatment of it. Its object at Rome: to assure oneself of the pax deorum; but it was the most futile method used. Private divination; limited and discouraged by the State, except in the form of family auspicia. Public divination; auspicia needed in all State operations; close connection with imperium. The augurs were skilled advisers of the magistrates, but could not themselves take the auspices. Probable result of this: Rome escaped subjection to a hierarchy. Augurs and auspicia become politically important, but cease to belong to religion. State divination a clog on political progress. Sinister influence on Rome of Etruscan divination; history of the haruspices
292-313
LECTURE XIV
THE HANNIBALIC WAR
Tendency towards contempt of religious forms in third century B.C.; disappears during this war. Religio in the old sense takes its place, i.e. fear and anxiety. This takes the form of reportingxvi prodigia; account of these in 218 B.C., and of the prescriptions supplied by Sibylline books. Fresh outbreak of religio after battle of Trasimene; lectisternium of 216, without distinction of Greek and Roman deities; importance of this. Religious panic after battle of Cannae; extraordinary religious measures, including human sacrifice. Embassy to Delphi and its result; symptoms of renewed confidence. But fresh and alarming outbreak in 213; met with remarkable skill. Institution of Apolline games. Summary of religious history in last years of the war; gratitude to the gods after battle of Metaurus. Arrival of the Great Mother of Phrygia at Rome. Hannibal leaves Italy
314-334
LECTURE XV
AFTER THE HANNIBALIC WAR
Religion used to support Senatorial policy in declaring war (1) with Philip of Macedon, (2) with Antiochus of Syria; but this is not the old religion. Use of prodigia and Sibylline oracles to secure political and personal objects; mischief caused in this way. Growth of individualism; rebellion of the individual against the ius divinum. Examples of this from the history of the priesthoods; strange story of a Flamen Dialis. The story of the introduction of Bacchic rites in 186 B.C.; interference of the Senate and Magistrates, and significance of this. Strange attempt to propagate Pythagoreanism; this also dealt with by the government. Influence of Ennius and Plautus, and of translations from Greek comedy, on the dying Roman religion
335-356
LECTURE XVI
GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND ROMAN RELIGION
Religious destitution of the Roman in second century b.c. in regard to (1) his idea of God, (2) his sense of Duty. No help from Epicurism, which provided no religious sanction for conduct; Lucretius, and Epicurean idea of the Divine. Arrival of Stoicism at Rome; Panaetius and the Scipionic circle. Character of Scipio. The religious side of Stoicism; it teaches a new doctrine of the relation of man to God. Stoic idea of God as Reason, and as pervading the universe; adjustment of this to Roman idea of numina. Stoic idea of Man as possessing Reason, and so partaking the Divine nature. Influence of these two ideas on the best type of Roman; they appeal to his idea of Duty, and ennoble his idea of Law. Weak points in Roman Stoicism: (1) doctrine of Will, (2) neglect of emotions and sympathy. It failed to rouse an "enthusiasm of humanity"
357-379
xvii
LECTURE XVII
MYSTICISM—IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE
Early Pythagoreanism in S. Italy; its reappearance in last century b.c. under the influence of Posidonius, who combined Stoicism with Platonic Pythagoreanism. Cicero affected by this revival; his Somnium Scipionis and other later works. His mysticism takes practical form on the death of his daughter; letters to Atticus about a fanum. Individualisation of the Manes; freedom of belief on such questions. Further evidence of Cicero's tendency to mysticism at this time (45 B.C.), and his belief in a future life. But did the ordinary Roman so believe? Question whether he really believed in the torments of Hades. Probability of this: explanation to be found in the influence of Etruscan art and Greek plays on primitive Roman ideas of the dead. Mysticism in the form of astrology; Nigidius Figulus
380-402
LECTURE XVIII
RELIGIOUS FEELING IN THE POEMS OF VIRGIL
Virgil sums up Roman religious experience, and combines it with hope for the future. Sense of depression in his day; want of sympathy and goodwill towards men. Virgil's sympathetic outlook; shown in his treatment of animals, Italian scenery, man's labour, and man's worship. His idea of pietas. The theme of the Aeneid; Rome's mission in the world, and the pietas needed to carry it out. Development of the character of Aeneas; his pietas imperfect in the first six books, perfected in the last six, resulting in a balance between the ideas of the Individual and the State. Illustration of this from the poem. Importance of Book vi., which describes the ordeal destined to perfect the pietas of the hero. The sense of Duty never afterwards deserts him; his pietas enlarged in a religious sense
403-427
LECTURE XIX
THE AUGUSTAN REVIVAL
Connection of Augustus and Virgil. Augustus aims at re-establishing the national pietas, and securing the pax deorum by means of the ius divinum. How this formed part of his political plans. Temple restoration and its practical result. Revival of the ancient ritual; illustrated from the records of the Arval Brethren. xviii The new element in it; Caesar-worship; but Augustus was content with the honour of re-establishing the pax deorum. Celebration of this in the Ludi saeculares, 17 B.C. Our detailed knowledge of this festival; meaning of saeculum; description of the ludi, and illustration of their meaning from the Carmen saeculare of Horace. Discussion of the performance of this hymn by the choirs of boys and girls
428-451
LECTURE XX
CONCLUSION
Religious ingredients in Roman soil likely to be utilised by Christianity. The Stoic ingredient; revelation of the Universal, and ennobling of Individual. The contribution of Mysticism; preparation for Christian eschatology. The contribution of Virgil; sympathy and sense of Duty. The contribution of Roman religion proper: (1) sane and orderly character of ritual, (2) practical character of Latin Christianity visible in early Christian writings, (3) a religious vocabulary, e.g. religio, pietas, sanctus, sacramentum. But all this is but a slight contribution; essential difference between Christianity and all that preceded it in Italy; illustration from the language of St. Paul
452-472
APPENDIX
I.
On the Use of Huts or Booths in Religious Ritual
473
II.
Prof. Deubner's Theory of the Lupercalia
478
III.
The Pairs of Deities in Gellius
481
IV.
The Early Usage of the Words Ius and Fas
486
V.
The Worship of Sacred Utensils
489
INDEX 491
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1
LECTURE I
INTRODUCTORY
I was invited to prepare these lectures, on Lord Gifford's foundation, as one who has made a special study of the religious ideas and practice of the Roman people. So far as I know, the subject has not been touched upon as yet by any Gifford lecturer. We are in these days interested in every form of religion, from the most rudimentary to the most highly developed; from the ideas of the aborigines of Australia, which have now become the common property of anthropologists, to the ethical and spiritual religions of civilised man. Yet it is remarkable how few students of the history of religion, apart from one or two specialists, have been able to find anything instructive in the religion of the Romans—of the Romans, I mean, as distinguished from that vast collection of races and nationalities which eventually came to be called by the name of Rome. At the Congress for the History of Religions held at Oxford in 1908, out of scores of papers read and offered, not more than one or two even touched on the early religious ideas of the most practical and powerful people that the world has ever known.
This is due, in part at least, to the fact that just when Roman history begins to be of absorbing interest, and fairly well substantiated by evidence, the Roman religion, as religion, has already begun to lose its vitality, its purity, its efficacy. It has become overlaid with foreign rites and ideas, and it has also become a religious monopoly of the2 State; of which the essential characteristic, as Mommsen has well put it, and as we shall see later on, was "the conscious retention of the principles of the popular belief, which were recognised as irrational, for reasons of outward convenience."1 It was not unlike the religion of the Jews in the period immediately before the Captivity, and it was never to profit by the refining and chastening influence of such lengthy suffering. In this later condition it has not been attractive to students of religious history; and to penetrate farther back into the real religious ideas of the genuine Roman people is a task very far from easy, of which indeed the difficulties only seem to increase as we become more familiar with it.
It must be remarked, too, that as a consequence of this unattractiveness, the accounts given in standard works of the general features of this religion are rather chilling and repellent. More than fifty years ago, in the first book of his Roman History, Mommsen so treated of it—not indeed without some reservation,—and in this matter, as in so many others, his view remained for many years the dominant one. He looked at this religion, as was natural to him, from the point of view of law; in religion as such he had no particular interest. If I am not mistaken, it was for him, except in so far as it is connected with Roman law, the least interesting part of all his far-reaching Roman studies. More recent writers of credit and ability have followed his lead, and stress has been laid on the legal side of religion at Rome; it has been described over and over again as merely a system of contracts between gods and worshippers, secured by hard and literal formalism, and without ethical value or any native principle of growth. Quite recently, for example, so great an authority as Professor Cumont has written of it thus:—
"Il n'a peut être jamais existé aucune religion aussi froide, aussi prosaïque que celle des Romains. Subordonnée à la politique, elle cherche avant tout, par la stricte exécution de pratiques appropriées, à assurer à l'État la protection des dieux ou à détourner les effets3 de leur malveillance. Elle a conclu avec les puissances célestes un contrat synallagmatique d'où découlent des obligations réciproques: sacrifices d'une part, faveurs de l'autre.... Sa liturgie rappelle par la minutie de ses prescriptions l'ancien droit civil. Cette religion se défie des abandons de l'âme et des élans de la dévotion." And he finishes his description by quoting a few words of the late M. Jean Réville: "The legalism of the Pharisees, in spite of the dryness of their ritualistic minutiae, could make the heart vibrate more than the formalism of the Romans."2
Now it is not for me to deny the truth of such statements as this, though I might be disposed to say that it is rather approximate than complete truth as here expressed, does not sum up the whole story, and only holds good for a single epoch of this religious history. But surely, for anyone interested in the history of religion, a religious system of such an unusual kind, with characteristics so well marked, must, one would suppose, be itself an attractive subject. A religion that becomes highly formalised claims attention by this very characteristic. At one time, however far back, it must have accurately expressed the needs and the aspirations of the Roman people in their struggle for existence. It is obviously, as described by the writers I have quoted, a very mature growth, a highly developed system; and the story, if we could recover it, of the way in which it came to be thus formalised, should be one of the deepest interest for students of the history of religion. Another story, too, that of the gradual discovery of the inadequacy of this system, and of the engrafting upon it, or substitution for it, of foreign rites and beliefs, is assuredly not less instructive; and here, fortunately, our records make the task of telling it an easier one.
Now these two stories, taken together, sum up what we may call the religious experience of the Roman people; and as it is upon these that I wish to concentrate your attention during this and the following course, I have called these lectures by that name. My plan is not to provide an exhaustive account of the details of the Roman4 worship or of the nature of the Roman gods: that can be found in the works of carefully trained specialists, of whom I shall have something to say presently. More in accordance with the intentions of the Founder of these lectures, I think, will be an attempt to follow out, with such detailed comment as may be necessary, the religious experience of the Romans, as an important part of their history. And this happens to coincide with my own inclination and training; for I have been all my academic life occupied in learning and teaching Roman history, and the fascination which the study of the Roman religion has long had for me is simply due to this fact. Whatever may be the case with other religions, it is impossible to think of that of the Romans as detached from their history as a whole; it is an integral part of the life and growth of the people. An adequate knowledge of Roman history, with all its difficulties and doubts, is the only scientific basis for the study of Roman religion, just as an adequate knowledge of Jewish history is the only scientific basis for a study of Jewish religion. The same rule must hold good in a greater or less degree with all other forms of religion of the higher type, and even when we are dealing with the religious ideas of savage peoples it is well to bear it steadfastly in mind. I may be excused for suggesting that in works on comparative religion and morals this principle is not always sufficiently realised, and that the panorama of religious or quasi-religious practice from all parts of the world, and found among peoples of very different stages of development, with which we are now so familiar, needs constant testing by increased knowledge of those peoples in all their relations of life. At any rate, in dealing with Roman evidence the investigator of religious history should also be a student of Roman history generally, for the facts of Roman life, public and private, are all closely concatenated together, and spring with an organic growth from the same root. The branches tend to separate, but the tree is of regular growth, compact in all its parts, and you cannot safely concentrate your attention on one of these5 parts to the comparative neglect of the rest. Conversely, too, the great story of the rise and decay of the Roman dominion cannot be properly understood without following out the religious history of this people—their religious experience, as I prefer to call it. To take an example of this, let me remind you of two leading facts in Roman history: first, the strength and tenacity of the family as a group under the absolute government of the paterfamilias; secondly, the strength and tenacity of the idea of the State as represented by the imperium of its magistrates. How different in these respects are the Romans from the Celts, the Scandinavians, even from the Greeks! But these two facts are in great measure the result of the religious ideas of the people, and, on the other hand, they themselves react with astonishing force on the fortunes of that religion.
I do not indeed wish to be understood as maintaining that the religion of the Roman was the most important element in his mental or civic development: far from it. I should be the first to concede that the religious element in the Roman mind was not that part of it which has left the deepest impress on history, or contributed much, except in externals, to our modern ideas of the Divine and of worship. It is not, as Roman law was, the one great contribution of the Roman genius to the evolution of humanity. But Roman law and Roman religion sprang from the same root; they were indeed in origin one and the same thing. Religious law was a part of the ius civile, and both were originally administered by the same authority, the Rex. Following the course of the two side by side for a few centuries, we come upon an astonishing phenomenon, which I will mention now (it will meet us again) as showing how far more interest can be aroused in our subject if we are fully equipped as Roman historians than if we were to study the religion alone, torn from the living body of the State, and placed on the dissecting-board by itself. As the State grew in population and importance, and came into contact, friendly or hostile, with other peoples, both the religion and the law of the State were6 called upon to expand, and they did so. But they did so in different ways; Roman law expanded organically and intensively, absorbing into its own body the experience and practice of other peoples, while Roman religion expanded mechanically and extensively, by taking on the deities and worship of others without any organic change of its own being. Just as the English language has been able to absorb words of Latin origin, through its early contact with French, into the very tissue and fibre of its being, while German has for certain reasons never been able to do this, but has adopted them as strangers only, without making them its very own: so Roman law contrived to take into its own being the rules and practices of strangers, while Roman religion, though it eventually admitted the ideas and cults of Greeks and others, did so without taking them by a digestive process into its own system. Had the law of Rome remained as inelastic as the religion, the Roman people would have advanced as little in civilisation as those races which embraced the faith of Islam, with its law and religion alike impermeable to any change.3 Here is a phenomenon that at once attracts attention and suggests questions not easy to answer. Why is it that the Roman religion can never have the same interest and value for mankind as Roman law? I hope that we shall find an answer to this question in the course of our studies: at this moment I only propose it as an example of the advantage gained for the study of one department of Roman life and thought by a pretty complete equipment in the knowledge of others.
At the same time we must remember that the religion of the Romans is a highly technical subject, like Roman law, the Roman constitution, and almost everything else Roman; it calls for special knowledge as well as a sufficient training in Roman institutions generally. Each of these Roman subjects is like a language with a delicate accidence, which is always presenting the unwary with pitfalls into which they are sure to blunder unless they have a thorough mastery of it. I could mention a book7 full of valuable thoughts about the relation to Paganism of the early Christian Church, by a scholar at once learned and sympathetic;4 who when he happens to deal for a moment with the old Roman religion, is inaccurate and misleading at every point. He knew, for example, that this religion is built on the foundation of the worship of the family, but he yielded to the temptation to assume that the family in heaven was a counterpart of the family on earth, "as it might be seen in any palace of the Roman nobility." "Jupiter and Juno," he says, "were the lord and lady, and beneath them was an army of officers, attendants, ministers, of every rank and degree." Such a description of the pantheon of his religion would have utterly puzzled a Roman, even in the later days of theological syncretism. Again he says that this religion was strongly moral; that "the gods gave every man his duty, and expected him to perform it." Here again no Roman of historical times, or indeed of any age, could have allowed this to be his creed. Had it really been so, not only the history of the Roman religion, but that of the Roman state, would have been very different from what it actually was.
The principles then on which I wish to proceed in these lectures are—(1) to keep the subject in continual touch with Roman history and the development of the Roman state; (2) to exercise all possible care and accuracy in dealing with the technical matters of the religion itself. I may now go on to explain more exactly the plan I propose to follow.
It will greatly assist me in this explanation if I begin by making clear what I understand, for our present purposes, by the word religion. There have been many definitions propounded—more in recent years than ever before, owing to the recognition of the study of religion as a department of anthropology. Controversies are going on which call for new definitions, and it is only by slow degrees that we are arriving at any common understanding as to the real essential thing or fact for8 which we should reserve this famous word, and other words closely connected with it, e.g. the supernatural. We are still disputing, for example, as to the relation of religion to magic, and therefore as to the exact meaning to be attributed to each of these terms.
Among the many definitions of religion which I have met with, there is one which seems to me to be particularly helpful for our present purposes; it is contributed by an American investigator. "Religion is the effective desire to be in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe."5 Dr. Frazer's definition is not different in essentials: "By religion I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life;"6 only that here the word is used of acts of worship rather than of the feeling or desire that prompts them. The definition of the late M. Jean Réville, in a chapter on "Religious Experience," written near the end of his valuable life, is in my view nearer the mark, and more comprehensive. "Religion," he says, "is essentially a principle of life, the feeling of a living relation between the human individual and the powers or power of which the universe is the manifestation. What characterises each religion is its way of looking upon this relation and its method of applying it."7 And a little further on he writes: "It is generally admitted that this feeling of dependence upon the universe is the root of all religion." But this is not so succinct as the definition which I quoted first, and it introduces at least one term, the individual, which, for certain good reasons, I think it will be better for us to avoid in studying the early Roman religious ideas.
"Religion is the effective desire to be in right relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe." This has the advantage of treating religion as primarily and essentially a feeling, an instinctive desire, and the word "effective," skilfully introduced, suggests that this feeling manifests itself in certain actions undertaken in order to9 secure a desired end. Again, the phrase "right relations" seems to me well chosen, and better than the "living relation" of M. Réville, which if applied to the religions of antiquity can only be understood in a sacramental sense, and is not obviously so intended. "Right relation" will cover all religious feeling, from the most material to the most spiritual. Think for a moment of the 119th Psalm, the high-water mark of the religious feeling of the most religious people of antiquity; it is a magnificent declaration of conformity to the will of God, i.e. of the desire to be in right relation to Him, to His statutes, judgments, laws, commands, testimonies, righteousness. This is religion in a high state of development; but our definition is so skilfully worded as to adapt itself readily to much earlier and simpler forms. The "Power manifesting itself in the universe" may be taken as including all the workings of nature, which even now we most imperfectly understand, and which primitive man so little understood that he misinterpreted them in a hundred different ways. The effective desire to be in right relation with these mysterious powers, so that they might not interfere with his material well-being—with his flocks and herds, with his crops, too, if he were in the agricultural stage, with his dwelling and his land, or with his city if he had got so far in social development—this is what we may call the religious instinct, the origin of what the Romans called religio.8 The effective desire to have your own will brought into conformity to the will of a heavenly Father is a later development of the same feeling; to this the genuine Roman never attained, and the Greek very imperfectly.
If we keep this definition steadily in mind, I think we shall find it a valuable guide in following out what I call the religious experience of the Roman people; and at the present moment it will help me to explain my plan in drawing up these lectures. To begin with, in the prehistoric age of Rome, so far as we can discern from survivals of a later age, the feeling or desire must have10 taken shape, ineffectively indeed, in many quaint acts, some of them magical or quasi-magical, and possibly taken over from an earlier and ruder population among whom the Latins settled. Many of these continued, doubtless, to exist among the common folk, unauthorised by any constituted power, while some few were absorbed into the religious practice of the State, probably with the speedy loss of their original significance. Such survivals of ineffective religion are of course to be found in the lowest stratum of the religious ideas of every people, ancient and modern; even among the Israelites,9 and in the rites of Islam or Christianity. They form, as it were, a kind of protoplasm of religious vitality, from which an organic growth was gradually developed. But though they are necessarily a matter of investigation as survivals which have a story to tell, they do not carry us very far when we are tracing the religious experience of a people, and in any case the process of investigating them is one of groping in the dark. I shall deal with these survivals in my next two lectures, and then leave them for good.
I am more immediately concerned with the desire expressed in our definition when it has become more effective; and this we find in the Latins when they have attained to a complete settlement on the land, and are well on in the agricultural stage of social development. This stage we can dimly see reflected in the life of the home and farm of later times; we have, I need hardly say, no contemporary evidence of it, though archaeology may yet yield us something. But the conservatism of rural life is a familiar fact, and comes home to me when I reflect that in my own English village the main features of work and worship remained the same through many centuries, until we were revolutionised by the enclosure of the parish and the coming of the railroad in the middle of the nineteenth century. The intense conservatism of rural Italy, up to the present day, has always been an acknowledged fact, and admits of easy explanation. We may be sure that the Latin farmer,11 before the City-state was developed, was like his descendants of historical times, the religious head of a family, whose household deities were effectively worshipped by a regular and orderly procedure, whose dead were cared for in like manner, and whose land and stock were protected from malignant spirits by a boundary made sacred by yearly rites of sacrifice and prayer. Doubtless these wild spirits beyond his boundaries were a constant source of anxiety to him; doubtless charms and spells and other survivals from the earlier stage were in use to keep them from mischief; but these tend to become exceptions in an orderly life of agricultural routine which we may call religious. Spirits may accept domicile within the limits of the farm, and tend, as always in this agricultural stage, to become fixed to the soil and to take more definite shape as in some sense deities. This stage—that of the agricultural family—is the foundation of Roman civilised life, in religious as in all other aspects, and it will form the subject of my fourth lecture.
The growing effectiveness of the desire, as seen in the family and in the agricultural stage, prepares us for still greater effectiveness in the higher form of civilisation which we know as that of the City-state. That desire, let me say once more, is to be in right relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe. It is only in the higher stages of civilisation that this desire can really become effective; social organisation, as I shall show, produces an increased knowledge of the nature of the Power, and with it a systematisation of the means deemed necessary to secure the right relations. The City-state, the peculiar form in which Greek and Italian social and political life eventually blossomed and fructified, was admirably fitted to secure this effectiveness. It was, of course, an intensely local system; and the result was, first, that the Power is localised in certain spots and propitiated by certain forms of cult within the city wall, thus bringing the divine into closest touch with the human population and its interests; and secondly, that12 the concentration of intelligence and will-power within a small space might, and did at Rome, develop a very elaborate system for securing the right relations—in other words, it produced a religious system as highly ritualistic as that of the Jews.
With the several aspects of this system my fifth and succeeding lectures will be occupied. I shall deal first with the religious calendar of the earliest historical form of the City-state, which most fortunately has come down to us entire. I shall devote two lectures to the early Roman ideas of divinity, and the character of their deities as reflected in the calendar, and as further explained by Roman and Greek writers of the literary age. Two other lectures will discuss the ritual of sacrifice and prayer, with the priests in charge of these ceremonies, and the ritual of vows and of "purification." In each of these I shall try to point out wherein the weakness of this religious system lay—viz. in attempts at effectiveness so elaborate that they overshot their mark, in a misconception of the means necessary to secure the right relations, and in a failure to grow in knowledge of the Power itself.
Lastly, as the City-state advances socially and politically, in trade and commerce, in alliance and conquest, we shall find that the ideas of other peoples about the Power, and their methods of propitiation, begin to be adopted in addition to the native stock. The first stages of this revolution will bring us to the conclusion of my present course; but we shall be then well prepared for what follows. For later on we shall find the Romans feeling afresh the desire to be in right relation with the Power, discovering that their own highly formalised system is no longer equal to the work demanded of it, and pitiably mistaking their true course in seeking a remedy. Their knowledge of the Divine, always narrow and limited, becomes by degrees blurred and obscured, and their sight begins to fail them. I hope in due course to explain this, and to give you some idea of the sadness of their religious experience before the advent of an age of13 philosophy, of theological syncretism, and of the worship of the rulers of the state.
Let us now turn for a few minutes to the special difficulties of our subject. These are serious enough; but they have been wonderfully and happily reduced since I began to be interested in the Roman religion some twenty-five years ago. There were then only two really valuable books which dealt with the whole subject. Though I could avail myself of many treatises, good and bad, on particular aspects of it, some few of which still survive, the only two comprehensive and illuminating books were Preller's Römische Mythologie, and Marquardt's volume on the cult in his Staatsverwaltung. Both of these were then already many years old, but they had just been reedited by two eminent scholars thoroughly well equipped for the task—Preller's work by H. Jordan, and Marquardt's by Georg Wissowa. They were written from different points of view; Preller dealt with the deities and the ideas about them rather than with the cults and the priests concerned with them; while Marquardt treated the subject as a part of the administration of government, dealing with the worship and the ius divinum, and claiming that this was the only safe and true way of arriving at the ideas underlying that law and worship.10 Both books are still indispensable for the student; but Marquardt's is the safer guide, as dealing with facts to the exclusion of fancies. The two taken together had collected and sifted the evidence so far as it was then available.
The Corpus Inscriptionum had not at that time got very far, but its first volume, edited by Mommsen, contained the ancient Fasti, which supply us with the religious calendar of early Rome, and with other matter throwing light upon it. This first volume was an invaluable help, and formed the basis (in a second edition) of the book I was eventually able to write on the Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic. At that time, too, in the 'eighties, Roscher's Lexicon of Greek and Roman Mythology began to appear, which aimed at summing up all that was then14 known about the deities of both peoples; this is not even yet completed, and many of the earlier articles seem now almost antiquated, as propounding theories which have not met with general acceptance. All these earlier articles are now being superseded by those in the new edition of Pauly's Real-Encyclopädie, edited by Wissowa. Lastly, Wissowa himself in 1902 published a large volume entitled Die Religion und Kultus der Römer, which will probably be for many years the best and safest guide for all students of our subject. Thoroughly trained in the methods of dealing with evidence both literary and archaeological, Wissowa produced a work which, though it has certain limitations, has the great merit of not being likely to lead anyone astray. More skilfully and successfully than any of his predecessors, he avoided the chief danger and difficulty that beset all who meddle with Roman religious antiquities, and invariably lead the unwary to their destruction; he declined to accept as evidence what in nine cases out of ten is no true evidence at all—the statements of ancient authors influenced by Greek ideas and Greek fancy. He holds in the main to the principle laid down by Marquardt, that we may use, as evidence for their religious ideas, what we are told that the Romans did in practising their worship, but must regard with suspicion, and subject to severe criticism, what either they themselves or the Greeks wrote about those religious ideas—that is, about divine beings and their doings.
It is indeed true that the one great difficulty of our subject lies in the nature of the evidence; and it is one which we can never hope entirely to overcome. We have always to bear in mind that the Romans produced no literature till the third century B.C.; and the documentary evidence that survives from an earlier age in the form of inscriptions, or fragments of hymns or of ancient law (such as the calendar of which I spoke just now), is of the most meagre character, and usually most difficult to interpret. Thus the Roman religion stands alone among the religions of ancient civilisations in that we are almost15 entirely without surviving texts of its forms of prayer, of its hymns or its legends;11 even in Greece the Homeric poems, with all the earliest Greek literature and art, make up to some extent for the want of that documentary evidence which throws a flood of light on the religions of Babylon, Egypt, the Hindus, and the Jewish people. We know in fact as little about the religion of the old Italian populations as we do about that of our own Teutonic ancestors, less perhaps than we do about that of the Celtic peoples. The Romans were a rude and warlike folk, and meddled neither with literature nor philosophy until they came into immediate contact with the Greeks; thus it was that, unfortunately for our purposes, the literary spirit, when at last it was born in Italy, was rather Greek than Roman. When that birth took place Rome had spread her influence over Italy,—perhaps the greatest work she ever accomplished; and thus the latest historian of Latin literature can venture to write that "the greatest time in Roman history was already past when real historical evidence becomes available."12
We have thus to face two formidable facts: (1) that the period covered by my earlier lectures must in honesty be called prehistoric; and (2) that when the Romans themselves began to write about it they did so under the overwhelming influence of Greek culture. With few exceptions, all that we can learn of the early Roman religion from Roman or Greek writers comes to us, not in a pure Roman form, clearly conceived as all things truly Roman were, but seen dimly through the mist of the Hellenistic age. The Roman gods, for example, are made the sport of fancy and the subject of Hellenistic love-stories, by Greek poets and their Roman imitators,13 or are more seriously treated by Graeco-Roman philosophy after a fashion which would have been absolutely incomprehensible to the primitive men in whose minds they first had their being. The process of disentangling the Roman element from the Greek in the literary evidence is one which can never be satisfactorily16 accomplished; and on the whole it is better, with Wissowa and Marquardt, to hold fast by the facts of the cult, where the distinction between the two is usually obvious, than to flounder about in a slough of what I can only call pseudo-evidence. If all that English people knew about their Anglo-Saxon forefathers were derived from Norman-French chroniclers, how much should we really know about government or religion in the centuries before the Conquest! And yet this comparison gives but a faint idea of the treacherous nature of the literary evidence I am speaking of. It is true indeed that in the last age of the Republic a few Romans began to take something like a scientific interest in their own religious antiquities; and to Varro, by far the most learned of these, and to Verrius Flaccus, who succeeded him in the Augustan age, we owe directly or indirectly almost all the solid facts on which our knowledge of the Roman worship rests. But their works have come down to us in a most imperfect and fragmentary state, and what we have of them we owe mainly to the erudition of later grammarians and commentators, and the learning of the early Christian fathers, who drew upon them freely for illustrations of the absurdities of paganism. And it must be added that when Varro himself deals with the Roman gods and the old ideas about them, he is by no means free from the inevitable influence of Greek thought.
Apart from the literary material and the few surviving fragments of religious law and ritual, there are two other sources of light of which we can now avail ourselves, archaeology and anthropology; but it must be confessed that as yet their illuminating power is somewhat uncertain. It reminds the scrupulous investigator of those early days of the electric light, when its flickering tremulousness made it often painful to read by, and when, too, it might suddenly go out and leave the reader in darkness. It is well to remember that both sciences are young, and have much of the self-confidence of youth; and that Italian archaeology, now fast becoming well organised within17 Italy, has also to be co-ordinated with the archaeology of the whole Mediterranean basin, before we can expect from it clear and unmistakable answers to hard questions about race and religion. This work, which cannot possibly be done by an individual without co-operation—the secret of sound work which the Germans have long ago discovered—is in course of being carried out, so far as is at present possible, by a syndicate of competent investigators.14
In order to indicate the uncertain nature of the light which for a long time to come is all we can expect from Italian archaeology, I have only to remind you that one of the chief questions we have to ask of it is the relation of the mysterious Etruscan people to the other Italian stocks, in respect of language, religion, and art. Whether the Etruscans were the same people whom the Greeks called Pelasgians, as many investigators now hold: whether the earliest Roman city was in any true sense an Etruscan one: these are questions on the answers to which it is not as yet safe to build further hypotheses. In regard to religion, too, we are still very much in the dark. For example, there are many Etruscan works of art in which Roman deities are portrayed, as is certain from the fact that their names accompany the figures; but it is as yet almost impossible to determine how far we can use these for the interpretation of Roman religious ideas or legends. Many years ago a most attractive hypothesis was raised on the evidence of certain of these works of art, where Hercules and Juno appear together in a manner which strongly suggests that they are meant to represent the male and female principles of human life; this hypothesis was taken up by early writers in the Mythological Lexicon, and relying upon them I adopted it in my Roman Festivals,15 and further applied it to the interpretation of an unsolved problem in the fourth Eclogue of Virgil.16 But since then doubt has been thrown on it by Wissowa, who had formerly accepted it. As being of Etruscan origin, and found in places very distant from each other and from Rome, we have, he says, no good right to use these works18 of art as evidence for the Roman religion.17 The question remains open as to these and many other works of art, but the fact that the man of coolest judgment and most absolute honesty is doubtful, suggests that we had best wait patiently for more certain light.
In Rome itself, where archaeological study is concentrated and admirably staffed, great progress has been made, and much light thrown on the later periods of religious history. But for the religion of the ancient Roman state, with which we are at present concerned, it must be confessed that very little has been gleaned. The most famous discovery is that recently made in the Forum of an archaic inscription which almost certainly relates to some religious act; but as yet no scholar has been able to interpret it with anything approaching to certainty.18 More recently excavations on the further bank of the Tiber threw a glint of light on the nature of an ancient deity, Furrina, about whom till then we practically knew nothing at all; but the evidence thus obtained was late and in Greek characters. We must in fact entertain no great hopes of illumination from excavations, but accept thankfully what little may be vouchsafed to us. On the other hand, from the gradual development of Italian archaeology as a whole, and, I must here add, from the study of the several old Italian languages, much may be expected in the future.
The other chief contributory science is anthropology, i.e. the study of the working of the mind of primitive man, as it is seen in the ideas and practices of uncivilised peoples at the present day, and also as it can be traced in survivals among more civilised races. For the history of the religion of the Roman City-state its contribution must of necessity be a limited one; that is a part of Roman history in general, and its material is purely Roman, or perhaps I should say, Graeco-Roman; and Wissowa in all his work has consistently declined to admit the value of anthropological researches for the 19elucidation of Roman problems. Perhaps it is for this very reason that his book is the safest guide we possess for the study of what the Romans did and thought in the matter of religion; but if we wish to try and get to the original significance of those acts and thoughts, it is absolutely impossible in these days to dispense with the works of a long series of anthropologists, many of them fortunately British, who have gradually been collecting and classifying the material which in the long run will fructify in definite results. If we consider the writings of eminent scholars who wrote about Greek and Roman religion and mythology before the appearance of Dr. Tylor's Primitive Culture—Klausen, Preuner, Preller, Kuhn, and many others, who worked on the comparative method but with slender material for the use of it—we see at once what an immense advance has been effected by that monumental work, and by the stimulus that it gave to others to follow the same track. Now we have in this country the works of Lang, Robertson Smith, Farnell, Frazer, Hartland, Jevons, and others, while a host of students on the Continent are writing in all languages on anthropological subjects. Some of these I shall quote incidentally in the course of these lectures; at present I will content myself with making one or two suggestions as to the care needed in using the collections and theories of anthropologists, as an aid in Roman religious studies.
First, let us bear in mind that anthropologists are apt to have their favourite theories—conclusions, that is, which are the legitimate result of reasoning inductively on the class of facts which they have more particularly studied. Thus Mannhardt had his theory of the Vegetation-spirit, Robertson Smith that of the sacramental meal, Usener that of the Sondergötter, Dr. Frazer that of divine Kingship; all of which are perfectly sound conclusions based on facts which no one disputes. They have been of the greatest value to anthropological research; but when they are applied to the explanation of Roman practices we should be instantly on our guard, ready20 indeed to welcome any glint of light that we may get from them, but most carefully critical and even suspicious of their application to other phenomena than those which originally suggested them. It is in the nature of man as a researcher, when he has found a key, to hasten to apply it to all the doors he can find, and sometimes, it must be said, to use violence in the application; and though the greatest masters of the science will rarely try to force the lock, they will use so much gentle persuasion as sometimes to make us fancy that they have unfastened it. All such attempts have their value, but it behoves us to be cautious in accepting them. The application by Mannhardt of the theory of the Vegetation-spirit to certain Roman problems, e.g. to that of the Lupercalia,19 and the October horse,20 must be allowed, fascinating as it was, to have failed in the main. The application by Dr. Frazer of the theory of divine Kingship to the early religious history of Rome, is still sub judice, and calls for most careful and discriminating criticism.21
Secondly, as I have already said, Roman evidence is peculiarly difficult to handle, except in so far as it deals with the simple facts of worship; when we use it for traditions, myths, ideas about the nature of divine beings, we need a training not only in the use of evidence in general, but in the use of Roman evidence in particular. Anthropologists, as a rule, have not been through such a training, and they are apt to handle the evidence of Roman writers with a light heart and rather a rough hand. The result is that bits of evidence are put together, each needing conscientious criticism, to support hypotheses often of the flimsiest kind, which again are used to support further hypotheses, and so on, until the sober inquirer begins to feel his brain reeling and his footing giving way beneath him. I shall have occasion to notice one or two examples of this uncritical use of evidence later on, and will say no more of it now. No one can feel more grateful than I do to the many leading anthropologists who have touched in one way or another21 on Roman evidence; but for myself I try never to forget the words of Columella, with which a great German scholar began one of his most difficult investigations: "In universa vita pretiosissimum est intellegere quemque nescire se quod nesciat."22
NOTES TO LECTURE I
1 Mommsen, Hist. of Rome (E.T.), vol. ii. p. 433.
2 Cumont, Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, p. 36. Cp. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, p. 63. Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God, vol. ii. p. 133.
3 See some valuable remarks in Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, vol. ii. p. 135.
4 Since this lecture was written this scholar has passed away, to the great grief of his many friends; and I refrain from mentioning his name.
5 Ira W. Howerth, in International Journal of Ethics, 1903, p. 205. I owe the reference to R. Karsten, The Origin of Worship, Wasa, 1905, p. 2, note. Cp. E. Caird, Gifford Lectures ("Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers"), vol. i. p. 32. "That which underlies all forms of religion, from the highest to the lowest, is the idea of God as an absolute power or principle." To this need only be added the desire to be in right relation to it. Mr. Marett's word "supernaturalism" seems to mean the same thing; "There arises in the region of human thought a powerful impulse to objectify, and even to personify, the mysterious or supernatural something felt; and in the region of will a corresponding impulse to render it innocuous, or, better still, propitious, by force of constraint (i.e. magic), communion, or conciliation." See his Threshold of Religion, p. 11. Prof. Haddon, commenting on this (Magic and Fetishism, p. 93), adds that "there are thus produced the two fundamental factors of religion, the belief in some mysterious power, and the desire to enter into communication with the power by means of worship." Our succinct definition seems thus to be adequate.
6 The Golden Bough, ed. 2, vol. i. p. 62.
7 Liberal Protestantism, p. 64.
8 For religio as a feeling essentially, see Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, p. 318 (henceforward to be cited as R.K.. For further development of the meaning of the word in Latin literature, see the author's paper in Proceedings of the Congress for the History of Religions (Oxford, 1908), vol. ii. p. 169 foll. A different view of the original meaning of the word is put forward by22 W. Otto in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, vol. xii., 1909, p. 533 (henceforward to be cited as Archiv simply). See also below, p. 459 foll.
9 See, e.g., Frazer in Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor, p. 101 foll.
10 Staatsverwaltung, iii. p. 2. This will henceforward be cited as Marquardt simply. It forms part of the great Handbuch der römischen Alterthümer of Mommsen and Marquardt, and is translated into French, but unfortunately not into English. I may add here that I have only recently become acquainted with what was, at the time it was written, a remarkably good account of the Roman religion, full of insight as well as learning, viz. Döllinger's The Gentile and the Jew, Book VII. (vol. ii. of the English translation, 1906).
11 Two fragments of ancient carmina, i.e. formulae which are partly spells and partly hymns, survive—those of the Fratres Arvales and the Salii or dancing priests of Mars. For surviving formulae of prayer see below, p. 185 foll. Our chief authority on the ritual of prayer and sacrifice comes from Iguvium in Umbria, and is in the Umbrian dialect; it will be referred to in Bücheler's Umbrica (1883), where a Latin translation will be found. The Umbrian text revised by Prof. Conway forms an important part of that eminent scholar's work on the Italian dialects.
12 F. Leo, in Die griechische und lateinische Literatur und Sprache, p. 328. Cp. Schanz, Geschichte der röm. Literatur, vol. i. p. 54 foll.
13 Among Roman poets Ovid is the worst offender, Propertius and Tibullus mislead in a less degree; but they all make up for it to some extent by preserving for us features of the worship as it existed in their own day. The confusion that has been caused in Roman religious history by mixing up Greek and Roman evidence is incalculable, and has recently been increased by Pais (Storia di Roma, and Ancient Legends of Roman History), and by Dr. Frazer in his lectures on the early history of Kingship—writers to whom in some ways we owe valuable hints for the elucidation of Roman problems. See also Soltau, Die Anfänge der römischen Geschichtsschreibung, 1909, p. 3.
14 Most welcome to English readers has been Mr. T. E. Peet's recently published volume on The Stone and Bronze Ages in Italy, and still more valuable for our purposes will be its sequel, when it appears, on the Iron Age.
15 Roman Festivals, p. 142 foll.; henceforward to be cited as R.F.
16 See Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, by Mayor, Fowler, and Conway, p. 75 foll.
17 Wissowa, R.K. p. 227.
18 An account of this in English, with photographs, will be23 found in Pais's Ancient Legends of Roman History, p. 21 foll., and notes.
19 Mannhardt, Mythologische Forschungen, p. 72 foll.
20 Ibid., p. 156 foll.
21 Lectures on the Early History of Kingship, lectures 7-9.
22 Not long after these last sentences were written, a large work appeared by Dr. Binder, a German professor of law, entitled Die Plebs, which deals freely with the oldest Roman religion, and well illustrates the difficulties under which we have to work while archaeologists, ethnologists, and philologists are still constantly in disagreement as to almost every important question in the history of early Italian culture. Dr. Binder's main thesis is that the earliest Rome was composed of two distinct communities, each with its own religion, i.e. deities, priests, and sacra; the one settled on the Palatine, a pastoral folk of primitive culture, and of pure Latin race; the other settled on the Quirinal, Sabine in origin and language, and of more advanced development in social and religious matters. So far this sounds more or less familiar to us, but when Dr. Binder goes on to identify the Latin folk with the Plebs and the Sabine settlement with the Patricians, and calls in religion to help him with the proof of this, it is necessary to look very carefully into the religious evidence he adduces. So far as I can see, the limitation of the word patrician to the Quirinal settlement is very far from being proved by this evidence (see The Year's Work in Classical Studies, 1909, p. 69). Yet the hypothesis is an extremely interesting one, and were it generally accepted, would compel us to modify in some important points our ideas of Roman religious history, and also of Roman legal history, with which Dr. Binder is mainly concerned.
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24
LECTURE II
ON THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION: SURVIVALS
My subject proper is the religion of an organised State: the religious experience of a comparatively civilised people. But I wish, in the first place, to do what has never yet been done by those who have written on the Roman religion—I wish to take a survey of the relics, surviving in later Roman practice and belief, of earlier stages of rudimentary religious experience. In these days of anthropological and sociological research, it is possible to do this without great difficulty; and if I left it undone, our story of the development of religion at Rome would be mutilated at the beginning. Also we should be at a disadvantage in trying to realise the wonderful work done by the early authorities of the State in eliminating from their rule of worship (ius divinum) almost all that was magical, barbarous, or, as later Romans would have called it, superstitious. This is a point on which I wish to lay especial stress in the next few lectures, and it entails a somewhat tiresome account of the ideas and practices of which, as I believe, they sought to get rid. These, I may as well say at once, are to be found for the most part surviving, as we might expect, outside of the religion of the State; where they survive within its limits, they will be found to have almost entirely lost their original force and meaning.
Every student of religious history knows that a religious system is a complex growth, far more complex than would appear at first sight; that it is sure to25 contain relics of previous eras of human experience, embedded in the social strata as lifeless fossils. These only indeed survive because human nature is intensely conservative, especially in religious matters; and of this conservative instinct the Romans afford as striking an example as we can readily find. They clung with extraordinary tenacity, all through their history, to old forms; they seem to have had a kind of superstitious feeling that these dead forms had still a value as such, though all the life was gone out of them. It would be easy to illustrate this curious feature of the Roman mind from the history of its religion; it never disappeared; and to this day the Catholic church in Italy retains in a thinly-disguised form many of the religious practices of the Roman people.
Stage after stage must have been passed by the Latins long before our story rightly begins; how many revolutions of thought they underwent, how much they learnt and took over from earlier inhabitants of the country in which they finally settled, we cannot even guess. As I said in the last lecture, we have no really ancient history of the Romans, as we have, for example, of the Egyptians or Babylonians; to us it is all darkness, save where a little light has been thrown on the buried strata by archaeology and anthropology. That little light, which may be expected to increase in power, shows survivals here and there of primitive modes of thought; and these I propose to deal with now in the following order. Totemism I shall mention merely to clear it out of the way; but taboo will take us some little time, and so will magic in its various forms.
About totemism all I have to say is this. As I write, Dr. Frazer's great work on this subject has just appeared; it is entirely occupied with totemism among modern savages, true totemic peoples, with the object of getting at the real principles of that curious stratum of human thought, and he leaves to others the discussion of possible survivals of it among Aryans, Semites, and26 Egyptians. He himself is sceptical about all the evidence that has been adduced to prove its existence in classical antiquity (see vol. i. p. 86 and vol. iv. p. 13). Under these circumstances, and seeing that Dr. Frazer has always been the accepted exponent of totemism in this country since the epoch-making works appeared of Tylor and Robertson Smith, it is obviously unnecessary for me either to attempt to explain what it is, or to examine the attempts to find survivals of it in ancient Italy. When it first became matter of interest to anthropologists it was only natural that they should be apt to find it everywhere. Dr. Jevons, for example, following in the steps of Robertson Smith, found plenty of totemistic survivals both in Greece and Italy in writing his valuable Introduction to the History of Religion; but he is now aware that he went too far in this direction. Quite recently there has been a run after the same scent in France; not long ago a French scholar published a book on the ensigns of the Roman army,23 which originally represented certain animals, and using Dr. Frazer's early work on totemism with a very imperfect knowledge of the subject, tried to prove that these were originally totem signs. Roman names of families and old Italian tribe-names are still often quoted as totemistic; but the Fabii and Caepiones, named after cultivated plants, and the Picentes and Hirpini, after woodpecker and wolf, though tempting to the totemist, have not persuaded Dr. Frazer to accept them as totemistic, and may be left out of account here; there may be many reasons for the adoption of such names besides the totemistic one. In the course of the last Congress of religious history, a sober French scholar, M. Toutain, made an emphatic protest against the prevailing tendency in France, of which the leading representative is M. Salomon Reinach.24 Let us pass on at once to the second primitive mode of thought which I mentioned just now, and which is not nearly so remote—speaking anthropologically—from classical times as totemism. Totemism belongs to a form of society, that27 of tribe or clan, in which family life is unknown in our sense of the word, and it is therefore wholly remote from the life of the ancient Italian stocks, in whose social organisation the family was a leading fact; but taboo seems rather to be a mode of thought common to primitive peoples up to a comparatively advanced stage of development, and has left its traces in all systems of religion, including those of the present day.
By this famous word taboo, of Polynesian origin, is to be understood a very important part of what I have called the protoplasm of primitive religion, and one closely allied both to magic and fetishism. For our present purposes we may define it as a mysterious influence believed to exist in objects both animate and inanimate, which makes them dangerous, infectious, unclean, or holy, which two last qualities are often almost identical in primitive thought, as Robertson Smith originally taught us.25 What exactly the savage or semi-civilised mind thought about this influence we hardly yet know; we have another Polynesian word, mana, which expresses conveniently its positive aspect, and may in time help us towards a better understanding of it.26 It is in origin pre-animistic, i.e. it is not so much believed to emanate from a spirit residing in the object, as from some occult miasmatic quality. All human beings in contact with other men or things possessing this quality are believed to suffer in some way, and to communicate the infection which they themselves receive. As Dr. Farnell says in his chapter on the ritual of purification,27 "The sense-instinct that suggests all this was probably some primeval terror or aversion evoked by certain objects, as we see animals shrink with disgust at the sight or smell of blood. The nerves of savage man are strangely excited by certain stimuli of touch, smell, taste, sight; the specially exciting object is something that we should call mysterious, weird, or uncanny."
Based on this notion of constant danger from infection, there arose a code of unwritten custom as rigid as that28 enforced by a careful physician in infectious cases at the present day; and thus, too, in course of time there was developed the idea of the possibility of disinfection, an idea as salutary as the discovery in medical science of effective methods for the disinfection of disease. The code of taboo had an obvious ethical value, as Dr. Jevons pointed out long ago;28 like all discipline carried out with a social end in view, it helped men to realise that they were under obligations to the community of which they were a part, and that they would be visited by severe penalties if they neglected these duties. But it inevitably tended to forge a set of fetters binding and cramping the minds of its captives with a countless number of terrors; life was full of constant anxiety, of that feeling expressed by the later Romans in the word religio,29 which, as we shall see, probably had its origin in this period of primitive superstition. The only remedy is the discovery of the means of disinfection, or, as we commonly call it, of purification: a discovery which must have been going on for ages, and only finds its completion at Rome in the era of the City-state. We shall return to this part of the subject when we deal with the ritual of purification; at present we must attend to certain survivals in that ritual which suggest that at one time the ancestors of the Roman people lived under this unwritten code of taboo.
Let us see, in the first place, how human beings were supposed to be affected by this mysterious influence under certain circumstances and at particular periods of their existence. As universally in primitive life, the newborn infant must originally have been taboo; for every Roman child needed purification or disinfection, boys on the ninth, girls on the eighth day after birth. This day was called the dies lustricus, the day of a purificatory rite; "est lustricus dies," says Macrobius, "quo infantes lustrantur et nomen accipiunt."30 In historical times the naming of the child was doubtless the more practically important part of the ceremony; though we may note29 in passing that the mystic value attaching to names, of which there are traces in Roman usage, may have even originally given that part a greater significance than we should naturally attribute to it.31 Again, when the child reaches the age of puberty, it is all the world over believed to be in a critical or dangerous condition, needing disinfection; of this idea, so far as I know, the later Romans show hardly a trace, but we may suppose that the ceremony of laying aside the toga of childhood, which was accompanied by a sacrifice, was a faint survival of some process of purification.32 Once more, after a death the whole family had to be purified with particular care from the contagion of the corpse,33 which was here as everywhere taboo; a cypress bough was stuck over the door of the house of a noble family to give warning to any passing pontifex that he was not to enter it;34 and those who followed the funeral cortège were purified by being sprinkled with water and by stepping over fire.35 Society had effectually protected itself against the miasma in all these cases by the discovery of the means of disinfection.
One of the commonest forms of taboo is that on women, who, especially at certain periods, were apparently believed to be "infectious."36 Of this belief we have very distinct survivals in Roman ritual, which I must here be content to mention only, leaving details to trained anthropologists to explain. We find them both in sacra privata and sacra publica. Cato has preserved the formula for the propitiation of Mars Silvanus in the private rites of the farm; it is to take place in silva, and its object is the protection of the cattle, doubtless those which have been turned out to pasture in the forest, and are therefore in danger from evil beasts and evil spirits. Now this res divina may be performed either by a free man or a slave, but no woman may be present, nor see what is going on.37 In sacra publica women were excluded from the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima, and were not allowed to swear by the name of that god; facts which are usually connected with30 the doubtful identification of Hercules with Genius, or the male principle of life.38 More conclusive evidence of taboo in the case of women is the fact that at certain sacrifices they were ordered to withdraw, both mulieres and virgines, together with other persons to be mentioned directly.39 Unfortunately we are not told what those sacrifices were; but it seems clear enough that there had been at one time a scruple (religio) about admitting women of any age to certain sacred rites. If so, it is remarkable how the good sense of the Roman people overcame any serious disabilities which might have been produced by such ideas; the Roman woman gained for herself a position of dignity, and even of authority, in her household, which had very important results on the formation of the character of the people.40 Traces of the old superstition doubtless continued to survive in folklore; an example, interesting because it seems to illustrate the positive aspect of taboo (mana), may be found by the curious in Pliny's Natural History, xxviii. 78.
Another widely-spread example of the class of ideas we are discussing is the belief that strangers are dangerous. Dr. Frazer tells us that "to guard against the baneful influence exerted voluntarily or involuntarily by strangers is an elementary dictate of savage prudence." You have to disarm them of their magical powers, to counteract "the baneful influence which is believed to emanate from them."41 Of this feeling he has collected a great number of convincing illustrations. We find it also surviving in Roman ritual. A note, referred to above, which has come down to us from the learned Verrius Flaccus, informs us that at certain sacrifices the lictor proclaimed "hostis vinctus mulier virgo exesto," where hostis has its old meaning of stranger.42 This is, of course, merely the old feeling of taboo surviving in the religious ritual of the City-state, and is also no doubt connected with the belief that the recognised deities of a community could not be approached by any but the members of that community; but its taproot is probably to be found in the ideas described by Dr. Frazer.31 We can illustrate it well from the ritual of another Italian city, Iguvium in Umbria, which, as I mentioned in a note to my last lecture, has come down to us in a very elaborate form. In the ordinance for the lustratio populi of that city the magistrate is directed to expel all members of certain neighbouring communities by a thrice-repeated proclamation.43 Such fear of strangers is not even yet extinct in Italy. Professor von Duhn told me that once when approaching an Italian village in search of inscriptions he was taken for the devil, being unluckily mounted on a black horse and dressed in black, and was met by a priest with a crucifix, who was at last persuaded to "disinfect" him with holy water as a condition of his being admitted to the village. But the Romans of historical times, in this as in so many other ways, discovered easy methods of overcoming these fears and scruples: we find a good example of this in the organised college of Fetiales, who, on entering as envoys a foreign territory, were fully protected by their sacred herbs, carried by a verbenarius, against all hostile contamination.44
A remark seems here necessary about the apparent inconsistency between this feeling of anxiety about strangers and the well-known ancient Italian practice of hospitium, by which two communities, or two individuals, or an individual and a community, entered into relations which bound them to mutual hospitality and kindness in case of need:45 a practice so widely spread and so highly developed that it may be considered one of the most valuable civilising agents in the early history of Italy. There is, however, no real inconsistency here. In the first place, the stranger who was removed on the occasion of solemn public religious rites may be assumed not to have been in possession of the ius hospitii with the Roman state, and in any case it must be doubtful whether that ius would give him the right of being present at all sacrificial rites. Secondly, the researches of Dr. Westermarck have recently, for the first time, made it clear that both the taboo on strangers and the very widely-spread32 practice of hospitality can ultimately be traced down to the same root. The stranger is dangerous; but for that very reason it is desirable to secure his good-will at once. He may have the evil eye; but if so, it is as well to disarm him by offering him food and drink, and, when he has partaken of these, by entering into communion with him in the act of partaking also yourself. Expediency would obviously suggest some such remedy for the danger of his presence, and this would in course of time, in accordance with the instinct of Romans and Italians, grow into a set of rules sanctioned by law as well as custom—the ius hospitii.46
Hostis vinctus mulier virgo exesto. We have noticed traces of taboo on women and strangers: what of the vinctus? This is, so far as I know, the only proof we have that a man in chains was thought to be religiously dangerous. I am not sure how his expulsion from religious rites is to be explained. It is, however, as well to note that criminals were in primitive societies thought to be uncanny, probably because the commonest of all crimes, if not the only one affecting society as a whole, was the breaking of taboo, which made the individual an outcast.47 And we may put this together with the fact that in the early City-state such outcasts were probably not kept shut up in a prison, but allowed to wander about secured with chains; this seems a fair inference from the power which the priest of Jupiter (Flamen Dialis) possessed of releasing from his chains any prisoner who entered his house, i.e. who had taken refuge there as in an asylum.48 Thus the fettered criminal, who was certainly not a citizen, might find his way to the place where a sacrifice was going on, and have to submit to expulsion together with the strangers. It is, however, also possible that the iron of the chains, if they were of iron, made him doubly dangerous; for, as we shall see directly, iron was taboo, and the chains of the prisoner who took refuge with the Flamen had to be thrown out of the house, no doubt for this reason, by the impluvium.49
Turning to inanimate objects, which are supposed by33 primitive man to be dangerous or taboo, we are met by a fact which will astonish anthropologists, and which I cannot satisfactorily explain. Blood is everywhere in the savage world regarded with suspicion and anxiety; there is something mysterious about it as containing (so they thought) the life, and its colour and smell are also uncanny; horses cannot endure it, and there are still strong men who faint at the sight of it. Yet at Rome, so far as I can discover, there was in historical times hardly a trace left of this anxiety in its original form of taboo; the religious law had effectually eliminated the various chances that might arouse it. No student of Roman religious antiquities seems to have noticed this singular fact. No anthropologist, as far as I know, has observed that among the many taboos to which the Flamen Dialis was subject, blood does not appear. The reason no doubt is that anthropologists are not as a rule Roman historians; their curiosity is not excited by a fact which must have some explanation in Roman religious history. From a single passage of Festus (p. 117) we learn that soldiers following the triumphal car carried laurel "ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem"; and this is the only distinct relic of the idea that I can find. Pliny's Natural History, that wonderful thesaurus of odds and ends, affords no help; the mystic qualities of blood are hardly alluded to there, and the same can be said of Servius' commentary on the Aeneid. The word blood is not to be found in the index to Wissowa's great work, of which the supreme value is its accurate record of the religious law and all the ceremonies of the State. I am constrained to believe that the priests or priest-kings who developed the ius divinum of the Roman City-state deliberately suppressed the superstition, for reasons which it is impossible to conjecture with certainty. And this guess, which I put forward with hesitation, is indeed in keeping with certain other facts of Roman life. It is doubtful whether human sacrifice ever existed among this people;50 it is certain that the execution of citizens in civil life by beheading was abandoned at a very early period.51 The34 shedding of blood, except when a victim was sacrificed under the rules of sacred law, was carefully avoided; thus the horror of blood had a social and ethical result of value, instead of remaining a mere religio (taboo). It is true that in one or two rites, such as that of the October horse, the blood of a sacrifice seems to have been thought to possess peculiar powers;52 but it is at the same time noticeable that this rite is not included in the old calendar, a fact of which a wholly satisfactory explanation has not yet been offered. In the Lupercalia there is a trace of the mystic use of blood in sacrifice, but a very faint one: to this we shall return later on. The two Luperci had their foreheads smeared with the knife bloody from the slaughter of the victims, but the blood was at once wiped off with wool dipped in milk.53 This rite is of course in the old calendar; it stands almost alone in its mystical character, and may have been taken over by the Romans from previous inhabitants of the site of Rome. Lastly, in the Terminalia, or boundary-festival of arable land in country districts, the boundary-stone was sprinkled with the blood of the victims, showing that a spirit, or numen, was believed to reside in it;54 but I cannot find that this practice survived in the public sacrifices of the city. It is found only in the sacrifices (Graeco ritu) supervised by the XV viri sacris faciundis in that part of the Ludi Saeculares of Augustus which was concerned with Greek chthonic deities in the Campus Martius.55
Yet unquestionably there had been a time when many inanimate objects were supposed to have a mystic or dangerous influence; this is sufficiently proved by the long list of taboos to which the unfortunate Flamen Dialis was even in historical times subject. He was forbidden to touch a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans, ivy, wheat, leavened bread; he might not walk under a vine, and his hair and nails might not be cut with an iron knife; and he might not have any knot or unbroken ring about his person. Dr. Frazer has the merit of being the first to point out the real meaning of this strange list of disabilities, and to35 explain the mystic or miasmatic origin of some of them.56 They need not detain us now, as they are survivals only, and survivals of ideas which must have been long extinct before Roman history can be said to begin. Almost the only one among them of which we have other traces is the taboo on iron, which must have been of comparatively late date, as the use of iron in Italy seems only to have begun about the eighth century B.C.57 This is found also in the ritual of the Arval Brotherhood, the ancient agricultural priesthood revived by Augustus, and better known to us than any other owing to the discovery of its Acta in the site of the sacred grove between Rome and Ostia. These Brethren had originally suffered from the taboo on iron; but in characteristic fashion they had discovered that a piacular or disinfecting sacrifice would sufficiently atone for its use whenever it was necessary to take a pruning-hook within the limits of the grove.58 We may here also recall the fact that no iron might be used in the building or repairing of the ancient pons sublicius, the oldest of all the bridges of the Tiber.59
Every one who wishes to get an idea of the nature of taboo in primitive Rome, and of the way in which it was got rid of, should study the disabilities of the Flamen Dialis, and satisfy himself of their absence, with the exception just mentioned, and possibly one or two more, in the ritual of historical Rome. Nothing is more likely to convince him of the way in which Roman civilisation contrived to leave these superstitions as mere fossils, incapable any longer of doing mischief by cramping the conscience and inducing constant anxiety. If he is disposed to ask why such a large number of these fossils should be found attached to the priesthood of Jupiter, I must ask him to let me postpone that question, which would at this moment lead us too far afield.
I may, however, mention here that the Flaminica Dialis, who was not priestess of Juno as is commonly supposed, but assisted her husband in the cult of Jupiter, was also subject to certain taboos. On three occasions in36 the religious year she might not appear in public with her hair "done up," viz. the moving of the ancilia in March, the festival of the Argei in March and May, and during the cleansing of the penus Vestae in June. Also she might not wear shoes made from the skin of a beast that had died a natural death, but only from that of a sacrificial victim. There are traces of a religio about shoe-leather, I may remark, both in the Roman and in other religious systems. Varro tells us that "in aliquot sacris et sacellis scriptum habemus, Ne quid scorteum adhibeatur: ideo ne morticinum quid adsit." Leather was taboo in the worship of the almost unknown deity Carmenta. Petronius describes women in the cult of Jupiter Elicius walking barefoot; and we are reminded of the well-known rule which still survives in Mahommedan mosques.60 The original idea may have been that the skin of an animal not made sacred by sacrifice might destroy the efficacy of the worship contemplated. On the other hand, the skin of a duly sacrificed animal had potency of a useful kind—a fact or belief so widespread as to need no illustration here; but we shall come upon an example of it in my next lecture.
Certain places were also affected by the idea of taboo. In the later religious law of the City-state the sites of all temples, i.e. all places in which deities had consented to take up their abode, were of course holy; but this is a much more mature development, though it unquestionably had its root in the same idea that we are now discussing. Such sites, as we shall see in a later lecture, were loca sacra, and sacer is a word of legal ritual, meaning that the place has been made over to the deity by certain formulae, accompanied with favourable auspices, under the authority of the State.61 But there were other holy places which were not sacra but religiosa; and the word religiosum here might almost be translated "affected by taboo." Wissowa provides us with a list of these places, and this and the quotations he supplies with it are of the utmost value for my present subject.6237 They comprised, of course, all holy places which the State had not duly consecrated, and therefore some which hardly concern us here, such as shrines belonging to families and gentes, and temple-sites in the provinces of a later age. More to our purpose at this moment are the spots where thunderbolts were supposed to have fallen. Such spots were encircled with a low wall and called puteal from their resemblance to a well, or bidental from the sacrifice there of a lamb as a piaculum; the bolt was supposed to be thus buried, and the place became religiosum.63 So, too, all burial-grounds were not loca sacra but loca religiosa, technically because they were not the property of the state or consecrated by it; in reality, I venture to say, because the place where a corpse was deposited was of necessity taboo. Such places were extra commercium, and their sanctity might not be violated: "religiosum est," wrote the learned Roman Masurius Sabinus, "quod propter sanctitatem aliquam remotum et sepositum est a nobis."64 So, too, the great lawyer of Cicero's time, Servius Sulpicius, defines religio as "quae propter sanctitatem aliquam remota ac seposita a nobis sit," where he is using religio in the sense of a thing or place to which a taboo attaches.65 And again, another authority, Aelius Gallus, said that religiosum was properly applied to an object in regard to which there were things which a man might not do: "quod si faciat," he goes on, "adversus deorum voluntatem videatur facere."66 These last words are in the language of the City-state; if we would go behind it to that of an earlier age, we should substitute words which would express the feeling or scruple, the religio, without reference to any special deity. Virgil has pictured admirably this feeling as applied to places, in describing the visit of Aeneas to the site of the future Rome under the guidance of his host Evander (Aen. viii. 347):—
hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit,
aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis.
iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis
38dira loci: iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant.
"hoc nemus, hunc," inquit, "frondoso vertice collem,
(quis deus, incertum est) habitat deus."
This is a passage on which I shall have to comment again: at present I will content myself with noting how accurately the poet, who of all others best understood the instincts of the less civilised Italians of his own day, has used his knowledge to express the antique feeling that there were places which man must shrink from entering—a feeling far older than the invention of legal consecratio by the authorities of a City-state.
Lastly, the principle of taboo, or religio, if we use the Latin word, affected certain times as well as places. Just as under the ius divinum of the fully-developed State certain spots were made over to the deities for their habitation and rendered inviolable by consecratio, so certain days were also appointed as theirs which the human inhabitants might not violate by the transaction of profane business. But I have just pointed out that the consecration of holy places in this legal fashion was a late development of a primitive feeling or religio; exactly the same, if I am not mistaken, was the case with regard to the holy days. These were called nefasti, and belong to the life of the State; but there were others, called religiosi, which I believe to have been tabooed days long before the State arose.
When we come to examine the ancient religious calendar, it will be found that I shall not then be called upon to deal with dies religiosi, for the very good reason that they are not indicated in that calendar—there is no mark for them as religiosi, and some of them are not even dies nefasti, as we might naturally have expected.67 What, then, is the history of them? We may be able to make a fair guess at this by noting exactly what these days were; Dr. Wissowa has put them together for us in a very succinct passage.68 He begins the list with the 18th of Quinctilis (July), on which two great disasters had happened to Roman39 armies, the defeats on the Cremera and the Allia; and also the 16th, the day after the Ides, because, according to the legend, the Roman commander had sacrificed on that day with a view to gaining the favour of the gods in the battle. We may regard the story about the 18th as historical; but then we are told that all days following on Kalends, Nones, and Ides were likewise made religiosi (or atri, vitiosi, which have the same meaning) as being henceforward deemed unlucky by pronouncement of senate and pontifices;69 thus all dies postriduani, as they were called, were put out of use, or at any rate declared unlucky, for many purposes, both public and private, e.g. marriages, levies, battles, and sacred rites,70 simply because on one occasion disaster had followed the offering of a sacrifice on the 16th of Quinctilis. It is difficult to believe that thirty-six days in the year were thus tabooed, by a Roman senate and Roman magistrates, in a period when the practical wisdom of the government was beginning to be a marked characteristic of the State. Some people, we are told, went so far as to treat the fourth day before Kalends, Nones, and Ides in the same way; but Gellius declares that he could find no tradition about this except a single passage of Claudius Quadrigarius, in which he said that the fourth day before the Nones of Sextilis was that on which the battle of Cannae was fought.71
I am strongly inclined to suggest that the traditional explanation of the tabooing of these thirty-six, or possibly seventy-two days was neither more nor less than an aetiological myth, like hundreds of others which were invented to account for Roman practices, religious and other; and this supposition seems to be confirmed as we go on with the list of dies religiosi as given by Wissowa. The three days—Sextilis 24, October 5, November 8—on which the Manes were believed to come up from the underworld through the mundus (to which I shall return later on) were religiosi;72 so were those when the temple of Vesta remained open (June 740 to 15),73 those on which the Salii performed their dances in March and October,74 two days following the feriae Latinae (a movable festival),75 and the days of the Parentalia in February and the Lemuria in May, which were concerned with the cult and the memory of the dead.76 Now the religio or taboo on these days obviously springs either from a feeling of anxiety suggested by very primitive notions of the dead and of departed spirits; or in the case of the temple of Vesta, by some mystical purification or disinfection preparatory to the ingathering of the crops, which I noticed in my Roman Festivals (p. 152 foll.); or again in the case of the Salii, by some danger to the crops from evil spirits, etc., which might be averted by their peculiar performances. In fact, all these dies religiosi date as such, we may be pretty sure, from a very primitive period before the genesis of the City-state, and were not recognised—for what reason we will not at present attempt to guess—as religiosi by the authorities who drew up the Calendar. Some of them appear in that calendar as dies nefasti, but not all; and I am entirely at one with Wissowa, whose knowledge of the Roman religious law is unparalleled for exactness, in believing that a religio affecting a day had nothing whatever to do with its character as fastus or nefastus.77
If all these last-mentioned dies religiosi are such because ancient popular feeling attached the religio to them, we may infer, I think, that the same was really the case also with the dies postriduani. The fact that the authorities of the State had made one or two days religiosi as anniversaries of disasters, supplied a handy explanation for a number of other dies religiosi of which the true explanation had been entirely lost; but that there was such a true explanation, resting on very primitive beliefs, I have very little doubt. Lucky and unlucky days are found in the unwritten calendars of primitive peoples in many parts of the world. An old pupil, now a civil servant in the41 province of Madras, has sent me an elaborate account of the notions of this kind existing in the minds of the Tamil-speaking people of his district of southern India. The Celtic calendar recently discovered at Coligny in France contains a number of mysterious marks, some of which may have had a meaning of this kind.78 Dr. Jevons has collected some other examples from various parts of the world, e.g. Mexico.79 The old Roman superstition about the luckiness of odd days and the unluckiness of even ones, which appears, as we shall see, in the arrangement of the calendar, was probably at one time a popular Italian notion, not derived, as used to be thought, from Pythagoras and his school.
I therefore conclude that we may add times and seasons to the list of those objects, animate and inanimate, which were affected by the practice of taboo in primitive Rome; and I hold that the word religiosus, as applied both to times and places, exactly expresses the feeling on which that practice is based. The word religiosus came to have another meaning (though it retained the old one as well) in historical times, and the Romans could be called religiosissimi mortalium in the sense of paying close attention to worship and all its details. But the original meaning of religio and religiosus may after all have been that nervous anxiety which is a special characteristic of an age of taboo.80 To discover the best methods of soothing that anxiety, or, in other words, the methods of disinfection, was the work of the organised religious life of family and State which we are going to study. But I must first devote a lecture to another class of primitive survivals.
NOTES TO LECTURE II
23 Renel, Les Enseignes, p. 43 foll. For the contrary view, Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 490.
24 On taboo in general, Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, ch. vi.; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 142 foll.; Frazer, Golden Bough (ed. 2), i. 343; Crawley, The Mystic Rose,42 passim. On the relation of taboo to magic, Marett, Threshold of Religion, p. 85 foll. Lately M. van Gennep in his Rites de passage has attempted to classify and explain the various rites resulting from taboo.
25 See the Transactions of the Congress (Oxford University Press), vol. i. p. 121 foll. M. Reinach had alleged that the gens Fabia was originally a totem clan, Mythes et cultes, i. p. 47.
26 Marett, On the Threshold of Religion, p. 137 foll. "In taboo the mystic thing is not to be lightly approached (negative aspect); qua mana, it is instinct with mystic power (positive aspect)": so Mr. Marett states the distinction in a private letter.
27 Evolution of Religion, p. 94.
28 Introduction, ch. viii.; Westermarck, Origin and Development of Ethical Ideas, i. 233 foll.
29 See a paper by the author in the Transactions of the Congress of the History of Religions, 1908, ii. 169 foll.
30 Macrobius, Sat. i. 16. 36; De Marchi, La Religione nella vita domestica, i. p. 169 foll.; Samter, Familienfeste der Griechen und Römer, p. 62 foll., where the dies lustricus is compared with the Greek ἀμφιδρὁμια. Unfortunately the details of the Roman rite are unknown to us, which seems to indicate that the primitive or magical character of it had disappeared. Van Gennep, op. cit. ch. v., reviews and classifies our present knowledge of this kind of rite. See also Crawley, Mystic Rose, p. 435 foll.
31 Crawley, op. cit. p. 436; Frazer, G.B. i. 403 foll. From this point of view Roman names need a closer examination than they have yet received. See, however, Marquardt, Privatleben der Römer, pp. 10 and 81, and Mommsen, Röm. Forschungen, i. 1 foll. Marquardt must be wrong in stating (p. 10) that only the praenomen was given on the dies lustricus; children dying before that day usually, as he says on p. 82 note, have no name in inscriptions, and that ceremony must surely have introduced the child to the gens of its parents. Certainly that introduction had not to wait till the toga virilis was taken; though Tertull. de Idol. 16 looks at first a little like it. The same statement is made in the Dict. of Antiq., s.v. "nomen." Macr. Sat. i. 16. 36, and Fest. 120, simply speak of nomen.
32 Fowler, R.F. p. 56; De Marchi, op. cit. p. 176. For the primitive ideas about puberty, Crawley, Mystic Rose, ch. xiii. The idea of the Romans seems to have been simply that the child, who had so far needed special protection from evil influences (of what kind in particular it is impossible to say) by purple-striped toga and amulet (see below, p. 60), was now entering a stage when these were no longer needed. All notions of taboo seem to have vanished.
33 Marquardt, Privataltertümer, p. 337 foll.
34 Serv. Aen. ii. 714, and especially iii. 64. Other references in Marq. op. cit. p. 338, note 5, and De Marchi, La Religione nella43 vita domestica, p. 190. For similar usages of prohibition see van Gennep, op. cit. ch. ii.
35 Festus, p. 3, "itaque funus prosecuti redeuntes ignem supragradiebantur aqua aspersi, quod purgationis genus vocabant suffitionem." For the possibly magic influence of these elements, see Jevons, op. cit. p. 70.
36 Frazer, G.B. i. 325, iii. 222 foll.; Jevons, p. 59.
37 Cato, R.R. 83, "mulier ad eam rem divinam ne adsit neve videat quomodo fiat."
38 Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 60. Dogs were also excluded (ib. 90); Gellius xi. 6. 2; Wissowa, R.K. p. 227; Fowler, R.F. p. 194, where the private and public taboos are compared.
39 Festus, s.v. "exesto." For similar taboos in Greece, Farnell in Archiv for 1904, p. 76.
40 Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 143 foll. Cp. Westermarck, Origin, etc., vol. i. ch. xxvi., especially p. 652 foll.
41 G.B. i. 298 foll.
42 Festus, s.v. "exesto."
43 Bücheler, Umbrica, p. 94 foll. Cp. Livy v. 50, where it is said that, after the Gauls had left Rome, all the temples, quod ea hostis possedisset, were to be restored, to have their bounds laid down afresh (terminarentur) and to be disinfected (expiarentur). Digest, xi. 7. 36, "cum loca capta sunt ab hostibus, omnia desinunt religiosa vel sacra esse, sicut homines liberi in servitutem perveniunt; quod si ab hac calamitate fuerint liberata, quasi quodam postliminio reversa pristino statui restituerentur." Cp. Plutarch, Aristides, 20. A friend reminds me that Bishop Berkeley, when in Italy, had his bedroom sprinkled with holy water by his landlady.
44 See Marquardt, p. 420, notes 5 and 6. The verbenarius is mentioned in Serv. Aen. xii. 120, and Pliny N.H. xxii. 5. For the disinfecting power of verbena (myrtea verbena) see Pliny xv. 119, where it is said to have been used by Romans and Sabines after the rape of the Sabine virgins.
45 See Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 192 foll., based on the famous essay of Mommsen in his Römische Forschungen, i. 319 foll. The passages quoted from Livy for the practice in early times (i. 45, v. 50) are not, of course, historical evidence; but we may fairly argue back from the more explicit evidence of later times, e.g. the Senatus-consultum de Asclepiade of 78 B.C. (C.I. Graec. 5879).
There is a good example of the feeling in modern Italy in a book called In the Abruzzi, by Anne Macdonell, p. 275. I have experienced it in remote parts of South Wales long ago. Moritz, the German pastor who travelled on foot in England towards the end of the eighteenth century, noted that even the innkeepers were constantly unwilling to take him in. His book was reprinted in Cassell's National Library some years ago.
44
46 See the very interesting chapter in The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, vol. i. p. 570 foll., especially p. 590 foll. Dr. Westermarck aptly points out that hospitality is almost universal among "rude" peoples, and loses its hold as they become more civilised. M. van Gennep in his recently published work, Les Rites de Passage, has attempted to classify the various rites relating to taboo of strangers; see ch. iii., especially p. 38 foll.
47 Jevons, Introduction, p. 70.
48 Gellius x. 15. 8, "vinctum, si aedes eius introierit, solui necessum est." (In hot countries chains still usually, or in some degree, take the place of bolts and bars, e.g. in the Soudan, as I am told by an old pupil now in the Soudan civil service.) The regular Latin phrase for imprisonment is "in vincula conicere": Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "carcer."
49 Gellius, l.c.; Serv. Aen. ii. 57, a curious passage, in which the release of Sinon from his bonds by King Priam is compared with that of the prisoner who enters the flaminia (house of the Flamen Dialis). That there was something in the iron which interfered with the religious efficacy of the Flamen seems likely; cp. the rule that he might wear no ring unless it were broken, and have no knot about his dress. But the latter restriction suggests that binding may have been originally the object of the taboo (cp. Ovid, Fasti, v. 432), and that the iron taboo came in with the iron age. Appel, de Romanorum precationibus, p. 82, note 2, seems so to understand it. Cp. Eurip. Iph. Taur. 468, where Orestes and Pylades are unbound before entering the temple.
50 There has been much discussion of this question; I entirely agree with Wissowa (R.K. p. 354, where references are given for the opposite opinion) that there is no evidence for human sacrifice in the old Roman religion or law, except in the rule that a condemned criminal was made over to a deity (sacer), which may have been a legal survival of an original form of actual sacrifice. The alleged sacrifice by Julius Caesar of two mutinous soldiers in the Campus Martius (Dio Cass. xliii. 24) is of the same nature as the sacrifice of captives to Orcus in Aen. xi. 81, i.e. it is outside of the civil life and religious law; this is shown in the latter case by the mention of blood in the ritual (caeso sparsurus sanguine flammas), and in the former by the beheading of the mutineers.
51 Mommsen, Strafrecht, p. 917 foll.; Livy x. 9; Cic. de Rep. ii. 31. 65. All other methods of execution were bloodless. Decollatio remained in use in the army (as in the case just mentioned), but the axe disappeared from the fasces in the city with the abolition of kingship. As further illustration of the dislike of all bloodshed, cp. the rule of XII. Tables, "mulieres genas ne radunto," i.e. at funerals, Cic. de Legibus, ii. 59, and Serv. Aen. iii. 67 from Varro, and v. 78. The gladiatorial ludi may have been a revival of an old custom akin to human sacrifice of captives in the field. See Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 304, note 3.45
We may also note in this connection that there is no distinct trace of the blood-feud in old Roman law; see Zum ältesten Strafrecht der Kulturvölker, p. 38 (questions of comparative law suggested by Mommsen and answered by various specialists). Doubtless it once existed, but vanished at an early date.
52 Fowler, R.F. p. 242. The tail of the sacrificed horse was carried to the Regia, where the blood was allowed to drip on the sacred hearth (participandae rei divinae gratia), Festus, p. 178.
53 R.F. p. 311 foll., from Plutarch, Rom. 21.
54 For this practice in many ancient religions, and its substitute, the smearing of the stone with turmeric or other red stain, see Jevons, Introduction, p. 139 foll.; Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 415.
55 This is found in Zosimus ii. 1. 5; Diels, Sibyllinische Blätter, 132, and 73 note. Cp. Virg. Aen. viii. 106; also a Greek rite.
56 G.B. ed. 2, i. 241 foll.
57 The bronze and iron ages, of course, overlap; see Helbig, Italiker in der Poebene, p. 78 foll.
58 Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. pp. 22 and 128 foll. Other examples are collected by Helbig, op. cit. p. 80.
59 Dion. Hal. iii. 45; Mommsen in C.I.L. i. p. 177. It may be as well to point out that iron, like wheat in the taboos of the Flamen, was considered dangerous, as being a novelty. The old Italian grain was not true wheat but far, which continued to be used in religious rites; R.F. p. 304, and Marquardt, Privatleben der Römer, p. 399 foll.
60 Varro, L.L. vii. 84; Ovid, Fasti, i. 629; Petronius, Sat. 44. There are many parallels in Greek ritual.
61 See below, p. 146. Mr. Marett suggests to me a comparison with the rongo (sacred) of the Melanesians, and tapu as used of a place by them, i.e. set apart by a human authority; Codrington, Melanesians, p. 77.
62 Wissowa, R.K. p. 408 foll.; cp. 323 and notes.
63 The fullest account of this will be found in Marquardt, p. 262 foll. For the case of a man killed by lightning, see note 4 on p. 263; the body was not burnt but buried, and the grave became a bidental, and religiosum.
64 For the intricate pontifical law of burial-places see Wissowa, p. 409. The quotation from Masurius is in Gellius iv. 9. 8, "M. Sabinus in commentariis quos de indigenis composuit." The word sanctitas is here used merely by way of explanation and not in a technical sense; for which see Marq. p. 145 and references; but it seems to have had a special use in the cult of the dead. (See below, p. 470.)
65 Quoted by Macrobius, Sat. iii. 3. 8. For Sulpicius see Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 118 foll.
66 Festus, p. 278. This Aelius lived at the end of the Republican period, and belonged to the school of Sulpicius; Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Lit. i. pt. 2, p. 486.46
67 e.g. the three days on which the mundus was open were all comitiales, though at the same time religiosi.
68 R.K. pp. 376, 377.
69 The authorities for the story are Verrius Flaccus, ap. Gell. v. 17, and Macrobius, Sat. i. 16. 21.
70 For the extent of the taboo see Gell. iv. 9. 5; Macr. i. 16. 18.
71 Gell. v. 17. 3 foll. (annalium quinto).
72 Festus, p. 278.
73 R.F. p. 151.
74 Wissowa, R.K. p. 377, note 6.
75 Cic. ad Qu. Fratr. ii. 4. 2.
76 Wissowa, R.K. pp. 187, 189.
77 R.K. p. 377. Gell. iv. 9. 5 says that the multitudo imperitorum confused the dies religiosi and dies nefasti. The distinction is most clearly seen in the fact that on dies religiosi the temples were (or ought to be) shut, and "res divinas facere" was ill-omened (Gell., ib.), while on dies nefasti the latter was regular, such days being made over to the gods. No wonder that Gellius brands the popular ignorance with such words as prave and perperam.
78 See Prof. Rhys's paper read before the British Academy, "Notes on the Coligny Calendar," p. 33 and elsewhere.
79 Introduction, p. 65 foll.
80 Since writing this sentence I have read the paper by W. Otto on "Religio and Superstitio" in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 1909, p. 533 foll.; in which at p. 544 he hints at a connection of religio with the practice of taboo. With some of his conclusions, however, I cannot agree. The same explanation of the origin of religio, i.e. in an age of taboo, has also been suggested since my lecture was written by Maximilianus Kobbert, De verborum "religio atque religiosus" usu apud Romanos, p. 31 (Königsberg, 1910).
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47
LECTURE III
ON THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION: MAGIC
Taboo, the traces of which at Rome we examined in the last lecture, is, as we saw, closely allied to magic, even if it be not, as Dr. Frazer thinks, magic in a negative form. We have now to see what traces are to be found of magic in the proper or usual sense of the word—active or positive magic, as we may call it. By this we are to understand the exercise of a mysterious mechanical power by an individual on man, spirit, or deity, to enforce a certain result. In magic there is no propitiation, no prayer. "He who performs a purely magical act," says Dr. Westermarck,81 "utilises such mechanical power without making any appeal at all to the will of a supernatural being." Religion, on the other hand, is an attitude of regard and dependence; in a religious stage man feels himself in the hands of a supernatural power with whom he desires to be in right relation.
If we accept this distinction, as I think we may (though one school of anthropologists is hardly disposed to do so), it is plain that magical practices are of a totally different kind from religious practices, as being the result of a different mental attitude towards the supernatural; they belong to a ruder and more rudimentary idea of the relation of Man to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. True, they have their origin in the same kind of human experience, in the difficulties man meets with in his struggle for existence, and his desire to overcome these; but unlike48 religion, magic is a wholly inadequate attempt to overcome them. This inadequacy was long ago well explained by Dr. Jevons.82 He showed that man in that early stage of his experience did not understand the true relation of cause and effect; that, "turned loose as it were among innumerable possible causes (of a given effect), with nothing to guide his choice, the chances against his making the right choice were considerable." As a matter of fact he usually made the wrong one, and is still apt to do so. There is probably more magic going on behind the scenes even in civilised countries, and more especially both in Greece and Italy, than either men of science or men of religion have any idea of. In its various forms as they are now classified,83 e.g. contagious magic, and homoeopathic magic, the exercise of the mysterious will-power, real or imaginary, is to be found all the world over, accompanied usually with a spell or incantation which is believed to enforce and increase that power—a kind of telepathy, which seems to be the psychological basis, so far as there is one, of the whole system. In these rites the virtue resides in some action, which, together with the spell or incantation, enforces the desired result by calling out the will-power, or mana, if we adopt the convenient Melanesian word lately brought into use. Whatever percentage of psychological truth may lie at the root of such performances, it is obvious that they must in the main be wholly inadequate, and must constantly tend to pass into mere quackery and become discredited; and it was the special function of the religious organisation of early society to eliminate and discredit them.
But it was a long stage in the evolution of society before man arrived at a better knowledge of his relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe; before he reached the idea of a god or spirit realisable and nameable, and thus capable of being addressed, placated, worshipped. When this stage is reached, there supervenes almost always a strong tendency to regulate and systematise49 the methods of address, placation, and worship; and among some peoples, e.g. the Romans, for reasons which it is by no means easy to explain, this tendency is much stronger than among others. Wherever it has been strong, wherever these methods of putting oneself in right relation with the Power have been systematised by a central authority or priesthood, and thus made into religious law, there, as we might naturally expect, the performances and performers of magic have been most vigorously discountenanced and outlawed. The interests of religion and its officials are wholly antagonistic to those of magic and magicians. In civilised communities and in historical times magic is in the main individualistic, not social; magical ceremonies for the good of the community seem to be confined to races in a very early stage of development. The examples on which Dr. Frazer relies for his theory of the development of the public magician into a king84 are of this primitive kind, or are mere survivals of magic in a higher stage of civilisation—such survivals as there will always be among forms and ceremonies, of which it is man's nature to be tenacious. But religion, once firmly established, invariably seeks to exclude magic; and the priest does his best to discredit the magician, as claiming to exercise mysterious powers outside the pale of the legally recognised methods of propitiation and worship. As Dr. Tylor observed long ago, the more civilised the race, the more apt it is to associate magic with men of inferior civilisation.85 In the Jewish law, though magic was well known to the Jews and privately practised, there is no recognition of it; the magical books attributed to Solomon were suppressed, according to tradition, by the pious king Hezekiah.86 So too at Rome, where the outward forms of religion were also very highly systematised, magic, as it seems to me, was rigorously excluded from the State ritual, though it continued in use in private life under certain precautions taken by the State; in the few genuine examples of it in the rites belonging to the ius divinum (i.e. those used and50 sanctioned for the purposes of the community), it is nothing more than a survival of which the magical meaning was unknown to the writers from whom we hear of it.
A good example of such survivals is the curious ceremony of the aquaelicium, without doubt a genuine case of magical "rain-making"—one of the many inadequate and blundering attempts on the part of primitive man to obtain what he needs. Probably it may be classed under the head of "sympathetic magic," but the evidence as to what was done in the ceremony is not quite explicit enough to allow us to do this confidently.87 It was, of course, not included in the religious calendar, as it would be only occasionally called for, and could not be fixed to a day; but there is clear evidence that it was sanctioned by the State, for the pontifices took part in it, and the magistrates without the toga praetexta, and the lictors carrying the fasces reversed.88 A stone, which lay outside the walls near the Porta Capena, was brought into the city by the pontifices, so far as we can make out the details, and it has been conjectured that it was taken to an altar of Jupiter Elicius on the Aventine hard by, this cult-title of the god of the sky having possibly some relation to the technical name of the ceremony. What was done with the stone we unluckily do not know; but it has been reasonably conjectured that it was a hollow one, and that it was filled with water which was allowed to run over the edge, as a means of inducing the rain-god to suffer the heavens to overflow.89 It was called lapis manalis; and the epithet here can have nothing to do with the Manes, as in the case of another lapis manalis, of which I shall have a word to say later on, but must mean "pouring" or "overflowing." One or two other fragments of evidence point in the same direction, and I think we may fairly conclude that the rite was originally one of sympathetic magic—that as the stone overflowed, so the sky would pour down rain. In my Roman Festivals I have pointed out a remarkable parallel to this in the collections of the Golden Bough; in a Samoan village51 a stone represented the god of rain, and in a drought his priests carried it in procession and dipped it in a stream.
This parallel I owe to Dr. Frazer's wide knowledge of all such practices among savage peoples. But this ever helpful and friendly guide, in treating of the Jupiter Elicius concerned in this ceremony, has gone beyond the evidence, and attributed to the Romans another kind of magic of which I believe they were quite innocent. He has been led to this by his theory that kings were developed out of successful magicians. In his lectures on the early history of the Kingship90 he maintains that the Roman kings practised the magical art of bringing down lightning from heaven. "The priestly king Numa passed for an adept in the art of drawing down lightning from the sky.... Tullus Hostilius is reported to have met with the same end (as Salmoneus, king of Elis) in an attempt to draw down Jupiter in the form of lightning from the clouds." To support these statements Dr. Frazer quotes Pliny, Livy, Ovid, Plutarch, Arnobius, Aurelius Victor, and Zonaras—truly a formidable list of authorities; but without any attempt to discover where any of these late writers found the stories. Yet he had but to read Aust's admirable article "Jupiter" in the Mythological Lexicon91 to assure himself that legends which cannot be traced farther back than the middle of the second century B.C. cannot seriously be assumed to be genuinely Roman. Pliny happens to mention Calpurnius Piso as his authority; this was the man who is well known in Roman history as the author of the first lex de repetundis of the year 149 B.C., a good statesman, but as an annalist much given to indulging a mythological fancy.92 We happen to know that he wrote with happy confidence about the life and habits of Romulus, and a story about wine-drinking which he attributes to that king is obviously transferred to him from some more historical personage. Romulus would not drink wine one day because he was going to be very busy on the next. Then they said to him, "If52 we all did so, Romulus, wine would be cheap." "Nay, dear," he replied, "if every one drank as much as he wished; and that is exactly what I am doing."93 I quote the story simply as a good example of the way in which Roman historians could deal with their kings, and of the absolute necessity of acquainting oneself with their methods before building hypotheses upon their statements. I hardly need to add that another of Dr. Frazer's authorities, Arnobius, informs us that he took the story from the second book of Valerius Antias, a later writer than Piso, whose name is a byword even with the uncritical Livy for shameless exaggeration and mis-statement.94
But how did these writers come by such legends, which, as Dr. Frazer shows, are to be found also in Greece and in other parts of the world? Why should they have wished to make Roman kings into magicians? Rain-making we can understand at Rome,—it had a practical end in view, the procuring of rain for the crops,—but why lightning and thunder, which were so much dreaded that every bit of damage done by a thunderstorm had to be carefully expiated by a religious process? Rome is not in the tropics, where rain and thunder so often come together, and where an attempt to produce rain by magic might naturally include thunder, as in some of Dr. Frazer's examples from tropical lands. I entirely agree with the latest and most sober investigators of Roman ritual that this kind of magic is quite foreign to Roman ideas and practice;95 there is no vestige of it in the Roman cult; these stories must have come from outside. And there is every probability that they came from Etruria, where the lore of lightning had become a pseudo-science, a waste of human ingenuity, for the origin of which we must look, as we are now beginning to understand, to Babylonia and the Eastern magic.96 The Jupiter Elicius of the Aventine had nothing to do with lightning; he took his cult-title from the rite of aquaelicium; but as soon as the Romans began to interest themselves53 in the Etruscan lightning-lore, of which this electrical magic was only a part,97 they perverted the meaning of the epithet to suit their new studies, and began to attribute to their legendary kings powers which properly belonged to Etruscan or Oriental magicians. The second century B.C., when Piso wrote his Annals, is exactly the period when we should naturally expect such studies to come into fashion, and with such perversions of "history" as their consequence.98
I go on to note one or two more examples of real magic in the State religion; but they are hard to find. Pliny tells that even in his day people believed that a runaway slave who had not escaped out of the city might be arrested by a spell uttered by the Vestal virgins.99 I take this to mean that any one who had lost his slave might get the Vestals to use the spell as a means of keeping the runaway within the city. The word for spell is here precatio, i.e. a prayer, not carmen, which is the usual word for a spell; and Pliny evidently thinks of it as addressed to some god. But no doubt it was originally at least a genuine spell, of the same kind as others used in private life, which we shall notice directly; and it implies a belief in some magical power inherent in the Vestals, of whom we are told that if they accidentally met a criminal being led to punishment they might secure his release.100 As the spell in this case seems to be telepathic, i.e. an exercise of will-power projected from a distance, it may perhaps be paralleled with certain mystical powers exercised by women, especially when their husbands are at war, among some savage peoples;101 but we have no information about it beyond the passage in Pliny, and further guessing would be useless.
This last is a case of genuine magic, but it is outside the ritual of the State, though exercised by a State priesthood. Within that ritual there is one other very curious case of what must be classed as a magical process, and one that has accidentally become famous. At the Lupercalia on February 15, the two young men54 called Luperci, or, more strictly, belonging respectively as leaders to the two collegia of Luperci, girt themselves with the skins of the slaughtered victims, which were goats, and then ran round the base of the Palatine hill, striking at all the women who came near them or offered themselves to their blows, with strips of skin cut from the hides of these same victims. The object was to produce fertility; on this point our authorities are explicit.102 Thus this particular feature of the whole extraordinary ritual of the Lupercalia is unmistakably within the region of magic rather than of religion. Some potency was believed to work in the act of striking, though apparently without a spoken spell or carmen, such as usually accompanies acts of this kind; and this part of the rite, grotesque though it was, was allowed to survive by the grave religious authorities who drew up the calendar of religious festivals. It was probably a superstition too deeply rooted in the minds of the people to admit of being excluded; and, strange to say, it survived, in outward form at least, until Rome had become cosmopolitan and even Christian. The Lupercalia has always been a puzzle to students of early religion, and as each new theory is advanced, this strange festival is seized on for fresh interpretation;103 but for our present purposes it must suffice to point out that we clearly find embedded in it a piece of genuine magic, dating beyond doubt from a very primitive stage of thought.
There is one other very curious performance, occurring each year on the ides of May, which in my view is rather magical than religious, though the ancients themselves looked upon it as a kind of purification: I mean the casting into the Tiber from the pons sublicius of twenty-four or twenty-seven straw puppets by the Vestal virgins, in the presence of the magistrates and pontifices. Recently an attempt has been made by Wissowa to prove that this strange ceremony was not primitive, but simply a case of the substitution of puppets for real human victims as late as the age of the Punic wars.104 These puppets were55 called Argei, which word naturally suggests Greeks; and Wissowa has contrived to persuade himself not only that a number of Greeks were actually put to death by drowning in an age when everything Greek was beginning to be reverenced at Rome, but (still more extraordinary to an anthropologist) that the primitive device of substitution was had in requisition at that late date in order to carry on the memory of the ghastly deed. And the world of German learning has silently followed their leader, without taking the trouble to test his conclusions by a careful and independent examination of the evidence. It happens that this fascinating puzzle of the Argei was the first curiosity that enticed me into the study of the Roman religion, and for some thirty years I have been familiar with every scrap of evidence bearing on it; and after going over that evidence once more I can emphatically state my conviction that Wissowa's theory will not hold water for a moment. I shall return to the subject in a later lecture dealing with the religious history of the second Punic war; at present I merely express a belief that, whatever be the history of the accessories of the rite,—and they are various and puzzling,—the actual immersion of the puppets is the survival of a primitive piece of sympathetic magic, the object being possibly to procure rain. It is, in my opinion, quite impossible to resist the anthropological evidence for this conclusion, though we cannot really be certain about the object; for this evidence I must refer you to my Roman Festivals, and to the references there given.105
This rite of the Argei, then, was a case of genuine magic, and exercised by a State priesthood, virgins to whom certain magical powers were supposed to be attached; it was, I think, a popular performance, like one or two others which are also outside the limit of the Fasti,106 and was embodied in a more complicated ceremonial long after that calendar had been drawn up. In the ritual authorised by the State, with public objects in view, i.e. for the benefit of society as a whole, there is hardly a trace of anything56 that we can call genuine magic apart from the examples I have just been explaining. There were, I need not say, many survivals of magical processes of which the true magical intent had long been lost—ancient magical deposits in a social stratum of religion, which I shall notice in their proper place. This is not peculiar to the religion of the Romans; it is a phenomenon to be found in all religions, even in those of the most highly developed type, and it is one apt to cause some confusion as to the true distinction between magic and religion.107 It is easy to find magical processes even in Christian worship, if we have the will to do so; but if we steadily bear in mind that the true test of magic is not the nature of an act, but the intent or volition which accompanies it, the search will not be an easy one.
The modern French school of sociologists, which now has to be reckoned with in investigating the early history of religion, claims that magic was not originally, as we now see it, a matter of individual skill, but a sociological fact, i.e. it was used for the benefit of the community, as religion came to be in a later age. If this be true, as it very possibly is, we see at once how the dead bones of magical processes might survive, with their original meaning entirely lost, into an age in which higher and more reasonable ideas had been developed about the relation of Man to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. To take a single example from Rome, divination by the examination of a victim's entrails was originally a magical process, according to the opinion of most modern authorities;108 but it ceases to be magic when it is used simply to determine in the State ritual whether in a religious process the victim is perfect and agreeable to the deity. In fact magical formulae, magical instruments, unless they are used in the true spirit of magic, to compel, not to propitiate a deity, are no longer magic, and may be passed over here. When we come to discuss the ritual of sacrifice and prayer, of lustratio, of vows, of divination, we may find it necessary to recall57 what has here been said. On the whole, we may conclude that organised religious cult, from its very nature and object, everywhere excluded magic in the true sense of the word; it implies prayer and propitiation, both of which are absolutely inconsistent with the object and methods of magic. Religion is the product of a higher stage of social development; it is the expression of a real advance of human thought; and in telling the story of the religious experience of the Roman people we are but indirectly concerned with those more rude and rudimentary ideas which it displaced.
But in private life, outside of the organised cult of the State and the family, magic was all through Roman history abundant, even over-abundant, and in this form I cannot pass it over entirely. Though the State authorities seem to have taken pains to exclude it rigidly from the public rites, and though there is little trace of it in the religious life of family and gens, yet there is evidence that it was deeply rooted in the nature of the people, and that they must have passed through an age in which it was an important factor in their social life. This fact, taken together with its almost complete elimination from the public religion, throws into relief the persistent efforts of the State authorities, from the framing of the old religious calendar to the time of the Augustan revival, to keep their relations with the Power clear of all that they believed to be unworthy or injurious. No better example can be found of the inherent antagonism between religion and magic.
Private magic may be divided into two kinds, according as it was used to damage another, or only to benefit oneself. In the former case the State interfered to protect the person threatened with damage, and treated this kind of magic as a crime. The commonest form of it was that of the spell, or carmen, no doubt often sung, and accompanied by some action which would bring it under the head of sympathetic magic; but the spell alone is taken cognisance of by the State. Pliny has preserved58 three words from the XII. Tables which tell their own tale: "qui fruges excantassit."109 Servius, commenting on the line of Virgil's 8th Eclogue, "atque satas alio vidi traducere messes," writes, "magicis quibusdam artibus hoc fiebat, unde est in XII. Tabb. 'Neve alienam segetem pellexeris.'" These last words, with the verb in the second person, are probably not quoted exactly from the ancient text,110 but they help to show us the nature of this hostile spell. There must have been a belief that the spirit, or life, or fructifying power of your neighbour's crops could be enticed away and transferred to your own. This is confirmed by a remark of St. Augustine in the de Civitate Dei;111 after quoting the same line from Virgil, he adds, "eo quod hac pestifera scelerataque doctrina fructus alieni in alias terras transferri perhibentur, nonne in XII. Tabulis, id est Romanorum antiquissimis legibus, Cicero commemorat esse conscriptum et ei qui hoc fecerit supplicium constitutum?" Given the belief, the temptation can be well understood if we reflect that the arable land of the old Romans was divided in sections of a square, and that each man's allotment would have that of a neighbour on two sides at least.112 If one man's corn were found to be more flourishing than that of his neighbours, what more likely than that he should have enticed away the spirit of their crops? The process reminds us, as it reminded Pliny, of the evocatio of the gods of foreign communities, a rite which belongs to religion and not to magic, though it doubtless had its origin in the same class of ideas as the excantatio.
In more general terms the old Roman law (i.e. originally the ius divinum) forbade the use of evil spells, as we see in another fragment of the Tables, "qui malum carmen incantassit." In later times this was usually taken as referring to libel and slander, but there can be no doubt that the carmina here alluded to were originally magical, and became carmina famosa in the course of legal interpretation. Cicero seems to combine the two meanings in the de Rep. (iv. 10. 2) when he says that the Tables made59 it a capital offence "si quis occentavisset, sive carmen condidisset quod infamiam faceret flagitiumve alteri" (to bring shame or criminal reproach on another). In the later sense these carmina have a curious history, into which I cannot enter now.113 In the earlier sense they existed and flourished without doubt, in spite of the law; or it may be that, as the words of the Tables were interpreted in the new sense, the old form of offence was tolerated in private. "We are all afraid," says Pliny, "of being 'nailed' (defigi) by spells and curses" (diris precationibus).114 These dirae, and all the various forms of love-charms, defixiones, accompanied by the symbolic actions which are found all the world over, lie outside my present subject, and are so familiar to us all in Roman literature that I do not need to dwell on them.115
Nor of the common harmless kind of magic need I say much now. It survived, of course, alongside of the religion of the family and State, from the earliest times to the latest, as it survives at the present day in all countries civilised and uncivilised; and being harmless the State took no heed of it. Some assortment of charms and spells for the cure of diseases will be found in Cato's book on agriculture, and one or two incidentally occur in that of Varro.116 They performed the work of insurance against both fire and accident, and even such a man as Julius Caesar was not independent of such arts. Pliny tells us that after experiencing a carriage accident he used to repeat a certain spell three times as soon as he had taken his seat in a vehicle, and adds significantly, "id quod plerosque nunc facere scimus."117 Such carmina were written on the walls of houses to insure them against fire.118 Pliny has a large collection of small magical delusions and superstitions, many of which have an interest for anthropologists, in the 28th book of his Natural History.
Another kind of harmless magic, to which the Romans, like all Italians ancient and modern, were peculiarly addicted, is the use of amulets. Here there is no spell, or60 obvious and expressed exercise of will-power on the part of the individual, but the potent influence, mana, or whatever we choose to call it, resides in a material object which brings good luck, like the cast horse-shoe of our own times, or protects against hostile will-power, and especially against the evil eye. This curious and widely-spread superstition was probably the raison d'être of most of the amulets worn or carried by Romans. A modern Italian, even if he be a complete sceptic and materialist, will probably be found to have some amulet about him against the evil eye, "just to be on the safe side."119 A list of amulets, both Greek and Roman, will be found in the Dictionary of Antiquities, and in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie, s.v. "amulet," and it is not necessary here to explain the various kinds in use in Italy; but I must dwell for a moment on one type, which had been taken up into the life of the family, and in one sense into that of the State, viz. the bulla worn by children, both boys and girls.
The bulla was a small object, enclosed in historical times in a capsule, and suspended round the child's neck. It was popularly believed to have been originally an Etruscan custom,120 and borrowed by the Romans, like so many other ornaments. It is, however, much more probable that the custom was old Italian (as indeed the "medicine-bag" is world-wide), and that the Etruscan contribution to it was merely the case or capsule, which was of gold where the family could afford it—gold itself being supposed to have some potency as a charm.121 The object within the case was, as Pliny tells us, a res turpicula as a rule,122 and this may remind us that a fascinum was carried in the car of the triumphator as medicus invidiae, to use Pliny's pregnant expression. The triumphing general needed special protection; he appeared in the guise of Jupiter himself, and was for the moment lifted above the ordinary rank of humanity. Some feeling of the same kind must have originally suggested similar means for the protection of children under61 the age of puberty. They also wore the toga praetexta, which, though associated by us with secular magistrates, had undoubtedly a religious origin. There are distinct signs that children were in some sense sacred, and at the same time that they needed special protection against the all-abounding evil influences to be met with in daily life.123 Thus this particular form of amulet became a recognised institution of family life, and in due time little more than a mark of childhood.
Yet another kind of charm must be mentioned here which was used at certain festivals, though apparently not at any of those belonging to the authorised calendar. At the Compitalia, Paganalia, and feriae Latinae we are told that small images of the human figure, or masks, or simply round balls (pilae), were hung up on trees or doorways, and left to swing in the wind.124 At the Compitalia the images had a special name, maniae, of which the meaning is lost; but inasmuch as the charms were hung up at cross-roads on that occasion, where the Lares compitales of the various properties had their shrine, it was not difficult to manufacture out of them a goddess, Mania, mother of the Lares.125 The common word for these figures was oscilla, and the fact of their swinging in the wind suggested a verb oscillare, which survives in our own tongue with the same meaning. Until lately it used to be believed that they were substitutes for original human sacrifices: a view for which there is not a particle of evidence, though it was originated by Roman scholars.126 Modern anthropology has found another explanation, which is by no means improbable. Dr. Frazer, in an appendix to the 2nd volume of the Golden Bough, has collected a number of examples of the practice of swinging by human beings as a magical rite; they come from many parts of the world, including ancient Athens, and even modern Calabria. He also points out that at the feriae Latinae the swingers seem to have been human beings, if we accept the evidence of Festus, s.v. "oscillantes"; thus we are left with the possibility that the oscilla were really62 imitations of men and women, though not of human sacrificial victims.
Dr. Frazer is obviously hard put to it to explain the original meaning and object of this curious custom. In the Paganalia, as described by Virgil in the second Georgic,127 the object would seem to be the prosperity of the vine-crop.
coloni
versibus incomptis ludunt risuque soluto,
oraque corticibus sumunt horrenda cavatis,
et te Bacche vocant per carmina laeta, tibique
oscilla ex alta suspendunt mollia pinu.
hinc omnis largo pubescit vinea fetu, etc.128
But here we must leave a question which is still unsolved. All we can say is that the old idea of substitutes for human sacrifice must be finally given up, and that the oscilla, whether or not they were substitutes for human swingers, were probably charms intended to ward off evil influences from the crops. I am not disposed to put any confidence in what Servius tells us, that this was a purification by means of air, just as fire and water were also purifying agents; this looks like the ingenious explanation of a later and a religious age.129
So much, then, for magical charms and spells, and the survivals of them in the fully developed Roman religion.130 It might seem hardly worth while to spend even so much time on them as I have done, and I cannot deny that I am glad now to be able to leave them. My object has simply been to show how little of this kind of practice, which meets us on the threshold of religion, was allowed to survive by the religious authorities of the State; in other words, I wished to make clear that in our inquiries into the nature of the Roman religion it is really religion and not magic that we have to do with.
It is really religion; it is desire, beginning already to be effective, to be in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The Romans, as I hope to show in the next lecture, when we can begin to know and feel an interest in them, had not only begun to63 recognise this Power in various forms and functions as one that must be propitiated, because they were dependent on it for their daily needs, but to regulate and make permanent the methods of propitiation. What was the relation between this simple religion and morality—between ritual and conduct—is a very difficult question, to which I shall return later on. Dr. Westermarck has recently come to the conclusion that the religion of primitive man has no true relation to morality, that it is not apt to give a sanction to good action, or to develop the germs of a conscience. But so far as I can discern, the idea of active duty, and therefore the germ of conscience, must have been so intimately connected with the religious practice of the old Latin family that it is to me impossible to think of the one apart from the other. Surely it is in that life that the famous word "pius" must have originated, which throughout Roman history meant the sense of duty towards family, State, and gods, as every reader of the Aeneid knows. That the formalised religion of later times had become almost entirely divorced from morality there is indeed no doubt; but in the earliest times, in the old Roman family and then in the budding State, the whole life of the Roman seems to me so inextricably bound up with his religion that I cannot possibly see how that religion can have been distinguishable from his simple idea of duty and discipline.
NOTES TO LECTURE III
81 Westermarck, Origin etc. of Moral Ideas, ii. 584.
82 Jevons, Introduction, p. 33.
83 A useful summary of the whole subject, embodying the results and terminology of Tylor, Frazer, and other anthropologists, is Dr. Haddon's Magic and Fetishism, in Messrs. Constable's series, Religions Ancient and Modern. See also Marett, On the Threshold of Religion, passim.
84 Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, p. 89 foll. For an example not mentioned in the text (devotio) see below, p. 206 foll. This may have been originally practised by the Latin kings. I may64 here draw attention to the almost dogmatic conclusions of the modern French sociological school of research; e.g. M. Huvelin, in L'Année sociologique for 1907, begins by asserting as a fundamental law, proved by MM. Hubert et Mauss, that magic is just as much a social fact as religion: "Les uns et les autres sont des produits de l'activité collective" (Magie et droit individuel, p. 1). But M. Huvelin's paper is to some extent a modification of this dogma. He seeks to explain the fact that magic is both secret and private, not public and social, in historical times; and in the domain of law, with which he is specially concerned, he concludes that "a magical rite is only a religious rite twisted from its proper social end, and employed to realise the will or belief of an individual" (p. 46). This is the only form in which we shall find magic at Rome, except in so far as a few of its forms survive in the ritual of religion with their meaning changed. In early Roman law, as a quasi-religious body of rules and practices, there are a few magical survivals which will be found mentioned by M. Huvelin in this article; but they are of no importance for our present subject.
85 Primitive Culture, vol. i. ch. iv. See also Jevons, Introduction, p. 36 foll.
86 See Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ (Eng. trans.), Division II. vol. iii. p. 151 foll.
87 Fowler, R.F. p. 232; Wissowa, R.K. p. 106. The most careful examination of the rite and the evidence for it is that of Aust in Mythological Lexicon, s.v. "Iuppiter," p. 656 foll. See also M.H. Morgan in vol. xxxii. of Transactions of the American Philological Association, p. 104.
88 Tertullian, de Jejun. 16. Petronius, Sat. 44, adds that the matrons went in the procession with bare feet and streaming hair (cp. Pliny xvii. 266); but this seems rather Greek than Roman in character, and Petronius is plainly thinking of the town (colonia he calls it) in southern Italy where the scene of Trimalchio's supper is laid; probably a Greek city by origin, Croton or Cumae. A translation of this passage will be found in Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 133. The most useful words in it for our purpose are "Jovem aquam exorabant."
89 This suggestion was originally made by O. Gilbert, Röm. Topographie, ii. 184.
90 p. 204 foll.
91 p. 657. The story is mixed up with Greek fables, e.g. that of Proteus, as Wissowa has pointed out, R.K. p. 106, note 10.
92 See Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol. i. (ed. 3) p. 270 foll.
93 This fragment of Piso is preserved by Gellius, xi. 14. 1.
94 See, e.g., Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol. ii. p. 106.
95 Wissowa, l.c. Aust in Roscher's Lexicon, s.v. "Iuppiter," p. 657.65
96 Cumont, Religions Orientales dans le paganisme romain, ch. 5. I shall return to this subject in my second course of lectures.
97 Müller-Deecke, Etrusker, ii. ch. vii., especially p. 176 foll.
98 Cp. below, Lecture XV.
99 Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 13: "Vestales nostras hodie credimus nondum egressa urbe mancipia fugitiva retinere in loco precationibus."
100 Plutarch, Numa, 10. Virginity would increase the power of the spell; see Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum, p. 54 foll.
101 See, e.g., Frazer, G.B. i. 360 foll.
102 See R.F. p. 320, notes 6 and 7.
103 Within the last thirty years or so the Lupercalia has been discussed (apart from writers on classical subjects exclusively) by Mannhardt in his Mythologische Studien, p. 72 foll.; Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 459; Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 481 foll.; and at the moment of writing by E. S. Hartland, Primitive Paternity, i. ch. ii. R.F. p. 310 foll. See Appendix D.
104 This view was originally stated in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Argei." I endeavoured to confute it in the Classical Review, 1902, p. 115 foll., and Wissowa replied in Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 211 foll. Since then my conviction has become stronger that this great scholar is for once wrong. Ennius alluded to the Argei as an institution of Numa, i.e. as primitive (frag. 121, Vahlen, from Festus p. 355, and Varro, L.L. vii. 44), yet Ennius was a youth at the very time when Wissowa insists that the rite originated. Wissowa makes no attempt to explain this. See below, p. 321 foll.
105 R.F. p. 111 foll.
106 e.g. the October horse, which also occurred on the Ides; see R.F. p. 241 foll.; and the festival of Anna Perenna, also on Ides (March 15), R.F. p. 50 foll. It is just possible that all the three festivals were originally in the old calendar, and dropped out because the mark of the Ides had to be affixed to the day in the first place. See Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 164 foll.; R.F. p. 241.
107 Thus Messrs. Hubert et Mauss (Mélanges d'histoire des religions, Preface, p. xxiv.) maintain that there is no real antinomy between "les faits du système magique et les faits du système religieux." There is in every rite, they insist, a magical as well as a religious element. Yet on the same page we find that they exclude magic from all organised cult, because it is not obligatory, and cannot (if I understand them rightly) be laid down in a code, like religious practice. I think it would have been simpler to consider the magical element in religious rites as surviving, with its original meaning lost, from an earlier stage of thought. M. van Gennep, in his interesting work Les Rites de passage, p. 17, goes so far as to call all religious ceremonies magical, as distinguished from the theories (e.g. animism) which constitute religion. This seems to me apt to bring confusion into the discussion; for all rites are the outward expression of thought, and it is by the thought (or, as he calls it, theories) that we must trace66 the sociological development of mankind, the rites being used as indexes only. I cannot but think that (as indeed in these days is quite natural) this French school lays too much stress upon the outward acts, and that this tendency has led them to find real living magic where it is present only in a fossil state.
108 e.g. Tylor, article "Magic" in Encycl. Brit., and Primitive Culture, 1. ch. iv.; Marett, Threshold of Religion, 83. See below, p. 180.
109 Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 17 and 18. For the singing or murmuring of spells in many countries, see Jevons, Anthropology and the Classics, p. 93 foll.
110 Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani, note on this passage.
111 Civ. Dei, viii. 19.
112 See, e.g., Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin, p. 446, for an account of simple land measurement which will suffice to illustrate the point made here.
113 The carmina famosa sung at a triumph by the soldiers had the same origin, but were used to avert evil from the triumphator. The best exposition of this is in H. A. J. Munro's Elucidations of Catullus, p. 76 foll.
114 Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 19. For the technical sense of defigere, defixio, see Jevons in Anthropology and the Classics, p. 108 foll.
115 The most familiar examples are Virgil's eighth Eclogue, 95 foll.; Ovid, Met. vii. 167, and elsewhere; Fasti, iv. 551; Horace, Epode v. 72; cp. article "Magia" in Daremberg-Saglio; Falz, De poet. Rom. doctrina magica, Giessen, 1903. There is a collection of Roman magical spells in Appel's De Romanorum precationibus, p. 43 foll. Many modern Italian examples and survivals will be found in Leland's Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, pt. ii.
116 Cato, R.R. 160; Varro, R.R. i. 3.
117 Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 21.
118 Ib. xxviii. 20. The following sections of this book are the locus classicus for these popular superstitions.
119 See, e.g., Italian Home Life, by Lina Duff Gordon, p. 230 foll.
120 Juvenal v. 164. The idea probably arose, as a passage of Plutarch suggests (Rom. 25), from the fact that the triumphator, whose garb was no doubt of Etruscan origin, wore the bulla.
121 Frazer, G.B. i. 345, note 2, where we learn that gold was taboo in some Greek worships, e.g. at the mysteries of Andania, which sufficiently proves that it possessed potency. Pliny, xxxiii. 84, mentions cases of such potency as medicine, and among them its application to children who have been poisoned.
122 Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 39.
123 See an article by the author on the original meaning of the toga praetexta in Classical Review, vol. x. (1896) p. 317.
124 For the Compitalia, Macrob. i. 7. 34; Festus p. 238. For the Paganalia, Probus, ad Georg. ii. 385, assuming the feriae Sementinae67 there mentioned to be the Paganalia (see R.F. p. 294). For the feriae Latinae, Festus, s.v. "oscillantes."
125 Wissowa, R.K. p. 193, with whose view I entirely agree. We learn of the imaginary goddess from Varro, L.L. ix. 61. Pais, I may remark in passing, is certain that Acca Larentia was the mater Larum; see his Lectures on Ancient Legends of Roman History, p. 60 foll.
126 46. Wissowa, R.K. p. 354, note 5.
127 Georg. ii. 380 foll. It is not certain that Virgil is describing the festival generally known as Paganalia, which took place early in January; but it seems probable from line 382 that he is thinking of some festival of the pagus. The oscilla may have been used at more than one.
128 Note that Virgil writes of masks used in rude play-acting, as well as of oscilla hung on trees, and conjoins the two as though they had something in common. The evidence of an engraved onyx cup in the Louvre, of which a cut is given in the article "Oscilla" in the Dict. of Antiquities, seems to make it probable that masks worn by rustics on these occasions were afterwards hung by them on trees as oscilla. Some of these masks on the cup are adorned with horns, which may explain an interesting passage of Apuleius (Florida, i. 1): "neque enim iustius religiosam moram viatori obiecerit aut ara floribus redimita ... aut quercus cornibus onerata, aut fagus pellibus coronata," etc. See also Gromatici veteres, ii. 241.
129 See, however, Dr. Frazer's remarks in G.B. ii. p. 454. He thinks that the air might in this way be purged of vagrant spirits or baleful ghosts, as the Malay medicine man swings in front of the patient's house in order to chase away the disease. Cp. G.B. ii. 343, where a rather different explanation is attempted of the maniae and pilae.
130 Magic in the old forms, or many of them, has survived not only into the old Roman religion, but to the present day, in many parts of Italy. "The peasants have recourse to the priests and the saints on great occasions, but they use magic all the time for everything," was said by a woman of the Romagna Toscana to the late C.G. Leland (Etruscan Roman Remains, Introduction, p. 9). This enterprising American's remarkable book, though dealing only with a small region of northern Italy, deserves more consideration than it has received. The author may have been uncritical, but beyond doubt he had the gift of extracting secrets from the peasantry. He claims to have proved that "la vecchia religione" contains much that has come down direct from pre-Christian times; and the appearance of Mr. Lawson's remarkable book on Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion may tempt some really qualified investigator to undertake a similar work in Italy before it is too late.
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68
LECTURE IV
THE RELIGION OF THE FAMILY
Some of the survivals mentioned in the last two lectures seem to carry us back to a condition of culture anterior to the family and to the final settlement on the land. Some attempt has recently been made to discover traces of descent by the mother in early Latium;131 if this could be proved, it would mean that the Latins were already in Latium before they had fully developed the patriarchal system on which the family is based. However this may be, the first real fact that meets us in the religious experience of the Romans is the attitude towards the supernatural, or "the Power that manifests itself in the Universe," of the family as settled down upon the land. The study of religion in the family, as we know it in historical times, is also that of the earliest organisation of religion, and of the most permanent type of ancient Italian religious thought. Aust, whose book on the Roman religion is the most masterly sketch of the subject as yet published, writes thus of this religion of the family:132 "Here the limits of religion and superstition vanish ... and in vain we seek here for the boundary marks of various epochs." By the first of these propositions he means that the State has not here been at work, framing a ius divinum, including religion and excluding magic; in the family, magic of all kinds would be admissible alongside of the daily worship of the family deities, and thus the family would represent a kind of half-way house between the age of magic and all such superstitions, and the age of the rigid69 regulation of worship by the law of a City-state. By the second proposition he means that the religious experience of the family is far simpler, and therefore far less liable to change than that of the State. Greek forms and ideas of religion, for example, hardly penetrated into its worship:133 new deities do not find their way in—the family experience did not call for them as did that of the State. It may be said without going beyond the truth that the religion of the family remained the same in all essentials throughout Roman history, and the great priesthoods of the State never interfered with it in any such degree as to affect its vitality.134
But in order to understand the religion of the family, we must have some idea of what the family originally was. When a stock or tribe (populus) after migration took possession of a district, it was beyond doubt divided into clans, gentes, which were the oldest kinship divisions in Italian society. All members of a clan had the same name, and were believed to descend from a common ancestor.135 According to the later juristic way of putting it, all would be in the patria potestas of that ancestor supposing that no deaths had ever occurred in the gens; and, indeed, the idea that the gens is immortal in spite of the deaths of individuals is one which constitutes it as a permanent entity, and gives it a quasi-religious sanction. For primitive religion, as has been well said, disbelieves in death; most of the lower races believe both in a qualified immortality and in the non-reality or unnaturalness of death.136 In regard to the kinship of a clan, death at any rate has no effect: the bond of union never breaks.
Now a little reflection will show that a clan or gens of this kind might be maintained intact in a nomadic state, or during any number of migrations; it is, in fact, manifestly appropriate to such a mobile condition of society, and expresses its natural need of union; and when the final settlement occurs, this body of kin will hold together in the process, whether or no it has smaller divisions70 within it. We may be certain that this was the one essential kin-division of the Latin stock when it settled in Latium, and all through Roman history it continues so, a permanent entity though families may die.137 Every Roman lawyer will recognise this fact as true, and I need not dwell on it now.
It is when the gens has settled upon the land that the family begins to appear as a fact of importance for our purpose. Such operations as the building of a permanent house, the clearing and cultivation of a piece of land, can best be carried out by a smaller union than the gens, and this smaller union is ready to hand in the shape of a section of the gens comprising the living descendants of a living ancestor, whether of two, three, or even four generations.138 This union, clearly visible to mortal eye, and realisable in every-day work, settles together in one house, tends its own cattle and sheep, cultivates its own land with the help of such dependants as it owns, slave or other, and is known by the word familia. This famous word, so far as we know, does not contain the idea of kinship, at any rate as its leading connotation; it is inseparable from the idea of land-settlement,139 and is therefore essentially das Hauswesen, the house itself, with the persons living in it, free or servile, and with their land and other property, all governed and administered by the paterfamilias, the master of the household, who is always the oldest living male ancestor. The familia is thus an economic unit, developed out of the gens, which is a unit of kin and little more. And thus the religion of the familia will be a religion of practical utility, of daily work, of struggle with perils to which the shepherd and the tiller of the soil are liable; it is not the worship of an idea of kinship expressed in some dimly conceived common ancestor; the familia, as I hope to show, had no common ancestor who could be the object of worship, except that of the gens from which it had sprung. The life of the familia was a realisation of the present and its needs and perils, without the stimulus to take much thought about the past, or indeed71 about the future; for it, sufficient for the day was the evil thereof; for what had been and what was to come it could look to the gens to which it owed its existence. But in practical life the gens was not of much avail; and instead of it, exactly as we might expect, we find an artificial union of familiae, a union of which the essential thing is not the idea of kin, but that of the land occupied, and known all over Italy by the word pagus.140 Before I go on to describe the religion of the family, it is necessary to put the familia into its proper relation with this territorial union.
The pagus is the earliest Italian administrative unit of which we know anything; a territory, of which the essential feature was the boundary, not any central point within the boundary. In all probability it was originally the land on which a gens had settled, though settlement produces changes, and the land of gens and pagus was not identical in later times. But within this boundary line, of which we shall hear something more presently, how were the component parts, the familiae of the gens, settled down on the land? Of the village community so familiar to us in Teutonic countries, there is no certain trace in Latium. Vicus, the only word which might suggest it, is identical with the Greek οἶκοϛ, a house; later it is used for houses standing together, or for a street in a town. But the vicus in the country has left no trace of itself as a distinct administrative union like our village community; the vico-magistri of the Roman city were urban officers; and what is more important, we know of no religious festivals of the vicus, like those of the pagus, of which there are well-attested records. The probability then is that the unit within the pagus was not the village but the homestead, and that these stood at a distance from each other, as they do in Celtic countries, not united together in a village, and each housing a family group working its own land and owning its own cattle.141 The question of the amount and the tenure of the land of this group is a very difficult one, into which72 it is not necessary to enter closely here. There can, however, be no doubt that it possessed in its own right a small piece of garden ground (heredium), and also an allotment of land in the arable laid out by the settlers in common—centuriatus ager; whether the ownership of this was vested in the individual paterfamilias or in the gens as a whole, does not greatly matter for our purposes.142 Lastly, as it is certain that the familia owned cattle and sheep, we may be sure that it enjoyed the right of common pasture on the land not divided up for tillage.
We see all this through a mist, and a mist that is not likely ever to lift; but yet the outlines of the picture are clear enough to give us the necessary basis for a study of the religion of the familia. The religious points, if I may use the expression—those points, that is, which are the object of special anxiety (religio)—lie in the boundaries, both of the pagus as a whole, and of the arable land of the familia, in the house itself and its free inhabitants, and in the family burying-place; and to these three may no doubt be added the spring which supplied the household with water. Boundaries, house, burying-place, spring,—all these are in a special sense sacred, and need constant and regular religious care.
Let us begin with the house, the central point of the economic and religious unit. The earliest Italian house was little more than a wigwam, more or less round, constructed of upright posts connected with wattles, and with a closed roof of straw or branches.143 This would seem to have been the type of house of the immigrating people who settled on the tops of hills and lived a pastoral life; when they descended into the plains and became a settled agricultural people, they adopted a more roomy and convenient style of building, suitable for storing their grain or other products, and for the maintenance of a fire for cooking these. Whether the rectangular house, with which alone we are here concerned, was developed under Greek or Etruscan influence, or suggested independ73ently by motives of practical convenience, is matter of dispute, and must be left to archaeologists to decide.144
This is the house in which the Latin family lived throughout historical times, the house which we know as the sacred local habitation of divine and human beings. It consisted in its simplest form, as we all know, of a single room or hall, the atrium, with a roof open in the middle and sloping inwards to let the rain fall into a basin (compluvium). Here the life of the family went on, and here was the hearth (focus), the "natural altar of the dwelling-room of man,"145 and the seat of Vesta, the spirit of the fire, whose aid in the cooking of the food was indispensable in the daily life of the settlers. This sacred hearth was the centre of the family worship of later times, until under Greek influence the arrangement of the house was modified;146 and we may be certain that it was so in the simple farm life of early Latium. In front of it was the table at which the family took their meals, and on this was placed the salt-cellar (salinum), and the sacred salt-cake, baked even in historical times in primitive fashion by the daughters of the family, as in all periods for the State by the Vestal virgins. After the first and chief course of the mid-day meal, silence was enjoined, and an offering of a part of the cake was thrown on to the fire from a small sacrificial plate or dish (patella).147 This alone is enough to prove that Vesta, the spirit of the fire, was the central point of the whole worship, the spiritual embodiment of the physical welfare of the family.
Behind the hearth, i.e. farther at the back of the atrium, was the penus, or storing-place of the household. Penus was explained by the learned Scaevola148 as meaning anything that can be eaten or drunk, but not so much that which is each day set out on the table, as that which is kept in store for daily consumption; it is therefore in origin the food itself, though in later times it became also the receptacle in which that food was stored. This store was inhabited or guarded by spirits, the di penates, who74 together with Vesta represent the material vitality of the family; these spirits, always conceived and expressed in the plural, form a group in a way which is characteristic of the Latins, and their plurality is perhaps due to the variety and frequent change of the material of the store. The religious character of the store is also well shown by the fact, if such it be, that no impure person was allowed to meddle with it; the duty was especially that of the children of the family,149 whose purity and religious capability was symbolised throughout Roman history by the purple-striped toga which they wore, and secured also by the amulet, within its capsule the bulla, of which I spoke in the last lecture.
Vesta and the Penates represent the spiritual side of the material needs of the household; but there was another divine inhabitant of the house, the Genius of the paterfamilias, who was more immediately concerned with the continuity of the family. Analogy with the worldwide belief in the spiritual double of a man, his "other-soul," compels us to think of this Genius, who accompanied the Latin from the cradle to the grave, as originally a conception of this kind. The Latins had indeed, in common with other races, what we may call the breath-idea of the soul, as we see from the words animus and anima, and also the shadow-idea, as is proved by the word umbra for a departed spirit. But the Genius was one of those guardian spirits, treated by Professor Tylor as a different species of the same genus, which accompany a man all his life and help him through its many changes and chances;150 and the peculiarity of this Latin guardian is that he was specially helpful in continuing the life of the family. The soul of a man is often conceived as the cause of life, but not often as the procreative power itself; and that this latter was the Latin idea is certain, both from the etymology of the word and from the fact that the marriage-bed was called lectus genialis. I am inclined to think that this peculiarity of the Latin conception of Genius was the result of the75 unusually strong idea that the Latins must have had, even when they first passed into Italy, of kinship as determined not by the mother but by the father.151 It is possible, I think, that the Genius was a soul of later origin than those I have just mentioned, and developed in the period when the gens arose as the main group of kinsmen real or imaginary. I would suggest that we may see in it the connecting link between that group and the individual adult males within it; in that case the Genius would be that soul of a man which enables him to fulfil the work of continuing the life of the gens. We can easily imagine how it might eventually come to be his guardian spirit, and to acquire all the other senses with which we are familiar in Roman literature. With the development of the idea of individuality, the individuality of a man as apart from the kin group, the idea of the individuality of the Genius also became emphasised, until it became possible to think of it as even living on after the death of its companion;152 in this way, in course of time, the Genius came to exercise a curious influence on the idea of the Manes. The history of the idea of Genius, and its application to places, cities, etc., is indeed a curious one, and of no small interest in the study of religion; but we must return to the primitive house and its divine inhabitants. There is one more of these who calls for a word before I pass to the land and the boundaries; we meet him on the threshold as we leave the dwelling.
It is, of course, well known to anthropologists that the door of a house is a dangerous point, because evil spirits or the ghosts of the dead may gain access to the house through it. Among the innumerable customs which attest this belief there are one or two Roman ones, e.g. the practice of making a man, who has returned home after his supposed death in a foreign country, enter the house by the roof instead of the door; for the door must be kept barred against ghosts, and this man may be after all a ghost, or at least he may have evil spirits or miasma76 about him.153 It was at the doorway that a curious ceremony took place (to which I shall ask your attention again) immediately after the birth of a child, in order to prevent Silvanus, who may stand for the dangerous spirits of the forest, from entering in and vexing the baby.154 Again, a dead man, as among so many other peoples, was carried out of the doorway with his feet foremost, so that he should not find his way back; and the old Roman practice of burial by night probably had the same object.155 Exactly the same anxiety (religio) is seen in regard to the gates of a city; the wall was in some sense holy (sanctus), but the gates, through which was destined to pass much that might be dangerous, could not be thus sanctified. Was there, then, no protecting spirit of these doors and gates?
St. Augustine, writing with Varro before him, finds no less than three spirits of the entrance to a house: Forculus, of the door itself; Limentinus, of the threshold; and Cardea, of the hinges of the door; and these Varro seems to have found in the books of the pontifices.156 I must postpone the question as to what these pontifical books really represented; but the passage will at least serve to show us the popular anxiety about the point of entrance to a house, and its association with the spirit world. Of late sober research has reached the conclusion that the original door-spirit was Janus, whom we know in Roman history as residing in the symbolic gate of the Forum, and as the god of beginnings, the first deity to be invoked in prayer, as Vesta was the last.157 But Janus is also wanted for far higher purposes by some eminent Cambridge scholars; they have their own reasons for wanting him as a god of the sky, as a double of Jupiter, as the mate of Diana, and a deity of the oak.158 So, too, he was wanted by the philosophical speculators of the last century b.c., who tried to interpret their own humble deities in terms of Greek philosophy and Greek polytheism. The poets too, who, as Augustine says, found Forculus and his companions beneath their notice, played strange77 tricks with this hoary old god, as any one may read in the first book of Ovid's Fasti. I myself believe that the main features of the theology (if we may use the word) of the earliest Rome were derived from the house and the land as an economic and religious unit, and I am strongly inclined to see in Janus bifrons of the Forum a developed form of the spirit of the house-door; but the question is a difficult one, and I shall return to it in a lecture on the deities of early Rome.
So far I have said nothing of the Lar familiaris who has become a household word as a household deity; and yet we are on the point of leaving the house of the old Latin settler to look for the spirits whom he worships on his land. The reason is simply that after repeated examination of the evidence available, I find myself forced to believe that at the period of which I am speaking the Lar was not one of the divine inhabitants of the house. When Fustel de Coulanges wrote his brilliant book La Cité antique, which popularised the importance of the worship of ancestors as a factor in Aryan civilisation, he found in the Lar, who in historical times was a familiar figure in the house, the reputed founder of the family; and until lately this view has been undisputed. But if my account of the relation of the family to the gens is correct, the family would stand in no need of a reputed founder; that symbol of the bond of kinship was to be found in the gens of which the family was an offshoot, a cutting, as it were, planted on the land. Still more convincing is the fact that when we first meet with the Lar as an object of worship he is not in the house but on the land. The oldest Lar of whom we know anything was one of a characteristic Roman group of which the individuals lived in the compita, i.e. the spots where the land belonging to various households met, and where there were chapels with as many faces as there were properties, each face containing an altar to a Lar,—the presiding spirit of that allotment, or rather perhaps of the whole of the land of the familia, including that on which the78 house stood.159 Thus the Lar fills a place in the private worship which would otherwise be vacant, that of the holding and its productive power. In this sense, too, we find the Lares in the hymn of the Arval Brethren, one of the oldest fragments of Latin we possess; for the spirits of the land would naturally be invoked in the lustration of the ager Romanus by this ancient religious gild.160
But how, it may be asked, did the Lar find his way into the house, to become the characteristic deity of the later Roman private worship there? I believe that he gained admittance through the slaves of the familia, who had no part in the worship of the dwelling, but were admitted to the Compitalia, or yearly festival of which the Lares of the compita were the central object. Cato tells us that the vilicus, the head of the familia of slaves, might not "facere rem divinam nisi Compitalibus in compito aut in foco";161 which I take to mean that he might sacrifice for his fellow-slaves to the Lar at the compitum, or to the Lar in the house, if the Lar were already transferred from the compitum to the house. In the constant absence of the owner, the paterfamilias of Rome's stirring days, the worship of the Lar at the compitum or in the house came to be more and more distinctly the right of the vilicus and his wife as representing the slaves, and thus too the Lar came to be called by the epithet familiaris, which plainly indicates that in his cult the slaves were included. And as it was the old custom that the slaves should sit at the meals of the family on benches below the free members (subsellia),162 what more natural than that they should claim to see there the Lar whom alone of the deities of the farm they were permitted to worship, and that they should bring the Lar or his double from the compitum to the house, in the frequent absence of the master?163
The festival of the Lar was celebrated at the compitum, and known as Compitalia or Laralia; it took place soon after the winter solstice, on a day fixed by the paterfamilias, in concert, no doubt, with the other heads79 of families in the pagus. Like most rejoicings at this time of year, it was free and jovial in character, and the whole familia took part in it, both bond and free. Each familia sacrificed on its own altar, which was placed fifteen feet in front of the compitum, so that the worshippers might be on their own land; but if, as we may suppose, the whole pagus celebrated this rite on the same day, there was in this festival, as in others to be mentioned directly, a social value, a means of widening the outlook of the familia and associating it with the needs of others in its religious duties. This is the religio Larium of which Cicero speaks in the second book of his de Legibus, which was "posita in fundi villaeque conspectu," and handed down for the benefit both of masters and men from remote antiquity.164
There were other festivals in which all the familiae of a pagus took part. Of these we know little, and what we do know is almost entirely due to the love of the Augustan poets for the country and its life and customs; "Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes," wrote Virgil, contrasting himself with the philosopher poet whom he revered. Varro, in his list of Roman festivals,165 just mentions a festival called Sementivae, associated with the sowing of the seed, and celebrated by all pagi, if we interpret him rightly; but Ovid has given us a charming picture of what must be this same rite, and places it clearly in winter, after the autumn sowing166:—
state coronati plenum ad praesaepe iuvenci:
cum tepido vestrum vere redibit opus.
rusticus emeritum palo suspendit aratrum:
omne reformidat frigida volnus humus.
vilice, da requiem terrae, semente peracta:
da requiem terram qui coluere viris.
pagus agat festum: pagum lustrate, coloni,
et date paganis annua liba focis.
placentur frugum matres Tellusque Ceresque,
farre suo gravidae visceribusque suis.
Ovid may here be writing of his own home at Sulmo, and what took place there in the Augustan age; but we80 may read his description into the life of old Latium, for rustic life is tenacious of old custom, especially where the economic conditions remain always the same. We may do the same with another beautiful picture left us by Tibullus, also a poet of the country, which I have recently examined at length in the Classical Review.167 The festival he describes has often been identified with Ovid's, but I am rather disposed to see in it a lustratio of the ager paganus in the spring, of the same kind as the famous one in Virgil's first Georgic, to be mentioned directly; for Tibullus, after describing the scene, which he introduces with the words "fruges lustramus et agros," puts into perfect verse a prayer for the welfare of the crops and flocks, and looks forward to a time when (if the prayer succeeds) the land shall be full of corn, and the peasant shall heap wood upon a bonfire—perhaps one of the midsummer fires that still survive in the Abruzzi. Virgil's lines are no less picturesque;168 and though he does not mention the pagus, he is clearly thinking of a lustratio in which more than one familia takes part—
cuncta tibi Cererem pubes agrestis adoret.
This is a spring festival "extremae sub casum hiemis, iam vere sereno"; and I shall return to it when we come to deal with the processional lustratio of the farm. Like the descriptions of Ovid and Tibullus, it is more valuable to us for the idea it gives us of the spirit of old Italian agricultural religion than for exact knowledge about dates and details. There was, of course, endless variety in Italy in both these; and it is waste of time to try and make the descriptions of the rural poets fit in with the fixed festivals of the Roman city calendar.
Nor is it quite safe to argue back from that calendar to the life of the familia and the pagus, except in general terms. As we shall see, the calendar is based on the life and work of an agricultural folk, and we may by all means guess that its many agricultural rites existed before81hand in the earlier social life; but into detail we may not venture. As Varro, however, has mentioned the Saturnalia in the same sentence with the Compitalia, we may guess that that famous jovial festival was a part of the rustic winter rejoicing. And here, too, I may mention another festa of that month, of which a glimpse is given us by Horace, another country-loving poet, who specially mentions the pagus as taking part in it. Faunus and Silvanus were deities or spirits of the woodland among which these pagi lay, and in which the farmers ran their cattle in the summer;169 by Horace's time Faunus had been more or less tarred with a Greek brush, but in the beautiful little ode I am alluding to he is still a deity of the Italian farmer,170 who on the Nones of December besought him to be gracious to the cattle now feeding peacefully on the winter pasture:—
ludit herboso pecus omne campo
cum tibi Nonae redeunt Decembres:
festus in pratis vacat otioso
cum bove pagus.
There is one more rite of familia or pagus, or both, of which I must say a word before I return for a while to the house and its inhabitants. One of the most important matters for the pagus, as for the landholding household, was the fixing of the boundaries of their land, whether as against other pagi or households, or as separating that land from unreclaimed forest. This was of course, like all these other operations of the farm, a matter of religious care and anxiety—a matter in which the feeling of anxiety and awe (religio) brought with it, to use an expression of Cicero's, both cura and caerimonia.171 The religio terminorum is known to us in some detail, as it existed in historical times, from the Roman writers on agrimetatio; and with their help the whole subject has been made intelligible by Rudorff in the second volume of the Gromatici.172 We know that many different objects might serve as boundary marks, according to the nature of the land, especially trees and stones; and in the case of82 the latter, which would be the usual termini in agricultural land at some distance from forest, we have the religious character of the stone and its fixing most instructively brought out. "Fruits of the earth, and the bones, ashes, and blood of a victim were put into a hole in the ground by the landholders whose lands converged at the point, and the stone was rammed down on the top and carefully fixed."173 This had the practical effect—for all Latin religion has a practical side—of enabling the stone to be identified in the future. But Ovid174 gives us a picture of the yearly commemorative rite of the same nature, from which we see still better the force of the religio terminorum. The boundary-stone is garlanded, and an altar is built; the fire is carried from the hearth of the homestead by a materfamilias, the priestess of the family; a young son of the family holds a basket full of fruits of the earth, and a little daughter shakes these into the fire and offers honey-cakes. Others stand by with wine, or look on in silence, clothed in white. The victims are lamb and sucking-pig, and the stone is sprinkled with their blood, an act which all the world over shows that an object is holy and tenanted by a spirit.175 And the ceremony ends with a feast and hymns in honour of holy Terminus, who in Ovid's time in the rural districts, and long before on the Capitolium of Rome, had risen from the spirit sanctifying the stone to become a deity, closely connected with Jupiter himself, and to give his name to a yearly city festival on February 23.
These festivals on the land were, some of them at least, scenes of revelry, accompanied with dancing and singing, as the poets describe them, the faces of the peasants painted red with minium,176 according to an old Italian custom which survived in the case of the triumphator of the glorious days of the City-state. But if we may now return for a moment to the homestead, there were events of great importance to the family which were celebrated there in more serious and sober fashion, with rites that were in part truly religious, yet not without some features83 that show the prevailing anxiety, rooted in the age of taboo, which we learnt to recognise under the word religio. Marriage was a religious ceremony, for we can hardly doubt that the patrician confarreatio, in which a cake made of the anciently used grain called far was offered to Jupiter, and perhaps partaken of sacramentally by bride and bridegroom, was the oldest form of marriage, and had its origin in an age before the State came into being. We must remember that the house was a sacred place, with religious duties carried on within it, and the abode of household spirits; and when a bride from another family or gens was to be brought into it, it was essential that such introduction should be carried out in a manner that would not disturb the happy relations of the human and divine inhabitants of the house. It was essential, too, that the children expected of her should be such as should be able to discharge their duties in the household without hurting the feelings of these spirits. Some of the quaint customs of the deductio of later times strongly suggest an original anxiety about matters of such vital interest; the torch, carried by a boy whose parents were both living, was of whitethorn (Spina alba), which was a powerful protective against hostile magic, and about which there were curious superstitions.177 Arrived at the house, the bride smeared the doorposts with wolf's fat and oil, and wound fillets of wool around them—so dangerous was the moment of entrance, so sacred the doorway; and finally, she was carried over the threshold, and then, and then only, was received by her husband into communion of fire and water, symbolic of her acceptance as materfamilias both by man and deity.178
When the new materfamilias presented her husband with a child, there was another perilous moment; the infant, if accepted by the father (sublatus, i.e. raised from the earth on which it had been placed),179 did not immediately become a member of the family in the religious sense, and was liable to be vexed by evil or mischievous spirits from the wild woodland, or, as they phrased it in84 later days, by Silvanus. I have already alluded to the curious bit of mummery which was meant to keep them off. Three men at night came to the threshold and struck it with an axe, a pestle, and a besom, so that "by these signs of agriculture Silvanus might be prevented from entering." The hostile spirits were thus denied entrance to a dwelling in which friendly spirits of household life and of settled agricultural pursuits had taken up their abode. Nothing can better show the anxiety of life in those primitive times, especially in a country like Italy, full of forest and mountain, where dwelt mischievous Brownies who would tease the settler if they could. But on the ninth day after the birth (or the eighth in the case of a girl) the child was "purified" and adopted into the family and its sacra, and into the gens to which the family belonged, and received its name—the latter a matter of more importance than we can easily realise.180 From this time till it arrived at the age of puberty it was protected by amulet and praetexta; the tender age of childhood being then passed, and youth and maiden endued with new powers, the peculiar defensive armour of childhood might be dispensed with.181
Lastly, the death of a member of the family was an occasion of extreme anxiety, which might, however, be allayed by the exact performance of certain rites (iusta facere). The funeral ceremonies of the City-state were of a complicated character, and the details are not all of them easy to interpret. But the principle must have been always the same—that the dead would "walk" unless they had been deposited with due ceremony in the bosom of Mother Earth, and that their natural tendency in "walking" was to find their way back to the house which had been their home in life. Whether buried or burnt, the idea was the same: if burnt, as seems to have been common Roman practice from very early times, at least one bone had to be buried as representing the whole body. We have seen that certain precautions were taken to prevent the dead man from finding his way back,85 such as carrying him out of the house feet foremost; and if he were properly buried and the house duly purified afterwards, the process of prevention was fairly complete. His ghost, shade, or double then passed beneath the earth to join the whole body of Manes in the underworld,182 and could only return at certain fixed times—such at least was the idea expressed in the customs of later ages. But if a paterfamilias or his representative had omitted iusta facere, or if the dead man had never been buried at all, carried off by an enemy or some wild beast, he could never have descended to that underworld, and was roaming the earth disconsolately, and with an evil will. The primitive idea of anxiety is well expressed in the Roman festival of the Lemuria in May, when the head of a household could get rid of the ghosts by spitting out black beans183 from his mouth and saying, "With these I redeem me and mine." Nine times he says this without looking round: then come the ghosts behind him and gather up the beans unseen. After other quaint performances he nine times repeats the formula, "Manes exite paterni," then at last looks round, and the ghosts are gone.184 This is plainly a survival from the private life of the primitive household, and well illustrates its fears and anxieties; but the State provided, as we shall see, another and more religious ceremony, put limitations on the mischievous freedom of the ghosts, and ordained the means of expiation for those who had made a slip in the funeral ceremonies, or whose dead had been buried at sea or had died in a far country.
I have thus tried to sketch the life of the early Latin family in its relations with the various manifestations of the Power in the universe. We have seen enough, I think, to conclude that it had a strong desire to be in right relations with that Power, and to understand its will; but we may doubt whether that desire had as yet become very effective. The circumstances of the life of the Latin farmer were hardly such as to rid him of much of the religio that he had inherited from his wilder86 ancestors, or had found springing up afresh within him as he contended with the soil, the elements, and the hostile beings surrounding him, animal, human, and spiritual. He is living in an age of transition; he is half-way between the age of magic and a new age of religion and duty.
NOTES TO LECTURE IV
131 Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, lect. viii. Dr. Frazer finds traces of Mutterrecht only in the succession to the kingship of Alba and Rome, of which the evidence is of course purely legendary. If the legends represent fact in any sense, they point, if I understand him rightly, to a kingship held by a non-Latin race, or, as he calls it, plebeian. Binder, Die Plebs, p. 403 foll., believes that the original Latin population, i.e. the plebs of later times, lived under Mutterrecht.
132 Aust, Religion der Römer, p. 212.
133 In historical times the household deities were often represented by images of Greek type: e.g. the Penates by those of the Dioscuri. Wissowa, Rel. und Kult. p. 147, and Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 95 foll., and 289. See also De Marchi, La Religione nella vita privata, i. p. 41 foll. and p. 90 foll.
134 De Marchi, op. cit. i. 13 foll. In the ordinary and regular religion of the family the State, i.e. the pontifices, did not interfere; but they might do so in matters such as the succession of sacra, the care of graves, or the fulfilment of vows undertaken by private persons. See Cicero, de Legibus, ii. 19. 47.
135 Mucius Scaevola, the great lawyer, defined gentiles as those "qui eodem nomine sunt, qui ab ingenuis oriundi sunt, quorum maiorum nemo servitutem servivit, qui capite non sunt deminuti," Cic. Topica, vi. 29. This is the practical view of a lawyer of the last century b.c., and does not take account of the sacra gentilicia, which had by that time decayed or passed into the care of sodalitates: Marquardt, p. 132 foll.; De Marchi, ii. p. 3 foll. The notion of descent from a common ancestor is of course ideal, but none the less a factor in the life of the gens; it crops up, e.g., in Virgil, Aen. v. 117, 121, and Servius ad loc.
136 Crawley, The Tree of Life, p. 47.
137 For the alleged extinction of the gens Potitia, and the legend connected with it, Livy i. 7, Festus 237.
138 See Marquardt, Privataltertümer, p. 56, and note 6.
139 There is, I believe, no doubt that the etymological affinities of the word familia point to the idea of settlement and not that of kin; e.g. Oscan Faama, a house, and Sanscrit dhâ, to settle.87
140 The exact meaning and origin of the word has been much discussed. It is tempting to connect it with pax, paciscor, and make it a territory within whose bounds there is pax; see Rudorff, Gromatici veteres, ii. 239, and Nissen, Italische Landeskunde, ii. 8 foll.
141 See Rudorff, Grom. vet. ii. 236 foll.; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. 116 foll.; Kornemann in Klio, vol. v. (1905) p. 80 foll.; Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 1 foll.
142 Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. 22 foll.; Kornemann, l.c.; Roby in Dict. of Antiquities, s.v. "Agrimetatio," p. 85. The view that there was freehold garden land attached to the homestead gains strength from a statement of Pliny (N.H. xix. 50) that the word used in the XII. Tables for villa, which was the word in classical times for the homestead, was hortus, a garden, and that this was heredium, private property. See Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. 23. It would indeed be strange if the house had no land immediately attached to it; we know that in the Anglo-Saxon village community the villani, bordarii and cotagii, had their garden croft attached to their dwellings, apart from such strips as they might hold from the lord of the manor in the open fields. See Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, p. 148. For the centuriatus ager, Roby l.c. We have no direct knowledge of the system in the earliest times, but it is almost certain that it was old-Italian in outline, and not introduced by the Etruscans, as stated, e.g., by Deecke-Müller, Etrusker, ii. 128.
143 For Latium this is proved by the sepulchral hut-urns found at Alba and also on the Esquiline. One of these in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford shows the construction well. See article "Domus" in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie; Helbig, Die Italiker in der Poebene, p. 50 foll. Later there was an opening in the roof.
144 Von Duhn in Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1896, p. 125 foll., and article "Domus" in Pauly-Wissowa.
145 This is Aust's admirable expression, Religion der Römer, p. 214.
146 See the author's Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 242.
147 Serv. Aen. i. 270; Marquardt, p. 126.
148 Ap. Gellium, iv. 1. 17. For the sacredness of food and meals, see below (Lect. VIII. p. 172).
149 See a paper by the author in Classical Rev. vol. x. (1896) p. 317, and references there given. Cp. the passage of Servius quoted above (Aen. i. 730), where a boy is described as announcing at the daily meal that the gods were propitious. For the purity necessary I may refer to Hor. Odes, iii. 23 ad fin., "Immunis aram si tetigit manus," etc.
150 Primitive Culture, i. 393.
151 The feminine counterpart of Genius was Juno, of which more88 will be said later on. Each woman had her Juno; but this "other-soul" has little importance as compared with Genius.
152 See J. B. Carter in Hastings' Dict. of Religion and Ethics, i. 462 foll. For Genius in general, Birt in Myth. Lex. s.v.; Wissowa, R.K. p. 154 foll.; Stewart, Myths of Plato, p. 450, for the connexion of souls with ancestry.
153 See the fifth of Plutarch's Quaestiones Romanae, and Dr. Jevons' interesting comments in his edition of Phil. Holland's translation, pp. xxii. and xxxv. foll. Cp. the throwing the fetters of a criminal out by the roof of the Flamen's house.
154 Civ. Dei, vi. 9. These are deities of the Indigitamenta; see below, p. 84.
155 De Marchi, La Religione, etc. i. 188 foll.; Marquardt, Privatleben der Römer, p. 336, "la porte est la limite entre le monde étranger et le monde domestique" (A. van Gennep, Rites de passage, p. 26, where other illustrations are given).
156 See below, Lect. XII. p. 281.
157 Wissowa, R.K. p. 96; Aust, Rel. der Römer, p. 117; Roscher in Myth. Lex. s.v. "Janus"; J. B. Carter, Religion of Numa, p. 13. Cp. Von Domaszewski in Archiv, 1907, p. 337.
158 Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship, p. 286 foll.; A. B. Cook in Classical Review, 1904, p. 367 foll.
159 Gromat. vet. i. 302, line 20 foll., describes the chapels, but without mentioning the Lares. Varro (L.L. vi. 25) supplies the name: "Compitalia dies attributus Laribus Compitalibus; ideo ubi viae competunt tum in competis sacrificatur." Cp. Wissowa, R.K. p. 148. But the nature of the land thus marked off is not clear to me, nor explained (for primitive times) by Wissowa in Real-Encycl., s.vv. "Compitum" and "Compitalia."
160 "Enos Lases juvate." See Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 26 foll.
161 Cato, R.R. 5. Cp. Dion. Hal. iv. 13. 2. In Cato 143 the vilica is to put a wreath on the focus on Kalends, Nones and Ides, and to pray to the Lar familiaris pro copia (at the compita?).
162 Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 172.
163 The controversy about the Lar may be read in the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 1904, p. 42 foll. (Wissowa), and 1907, p. 368 foll. (Samter in reply). De Marchi (La Religione, etc. i. 28 foll.) takes the same view as Samter, who originally stated it in his Familienfesten, p. 105 foll., in criticism of Wissowa's view. See also a note by the author in the Archiv, 1906, p. 529.
164 Wissowa, R.K. p. 148; the details as to the altar occur in Gromatici vet. i. 302. It was on this occasion that maniae and pilae were hung on the house and compitum ("pro foribus," Macr. i. 7. 35); see above, p. 61. For the religio Larium, Cic. de Legg., ii. 19 and 27. That the Compitalia was an old Latin festival is undoubted; but as we are uncertain about the exact nature of the89 earliest form of landholding, we cannot be sure about the nature of the compita in remote antiquity. The passage from the Gromatici (Dolabella), quoted above, refers to the fines templares of possessiones, i.e. the boundaries marked by these chapels in estates of later times. See Rudorff in vol. ii. p. 263; Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Compitum."
165 Varro, L.L. vi. 26. I have discussed this passage in R.F. p. 294; it is still not clear to me whether Varro is identifying his Paganicae with the Sementivae, but on the whole I think he uses the latter word of a city rite (dies a pontificibus dictus), and the former of the country festivals of the same kind.
166 Fasti, i. 663.
167 Cl. Rev., 1908, p. 36 foll.
168 Georg. i. 338 foll.
169 See my discussion of Faunus in R.F. p. 258 foll. I am still unable to agree with Wissowa in his view of Faunus (R.K. p. 172 foll.). I may here mention a passage of the gromatic writer Dolabella (Gromatici, i. 302), in which he says that there were three Silvani to each possessio or large estate of later times: "S. domesticus, possessioni consecratus: alter agrestis, pastoribus consecratus: tertius orientalis, cui est in confinio lucus positus, a quo inter duo pluresque fines oriuntur." Faunus never became domesticated, but he belongs to the same type as Silvanus. Von Domaszewski, in his recently published Abhandlungen zur röm. Religion, p. 61, discredits the passage about the three Silvani, following a paper of Mommsen. But his whole interesting discussion of Silvanus shows well how many different forms that curious semi-deity could take.
170 Odes, iii. 18.
171 Cic. de Inventione, ii. 161.
172 pp. 236-284.
173 R.F. 325, condensed from Siculus Flaccus (Gromatici, i. 141).
174 Fasti, ii. 641 foll.
175 See, e.g., Jevons, Introduction, etc., p. 138; Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 321.
176 See, e.g., Tibullus ii. 1. 55; Virg. Ecl. vi. 22, x. 27, and Servius on both these passages. Pliny, N.H. xxxiii. 111; and cp. below, p. 177. For primitive ideas about the colour red see Jevons, Introd. pp. 67 and 138; Samter, Familienfeste, p. 47 foll. Cp. also the very interesting paper of von Duhn in Archiv, 1906, p. 1 foll., esp. p. 20: "Es soll eben wirklich pulsierendes kraftvolles Leben zum Ausdruck gebracht werden." His conclusions are based on the widespread custom of using red in funerals, coffins, and for colouring the dead man himself: the idea being to give him a chance of new life—which is what he wants—red standing for blood.
177 I am not sure that I am right in calling this whitethorn. For the qualities of the Spina alba see Ovid, Fasti, vi. 129 and 165, "Sic fatus spinam, quae tristes pellere posset A foribus nexas,90 haec erat alba, dedit." In line 165 he calls it Virga Janalis. See also Festus, p. 289, and Serv. ad Ecl. viii. 29; Bücheler, Umbrica, p. 136.
178 The details are fully set forth in Marquardt, Röm. Privataltertümer, p. 52 foll. The religious character of confarreatio and its antiquity are fully recognised by Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 427. Some interesting parallels to the smearing of the doorposts from modern Europe will be found collected in Samter, Familienfeste, p. 81 foll. The authority for the wolf's fat was Masurius Sabinus, quoted by Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 142 (cp. 157), who adds from the same author, "ideo novas nuptas illo perungere postes solitas, ne quid mali medicamenti inferretur." The real reason was, no doubt, that it was a charm against evil spirits, not against poison; but it is worth while to quote here another passage of Pliny (xx. 101), where he says that a squill hung in limine ianuae had the same power, according to Pythagoras. Some may see a reminiscence of totemism in the wolf's fat: in any case the mention of the animal as obtainable is interesting.
179 Dieterich, Mutter Erde, p. 6 foll. The idea is that the child comes from mother earth, and will eventually return to her.
180 For Roman names Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 7 foll., and Mommsen, Forschungen, i. I foll., are still the most complete authorities. For the importance of the name among wild and semi-civilised peoples, Frazer, G.B. i. 403 foll.; Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. 430 foll. All these ceremonies of birth, naming, and initiation (puberty) have recently been included by M. van Gennep in what he calls Rites de passage (see his book with that title, which appeared after these lectures were prepared, especially chapters v. and vi.). In all these ceremonies he traces more or less successfully a sequence of rites of separation (i.e. from a previous condition), of margin, where the ground is, so to speak, neutral, and of "aggregation," when the subject is introduced to a new state or condition of existence. If I understand him rightly, he looks on this as the proper and primitive explanation of all such rites, and denies that they need to be accounted for animistically, i.e. by assuming that riddance of evil spirits, or purification of any kind, is the leading idea in them. They are, in fact, quasi-dramatic celebrations of a process of going over from one status to another, and may be found in connection with all the experiences of man in a social state. But the Roman society, of which I am describing the religious aspect, had beyond doubt reached the animistic stage of thought, and was in process of developing it into the theological stage; hence these ceremonies are marked by sacrifices, as marriage, the dies lustricus (see De Marchi, p. 169, and Tertull. de Idol. 16) most probably, and puberty (R.F. p. 56). I do not fully understand how far van Gennep considers sacrifice as marking a later stage in the development of the ideas of a society on these matters (see his91 note in criticism of Oldenburg, p. 78); but I see no good reason to abandon the words purification and lustration, believing that even if he is right in his explanation of the original performances, these ideas had been in course of time engrafted on them.
181 In historical times the toga pura was assumed when the parents thought fit; earlier there may have been a fixed day (R.F. p. 56, "Liberalia"). In any case there was, of course, no necessary correspondence between "social and physical puberty"; van Gennep, p. 93 foll.
182 Wissowa, R.K. p. 191; J. B. Carter in Hastings' Dict. of Religion and Ethics, i. 462 foll.; Dieterich, Mutter Erde, p. 77. The whole question of the so-called cult of the dead at Rome calls for fresh investigation in the light of ethnological and archaeological research. The recent work of Mr. J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, seems to throw grave doubt on some of the most important conclusions of Rohde's Psyche, the work which most writers on the ideas of the Greeks and Romans have been content to follow. Mr. Lawson seems to me to have proved that the object of both burial and cremation (which in both peninsulas are found together) was to secure dissolution for the substance of the body, so that the soul might not be able to inhabit the body again, and the two together return to annoy the living (see especially chapters v. and vi.). But his answer to the inevitable question, why in that case sustenance should be offered to the dead at the grave, is less satisfactory (see pp. 531, 538), and I do not at present see how to co-ordinate it with Roman usage. But I find hardly a trace of the belief that the dead had to be placated like the gods by sacrifice and prayer, except in Aen. iii. 63 foll. and v. 73 foll. In the first of these passages Polydorus had not been properly buried, as Servius observes ad loc. to explain the nature of the offerings; the second presents far more difficulties than have as yet been fairly faced.
183 For recent researches about beans as tabooed by the Pythagoreans and believed to be the food of ghosts, see Gruppe, Mythologische Literatur, p. 370 (Samter and Wünsch). Cp. R.F., p. 110.
184 Ov. Fasti, v. 421 foll.; R.F. p. 107.
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92
LECTURE V
THE CALENDAR OF NUMA
The religion of the household had two main characteristics. First, it was a perfectly natural and organic growth, the result of the Roman farmer's effective desire to put himself and his in right relations with the spiritual powers at work for good or ill around him. His conception of these powers I shall deal with more fully in the next lecture; but I have said enough to prove that it was not a degrading one. The spirits of his house and his land and his own Genius were friendly powers, all of them of the greatest importance for his life and his work, and their claims were attended to with regularity and devotion. From Vesta and the Penates, the Lar, the Genius, the Manes, and the spirits of the doorway and the spring, there was nothing to fear if they were carefully propitiated; and as his daily life and comfort depended on this propitiation, they were really divine members of the familia, and might become, and perhaps did become, the objects of real affection as well as worship. In this well-regulated practical life of the early agricultural settlers, with its careful attention to the claims of its divine protectors, we may perhaps see the germs of a real religious expression of human life.
Secondly, there was doubtless at the same time constant cause for anxiety. Beyond the house and the land there were unreclaimed spirits of the woodland which might force an entrance into the sacred limits of the house; the ghosts of the dead members were93 constantly wishing to return; the crops might be attacked by strange diseases, by storms or drought, and man himself was liable to seasonal disease or sudden pestilence. The cattle and sheep might stray into the remote forest and become the prey of evil beasts, if not of evil spirits. How was the farmer to meet all these troubles, caused, as he supposed, by spirits whose ways he did not understand? How were they to be propitiated as they themselves would wish? How were the omens to be interpreted from which their will might be guessed? How were the proper times and seasons for each religious operation to be discovered? If my imagination is not at fault, I seem to see that the Latin farmer must have had to shift for himself in most of his dealings with the supernatural powers about him; religio, the sense of awe and of dependence, must have been constantly with him. But even here we may see, I think, a possible germ of religious development; for without this feeling of awe religious forms tend to become meaningless: lull religio to sleep, and the forms cease to represent effectively man's experience of life. We have to see later on how this paralysis of the religious instinct did actually take place in early Roman history.
For we now have to leave the religion of the household, and to study that of the earliest form of the City-state. We have enjoyed a glint of light reflected from later times on the religion of the early Roman family, and are about to enjoy another glint—nay, a gleam of real light, and not merely a reflected one—which the earliest religious document we possess casts on the religion of the City-state of Rome. Between the two there is a long period of almost complete darkness. We know hardly anything as yet, and it is not likely that we shall ever know anything definite, about the stages of development which must have been passed before Rome became the so-called city of the Four Regions, when her history may be said really to begin. The pagus hardly helps us here; it was not an essential advance on the family, and its religion was comprehensive, not intensive. Each pagus,94 however, seems to have had within its bounds an oppidum, or stronghold on a hill; and such oppida were the seven montes of early Rome, which, with the pagi belonging to them, survived in name to the end of the Republic, with some kind of a religious festival uniting them together, about which we have hardly any knowledge.185 This looks like a stage in the process of change from farm to city, and it has generally been believed to mark one. Unfortunately nothing to our purpose can be founded on it. We must be content with the undoubted fact that about the eighth or seventh century b.c. the site of Rome was occupied and strengthened as a bulwark against the Etruscan people who were pressing down from the north upon the valley of the Tiber;186 we may take it that the old central fortress of Latium, on the Alban hill, was not in the right position for defence, and that it was seen to be absolutely necessary to make a stronghold of the position offered by the hills which abut on the river twenty miles above its mouth—the only real position of defence for the Latin settlements in its rear. Here an urbs was made with murus and pomoerium, i.e. material and spiritual boundaries, taking in a space sufficient to hold the threatened rural population with their flocks and herds, with the river in the front and a common citadel on the Capitoline hill, and including the Palatine, Quirinal, Esquiline, Caelian and Aventine hills, though the last named remained technically outside the pomoerium.187
It is to this city that our earliest religious document, the so-called Calendar of Numa, belongs. That calendar includes the cult of Quirinus on the hill which still bears his name, and that hill was an integral part of the city as just described. On the other hand, it tells us nothing of the great cult of the trias on the Capitoline—Jupiter, Juno, Minerva—which by universal tradition was instituted much later by the second Tarquinius, i.e. under an Etruscan dynasty; nor does Diana appear in it, the goddess who was brought from Latium and settled on the Aventine before the end of the kingly period. We have, then, a95 terminus ex quo for the date of the calendar in the inclusion in the city of the Quirinal hill, and a terminus ad quem in the foundation of the Diana temple on the Aventine.188 We cannot date these events precisely; but it is sufficient for our purpose if it be taken as proved that the Fasti belong to the fully developed city, and yet were drawn up before that conquest by the Etruscans which we may regard as a certainty, and which is marked by the foundations of Etruscan masonry which served to support the great Capitoline temple. And this is also borne out by the undoubted fact that the calendar itself shows no trace of Etruscan influence. But I must now go on to explain exactly what this calendar is.
The Fasti anni Romani exist chiefly on stone as inscriptions, and date from the Early Empire, between 31 b.c. and a.d. 51. They give us, in fact, the calendar as revised by Caesar; but no one now doubts that Mommsen was right in detecting in these inscriptions the skeleton of the original calendar which the Romans ascribed to Numa.189 This is distinguished from later additions by the large capital letters in which it is written or inscribed in all the fragments we possess; it gives us the days of the month with their religious characteristics as affecting state business, the names of the religious festivals which concern the whole state, and the Kalends, Nones, and Ides in each month. Excluding these last, we have the names, in a shortened form, of forty-five festivals; and these festivals, thus placed by an absolutely certain record in their right place in each month and in the year, must be the foundation of all scientific study of the religious practice of the Roman state, taken together with certain additions in smaller capitals, and with such information about them as we can obtain from literary sources.190
The smaller capitals give us such entries as feriae Iovi, feriae Saturno, i.e. the name of a deity to whom a festival was sacred, the foundation days of temples, generally with the name of the deity in the dative and the position of the temple in the city, and certain ludi96 and memorial days, which belong to a much later age than the original festivals. But the names of those which are inscribed in large letters bear witness beyond all question to their own antiquity; for among them there is not one which has anything to do, so far as we know, with a non-Roman deity, and we know that foreign deities began to arrive in Rome before the end of the kingly period. Here, then, we have genuine information about the oldest religious doings of the City-state, in what indeed is, as Mommsen said, the most ancient source of our knowledge about Roman antiquity generally.
The first point we notice in studying this calendar (putting aside for the present the question as to the agency by which it was drawn up) is this: it exactly reflects a transition from the life of a rural population engaged in agriculture, to the highly-organised political and military life of a City-state. In other words, the State, whose religious needs and experience it reflects, was one whose economic basis was agriculture, whose life included legal and political business, and whose activity in the season of arms was war.
This last characteristic is discernible chiefly, if not entirely, in the months of March and October; and the former of these bears the name of the great deity, who, whatever may have been his origin or the earliest conception of him, was throughout Roman history the god of war. All through March up to the 23rd the Salii, the warlike priests of Mars, were active, dancing and singing those hymns of which an obscure fragment has come down to us, and clashing and brandishing the sacred spears and shields of the god (ancilia).191 On the 19th these ancilia were lustrated—a process to which I shall recur in another lecture; and on the 23rd we find in the calendar the festival Tubilustrium, which suggests the lustration of the trumpets of the host before it took the field. On the 14th of March,192 and also on the 27th of February, we find Equirria in the calendar, which must be understood as lustrations of the horses of the host, accom97panied with races. If we may take the ancilia as symbolising the arms of the host, we see in the festivals of this month a complete religious process preparing the material of war for the perils inevitably to be met with beyond the ager Romanus, whether from human or spiritual enemies; and that the warriors themselves were subjected to a process of the same kind we know from the historical evidence of later times.193 Now in October, when the season of arms was over, we find indications of a parallel process, which Wissowa was the first to point out clearly, but without fully recognising its religious import.194 It was not so much thanksgiving (Dankfest) after a campaign that was necessary on the return of the army, as purification (or disinfection) from the taint of bloodshed, and from contact with strange beings human and spiritual.195 On October 15, the Ides, there was a horse-race in the Campus Martius, with a sacrifice of the winning horse to Mars with peculiar primitive ritual; this, however, for some reason which I shall presently try to discover, was not embodied in the calendar under any special name. On the 19th, however, we find the entry Armilustrium, which tells its own tale. The Salii, too, were active again in these days of October, and on the day of the Armilustrium, as it would seem, put their shields away (condere) in their sacrarium until the March following. As Wissowa says, the ritual of the Salii is thus a symbolic copy of the procedure of war.196 From these indications in the calendar, helped out by information drawn from the later entries and from literary evidence, we see quite plainly that we are dealing with the religion of a state which for half the year is liable to be engaged in war. Rome was, in fact, a frontier fortress on the Tiber against Etruscan enemies; she is destined henceforward to be continually in arms, and she has already expressed this great fact in her religious calendar.
The legal and political significance of the calendar consists in the division of the days of the year into two great98 groups, dies fasti and nefasti: the former are those on which it is fas, i.e. religiously permissible, to transact civil business, the latter those on which it would be nefas to do so, i.e. sacrilege, because they are given over to the gods. We need not, indeed, assume that these marks F and N descend in every case from the very earliest times into the pre-Julian calendar, or that the few days which have other marks stood originally as we find them; but of the primitive character of the main division we can have no doubt. In the calendar as we have it 109 days belong to the divine, 235 to the human inhabitants of the city. All but two of the former are days of odd numbers in the month, and it is reasonable to suppose that these two exceptions were later alterations. The belief that odd numbers are lucky is a very widely-spread superstition, and we do not need to have recourse to Pythagoras to explain it; in this rule, as in others, e.g. their taboo on eating beans, the Pythagoreans were only following a native prejudice of southern Italy. "The idea of luck in odd numbers," says Mr. Crooke,197 writing of the Hindus, "is universal." Thus the simpler odd numbers, three, five, seven, and nine, all recur constantly in folklore; and the result is visible in this calendar. Where a festival occupies more than one day in a month, there is an interval between the two of one or three days, making the whole number three or five. Thus Carmentalia occur on 11th and 15th January, and the Lemuria in May are on the 9th, 11th, and 13th; the Lucaria in July on 19th and 21st. In some months, too, e.g. August and December, perhaps also July and February, there seem to be traces of an arrangement by which festivals which probably had some connection with each other are thus arranged; e.g. in August six festivals, all concerned in some way with the fruits of the earth and the harvest, occur on the 17th, 19th, 21st, 23rd, 25th, and 27th. It has recently been suggested198 that these are arranged round one central festival, which gives a kind of colouring to the others, as the Volcanalia99 in August, the Saturnalia in December. But the reasons von Domaszewski gives for the arrangement, and the further speculation that where it does not occur we may find traces of an older system, as yet unaffected by the so-called Pythagorean prejudice, do not seem to me satisfactory. We may be content with the general principle as I have stated it, and note that while religious duties must be performed on days of odd number, civil duties were not so restricted: the days belonging to the gods, which were, so to speak, taboo days, were more important than those belonging to men. There are, as I have said, but two days marked in the large letters as festivals, which are on days of even number, 24th February and 14th March, the Regifugium and the second Equirria; and about these we know so little that it is almost useless to speculate as to the reason for their exception from the rule. Two others, 24th March and 24th May, were partly the property of the gods and partly of men, and are marked QRCF (quando rex comitiavit fas); but the sense in which they partially belonged to the gods is not the same as in the case of sacrificial festivals.
This calendar thus shows obvious signs of both military and political development; in other words, its witness to the religious experience of the Romans proves that they had successfully adjusted the forms and seasons of their worship to the processes of government at home and of military service in the field. But the most conspicuous feature in it is the testimony it bears to the agricultural habits of the people—to the fact that agriculture and not trade, of which there is hardly a trace, was the economic basis of their life. At the time when it was drawn up, the Romans must have been able to subsist upon the ager Romanus, though, as we shall see later on, it was probably not long before they began commercial relations with other peoples; for their food, which was almost entirely vegetarian, and their clothing, which was entirely of wool and leather,199 they depended on their crops,100 flocks, and herds; and the perils to which these were liable remain for the State, as for the farming household, the main subject of the propitiation of the gods, the main object of their endeavours to keep themselves in right relation with the Power manifest in the universe.
We can trace the series of agricultural operations in the calendar without much difficulty all through the year. The Roman year, we must remember, began with March, and March, as we have seen, had under the military necessities of the State become peculiarly appropriated to the religious preparation of the burgher host for warlike activity. But the festivals of April, when crops were growing, cattle bringing forth young or seeking summer pasture, all have direct reference to the work of agriculture.200 At the Fordicidia, on the 15th, pregnant cows were sacrificed to the Earth-goddess, and their unborn calves burnt, apparently with the object of procuring the fertility of the corn; and the Cerealia on the 19th, to judge by the name, must have had an object of the same kind, though the supersession of Ceres by the Greek Demeter had obscured this in historical times. The Parilia on the 19th, recently illuminated by Dr. Frazer,201 was a lustration of the cattle and sheep before they left their winter pasture to encounter the dangers of wilder hill or woodland, and may be compared with the lustratio of the host before a campaign. On the 23rd the Vinalia tells its own tale, and shows that the cultivation of the vine was already a part of the agricultural work. On the 25th the spirit of the red mildew, Robigus, was the object of propitiation, at the time when the ear was beginning to be formed in the corn, and was particularly liable to attack from this pest.
The religious precautions thus taken in April were not renewed in May; but at the end of that month of ripening the whole of the ager Romanus was lustrated by the Fratres Arvales. This important rite, for some reason which we cannot be sure of, was a movable feast, left to the discretion of the brethren, and therefore does not101 appear in the calendar. In June the sacred character of the new crops, now approaching their harvest, becomes apparent; the penus Vestae, the symbolic receptacle of the grain-store of the State, after remaining open from the 7th to the 15th, was closed on that day for the rest of the year, after being carefully cleansed: the refuse was religiously deposited in a particular spot. Thus all was made ready for the reception of the new grain, which, as is now well known, has a sacred character among primitive peoples, and must be stored and eaten with precaution.202 This was the chief religious work of June; in July, the month when the harvest was actually going on, the festivals are too obscure to delay us; they seem to have some reference to water, rain, storms, but it is not clear to me whether the object was to avert stormy weather during the cutting of the crops, or, on the other hand, to avert a drought in the hottest time of the year. The true harvest festivals begin in August; the Consualia on 21st and Opiconsiva on 25th both seem to suggest the operation of storing up (condere) the grain, and between them we find the Volcanalia, of which the object was perhaps to propitiate the fire-spirit at a time when the heat of the sun might be dangerous to the freshly-gathered crops.
After the crops were once harvested, ploughing and sowing chiefly occupied the farming community until December; and as these operations were not accompanied by the same perils which beset the agriculturist in spring and summer, they have left no trace in the calendar. Special religious action was not necessary on their behalf. It is not till the autumn sowing was over, and the workers could rest from their labours, that we find another set of festivals, of which the centre-point is the Saturnalia on the 17th, Saturnus being the deity, I think, both of the operation of sowing and of the sown seed, now reposing in the bosom of mother earth.203 A second Consualia on the 15th, and the Opalia on the 19th, like the corresponding August festivals, seem to be concerned with the housed102 grain harvested in the previous August; I am disposed to think that in all three we should see not only the natural rejoicing after the labours of the autumn, but the opening of the granaries and, perhaps, the first eating of the grain. For on the Saturnalia there was a sacrifice at Saturnus' altar, followed by a feast, which was afterwards Graecised, but doubtless originally represented the primitive feasting of the farm, in which the whole familia took part. This brings us practically to the end of the agricultural year as represented in the calendar; for spring sowing was exceptional, the joyful feasts of pagus and compitum are not to be found in our document, and the month of February is specially occupied with the care and cult of the dead (Manes).
At this point I wish to notice one or two results of the adoption of a religious calendar such as I have been describing, which are more to the purpose of these lectures than some of the details I have had to point out. First, let us remember that agricultural operations necessarily vary in date according to the season, and that most of the rural festivals of ancient Italy were not fixed to a particular day, but were feriae conceptivae, settled perhaps according to the decision of some meeting of heads of families or officers of a pagus. That this was so we may conjecture from the fact that those which survived into historical times, e.g. Compitalia and Paganalia, and were celebrated in the city, though not as sacra pro populo,204 were of varying date. But all the festivals of the calendar were necessarily fixed, and the days on which they were held were made over to the gods. Now by being thus fixed they would soon begin to get out of relation to agricultural life; just as, if the harvest festivals of our churches were fixed to one day throughout the country, the meaning of the religious service would sooner or later begin to lose something of its force. And how much the more would this be so if the calendar itself, from ignorance or mismanagement, began to get out of relation with the true season, as in course of time was frequently the103 case? When once under such circumstances the meaning of a religious rite is lost, where is its psychological efficacy? In the life of the old Latin farmer, as we saw, his religion was a reality, an organic growth, coincident at every point with the perils he encountered in his daily toil; here, in the City-state, it must from the beginning have had a tendency to become an unreality, and it ended by becoming one entirely. Some of the old rites may have attached new meanings to themselves; it is possible, for example, that beneath the military rites of March there was an original agricultural significance; the Saturnalia became a merry mid-winter festival for a town population. But a great number wholly lost meaning, and were so forgotten or neglected in course of time that even learned men like Varro do not seem to have been able to explain them. The only practical question about them for the later Romans was whether their days were dies fasti or nefasti or comitiales,—what work might or might not be done on them.
Another point, closely connected with the last, and tending in the same direction, is that such a calendar as this implies rigidity and routine in religious duties. A well-ordered city life under a strong government must, of course, be subject to routine; law, religious or civil, written or unwritten, forces the individual into certain stereotyped ways of life, subjects him to a certain amount of wholesome discipline. The value of such routine to an undisciplined people has been well pointed out by Bishop Stubbs, in writing of the effect of the rule of the Norman and Angevin kings on the English people,205 where it was also a religious as well as a legal discipline that was at work. In neither case was it the ignorant and superstitious routine of savage life, which of late years we have had to substitute for old fancies about the freedom of the savage; it is the willing obedience of civilised man for his own benefit. But if it means a routine of religious rites which are beginning to lose their meaning; if the relation between them and man's life and work is lost;104 and lastly, if, as was probably the case, the Fasti were not published, but remained in the hands of a priesthood or an aristocracy,206—then there is serious loss as well as gain. You begin sooner or later to cease to feel your dependence on the divine beings around you for your daily bread, to get out of right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe.
But, in the third place, we must believe that at first, and indeed perhaps for ages, this very routine had an important psychological result in producing increased comfort, convenience, and confidence in the Roman's relations with the divine inhabitants of his city. A certain number of deities have taken up their abode within the walls of the city, and are as much its inhabitants, its citizens, as the human beings who live there; and all the relations between the divine and human citizens are regulated now by law, by a ius divinum, of which the calendar is a very important part. Religio, the old feeling of doubt and scruple, arising from want of knowledge in the individual, is still there; it is, in fact, the feeling which has given rise to all this organisation and routine, the cura and caerimonia, as Cicero phrases it. But it must be already losing its strength, its life; it was, so to speak, a constitutional weakness, and the ius divinum is already beginning to act on it as a tonic. Doubt has passed into fixed usage, tradition has given place to organisation. Time, place, procedure in all religious matters, are guaranteed by those skilled in the ius divinum; they know what to do as the festival of each deity comes round, and at the right time and place they do it with scrupulous attention to every detail. Thus the organisation of which the calendar is our best example would have as its first result the destruction of fear and doubt in the mind of the ordinary Roman; it would tend to kill, or at least to put to sleep, the religio which was the original motive cause of this very organisation. As the State in our own day has a tendency to relieve families of such duties as the care and education of children, so the State at Rome105 relieved the family of constant anxiety about matters in which they were ever in danger from the spirit-world. The State and its authorities have taken the whole responsibility of adjusting the relations of the human and divine citizens.207
Entirely in keeping with this psychological result of the calendar is the fact, to which I have already alluded, that it supplies us with hardly any evidence of the existence of magic, or of those "beastly devices of the heathen" which may roughly be included under that word; to use the language of Mr. Lang, we find none of those "distressing vestiges of savagery and barbarism which meet us in the society of ancient Greece." It is true enough that we do not know much about what was done at the various festivals of the calendar, but what we do know, with one or two exceptions, suggests an idea of worship as clean and rational as that of the Homeric poems, which stands in such striking contrast to that reflected in later Greek literature.208 When we do read of any kind of grossness in worship or the accompanying festivities, it is almost always in the case of some rite which is not among those in the Fasti. Such was the old festival of Anna Perenna in March, where the plebs in Ovid's time spent the day in revelry and drinking, and prayed for as many years of life as they could drink cups of wine. Such again was that of the October horse, when after a chariot-race in the Campus the near horse of the winning team was sacrificed, and his tail carried in hot haste to the Regia, where the blood was allowed to drip on the sacred hearth; while the head was the object of a fight between the men of the Via Sacra and those of the Subura.209 We may perhaps include in the list the ritual of the Argei, if it was indeed, as I believe, of great antiquity;210 on May 15, as we have seen, twenty-seven puppets of reeds or straw were thrown into the Tiber from the pons sublicius, possibly with the object of procuring rain for the growing crops. Let us also note that dies religiosi were not marked in the Fasti, i.e. days on which some uncomfort106able feeling prevailed, such as the three days on which the mundus was open to allow the Manes to come up from their shadowy abode below the earth; with the character of such days as "uncanny" the calendar has simply nothing to do. It is a document of religious law, not of superstitio, a word which in Roman usage almost invariably means what is outside that religious law, outside the ius divinum; and it is a document of religio only so far as it is meant to organise and carry out the cura and caerimonia, the natural results of that feeling which the Romans called religio. It stands on exactly the same footing as the Law of the Israelites, which supplied them in full detail with the cura and caerimonia, and rigidly excluded all foreign and barbarous rites and superstitions.
I do not, of course, mean to say that the State did not recognise or allow the festivals which are not marked in the calendar; the pontifices and Vestals were present at the ceremony of the Argei, and the Regia was the scene of a part of that of the October horse. But those who drew up the calendar as the fundamental charter of the ius divinum must have had their reasons for the selection of forty-five days as made over to the deities who were specially concerned with the State's welfare. And on these days, so far as we know, there was a regular ordered routine of sacrifice and prayer, with but little trace of the barbarous or grotesque. The ritual of the Lupercalia is almost a solitary exception. The Luperci had their foreheads smeared with the blood of the victims, which were goats, and then this was wiped off with wool dipped in milk; after this they were obliged to laugh, probably as a sign that the god (whoever he was) was in them, or that they were identified with him.211 They then girt themselves with the skins of the victims and ran round the ancient pomoerium, striking at any women they met with strips of the same victims in order to produce fertility. This was perhaps a rite taken over from aboriginal107 settlers on the Palatine, and so intimately connected with that hill that it could not be omitted from the calendar. The ritual of the three days of Lemuria in May, when ghosts were expelled from the house, as Ovid describes the process, by means of beans,212 seems also to have been a reminiscence of ideas about the dead more primitive than those which took effect in the more cheerful Parentalia of February: here again we may perhaps see a concession to the popular tradition and prejudice of a primitive population. On the other hand, the revelry of the Saturnalia in December, of which Dr. Frazer has made so much in the second edition of the Golden Bough,213 is nothing more than the licence of the population of a great cosmopolitan city, an out-growth, under Greek influence, from the rude winter rejoicings of the farmer and his familia; and for his conjecture that a human victim was sacrificed on this occasion in ancient Rome there is simply no evidence whatever. There is, indeed, not a trace of human sacrifice at Rome so long as the ius divinum was the supreme religious law of the State; in the whole Roman literature of the Republic hardly anything of the kind is alluded to;214 it is only when we come to an age when the taste for bloodshed was encouraged by the shows of the amphitheatre, and when the blood-loving religions of the East were pressing in, that we hear of human sacrifice, and then only from Christian writers, who would naturally seize on anything that came to hand to hold up paganism to derision, without inquiring into the truth or the history of the alleged practice.215
Thus we may take it as highly probable that those who drew up the calendar had the deliberate intention of excluding from the State ritual, as far as was possible, everything in the nature of barbarism and magic. For the religious purposes of a people occupied in agriculture and war, and already beginning to develop some idea of law and order, there was no need of any religious rites except such as would serve, in decency and order,108 to propitiate the deities concerned with the fertilisation of man, beast, and crop, and with the safety and efficacy of the host in its struggle with the enemies of the city. The Roman people grew up, in their city life as in the life of the family, in self-restraint, dignity, and good order, confident in the course of cura and caerimonia, itself decent and stately, if soulless, which the religious authorities had drawn up for them.
We should naturally like to know something about those authorities, who thus placed the religion of the State on a comparatively high level of ritualistic decency, if not of theological subtlety. The Romans themselves attributed the work to a priest-king, Numa Pompilius, and probably their instinct was a right one. Names matter little in such matters; but there is surely something in the universal Roman tradition of a great religious legislator, something too, it may be, in the tradition that he was a Sabine, a representative of the community on the Quirinal which had been embodied in the Roman city before the calendar was drawn up, and of the sturdy, serious stock of central Italy, which retained its virtus longer than any other Italian people.216 We are quite in the dark as to all this, unless we can put any kind of confidence in the traditional belief of the Romans themselves. But there is one point on which I should like to make a suggestion—a new one so far as I know. Numa was said to have been the first Flamen Dialis; but that is absolutely impossible, for the ancient taboos on that priesthood would have made it impossible for him to become supreme legislator. Evidently this Flamen, who could hardly leave his own house, might never leave the city, and was at every turn hedged in by restrictions on his activity, was a survival of those magician-kings who make rain and do other useful things, but would lose their power if they were exposed to certain contingencies; the number of possible contingencies increases till the unfortunate owner of the powers becomes powerless by virtue of the care so109 painfully taken of him.217 The priest of Jupiter and his taboos carry us back, beyond a doubt, into the far-away dim history of primitive Latium. By the time the eternal city was founded on the Tiber, he must have been already practically obsolete. My suggestion is that he is the representative in the Roman religious system of another and more primitive system which existed in Latium, probably at Alba, where Jupiter was worshipped on the mountain from time immemorial. When the strength of Latium was concentrated at the best strategical point on the Tiber, the priest of Jupiter was transferred to the new city, because he was too "precious" to be left behind, though even then a relic of antiquity. There he became what he was throughout Roman history, a practically useless personage, about whom certain sacred traditions had gathered, but placed in complete subjection to the new legal and religious king, and afterwards to the Pontifex maximus.218
If there be any truth in this—and I believe it to be a legitimate inference from the legal position of this Flamen, and his permanent state of taboo—then I think we may see a great religious change in the era of the "calendar of Numa." Inspired with new ideas of the duty and destiny of the new city of the four regions, a priest-king, doubtless with the help and advice of a council, according to the true Roman fashion, put an end for ever to the reign of the old magician-kingship, but preserved the magician-king as a being still capable of wonder-working in the eyes of the people. As religious law displaced magic in the State ritual, so the new kings, with their collegia of legal priests, pontifices and augurs, neutralised and gradually destroyed the prestige of the effete survivor of an age of barbarism.
NOTES TO LECTURE V.
185 Kornemann, op. cit. p. 87; Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 230 foll.; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. p. 790, note 1. For the festival110 of the Septimontium, Varro, L.L. vi. 24; Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 69; Fowler, R.F. p. 265 foll. This festival does not appear in the calendar, as not being "feriae populi, sed montanorum modo" (Varro, l.c.). There are some interesting remarks on the relation between agricultural life and the origin of towns in von Jhering's Evolution of the Aryan (Eng. trans.), p. 86 foll., with special reference to Rome.
186 Von Duhn in J.H.S. xvi. 126 foll. The latest research (Korte in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Etrusker," p. 747) concludes that the arrival of the Etruscans on the west coast of Italy cannot be safely put earlier than the eighth century.
187 Hülsen-Jordan, Rom. Topogr. iii. 153. In a brief but masterly paper in the publications of the American School at Rome, 1908, p. 173 foll., J. B. Carter deals with the whole problem of the pomoerium and the pre-Servian city.
188 Wissowa, R.K. p. 27.
189 In C.I.L. i.2, p. 297 foll. See R.F. p. 14 foll.
190 See the Fasti in R.F. p. 21 foll.; or in Wissowa, R.K., at end of the book.
191 R.F. p. 38 foll. Marindin's article "Salii," Dict. of Antiqq., is very useful and sensible. There is little doubt that the dress and armour of the Salii represented that of the primitive Latin warrior, calculated to frighten away evil spirits as well as enemies, and that their dances in procession had some object of this kind. It is noticeable that there were two gilds or collegia of them belonging to the Palatine and Quirinal cities respectively; and they are also found at Tibur, Alba, Lanuvium, and other Latin cities.
192 Or 15th (Ides), according to the conjecture of Wissowa; see R.F. p. 44 and R.K. p. 131. It is almost incredible that this should originally have been on a day of even number, contrary to the universal rule of the Fasti.
193 See below, p. 212 foll., for further consideration of this so-called purification.
194 R.K. p. 131.
195 See below, p. 217.
196 R.K. p. 131.
197 Popular Religion and Folklore of India, ii. 51. For the sacredness of the number three and its multiples, see Diels, Sibyllinische Blätter, p. 40 foll.; but he limits it too much to chthonic religious ritual. See also H. Usener, "Dreizahl," in Rheinisches Museum, vol. 58, pp. 1 foll., 161 foll., and 321 foll. There is a summary of the results of these papers in Gruppe's Mythologische Literatur, 1898-1905, p. 360 foll. I may also refer to my friend Prof. Goudy's very interesting Trichotomy in Roman Law (Oxford, 1910), p. 8 foll.
198 By von Domaszewski in Archiv for 1907, p. 333 foll. The learned author's reasoning is often based on mere hypotheses as111 to the meaning of the festivals or the gods concerned in them, and his ideas as to the agricultural features of the months July, August, December seem to me doubtful; but the paper is one that all students of the calendar must reckon with.
199 Marquardt, Privatleben, pp. 459 and 569 foll.
200 For the festivals mentioned in the following paragraphs see R.F., s.v., and Wissowa, R.K., section 63.
201 "St. George and the Parilia," in Revue des études ethnographiques et sociologiques for Jan. 1908. I owe my knowledge of this admirable study to the kindness of its author.
202 Frazer, G.B. ii. 318 foll.
203 Varro, L.L. v. 64, says, "Ab satu dictus Saturnus." And in Augustine (Civ. Dei, vi. 8) he is quoted as holding the opinion "quod pertineat Saturnus ad semina, quae in terram de qua oriuntur iterum recidunt." He was probably the numen of the seed-sowing (Saeturnus), and as his festival comes after the end of sowing, we may presume that he was the numen of the sown as well as of the unsown seed. In the article "Saturnus" in Roscher's Lexicon, which has appeared since the above note was written, Wissowa provisionally accepts Varro's etymology.
204 Festus, p. 245a, "Publica sacra quae publico sumptu pro populo fiunt, quaeque pro montibus, pagis, curiis, sacellis." See article "Sacra" in Dict. of Antiqq. ii. 577.
205 "Routine is the only safeguard of a people under a perfect autocracy" (Select Charters, Introduction, p. 19).
206 The annalists believed that the publication first took place in the year 304 b.c.: Livy ix. 46. Mommsen (Chronologie, p. 31) thought it possible that it had already been done by the Decemvirs in one of the two last of the XII. Tables, but again withdrawn. The object of keeping the Fasti secret was, of course, to control the times available for legal and political business.
207 This paragraph is abridged from a passage in the author's paper in the Hibbert Journal for 1907, p. 848.
208 See Anthropology and the Classics (Oxford, 1908), p. 44.
209 R.F. p. 241 foll.
210 Wissowa holds that it dates from the third century b.c.: Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl., s.v. "Argei." I endeavoured to refute this view in the Classical Review for 1902, p. 115 foll., and Dr. Wissowa criticised my criticism in his Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 222. It is dealt with at length in R.F. p. 111 foll. See below, p. 321 foll.
211 This is not exactly the view expressed in R.F. p. 315 foll., where I was inclined to adopt that of Mannhardt that the laughing symbolised the return to life after sacrificial death. I am now disposed to think of it as parallel with the ecstasy of the Pythoness and other inspired priests, or the shivering and convulsive movements which denote that a human being is "possessed" by a god112 or spirit. See Jevons, Introduction, p. 174. Mannhardt's view seems, however, to gain support from Pausanias' description of the ordeal he underwent himself at the cave of Trophonius, after which he could laugh again: Paus. ix. 39. See also Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 580. Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 501.
212 R.F. p. 109; Ov. Fasti, v. 421 foll. Ovid's account is of a private rite in the house, as elsewhere he tells us of things done by private persons on festival days. We do not know whether there was any public ritual for these days. For further discussion of the contrast between the two festivals of the dead, see below, Lect. XVII. p. 393.
213 G.B. iii. 138 foll. The attempt to connect the so-called Saturnalia of the army of the Danube in the third century a.d. with the early practice of Roman Saturnalia seems to me to fail entirely, even after reading Prof. Cumont's paper in the Revue de philologie, 1897, p. 133 foll. I should imagine that Cumont would now admit that the Saturn who was sacrificed on the Danube as described in the Martyrdom of St. Dasius must have been of Oriental origin, and that the soldiers concerned were in no sense Roman or Italian. For the hellenisation of the Saturnalia, see Wissowa in Roscher's Lexicon, s.v. "Saturnus," p. 432. Wissowa, I may note, does not believe in the accuracy of the account of the "Martyrdom."
214 Nothing, that is, in the regular ritual of the Roman State—except in so far as the killing of a criminal who was sacer to a god can be so regarded; and the only instance of any kind that can be quoted is that of the two pairs of Gaulish and Greek men and women who in the stress of the second Punic war and afterwards were buried alive, as it was said, in the Forum Boarium. Wissowa, R.K. p. 355 and notes. I shall return to this in Lecture XIV.
215 The earliest mention of the slaying of a victim (bestiarius) to Jupiter is in Minucius Felix, Octav. 22 and 30, i.e. towards the end of the second century a.d. or even later. Cp. Tertull. Apol. 9, Lactantius i. 21. I do not go so far as to say with Wissowa (p. 109, note 3) that this story is "ganz gewiss apokryph," but I take it as simply a case of degeneracy under the influence of the amphitheatre and of Orientalism.
216 For Numa see Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. i. 551 foll.
217 See Dr. Frazer's most recent account of this subject, in his Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, chaps, iii.-v. Prof. Ridgeway's idea that the Flamen Dialis was really a Numan institution is of course simply impossible, and the arguments he founds on it fall to the ground. Ovid, probably reflecting Varro, speaks of the Flamen Dialis as belonging to the Pelasgian religion, which at least means that he was aware of the extreme antiquity of the office; Fasti, ii. 281. Dr. Döllinger (The Gentile and the Jew, vol. ii. p. 72) with his usual insight was inclined to see in113 this Flamen the "ruins of an older system of ceremonial ordinances."
218 He was sui iuris (Gaius i. 130), as soon as he was chosen or taken (captus) by the Pontifex maximus; but he was subject to the authority of the P.M., like all the other flamines and the Vestals. See Wissowa, R.K. p. 438; Tac. Ann. iv. 16.
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114
LECTURE VI
THE DIVINE OBJECTS OF WORSHIP
We must now turn our attention to what is the most difficult part of our subject, the ideas of the early Romans about "the Power manifesting itself in the universe." In my first lecture I indicated in outline what the difficulties are which beset us all through our studies; they are in no part of it so insurmountable as in this. Material fails us, because there was no contemporary literature; because the Romans were not a thinking people, and probably thought very little about the divine beings whom they propitiated; and again, because comparative religion, as it is called, is of scant value in such a study. We have to try and get rid of our own ideas about God or gods, to keep our minds free of Greek ideas and mythology, and, in fact, to abstain from bringing the ideas of any other peoples to bear upon the question until we are pretty sure that we have some sort of understanding of those Roman ideas with which we are tempted to compare them. The first duty of the student of any system of religion is to study that religion in and by itself. As M. S. Reinach observed in an address at the Congress for the History of Religions at Oxford, it is time that we began to attend to differences as well as similarities; and this can only be done by the conscientious use of such materials as are available for the study of each particular religion.
The only materials available in the case of the earliest Rome are (1) the calendar which I was explaining in the last lecture, which gives us the names of the festivals of the115 religious year; (2) the names of the deities concerned in these festivals, so far as we know them from later additions to the calendar, from Roman literature, and from evidence, chiefly epigraphical, of the names of deities among kindred Italian peoples; (3) the fragments of information, now most carefully collected and sifted, about what the Romans did in the worship of their deities. The names and order of the festivals, the names of the deities themselves, the cult, or detail of worship, including priesthoods and holy places,—these are the only real materials we possess, and our only safe guides. To trust to legends is fatal, because such legends as there were in Italy were never written down until the Greeks turned their attention to them, colouring them with their own fancy and with reminiscences of their own mythology. For example, no sane investigator would now make use of the famous story told by Ovid and Plutarch about Numa's interview with Jupiter, and the astute way in which he deceived the god, as an illustration of the Roman's ideas of the divine; we know that it can be traced back to the greatest liar among all Roman annalists,219 that it was in part derived from a Greek story, and in part invented to explain a certain piece of ritual, the procuratio fulminis. Even what was done in the cult must be handled with knowledge and discretion. Dr. Frazer has a theory that the Roman kings personated Jupiter, and uses as evidence of this the fact that in the triumph the triumphator was dressed after the fashion of the statue of the god in the Capitoline temple, with his face reddened with minium: forgetting that the temple, its cult and its statue, all date from the very end of the period of the kingship, and were the work of an Etruscan monarch, almost beyond doubt. There may be truth in his theory, but this is not the way to prove it; this is not the way to arrive at a true understanding of Roman religious ideas.
What did the old Romans know about the nature of the objects of their worship? All religion is in its development a process of gaining such knowledge: if it116 makes no progress it is doomed. It is because the Jews made such wonderful progress in this path, in spite of formalism and backsliding, that they were chosen to produce a Teacher whose life and doctrine revealed the will and the nature of His Father for the eternal benefit of mankind. The fear of the Lord is imperfect knowledge, it is but the beginning of wisdom; but it could become, in a Jew like St. Paul, the perfect knowledge of His will. It may seem absurd to think of two such religions as the Jewish and the Roman side by side; but the absurdity vanishes when we begin to understand the humble beginnings of the Jewish religion as scientific research has already laid it bare. Knowledge of the Power manifesting itself in the universe is open to all peoples alike, and some few have made much progress in it beside the Jews. The Romans were not among these, at any rate in all the later stages of their history; but we have to ask how far they got in the process, and later on again to ask also why they could go no farther.220
We have seen how one great forward step in the attainment of this knowledge was made in the religion of the household, when the house had become a kind of temple, being the dwelling of divine as well as human beings, and when the cultivated land had been separated by a sacred boundary from the mountain or forest beyond, with their wild and unknown spiritual inhabitants. We met, however, with nothing in the house or on the land that we can properly call a god, if we may use that word for the moment in the sense of a personality as well as a name, and a personality perfectly distinct from the object in which it resides. Vesta seems to be the fire, Penates the store, or at least spirits undistinguishable from the substance composing the store. But inasmuch as the farmer knew how to serve these spirits and address them, looking upon them as friends and co-habitants of his own dwelling, we may go so far as to guess that they were somewhat advanced in their career as spirits, and might possibly develop into powers of a more definite kind, if117 not into gods, real dei conceived as persons.221 In other words—for it is better to keep as far as we can to the subjective or psychological aspect of them—the Roman might realise the Power better by getting to think of his nameless spirits as dei at work for his benefit if rightly propitiated. There are some signs in the calendar and the other sources I mentioned just now that such a process had been going on before the State arose; and it is certain that the whole field of divine operation had been greatly widened by that time, as we might expect from the enlarged sphere of man's experience and activity.
The deities originally belonging to the city of the four regions, i.e. to the city of the calendar of Numa, were known to Roman antiquarians as di indigetes, in contradistinction from the di novensiles or imported deities, with which at present we have nothing to do. On the basis of the calendar, and of the names of the most ancient priesthoods attached to particular cults, the Rex and the Flamines, Wissowa (R.K. p. 16) has constructed a list of these di indigetes which may be accepted without any further reservation than he himself applies to it. They are thirty-three in number, but in two cases we have groups instead of individuals, viz. the Lares and the Lemures: the plurality of the Lares (compitales) we have already explained, and the Lemures, the ghosts of departed ancestors, we may also for the present leave out of account. Others are too obscure to help us, e.g. Carna, Angerona, Furrina, Neptunus, Volturnus,222 except in so far as their very obscurity, and the neglect into which they and their cults fell in later times, is proof that they were not thought of as lively personal deities. Then, again, there are others whose names are suggested by certain festivals, Terminus, Fons, Robigus, who seem to be simply survivals from the animistic period—spirits inherent in the boundary-stone, the spring, or the mildew, and incapable of further development in the new conditions of city life. Faunus, the rural semi-deity, perhaps representing a group of such beings, appears in the list as the deity of118 the Lupercalia; but this is a point in which I cannot agree with Wissowa and the majority of modern authorities.223
We are struck, as we examine the list further, by the adjectival character of many of the names—Neptunus, Portunus, Quirinus, Saturnus, Volcanus, Volturnus: these are not proper names, but clearly express some character or function exercised by the power or numen to whom the name is given. Saturnus is the most familiar example; the word suggests no personality, but rather a sphere of operations (whether we take the name as referring to sowing or to seed maturing in the soil) in which a certain numen is helpful. Saturnus, Volcanus, Neptunus were indeed identified later on with Greek gods of a ripe polytheistic system, and have thus become quite familiar to us, far too familiar for a right understanding of early Roman ideas. We might naturally expect that the identification of Saturnus with Kronos, of Neptunus with Poseidon, would give us some clue to the original Roman conception of the numen thus Graecised, but it is not so. Neptunus may have had some connection with water, rain, or springs, but we have no real proof of it, and it is impossible to say why Saturnus became Kronos.224 The only certain result that we can win from the study of these adjectival titles is that they represent a transition between animism and polytheism, a transition exactly expressed by the one word numen.
Numen is so important a word in the Roman religion that it is necessary to be perfectly clear as to what was meant by it. It must be formed from nuere as flumen from fluere, with a sense of activity inherent in the verb. As flumen is that which actively flows, so numen is that which actively does whatever we understand by the word nuere; and so far as we can determine, that was a manifestation of will. Adnuere is to consent, to give your good will to some act proposed or completed, and is often so used of Jupiter in the Aeneid. Nuere should therefore express a simple exercise of will-power, and numen is the being119 exercising it. In time it came to be used for the will of a god as distinct from himself, as in the fourth Aeneid (269)—
ipse deum tibi me claro demittit Olympo
regnator, caelum ac terras qui numine torquet.
Or in the fourth Eclogue (47)—
concordes stabili fatorum numine Parcae,
where Servius explains it as "potestate, divinatione, ac maiestate." But beyond doubt this use is a product of the literary age, and the word originally indicated the being himself who exercised the will—a sense familiar to us in the opening lines of the Aeneid ("quo numine laeso") and in innumerable other passages. Thus von Domaszewski in his collected papers (p. 157) is undoubtedly right in defining a numen as a being with a will—"ein wollendes Wesen"; though his account of its evolution, and of the way in which in its turn it may produce a deus, may be open to criticism.
The word thus suggests that the Roman divine beings were functional spirits with will-power, their functions being indicated by their adjectival names. Proper names they had not as a rule, but they are getting cult-titles under the influence of a priesthood, which titles may in time perhaps attain to something of the definiteness of substantival names. This indeed could hardly have been so in the mind of the ordinary Roman even at a later age; and it is quite possible that if an intelligent Greek traveller of the sixth century b.c. had given an account of the gods of Rome,225 he would have said, as Strabo said of an Iberian people in the time of Augustus, that they were without gods, or worshipped gods without names. But the name, even as a cult-title, is of immense importance in the development of a spirit into a deity, and in most cases, at any rate at Rome, it was the work of officials, of a state priesthood, not of the people. To address a deity rightly was matter of no small difficulty: how were you to120 know how he would wish to be addressed? Servius tells us that the pontifices addressed even Jupiter himself thus: "Iupiter optime maxime, sive quo alio nomine te appellari volueris." On the other hand, in the same comment he tells us that "iure pontificio cautum est, ne suis nominibus di Romani appellarentur, ne exaugurari possent," i.e. lest they should be enticed away from the city by enemies. This last statement seems indeed to me to be a doubtful one,226 but it will serve to illustrate the nervousness about divine names, of which there is no doubt whatever. We know for certain that those religious lawyers the pontifices were greatly occupied with the task of drawing up lists of names by which numina should be invoked,—formularising the ritual of prayer, as we shall see in another lecture; and this must have become at one time almost a craze with them, to judge by the lists of Indigitamenta preserved in their books, to which Varro had access, and which were copied from him by St. Augustine.227 But after all it needed the stimulus given by actual contact with a polytheistic system to turn a Roman numen into a full-fledged personal deity: the pontifices might carry the process some way, but they never could have completed it themselves without the help of the Greeks.
One deity seems to stand alone in the list—Tellus or Terra Mater, Mother Earth.228 We are coming directly to the great deity of the heaven, and we might naturally expect that an agricultural folk would be much concerned with her who is his counterpart among so many peoples. She does not give her name to any of the festivals of the calendar; but at one of them, the Fordicidia in April, at a time when the earth is teeming with mysterious power, and when the festivals are of a peculiarly agricultural character, she has her own special sacrifice—a pregnant cow, whose young are torn from her womb, burnt by the Virgo vestalis maxima, and their ashes used in certain mystic rites, e.g. at the Parilia which followed on the 21st.229 She seems to have had her function in human life as well; but about this we are much in the dark in121 spite of Dieterich's attempts to elucidate it in his Mutter Erde.230 Whether she played a part at the birth of a child we cannot be sure; but at marriage there is little doubt that she was originally an object of worship, though in later days she gave way before Ceres and Juno.231 And as at death the body was laid in her embrace, we are not surprised to find her prominent here also: she was the home of the dead whether buried or burnt, and of the whole mass of the Manes. We shall presently see how a Roman commander might devote himself and the whole army of the enemy to Tellus and the Manes; and it is interesting to find that a similar formula of devotio, of later date, combines Tellus with Jupiter, the speaker touching the ground when he mentions her name, and holding his hands upwards to heaven when he names the god.232 Very curious, too, is the rite of the porca praecidanea, which in historical times was offered to Ceres as well as Tellus immediately before harvest; in case a man had wittingly or unwittingly omitted to pay the proper rites (iusta facere) to his own dead, it was his duty to make this offering, lest as a result of the neglect the earth-power should not yield him a good harvest.233 Originally, we need hardly doubt, Tellus was alone concerned in this; but Ceres, who at all times represented rather the ripening and ripened corn than the seed in the bosom of the earth, gradually took her place beside her, and the idea gained ground that the offering was more immediately concerned with the harvest than with the Manes.234 When Cato wrote his book on agriculture, he included in it the proper formula for this sacrifice, without any indication that Tellus or the Manes had any part in the business.235 Tellus was not a deity whose life would be vigorous in a busy City-state destined gradually to lose its agricultural outlook; there the supply of grain, from whatever quarter it might come, was a far more important matter than the process of producing it, and it was natural that Ceres and her April festival should become more popular than Tellus and her Fordicidia, and that the Cerealia should122 eventually develop into ludi of no less than eight days' duration. Yet Tellus survived in such forms as that of the devotio; and even under the Empire we find her as Terra on sepulchral monuments, e.g.—
ereptam viro et matri mater me Terra recepit,
or
terra mater rerum quod dedit ipsa teget.
And there is a curious story, noticed by Wissowa and by Dieterich after him, that on the death of Tiberius the plebs shouted not only "Tiberius in Tiberim," but "Terram matrem deosque Manes," in order that his lot might be among the impii beneath the earth.236
So far we have met with nothing to suggest that the Roman idea of divinity had passed much beyond an advanced type of animism; we have found little or no trace of personal deities of a polytheistic cast. There is, however, a fact of importance now to be considered, which has some bearing upon this difficult subject. Some of the numina of the calendar had special priests attached to their cults; e.g. among those I have already mentioned, Volcanus, Furrina, Portunus, and Volturnus, to which we may now add Pales, Flora, Carmenta, Pomona, and a wholly unknown deity, Falacer. These nine all had flamines, a word which is generally derived from flare, i.e. they were the kindlers of the sacrificial fire.237 Sacrificing priests they undoubtedly always were, each limited to the sacrificial rites of a particular cult, unless authorised by religious law to undertake those of some other deity whose name he did not bear, and who was destitute, like Robigus, of a priest of his own.238 We have no certain evidence that all these flamines were of high antiquity; but those attached to deities of the calendar were probably of earlier origin than that document, and as we have no record of the creation of a new flaminium in historical times until the era of Caesar-worship, it is fair to conclude that the others I have mentioned were not younger.123
Now what bearing has this fact on the question as to how the early Romans conceived the objects of their worship? There are, of course, so-called priests all the world over, even among the lowest fetishistic and animistic peoples, who exercise power over the various kinds of spirits by potent charms and spells; these should rather be called wizards, medicine-men, magicians, and so on.239 But the flamines as we know them were not such; they were officials of a State, entrusted with the performance of definite ritualistic duties, more particularly with sacrifice, and therefore, as we may assume from universal Roman practice so far as we know it, also with prayer. If they did not actually slay the victims themselves—and in historical times this was done by an assistant—they superintended the whole process and were responsible for its correct performance.240 Does the existence of such priests come into relation with the development of the idea of a deus out of a numen or a spirit? What is the influence of the sacrificing priest on the divinity whom he serves? This last is a question to which it is not easy to find a ready answer; the history of priesthood, and of the moral and intellectual results of the institution, has yet to be written. Even Dr. Westermarck, in his recently published great work on the development of moral ideas, has little to say of it. It is greatly complicated by the undoubted fact that among many peoples, perhaps to some extent even among the Latins, the earliest real priests had a tendency to personate the deity themselves, to be considered as the deity, or in some sense divine.241 But in regard to Roman priests we may, I think, go at least as far as this. When a spirit was named and localised as a friendly being at a particular spot within the walls of the city, which is made over to him, and where he has his ara; when the ritual performed at this spot is laid down in definite detail, and undertaken by an individual appointed for this purpose by the head of the community with solemn ceremony; then the spirit, hitherto but vaguely124 conceived, must in course of time become individualised. The priestly if not the popular conception of him is fixed; there is now no question who he is or how he should be called; "quis deus incertum est"242 can no longer be said of him. Once provided with a flamen and an ordered cult of sacrifice and prayer, I conceive that he had now in him the possibility of turning into a deus personally conceived, if he came by the chance.243 A few did get the chance; others did not; Volcanus, for example, became a god after the model of the Greek Hephaestus, while Volturnus remained a numen and made no further progress, though he was doubtless ready to "take" the Graecising epidemic when it came. I do not say that he or any other numen was the better for the change. But I must not now pursue the story of this strange double fate of the old Roman deities; I have perhaps said enough to show that city life, with its priesthoods and its ordered ritual, had some appreciable effect on the deities who were admitted to it.
Among these deities there were four of whom I have as yet said nothing at all, though they are the most famous of all the divine inhabitants of Rome. I have mentioned nine flamines; there were in all twelve, and besides these there was in historical times a priest known as the rex sacrorum, the republican successor to some of the religious functions of the civil king. This rex, and the three flamines maiores, so called in contra-distinction to the other nine, were specially attached to the cults of Janus, Jupiter (Flamen Dialis), Mars (Flamen Martialis), and Quirinus (Flamen Quirinalis). I have kept these deities apart from the others already mentioned, not only because their priests stand apart from the rest, but because they themselves seem from the first to have been more really gods (dei); Quirinus is the only one who has an adjectival name. Two of them, Jupiter and Mars, remained throughout Roman history of real importance to the State, and in Jupiter there were at least some germs of possible development into a deity capable of influencing125 conduct and enforcing morality. Of Janus this cannot possibly be said; and as he is historically the least important of the four, I will begin by saying a few words about him as a puzzle and a curiosity only.
Janus, ever since he ceased to be an intelligible deity, has been the sport of speculators; and this happened long before the Roman religion came to an end. In the last century b.c. philosophic writers about the gods got hold of him, and Varro tells us that some made him out to be the heaven, others the universe (mundus).244 Ovid amused himself with this uncertainty of the philosophers, and in the first book of his Fasti "interviewed" the god, whose answers are unluckily of little value for us.245 At various times and in different hands Janus has been pronounced a sun-god, a heaven-god, a year-god, a wind-god; and now a Cambridge school of speculators, to whose learning I am in many ways indebted, has claimed him as an oak-god, the mate of Diana, the Jupiter of aboriginal Latium, and so on.246 We have fortunately long left behind us the age when it was thought necessary to resolve the Greek and Roman gods into personifications of natural phenomena, and to try to explain all their attributes on one principle; but my learned friends at Cambridge have of late been showing a tendency to return to methods not less dangerous; they hanker, for example, after etymological evidence, which in the case of deities is almost sure to be misleading unless it is absolutely certain, and supported by the history of the name. This is unluckily not the case with Janus; his etymology is matter of dispute,247 and he is therefore open, and always will be so, to the inquirer who is hunting a scent, and more concerned to prove a point than to discover what the early Romans really thought about a god. In this lecture I am but humbly trying to do this last, and I may therefore leave etymology, with the mythology and philosophy of a later age, and confine myself to such facts of the cult of Janus as are quite undisputed. They will admit of being put together very shortly.126
The first and leading fact is that Janus was the first deity to be addressed in all prayers and invocations; of this we have abundant evidence, as also of the corresponding fact that Vesta came last.248 Secondly, we know that he was the object of worship on the Kalends of January, and probably of every month, and that the sacrificing priest was in this case the rex sacrorum. Thirdly, we know that he had no temple until the year 260 b.c., but that he was associated with the famous gateway at the north-east end of the Forum—not a gate in the wall, but a symbolic entrance to the heart of the city, as the round temple of Vesta at the opposite end, with its eternal fire, was symbolic of the common life of the community. Fourthly, we know a few cult-titles of Janus, among them Clusius (or Clusivius), and Patulcius, in which the connection with gates is obvious; Junonius, which may have originated in the fact that Juno also was worshipped on the Kalends; Matutinus, which seems to be a late reference to the dawn as the opening or gate of the day, and Quirinus, which last is also almost certainly of late origin. Clusius and Patulcius are genuine old titles, if the text of the Salian hymn is rightly interpreted; so too is another, Curiatius, for it was used of the god only as residing in an ancient gateway near the Subura called the tigillum sororium.249 These are all the most important facts we have to go upon; the double head of Janus on the earliest Roman as is of uncertain origin, and Wissowa seems to have conclusively shown that this representation was not admitted to the gate called Janus Geminus until towards the close of the republican period.250 The connection of the god with the fortress on the hill across the Tiber, which still bears his name, admits of no quite satisfactory explanation.
Now if we recall the fact that the entrance to the house and the entrance to a city were points of great moment, and the cause of constant anxiety to the early Italian mind, we may naturally infer that they would be127 in the care of some particular numen, and that his worship would be in the care of the head of the family or community—in the case of the city, in the care of the rex, whose duties of this kind were afterwards taken over by the priest called rex sacrorum. The fact that the word for an entrance was ianus confirms this conjecture; Janus was perhaps the spirit guarding the entrance to the real wall of the earliest city, but when the city was enlarged in the age from which the calendar dates, a symbolic gateway was set up where you entered the forum from the direction of Latium, answering to the symbolic hearth in the aedes Vestae, and this very naturally took the name of the deity associated with entrances. Two other iani probably existed in the forum, and the name was later on transferred as a substantive to similar objects in Roman colonies, while a feminine form, ianua, came to be used for ordinary house entrances.251 Whether there ever was a cult of the god at the real gateway of a city we do not know; there was none at the symbolic gateway of Rome, which was in no sense a temple. But the idea of entrance stuck to the old spirit of the doorway long after the reconstruction of the city, and the rex now sacrifices to him on the entrance-day of each month, and more particularly on the entrance-day of the month which bears his name and is the beginning of the natural year after the winter solstice. This is the best account to be had of the original Janus,252 a deity, let it be remembered, of a simple agricultural and warlike people, without literature or philosophy. But it is not difficult to see how, when philosophy and literature did at last come in a second-hand form to this people, they might well have overlaid with cobwebs of story and speculation a deity for whom they had no longer any real use, who was best known to them by the mysterious double-head on the as and the gateway, and for whom they could find no conclusive parallel among the gods of Greece.
Next in order of invocation to Janus came Jupiter,128 and his priest, the Flamen Dialis, was likewise the second in rank, according to ancient rule, after the rex sacrorum. Unlike Janus, Jupiter (to use the spelling familiar in England) was at all times a great power for the Roman people, and one who could be all the more valued because he was intelligible. No one doubted then, and no one doubts now, that he was the god of the light and of heaven, Diovis pater, or rather perhaps the heaven itself253 with all its manifestations of rain and thunder, of blessing and damage to the works of man; the common inheritance of the Italian peoples, dwelling and worshipped in their woods and on their hills; and, as we know now, also the common inheritance of all Aryan stocks, the "European Sky-god," as Mr. A. B. Cook has traced him with learning and ingenuity from the Euxine to Britain.254
Jupiter must have had a long and important history in Latium before the era of the Roman City-state; Dr. Frazer has seen this, and set it forth in his lectures on the early history of the kingship, though basing his conclusions on evidence much of which will not bear a close examination.255 The one substantial proof of it lies in the unique and truly extraordinary character of the taboos placed on his flamen, and to some extent on the flamen's wife, by the Roman ius divinum. Even if we suppose that some of these may have been later inventions of an ecclesiastical college like the pontifices (and this is hardly probable), many of them are obviously of remote antiquity, and can only have originated at a time when the magical power of the man responsible for the conduct of Jupiter was so precious that it had to be safeguarded in these many curious ways. I have already suggested that the scene of the early paramount importance of Jupiter and his flamen, in that age perhaps a king of some kind, was Alba Longa, which by universal tradition was the leading city of Latium before Rome rose to importance, and where the sky-god was worshipped on his holy mountain as the religious centre of 129Latium from the earliest times. I have also suggested that when the new warlike city on the Tiber took the place of Alba, the worship was transferred thither, but lost its strength in the process, and that the flamen was little more than a survival even in the most primitive period of what we may call for the moment Roman history. This can be accounted for by the fact that the traditions of primitive Rome were connected much more closely with Mars than with Jupiter. Not till Etruscan kings founded the great temple on the Capitol, which was to endure throughout all later ages of Roman dominion, did the sky-god become the supreme guardian deity of his people, under the titles of Optimus Maximus, the best and greatest of all her deities.
But Jupiter was there; and we know certain facts of his cult which give us a pretty clear idea of what the Romans of the pre-Etruscan period thought about him. In the calendar all Ides belonged to him, were feriae Iovis;256 he seems to be the source of light, whether of sun or moon, for neither of which the Romans had any special divinity; in the hymn of the Salii he is addressed as Lucetius, the giver or source of light. The festivals of the vintage belonged to him, since the production of wine specially needed the aid of sun and light, and his flamen was employed in the cult on these occasions.257 When rain was sorely needed, the aid of the sky-god was sought under the cult-title Elicius, and as Fulgur or Summanus258 he was the Power who sent the lightning by day and by night. The ideas thus reflected in the Roman cult were common to all Italian peoples of the same stock; everywhere we find him worshipped on the summits of hills, and in woods of oak, ilex, or beech,259 where nothing but the trees he loved intervened between the heaven and the earth.
His oldest cult at Rome was on the Capitoline hill, but at all times quite distinct from that which became so famous afterwards; he was known here as Feretrius, a cult-title of which the meaning is uncertain,260 and here, so far as we can guess, there must have been an ancient oak130 regarded either as the dwelling of the numen or as the numen himself, upon which Romulus is said to have hung the spolia opima taken from the king of the Caeninenses;261 here we may see the earliest trace of the triumphal procession that was to be. Doubtless an ara was here from the first, and then followed a tiny temple, only fifteen feet wide as Dionysius describes it from personal knowledge in the time of Augustus,262 who restored it. There was no image of the god, but in the temple was kept a silex, probably a stone celt believed to have been a thunderbolt;263 this stone the Fetiales took with them on their official journeys, and used it in the oath, per Iovem lapidem, with which they ratified their treaties. As the Romans thought of Jupiter, not as a personal deity living in the sky like Zeus, but rather as the heaven itself, so they could think of him as immanent in this stone, Iuppiter lapis. And the use of the flint in treaty-making suggests another aspect of the god, which he retained in one way or another throughout Roman history; it is his sanction that is called in to the aid of moral and legal obligations, resulting from treaties, oaths, and contracts such as that of marriage. As Dius Fidius he was invoked in the common Roman oath medius fidius; as Farreus (if this were an old cult-title) he gave his sanction to the solemn contract entered into in the ancient form of marriage by confarreatio, where his flamen had to be present, and where in all probability the cake of far was eaten as a kind of sacrament by the parties to the covenant.264 In much of this it is tempting to see, as we can see nowhere else in the Roman religion, faint traces of a feeling about the heaven-god brought from a remote pastoral life under the open sky, where neither forest nor mountain intervened to shelter man from the great Presence;265 and it is also tempting to think that there was here, even for Latins who had learnt to worship Jupiter under the form of stocks and stones in the land of their final settlement, some chance of the development of a deity "making for righteousness."131
Third and fourth in the order of invocation came Mars and Quirinus, and the same order held good for their flamines. These two priests may have been subject to some of the taboos which restricted the Flamen Dialis;266 they too, that is, may have been to some extent precious, and have been endowed in a lost period of history with magical powers; but if so, the memory and importance of such disabilities was rapidly forgotten in the City-state, and they were early allowed to fill civil offices, a privilege which the Dialis did not attain till the second century b.c.267 Of the sacrificial duties of the Martialis we know nothing for certain, and can get no help from him as to the ideas of the early Romans about their great deity Mars.
Mars is in some ways the most interesting of all the Roman deities; but except as the familiar war-god of Roman history he remains a somewhat doubtful conception. Like Jupiter and Janus he has attained to a real name; but of that name, which in various forms is still so often on our lips, no convincing account has ever been given. Comparative mythology used to be much occupied with him, and he has been compared with Indra, Apollo, Odin, and others. But as M. Reinach said, it is time to attend more closely to differences; and Mars seems to stand best by himself, as a genuine Italian religious conception. His name is found all over ancient Italy in various forms—Mavors, Mamers, Marmor, and as Cerfus Martius at Iguvium. His wild and warlike character, his association with the wolf and the spear, seem to suggest the struggle for existence that must have gone on among the tribes that pushed down into a peninsula of rugged mountain and dense forest, abounding with the wolves which are not yet wholly extinct there. Whether or no his antecedents are to be found in other lands, we shall not be far wrong in assuming that the Roman Mars was the product of life and experience in Italy, and Italy only.
There is an excellent general account of him in132 Roscher's article in his Lexicon, which, like that on Janus, has the advantage of being the result of a second elaborate study, free from the enticements of the comparative method. What we know for certain about his cult at Rome in early times can be very briefly stated. First, we have the striking fact that he is conspicuous, together with the Lares, in the carmen which has come down to us as sung by the Arval Brethren in their lustration of the cultivated land of the Roman city:268 "Neve luerve Marmor sins incurrere in pleores, satur fu fere Mars!" One is naturally inclined to ask how this wild and warlike spirit can have anything to do with cultivation and crops. But there is no mistake; the connection is confirmed by the fact that he is also the chief object of invocation in the private lustratio of the farm, which Cato has preserved for us.269 In each case the victims are the same, the suovetaurilia of ox, sheep, and pig, the farmer's most valuable property. Again, let us remember that the month which bears his name is that not only of the opening of the war season, but of the springing up of vegetation, and that the dances and singing of the Salii at this time may probably have been meant, like similar performances of savage peoples,270 to frighten away evil demons from the precious cultivated land and its growing produce, and to call on the Power to wake to new life. The clue to the mystery is perhaps to be found in the cult-title Silvanus which we find in the prayer set down by Cato as proper for the protection of the cattle when they are on their summer pasture (in silva): "Marti Silvano in silva interdius in capita singula boum facito."271 We know that wealth in early Italy consisted chiefly of sheep and cattle; we know that these were taken in the warm months, as they still are, into the forest (saltus) to feed;272 and from this passage of Cato we know that Mars was there. It is only going one step farther if we conjecture that Mars, like Silvanus, who may have been an offshoot of his own being, was for the early settler never a peaceful inhabitant of the farm or the dwelling, but a spirit of the woodland133 of great importance for the cattle-owner, and of great importance, too, in all circumambulation of the boundaries which divided the woodland from the cultivated land.273
But with conjecture I deal on principle but sparingly. It is time to turn to the Mars of the City-state of Rome; and it is at once interesting to find that until the age of Augustus, who introduced a new form of Mars-worship, he had no temple within the walls, and even outside only two fana, one an altar in his own field the Campus Martius, the other a temple dedicated in 388 b.c. outside the Porta Capena. "He was always worshipped outside the city," says Dr. J. B. Carter in his Religion of Numa, "as a god who must be kept at a distance." Should we not rather say that the god was unwilling to come within those sacred boundaries encircling the works of man? So stated, we may see in this singular fact a reminiscence of the time when Mars was really the wild spirit of the "outland," where wolves and human enemies might be met with; he was perhaps in some sense a hostis, a stranger, like the many other deities originally strange to Rome who, until the second Punic war, were never allowed to settle within the sacred precincts.274 In one sense, however, Mars was actually resident in the very heart of the city. In a sacrarium or chapel of the regia,275 the ancient dwelling of the king, were kept the spears and shields which the Salii carried in their processions in March and October; and that the deity was believed to be there too must be inferred from the fact, if it be correctly stated by Servius, that the consul who was about to take the field entered the chapel and shook these spears and shields together, saying, "Mars vigila." I am, however, rather disposed to think that this practice belongs to a time when Mars was more distinctly recognised as a god of war, and when the weapons of the Salii were thought of rather as symbols of his activity than as objects in which he was immanent.276
These are the salient facts in the oldest cult of Mars, and they are entirely in keeping with all we know of the134 early history and economy of the Roman people—a people economically dependent on agriculture, and especially on cattle-breeding, living in settlements in the midst of a wilder country, and constantly liable to the attacks of enemies who might raid their cattle and destroy their crops. I do not see in him only a deity of agriculture, or only a god of war; in my view he is a spirit of the wilder regions, where dwell the wolf and woodpecker which are connected with him in legend: a spirit who dwells on the outskirts of civilisation, and can with profit be propitiated both for help against the enemies beyond, and for the protection of the crops and cattle within, the boundaries of human activity.
Fourth in invocations came Quirinus, and fourth in order of precedence was his flamen. But of Quirinus I need say little; there is, on the whole, a consensus of opinion that he was a form of Mars belonging to the community settled on the hill that still bears his name. The most convincing proof of his identity with Mars (though identity is doubtless too strong a word) lies in the well-known fact that there were twelve Salii Collini, i.e. belonging to the Collis Quirinalis, occupied with the cult of Quirinus, answering to the twelve Salii Palatini of the cult of Mars. "Quid de ancilibus vestris," Camillus says in Livy's glowing rhetoric, "Mars Gradive (the particular cult-title of the warlike Mars), tuque Quirine pater?"277 Now the Quirinal was, of course, within the walls, and the Romans who identified the two deities noted this point of contrast with the Mars-cult; for Servius writes, "Quirinus est Mars qui praeest paci et intra civitatem colitur, nam belli Mars extra civitatem templum habet." In keeping with this is the use of the word Quirites of the Romans in their civil capacity; but unluckily we are altogether uncertain as to the etymology and history of both Quirites and Quirinus.278 And as Quirinus never became, like Mars, an important property of the Roman people, but was speedily obscured and only revived by the legend of late origin which identified him with135 Romulus, he is not of importance for my subject, and I may leave him to etymologists and speculators.
There is one other deity of whom I might naturally be expected to say something; I mean Juno. But our familiarity with Juno in Roman literature must not be allowed to lead us into believing too rashly that she was one of those great numina of the early Roman State with whom I have just been dealing. She had no special festival in the calendar;279 her connection with the Kalends she shared, as we have seen, with Janus. She had no special priest of her own; for in spite of all assertions that the flaminica Dialis was attached to her cult, I am convinced that I was right some years ago in maintaining that this is an error, though a natural one.280 It cannot be proved that she had any ancient temple in the city; for the oldest known to us as strictly indigenous, that of Juno Moneta on the arx, was not dedicated till 344 b.c., and we do not know that there was an older altar on the same spot.281 Assuredly Rome was not in early times a great centre of the Juno cult, as were some of the cities in her neighbourhood, e.g. Lanuvium, Falerii, and Veii;282 and the gradual establishment of her position as a truly Roman goddess may be explained by her appearance in the trias of deities in the Capitoline temple at the end of the regal period, and by the removal to Rome of Juno Regina of Veii still later, after the destruction of that city.
What, then, was Juno originally to the Roman religious mind? There is no more difficult question than this in our whole subject; as we probe carefully in those dark ages she baffles us continually. Undoubtedly she was a woman's deity, and we may aptly say of her "varium et mutabile semper femina." The most singular fact we know about her cult is that women used to speak of their Juno as men spoke of their Genius;283 and it is not by any means impossible that this may be the clue to the original Italian conception of her.284 In that case we should have to explain her appearance as a well-defined goddess in so many Latin towns, as the anthropomorphising result of136 that penetration of Greek ideas into Latium from the south, of which I shall have something to say later on. Such ideas, when they reached Rome, may have produced the notion that she was the consort of Jupiter, for which I must confess that I can find no sufficient evidence in the early cult of either.285 But I must here leave her, for in truth she does not belong to this lecture; and it would need at least one whole lecture to discuss her adequately in all her later aspects. The latest German discussion of her occupied sixty closely printed pages; and instructive as it was in some ways, arrived at the apparently impossible conclusion that she was a deity of the earth.
Last in the order of invocation, even to the latest days of Rome, came Vesta, "the only female deity among the highest gods of the most ancient State,"286 for Juno can hardly be reckoned among them, and Tellus had no special cult or priesthood of her own. We have already noticed Vesta as the religious centre of the house, making it into a home in a sense almost more vivid than that in which we use the sacred word. Through all stages of development from house to city this religious centre must have been preserved, and in the Rome of historical times Vesta was still there, inherent in her sacred hearth-fire, which was tended by her six virgin priestesses, and renewed on the Roman New Year's day (March 1) by the primitive method of friction.287 The Vestals beyond doubt represented the unmarried daughters of the primitive Latin family, and the penus Vestae, a kind of Holy of Holies of the Roman State, recalled the penus or store-closet of the agricultural home; this penus was cleansed on June 15 for the reception of the first fruits of the harvest, and then closed until June 7 of the following year.288 These and other simple duties of the Vestals, all of them traceable to the old life on the farm, together with their own sex and maidenhood, preserved this beautiful cult throughout Roman history from all contamination. Vesta in her aedes, a round dwelling which was never a temple in the technical sense, was represented by no137 statue, and her title of Mater never suggested to the true Roman worshipper anything but her motherly grace and beneficence.289 Far more than any other cult, that of Vesta represents the reality and continuity of Roman religious feeling; and the remains of her latest dwelling, and the statues of her priestesses with no statue of herself among them, may still give the visitor to the Forum some dim idea of the spirit of Roman worship.290
NOTES TO LECTURE VI
219 Arnobius (v. 155) fortunately mentions that this story came from the second book of Valerius Antias, whose bad reputation is well known. It was plainly meant to account for the cult-title of Jupiter Elicius, and the origin of the procuratio fulminis, and was invented by Greeks or Graecising Romans at a time (2nd century b.c.) when all reverence for the gods had vanished as completely as in Greece. Yet Dr. Frazer writes of Numa as "an adept at bringing down lightning from heaven" (Early History of Kingship, p. 204).
220 On this subject, the evolution of the knowledge of God, I may refer to Professor Gwatkin's Gifford Lectures of 1904-5, published by Messrs. T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh.
221 The meaning of deus is well put by Mr. C. Bailey in his sketch of Roman Religion (Constable & Co.), p. 12.
222 Guesses can be made about these, but little or nothing is to be learnt from them to help us in this lecture.
223 I adhere to what was said in R.F. p. 312 foll. We do not know, and probably never shall know, the original deity concerned in that festival. The ritual is wholly unlike that of the rustica Faunalia (R.F. p. 256 foll.). I believe that it dates from a time anterior to the formation of real gods—possibly from an aboriginal people who did not know any. (I am glad to see this view taken in the latest summary of German learning on this subject, Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft, by Gaercke and Norden, vol. ii. p. 262.) At the moment of printing an interesting discussion of the Lupercalia, by Prof. Deubner, who treats it as a historical growth, in which are embodied ideas and rites of successive ages, has appeared in Archiv (1910, p. 481 foll.). See Appendix B.
224 Wissowa, R.K. pp. 170 and 250 foll.
225 Strabo, p. 164. Cp. Usener, Götternamen, p. 277, whose comment is, "Die Götter aller dieser Stämme waren 'namenlos,' weil sie nicht mit Eigennamen sondern durch Eigenschaftsworte138 benannt wurden. Für einen griechischen Reisenden vorchristlicher Zeit waren sie nicht fassbar." Arnobius iii. 43, Gellius ii. 28. 2 are good passages for the principle. The latter alludes to the anxiety of veteres Romani on this point, "ne alium pro alio nominando falsa religione populum alligarent." Hence the formulae "si deus si dea," or "sive quo alio nomine fas est nominare," Serv. Aen. ii. 351; "quisquis es," Aen. iv. 576. See also Farnell, Evolution of Religion, 184 foll.; Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, p. 110 foll.
226 Serv. Aen. ii. 351. I am inclined to think it is only an inference from the want of substantival names in so many Roman deities; surely, it would be argued, the pontifices must have had some reason for this. It is contradicted by the fact that in such ancient formulae as that of the devotio (Livy viii. 9) the great gods are called by their own names, though the army was in the field and in presence of the enemy. There was, however, an old idea that the name of the special tutelary god of the city was never divulged, lest he should become captivus, and that the true name of the city itself was unknown; see Macrob. iii. 9. 2 foll. I believe that these ideas were encouraged by the pontifices, but were not founded on fact.
227 For the Indigitamenta see below, p. 159; R.F. p. 341; R. Peter's able article in Myth. Lex., s.v. Scholars do not seem to me to have reckoned sufficiently with the tendency of a legal priesthood, devoted to the strict maintenance of religious minutiae, to elaborate and organise the material for god-making which was within their reach. To judge by the elaboration of the ritual at Iguvium, the same tendency must have existed in other kindred Italian communities, both to develop ritualistic priesthoods, and through them to elaborate the ritual. This is, I think, the weak point of Usener's reasoning in his Götternamen, and as applied to Roman deities it is the weak point of an interesting article by von Domaszewski, reprinted in his Abhandlungen zur röm. Religion, p. 155 foll.
228 The best account of Tellus is in Wissowa, R.K. p. 159 foll.
229 R.F. p. 71; Ovid, Fasti, iv. 631 foll. This was a festival of the populus as a whole, and also of each Curia, like the Fornicalia in February. Both were clearly agricultural in origin, though the Curia as we know it was probably an institution of the city. I must own that I am quite uncertain as to what the thing was which was originally meant by the word Curia; my friend Dr. J. B. Carter may have something to say on the subject in his book on the Roman religion in the Jastrow series.
230 Dieterich, Mutter Erde, pp. 11 and 73 foll.
231 Virg. Aen. iv. 166, "prima et Tellus et pronuba Iuno Dant signum"; commenting on which Servius wrote, "quidam sane etiam Tellurem praeesse nuptiis tradunt; nam et in auspiciis nuptiarum invocatur: cui etiam virgines, vel cum ire ad domum mariti coeperint, vel iam ibi positae, diversis nominibus vel ritu sacrificant." There is little doubt that Tellus is frequently concealed under the names of139 Ceres, Dea Dia, etc. For Ceres and Juno in marriage rites, see Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 49.
232 See below, p. 206 foll.; Macrob. iii. 9. 11; Deubner in Archiv, 1905, p. 66 foll.
233 See De Marchi, La Religione, etc., i. p. 188 and reff. (The reference to Gellius should be iv. 6. 7, not iv. 67.) Like some other operations of the Roman religion, this became a form, and was used as a kind of insurance, whether or no there had been any omission; Wissowa, R.K. p. 160.
234 That Ceres represented the fructus is shown by the fact that in the XII. Tables the man who raided a field of standing corn at night was made sacer to her; Pliny, N.H. xviii. 12.
235 Cato, R.R. 134. De Marchi, op. cit. p. 135. Janus, Jupiter, and Juno are concerned in this rite, Ceres coming last. Varro has preserved the part of Tellus for us: "quod humatus non sit, heredi porca praecidanea suscipienda Telluri et Cereri, aliter familia non pura est" (ap. Nonium, p. 163).
236 The verses are quoted by Dieterich, Mutter Erde, p. 75, among others from Buecheler's Anthology of Roman Epitaphs, Nos. 1544 and 1476. The story is told in Suetonius' Life of Tib. c. 75, and again of Gallienus by Aurelius Victor (Caes. c. 33).
237 Marquardt, p. 326, who notes that the Romans themselves derived the word from filum, a fillet; e.g. Varro, L.L. v. 84, "quod in Latio capite velato erant semper, ac caput cinctum habebant filo." Modern etymologists equate the word with Brahman.
238 Thus the Flamen Quirinalis sacrificed at the Robigalia, R.F. p. 89, and with the Pontifices and Vestals took part in the Consualia, Marq. 335.
239 We may note here that the most general Latin name for a priest was sacerdos, which seems to have excluded all magic, etc.; it means an office sanctioned by the State. On the general question of the origin of priesthood see Jevons, Introduction, etc., ch. xx., with whose explanations, however, I cannot entirely agree. I should prefer to keep the word priest for an official who sacrifices and prays to his god. In this view I am at one with E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, i.2 p. 121 foll. God and priest go together as permanent, regular in function, and entrusted by a community with certain duties.
240 Marquardt, p. 180; Wissowa, R.K. p. 427. The popa or victimarius is seen in many artistic representations of sacrifice, e.g. Schreiber, Atlas of Classical Antiquities, plate xvii. figs. 1 and 3.
241 Jevons, ch. xx.; Frazer, G.B. i. 245 foll., and Lectures on Early History of Kingship, Lectures ii. and v.
242 Virg. Aen. viii. 352.
243 In a valuable paper in his Gesammelte Abhandlungen (p. 284) Wissowa says that "personal conception of deity is absolutely strange to the old Roman religion of the di indigetes." I believe this to be140 essentially true; but my point is that localisation and ritual prepared the way for the reception of Greek ideas of personality. The process had already begun in the religion of the house; but it was not likely there to come in contact with foreign germs. When Janus and Vesta, who were in every house (Wissowa, p. 285), were localised in certain points in a city, they would be far more likely to acquire personality, if such an idea came in their way, than in the worship of the family.
244 Aug. Civ. Dei, vii. 28, "quem alii caelum, alii dixerunt esse mundum." Dr. Frazer, citing this passage (Kingship, p. 286) in support of his view that Janus was a duplicate of Jupiter, has omitted to notice that some theorisers fancied he was the universe, which by itself is enough to betray the delusive nature of this kind of theological speculation. Varro elsewhere gives us a clue to the liability of Janus to be exalted in this unnatural fashion, L.L. vii. 27, "divum deo" (in the Salian hymn), if this be taken as referring to Janus, as it may be, comparing Macrob. i. 9. 14. But this is easily explained by the position of Janus in prayers; cp. Cic. Nat. Deor. ii. 27. 67, "cum in omnibus rebus vim haberent maximam prima et extrema, principem in sacrificando Ianum esse voluerunt." The phrase "Deorum" or "Divum deus" is indeed remarkable, and unparalleled in Roman worship; but no one acquainted with Roman or Italian ritual will for a moment suspect it of meaning "God of gods" in either a Christian or metaphysical sense. I shall have occasion to notice the peculiar use of the genitive case and of genitival adjectives in worship later on. See below, p. 153 foll.
245 Fasti, i. 89 foll.; R.F. p. 281 foll.
246 Frazer, l.c. (a page of which every line appears to me to be written under a complete misapprehension of the right methods of research into the nature of Roman gods); A. B. Cook, Classical Review, vol. xviii. 367 foll.; Professor Ridgeway, Who were the Romans? p. 12, where, among other remarkable statements, Janus is confidently said to have been introduced at Rome by the Sabine Numa, and therefore to have been a Sabine deity, an assumption quite irreconcilable with those of Dr. Frazer and Mr. Cook. In striking contrast with such speculations is a sensible paper on Janus in M. Toutain's Études de mythologie et d'histoire, p. 195 foll. (Paris, 1909).
247 Dr. Frazer is aware of this; see his Kingship, p. 285, note 1. See also Roscher in Myth. Lex., s.v. "Janus," p. 45 foll.
248 For the evidence for this and the following facts, see Roscher's article just cited, or Wissowa, R.K. p. 91 foll.; cp. R.F. p. 280 foll. The cult epithets of Janus are thus explained by von Domaszewski, Abhandlungen, p. 223, note 1, "Bei Ianus tritt regelmässig der Begriff des Wesens hinzu, dessen Wirkung er von Anfang an bestimmt, so I. Consevius der Anfang der in Consus wirkenden Kraft, und in derselbe Weise I. Iunonius, Matutinus," etc. This is reasonable, but it does not suit with I. Patulcius-Clusius, and I cannot accept it with confidence at present.141
249 Roscher, op. cit. p. 34.
250 Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 284 foll.
251 Festus, p. 185.
252 It is due to the good sense and learning of Dr. Roscher; he had previously, when working on the old methods, tried to prove that Janus was a "wind-god" (Hermes der Windgott, Leipzig, 1878); but a more searching inquiry into the Roman evidence, when the prepossessions had left him which the comparative method is so likely to produce, brought him to the view I have explained in outline, which has been adopted in the main by Wissowa, Aust, and J. B. Carter, as well as by myself in R.F. The last word about so puzzling a deity can of course never be said; but if we indulge in speculations about him we must use the Roman evidence with adequate knowledge of the criticism it needs.
253 This difference between Zeus and Jupiter has been pointed out by Wissowa, R.K. p. 100; Jupiter stands for the heaven even in classical Latin literature, as we all know.
254 See his papers in the Classical Review, vol. xvii. 270 and xviii. 365 foll., and in Folklore, vol. xv. 301; xvi. 260 foll.
255 Kingship, p. 196 foll.
256 Macrobius i. 15. 14. In historical times a white victim, ovis idulis, was taken to the Capitol by the via sacra in procession (Ov. Fasti, i. 56. 588). Festus says that some derived the term via sacra from this procession (p. 290); and to this Horace may be alluding in Ode iii. 30. 8, "dum Capitolium Scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex."
257 R.F. pp. 86, 204.
258 R.F. p. 160.
259 No doubt Jupiter was specially connected with the oak, as Mr. Cook has shown with great learning in the paper cited above, note 36; but at Rome he had an ancient shrine among beeches, and was known as I. Fagutalis: Varro, L.L. v. 152; Paulus 87. For I. Viminalis, see R.F. p. 229.
260 See Aust's article "Jupiter" in Myth. Lex. p. 673.
261 Aust gives a cut of a coin of the consul Claudius Marcellus (223 b.c.) dedicating spolia opima in this little temple, according to the ancient fashion, supposed to be initiated by Romulus, Livy i. 10.
262 Dionys. Hal. ii. 34.
263 R.F. p. 230.
264 See De Marchi's careful investigation, La Religione, etc., i. p. 156 foll.; Gaius i. 112. The cult-title should indicate that the god was believed to be immanent in the cake of far, rather than that it was offered to him (so I should also take I. Dapalis, though in later times the idea had passed into that of sacrifice, Cato, R.R. 132), and if so, the use of the cake was sacramental; cp. the rite at the Latin festival, R.F. p. 96.
265 There are distinct traces of a practice of taking oaths in the142 open air, i.e. under the sky; of Dius Fidius, unquestionably a form of Jupiter, Varro says (L.L. v. 66), "quidam negant sub tecto per hunc deiurare oportere." Cp. Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 28; R.F. p. 138. For the conception of a single great deity as primitive, see Lang, The Making of Religion, ch. xii.; Flinders Petrie, Religion of Egypt (in Constable's shilling series), ch. i.; Ross, The Original Religion of China, p. 128 foll.; Warneck, Die Lebenskräfte des Evangeliums, p. 20 (of the Indian Archipelago). The last reference I owe to Professor Paterson, of Edinburgh University.
266 Serv. Aen. viii. 552, "more enim veteri sacrorum neque Martialis flamen neque Quirinalis omnibus caerimoniis tenebantur quibus flamen Dialis, neque diurnis sacrificiis distinebatur." It is, however, possible that under the word caerimonia Servius is not here including taboos, but active duties only.
267 See my paper, "The Strange History of a Flamen Dialis," in Classical Review, vol. vii. p. 193.
268 Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 26.
269 Cato, R.R. 141; Henzen, op. cit. p. 48.
270 Frazer, G.B. iii. 123, note 3; R.F. p. 40, for further examples. It may be worth while to point out here that the coupling of all farm animals except goats took place in spring or early summer; Varro, R.R. ii. 2 foll. Isidorus (Orig. v. 33), who embodies Varro and Verrius to some extent, derived the name Mars from mares, because in the month of March "cuncta animalia ad mares aguntur."
271 I prefer, with De Marchi, to take Silvanus here as a cult-title, though we do not meet with it elsewhere; see La Religione, etc., p. 130 note; but Wissowa, who has a prejudice against the view that Mars was connected with agriculture, insists on taking Marti Silvano as a case of asyndeton, i.e. as two deities.
272 See, e.g., Varro, L.L. v. 36, "quos agros non colebant propter silvas aut id genus, ubi pecus possit pasci, et possidebant, ab usu salvo saltus nominarunt."
273 Cato, R.R. 141. Mars is there invoked as able to keep off (averruncare) evil influences and to make the crops grow, etc.; he has become in the second century b.c. a powerful deity in the actual processes of husbandry, just as he became in the city a powerful deity of war. But as he was not localised either on the farm or in the city, I prefer to think that he was originally conceived as a Power outside the boundary in each case, but for that very reason all the more to be propitiated by the settlers within it.
274 See below, p. 235.
275 So Wissowa, R.K. p. 131. Cp. R.F. p. 39, note 4. Deubner in Archiv, 1905, p. 75.
276 Servius, commenting on line 3 of Aen. viii. (utque impulit arma) writes: "nam is qui belli susceperat curam, sacrarium Martis ingressus, primo ancilia commovebat, post hastam simulacri ipsius,143 dicens, Mars vigila." The mention of a statue shows that this account belongs to a late period. But Varro seems to have stated that there was originally only a spear; see a passage of Clement of Alexandria in the fragments of the Ant. rer. div., Agahd, p. 210, to which Deubner (l.c.) adds Arnobius vi. 11. Deubner calls this spear a fetish, which is not the right word if the deity were immanent in it in the sense suggested by "Mars vigila." See above, p. 116. If Servius correctly reports the practice, it must be compared with the clashing of shields and spears by the Salii, which may thus have had a positive as well as negative object.
277 Livy v. 52.
278 Mr. A. B. Cook (Classical Review, 1904, p. 368) has tried to connect both names with the Greek word πρῖνοϛ, and Professor Conway, quoted by him, is inclined to lend the weight of his great authority to the conjecture. Thus Quirinus would be an oak-god, and Quirites oak-spearmen. We must, however, remember that Mr. Cook is, so to speak, on an oak scent, and his keenness as a hunter leads him sometimes astray. One is a little perplexed to understand why Jupiter, Janus, Mars, and Quirinus should all be oak-gods (and all in origin identical as such!). On the other hand, it is fair to note that the original spear was probably of wood, with the point hardened in the fire, like the hasta praeusta of the Fetiales: Festus, p. 101. If quiris has really anything to do with oaks, it would be more natural to explain the two words as springing from an old place-name, Quirium, as Niebuhr did long ago, and to derive that again from the oaks among which it may have stood. But I am content to take quiris as simply a spear, as Buecheler did; see Deubner, op. cit. p. 76. Since the above was written, the article "Quirinus" by Wissowa in the Myth. Lex. has appeared. Naturally it does not add anything to our knowledge; but Wissowa holds to the opinion that the most probable derivation of the name Quirinus is from Quirium, possibly the name of the settlement on the Quirinal; and compares Q. pater (e.g. Livy v. 52. 7) with the Reatinus pater of C.I.L. ix. 4676.
279 The Nonae Caprotinae (July 7), the day when women sacrificed to Juno Caprotina under a wild fig-tree in the Campus Martius, is not known to us except from Varro. See R.F. p. 178, where (note 8) is a suggestion that the festival had to do with the caprificatio, or method of ripening the figs, which Dr. Frazer has expanded in his Lectures on Kingship, p. 270, believing the process to be that of fertilisation.
280 Classical Review, vol. ix. p. 474 foll. The same view has recently been taken independently by W. Otto in Philologus, 1905, pp. 215 foll., 221. It is perfectly clear that the monthly sacrifice to Juno was the duty of the wife of the rex sacrorum; a pontifex minor is also mentioned (Macrob. i. 15. 19).
281 Wissowa, R.K. p. 116.
282 Ib. p. 114.144
283 See Ihm's article "Iunones" in Myth. Lex. vol. ii. 615; Pliny, N.H. ii. 16.
284 Dr. J. B. Carter tells me that he has abandoned this explanation of the evolution of Juno. On the other hand, von Domaszewski seems in some measure to accept it (Abhandlungen, p. 169 foll.), when he says that "similar functions, when exercised by different numina, can eventually produce a god. Auf diese Weise ist Iuno geworden." He means that the creative power is called Juno in a woman, or in a people (Iuno Populonia), or in the curiae (Iuno Curitis), and that an independent deity, Juno par excellence, emerges from all these. But so far I cannot follow him.
285 There is no real evidence from purely Roman sources of this fancied conjugal or other relation, if we exclude that of the alleged cult of Juno by the Flaminica Dialis. This has been well seen and expressed by W. Otto, l.c. p. 215 foll.; see also Classical Review as quoted above. As we shall see in the next lecture, Dr. Frazer is much concerned to show that Jupiter and Juno are actually a married pair, and consequently he will have nothing to do with my opinion on this point: Early History of Kingship, p. 214 foll., and Adonis, Attis, Osiris, ed. 2, p. 410, note 1.
286 Wissowa, R.K. p. 141.
287 Festus, p. 106; Macrob. i. 12. 6.
288 I have discussed the Vestalia and the nature of Vesta and her cult in R.F. p. 145 foll. See also Marquardt, p. 336 foll., and Wissowa, R.K. p. 141 foll.
289 Ovid, Fasti, vi. 296, says that he had been stupid enough to believe that there was a statue in the aedes Vestae, but found out his mistake:—
esse diu stultus Vestae simulacra putavi;
mox didici curvo nulla subesse tholo.
The passage is interesting as showing how natural it was for a Roman of the Graeco-Roman period to suppose that his deities must be capable of taking iconic form. For anthropomorphic representations of Vesta in other places and at Pompeii, see Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 67 foll.
290 See Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome, p. 223 foll. The statues of the virgines vestales maximae, discovered in the Atrium Vestae, all belong to the period of the Empire. They are now in the museum of the Baths of Diocletian.
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145
LECTURE VII
THE DEITIES OF THE EARLIEST RELIGION: GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
In the last lecture we interrogated the calendar as to the deities whose festivals are recorded in it, with the aid of what we know of the most ancient priesthoods attached to particular cults. The result may be stated thus: we found a number of impersonal numina, with names of adjectival form, such as Saturnus, Vertumnus, and so on; others with substantival names, Tellus, Robigus, Terminus; the former apparently functional deities, concerned in the operations of nature or man, and the latter spirits immanent in objects—Mother Earth herself, a stone, the mildew, or (like Janus and Vesta) the entrance and the hearth-fire of human dwellings or cities. Lastly, we found from the evidence, chiefly of the priesthoods, that certain more important divinities stand out from the crowd of spirits, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and Vesta; and we found some reason to think that these, and possibly a few of the others, by becoming the objects of priestly cura and caerimonia at particular spots in the city, were not unlikely to become also in some sense personal deities, to acquire a quasi-human personality, if they came by the chance. In the present lecture I must go rather more closely into such evidence as we possess bearing on the mental conception which these early Romans had formed of the divine beings whom they had admitted within their city.
And, first, we must be quite clear that in those early ages there was nothing in Rome which we can call a146 temple, as we understand the word; nor was there any such representation of a deity as we can call an image or eidolon. The deities were settled in particular spots of ground, which were made loca sacra, i.e. handed over to the deity by the process of consecratio authorised by the ius divinum.291 It was matter of no moment what might be erected on this bit of ground; there might be a rude house like that of Vesta, round in shape like the oldest Italian huts; there might be a gateway like that of Janus; or the spot might be a grove, or a clearing within it (lucus), as in the case of Robigus or the Dea Dia of the Arval Brethren. All such places might be called by the general name fanum; and as a rule no doubt each fanum contained a sacellum, i.e. a small enclosure without a roof, containing a little altar (ara). These "altars" may at first have been nothing more than temporary erections of turf and sods; permanent stone altars were probably a later development. Servius tells us that in later times it was the custom to place a sod (caespes) on the top of such a stone altar, which must be one of the many survivals in cult of the usages of a simpler age.292
With such spots as these we cannot associate anything in the nature of an image of the deity established there; and we have every reason to believe that no such thing was known at Rome until the Etruscan temple of the Capitoline trias was built near the end of the regal period. Varro expressly declared that the Romans remained for more than 170 years without any images of their gods, and added that those who first introduced such images "civitatibus suis et metum dempsisse et errorem addidisse."293 What he had in his mind is clear; he had indeed no direct knowledge of those early times, but he is thinking of a definite traditional date in the kingly period—the last year of the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, who, according to Varro's own account, built the temple on the Capitol and placed in it a statue of Jupiter.294 That was the oldest image of which he knew anything; and, as Wissowa has remarked, his belief is entirely corroborated147 by the fact that in every single case in which the image of a god has any part in his cult, it is always either this Capitoline Jupiter or some deity of later introduction and non-Roman origin. It is also borne out by another significant and interesting fact—that the next image to be introduced, that of Diana in the temple on the Aventine, was a copy of the ξὁανον of Artemis at Massilia, itself a copy of the famous one at Ephesus.295 Let us note that these two earliest statues were placed in roofed temples which were the dwelling-places of gods in an entirely new sense; so far no Roman deity of the city had been so housed, because he could not be thought of in terms of human life, as visible in human form and needing shelter. But this later and foreign notion of divinity so completely took possession of the minds of the Romans of the cosmopolitan city that Varro is the only writer who has preserved the tradition of the older way of thinking. In the religion of the family Ovid indeed has charmingly expressed it, perhaps on the authority of some lost passage of Varro296:—
ante focos olim scamnis considere longis
mos erat, et mensae credere adesse deos.
Tibullus in one passage has mentioned what seems to be some rude attempt to give outward shape and form to an ancient pastoral deity297:—
lacte madens illic suberat Pan ilicis umbrae
et facta agresti lignea falce Pales.
And Propertius hints at a like representation of Vertumnus, the garden deity. But without some corroborative evidence it is hardly safe to take these as genuine examples of early iconic worship.
Thus we may take it as certain that even the greater deities of the calendar, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and Vesta, were not thought of as existing in any sense in human form, nor as personal beings having any human characteristics. The early Romans were destitute of mythological fancy, and as they had never had their deities presented to them in visible form, could hardly148 have invented such stories about them as sprang up in a most abundant crop when Greek literature and Greek art had changed their mental view of divinity. Roman legends were occupied with practical matters, with kings and the foundation of cities; and even among these it is hardly possible to detect those which may be really Roman, for they are hidden away, like rude ancient frescoes, under the elaborate decorations of the Greek artists, who seized upon everything that came to hand, including the old deities themselves, to amuse themselves and win the admiration of their dull pupils at Rome. He who would appreciate the difficulty of getting at the original rude drawings must be well acquainted with the decorative activity of the Alexandrian age.
Thus we might well presume a priori that the old Roman gods were not conceived as married pairs, nor as having children; and this is indeed the conclusion at which we have arrived after half a century or more of most careful and conscientious investigation by a series of German scholars. But quite recently in this country the contrary view has been put forward by an author of no less weight than Dr. Frazer; and another eminent Cambridge scholar, Mr. A. B. Cook, evidently inclines to the same view. I should in any case be reluctant to engage in controversy with two valued personal friends; but it is just possible that in what follows I may be able to throw some faint light on the evolution of the idea of marriage among divine beings; and on the strength of this I am content for the moment to be controversial. Dr. Frazer's arguments, with strictures on my opinions, will be found in an appendix to his book on Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 2nd edition.
In pure animism the spirits are nameless; when their residence and functions are more clearly recognised they acquire names, and these names are naturally masculine or feminine among peoples whose language is not genderless, as was the case with the Sumerians of Babylonia.298 This would seem to be the first step on the path to a149 personal conception of divinity. But there are signs that the Romans had not got very far on this path when we begin to know anything about their religion. I have already alluded to the formula "Sive deus sive dea," which occurs in the ritual of the Fratres Arvales, in the formula given by Cato for making a new clearing, and elsewhere;299 and indeed there seems to have been always some uncertainty about the sex of one or two well-known deities, such as Pales and Pomonus or Pomona.300 It is not, therefore, a priori probable that the process of personalisation (if I may coin the word) should have proceeded, at the period we are treating of, so far as to ascribe to these named deities of both sexes the characteristics of human beings in social life and intercourse. Yet Varro, as Dr. Frazer points out, is quoted by St. Augustine as saying that his ancestors (that is, as Augustine adds), "veteres Romanos," believed in the marriage of gods and in their procreative power.301 If Varro wrote "maiores meos," as he seems to have done, of whom was he really thinking? Was Augustine's comment based on the rest of Varro's text, or was he jumping to a conclusion which would naturally serve his own purpose? Varro, of course, was not a Roman, but from Reate in the Sabine country. But even if he were thinking of Rome, how far back would his knowledge extend? The Romans had known Greek married gods for three or four centuries before his time, and he may quite well be thinking of these. Of the di indigetes of an earlier period he could hardly know more than we do ourselves; his only sources of information were the facts of the cult and the books of the pontifices. The facts of the cult, so far as he and others have recorded them, suggest no pairing of deities, no "sacred marriage."302 The pontifical books, which contained rules and formulae for the proper invocation of deities by their right names, do indeed seem to have suggested a certain conjunction of male and female divine names; and it is just possible that this is what Varro had in his mind when he wrote the passage seized upon by Augustine.150 I will proceed at once to examine this evidence, as it is incidentally of great interest in the history of Italian religion; and Dr. Frazer will probably allow that his conclusion must stand or fall by it.
The evidence to which I allude is preserved in the 13th book of the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius (ch. xxiii.), and extracted from "libri sacerdotum populi Romani," as "comprecationes deorum immortalium"; these also occur, he says, in plerisque antiquis orationibus, i.e. in the invocations to the gods made by the orator at the beginning or end of his speech.303 Among these Gellius found the following conjunctions of divine names: Lua Saturni, Salacia Neptuni, Hora Quirini, Virites Quirini, Maia Volcani, Herie Iunonis, Moles Martis, and Neriene Martis, or Nerio Martis. Now among these conjunctions there are three which obviously do not express pairs of deities, married or other, viz. Virites Quirini, Moles Martis, and Herie Iunonis; the first two of which plainly mean the strength or force of Quirinus and Mars, and the third conjoins two female names. The question is whether the others are to be understood as giving us the names of the "wives" of Saturnus, Neptunus, Quirinus, Volcanus, and Mars. The fact that these are associated with others which cannot mean anything of the kind is itself against this conclusion; but I have carefully examined each pair by the light of such stray information about them as we possess, and have failed to find anything to suggest Dr. Frazer's emphatic conclusion that these are married pairs. I should be tedious if I were to go through the evidence in detail in a lecture like this; but I will take the pair which Gellius himself discusses, and on which Dr. Frazer chiefly relies, Neriene or Nerio Martis: it is the pair about which we know most, and in every way is the most interesting of the set.304
After giving the list of names, Gellius goes on to express his own opinion that Nerio Martis means (like Moles Martis) the virtus or fortitudo of Mars, Nerio being a Sabine word meaning strength or courage;305 and a151 little further he sums up his view thus: "Nerio igitur Martis vis et potentia et maiestas quaedam esse Martis demonstratur." This seems to fit in very comfortably with what can be guessed of the meaning of two of the other pairs, Virites Quirini and Maia Volcani: Maia was explained by another Roman scholar as equivalent to Maiestas.306
But Gellius goes on to quote three passages from old Latin authors in which Nerio (or Neria) appears positively as the wife of Mars; and again concludes that there was also a tradition that these two were coniuges. Of these passages we luckily have the context of one, for it occurs in the Truculentus of Plautus: turning this out (line 515) we find that a rough soldier, arriving at Athens, salutes his sweetheart with the words "Mars peregre adveniens salutat Nerienen uxorem suam"—words which Plautus must have adapted from his Greek original in such a way as to make them intelligible to a Roman audience. Gellius says that he had often heard a learned friend blame Plautus for thus putting a false notion about Mars (that he had a wife) into the mouth of his soldier—"nimis comice"—merely to produce a comic effect. But, he adds, there was some justification for it; for if you read the third book of the annals of Gellius (a namesake who lived in the second century b.c.) you will find that he puts into the mouth of Hersilia, pleading for peace before Ti. Tatius, words which actually make Nerio the wife of Mars: "De tui, inquit, coniugis consilio, Martem scilicet significans." Little, I fear, can be said to the credit of this Gellius;307 he lived in an age when annalists were many and inventive, and long after the Romans had grown accustomed to Greek ideas of the gods; but we may take this passage as evidence of what may have been in his day a popular idea of Mars and his consort. Lastly, Aulus Gellius quotes a brace of lines from one Licinius Imbrex, an old comic writer of the same century, who, in a fabula palliata called Neaera, wrote:152—
nolo ego Neaeram te vocent, aut Nerienem,
cum quidem Marti es in connubium data.
The real question is whether these passages from comic writers and an annalist of no reputation combine to prove that there was an ancient popular idea of Mars as a married god; as to the priestly view of the matter they can, of course, prove nothing. It seems to me that Dr. Frazer is entitled to argue that in the second century b.c. such a popular idea existed,308 which the Roman state religion did not recognise, and which Aulus Gellius, as we have seen, could not agree with. I do not, however, think him entitled to go farther, and to infer that this was an idea of divinity native to Italy or of very old standing. Is it not much simpler to suppose, with a cool-headed scholar whom Dr. Frazer is willing to follow when it suits his turn, that pairs or conjunctions of this kind, the true meaning of which I hope to explain directly, were easily mistaken by the vulgar mind for married god and goddess?309 In those degenerate days of the Roman religion, after the war with Hannibal, to which these writers belong—and all are later than Ennius, the first to make mischief by ridiculing the gods—nothing could be easier than to take advantage of what looked like married life to invent comic passages to please a Roman audience, now consisting largely of semi-educated men who had lost faith in their own religion, and of a crowd of smaller people of mixed descent and nationality. Such passages, in fact, cannot safely be used as evidence of religious ideas, apart from the tendencies of the age in which they were written. Had there really been religious beliefs, rooted in the old Roman mind, about the wedded life of gods and goddesses, it would even then have been dangerous to use them mockingly in comedy. And once more, had there been such genuinely Roman ideas, why, in an age that made for anthropomorphism, did they not find their way into the Roman Pantheon,—why did they survive only in literary allusions, to the bewilderment of scholars like Aulus Gellius?153
The real explanation of these curious conjunctions of masculine and feminine names is, I think, not very hard to come by. Let us remember, in the first place, that they were found in the books of the priests, and that they belonged to forms of prayer—comprecationes deorum immortalium; in other words, they do not represent popular ideas of the deities, but ritualistic forms of invocation. As such they may indeed no doubt be regarded as expressing, or as growing out of, a popular way of thinking of the Power manifesting itself in the universe; but they are themselves none the less, like those strange lists of divine names called Indigitamenta, with which I shall deal directly, the creations of an active professional priesthood, working upon the principle that every deity must be addressed in precisely the correct way and no other, and accounting the name of the deity, as indicating his or her exact function, the most vitally important thing in the whole invocation. I have already pointed out how difficult the early Latin must have found it to discover how to address the numina at work around him, and I shall return to the subject in another lecture; at present all I want to insist upon is that the priests of the City-state relieved him of this anxiety, and indeed must have carried the work so far as to develop a kind of science of divine nomenclature. Every one who has studied the history of religions knows well how strong the tendency is, when once invocation has become ritualised, for the names and titles of the objects of worship to abound and multiply. The Roman Church of to-day still shows this tendency in its elaborate invocation of the Virgin.
With the old Romans the common method of elaboration lay in the invention of cult-titles, of which the different kinds have been distinguished and explained by Dr. J. B. Carter in his treatise "de Deorum Romanorum cognominibus."310 Most of them are suggestive of function or character, as, e.g., Janus Patulcius Clusivius, or Jupiter Lucetius, Ops Opifera; sometimes they doubled the idea, as in Aius Locutius, or Anna Perenna, or Fors154 Fortuna; and in one or two cases they seem to have combined two deities together in rather puzzling conjunctions, which usually, however, admit of some possible explanation, as Janus Junonius, or Ops Consiva (i.e. Ops belonging to Consus).311 In the Iguvian ritual, which is the highly-elaborated work of a priesthood as active as the Roman, we find combinations of not less than four names:312 Cerfe Martie, Praestita Cerfia Cerfi Martii, Tursa Cerfia Cerfi Martii, which may perhaps be rendered "Spirit of Mars, protecting (female) spirit of the (male) spirit of Mars, fear-inspiring (female) spirit of the (male) spirit of Mars."
Such strange multiple combinations as these suggest that expressions like Moles Martis or Virites Quirini are only another form of the usual cult-title, expressing adoration of the power of the deity addressed; and it is only reasonable to explain the others of the same group on the same principle. As we have seen, Roman scholars themselves explained Nerio Martis as equivalent to Virtus Martis; Herie Iunonis probably means something of the same kind; the others are not so easily explained, and guesswork about them is unprofitable. But I hope I have said enough to show that there is absolutely no good ground for supposing that these combinations of names in nominative and genitive indicate a relationship of any kind except a qualitative one. Abstract qualities, let us note, are usually feminine in Latin, and I think it is not improbable that abstractions such as Fides and Salus, which were deified at a very early period at Rome, may have reached divinity by attachment to some god from whom they subsequently became again separated.313 And lastly, we can trace the same tendency to combine names and ideas together far down the course of Roman history; witness the combination of Genius with cities, legions, gods, etc., as well as with the individual man, and again such expressions as Pietas Legionis, by analogy with which von Domaszewski, wrongly as I think, would explain those we have been discussing.314
155Before leaving this complicated and cloudy system of divine nomenclature, it is as well to ask the question once more, even if we cannot answer it, whether if left to itself it might have developed into a polytheistic system of personal deities. I will give my own opinion for what it is worth. I do not think that such a result could have been reached without the magic touch of the Greek poet and artist, or the arrival of Greek deities and their images in Latium. Professor Sayce, in his Gifford lectures on the religion of Babylonia, has shown how the non-Semitic Sumerians knew only of spirits and demons until the Semite arrived in the Persian Gulf with his personal gods of both sexes;315 and I gather that he does not suppose that without such immigration the Sumerian ideas of divinity could have become personalised. The question is not exactly the same at Rome; for there the spirit world had passed into the hands of an organised priesthood occupied with ritual, and especially with its terminological aspect; and the chance of personalisation, if it were there at all, lay in the importance of the functional name. But the question is after all beside the mark; we shall see what happened when the Greeks arrived. We may be content at present to note the fact that they found the functional terminology sufficiently advanced to take advantage of it, and to revolutionise the whole Roman conception of the divine.
Dr. Frazer gives me an opportunity of adverting to another point bearing on the question we are discussing,—the way in which the old Roman thought of his deities. "It is difficult," he says,316 "to deny that the epithets Pater and Mater, which the Romans bestow on so many of their gods, do really imply paternity and maternity; if this implication be admitted, the inference appears to be inevitable that these divine beings were supposed to exercise sexual functions, etc." In a footnote he adds a number of formidable-looking references, meant, I suppose, to prove this point. I have closely examined these passages; what they do prove is simply that many deities156 were called Pater and Mater. Not one even suggests that paternity and maternity were in such cases to be understood literally and, so to speak, physically. The two that come nearest to what he is looking for are those from Varro and Lactantius. Varro says317 that Ops was called Mater because she was identical with Terra, who was, of course, Terra Mater: "Haec enim—
'terris gentes omnes peperit et resumit denuo,
quae dat cibaria,' ut ait Ennius."318 It is clear, then, that neither Varro nor Ennius understood this title of Ops and Terra in Dr. Frazer's sense of the word. The quotation from the early Christian father Lactantius, which contains three well-known lines of Lucilius, might possibly deceive those who neglect to turn it out and read the context; there we find at once that not even Lactantius could attribute to these epithets the meaning which Dr. Frazer wishes to put on them. He would have been as glad to do so as Dr. Frazer himself, though for a very different reason; but what he actually wrote is this:—
"Omnem Deum qui ab homine colitur, necesse est inter solennes ritus et precationes patrem nuncupari, non tantum honoris gratia, verum etiam rationis; quod et antiquior est homine, et quod vitam, salutem, victum praestat, ut pater. Itaque ut Iuppiter a precantibus pater vocatur, etc."319
Dr. Frazer's quotation begins with this last sentence; it is a pity that he did not read the context. If he had read it, his candour would have compelled him to confess that not even a Christian father, with a keen sense of what was ridiculous or degrading in the pagan religion, understood the fatherhood of the gods as he wishes to understand it.
But I am wasting time in pressing this point. Dr. Frazer would hardly have used such an argument if he had not been hard put to it. The figurative use of human relationships is surely a common practice, when addressing their deities, of all peoples who have reached the stage157 of family life. As another distinguished anthropologist says: "The very want of an object tends to supply an object through the imagination; and this will be either the vital energy inherent in things, or the reflex of the human father, who once satisfied his needs (i.e. of the worshipper). So, in Aryan religions, the supreme god is father, Ζεὺς πατἡρ, Diespiter, Marspiter. Ahura-Mazda is a father.... Another analogy shows the relationship of brother and friend, as in the case of Mithra."320 The Romans themselves were familiar from the first with such figurative use of relationship, as was natural to a people in whom the family instinct was so strong; we have but to think of the pater patratus of the Fetiales,321 of the Fratres Arvales, or the Fratres Attiedii of Iguvium. What exactly they understood by Pater and Mater when applied to deities is not so easy to determine: we have not the necessary data. They were never applied, I believe, to imported deities, di novensiles; always to di indigetes, those on whom the original Roman stock looked as their fellow-citizens and guardians. And we shall not be far wrong if we conclude that in general they imply the dependence of the human citizen upon his divine protector, and thus bring the usage into line with that of other Aryan peoples. Behind this feeling of dependence there may have been the idea, handed down from remote ages, that Father Sky and Mother Earth were in a sense the parents of all living things; but there is nothing in the Roman religion to suggest that the two were thought of as personally uniting in marriage or a sexual act.
I will sum up this part of the discussion by translating an admirable passage in Aust's book on the Roman religion, with which I am in cordial agreement322:—
"The deities of Rome were deities of the cult only. They had no human form; they had not the human heart with its virtues and vices. They had no intercourse with each other, and no common or permanent residence; they 158enjoyed no nectar and ambrosia ... they had no children, no parental relation. They were indeed both male and female, and a male and female deity are often in close relations with each other; but this is not a relation of marriage, and rests only on a similarity in the sphere of their operations.... These deities never become independent existences; they remain cold, colourless conceptions, numina as the Romans called them, that is, supernatural beings whose existence only betrays itself in the exercise of certain powers."
They were, indeed, cold and colourless conceptions as compared with the Greek gods of Olympus, whose warmth and colour is really that of human life, of human passions; but the one remarkable and interesting thing about these Roman and Italian numina is the life and force for good or evil which is the very essence of their being. The puzzling combinations we have just been studying are quite enough to illustrate this character. Moles, Virites, Nerio, and perhaps others too, seem to mean the strength or force inherent in the numen; Cerfius, or Cerus, as the Latins called it, Liber, Genius, all are best interpreted as meaning a functional or creative force. Jupiter is the sky or heaven itself, with all its manifestations of activity; Tellus is Mother Earth, full of active productive power. At the bottom of these cold and colourless conceptions there is thus a real idea of power, not supernatural but rather natural power, which may both hurt and benefit man, and which he must attempt to enlist on his side. This enlistment was the task of the Roman priesthood and the Roman government, and so effectually was it carried out that the divine beings lost their vitality in the process.
We shall be better able to follow out this curious fate of the Roman deities in later lectures; here I wish to note one other aspect of the Roman idea of divinity, which will help to explain what I have just been saying about the life and force inherent in these numina.
In most cursory accounts of the Roman religion it has been the practice to lay particular stress upon an immense159 number of "gods," as they used to be called, each of which is supposed to have presided over some particular act or suffering of the Roman from the cradle to the grave—from Cunina, the "goddess" of his cradle, to Libitina who looked after his interment. I have as yet said nothing about all these. I will now briefly explain why I have not done so, and why I hesitate to include them, at any rate in the uncompromising form in which they are usually presented, among the genuine religious conceptions of the earliest period. Later on I shall have further opportunity of discussing them; at the end of this lecture I can only sum up the results of recent research into this curious cloud of so-called deities.
We know of them mainly, but not entirely, from Tertullian, and the de Civitate Dei of St. Augustine.323 These scholarly theologians, wishing to show up the absurdity of the heathen religions, found a mine of material in the great work of Varro on the Roman religious antiquities; and though they found him by no means so elegant a writer as Cicero, they studied him with pains, and have incidentally added immensely to our knowledge both of Varro himself and of the Roman religion. St. Augustine tells us that it was in the last three books of his work that Varro treated of the Roman deities, and that he divided them under the heads of di certi, di incerti, and di selecti. In the first of these he dealt chiefly with those with which we are now concerned: they were certi because their names expressed their supposed activity quite clearly.324 We know for certain that Varro found these names in the books of the pontifices, and that they were there called Indigitamenta:325 a word which has been variously interpreted, and has been the subject of much learned disputation. I believe with Wissowa that it means "forms of invocation," i.e. the correct names by which gods should be addressed.
Thus these lists of names come down to us at third hand: Varro took them from the pontifical books, and the Christian fathers took them from Varro. It is obvious160 that this being the case they need very careful critical examination; and till recently they were accepted in full without hesitation, and without reflection on such questions as, e.g., whether they are psychologically probable, or whether they can be paralleled from the religious experience of other peoples. Some preliminary critical attempts were made about fifty years ago in this direction,326 but the first thoroughgoing examination of the subject was published by R. Peter in the article "Indigitamenta" in Roscher's Mythological Lexicon. This most industrious scholar, though his interpretation of the word Indigitamenta is probably erroneous,327 was the first to reach the definite conclusion that the lists are not really primitive, and do not, as we have them, represent primitive religious thought. It was after a very careful study of this article, which is long enough to fill a small volume, that I wrote in my Roman Festivals of the Indigitamenta as "based on"—not actually representing, I might have added—"old ideas of divine agency, now systematised by something like scientific terminology and ordered classification by skilled legal theologians"; and as "an artificial priestly exaggeration of a primitive tendency to see a world of nameless spirits surrounding and influencing all human life."328
I was not then specially concerned with the Indigitamenta, and only alluded to them in passing. But before my book was published there had already appeared a most interesting work on the names of deities (Götternamen) by H. Usener, a brilliant investigator, which drew fresh attention to the subject. Usener found in mediaeval records of the religion of the heathen Lithuanians what seemed to be a remarkable parallel with this old Roman theology, and he also compared these records with certain facts in what we may call the pre-Olympian religious ideas of the Greeks. "The conclusion which he draws," writes Dr. Farnell329—and I cannot state it better—"is that the Indo-Germanic peoples, on the way to the higher polytheism, passed through an earlier stage161 when the objects of cult were beings whom he designated by the newly-coined words 'Augenblickgötter' and 'Sondergötter'" (gods of momentary or limited function). He went further than this, and claimed that the anthropomorphic gods of Greece and Italy, of the Indo-Iranians, Persians, and Slavs, were developed out of these spirits presiding over special functions and particular moments of human life; but with this latter part of his theory I am not now concerned. What we want to know now is whether in writing thus of the Roman Indigitamenta Usener was using a record which really represents an early stage of religious thought in Italy; and I may add that we should be glad to know whether his Lithuanian records are also to be unhesitatingly relied on.330 As regards Greece, Dr. Farnell has criticised his theories with considerable effect.
The most recent contribution to the discussion of the Roman part of the subject is that of Wissowa, who in 1904 published a paper on "True and False Sondergötter at Rome";331 this is a piece of most valuable and weighty criticism, but extremely difficult to follow and digest. I here give only the main results of it. Wissowa takes two genuine examples of Sondergötter which have come down to us from other sources, and more directly than those mentioned above: the first from Fabius Pictor, the oldest Roman historian,332 and the other from the Acta Fratrum Arvalium.333 Fabius said that the flamen (Cerealis?), when sacrificing to Tellus and Ceres, also invoked the following deities: Vervactor, for the first ploughing, as Wissowa interprets it; Redarator, for the second ploughing; Imporcitor, for the harrowing; Insitor, for the sowing; Oberator, for the top-dressing; Occator, Sarritor, Subrincator, Messor, Convector, Conditor, Promitor, for subsequent operations up to the harvest and actual distribution of the corn for food. Secondly, in the Acta of the Arval Brethren we find, on the occasion of a piaculum caused by the growth of a fig-tree on the roof of the temple of Dea Dia, at the end of a long list of162 deities invoked, and before the names of the divi of the Imperial families, the names of three Sondergötter, Adolenda Commolenda Deferunda, and on another occasion, Adolenda and Coinquenda; these seem beyond doubt to refer to the process of getting the obnoxious tree down from the roof, of breaking it up, and burning it.
In both these examples, which have come down to us more directly than the lists in the Fathers, Wissowa sees assistant or subordinate deities (if such they can be called) grouped around a central idea, that of the main object of sacrifice in each case;334 these are the result of the cura and caerimonia supervised and over-elaborated by pontifical law and ritual. It is, I may add on my own account, most unlikely, and psychologically almost impossible, that any individual farmer should have troubled himself to remember and enumerate by name twelve deities representing the various stages of an agricultural process; and Cato, in fact, says nothing of such ritual. It was the flamen of the City-state, who, when sacrificing to Tellus and Ceres before harvest,335 pictured, or recalled to mind, the various processes of a year of what we may call high farming rather than primitive, under the names of deities plainly invented out of the words which express those processes—words which themselves are certainly not all antique. And in the second example, which dates from the second century a.d., we see that the process of destroying the intruding fig-tree is represented in ritual in exactly the same curious way: the names of the deities, Deferunda and the rest, being invented for the occasion out of the words which express the several acts of the process of destruction. These Arval Brethren of the second century inherited the traditions of their predecessors of an earlier age, and carried out the work of amplification in their invocations by pedantically imitating the pontifices of five or six centuries earlier. They held, in a way which to us is ludicrous, to the old notion that you should try and cover as much ground as possible in worship, and to cover it in detail, so that no chance might be missed of163 securing the object for which you were taking so much trouble.
Now to return to Varro and his lists of names. What is Dr. Wissowa's conclusion about these, after examining the two examples of Sondergötter which have not come down to us through so much book-learning as the rest?
Varro's di certi, he says336—and I think there is no doubt that he is right—included the name of every deity, great or small, of which he could feel sure that he knew something, as he found it in the books of the pontifices; and the part of those books in which he found these names, known as Indigitamenta, probably contained formulae of invocation, precationum carmina,337 of the same kind as the comprecationes deorum immortalium from which Gellius quoted the pairs of male and female deities which we discussed above. Varro arranged all these names in groups of principal and subordinate or assistant deities, the latter amplifying in detail the meaning and scope of the former, as we have just seen; and of this grouping some traces are still visible in the accounts of Augustine and Tertullian. But the good Fathers tumbled the whole collection about sadly in their search for material for their mockery, having no historical or scientific object in view; with the result that it now resembles the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, and can no longer be re-arranged on the original Varronian plan. The difficulty is increased by the etymologies and explanations which they offer of the divine names, which, as a rule, are even more absurd than the divinities themselves.338
But, in the last place, the question must be asked whether these Sondergötter of the real kind, such, for example, as those twelve agricultural ones invoked by the flamen at the Cereale sacrum, had their origin in any sense in popular usage or belief. At the end of his paper Wissowa emphatically says that he does not believe it. For myself, I would only modify this conclusion so far as this: they must, I think, have been the theological,164 or perhaps rather the ritualistic outcome, of a psychological tendency rooted in the popular mind. I have already noticed that curious bit of folklore in which three spirits of cultivation were invoked with a kind of acted parable at the birth of a child;339 and I cannot regard this custom as a piece of pontifical ritualism, though the names may have been invented by the priests to suit the practice. The old Roman seems to have had a tendency to ascribe what for want of a better word we may call divinity, not only to animate and inanimate objects, but to actions and abstractions; this, I take it, is an advanced stage of animism, peculiar, it would seem, to a highly practical agricultural people, and it is this stage which is reflected in the ritualistic work of the priests. They turned dim and nameless powers into definite and prehensible deities with names, and arranged them in groups so as to fall in with the life of the city as well as the farm. What was the result of all this ingenuity, or whether it had any popular result at all, is a question hardly admitting of solution. What is really interesting in the matter, if my view is the right one, is the curious way in which the early Roman seems to have looked upon all life and force and action, human or other, as in some sense associated with, and the result of, divine or spiritual agency.
NOTES TO LECTURE VII
291 For loca sacra and consecratio see Marquardt, p. 148 foll.; Wissowa, R.K. p. 400.
292 Serv. ad Aen. xii. 119, "Romani moris fuerat cespitem arae super imponere, et ita sacrificare." Cp. some valuable remarks of Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 23. The altar of the Fratres was in front of their grove; they used also a movable one (foculus) of silver, but cespiti ornatus (ib. p. 21): this was for the preliminary offering of wine and incense (Wissowa, R.K. p. 351).
293 In Aug. Civ. Dei, iv. 31; Agahd's edition of the fragments of Varro's Ant. rer. div. p. 164.
294 Aug. Civ. Dei, iv. 23; Agahd, p. 159. See Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 280 foll.
295 Strabo iv. 180.165
296 Fasti, vi. 305.
297 Tibull. ii. 5. 27. The lines of Propertius are iv. (v.) 2. 59, "Stipes acernus eram, properanti falce dolatus, Ante Numam grata pauper in urbe deus." The question is whether these are genuine examples of the natural evolution of a "stock or stone" into something in the nature of an anthropomorphic image of a deity, or whether they are the result of the introduction of Greek statues acting on the popular mind in rustic parts of Italy. The passages, so far as I know, stand alone, and we have no means of deciding whether the anthropomorphic tendency was native or foreign. Vortumnus was, however, undoubtedly of Etruscan origin; Wissowa, R.K. p. 233. The subject of iconic development of this kind is well summarised in E. Gardner's little volume on Religion and Art in Ancient Greece, ch. i.
298 See Sayce, Gifford Lectures on the Religions of Egypt and Babylonia, p. 302. An interesting paper on the evolution of dei at Rome out of functional numina will be found in von Domaszewski's Abhandlungen zur röm. Religion, p. 155 foll., based on Usener's theory of Sondergötter. It is ingenious and imaginative, but in my view does not square with the facts as far as we know them. His stages are: (1) momentary function of numina, e.g. lightning; (2) elevation of this into a permanent power or function; (3) consequent limitation of the numen to a special well-marked function; (4) elevation of the numen to a deus, conceived in the likeness of man, and male or female, because man cannot think of power otherwise than on the analogy of male or female creative energy. Lastly, when the deus is complete, the functions of the former numen become attributes or qualities, traces of which we find in the pairs of deities in Gellius, xiii. 23, which are discussed later on in this lecture. Some of these, of course, eventually became separate deities—Salacia, Maia, Lua. As I cannot accept the view that the earliest Roman idea of the supernatural is to be found in comprecationes of a comparatively late period, i.e. in the so-called Indigitamenta, this charmingly symmetrical account has no charm for me beyond its symmetry.
299 Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. pp. 144, 146; Cato, R.R. 139; C.I.L. vi. 110 and 111. Other references are given by Wissowa, R.K. p. 33, note 2.
300 For Pales, R.F. p. 80 note; for Pomona, Wissowa, R.K. p. 165.
301 The passage runs thus (Aug. C.D.. iv. 32): "Dicit enim (Varro) de generationibus deorum magis ad poetas quam ad physicos fuisse populos inclinatos, et ideo et sexum et generationes deorum maiores suos (id est veteres credidisse Romanos) et eorum constituisse coniugia." There is an amusing passage in Lactantius, i. 17 (de Falsa Religione), which Dr. Frazer might read with advantage. It begins, "Si duo sunt sexus deorum, sequitur concubitus." Then he goes on mockingly to argue that the gods166 must have houses, cities, lands which they plough and sow, which proves them mortal. Finally he takes the whole series of inferences backwards, finishing with "si domibus carent, ergo et concubitu. Si concubitus ab his abest, et sexus igitur foemineus," etc. All this, he means, can be inferred from the fact that gods are of both sexes; but that they have concubitus can no more be inferred from his argument than that they plough and sow.
302 Dr. Frazer conjectures a sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno under the forms of Janus and Diana, in Kingship, p. 214; but he is well aware that it is pure guesswork. There was, indeed, at Falerii such a marriage of Juno with an unknown deity (Ovid, Amores, iii. 13), of which, however, we do not know the history. Falerii was one of those cities, like Praeneste, where Etruscan, Greek, and Latin influences met. The "Orci nuptiae" on which Frazer lays stress was simply the Greek marriage of Pluto and Proserpine: "Orci coniux Proserpina," Aug. C.D. vii. 23 and 28, Agahd, p. 152. Wissowa shows this conclusively, R.K. p. 246. Orcus was Graecised as Plutus, but was himself totally without personality.
303 Dr. Frazer wrongly translates this as "ancient prayers" (p. 411), adding "the highest possible authority on the subject." Oratio is never used in this sense until Christian times: the word is always precatio. All scholars are agreed that what is meant is invocations to deities in old speeches, such as occur once or twice in Cicero (e.g. at the end of the Verrines); cp. Livy xxix. 15. As the recording of speeches cannot be assumed to have begun before the third century b.c., this does not carry us very far back. That century is also the age in which the pontifices were probably most active in drawing up comprecationes; see below, p. 285 foll.
304 See Appendix B at end of volume.
305 Cp. Ovid, Fasti, iii. 850, "forti sacrificare deae." In R.F. p. 60 foll., I have criticised the attempts, ancient and modern, to make this Nerio the subject of myths.
306 Macrob. i. 12. 18. This word Maiestas shows the doubtful nature of these feminine names, and probably betrays the real meaning of Maia. I may mention here that Bellona instead of Nerio is ascribed as wife to Mars by Seneca ap. Aug. C.D. vi. 10; also Venus to Volcanus instead of Maia. Neither have any connection, so far as we know, with the gods to whom Seneca ascribes them as wives: Venus-Vulcan is, of course, Greek. Both Augustine and Dr. Frazer might with advantage have abstained from citing Seneca on such a point: as a Spaniard by birth he was not likely to know much about technical questions of Roman ritual.
307 See Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, i. 274.
308 In the Graeco-Roman age Mars seems to have been rather a favourite subject of myth-making; see Usener's article on Italian myths in Rhein. Mus. vol. xxx.; Roscher in Myth. Lex. for works167 of Graeco-Etruscan art in which he appears in certain mythical scenes.
309 H. Jordan, quoted in R.F. p. 61 note. I relegate to an appendix what needs to be said about the other pairs of deities mentioned by Gellius.
310 Leipzig, 1898, p. 7 foll.
311 Wissowa, R.K. p. 168. Carter, op. cit. p. 21.
312 See Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 22 and 98.
313 So Fides is usually explained, as originally belonging to Jupiter (Wissowa, R.K. p. 103 foll.); but a different view is taken by Harold L. Axtell in his work on the Deification of Abstract Ideas at Rome (Chicago, 1907), p. 20.
314 In the Festschrift f. O. Hirschfeld, p. 243 foll.
315 Religion of the Babylonians, introductory chapter.
316 Op. cit. p. 412.
317 L.L. v. 64.
318 This fragment is No. 503 in Baehrens, Fragm. Poet. Rom.
319 Lactantius, Div. inst. iv. 3.
320 Crawley, The Tree of Life, p. 256; Farnell, Evolution of Religion, p. 180; von Domaszewski, Abhandlungen, p. 166, "Man ruft sie an im Gebete als pater und mater zum Zeichen der Unterwerfung unter ihren Willen, wie der Sohn dem Gebote des paterfamilias sich fügt. Der sittlich strenge Gehorsam, der das Familienleben der Römer beherrscht, die pietas, ist der Sinn der römischen religio." Cp. also Appel, de Rom. precationibus, pp. 102-3, who thinks that they regarded the gods "velut patriarchas sive patres familias." He quotes Preller-Jordan i. 55 and Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, p. 142 sq. So too with mater—"velut mater familias."
321 The expression seems to mean "a father made for the purpose of the embassy." Wissowa, R.K. p. 477, note 3.
322 p. 19. This was written, it may be noted, several years after Aust had thoroughly investigated the cult of Jupiter for his article in the Mythological Lexicon; in which cult, if anywhere, one may be tempted to see evidence of a personal conception of deities. As Dr. Frazer has referred to the cult of Jupiter at Praeneste, to which I referred him as evidence of a possibly personal conception of the god in that Latin city, I may say here that I adhere to what I said about this in R.F. p. 226 foll.; no piece of antique cult has occupied my attention more than this, and I have tried to lay open every source of confirmation or criticism. Wissowa has expressed himself in almost exactly the same terms in R.K. p. 209: we arrived at our conclusions independently.
323 Tertullian, ad Nationes 11, and de Anima, 37 foll.; Aug. de Civ. Dei, iv. passim, and especially ch. xi.; R. Peter compiled a complete list (Myth. Lex., s.v. "Indigitamenta," p. 143) from these and other sources.168
324 Aug. C.D. vii. 17. That this was what Varro meant by di certi was first affirmed by Wissowa in a note to his edition of Marquardt, p. 9; it has been generally accepted as the true account. A full discussion will be found in Agahd's edition of the fragments of Varro's work, p. 126 foll.; cf. Peter's article quoted above, and Wissowa, R.K. pp. 61 and 65. A somewhat different view is given in Domaszewski's article in Archiv for 1907, p. 1 foll., suggested by Usener's Götternamen.
325 The evidence for this will be found in Marquardt's note 4 on p. 9. I have no doubt that Wissowa is right in explaining Indigitamenta as "Gebetsformeln," formulae of invocation; in which the most important matter, we may add, would be the name of the deity. See his Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 177 foll. The Indigitamenta contained, as one section, the invocations of di certi.
326 Chiefly by Ambrosch in his Religionsbücher der Römer. Peter's article contains a useful account of the whole progress of research on this subject.
327 Lex. p. 137; it was that of his master Reifferscheid. Cp. Wissowa, op. cit. (Ges. Abhandl. p. 306 foll.).
328 R.F. pp. 191, 341.
329 "The place of the Sondergötter in Greek Polytheism," printed in Anthropological Essays addressed to E. B. Tylor, p. 81. Usener's discussion of the Roman and Lithuanian Sondergötter is in his Götternamen, p. 73 foll.
330 Wissowa writes (Ges. Abhandl. p. 320 note) that he has reason to believe that a great number of the Lithuanian Sondergötter only became such through the treatment of the subject by the mediaeval writers on whom Usener relied!
331 Ges. Abhandl. p. 304 foll.
332 Servius (Interpol.) ad Georg. i. 21.
333 Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 147; C.I.L. vi. 2099 and 2107.
334 Op. cit. p. 323 foll.; for famuli and anculi divi, Henzen, op. cit. p. 145.
335 See above, p. 121.
336 p. 312; cp. 320, where he further asserts his belief that Varro is responsible himself for the creation of a great number of these Sondergötter, owing to his extreme desire to fix and define the function of every deity in relation to human life; just as the mediaeval writers Laskowski and Pretorius may have created many Lithuanian Sondergötter. As I am not quite clear on this point, I have not mentioned it in the text.
337 Op. cit. p. 314, note 1. See above, note 33.
338 e.g. Vaticanus, "qui infantum vagitibus praesidet"; Rusina from rus; Consus from consilium, etc.
339 See above, p. 84.
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169
LECTURE VIII
RITUAL OF THE IUS DIVINUM
I have already frequently mentioned the ius divinum, the law governing the relations between the divine and human inhabitants of the city, as the ius civile governed the relations between citizen and citizen.340 When we examined the calendar of Numa, we were in fact examining a part of this law; we began with this our studies of the religion of the Roman city-state, because it is the earliest document we possess which illuminates the dark ages of city life, so far as religion is concerned. The study of the calendar naturally led us on to consider the evidence it yields, taken together with other sources of information, as to the nature of the deities for whose worship it fixes times and seasons, or, more accurately, the amount of knowledge to which the Romans had attained about their divine beings. But we must now return to the ius divinum, and study it in another aspect, for which the calendar itself does not suffice as evidence.
Perhaps the simplest way of explaining this ius is to describe it as laying down the rules for the maintenance of right relations between the citizens and their deities; as ordaining what things are to be done or avoided in order to keep up a continual pax, or quasi-legal covenant, between these two parties. The two words ius and pax, we may note, are continually meeting us in Roman religious documents. In a prayer sanctioned by the pontifices for use at the making of a new clearing, we read: "Si deus, si dea sit cuius illud sacrum est, ut tibi170 ius siet porco piaculo facere illiusce sacri coercendi ergo,"341 i.e. "O unknown deity, whether god or goddess, whose property this wood is, let it be legally proper to sacrifice to thee this pig as an expiatory offering, for the sake of cutting down trees in this wood of thine." "Pacem deorum exposcere" (or "petere") is a standing formula, as all readers of Virgil know;342 and it occurs in many other authors and religious documents. When Livy wants to express the horror of the old patrician families at the idea of plebeians being consuls—men who had no knowledge of the ius divinum and no right to have any—he makes Appius Claudius exclaim, "Nunc nos, tanquam iam nihil pace deorum opus sit, omnes caerimonias polluimus."343 How can we maintain our right relations with the gods, if plebeians have the care of them?
Thus it is not going too far to describe the whole Roman religion of the city-state as a Rechtsverkehr,344 a legal process going on continually. When a colonia was founded, i.e. a military outpost which was to be a copy in all respects of the Roman State, it was absolutely essential that its ius divinum should be laid down; it must have a religious charter as well as a civil one. Even at the very end of the life of the Republic, when Caesar founded a colony in Spain, he ordained that, within ten days of its first magistrates taking office, they should consult the Senate "quos et quot dies festos esse et quae sacra fieri publice placeat et quos ea sacra facere placeat," i.e. as to the calendar, the ritual, and the priesthood.345 The Romans, of course, assumed that Numa, their priest-king, had done the same thing for Rome; Livy describes him as ordaining a pontifex to whom he entrusted the care of all these matters, with written rules to follow.346 This was the imaginary religious charter of the Roman State. Without it the citizen, or rather his official representative, would not know with the necessary accuracy the details of the cura and caerimonia; without it, too, the deities could not be expected to perform their part of advancing the interests of the State, and indeed,171 as I think we shall find, could not be expected to retain the strength and vitality which they needed for the work. Support was needed on each side; the State needed the help of the gods, and the gods needed the help of the State's care and worship.
The ways and means towards the maintenance of this pax were as follows. First, the deities must be duly placated, and their powers kept in full vigour, by the ritual of sacrifice and prayer, performed at the proper times and places by authorised persons skilled in the knowledge of that ritual. Secondly, there must be an exact fulfilment of all vows or solemn promises made to the deities by the State or its magistrates, or by such private persons as might have made similar engagements. Thirdly, the city, its land and its people, must be preserved from all evil or hostile influences, whether spiritual or material or both, by the process broadly known as lustratio, which we commonly translate purification. Lastly, strict attention must be paid to all outward signs of the will of the gods, as shown by omens and portents of various kinds. This last method of securing the pax became specially prominent much later in Roman history, and I prefer to postpone detailed discussion of it for the present; but the other three we will now examine, with the help of evidence mainly derived from facts of cult, not from the fancies of mythologists.
First, then, I take sacrifice, dealing only with the general principles of sacrificial rites, so far as we can discern them in the numerous details which have come down to us. The word sacrificium, let us note, in its widest sense, may cover any religious act in which something is made sacrum, i.e. (in its legal sense) the property of a deity;347 I am not now concerned to conjecture what exactly may have been the meaning of this immortal word before it was embodied in the ius divinum. "Sacrificium" is limited in practical use by the Romans themselves to offerings, animal or cereal, made on the spot where the deity had taken up his residence, or at some place on the boundary of172 land or city (e.g. the gate) which was under his protection, or (in later times at least) at a temporary altar erected during a campaign. Thus it was as much a sacrificium when the paterfamilias threw at each meal a portion of the food into the fire, the residence of Vesta, as when the consul offered a victim to Mars on the eve of a battle.
Sacrifices have generally been divided into the three classes of (1) honorific, where the offering is believed to be in some sense a gift to the deity; (2) piacular, or sin-offerings, where the victim was usually burnt whole, no part being retained for eating (though this was not the case at Rome); (3) sacramental sacrifices, where the worshippers enter into communion with the deity by partaking of the sacred offering together with him.348 The two former are constant and typical in the Roman religion; but traces of the sacramental type, which Robertson Smith believed to be the oldest, are also found, and it will clear the ground if I refer to them at once. By far the most interesting example is that of the Latin festival on the Alban mount, where the flesh of the victim, a white heifer that had never felt the yoke, was partaken of by the deputies of all the cities of the Latin league, great importance being attached to the due distribution.349 Here the Latin race "yearly acknowledges its common kinship of blood, and seals it by partaking in the common meal of a sacred victim," thus entering into communion with Jupiter, the ancient god of the race, and with each other, by participation in the flesh of the sacred animal. "This common meal is perhaps a survival from the age when cattle were sacred animals, and were never slain or eaten except on the solemn annual occasions when the clan or race renewed its kinship and its mutual obligations by a solemn sacrament." It is tempting to compare with this great sacrament the epulum Iovis on the Ides of September, the dedication-day of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, which three deities seem to have been present in visible form to share the meal with the173 magistrates and senate.350 But we have not yet arrived at the age when this temple was built, and we have no evidence enabling us to carry the rite back in any form to the pre-Etruscan period. There are, however, faint indications that the old Italians believed the deities to be in some sense present at their meals, though not in visible form; and at one festival, the Fornacalia, which was a concern not of the State as a whole, but of the thirty curiae into which it was divided,351 there seems to be no doubt that a common meal took place in which the gods were believed to have a part, or at any rate to be present though invisible. Yet the ius divinum of the Roman State assuredly did not encourage this kind of sacrament; for in the regular round of State festivals, in which we cannot include even the feriae Latinae, the sacrifices, so far as we are informed, were all honorific or piacular. If I am not mistaken, the idea of participation by the people in solemn sacred rites was discouraged by the Roman priesthood; in the ius divinum the line drawn between sacrum and profanum was clear; scenes of gluttony or revelry, like the Greek hecatombs, were eliminated from the sacra publica, as I have already pointed out. Not till the advent of the Sibylline books and the Graecus ritus did the people take an active part in the State religion; their duty was merely to abstain from disturbance during the performance of sacred rites. "Feriis iurgia amovento" is the only reference in Cicero's imaginary sketch of the ius divinum to the conduct of the citizen on festival days.352[352] Within the family, the curia, the gens, there might be direct and active participation in daily or yearly ceremonies, but it was an essential principle of the life of the city-state that its business, religious as well as civil, should be carried out for the citizens by officials specially appointed.
In the typical and organised worship of the State, i.e. sacrifice honorific and piacular, sanctioned by the ius divinum, the utmost care was taken that the whole procedure should be in every sense acceptable to the deity;174 that nothing profanum should cross the threshold of the divine; hence it was quiet, orderly, dignified. The feeling that communication with the deity invoked was impossible save under such conditions was very strong in the Roman mind, stronger perhaps than with any other people whose religious practice is known to us; and the sense of obligation and duty, pietas, as they called it, was thus very early developed, and of infinite value to the State in its youth. This is entirely in keeping with what we have learnt in the last two lectures of the ideas of the Romans about the nature of their deities, and throws additional light on those ideas. They did not as yet know too much about the divine beings and their powers and wishes; familiarity had not yet bred contempt; religio, as we saw, was still strong among them—the feeling of awe that is likely to diminish or disappear when you have your god before you in the form of an idol. It is a principle of human nature that where knowledge is imperfect, care must be taken to be on the safe side; this is true of all practical undertakings, and as the religion of the Romans was that of a practical people with a practical end in view, it was particularly true of them.
First then, in order that the worship might be entirely acceptable to the deity invoked, it was essential that the person who conducted it should be also acceptable. At the head of the whole system was the rex, who was priest as well as king. We do not know, of course, exactly how the rex was appointed; but in the case of the typical priest-king Numa, Livy has described his inauguratio in terms of the ius divinum of later times for the appointment of priests, and we may take it as fairly certain that the same principle held good from the earliest times.353 After being summoned (so the story ran) from the Sabine city of Cures by the Senate, he consulted the gods about his own fitness. He was then conducted by the augur to the arx on the Capitol, and sat down on a stone facing the south. The augur took his seat on his left hand (the lucky side) with veiled head, holding the175 lituus354 of his office in his right hand, with which, after a prayer, he marked out the regiones from east to west, the north being to the left, the south to the right, and silently noted some object in the extreme distance of the ager Romanus, as the farthest point where the appearance of an omen might be accepted. Then, passing the lituus to his left hand, he laid his right on the head of Numa, and uttered this prayer: "Father Jupiter, if it be thy will (fas) that this Numa Pompilius, on whose head my hand is laid, be king of Rome, I pray thee give us clear token within the limits which I have marked out." Then he said aloud what auspicia he sought for (i.e. whether of birds, lightning, or what); and when they appeared, Numa descended as rex from the citadel. This process was called inauguratio; it is attested for the confirmation of the election of the three flamines maiores, the rex, and the augurs, in historical times,355 whatever was the method of that election, and without it the priest was not believed to be acceptable to the gods. It is not mentioned by Roman writers in connection with the Pontifices or the Vestals; if this be not merely from dearth of evidence, it is not easy to account for, unless the reason were that neither body was specially concerned with sacrifice. But the principle is perfectly clear—that the person who is to represent the community in worship must be one of whom the numina openly express approval.
A priest, sacerdos, is thus a person set apart by special ritual for the service of the sacra populi Romani. The rex no doubt himself made the selection and supervised the inauguratio of the other priests at whose head he was. When the kingship came to an end, his powers of this kind passed to the pontifex maximus; and it may be as well to add at once that his sacrificial powers, though they were in a special sense inherited by a priest who took his title, the rex sacrorum, passed with the civil power to all magistrates cum imperio, who wore the toga praetexta symbolic of priestly function, and had the right of presiding at sacrificial rites both at home and in the field.176 Thus magistrate and priest, though quite distinct under the Republic from the point of view of public law, have certain characteristics in common as deriving from a common source in the powers of the rex.356
But to return to the period of Numa and the calendar: it was not only necessary that the priest should be acceptable to the gods, but that he should be marked off from the rest of the community as being dedicated to their service. As Dr. Jevons says,357 in all early religions priests are marked off from other worshippers, partly by what they do, and partly by what they may not do; and what he means is (1) that the priest originally was the person who alone could slay a victim; (2) that in consequence of his sacredness he was subject to a great number of restrictions. I have already spoken of these restrictions or priestly taboos in my second lecture; and as I believe that in the period we are now dealing with they were little more than a survival, I shall not return to them now. But of the outward insignia, which marked off the priest as alone entitled to perform the essential act of worship, the sacrifice, and which bring him out of the region of the profanum into that of sacrum, I must say a few words before going farther.
In historical times the actual slaying of the victim was done by subordinates, popae, victimarii, etc.; but there is no doubt whatever that it was originally the work of the priest, for he seems at all times to have used one gesture which is clearly symbolic of it,358 and there are traces also of a practice of wearing the toga in such a way as to leave the right arm free for the act.359 That toga, or any other special robe worn by the priest, was always in whole or part red or purple. The purple-edged toga praetexta was worn both by priests and magistrates, and by children under age; and I think there is good reason to believe that in all these cases the original idea was the same—that they took part, directly or indirectly, as primary or secondary agents in sacrificial acts. The Salii and the augurs wore the trabea, which177 was of purple or red, or both; the flamines had a special robe about the colour of which we are not informed, but the Flaminica Dialis wore a purple garment called rica, and a red veil called flammeum, which was also worn by the bride in the religious ceremony of marriage. Whether we are to see in this prevalence of red or purple any symbolism of the shedding of blood in sacrifice I cannot be sure, but the inference is a tempting one, and has been put forward with confidence by some recent investigators. It is worth noting that the Vestals, who did not sacrifice animals, wore white only.360 If the red colour has anything to do with blood-shedding, it is probably more than merely symbolic; it may mean that the sacrificing priest partakes of that life and strength which he passes on to the god through the blood, that is the life, of the victim.361
The Roman priests had also other insignia, of which the original meaning is less evident. The Flamen Dialis, and probably all the flamines, wore a cap with an olive-twig fastened to the top of it; this is well shown in the sculptures of the Ara Pacis of Augustus.362 The flaminicae had a head-dress called tutulus, which consisted in part, at least, of a purple fillet or ribbon. The flamines, when actually sacrificing, wore a galerus, or hood of some kind made of the skin of a victim, and the Flamen Dialis in particular wore one made of the skin of a white heifer sacrificed to Jupiter.363 In these various ways all priests were outwardly shown to be holy men, sacerdotes, marked off from the profanum vulgus. Only for the pontifices we have no information as to a special dress, just as we also have none as to their inauguratio.364
Thus there is no question that the priests were chosen and separated from the people in such a way as to meet with the approval of the gods; and even the acolytes, camilli and camillae, boys and girls who frequently appear in sacrificial scenes on monuments, wore the toga praetexta, and, in order to be acceptable, must be the178 children of living parents.365 This rule has lately been the subject of a discussion by Dr. Frazer, on which he has brought to bear, as usual, a great range of learning. He regards the restriction not so much as a matter of good omen, i.e. of freedom from contamination by the death of a parent, but as pointing to a notion that they were "fuller of life and therefore luckier than orphans."366 Whether or no this explanation is the right one, it is quite consistent, as we shall see directly, with the general idea of sacrifice at Rome, and the learning by which it is supported is in any case of interest and value.
There is abundant evidence from historical times that all worshippers, and therefore a fortiori all priests, when sacrificing, had to be personally clean and free from every kind of taint; a rule which also held good for the utensils used in the worship, which in many cases at least were of primitive make and material, not such as were in common use.367 The need of personal purity is well expressed by Tibullus in his description of a rural festival368:—
vos quoque abesse procul iubeo, discedat ab aris
cui tulit hesterna gaudia nocte Venus.
casta placent superis: pura cum veste venite
et manibus puris sumite fontis aquam.
These lines indicate an approach at least to the idea of mental as well as material purity; and Cicero in his ius divinum in the de Legibus369 actually reaches that idea: "caste iubet lex adire ad deos, animo videlicet, in quo sunt omnia: nec tollit castimoniam corporis," etc. But this is the language of a later age, and does not reflect the notions of the old Roman, but rather those of the religious philosophy of the Greek. The personal purity which the Roman rule required was a survival from a set of primitive ideas, closely connected with taboo, which we are only now beginning to understand fully. They are common to all or almost all peoples who have made any progress in systematising their sacrificial179 worship. As Dr. Westermarck has recently expressed it,370 "they spring from the idea that the contact of a polluting substance with anything holy is followed by injurious consequences. It is supposed to deprive a deity or holy being of its holiness.... So also a sacred act is believed to lose its sacredness by being performed by an unclean individual." And in the next sentence he goes still farther back in the history of the belief, pointing out that a polluting substance is itself held to contain mysterious energy of a baneful kind. But I must leave this interesting subject now; the story of the evolution of the habit of cleanliness from these ancient ideas will be found in the thirty-ninth chapter of his Origin and Development of Moral Ideas.
Coming next to the act of sacrifice itself, it is needless to say that the victim must be as exactly fitted to please the deity—if that be the right way to express the obligation—as the priest who sacrificed it. It must be of the right kind, sex, age, colour; it must go willingly to the slaughter, adorned with fillets and ribbons (infulae, vittae), in order to mark it off from other animals as holy; in the case of oxen, we hear also of the gilding of the horns, but this must have been costly and unusual.371 All these details were doubtless laid down in the ius divinum, and in later times, when the deities dwelt in roofed temples, they were embodied in the lex or charter of each temple.372 I do not need to go into them here minutely; for my present purpose, the elucidation of the meaning which the Romans attached to sacrificial worship, it will be sufficient to point out that all victims, so far as we know, were domestic animals, and in almost all cases they were valuable property (pecunia), such as belonged to the stock of the Latin farmer, ox, sheep, pig, varying according to age and sex. Goats were used at the Lupercalia, and a horse was sacrificed to Mars, as we have seen, on October 15, and at the Robigalia in April a red dog was offered to the spirit of the mildew. But though time forbids me to explain all these rules, a180 careful study of the evidence for them is most useful for any one who wishes to understand the influence of the ius divinum on the mind of the early Roman. In the family what rules were needed were matter of tradition; deities were few, and offerings limited. But in the city-state it was very different; here even the di indigetes were many, with diverse wishes and likings as well as functions: how were these to be ascertained and remembered at the right moment? Here, as in all methods of securing the pax deorum, a central supervising authority was needed, in whose knowledge and wisdom the whole community had confidence; and he was found in the rex, as is clearly shown in the whole traditional account of the priest-king Numa. Very naturally tradition also ascribed to Numa the institution of the pontifices, whom the historical Romans knew as succeeding the rex in the supervision of religious law.373
If all went well, the victim going willingly and no ill omen supervening, the actual slaughter followed at the altar. During the whole operation silence was enjoined; the priests' heads were veiled with the folds of the toga;374 pipers (tibicines) continued to play, in order that no unlucky sound or word might be heard which would make it necessary to start afresh with another victim (instauratio). Immediately before the slaughter the victim was made holier than ever by sprinkling upon it fragments of sacred cake made of far (immolatio), and by pouring on it libations of wine from a foculus or movable altar containing this holy condiment, together with incense if that were used in the rite. As soon as it was dead, the internal organs were examined to make sure that there was no physical defect or abnormal growth, for it was, of course, quite as necessary that the animal should be "purus" within as without; this was the only object of the examination, until the Etruscan art of extipicina made its way to Rome. What became of the blood we are not told; I have already remarked that blood has curiously little part in Roman181 ritual and custom.375 But the exta, i.e. internal organs of life, were separated from the rest of the carcase, and carefully cooked in holy vessels, before being laid upon the altar (porrectio), together with certain slices of flesh called magmenta, or increase-offerings, while the rest of the flesh, which had now lost its holiness, was retained for the use of the priests.376 The time occupied in the actual slaughter and inspection of the organs was not long; but the cooking of these must have been often a lengthy process. Ovid tells us how on April 25 he met the Flamen Quirinalis carrying out the exta of a dog and a sheep, which had been sacrificed at Rome to Robigus that morning, in order to lay them on the altar of that deity at the fifth milestone on the Via Claudia.377 Certain days in the calendar, called endotercisi, which were nefasti in morning and evening, were fasti in the middle of the day, between the slaying of a victim and the placing of its exta on the altar (inter hostiam caesam et exta porrecta).378
I have so far purposely omitted one important detail—the prayer which, so far as we know, invariably accompanied the sacrifice. It is not absolutely certain at what moment of the rite it was said at Rome; in the ritual of Iguvium we find it occurring immediately before the placing of the exta on the altar;379 but as that ritual is a processional one, concerned with sacrifices at several spots, the two chief parts of the rite, the slaughter and the porrectio, probably followed closely on one another. We may perhaps guess that where these two parts were separated by a considerable interval, as in the majority of Roman festivals, the prayer was said by the priest also at the moment of porrectio. The prayer is so important a detail as to need separate handling—important because it helps us to interpret the ideas of the Romans about their sacrifices, and the attitude in which they conceived themselves as standing towards the deities whom they thus approached. I propose to occupy the rest of this lecture in considering this most182 interesting topic. I wish first to draw attention to a particular feature, or rather expression, which occurs in the authentic wording of certain prayers which we are lucky enough to possess, because I think it throws some light on the meaning which the Romans attached to the sacrifice it accompanied; and secondly, to consider the character of Roman prayers generally, in view of a question now being largely discussed, i.e. whether prayer is a development from spell or charm, belonging in its origin to the region of magic.
We have various forms of prayer surviving in Roman literature: some of them are versified by the poets, and therefore give us a general impression of the contents without the actual and genuine wording; we have also two fragments of ancient carmina which have the form of prayers, those of the Salii and the Fratres Arvales; and we have certain forms used on special occasions, such as the evocatio of the gods of a hostile community, or the formulae of vows (vota) which I must postpone to the next lecture. But the only unquestionably genuine old Roman prayers used at sacrifice, taken from the books of the pontifices and preserved word for word, are those which Cato embodied in his treatise on agriculture in the second century b.c., as proper to be used with sacrifice on certain occasions in the agricultural year.380 It is here that we meet with the phrase, familiar in another form to all Latin scholars, on which I wish to lay stress now. It occurs in all the four forms of prayer which Cato copied down. The first is at the time of the flowering of the pear-trees, on behalf of the oxen: "Iuppiter dapalis, quod tibi fieri oportet in domo familia mea culignam vini dapi eius rei381 ergo, macte hac illace dape polucenda esto." And again, when the wine is offered: "Iuppiter dapalis, macte istace dape polucenda esto. Macte vino inferio esto." So in the piacular sacrifice when a clearing is made, the unknown deity is addressed in the last words of the prayer thus: "harum rerum ergo macte hoc porco piaculo immolando esto." We find this macte esto183 again in the prayer for the ceremony of lustratio, at the end of the formula: "macte hisce suovetaurilibus lactentibus immolandis esto." In the rite of the porca praecidanea, to which I have already referred, the instruction for the invocation of Jupiter runs: "Fertum (i.e. a kind of cake) Iovi obmoveto et mactato sic, Iuppiter, te hoc ferto obmovendo bonas preces precor, uti sies volens propitius mihi liberisque meis domo familiaeque meae mactus hoc ferto." Janus gets another kind of cake (strues) and a wine-offering, and is addressed in the same way. Then we read, "Iovi fertum obmoveto mactatoque item, ut prius feceris."
What is the real meaning of this phrase macte esto, which must surely have been in universal use at sacrifices, not only at private rites like those of Cato, since it came to be used in common speech of congratulation or felicitation, e.g. macte virtute esto?382 Servius in commenting on Virgil has made it sufficiently clear. He explains it as magis aucte, and connects it with magmentum, increase-offering, quasi magis augmentum, and adds that when the victims had been slain and their exta placed on the altar, they were said to be mactatae. So, too, in another comment he seems to connect the word with the victim rather than with the deity. But he is quite clear as to the meaning of the word, as signifying an increase or addition of some kind; and though his etymology is wrong, we may be sure that he was right in this respect, for it is beyond doubt built on a base, mac or mag, which produced magnus, maius, maiestas, and so on. "Macte nova virtute puer" means "Be thou increased, strengthened in virtus"; a fragment of Lucilius (quoted by Servius) brings this out well, "Macte inquam virtute simulque his viribus esto," and another from Ennius, "Livius inde redit magno mactatus triumpho."383 We might almost translate it in these passages by "glorified"; but it most certainly includes the meaning of "strengthened" or "increased in might."
Now in the formulae of Cato we have seen that it is184 applied to the deity and not to the victim; this naturally did not occur to Servius, whose mind was occupied rather with Virgil and the literary use of the word than with the original use and meaning of the language of prayer. Undoubtedly he has made a mistake here, which Cato's piety has enabled us to detect. It was, in fact, the deity whose strength was to be increased by the offerings; so much at least seems to me to be beyond doubt. There is, indeed, no certain trace in the ritual, or in Roman literature, that the gods were supposed to consume the exta, or the cakes and wine offered them; that primitive notion must have been excluded from the ius divinum. But instead of it we find the more spiritual idea that by placing on the altar the organs of the life of the victim, with ancient forms of sacred cake and offerings of wine, the vitality of the deity, his power to help his worshippers, to make the corn grow and the cattle bring forth young, to aid the State against enemies, or what not, was really increased in this semi-mystic way. Let us remember that the Roman numina were powers constantly at work in their own sphere; they are the various manifestations of the one Power as conceived in immediate relation to man and his wants; they are sometimes addressed in prayer, as we have seen, by additional titles which suggest their strength and vitality: Virites Quirini, Nerio Martis, Moles Martis, Maia or Maiestas Volcani. What, then, could be more natural than that the Roman should call upon his divine fellow-citizen to accept that which, according to ancient tradition and practice, will keep up his strength, and at the same time increase his glory and his goodwill towards his worshippers? This is, then, the idea which I believe to have been at the root of Roman sacrificial ritual, and it seems to confirm the dynamic theory of sacrifice recently propounded by some French anthropologists, i.e. that a mystic current of religious force passed through the victim, from priest to deity, and perhaps back again.384 I believe that we have here a transitional idea of the virtue of sacrifice—an idea that185 bridges over the gulf between the crude notion that the gods actually partake of the offering, and the later more spiritual view that the offering is an honorary gift "to the glory of God." It seems also to be found in the Vedic religion. Dr. Farnell writes: "In the Vedic ritual we find a pure and spiritual form of prayer; yet a certain spell-power may attach even to the highest types, for we find not infrequently the conception that not only the power of the worshipper, but the power of the deity also is nourished and strengthened by prayer, and the prayer itself is usually accompanied by a potent act (such as that of sacrifice). "May our prayers increase Agni": "The prayers fill thee with power and strengthen thee, like great rivers the Sindhu."385
I must now turn to the form and manner of Roman prayers, in order to gain further light on the question as to the mental attitude of the worshipper towards the deity invoked. Of late years there has been a strong tendency to find the origin of prayer in spell; or, in other words, to discover a bridge between that mental attitude which believes that a deity can be forced into a certain course of action by magical formulae, and the humble attitude of the petitioner in prayer, which assumes that the power of the deity altogether transcends that of his worshipper. The evidence of Roman prayers is, I think, of considerable value in dealing with this question; but it needs to be carefully studied and handled. The general impression conveyed by those who have written on the subject is that Roman prayers were dull, dry formulae, which were believed to have a constraining influence on the deity simply as formulae, if they were repeated with perfect precision the right number of times. Dr. Westermarck, for example, has no shadow of a doubt about this; quoting Renan, he says that "in the Roman, as in the majority of the old Italian cults, prayer is a magic formula, producing its effect by its own inherent quality." And again, he writes that the Romans were much more addicted to magic than to religion; "they wanted to186 compel the gods rather than to be compelled by them. Their religio was probably near akin to the Greek κατἁδεσμοϛ, which meant not only an ordinary tie, but also a magic tie or knot or a bewitching thereby."386 I need not stop to point out the misconception of the word religio which suggested the whole of this passage; the supposed derivation from ligare was quite enough to suggest magic to those who are on the trail of it.387 Let us go on to examine the prayers themselves; I think we shall find that though there is much truth in the common view of them, it is not quite the whole truth.
The oldest Roman prayers we possess are usually called hymns, because the Latin word for them was carmen, viz. the Carmen Saliare, which is too obscure and fragmentary to be of use to us, and the Carmen of the Arval Brethren, which is preserved on stone and is quite intelligible.388 The word carmen, let us notice, was used by the old Romans for any kind of metrical formula, whether hymn, prayer, or spell. Pliny, when writing of magic and incantations, plainly includes prayer among them;389 and Dr. Jevons has recently pointed out that singing, and especially singing in a low voice or muttered tones, is a characteristic of magic not only in Greece and Rome, but in many parts of the world at the present day.390 The evidence of the word is thus strongly in favour of the view that these ancient carmina of Roman worship were really spells; and the Carmen Arvalium itself does not contradict it. After an elaborate sacrificial ceremonial the priests, using a written copy of the carmen (libellis acceptis), danced in triple rhythm (tripodaverunt) while they sang it; it consisted of six clauses, each repeated three times. "Enos Lases iuvate! Neve luerve Marmar sins incurrere in pleores! Satur fu fere Mars, limen sali, sta berber! Semunes alternei advocapit cunctos! Enos Marmar iuvato! Triumpe!" With the precise interpretation of these words I am not now concerned; but they obviously contain invocations to the Lares and Mars, which may be either petitions or commands, and which187 perhaps are really on the borderland between the two; and as thrice repeated, and accompanied with dancing and gesticulation, they seem certainly to belong rather to the region of magic than of religion proper.
It is interesting to compare with this carmen the prayers of the guild of brethren (Attiedii) at Iguvium; these are the best preserved of all old Italian prayers, and though not Roman, are the product of the same race. In the lustratio of the arx (Ocris Fisius) of Iguvium we find three several deities invoked, with elaborate sacrificial ritual, at three gates, and a long prayer addressed to each deity, thrice repeated, as in the Carmen Arvale. It is to be said under the breath (tacitus precator totum, vi. A. 55), which was a common practice also at Rome, and is believed to be characteristic of the magical spell;391 and except in the case of the first prayer, which is addressed to the chief deity Jupiter Grabovius, it is accompanied by some kind of dancing or rhythmical movement (tripodatio).392 Thus in outward form this ritual seems to show but little advance on the Roman prayer of the Arvales, and indeed it may in substance go back to a time as remote as that in which the latter had its origin. But when we examine the matter of the prayer, we find that it is cast in the language of petition beyond all doubt—if it be rightly interpreted, as we may believe it is:—
"Te invocavi invoco divum Grabovium pro arce Fisia, pro urbe Iguvina, pro arcis nomine, pro urbis nomine: volens sis, propitius sis arci Fisiae, urbi Iguvinae, arcis nomini, urbis nomini. Sancte, te invocavi invoco divum Grabovium. Sancti fiducia te invocavi invoco divum Grabovium. Dive Grabovie te hoc bove opimo piaculo pro arce Fisia, etc. Dive Grabovi, illius anni quiquomque in arce Fisia ignis ortus est, in urbe Iguvina ritus debiti omissi sunt, pro nihilo ducito. Dive Grabovi, quicquid tui sacrificii vitiatum est, peccatum est, peremptum est, fraudatum est, demptum est, tui sacrificii visum invisum vitium est, dive Grabovi, quicquid ius sit, hoc bove opimo piaculo piando.... Dive Grabovi, piato188 arcem Fisiam, piato urbem Iguvinam. Dive Grabovi, piato arcis Fisiae, urbis Iguvinae, nomen, magistratus, ritus, viros, pecora, fundos, fruges: piato, esto volens propitius pace tua arci Fisiae, etc. Dive Grabovi, salvam servato arcem Fisiam salvam servato urbem Iguvinam .... Dive Grabovi, te hoc bove opimo piaculo pro arce Fisia, pro urbe Iguvina, pro arcis nomine, pro urbis nomine, Dive Grabovi, te invocavi."393
That in this prayer, and the others which accompany it, exactness of wording was believed to be essential, as in the ritual which preceded it exactness of performance, there is no doubt; for at the end of the whole document (vi. B. 48) we find that if there had been any slip in the ritual, the Brethren had to go back to the first gate and begin all over again. There is plainly present the idea, surviving from an age of magic, that the deities had strong feelings about the right way of invocation, and would not respond to the performance unless those feelings were understood and appealed to; that they would miss something and decline to do their part. Yet are we justified in going on to assume that they were bound, as by a solemn contract, to perform their part, if there were no slip in the ritual? I confess it is difficult for me to take this further step, in view of the language of the prayers, which is so clearly that of petition, nay, of humble petition. We are not dealing here with vota, to which I shall come in the next lecture, and in which there is a kind of legal contract between the man and the god—the former undertaking to do something pleasing to the deity, if the latter shall have faithfully performed what is asked of him. These vota, so abundant in historical times, are really responsible for the idea that Roman prayer is simply a binding formula—a magical spell, let us say, which in the hands of a city priesthood has become a quasi-legal formula. But these prayers are not vota; they do not contain any language which betrays the notion of binding the deity. They seem to me to mark a process of transition between the age of spell and magic and the age189 of prayer and religion; they retain some of the outward characteristics of spell, but internally, i.e. in the spirit in which they were intended, they have the real characteristics of prayer.394 The numina to whom they were addressed were powerful spirits, unknown, unfamiliar, until their wishes were discovered by the organised priesthood which handed down these forms of petition.
To return to Rome, and to the prayers in Cato's book, to which I referred just now when discussing the word macte. Attempts have been made to prove that these were originally written in metre;395 and this is quite possible. If so, it only means that they retained the outward form of the primitive spell; it must not lead us on to fancy that the sacrifice which accompanied the prayer was a magical act, or that the whole process was believed to compel the deity. No doubt there was believed to be efficacy in the exact repetition, as is shown by the directions for piacular sacrifices in case of error of any kind.396 But the language is the language of prayer, not of compulsion, nor even of bargaining: "Eius rei ergo te hoc porco piaculo immolando bonas preces precor, ut sies volens propitius mihi, domo familiaeque meis."397 "Mars pater, te precor quaesoque uti sies volens propitius mihi, domo," etc.398 No amount of vain repetition or scruple can deprive this language of its natural meaning. The god is powerful in his own sphere of action, and man has no control over him; man is fully recognised as liable to misfortune unless the god helps him; but he can worship in full assurance of faith that his prayer will be answered, if it be such as the authorities of the State have laid down as the right wording, and if the ritual accompanying it is equally in order. The faith is, indeed, thus founded upon man's devices rather than the god's good-will as such; it is a belief in the State and its authorities and ius divinum, which is conceived, not indeed as constraining the deity, but as calling upon him (invocare) to perform his part, in formulae which he cannot well neglect, simply because it190 would be unreasonable to do so, contrary to his nature as a deity of the Roman State and its ager.
It is obvious in all this sacrificial ritual that the officiating person or persons were expected to observe the traditional forms with the utmost care and exactness. Any slip or omission was, in fact, a piaculum, or sacrum commissum—terms of the ius divinum which seem to suggest, if I may use the expression, the obverse side of holiness. It is now well known that cleanness and uncleanness, holiness and its opposite, can be expressed in religious vocabulary by the same terms, for in both cases there is something beyond the ordinary, something dangerous, uncanny; thus we are not surprised to find that such words as I have just mentioned can be used to express some kind of impurity caused by a breach of ritual as well as that ritual itself. If we accept the latest theory of sacrifice, i.e. the dynamic theory, as it is called, we explain this intense nervousness about a ritualistic flaw as occasioned by the consciousness of a breach in the current of "religious force" (the expression is that of Messrs. Hubert and Mauss399), which must pass in regular sequence from the sacrificer through the victim to the deity, or vice versa. If this is the true explanation—and at present it may be said to hold the field—then the extreme exactness of the Roman ritual was a survival from an age when this strange feeling was a reality; but no more than a survival, for, so far as I can discover, the Roman idea was rather that the deity to whom the ritual was addressed was in some way offended by the omission.400 The dynamic notion is lost, if it ever were there, and its place has been taken by one that we may perhaps call theological. But however that may be, the culprit was regarded as in a state of sin or impurity, "un être sacré," and had to get rid of this sin or impurity by another sacrifice before the whole ritual could be started afresh (instaurare).
According to the "dynamic" theory of sacrifice, we might naturally expect that the victim, as being destined191 to carry away the unholiness (or whatever we choose to call it) of the culprit, would be burnt whole, not offered to the deity in the form of exta, or eaten by the sacrificers.401 But this does not seem to have been the case in the Roman practice; in all the examples of piacula of which we have details, the exta are laid on the altar as in the typical sacrifice.402 The inference seems to be that the theological idea of sacrifice had established itself completely ever since the formation of the ius divinum; the victim is not a scapegoat in any sense, but really an expiatory offering; and not only does the sacrificer yield up something of value, but he offers it to increase the strength of the deity as well as to appease his anger.
A curious point may be noticed in the last place. The practical Roman mind seems to have invented a kind of sacrificial insurance, by which a piacular sacrifice might be offered beforehand to atone for any omission in the ritual which was to follow. Thus the Fratres Arvales, if they had to take an iron implement into their sacred grove, offered a piaculum before as well as after this breach of religious rule.403 Again, the porca praecidanea, which I have already mentioned as offered before harvest, was an example of the same system of insurance; for the first cutting of the corn was a sacred rite, and one in which it was easy to take a false step. Writing of this, Gellius says in general terms that hostiae praecidaneae are those which are offered the day before sacrificia solennia.404
The term "piacular sacrifice" (piaculum) had a wide range of meaning, apart from the examples here given. With one important form of it I shall deal in the next lecture:405 others we shall come across later on.
NOTES TO LECTURE VIII
340 See Appendix C.
341 Cato, R.R. 139, where the language suggests that as the deity was unknown, the ius of the religious act was also uncertain, i.e. the ritual was not laid down. De Marchi translates (La Religione192 nella vita domestica, i. 132) "sia a te fatto il debito sacrificio," etc., which sufficiently expresses the anxiety of the situation. Keil reads here "ut tibi ius est," and gives no variant in his critical note; but the words just below, "uti id recte factum siet," seem to me to suggest the subjunctive. In any case there is no doubt about ius. In Tab. Iguv. vi. A. 28 (Umbrica, p. 58) Buecheler translates the Umbrian persei mersei by "quicquid ius sit," and compares this passage of Cato, together with Gellius i. 12. 14, where the phrase is used of the duties of a Vestal under the ius divinum in the formula used by the Pontifex Maximus, cum virginem capiat: "Sacerdotem Vestalem, quae sacra faciat, quae ius siet sacerdotem Vestalem facere pro pop. Rom." etc.
342 e.g. Aen. iv. 56, x. 31 ("si sine pace tua atque invito numine," etc.). Cp. Tab. Iguv. vi. 30, 33, etc. (Umbrica, p. 59), "esto volens propitiusque pace tua arci Fisiae."
343 Livy vi. 41 ad fin.
344 Wissowa, R.K. p. 318, and p. 319 for the illustrations that follow. Cp. Cicero, Part. Or. xxii. 78, where religio is explained as "iustitia erga deos."
345 Lex Coloniae Genetivae, cap. 64; C.I.L. ii., supplement No. 5439.
346 Livy i. 20. 5.
347 This follows from the definition in Festus, p. 321, and in Macrobius iii. 3. 2. This last is quoted from Trebatius de religionibus: "sacrum est quicquid est quod deorum habetur." In common use sacrificium seems to be reserved for animal sacrifice, but the verb sacrificare is not so limited. Festus, p. 319: "mustum quod Libero sacrificabant pro vineis ... sicut praemetium de spicis, quas primum messuissent, sacrificabant Cereri." It has been suggested to me by Mr. Marett that the termination of the word sacrificium may have reference to the use of facere for animal sacrifice, as in Greek ῥἑζειν, ἔρδειν, δρᾶν; but on the whole I doubt this. Facere and fieri are in that sense, I think, euphemisms, occasioned by the mystic character of the act (examples are collected in Brissonius de formulis, p. 9). Rem divinam facere seems to be the general expression, as in Cato, R.R. 83; or the particular victim is in the ablative, e.g. agna Iovi facit (Flamen Dialis) in Varro, L.L. vi. 16; cp. Virg. Ecl. iii. 77.
348 This classification, originally due to R. Smith, article "Sacrifice" in Encycl. Brit., ed. 10, has lately been criticised by Hubert et Mauss, in Mélanges d'histoire des religions, p. 9 foll.; but it is sufficiently complete for our purposes. At the same time it is well to be aware that no classification of the various forms of sacrifice can be complete at present; that which these authors prefer, i.e. constant and occasional sacrifices, is, however, a useful one.
349 R.F. p. 95 foll. Cp. Robertson Smith, Rel. of Semites, Lect. VIII.
350 R.F. p. 217 foll.193
351 R.F. p. 302 foll. Meals in connection with sacrifice are also found at the Parilia (R.F. p. 81, and Ovid, Fasti, iv. 743 foll.) and Terminalia (Ovid, Fasti, ii. 657); but in both cases Ovid seems to be describing rustic rites; nor is it certain that the meal was really sacramental. What does seem proved is that the old Latins and other Italians believed the deities of the house to be present at their meals—
ante focos olim scamnis considere longis
mos erat et mensae credere adesse deos (Fasti, vi. 307),
and thus the idea was maintained that in some sense all meals had a sacred character, i.e. all in which the members of a familia (see above, p. 78), or of gens or curia, met together. Cp. R. Smith, op. cit. p. 261 foll. We may remember that the Penates were the spirits of the food itself, not merely of the place in which it was stored; it had therefore a sacred character, which is also shown by the sanctification of the firstfruits (R.F. pp. 151, 195). (The cenae collegiorum, dinners of collegia of priests, were in no sense sacrificial meals; see Marquardt, p. 231, note 7; Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. pp. 13, 39, 40.)
352 Cic. de Legibus, ii. 8. 19.
353 Livy i. 18. For constitutional difficulties in this passage, see, e.g., Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 50.
354 For this and the augurs generally, see Lecture XII.
355 The passages are collected by Wissowa, R.K. p. 420, note 3. There is no doubt about the inauguratio of the three great flamines and the rex sacrorum, who were all specially concerned with sacrifice, and of the augurs, who would obviously need it in order to perform the same ceremony for others—as a bishop needs consecration for the same reason. As regards the pontifices, Dionysius (ii. 73. 3) clearly thought it was needed for them, and we might a priori assume that one who might become a pontifex maximus would need it; but Wissowa discounts Dionysius' opinion, and I am unwilling to differ from him on a point of the ius divinum, of which he is our best exponent. If he is right, it may be that the three flamines maiores, who were reckoned in strict religious sense as above the pontifices, including their head (Festus, p. 185), needed "holiness" more than any pontifex, and so with the augurs. The insignia of the pontifices, as well as many historical facts, show that the pontifices were competent to perform sacrifice in a general sense (Marq. p. 248 foll.); but it is possible that they never had the right, like the flamines, actually to slay the victim. I do not feel sure that the securis was really one of their symbols, though Horace seems to say so in Ode iii. 23. 12. The whole question needs further investigation. It may be found that the essential distinction between the pontifices and magistrates cum imperio on the one hand, and the flamines on the other, is to be sought in the ideas of holiness connected with the shedding of blood in sacrifice. The flamen is permanently holy, having charge of constant sacrifices; e.g. the Dialis had duties every day. He194 is the duly sanctified guide for all rites within his own religious range.
356 Wissowa, R.K. pp. 339, 410 foll.
357 The whole subject of the preparation of the sacrificer for his work, and of the steps by which he becomes separated from the profane, is well treated by Hubert et Mauss, Mélanges d'histoire des religions, p. 23 foll. The reference to Dr. Jevons is Introduction, ch. xx. p. 270 foll.
358 Serv. Aen. xii. 173; Virgil wrote "dant fruges manibus salsas, et tempora ferro Summa notant pecudum"; to which Servius adds that the symbolic movement was a (pretended) cut from head to tail of the victim. Wissowa, R.K. p. 352.
359 Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl., s.v. "cinctus Gabinus."
360 Marquardt, p. 340. The Vestals were never, so far as we know, directly concerned in animal sacrifice.
361 See below, p. 190. For the colour of the garments, and the explanation referred to, see Samter, Familienfeste, p. 40 foll.; Diels, Sibyllinische Blätter, p. 70; and cp. von Duhn's paper, "Rot und Tot" in Archiv, 1906, p. 1 foll. That red colouring was used in various ways in sacred and quasi-sacred rites there is no doubt (see above, p. 89, note 46); but whether it can be always connected with bloodshed is by no means so certain (Rohde, Psyche, i. 226). In the case of women it is at least hard to understand. The idea of consecration through blood, which is very rare in Roman literature, comes out curiously in the words which Livy puts into the mouth of Virginius after the slaughter of his daughter (iii. 48): "Te Appi tuumque caput sanguine hoc consecro" (i.e. to a deity not mentioned). The sentence to which this note refers was written before the appearance of Messrs. Hubert et Mauss' essay on sacrifice (Mélanges d'histoire des religions, pp. 1-122). The theory there developed, that the victim is the intermediary in all cases between the sacrificer and the deity, and that the force religieuse passes from one to the other in one direction or another, does not essentially differ from the words in the text; but the French savants would, I imagine, prefer to look on the insignia in a general sense as bringing the person wearing them within the region of the sacrum, the force of which would react on him still more strongly after the destruction of the victim (see p. 28 foll.).
362 See, e.g., Roman Sculpture by Mrs. Strong, Plates xi. and xv.
363 For this and other insignia see Marquardt, p. 222 foll. The question is under discussion whether some of these insignia are not old Italian forms of dress (see Gruppe, Mythologische Literatur, 1898-1905, p. 343). For the wearing of the skin of a victim, which meets us also at the Lupercalia (R.F. p. 311), see Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 416 foll.; Jevons, Introduction, p. 252 foll.; Frazer, G.B. iii. 136 foll.
364 They, of course, wore the praetexta when performing religious195 acts. Cp. the Fratres Arvales, who laid aside the praetexta after sacrificing. Henzen, Acta Fr. Arv. pp. 11, 21, and 28.
365 Serv. Aen. xi. 543. The camillae assisted the flaminicae, Marquardt, p. 227. This is one of the most beautiful features of the stately Roman ritual, and has been handed on to the Roman Church. It was, of course, derived from the worship of the household (see above, p. 74).
366 Adonis, Attis, Osiris, p. 413 foll. Dr. Frazer is criticising Dr. Farnell, who had touched on the subject in the Hibbert Journal for 1907, p. 689, and had taken the more obvious view that death in a family disqualified for actions requiring extreme holiness.
367 The passages are collected in Marquardt, p. 174 foll.; we may notice in particular Livy xlv. 5. 4, where, though only the washing of hands is referred to, we have the important statement that "omnis praefatio sacrorum," i.e. the preliminary exhortation of the priest, enjoined purae manus. Livy must be using the language of Roman ritual, though he is not speaking here of a Roman rite. For the material of sacred utensils see Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 30.
368 Tibullus ii. 1. 11.
369 Cic. de Legibus, ii. 10. 24.
370 Westermarck, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, ii. 352 foll.; consult the index for further allusions to the subject. Cp. Farnell, Evolution of Religion, Lecture III. [Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum (Giessen, 1910), has reached me too late for use in this chapter.
371 Full details, with the most important references quoted in full, are in Marquardt, p. 172 foll.; but some of the latter are applicable only to the Graeco-Roman period.
372 So we may gather from the Lex Furfensis of 58 b.c. (C.I.L. ix. 3513), and that of the Ara Augusti at Narbo of a.d. 12 (C.I.L. xii. 4333).
373 The real origin of the pontifices and their name is unknown to us. If they took their name from the bridging of the Tiber, as Varro held (L.L. v. 83) and as the majority of scholars believe (see O. Gilbert, Rom. Topographie, ii. 220, note), the difficulty remains that they are found in such a city as Praeneste, where there was no river to be bridged, and where they could not well have been merely an offshoot from the Roman college; see Wissowa, R.K. p. 432, note. Nor can we explain how they came to be set in charge of the ius divinum; and where there are no data conjecture is useless.
374 The covering of the head (operto capite, as opposed to aperto capite of the Graecus ritus) is usually explained as meant to shut out all sounds belonging to the world of the profanum; and the playing of the tibicines is interpreted in the same way. Hubert et Mauss explain the covered head differently: "le rituel romain prescrivit généralement l'usage du voile, signe de séparation et partant de consécration" (p. 28). Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to196 the Study of Greek Religion, p. 522, also holds that it is the outward sign of consecration; cp. S. Reinach, Cultes, mythes, et religions, i. 300 foll. The fact, noted by Miss Harrison, that in Festus's account of the ver sacrum (p. 379, ed. Müller) the children expelled were veiled, seems to point to the idea of dedication—unless, indeed, velabant here means that they blindfolded them.
375 The wine was poured over the altar as well as on the victim, which suggests a substitution for blood; Arnobius vii. 29 and 30; Dion. Hal. vii. 72. I cannot find that any one of the many utensils used in sacrifice were for pouring out blood. Blood was, however, poured on the stone at the Terminalia (R.F. pp. 325-326); but the rite here described by Ovid seems to be a rural one, outside the ius divinum. In the sacrifice of victims to Hecate in Virg. Aen. vi. 243 foll., which cannot be ritus Romanus, the warm blood is collected in paterae; but nothing is said of what was done with it, nor does Servius help. Cp. Aen. viii. 106. In Lucretius v. 1202, "aras sanguine multo spargere quadrupedum," the context shows that the ritual alluded to is not old Roman. In Livy's description of the "occulti paratus sacri" of the Samnites (ix. 41), we find "respersae fando nefandoque sanguine arae, et dira exsecratio ac furiale carmen." Livy seems to think of this blood-sprinkling, whether the blood be human or animal, as unusual and horrible. Ancient, no doubt, is the practice, recorded in the Acta Fratr. Arv. (see Henzen, pp. 21 and 23), of using the blood in a religious feast, in the process of cooking: "porcilias piaculares epulati sunt et sanguem." (There is a mention of the pouring of blood in an inscription from Lusitania in C.I.L. ii. 2395.) For the use of wine as a substitute for blood, see the recently published work of Karl Kircher, "Die sakrale Bedeuting des Weines," in Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche, etc., p. 82 foll., where, however, the subject is not worked out.
376 According to Lübbert (Commentarii pontificales, p. 121 foll.) magmentum is the same as augmentum, which word is also found (Varro, L.L. v. 112). Festus, p. 126, "magmentum magis augmentum"; Serv. Aen. iv. 57, to which passage I shall return. For the equivalent in the Vedic ritual of the cooking and offering of the exta, see Hubert et Mauss, op. cit. p. 60 foll.
377 R.F. p. 89.
378 ib. p. 10.
379 Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 60, 69, etc. Of course the prayer might be said while other operations were going on. For the constant connection of prayer and sacrifice, see Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 10, "quippe victimam caedi sine precatione non videtur referre aut deos rite consuli." If Macrobius is right (iii. 2. 7 foll.) in asserting that the prayer must be said while the priest's hand touches the altar, one may guess that this was done at the same time that the exta were laid on it. Ovid saw the priest at the Robigalia offer the exta and say the prayer at the same time (Fasti, iv. 905 foll.), but does197 not mention the hand touching the altar. For this see Serv. Aen. vi. 124; Horace, Ode iii. 23. 17, and Dr. Postgate on this passage in Classical Review for March 1910.
380 Cato, R.R. 132, 134, 139, and 141. That these formulae were taken from the books of the pontifices is almost certain, not only from the internal evidence of the prayers themselves, but because Servius (Interpol.) on Aen. ix. 641 quotes the words: "macte hoc vino inferio esto," which occur in 132, introducing them thus: "et in pontificalibus sacrificantes dicebant deo...."
381 The verb is omitted here for some ritualistic reason, as in the Iguvian prayers (Umbrica, p. 55).
382 Virg. Aen. ix. 641, "macte nova virtute puer, sic itur ad astra," etc., and many other passages. The verb mactare acquired a general sense of sacrificial slaying, as did also immolare, though neither had originally any direct reference to slaughter. The best account I find of the word is in H. Nettleship's Contributions to Latin Lexicography, p. 520. He takes mactus as the participle of a lost verb maco or mago, to make great, increase, equivalent to augeo, which is also a word of semi-religious meaning, as Augustus knew. Nettleship quotes Cicero in Vatinium, 14, "puerorum extis deos manes mactare."
383 Baehrens, Fragm. Poet. Lat. 180; Lusilius fragm. 143; Nonius, 341, 28 has "versibus."
384 It may possibly be objected that some of the deities were powerful for evil as well as good, e.g. Robigus, the spirit of the red mildew, and that the power of such a deity was not to be encouraged or increased. But all such deities (and I cannot mention another besides Robigus) were of course conceived as able to restrain their own harmful function; they were not invoked to go away and leave the ager Romanus in peace, but to limit their activity in the land where they had been settled for worship. We have no prayer to Robigus (or Robigo, feminine, as Ovid has it) except that which Ovid somewhat fancifully versified after hearing the Flamen Quirinalis say it (Fasti, iv. 911 foll.), in which of course the word macte does not occur. As the victim was a dog, an uneatable one, it is possible that the ritual was not quite the usual one. But the language of the prayer is interesting and brings out my point:
aspera Robigo, parcas Cerialibus herbis.
vis tua non levis est;...
parce precor, scabrasque manus a messibus aufer
neve noce cultis: posse nocere sat est.
It concludes by praying Robigo to direct her strength and attention to other objects, gladios et tela nocentia; but this is the poet's fancy.
385 Evolution of Religion, p. 212, quoting Vedic Hymns, pt. ii. pp. 259 and 391.198
386 Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, vol. ii. p. 585 foll.; cp. 657. See also Farnell, Evolution of Religion, p. 195.
387 See above, p. 9. Religio in the sense of an obligation to perform certain ritualistic acts is in my view a secondary and later use of the word. See Transactions of the Congress of Historical Religion for 1908, vol. ii. p. 169 foll.
388 Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 26 foll.; C.I.L. vi. 2104, 32 foll.; Buecheler und Riese, Carmina Lat., epigr. pars ii., no. 1. All surviving Roman prayers are collected in Appel's De Romanorum precationibus, Giessen, 1909.
389 Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 10 foll.
390 In Anthropology and the Classics, p. 94.
391 Cp. Tibullus ii. 1. 84, "vos celebrem cantate deum pecorique vocate, Voce palam pecori, clam sibi quisque vocet." This murmuring was certainly characteristic of Roman magic; see Jevons, p. 99, and especially the reference to a Lex Cornelia, which condemned those "qui susurris magicis homines occiderunt" (Justinian, Inst. iv. 18. 5).
392 On the nature of this tripodatio see Henzen, op. cit. p. 33. Buecheler, Umbrica, p. 69, gives the Umbrian verb a different meaning, though he translates it tripodato.
393 Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 13 and 52.
394 Wissowa, R.K., 333, inclines to the belief that prayer had a legal binding force upon the deity; but he does not cite any text which confirms this view, and is arguing on general grounds. I gather from the language of Aust (Religion der Römer, p. 30) that he thinks there was a germ which might have developed into a more truly religious attitude towards the gods, if it had not been killed by priestly routine and quasi-legal formulae. With this opinion I am strongly inclined to agree. Cp. the story of Scipio Aemilianus audaciously altering and elevating the formula dictated by the priest in the censor's lustratio (Val. Max. iv. 1. 10), to which I shall return in the proper place.
395 Westphal, quoted by De Marchi, La Religione, etc., i. p. 133, note.
396 See, e.g., ch. 141 ad fin. The prayer in the Acta of the Ludi Saeculares to the Moirae is an imitation of old prayers. See below, p. 442.
397 ib. ch. 139.
398 ib. ch. 141.
399 Hubert et Mauss, Mélanges d'histoire des religions, p. 74.
400 So Cato, R.R. 141, "si minus in omnes litabit, sic verba concipito; Mars pater, quod tibi illuc porco neque satisfactum est, te hoc porco piaculo." (The word for the slaughter is here euphemistically omitted; De Marchi, p. 134.)
401 Hubert et Mauss, op. cit. p. 55 foll.; Leviticus vi. I doubt whether the theory of the learned authors will hold good generally 199on this point.
402 Marquardt, p. 185, asserted the contrary, but cited no evidence except Serv. Aen. vi. 253, which does not prove the practice of the holocaust to be really Roman. Wissowa's exactness is well illustrated in his detection of this error; see R. K. p. 352, note 6. Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 135, leaves no doubt on the question possible.
403 Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 131. See above, p. 35. Festus, p. 218.
404 Gellius iv. 6. 7.
405 i.e. lustratio. That this was a form of piaculum is clear from the use of the word pihaklu of the victim in the lustratio of the arx of Iguvium, e.g. Buecheler, Umbrica, index, 5, v.
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LECTURE IX
RITUAL—continued
In the last lecture we found that the magical element in the Roman ritual is exaggerated by recent writers. But it has also long been the practice to describe that ritual as a system of bargaining with the gods: as partaking of the nature of a legal contract. "The old Roman worship was businesslike and utilitarian. The gods were partners in a contract with their worshippers, and the ritual was characterised by the hard formalism of the legal system of Rome. The worshipper performed his part to the letter with the scrupulous exactness required in pleadings before the praetor."406 This is an excellent statement of a view very generally held, especially since Mommsen, whose training in Roman law made him apt to dwell on the legal aspects of Roman life, wrote the famous chapter in the first volume of his history. I now wish to examine this view briefly.
No doubt it was suggested by the necessary familiarity of the Roman historian with vota publica, the vows so frequently made on behalf of the State by its magistrates, in terms supplied by the pontifices, and dictated by them to the magistrate undertaking the duty. Some few of these formulae have survived, and it may certainly be said of them that they are analogous to legal formulae, and express the quasi-contractual nature of the process. Such legalised religious contracts seem to be peculiar to Rome; they are curiously characteristic of the Roman genius for formularisation, which in course of time had most important201 effects in the domain of civil law. But the vow as such is, of course, by no means peculiar to Rome; it is familiar in Greek history, and is found in an elementary form among savages at the present day.407 But at Rome both in public and private life it is far more frequent and striking than elsewhere. This is a phenomenon that calls for careful study; and we must beware that we are not misled by quasi-legal developments into missing the real significance of it from the point of view of morality and religion.
The vota privata, which include vows and offerings made to deities by private individuals, had never been adequately examined till De Marchi wrote his book on the private religion of the Romans; nor could they have been so examined until the Corpus Inscriptionum was fairly well advanced. There the material is extraordinarily abundant, but it is, of course, almost entirely of comparatively late date, and the great majority of votive inscriptions belong to the period of the Empire. Yet it is quite legitimate to argue from this to an origin of this form of worship in the earliest times, and we have enough early evidence to justify the inference. Among the oldest Latin inscriptions are some found on objects such as cups or vases, showing that the latter were votive offerings to a deity: thus we have Saeturni poculum, Kerri poculum, and other similar ones which will be found at the beginning of the first volume of the Corpus.408 They give only the name of the deity as a rule, and do not tell us why the object was offered to him; but they must have been thank-offerings for some supposed blessing. In one case, not indeed at Rome, but not far away at Praeneste, we have proof of this; for a mother makes a dedication to Fortuna nationu cratia, which plainly expresses gratitude for good luck in childbirth;409 and this inscription is one of the oldest we possess. Nor do they tell us whether there was a previous vow or promise of which the offering is the fulfilment. But in the majority of inscriptions of late date the familiar letters V.S.L.M. (votum solvit lubens merito)202 betray the nature of the transaction, and it is not unreasonable to guess that there was usually a previous undertaking of some kind, to be carried out if the deity were gracious.
But these private vota were not, strictly speaking, legal transactions, supposed to bind both parties in a contract, as we shall see was to some extent the case with the vota publica. They could not have needed the aid of a pontifex, or a solemn voti nuncupatio, i.e. statement of the promise; they were rather, as De Marchi asserts,410 spontaneous expressions of what we may call religious feeling; and it may be that he is right in maintaining that throughout Roman history they remained as expressions of the religious sense and of the better feeling of the lower classes. The practice implies three conceptions: (1) of the deity as really powerful for good and evil; (2) of the gift, a work of supererogation, as likely to please him; (3) of the grateful act and feeling as good in themselves. Surely there must have been in this practice a germ of moral development; I am surprised that Dr. Westermarck has not mentioned in his chapter on gratitude the extraordinary abundance of Roman votive offerings and inscriptions. Doubtless there lies at the root of it the idea of Do ut des, or rather of Dabo ut des; doubtless also it could be turned to evil purposes in the form of devotio, when promises were made to a deity on condition that he killed or injured an enemy; but in the ordinary and common example it is impossible to deny that the final act, the performance of the vow, must have been accompanied by a feeling of gratitude. The merest recognition of a supposed blessing is of value in moral development.
But it is in the vota publica that we undoubtedly find something in the nature of a bargain—covenant would be a more graceful word—with a deity in the name of the State. Even here, however, the impression is rather produced by the use of legal terms and the formularisation of the process, than by any assumed attitude of contempt towards, or even of equality with, the deity concerned. There is no trace in early Roman religious history of any203 tendency to abuse or degrade the divine beings if they did not perform their part, such as is well known in China,411 or even, strange to say, occasionally met with in the southern Italy of to-day; the attitude towards the deity in cult (though not invariably in the later Graeco-Roman literature) was ever respectful, as it was towards the magistrates of the State. The farthest the Romans ever went in condemning their gods was when misfortune persuaded them that they were become indifferent or useless; then they began to neglect them, and to turn to other gods, as we shall see in subsequent lectures.
The public vota were of two kinds: the ordinary, or regularly recurring, and the extraordinary, which were occasioned by some particular event. Of the ordinary, the most familiar is that undertaken by the consul, and no doubt in some form by the Rex in the days of the kingship, for the benefit of the State on the first day of the official year. Accompanied by the Senate and a crowd of people, the consuls went up to the Capitoline temple, and performed the sacrifice which had been vowed by their predecessors of a year before; after which they undertook a new votum, "pro reipublicae salute."412 We have not the formula of this vow, and cannot tell what resemblance it bore to a bargain; but the ceremony itself must have been most impressive, and calculated to remind all who were present of the greatness and goodwill of the supreme deity who watched over the interests of the State. So too at the lustrum of the censors, which took place in the Campus Martius every five years, it is almost certain that the votum of the predecessors in office was fulfilled by a sacrifice, and a new one undertaken. Here again we are without the formula, but that there was one we know from a very interesting passage of Valerius Maximus. He tells us that Scipio Aemilianus, when as censor he was conducting this sacrifice, and the scriba (on behalf of the pontifex?) was dictating to him the solemne precationis carmen ex publicis tabulis, in which the immortal gods were besought to make the prosperity of the Roman State "better and204 greater," had the audacity to interrupt him, saying that the condition of the State was sufficiently good and great: "itaque precor ut eas (res) perpetuo incolumes servent." This change, Valerius says, was accepted, and the formula altered accordingly in the tabulae.413 This story, which is probably genuine and is quite characteristic of Scipio, must convince an impartial mind that in this votive ceremony there was enough truth and dignity to suggest a real advance in religious thought, so far at least as the State was concerned.
The extraordinary vota were innumerable. They were occasioned by dangers or misfortunes of various kinds, the magistrate undertaking to dedicate something to the god concerned if the State should have come safely through the peril. Many temples had their origin in this practice;414 we meet also with ludi, special sacrifices, or a tithe of the booty taken in war. In two or three cases Livy has copied the formula from the tabulae of the pontifices; thus before the war with Antiochus in 191 b.c., the consul recited the following words after the pontifex maximus: "Si duellum quod cum Antiocho rege sumi populus iussit, id ex sententia senatus populique Romani confectum erit; tum tibi Iuppiter populus Romanus ludos magnos dies decem continuos faciet ... quisquis magistratus eos ludos quando ubique faxit, hi ludi recte facti, donaque data recte sunto."415 This document dates from the days of the decay of the Roman religion, and is, of course, modernised by Livy; but it may give an idea of what is meant by writers who speak of an element of bargain or covenant in these vota. Still more elaborate, and probably more antique, is the famous formula of the vow of the ver sacrum in the darkest hour of the war with Hannibal.416 This very curious rite, which proves beyond question the devotion of the Italian stocks to the principle of the votum, consisted of a promise to dedicate to Mars or Jupiter all the valuable products of a single spring, including the male children born at that time; to this the Romans had recourse for the last time in 217 b.c., and205 Livy has fortunately preserved the words of the vow. These, with the exception of the dedication of the children, which is judiciously omitted, probably stand much as they had come down from a remote antiquity. The votum is put in the form of a rogatio to the people, without whose sanction it could not be put in force; are they willing to dedicate to Jupiter all the young of oxen, sheep, or pigs born in the spring five years after date, if the State shall have been preserved during those years from all its enemies? The curious feature of the document is, not that it binds the deity to any course of action, but that it secures the individual Roman against his anger in case of any chance slip in his part of the process, and the people against any evil consequences arising from such a slip or from misdoing on the part of an individual. "Si quis clepsit, ne populo scelus esto neve cui cleptum erit: si atro die faxit insciens, probe factum esto."417 Of this formula a recent writer of great learning and ability has written thus: "The well-known liturgical archive containing Rome's address to Jupiter in the critical days of the Hannibalic war is a wary and cleverly drawn legal document, intended to bind the god as well as the State."418 He is no exception to the rule that those who have not habitually occupied themselves with the Roman religion are liable to misinterpret its details. This is not an address to Jupiter, nor is there any sign in it that the god was considered as bound to perform his part as in a contract; the covenant is a one-sided one, the people undertaking an act of self-renunciation if the god be gracious to them, and thereby going far to assure themselves that he will so be gracious. And the legal cast of the language, which seems so apt to mislead the unwary,419 is only to be found in the clauses which guarantee the people against the contingency of the whole vow being ruined by the inadvertence or the rascality of an individual; surely a very natural and inevitable caveat, where for once the whole people, and not only their priests or magistrates, were concerned in the transaction.206
A curious form of the votum, which, however, I can only mention in passing, is that addressed to the gods of a hostile city, with a view to induce them to desert their temples and take up their abode at Rome; this is the process called evocatio, which was successfully applied at the siege of Veii, when Juno Regina consented to betray her city.420 Macrobius, commenting on Virgil's lines (Aen. ii. 351),
excessere omnes adytis arisque relictis
di quibus imperium hoc steterat,
has preserved the carmen used at the siege of Carthage.421 It is cast in the language of prayer: "Si deus si dea est cui populus civitasque Carthaginiensis est in tutela ... precor venerorque veniamque a vobis peto ut vos populum civitatemque Carthaginiensem deseratis," etc.; but it ends with a vow to build temples and establish ludi in honour of these deities if they should comply with the petition. It is worth noting here that it was, of course, impossible to make a bargain with strange or hostile gods, or in any way to force their hand; the promise is entirely one-sided; and I am inclined to think that in dealing with his own gods the mental attitude of the Roman was much the same, though his faith in them was undoubtedly greater.
This is the proper place to mention another very curious rite, closely allied to the votum, but differing from it in one or two important points, which is almost peculiar to the Romans and most characteristic of them; I mean the devotio of himself on the field of battle by a magistrate cum imperio.422 The famous example, familiar to us all, is that of Decius Mus at the battle of Vesuvius in the great Latin war423 (340 b.c.): the same story is told of his son in a war with Gauls and Samnites, and of his grandson in the war with Pyrrhus.424 The historical difficulties of these accounts do not concern us now; by common consent of scholars the method and formula of the devotio are authentic, and the rite must have had its origin in remote antiquity.207
The story runs425 that Decius, at whose preliminary sacrifice before the battle with the Latins the liver of the victim had been found imperfect, while that of his colleague was normal, perceived that his wing of the army was giving way. He therefore resolved to sacrifice himself by devotio, and called on the pontifex maximus, who was present, to dictate for him the correct formula. He was directed to put on the toga praetexta, to wear it with the cinctus Gabinus, to veil his head with it, to touch his chin with his hand under the folds of the robe, and to stand upon a spear. He then repeated after the pontifex the following formula: "Iane, Iuppiter, Mars pater, Quirine, Bellona, Lares, divi Novensiles, di Indigetes, divi quorum est potestas nostrorum hostiumque, diique Manes, vos precor, veneror, veniam peto feroque, uti populo Romano Quiritium vim victoriamque prosperetis, hostesque populi Romani Quiritium terrore formidine morteque adficiatis. Sicut verbis nuncupavi, ita pro re publica Quiritium, exercitu legionibus auxiliis populi Romani Quiritium, legiones auxiliaque hostium mecum deis Manibus Tellurique devoveo" (Livy ix. 9). He then mounted his horse and rode into the midst of the enemy to meet his death. The Latins were seized with panic and the Romans were victorious.
Here the vow is made and fulfilled almost at the same moment,—the fulfilment takes place before the gods have done their part. Here too the offering made is the life of a human being which brings the act within the domain of sacrifice. Its sacrificial nature is obvious in all the details.426 The dress is that of the sacrificing priest or magistrate;427 Decius was therefore priest and victim at the same time, and the two characters seem to be combined in the symbolic touching of the chin, which has been rightly explained,428 I think, as analogous to the laying on of hands in the consecratio of the Rex, as we saw it in the case of Numa, and perhaps to the immolatio of a victim by sprinkling the mola salsa on its head; where the object of consecration is made208 holy by contact with holy things.429 The standing on the spear is difficult to explain; it may have been a symbolic dedication to Mars, whose spear or spears, as we have seen, were kept in the Regia.430
The formula contains certain points of great interest. Firstly, it is not only the Roman gods of all sorts and conditions who are invoked, but those of the enemy also, or, in vague language, those who have power over both Romans and Latins.431 Secondly, it begins with a prayer combined with a curse upon the enemy: in which respect it resembles the prayer at the lustratio populi at Iguvium432 (which I shall mention again directly) and to a later type of devotio used at the siege of Carthage and preserved by Macrobius.433 Thirdly, in spite of this religious aspect of the formula, it ends with what can only be called a magical spell. By the act of self-sacrifice, which is the potent element in the spell, Decius exercises magical power over the legions of the enemy, and devotes them with himself to death,—to the Manes and Mother Earth.434
The story suggests to me that the rite had been at one time well known; the pontifex maximus was ready with the instructions and formula. It was a survival from an age of magic, but the priests have given it a religious turn, and the language of the first part is quite as much that of prayer as is the language of the collect to be said in time of war which still disfigures the Anglican prayer-book.435 What is still more remarkable is that it has not only a religious but an ethical character. The idea of service to the State is here seen at its highest point. The sacrifice is a vicarious one.436 Livy significantly adds that a private soldier might be chosen by the commander to represent him, and that if this man were not killed by the enemy an image seven feet long must be buried in the earth and a piacular sacrifice offered.437 Later on it would seem that instead of sacrificing himself, the consul might implore the gods to accept the hostile army or city as his substitutes: "eos209 vicarios pro me fide magistratuque meo pro populi Romani exercitibus do devoveo, ut me exercitumque nostrum ... bene salvos siritis esse."438 The idea here, and indeed in the devotio of Decius, bears some analogy to that which lies at the root of the old Roman practice, of making a criminal sacer to the deity chiefly concerned in his crime; when this was done, any man might kill him, and he was practically a victim offered as vicarius for the Roman people, who had been contaminated by his deed.439
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But I must now pass on the last kind of ritual to be explained in these lectures, and far the most impressive of all, that of lustratio, or the purification, as it is commonly called, of land, city, human beings, or even inanimate objects, by means of a solemn procession accompanied with sacrifice.
So important a part did these processional rites play in the public life of the Roman people,—so characteristic are they too of the old Roman habit of thought and action, that they have given a wonderful word to the Latin language. Lustrare has many meanings; but the one which is immediately derived from the rites I speak of, that of slow processional movement, is the most beautiful and impressive of them all. When Aeneas first sees Dido in all her stately beauty, he says:440
in freta dum fluvii current, dum montibus umbrae
lustrabunt convexa, polus dum sidera pascet,
semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt,
quae me cunque vocant terrae.
"So long as the cloud-shadows move slowly over the hollows of the hills." Here in Scotland you must have all seen this procession of the shadows, as I have watched it when fishing in Wales; let us always associate it with the magic of a poet of nature as well as with the religious processions of his people.
Lustrare, lustratio, are words which, as I think, belong210 to an age of religion, that is, according to our formula, of effective desire to be in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the Universe. In other processes which are usually called purificatory, magic seems to survive: the word februum, from which comes the name of our second month, meant an object with magical potency, such as water, fire, sulphur, laurel, wool, or the strips of the victims sacrificed at the Lupercalia, and the verb februare meant to get rid of certain unwholesome or miasmatic influences by means of these objects.441 What was the really primitive idea attached to these words need not concern us now; but Varro, and Ovid following him, explicitly explain them as meaning purifying agents and processes,442 from which we may infer that they had a magical power to produce certain desired conditions, or to protect from evil influences, like charms and amulets. But lustrare and lustratio seem to belong to an age when the thing to be driven or kept away is rather spiritual mischief, and when the means used are sacrifices and prayers, with processional movement.
What is the original meaning of the word lustrare? It seems to be a strong form of luere; and luere is explained by Varro as equivalent to solvere.443 The word lustrum, he says, i.e. the solemn five-yearly ceremony in the Campus Martius, is derived from luere in the sense of solvere, to pay; because every fifth year the contract-moneys for the collection of taxes and for public undertakings were paid into the treasury through the censors. Servius,444 doubtless following him, explains such expressions as peccata luere, supplicium luere, on the same principle—in the sense of payment, just as we speak of paying the penalty. We might thus be tempted to fancy that the root-idea of lustrare is to perform a duty and so get rid of it, as we do in paying for anything we buy; but this would be to misapprehend the original meaning of the word as completely as Varro did when he explained luere by reference to the payments of contractors. Varro211 and Servius do, however, suggest the right clue; they see that the idea lurking in the word is that of getting rid of something, but they understand that something in the light, not of primitive man's intelligence, but of the duty of man in a civilised State. What exactly it was that was to be got rid of is a more difficult question; but all that we have so far learnt about the early religious ideas of the Romans strongly suggests that they were in what we may call an advanced animistic stage of religious ideas, and that whatever may have been the notion of their primitive ancestors, they themselves, in these rites as we know them, saw the means of getting rid of and so keeping away hostile spirits. A French sociologist, M. van Gennep, whose book Les Rites de passage I have read with great interest, has kindly written me a long letter in which he insists that this animistic interpretation of lustratio is really superfluous, and that the idea of separation alone, i.e. of separation between sacred and profane, without any reference to spirits or dei, is a fully sufficient explanation. So no doubt it may be among many savage peoples; but he would probably allow that as a people advances from one stage of superstition to another, while it retains in outline the scheme of its rites, it will apply new meanings to them in keeping with the changes in its mental attitude. This is one of the most interesting processes with which modern research has been occupied; we are now familiar with the adoption of pre-Christian ceremonies, with a complete change of meaning, in the ritual of the Christian Church. These very processions of lustratio, which had already been once metamorphosed in an animistic period, were seized upon by the Roman Church with characteristic adroitness, adapted to its ritual, and given a new meaning; and the Catholic priest still leads his flock round the fields with the prayers of the Litania maior in Rogation week, begging a blessing on the flocks and herds, and deprecating the anger of the Almighty.445
But let us now pass briefly in review the more important212 of these rites of lustration and compare them with each other; we shall find the essential features the same in all of them.
The first permanent difficulty of new settlers in Latium was to mark off their cultivated land from the forest or waste land beyond it, and so, as M. van Gennep would phrase it,446 to make a margin of separation between the sacred and the profane, within which the sacred processes of domestic life and husbandry might go forward, undisturbed by dangers—human, spiritual, or what not—coming from the profane world without. The boundary was marked out in some material way, perhaps by stones (cippi) or posts, placed at intervals;447 and thus "a fixed piece of ground is appropriated by a particular social group, so that if any stranger penetrated it he would be committing a sacrilege as complete as he would if he trespassed in a sacred grove or a temple." This boundary-line was made sacred itself by the passage round it (lustratio) at some fixed time of the year, usually in May, when crops were ripening and especially liable to be attacked by hostile influences, of a procession occupied with sacrifice and prayer. The two main features of the rite, as formulated by Cato in his treatise on agriculture, are—1, the procession of the victims, ox, sheep, and pig (suovetaurilia), the farmer's most valuable property; 2, the prayer to Mars pater, after libations to Janus and Jupiter, asking for his kindly protection of the whole familia of the farm, together with the crops of all kinds and the cattle within the boundary-line.448 We are not expressly told that this procession followed the boundary throughout, but the analogy of other lustrations forbids us to doubt it; and thus the rite served the practical purpose of keeping it clear in the memory,—a matter of the utmost importance, especially for the practical Roman. In Cato's formula the farmer's object is to ward off disease, calamity, dearth, and infertility; and it is Mars who is invoked, i.e. a great god who has long ago emerged from the crowd of impersonal spirits; but213 we may safely believe that the primitive farmer used other language, addressing the spirits of disease and dearth themselves; and we may guess, if we will, that again before that there was no invocation or sacrifice at all, but that the object was only to mark the boundary between land civilised and sacred and land uncivilised and profane.
As we have seen, the farms and homesteads of the early Latins were grouped together in associations called pagi; and we can hardly doubt that these were subjected to the same process of lustratio as the farms themselves. We have no explicit account of a circumambulation in this case, but we have in the later poets several charming allusions to a lustratio pagi, and it is of a rite of this kind that Virgil must have been thinking when he wrote the beautiful passage in the first Georgic beginning "In primis venerare deos";449 and the lines
terque novas circum felix eat hostia fruges,
omnis quam chorus et socii comitentur ovantes, etc.,
clearly imply a procession with the object of keeping away harmful influences from the crops at a critical time. And when the city-state came into being we may be equally sure that its ager, so long at least as it was small enough to admit of such a processional ritual, was lustrated in the same way. In historical times this ager had become too extensive, and there is no procession to be found among the duties of the Fratres Arvales as we know them when they were revived by Augustus; but we have not, of course, the whole of the "acta" of the Brethren, and even if we had, it would not be likely that we should find any trace of a practice which must have been dropped in course of time as the Roman territory increased. Let us go on to the beginnings of the city, where we shall find the same principle and practice applied in striking fashion.
As it was necessary to protect the homestead and its land by a sacred boundary, so the city had to be clearly214 marked off from all that was outside of it. Its walls were sacred, or, strictly speaking, a certain imaginary line outside of them called the pomoerium was sacred. This is well shown in the traditional method of founding a city even in historical times, e.g. a colonia, as described by Varro, Servius, and Plutarch.450 A white ox and a white cow were harnessed to a plough, of which the share must be made of bronze—a rule which shows at once the antiquity and the religious character of the rite, for iron, as we saw, was taboo in most religious ceremonies. A rectangular furrow was drawn where the walls of the city were to be; the earth was turned inwards to mark the future line of the wall, and the furrow represented the future pomoerium. When the plough came to the place where there was to be a gate, it was lifted over it, and the ploughing resumed beyond it. This probably meant, as Plutarch expressed it, that the walls (or rather the pomoerium), were sacred while the gates were profane; had the gates been holy, scruple would necessarily have been felt about the passage in and out of them of things profane. Thus the pomoerium was a boundary line between the sacred and the profane, like that of the farm; but in historical times it acquired a more definite religious meaning, for within it there could only dwell those deities who belonged to the city and its inhabitants, i.e. the di indigetes, and who were recognised as its divine inhabitants.451 And only within its limits could the auspicia of the city be taken.
We should naturally expect that this sacred boundary would have its holiness secured or revived by an annual lustratio like that of the farm and pagus; and so no doubt it was. But the memory of this survives only in the word amburbium, which, on the analogy of ambarvalia, must mean a rite of this processional kind. Luckily we have definite knowledge of the real lustratio of a city in those ritualistic inscriptions of Iguvium which I have more than once referred to.452 It is the lustratio of the arx, the citadel of Iguvium, which we may guess215 to have been the original oppidum or germ of the historical city. The details are complex, and show clear traces of priestly organisation; but the main features stand out unmistakably. A procession goes round the arx (ocris Fisia), with the suovetaurilia—ox, sheep, and pig—as in the Latin lustratio; at each gate it stops, while sacrifice and prayer are offered on behalf of the citadel, the city, and the whole people of Iguvium. There were three gates, and each of them is the scene of sacrifice and prayer, because they are the weak points in the wall, and they need to be strengthened by annual religious operations; such at least is the most obvious explanation. Whether the Fratres Attiedii would have been able to explain it thus we may doubt; neither in the sacrificial ritual nor in the prayers, as recorded in the inscription, do we find any clear trace of a distinction between the sacred and the profane, or of the idea of a hostile spiritual world outside the sacred boundary. So far as we can judge from the prayers, the object is really a religious one, to implore the deities of the city to preserve it and all within it. The language of these prayers hardly differs from that in which a Christian Church of to-day asks for a blessing on a community.453
So far I have been speaking of the permanent separation of land or city by a sacred boundary line from the profane world without. But human beings en masse might be subjected to the same process—an army, for example, at the opening of the season of war; and so, too, might its appurtenances—horses, arms, and trumpets. In the account of the census and lustrum in the Campus Martius given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who passed some years in Rome in the time of Augustus, we find the suovetaurilia driven three times round the assembled host and sacrificed to Mars. This was doubtless the early form of the political census, which had a military meaning and origin. But we have a more exact and reliable account of a similar rite in the Iguvian documents, which contain instructions for the lustratio of the216 people apparently before a campaign.454 So far as we can gather from the Umbrian text, the male population was assembled in a particular spot in its military divisions, and round this host a procession went three times; at the end of each circuit there was sacrifice and prayer to Mars and two female associates of his power, the object of which, as we can read in the words of the prayer, was to bless the people of Iguvium and to curse its enemies, who were to be confounded and frightened and paralysed.
Here religion of a rude sort has been superimposed on the originally magical ceremonial. For the idea must have been that by drawing a "magic circle" around the host, which might have to march against enemies living far beyond the pale of the ager Romanus (or Iguvinus), where hostile magical influences might be brought to bear against them, they were in some mysterious way marked off, rendered "holy," and so protected against the wiles of the enemy. A later and animistic age would think of them as needing protection against hostile spirits, of whose ways and freaks they were of course entirely ignorant. Of these primitive ideas about the danger of entering hostile territory and of leaving your own, Dr. Frazer has collected some examples in his Golden Bough (i. 304 foll.), both from savage tribes and from Greek usage. A single parallel from the pen of a Roman historian, which Dr. Frazer has not mentioned, may suffice us here. Livy tells us that the method in Macedonia was to march the whole host in spring between the severed limbs of a dog:455 the principle is here the same as in Italy, but the method differs slightly. In each case some mysterious influence is brought to bear on the whole army without exception; but in the one case a line is drawn round it, in the other it passes through the parts of an object which must have been supposed to be endowed with magical power.
And once more, in spring before the season of arms, all the belongings of the host were subjected217 to some process of the same kind. I have alluded to this in my lecture on the calendar, and need not now reproduce the evidence of the Equirria at the end of February and on March 14, or of the Quinquatrus on March 19, when the lustratio took place of the shields (ancilia) of the Salii, the war-priests of Mars, and the Tubilustrium on March 23, which tells its own tale.456 But I may recall the fact that the calendar supplies us also with evidence that on the return of the host to their own territory all these lustrations had to be repeated in order to rid men, horses, arms, and trumpets of such evil contagion as they might have contracted during their absence. It may be that one special object of lustration after the return of an army was to rid it, with all belonging to it, of the taint of bloodshed, just as the Jewish warriors and their captives were purified before re-entering the camp.457 But in the Roman pontifical law this idea is hardly discernible, and the only trace I can find of it is a statement of Festus that the soldiers who followed the general's car in a triumph wore laurel wreaths "ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem."458 I may add here that the passage of a triumphing army through the Porta triumphalis, which was probably an isolated arch in the Campus Martius just outside the city wall,459 most likely had as its original meaning the separation of the host from the profane world in which it had been moving; and the triumphal arches of later times, which were within the city, were thus developed architecturally from an origin which belongs to the region of magic.460 To the same class of ideas, if I am not much mistaken, belongs the familiar Italian practice of compelling a surrendered army to pass under the yoke. As Livy explains this when he first mentions it, it was symbolical of subjection: "ut exprimatur confessio subactam domitamque esse gentem";461 and this was no doubt the idea in the minds of the historical Romans. But it may well have been that it had its root in a process which was supposed to deprive the218 conquered enemy of all dangerous contagion—to separate them from their own land and people before they came into peaceful contact with their conquerors.
A last word before I leave this part of my subject. Though it is interesting to try to get at the root-idea of these processes of lustratio, we must remember that in the Rome of history they had lost not only such magical meaning as they ever had, but also much of the religious meaning which in course of time was superimposed upon it. The sacrifices and the prayers remained, but the latter were muttered and unheard by the people. And except in the country districts these ceremonies were more and more absorbed, as time went on, into the social, military, and political life of the community, as e.g. the lustration of the host became a political census; or they tended to disappear altogether, like the ambarvalia and perhaps the amburbium. They grew up in the religious experience of the Romans, beginning with its very earliest and quasi-magical forms; but they came at last to represent that experience no longer, and when we meet with them in historical times it is impossible to ascribe to them any real influence on life and conduct. Lustratio never in pagan Italy developed an ethical meaning as catharsis did in Greece.462 But meaningless as they were, the stately processions remained, and could be watched with pride by the patriotic Roman all through the period of the Empire, until the Roman Church adapted them to its own ritual and gave them, as we saw, a new meaning. As the cloud-shadows still move slowly over the hollows of the Apennines, so does the procession of the patron saint pass still through the streets of many an Italian city.463
NOTES TO LECTURE IX
406 Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, p. 63.
407 See Westermarck, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, ii. 615 foll.219
408 C.I.L. i. Nos. 43 foll.
409 C.I.L. xiv. 2863. See R.F. p. 224, and Wissowa, R.K. p. 209.
410 Op. cit. vol. i. p. 252; cp. 271.
411 See Sir Alfred Lyall's Asiatic Studies, Series I. ch. vi. No one would call the vow of Aeneas, in Aen. vi. 69, a bargain with Apollo and the Sibyl.
412 Marquardt, p. 266; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, i.2 594 foll. The ceremony is best described by Ovid, Ex Ponto, iv. 9. 5 foll. He is addressing the consul of the year from his place of exile:
at cum Tarpeias esses deductus in arces,
dum caderet iussu victima sacra tuo,
me quoque secreto grates sibi magnus agentem
audisset media qui sedet aede deus.
(II. 28 foll.)
413 Valerius Maximus iv. 1. 10.
414 A list of these is given in Aust, De aedibus sacris populi Romani (Marpurg, 1889). A valuable work, which will be of service to us later on.
415 Livy xxxvi. 2. 3.
416 Ib. xxii. 10.
417 Ib. sec. 6. The meaning is that if any one has stolen an animal which was intended to be dedicated, no blame attaches to the person so robbed; and that if a man performs his dedication on a day of ill omen unwittingly, it will hold good none the less.
418 Farnell, Evolution of Religion, p. 195.
419 The fact that words like reus and damnatus were applied respectively to persons who had made a vow and to those who had performed it, i.e. as being liable like a defendant, and then released from that position by a verdict or sentence (see Wissowa, R.K. p. 320), is of course significant of the idea of the transaction in the mind of the Roman, who, as Macrobius says (iii. 2. 6) se numinibus obligat, as an accused person is obligatus to the authorities of the State (Mommsen, Strafrecht, 189 foll.). It is the natural tendency of the Roman mind to give all transactions a legal sanction; but it does not thence follow that the original idea was really thought of as a contract, and we have only to reflect that the final act was a thank-offering to see the difference between the civil and the religious process.
420 Livy v. 21.
421 Macr. iii. 9, 6. He says that he found it in the fifth book of Res reconditae by one Sammonicus Serenus, and that the latter had himself found it "in cuiusdam Furii vetustissimo libro."
422 On this subject see article "Devotio" in Pauly-Wissowa.
423 Livy viii. 10, "licere consuli dictatori praetori...." Cp. Cic. de Nat. deorum, ii. 10, "at vero apud maiores tanta religionis vis fuit, ut quidam imperatores etiam se ipsos dis immortalibus capite velato certis verbis pro republica devoverent."220
424 See Münzer's article "Decii" in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl.; Soltau, Die Anfänge der röm. Geschichtschreibung, p. 48 foll.
425 Livy viii. 9 foll.; Dio Cassius, fragment, xxxv. 6; Ennius, Ann. vi. 147, Baehrens. The latter fragment is the oldest reference to the event which we possess, and just sufficient to confirm Livy's account: "Divi hoc audite parumper, ut pro Romano populo prognariter armis certando prudens animum de corpore mitto."
426 It is worth remarking that the sacrificial aspect struck St. Augustine. In Civ. Dei, v. 18, he writes: "Si se occidendos certis verbis quodam modo consecrantes Decii devoverunt, ut illis cadentibus et iram deorum sanguine suo placantibus Romanus liberaretur exercitus," and goes on to compare the Decii with Christian martyrs. I am indebted for this reference to Mayor's note on Cicero, de Nat. deor. ii. 3. 10.
427 See above, p. 176; Wissowa, R.K. p. 352, note 1.
428 By Deubner in Archiv, 1905, p. 69 foll. This touching of the chin seems to be an example of that personal contact which makes a man or thing holy; see, e.g., Westermarck, op. cit. i. 586. Decius makes himself holy for the sacrifice (as victim) by touching (as priest) the only part of his person which was exposed. For the magic touch of the hand see O. Weinrich, Antike Heiligungswünder, p. 63 foll., and Macrobius iii. 2. 7, for the touching of the altar by a sacrificing priest.
429 See above, p. 180.
430 This is Deubner's explanation, which he elaborates at length by examples of the worship of the spear or sword among various peoples.
431 This is peculiar to the formula in Livy viii. 9. Is it possible that it may have some reference to the fact that the Romans were fighting their own kin, the Latins?
432 Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 22 and 102: "hastatos inhastatos completo timore tremore, fuga formidine, nive nimbo, fragore furore, senio servitio," where, however, the translator from the Umbrian is assisted by the Latin formulae we are discussing.
433 Macrobius iii. 9. 10, "exercitum quem ego me sentio dicere fuga formidine terrore compleatis," etc. This is of comparatively late origin, as it is addressed to Dis pater, who only became a Roman deity in 249 B.C. (Wissowa, R.K. p. 257). The interesting feature in this devotio, used at the siege at Carthage, is that it is not himself whom the commander devotes—the common sense of the Romans had got beyond that—but the enemy as substitutes for himself. "Eos vicarios pro me fide magistratuque meo pro populo Romano exercitibus do devoveo, ut me meamque fidem imperiumque legiones exercitumque nostrum bene salvos siritis esse." Thus the enemy is made the victim, and this is why the only gods invoked are the Di Inferi, Dis pater, Veiovis, Manes, while in the older formula it is the gods of Romans and Latins. Pacuvius in a praetextata called Decius wrote: "Lue patrium hostili fusum sanguen sanguine" (Ribbeck, p. 280). This is the language Ennius used before him of the sacrifice221 of Iphigenia: "ut hostium eliciatur sanguis sanguine," where, however, the word eliciatur shows that it is magic. The curious thing in this last passage is that the parallel passage in the Euripidean Iph. in Aul. (1486) does not suggest magic. Is the idea Italian? The curse (for such it really is) is to be witnessed by Tellus and Iuppiter, and the celebrant points down and up respectively in invoking them, as also in the devotio of Curtis in the Forum (Livy vii. 6), which was an abnormal procuratio prodigii.
434 Cp. the language used by Livy of the second Decius (x. 29): "prae se agere formidinem ac fugam ... contacturum funebribus diris signa tela arma hostium." For spells or curses of this kind see Westermarck i. 563: a curse is conveyable by speech, especially if spoken by a magistrate or priest. "Among the Maoris the anathema of the priest is regarded as a thunderbolt that an enemy cannot escape." See also Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 434, for the Jewish ban, by which impious sinners, or enemies of the city and its God, were devoted to destruction. He remarks that the Hebrew verb to ban is sometimes rendered "consecrate": Micah iv. 13; Deut. xiii. 16; and Joshua vi. 26 (Jericho), which exactly answers to the consecratio of Carthage. For curses conveyable by sacrifices, as in all the cases I have mentioned, see Westermarck ii. 618 foll. 624, and the same author's paper on conditional curses in Morocco, in Anthropological Essays, addressed to E. B. Tylor, p. 360.
435 "Abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices." I well remember hearing this read in church throughout the Crimean war.
436 "Pro republica Quiritium," in the formula quoted above.
437 Livy viii. 10 ad fin.
438 See above, note 28.
439 See Marquardt, p. 276 and notes; Mommsen, Strafrecht, 900 foll. The subject has generally been treated from the legal point of view rather than the religious; but from the religious point of view it has generally been assumed that the sacrifice was to appease the god. So no doubt it was; but I venture also to conjecture that the victim was vicarius for the contamination of the community. On the subject generally Westermarck's two chapters on human sacrifice and blood-revenge (xix. and xx. in vol. i.) are extremely well worth reading.
440 Aen. i. 607 foll. Cp. Aen. iii. 429—
praestat Trinacrii metas lustrare Pachyni
cessantem, longos et circumflectere cursus,
where the slow movement and circuitous course of a lustratio must have been in Virgil's mind. The movement round an object for lustral purposes is seen in Aen. vi. 229, "idem ter socios pura circumtulit unda," where Servius explains circumtulit by purgavit. As early as Livius Andronicus (second century B.C.) we find "classem lustratur" of fishes swimming round a fleet (Ribb. Trag. Fragmenta, p. 1).222
441 Marquardt, p. 324, for the februa of the Luperci, R.F. p. 320 foll., and the explanations there given. More will be found alluded to in Van Gennep, Les Rites de passage, p. 249. To my mind none are quite convincing. The Romans believed that blows with these februa (strips of the victim's skin) made women fertile; they were therefore clearly magical implements, but beyond this we do not seem to get. (See also Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 495 foll.)
442 Varro, L.L. vi. 13, "Februum Sabini purgamentum, et id in sacris nostris verbum." Cp. Varro, ap. Nonium, p. 114; Ovid, Fasti, ii. 19 foll., where he calls februa piamina, purgamenta, in the language of the ius divinum.
443 L.L. vi. 11.
444 Servius, ad Aen. x. 32; xi. 842; cp. i. 136.
445 See R.F. p. 127, for the same rite in the Church of England (Brand, Popular Antiquities, p. 292).
446 Les Rites de passage, ch. ii.
447 For boundary marks in historical times see Gromatici auctores, vol. ii. p. 250 foll. (Rudorff).
448 If the cattle were in the woodland beyond the settlement, as they would be in summer, they could not be protected in this way: like an army going into the country of hostes (see above, p. 216) they were treated in another way, which we may connect with the ritual of the Parilia, as Dr. Frazer has beautifully shown in his paper on St. George and the Parilia (Revue des études ethnographiques et sociologiques, 1908, p. 1 foll.).
449 Georg. i. 338 foll.
450 Varro, L.L. v. 143; Servius, Aen. v. 755 (from Cato); Plutarch, Romulus, xi.
451 See above, p. 117.
452 Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 12 foll. and 42 foll.
453 The deities of the city were invoked to preserve the name, the magistrates, rites, men, cattle, land, and crops: a list in which the name is the only item that carries us back to pre-Christian times.
454 Buecheler, Umbrica, pp. 21 and 84 foll.
455 Livy xl. 6 init.
456 See above, p. 96.
457 Numbers xxxi. 19.
458 Festus, p. 117.
459 See Hülsen-Jordan, Röm. Topographie, vol. iii. p. 495; Von Domaszewski, Abhandlungen, p. 217 foll.
460 Suggested by Van Gennep, Les Rites de passage, p. 28.
461 Livy iii. 28. 11.
462 Farnell, Evolution of Religion, p. 132 foll.
463 The account of lustratio given in this lecture is adapted from the author's chapter on the same subject in Anthropology and the Classics, Oxford University Press, 1908.
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223
LECTURE X
THE FIRST ARRIVAL OF NEW CULTS IN ROME
I said in my first lecture that the whole story of Roman religious experience falls into two parts: first, that of the formularisation of rules and methods for getting effectively into right relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe; secondly, that of the gradual discovery of the inadequacy of these, and of the engrafting on the State religion of Rome of an ever-increasing number of foreign rites and deities. The first of these stories has been occupying us so far, and before I leave it for what will be practically an introduction to succeeding lectures, it will be as well for me to sum up the results at which we have already arrived.
I began with what I called the protoplasm of religion, the primitive ideas and practices which form the psychological basis of the whole growth. The feeling of awe and anxiety about that which is mysterious and unknown, the feeling which the Romans called religio, seems to have manifested itself in Italy, as elsewhere, in those various ways which I discussed in my second and third lectures, in the various forms of magic, negative and positive. We find unmistakable evidence of the existence of those strict rules of conduct called taboos, which fetter the mind and body of primitive man, which probably arise from an ineffective desire to put himself in right relations with forces he does not understand, and which have their value as a social discipline. Again, we find surviving in historical Rome numerous forms of active or positive224 magic, by which it was thought possible to compel or overcome those powers, so as to use them for your own benefit and against your enemies. But I was careful to point out that on the whole little of all this evidence of the early existence of magic at Rome is to be found in the public religion of the Roman State, and that the natural inference from this is that at one time or another there must have been a very powerful influence at work in cutting away these obsolete root-leaves of the plant that was to be, and in making of that plant a neat, well-defined growth.
I went on to deal with the first stage in the working of this influence, which we found reflected in the religion of the family as we know it in historical times. The family, settled on the land, with its homestead and its regular routine of agricultural process, developed a more effective desire to get into right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe. Anxiety is greatly lessened both in the house and on the land, because within those limits there is a "peace" (or covenant) between the divine and human inhabitants who have taken up their residence there. The supernatural powers, conceived now (whatever they may have been before) as spirits, are friendly if rightly propitiated, and much advance has been made in the methods of propitiation; magic and religion are still doubtless mixed up together in these, but the tendency seems to be to get gradually rid of the more inadequate and blundering methods. In fact, man's knowledge of the Divine has greatly advanced; spirits have some slight tendency to become deities, and magic is in part at least superseded by an orderly round of sacrifice and prayer, which is performed daily within the house, and within the boundary of the land at certain seasons of the year. This stage of settlement and routine was the first great revolution in the religious experience of the Romans, and supplied the basis of their national character.
The second revolution which we can clearly discern, and far the most important as a factor in Roman history,225 is that of the organisation of the religion of the city-state of Rome. Doubtless there were stages intermediate between the two, but they are entirely lost to us. We had to concentrate our attention on the city of the four regions—the first city we really know—and to examine the one document which has survived from it, the so-called calendar of Numa. In my fifth lecture I explained the nature of that calendar, and noted how it reflects the life of a people at once agricultural and military, and how it must presuppose the existence of a highly organised legal priesthood, or of some powerful genius for political as well as religious legislation. The tradition of a great priest-king is not wholly to be despised, for it expresses the feeling of the Romans that religious law and order were indispensable parts of their whole political and social life. During the rest of these lectures I have been trying to interrogate this religious calendar, with such help as could be gained from any other sources, on two points: (1) the conception, or, if we can venture to use the word, the knowledge, which the Romans of that early city-state had of the Divine; (2) the chief forms and methods of their worship. We saw that they did not think of the divine beings as existing in human form with human weaknesses, but as invisible and intangible functional powers, numina. Each had its special limited sphere of action; and some were now localised within the pomoerium, or just outside it within the ager Romanus, and worshipped under a particular name. I suggested that this very settlement had probably some influence in preparing them for assuming a more definite and personal character, should the chance be given them. In regard to the forms of cult with which they were propitiated, I found in the ritual of sacrifice and prayer a genuine advance towards a really religious attitude to the deity, the sacrifices being meant to increase his power to benefit the community, and the prayers to diminish such inclination as he might have to damage it; but that there are in these certain survivals of the age of magic, which are, however, only formal, and226 have lost their original significance. I found some curious examples of such survivals in the rite of devotio, and in vows generally a somewhat lower type of method in dealing with the supernatural. But, on the other hand, the forms of lustratio, at the bottom of which seems to lie the idea of getting rid of evil spirits and influences, present very beautiful examples of what we may really call religious ceremony.
There was, then, in this highly-organised religion of the city-state, in some ways at least, a great advance. But in spite of this gain, it had serious drawbacks. Most prominent among these was the fact that it was the religion of the State as a whole, and not of the individual or the family. Religion, I think we may safely say, had placed a certain consecration upon the simple life of the family, which was, in fact, the life of the individual; for the essence of religion in all stages of civilisation lies in the feeling of the individual that his own life, his bodily and mental welfare, is dependent on the Divine as he and his regard it. But to what extent can it be said that religion so consecrated the life of the State as to enable each individual in his family group to feel that consecration more vividly? That would have constituted a real advance in religious development; that was the result, if I am not mistaken, of the religion of the Jewish State, which with all the force of a powerful hierarchical authority addressed its precepts to the mind and will of the individual. But at Rome, though the earliest traces and traditions of law show a certain consecration of morality, inasmuch as the criminal is made over as a kind of propitiatory sacrifice to the deity whom he has offended, yet in the ordinary course of life, so far as I can discern, the individual was left very much where he was, before the State arose, in his relation to the Divine.
In no other ancient State that we know of did the citizen so entirely resign the regulation of all his dealings with the State's gods to the constituted authorities set over 227him. His obligatory part in the religious ritual of the State was simply nil, and all his religious duty on days of religious importance was to abstain from civil business, to make no disturbance. Within the household he used his own simple ritual, the morning prayer, the libation to the household deities at meals; and it is exactly here that we see a pietas, a sense of duty consecrated by religion, which seems to have had a real ethical value, and reminds us of modern piety. But in all his relations with the gods qua citizen, he resigned himself to the trained and trusted priesthoods, who knew the secrets of ritual and all that was comprised in the ius divinum; and by passive obedience to these authorities he gradually began to deaden the sense of religio that was in him. And this tendency was increased by the mere fact of life in a city, which as time went on became more and more the rule; for, as I pointed out, the round of religious festivals no longer exactly expressed the needs and the work of that agricultural life in which it had its origin.
It would be an interesting inquiry, if the material for an answer were available, to try and discover how this gradual absorption of religion (or rather religious duties) by the State and its authorities affected the morality of the individual Roman. It has often been maintained of late that religion and morality have nothing in common; and even Dr. Westermarck,464 who, unlike most anthropologists, treats the whole subject from a psychological point of view, seems inclined to come to this conclusion. For myself, I am rather disposed to agree with another eminent anthropologist,465 that religion and morality are really elemental instincts of human nature, primarily undistinguishable from each other; and if that be so, then the over-elaboration of either the moral or religious law, or of the two combined, will tend to weaken the binding force of both. If, as at Rome, the citizen is made perfectly comfortable in his relations with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, owing to the complete mastery of the ius divinum by the State and its officials, there will assuredly be a tendency to paralyse the elemental religious228 impulse, and with it, if I am not mistaken, the elemental sense of right and wrong. For in the life of a state with such a legalised religious system as this, so long at least as it thrives and escapes serious disaster, there will be few or none of those moments of peril and anxiety in which "man is brought face to face with the eternal realities of existence,"466 and when he becomes awakened to a new sense of religion and duty. In the life of the family, the critical moments of birth, puberty, marriage, and death regularly recur, and keep up the instinct, because man is then brought face to face with these eternal facts; there is no need of extraordinary perils, such as tempests or pestilences, to keep the instinct alive. But in the life of the State as such there were no such continually recurring reminders; even the old agricultural perils were out of sight of the ordinary citizen. Thus the farthest we can go in ascribing a moral influence to the State religion is in giving it credit for helping to maintain that sense of law and order which served to keep the life of the family sound and wholesome. That it did to some extent perform this service I have already pointed out;467 and it is a remarkable fact that the decay of the State religion was coincident, in the last two centuries B.C., with the decay of the family life and virtues. But on the whole, as we shall see, the ius divinum had rather the effect of hypnotising the religious and moral instinct than of keeping it awake. It needed new perils for the State as a whole to re-create that feeling which is the root of the growth of conscience; and when the craving did at last come upon the Roman, which in times of doubt and peril has come upon individuals and communities in all ages, for support and comfort from the Unseen, it had to be satisfied by giving him new gods to worship in new ways—aliens with whom he had nothing in common, who had no home in his patriotic feeling, no place in his religious experience.468
I wish to conclude this first part of my subject by giving some account of the first beginning of this intro229duction of new deities, di novensiles as they were called,469 into the old Roman religious world. Those, however, of whom I shall speak here were not introduced as the result of disaster or distress, but were simply the inevitable consequence of the growing importance of the city on the Tiber—of the beginnings of her commercial and political relations with her neighbours, and also of her own development in the arts of civilisation. The religious system with which I have so far been dealing was the exclusive property, we must remember, of those gentes, with the families composing them, which formed the original human material of the State, and were known as patrician. If we had no other reason for being sure of this, the fact that all State priesthoods were originally limited to patrician families would be sufficient to prove it;470 even down to the latest times the rex sacrorum, the three flamines maiores, and the Salii were necessarily of patrician birth—a fact which had much to do with their tendency to disappear in the last age of the Republic.
But in the course of the period within which the Numan calendar was drawn up, this community of patrician burghers began to suffer certain changes. A population of "outsiders," as in so many Greek cities, had gained admittance to the site of Rome, though not into its political and religious organism.471 So solid a city, in such an important position, was sure to attract such settlers, whether from the Latins dwelling about it, or from the Etruscans on the north, or the Greek cities along the coast southwards and in Sicily. The Latins were, of course, of the same stock as the Romans, and already in some loose political relation to them; and as each Latin city was open, like Rome, to Greek and Etruscan influences, we should probably see in Latium an indirect channel of communication between those peoples and Rome, to be reckoned in addition to the direct and obvious one. As Dr. J. B. Carter has well said,472 "the Latins, becoming rapidly inferior to Rome, were enabled to do her at least this service, that of absorbing the230 foreign influences which came, and in certain cases of Latinising them, and thus transmitting them to Rome in a more or less assimilated condition." As Dr. Carter has been the first to explain the arrival of these new religious influences to English readers, I shall in what follows closely follow his footsteps. They indicate and also reflect a change from agricultural economy and habits to a society interested in trade and travel: I say interested, because we cannot be quite sure how far the old Romans engaged in such pursuits themselves, as well as admitting from outside those who did, with their worships. They indicate also the growth of an industrial population, organised in gilds, as in the Middle Ages; here beyond doubt the workers were mainly of native birth. Lastly, they indicate an advance in military efficiency and, as a result of this military progress, some change in the relation of Rome to her fellow-communities of Latium.
Perhaps the first of these new deities to arrive was the famous Hercules Victor or Invictus of the ara maxima in the Forum Boarium, who continued for centuries to accept the tithes of the booty of generals and the profits of successful merchants. Virgil in the eighth Aeneid473 makes Evander show his guest this altar and the celebration of its festival, and tell him the tale of Cacus and the oxen and the cave on the Aventine hard by; the poet, like every one else until the last few years, believed the cult to be primeval and Roman. But one of the many gains for the history of Roman religion which have recently been secured—even since the publication of my Roman Festivals—is the certainty that the Italian Hercules is really the Greek Heracles acclimatised in the sister peninsula, and that the cult of the ara maxima, though that altar was inside the sacred boundary of the pomoerium, was not native in Rome.474 It seems, however, almost certain that it did not come direct from any part of Hellas, though its position, close to the Tiber and its landing-place, might naturally lead us to think so. It is almost impossible to believe that Heracles would have231 been allowed inside the pomoerium, had he been introduced by foreigners in the strict sense of the word. No doubt much has yet to be learnt about Hercules in Italy; but recent painstaking researches have made it possible for us to acquiesce in the belief that this Hercules of the ara came from a Latin city,—from that Tibur which by tradition was of Greek origin—"Tibur Argeo positum colono,"—and which, like its neighbour Praeneste, was curiously receptive of foreign influence.475 It is believed that the Greek traders from Campania and Magna Graecia made their way northwards through Latium, and thus eventually reached Rome with the deity whom they seem to have always carried with them. He was, in the words of Dr. Carter,476 a deity of whom, by the contagion of commerce, the Romans already felt a great need, a god of great power from whom came success in the practical undertakings of life; and it was quite natural that his shrine should be in the busy cattle-market of the city, if we remember that the wealth of the early Romans, pecunia as they called it, mainly consisted in sheep and oxen. As Heracles in various forms was to be met with all over the Mediterranean coasts, it would indeed be strange if he were not found in the growing city commanding the central water-way of Italy; and his appearance there may be said to have put Rome in touch with the Mediterranean business of that day. There he was destined to remain, with all the honour of an oldest cult, though other cults of the same god came in later, and were established quite close to him; and though never a State deity of much importance, he exercised a wholesome influence in matters of trade, as the god who sanctioned your oath, and who accepted the tithe of your gain which you had vowed at the outset of an enterprise.477
In the same period, though the traditional date of their temple is later, came the Twin Brethren, Castor and Pollux, and found their way, like Hercules, into the city within the pomoerium. The famous temple of Castor (before whom his brother gradually gave way) was at232 the end of the Forum under the Palatine, close to the fountain of Juturna, where the Twins watered their horses after the battle of Lake Regillus; and there the beautiful remains of the latest reconstruction of it still stand.478 This position alone should make us feel confident that the cult did not come direct from Greek sources; and it had its origin, perhaps, in the period when Rome was in close relation with Latin cities, which themselves had been gradually absorbing the cults and products of the Greeks of Campania. There is a strong probability that it came from Tusculum, with which the legend of the Regillus battle is closely connected, and where the cult had beyond doubt taken strong root.479 Like the Hercules of the ara maxima, the Twins were no doubt brought by the course of trade, which was continually pushing up from the south; for they too were favourites of the merchant adventurer, and throughout Hellas were the special protectors of the seafarer. Their connection with horses is well known, and not as yet satisfactorily explained in its Roman aspect; but Dr. J. B. Carter thinks that they first became prominent in Greece when the Homeric use of chariots was abandoned for a primitive kind of cavalry, and that "the Castor-cult moved steadily northward (from Magna Graecia), carried, as it were, on horseback," and that when it reached Rome it became connected with the reorganisation of the cavalry. This seems to be almost pure guess-work, and, attractive as it is, I fear we cannot put much faith in it.480 The position in the Forum, and the well-known connection of both twins with oaths,481 seem to me rather to suggest a more natural origin in trade. I would suggest that the equine character of the cult in Latium was secondary, and that the connection of the temple and cult with the Roman cavalry was a natural result, but not a primary feature, of its introduction. I should be inclined to look on it as coming in with the building of the temple, which was probably of later origin than the original introduction of the cult.
Some time after the calendar was drawn up, a deity was established on the Aventine, i.e. not within the233 pomoerium, whose arrival marks a development in the organisation of handicraft. We cannot indeed prove that the settlement of Minerva on the Aventine took place so early, but we have strong grounds for the conclusion.482 This temple was in historical times the religious centre of trade-gilds; and these gilds were by universal Roman tradition ascribed to Numa as founder, which simply means that they were among the oldest institutions of the City-state. As Minerva does not appear in the calendar, had no flamen, and therefore must have been altogether outside the original patrician religious system, the natural inference is that the temple was founded, like the shrines of Hercules and the Twin Brethren, towards the end of the period we are dealing with, and was from the first the centre of the gilds. Of those mentioned by Plutarch in his life of Numa (ch. 17), we know that the following gilds belonged to Minerva: tibicines, fabri (carpenters?), fullones, sutores; and it is a reasonable guess that the others, coriarii, fabri aerarii, and aurifices, were also under her protection. These trades, as Waltzing remarks in his great work on Roman gilds,483 are all in keeping with the rudimentary civilisation of primitive Rome; they are those which were first carried on outside of the family. Workers in iron are not among them; bronze is still the common metal.
Now of course we must not go so far as to assume that none of these trades existed before the cult of Minerva came to Rome; but from her close association with them all through Roman history, and from the fact that the Romans were originally an agricultural folk, as the calendar shows, with a simple economy and simple needs, it is legitimate to connect the arrival of the goddess with the growth of town life and the demand for articles once made in rude fashion chiefly on the farms, and with a period of improvement in manufacture, and the use of better materials and better methods. Whence, then, did these improvements come? This is only another way of asking the question, Whence did Minerva come?234
By the common consent of investigators she came from the semi-Latin town of Falerii in southern Etruria, where these arts were practised by Etruscans, or those who had learnt of Etruscans.484 Her name is Italian, not Etruscan;485 she was an old Italian deity taken over by the invading Etruscans from the peoples whose land they occupied. But while in the hands of Etruscans she had adopted Greek characteristics, especially those of Athene, the patroness of arts and crafts. She soon, indeed, appeared with some of the character of Athene Polias, as we shall see at the end of this lecture; but her real importance, far down into the period of the Empire, was in the temple on the Aventine, and in connection with the crafts. The dedication day of the temple was March 19, which was known, as we learn on the best authority, also as artificum dies.486
There was another famous temple on the Aventine which by universal consent is attributed to the same period as that of Minerva. Diana does not appear in the calendar, and had no flamen; Roman tradition ascribed her arrival to Servius Tullius, and we shall not be far wrong if we place it at or towards the end of the age of the kingship. The temple was celebrated as containing an ancient statue of Diana, the oldest or almost the oldest representation of a deity in human form known at Rome, which was a copy of a rude image of Artemis at Massilia, of the type of the famous ξὁανον of the Ephesian Artemis.487 It also contained a lex templi in Greek characters, and a treaty or charter of a federation of Latin cities with Rome as their head, which was seen by Dionysius of Halicarnassus when in Rome in the time of Augustus.488
The explanation of the arrival of Diana is simple. The dies natalis of the temple is the same as that of the famous shrine of the same goddess at Aricia—the Ides of August.489 Aricia was at this time the centre of a league of cities including Tusculum and Tibur, with both of which, as we have just seen, Rome was closely connected at this time; a league which is generally supposed to have superseded that of Alba, marking some revolution in Latium con235sequent on the fall of Alba.490 Diana was a wood-spirit, a tree-spirit, as Dr. Frazer has taught us, with some relation to the moon and to the life of women; of late she has become familiar to every one, not as she was known later, in the disguise of Artemis, but as the deity of that shrine—"pinguis et placabilis ara Dianae"—of which the priest was the Rex Nemorensis: he who "slew the slayer and shall himself be slain."491 But in those days it was only the fact that she was the chief local deity of Aricia, the leading city of the new league, which brought her suddenly into notice. When the strategic position of Rome gave her in turn the lead in Latium, Diana passed on from Aricia to the Tiber, entered on a new life, and eventually took over the attributes of Artemis, with whom she had much in common. The Diana whom we know in Roman literature is really Artemis; but Diana of the Aventine, when she first arrived there, was the wood-spirit of Aricia, and her temple was an outward sign of Rome's new position in Latium: it was built by the chiefs of the Latin cities in conjunction with Rome, and is described by Varro as "commune Latinorum Dianae templum."492 It was appropriately placed on the only Roman hill which was then still covered with wood, and was outside the pomoerium.
There was one other goddess, a Latin one, who was traditionally associated with this period, and especially with king Servius Tullius—Fortuna, or Fors Fortuna; she does not appear in the calendar, had no flamen, and must have been introduced from outside. But it was long before Fortuna became of any real importance in Rome, and I shall leave her out of account here. She had two homes of renown in Latium, at Antium and Praeneste, and was in each connected with a kind of oracle, which seems to have been specially resorted to by women before and after childbirth. She was also very probably a deity of other kinds of fertility; and in course of time she took on the characteristics of the Greek Tyche, and became a favourite deity of good luck.493236
Let us pause for one moment to reflect on the character of these new deities of whom I have been speaking: Hercules, Castor, Minerva, Diana. It must be confessed that, as compared with the great deities of the calendar, they are uninteresting; with the exception, perhaps, of Hercules, they do not seem to have any real religious significance. They are local deities brought in from outside, and have no root in the mind of the Roman people as we have so far been studying it. They seem to indicate the growth of a population in which the true old Roman religious instinct was absent; they represent commerce, business, handicraft, or politics, pursuits in which the old Roman and Latin farmers were not directly interested; they were suffered to be in Rome because the new population and the new interests must of necessity have their own worships, but they were not taken into the heart and mind of the people. So at least it seems to us, after we have been examining the development of the native religious plant from its root upwards. But we must remember that of that new population, its life and its needs, we know hardly anything, and it would not be safe to assume that the conception of Minerva had no influence on the conscience of the artisan, or that of Hercules no power of binding the trader to honest dealing and respect for his oath. As for Diana, though, as Dr. Carter says, she had been introduced "as part of a diplomatic game, not because Rome felt any religious need of her," the fact that the Latin treaty was kept in her temple has a certain moral as well as political significance which ought not to be overlooked. It is impossible to put ourselves mentally in the position of the men who brought these cults to Rome, or of the Romans who granted them admittance; but we shall be on the safe side if we imagine the former at least to have had a conviction that their dealings at Rome would not prosper unless they were carried out with the blessing of their own gods.
But we now come, in the last place, to the foundation of a cult of a very different kind from these, and of far237 greater import than any of them in the history of Roman religious experience. We have seen that the temple of Diana on the Aventine meant the transference of the headship of the Latin league from Aricia to Rome. When Rome took over this headship, and by removing its religious centre to Rome—or, perhaps more accurately, by offering Diana of Aricia a new home by the Tiber—removed also any danger of a new power growing up in Latium outside her own influence, she seems to have taken another important step in the same direction. Archæological evidence confirms the tradition that at this time the temple of Jupiter Latiaris, the real and original god of the league, on the Alban hill, was rebuilt;494 and as the remains of its foundation are of Etruscan workmanship, we may believe that the work was undertaken at that period of an Etruscan dominion in Rome which no one now seriously doubts, and which is marked by the Etruscan name Tarquinius, and by the old tradition that Servius Tullius was really an Etruscan bearing the Etruscan name Mastarna.495 Now those in power at Rome at this time, whoever they were, not content with rebuilding the ancient temple of Jupiter on the Alban hill, conceived the idea of also building a great temple at Rome, on the steep rock overlooking the Forum, to the same deity of the heaven who had long presided over the Latin league. The tradition was that this temple was vowed by the first Tarquinius, begun by the second, and finally dedicated by the first consul Horatius in the year 509.496 It is quite possible that this tradition indicates the truth in outline—that it was an Etruscan who conceived the idea of the great work, and that the foreign domination gave way to a Roman reaction before the temple was ready for dedication. We cannot know what exactly was the Etruscan intention as to the cult; but we know that the temple was built in the Etruscan style, that its foundations were of Etruscan masonry,497 and that the deities inhabiting it were three—a trias—a feature quite foreign to the native Roman religion.498 Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva had each a separate dwelling (cella)238 within the walls of the temple, which, in order to meet this innovation, was almost as broad as it was long. Whether this trias was the one originally intended by the Etruscan king or kings it is impossible to say; but I have great doubts of it. I confess that I have no ground but probability to go on when I conjecture that a long period elapsed between the beginning of this great undertaking and the final completion, and that in the meantime many things had happened of which we have no record; that when the temple was finished it was in Roman hands, though retaining its Etruscan characteristics, and especially the combination of three deities; and that those three deities were essentially Roman in conception. Roman, too, was the idea that one of the three should be paramount; the two goddesses never attained to any special significance, and the temple always remained essentially the dwelling of the great Jupiter, the Father of heaven.499
The cult-titles of this Jupiter, Optimus Maximus, the best and greatest, seem to raise him to a position not only far above his colleagues in the temple, but above all other Jupiters in Latium or elsewhere, and presumably above all other deities. They thus suggest a deliberate attempt to place him in a higher position than even the Jupiter Latiaris of the Mons Albanus, whose temple had been rebuilt in the same period. The very novelty of such cult-titles betrays both power and genius in their originator; they are wholly unlike any we have met with so far; they do not suggest a function or a locality or a connection with some other deity; they stand absolutely alone in the history of the Roman religion till far on in the Empire.500 Here is no numen needed at a particular season to bless some agricultural operation; Jupiter Optimus Maximus seems hardly to be limited by space or season, and is to be always there looking down on his people from his seat on the hill which was henceforward to be called Capitolinus, because the space which had been prepared there for his reception bore the name of Capitolium, the place of headship.501 These titles, Best239 and Greatest, call for reflection, for more thought than we are apt to give them; one wonders whether they can be as old as tradition claimed, and in fact at least one recent writer has been tempted, without sufficient reason, to date the whole foundation two centuries later than the Tarquinii.502 To me they rather suggest the hypothesis that the break-up of the Etruscan domination in Rome was the work of a man or men inspired by a new national feeling which ascribed the revolution to the great god of the race, to whose shrine on the same hill the kings had been used to bring the spoils of their enemies503; and that they took advantage of the uncompleted Etruscan temple, with its huge foundations and underground favissae, to settle there a new Jupiter, better and greater than any other, to whom his people would be for ever grateful, and in whom they would for ever put their trust. All older associations with cults of the Heaven-god were to be banished from the Capitolium, just as all other deities were believed to have fled from the spot, save only Terminus; the ancient priest of Jupiter, the Flamen Dialis, had no special connection with this temple and its cult, which were under the immediate charge of an aedituus only.504 Here was the centre of the public worship of the State as a whole, not only of the old patrician State; and no such ancient curiosity as the Flamen Dialis, who, as I have suggested, was a survival from some older era of Latin religious history, was to be supreme there. Here the Consul of the free Republic was to offer, on entering office, the victim—the white heifer of the Alban cult—which his predecessor had vowed, and himself to bind his successor to a like sacrifice; and this he did on behalf of patrician and plebeian alike. Here the victorious general was to deposit his spoils, reaching the temple in the solemn procession of the triumphus, and wearing the ornamenta of the deity himself; for here, contrary to all precedent in the worship of Romans, there was an image of the god wrought in terra cotta and brought from Etruria.505 It is in connection with such solemn events as240 these that we may find the origin of those imposing processions which for centuries were to impress the minds of the Roman people, and indeed of their enemies also, with the might and magnificence of their Empire; for apart from the triumphal processions with which we are all familiar, the scene at the entrance of new consuls on their office must have been most impressive. They were accompanied by the other magistrates, the Senate, the priests in their robes of office, and by an immense crowd of citizens. After the ceremony the Senate met in the temple to transact the first religious business of the year. Here too the tribal assembly met for the purpose of enrolling the new levies before each season of war, in order that the youths who were to fight the battles of Rome might realise the presence of Rome's great protecting deity. Even in the most degenerate days of the Roman religion, though Jupiter had suffered from the ridicule of playwrights or the speculations of philosophers, an orator's appeal to the Best and Greatest looking down on the Forum from his seat above it, could not fail to move the hearers; "Ille, ille Iuppiter restitit," cried Cicero in the peril of the Catilinarian conspiracy, "ille Capitolium, ille haec templa, ille cunctam urbem, ille vos omnes salvos esse voluit."506
Nor was it only the State as represented by its officials that could and did address itself to the worship of this great god. It seems probable that the new idea of a single guardian deity, with his two attendant goddesses, for which the Romans were indebted to the genius (whoever he may have been) who released them from the yoke of the Etruscan, opened the cult to the individual in a way which must have been a novelty in the religious life of the people.507 The most memorable example of this is in the famous story told of Scipio, the conqueror of Hannibal, which is not likely to be an invention of the annalists. As Gellius records it, it stands thus: Scipio was wont to ascend to the temple just before daylight, to order the cella Iovis to be opened for him, and there to241 remain alone for a long time, as if taking counsel with the god about the affairs of the State. The dogs, it was said, which guarded the entrance, astonished the temple-keepers by treating him always with respect, while they would attack or bark at others.508
The reader may remark, that during the last few minutes I have wandered quite away from the Roman religion which we have so far been trying to understand, and he will be right. I have but just touched on this great cult, which properly belongs to Rome of the Republic, in order to show how great a change must have taken place, how great a revolution must have been consummated, when this temple arose on its Etruscan substructures. We have marked two forward steps in the social and political experience of the Romans: the settlement of the family on the land and the organisation of the City-state with its calendar. Here is a third, the liberation of that State from a foreign dominion, and the development, in matters both internal and external, which subjection and liberation alike brought with them. In regard to religious experience, the first produced the ordered worship of the household, which had a lasting effect on the Roman character; the second produced the ius divinum, the priesthoods and the ritual for the service of the various numina which had consented to take up their abode in the city and its precincts. These two taken together changed doubt and anxiety into confidence, stilled the religio natural to uncivilised man, and developed the machinery of magic into forms and ceremonies which were more truly religious. Now we note a third great social step forward, which brings with it a new conception and expression of the religious unity of the State; henceforward, alongside of a multiplicity of cults and of priests attached to them, we have one central worship to which all free citizens may resort, and a trinity of guardian deities, of whom one, Jupiter Best and Greatest, is the one presiding genius of the whole State.
Lastly, there can hardly be a doubt that this new cult242 marks a more extensive communication with neighbouring peoples than the State had as yet experienced or encouraged. Etruria, Latium, and Greece, all seem to have had a hand in it. Of its relation to the Latins and Etruscans I have already spoken. It only remains for me to note the fact that it was here, in this Capitoline temple, according to unanimous tradition, that those legendary "Sibylline books" were deposited which came from a Greek source, and according to the story, from Cumae.509 These mysterious books were destined to change the whole character of the religion of the Romans during the next two centuries; and this is why the dedication of the great temple is a convenient halting-place on our journey. I propose to begin the second part of my subject by examining the nature of this change, and then to pass on to others, until we have reached the end of the religious experience of the genuine Roman people.
NOTES TO LECTURE X.
464 Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, chapters l.-lii.: "Gods as guardians of morality."
465 Crawley, The Tree of Life, in a remarkable chapter on the function of religion (ch. ix.), especially p. 287 foll. "Morality," says Mr. Crawley, "is one of the results of the religious impulse." What he means here by morality is not "that elaborated by abstract thinkers," but the "morality of elemental human nature." "Elemental morality" may be a somewhat obscure term; but I think it is highly probable that Mr. Crawley is, in part at least, right in ascribing the origin of morality to the religious impulse.
466 Crawley, op. cit., p. 265.
467 Above, pp. 107-8.
468 See the author's article in Hibbert Journal for July 1907, p. 894.
469 Wissowa, R.K. p. 15 foll.
470 Ib. p. 421: Aust, Religion der Römer, p. 47.
471 I am, of course, well aware that quite recently attempts have been made to explain the plebs as the original inhabitants of Latium, and the Romans as conquering invaders; e.g. by Prof. Ridgeway in his paper, "Who were the Romans," read to the British Academy, and by Binder in his recently published volume Die Plebs.243 The theory is a natural one, and not out of harmony with the facts as known; but it has yet to be further developed and tested, and as those who hold it are not as yet in agreement with each other, and as the evidence which alone can prove it is of a very special character, archaeological and linguistic, I have expressed myself in terms of the older view.
472 The Religion of Numa, p. 30.
473 Aen. viii. 184 foll.; the description of the festival is in 280 foll.; where the interesting points are the priests of the gentes appointed to look after the cult (the Potitii only are here mentioned) "pellibus in morem cincti," and the Salii "populeis evincti tempora ramis."
474 Wissowa, R.K. p. 219 foll.; Carter, Religion of Numa, p. 31 foll. The ground had been prepared for the new view by the elaborate articles in Roscher's Mythological Lexicon, vol. ii. pp. 2253 foll. and 2901 foll. Of late a painstaking discussion by J. G. Winter has appeared in the University of Michigan Studies for 1910, p. 171 foll.; he mainly confirms Wissowa's conclusions, but provisionally accepts a suggestion of mine (R.F. 197) that the tithe practice of the ara maxima may possibly have been of Phoenician origin, and points out that E. Curtius made the same suggestion as long ago as 1845. On p. 269 he also dwells, very properly, I think, on the part which the Etruscans may have had in the dissemination of the myth and cult of the Greek Heracles. Wissowa, however, stoutly maintains that these are simply Greek and of commercial origin. It has been Wissowa's special and valuable function to elucidate the Greek origin of many Roman cults and legends; but I doubt if he has adequately considered the influence of other peoples, and in particular of Phoenicians and Etruscans. Certainly the Hercules question is not finally settled by his masterly analysis of it in R.K. p. 220 foll. But most of what I said in R.F. about the Hercules of the ara maxima may now be considered obsolete; and I may add that my remarks on the supposed connection of Hercules with Genius, Dius Fidius, and Jupiter in the same work, p. 143 foll., have lost much strength since Wissowa's book appeared. Yet I am not prepared to accept the view which would deny to Hercules on Italian soil all contamination with Italian ideas; as Willamowitz-Moellendorf puts it (Herakles, ed. 2, vol. i. p. 25), "Die Italiker haben dem Körper, den sie übernahmen, den Odem ihrer eigenen Seele eingeblasen: aber wie der Name ist der Gestalt des Hercules hellenischer Import." There are points in connection with the Roman Hercules, e.g. the nodus herculaneus of the bride's girdle, which Wissowa does not explain, and which, so far as I can see, can only be explained by assuming that, as might have been expected, the Greek Hercules became to some extent entangled in the web of Italian thought.244
475 The cult was Greek in detail; Graeco ritu, according to Varro as quoted by Macrobius iii. 6. 17; see also references in Wissowa, R.K. 222, note 2. Following R. Peter in the articles in Roscher, I assumed, in R.F. p. 194, that this might be a later reconstruction of an originally Italian cult; but for the present it is safer to look on the Graecus ritus as primitive, and on the presence of Salii, a genuine Italian institution, as brought from Tibur by the gens Pinaria, of which there is a trace in that city (C.I.L. xiv. 3541). There also Salii were engaged in the cult of Hercules Victor, to whom tithes were also offered (C.I.L. xiv. 3541). The evidence for the theory that the cult came to Rome from Tibur is summarised by Wissowa, R.K. p. 220.
476 Op. cit., p. 37.
477 For the connection of the cult with trade, Wissowa, R.K. 225; and the story told in Macrobius iii. 6. 11, from Masurius Sabinus, of a tibicen who became a merchant and had an interview with the god in a dream. For the connection with oaths, R.F. p. 138. I may say before leaving Hercules that though I accept the latest hypotheses provisionally, I am far from believing that the last word has been said on the subject.
478 See, e.g., Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome, p. 271 foll. The date of the temple is 482 B.C., but it was vowed in 496 after the Regillus battle. The three columns still standing date from 7 B.C.
479 Wissowa, R.K. p. 217, who points out that the Dioscuri never appear in lectisternia at Rome, as they do at Tusculum, which shows that the latter cult was more directly Greek than that at Rome, and that the Roman authorities admitted it as a Latin cult without the Greek details.
480 Carter, op. cit. p. 38. There seemed to be difficulties in the way of his conclusion; the Dioscuri were very strong in the Peloponnese, yet the Spartans neglected the use of cavalry. At any rate the theory needs careful historical testing. See article "Dioscuri" in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. It would seem natural that when once the cult had been introduced by traders it might become specially attached to the cavalry, owing to the ancient connection of the Twins with horses.
481 Ecastor and Edepol, which were oaths used especially by women, who were not allowed to swear by Hercules, Gell. xi. 6.
482 The reasoning will be found in full in Wissowa, R.K. p. 203 foll., and in his article "Minerva" in the Mythological Lexicon. See also Carter, Religion of Numa, p. 45 foll. For the position of this temple and that of Diana on the Aventine, a suburb which cannot be proved to have been then within any city wall, see Carter in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society for 1909, p. 136 foll.
483 Waltzing, Étude historique sur les corporations romaines,245 vol. i. pp. 63 and 199. The relation between town life and trades is stated with his usual insight by von Jhering, Evolution of the Aryan, p. 93 foll.
484 See Müller-Deecke, Etrusker, ii. 47; Deecke, Falisker, p. 89 foll.
485 Minerva or Menrva is assuredly not Etruscan, though frequently found on Etruscan monuments; see Deecke, l.c. p. 89 foll.
486 Fasti Praenestini in C.I.L. i.2 March 19. "Artificum dies (quod Minervae) aedis in Aventino eo die est (dedicata)." This is one of those additional notes in the Fast. Praen., which are believed to have been the work of Verrius Flaccus: see Roman Festivals, p. 12.
487 Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 288. We know the fact from Strabo's account of Massilia, Bk. iv. p. 180.
488 Dion. Hal. iv. 26. See R.F. p. 198.
489 Statius, Silvae iii. 1. 60. See Wissowa's article "Diana" in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl.
490 Wissowa, l.c. p. 332.
491 Golden Bough, i. p. 1 foll.; Early History of the Kingship, Lecture I.
492 Varro, L.L. 5. 43; Carter, op. cit. p. 55.
493 See on Fortuna the exhaustive article by R. Peter in the Mythological Lexicon; Wissowa, R.K. 206 foll.; R.F. p. 161 foll., and 223 foll.; Carter, op. cit. p. 50 foll. Dr. Carter seems to me to be too certain of the absence of any idea of luck or chance in the original conception of Fortuna: the word fors, so far as we know, never had any other meaning, and the deity Fors must be a personification of an abstraction, like Ops, Fides, and Salus. See Axtell, Deification of abstract idea in Roman literature, p. 9, with whom I agree in rejecting the notion of Marquardt and Wissowa that she was a deity of horticulture. He rightly points out that she is not included in the list of agricultural deities in Varro, R.R. i. 1. 6.
494 See Aust in his article "Jupiter" in the Myth. Lex. p. 689, where the evidence for the contemporaneous origin of the temple on the Alban hill and that on the Capitol is fully stated. In this case excavations have confirmed the Roman tradition, which ascribed the former temple to one or other of the Tarquinii. Jordan, Röm. Top. i. pt. 2. p. 9.
495 See the speech of Claudius the emperor, C.I.L. xiii. 1668, printed in Furneaux' Tacitus' Annals, vol. ii. Gardthausen, Mastarna, p. 40; Müller-Deecke, Etrusker, i. 111. For the Etruscan name Mastarna, see Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria3, ii. 506 foll.: Gardthausen gives a cut of the painting found in a tomb at Vulci in which he appears with the name attached. Even the ultra-sceptical Pais does not doubt the fact of an Etruscan domination in Rome; but he does not believe the Tarquinii and246 Mastarna to have been historical personages, and will not date the temples attributed to this age earlier than the fourth century B.C. See his Ancient Legends of Roman History, ch. vii.; Storia di Roma, i. 310 foll. But the names of these kings do not concern us, except so far as they connect Etruria with Roman history in the sixth century.
496 Cic. Rep. ii. 24. 44; Livy i. 38. and 55; Dionys. iii. 69; iv. 59. 61. The whole evidence will be found collected in Jordan, Topogr. i. pt. ii. p. 9 foll., and in Aust, Myth. Lex., s.v. Jupiter, p. 706 foll. If the date 509 were seriously impugned Roman chronology would be in confusion, for this is believed to be the earliest date on which we can rely, and on it the subsequent chronology hangs: Mommsen, Röm. Chronologie, ed. 2, p. 198.
497 Aust, p. 707 foll.; Jordan, op. cit., p. 9.
498 i.e. the admission of more than one deity into a single building. The word "trias" is sometimes used of the three old Roman deities, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus (e.g. by Wissowa, Myth. Lex. s.v. Quirinus), but this is in a different sense. On the idea of a trias generally, see Kuhfeldt, de Capitoliis imperii Romani, p. 82 foll.; Cumont, Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, p. 290, note 51.
499 The technical name of the temple was aedes Iovis Opt. Max.: for other indications of Jupiter's supremacy see Aust, p. 720.
500 On Oriental developments of Jupiter Opt. Max. see an interesting paper by Cumont in Archiv for 1906, p. 323 foll. (Iuppiter summus exsuperantissimus). A relief in the Berlin Museum has a dedication I.O.M. summo exsuperantissimo; but Prof. Cumont believes the deity to have been really Oriental, introduced by Greek philosophical theologians in the last century B.C., but probably Chaldaean in origin.
501 Jordan, op. cit. p. 7 and note. It is uncertain whether the whole hill had any earlier name. The Mons Saturnius of Varro, L.L. v. 42, with the legend of an oppidum Saturnia, and the Mons Tarpeius (Rhet. ad Herenn., iv. 32. 43; Pais, Ancient Legends, chs. v. and vi.) need not be taken into account.
502 Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, ch. v.
503 See above, p. 130.
504 This is an inference from the fact that this Flamen is nowhere mentioned as connected with the Capitoline cult. Macrob. i. 15, 16, speaks of the ovis Idulis as sacrificed on every ides a flamine, and this, it is true, took place on the Capitolium (Aust, in Lex. s.v. Jupiter, 655), but (1) Festus, 290, mentions sacerdotes, Ovid, Fasti i. 588, castus sacerdos only; and (2) this sacrifice may well, as O. Gilbert conjectured, have originally taken place in the Regia (Gesch. und Topogr. Roms, i. 236). In any case the Flamen was not in any special sense priest of Iup. Opt. Max.
505 The locus classicus for this is Pliny, N.H. xxxv. 157. The247 artist was said to have been one Volcas of Veii. Ovid, Fasti i. 201, says that the god had in his hand a fictile fulmen. Varro believed this to be the oldest statue of a god in Rome; see above, p. 146, and Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 280, accepts his statement as probably correct.
506 Cic. Catil. iii. 9. 21.
507 Jordan, Topogr. i. 2. pp. 39 and 62, notes. The most convincing passages quoted by him are Suet. Aug. 59, and Serv. Ecl. iv. 50 (of boys taking toga virilis who "ad Capitolium eunt"); but was not this to sacrifice to Liber or Iuventas? R.F. p. 56.
508 Gellius vi. 1. 6, from C. Oppius et Iulius Hyginus. In his famous character of Scipio (xxvi. 19) Livy seems to think that Scipio did this to make people think him superhuman or of divine descent.
509 Ovid, Fasti, iv. 158. 257; Virg. Ecl. iv. 4, Aen. vi. 42; Marquardt, 352, note 7, for evidence that the books came to Cumae from Erythrae. See also Diels, Sibyllinische Blätter, p. 80 foll.
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248
LECTURE XI510a
CONTACT OF THE OLD AND NEW IN RELIGION
I said at the beginning of my first lecture that Roman religious experience can be summed up in two stories. The first of these was the story of the way in which a strong primitive religious instinct, the desire to put yourself in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, religio as the Romans called it, was gradually soothed and satisfied under the formalising influence of the settled life of the agricultural family, and still more so under the organising genius of the early religious rulers of the City-state. This story I tried to tell in the last few lectures. The second story was to be that of the gradual discovery of the inadequacy of this early formalised and organised religion to cope with what we may call new religious experience; that is, with the difficulties and perils met with by the Roman people in their extraordinary advance in the world, and with the new ideas of religion and morals which broke in on them in the course of their contact with other peoples. This story I wish to tell in the present course of lectures. It is a long and complicated one, including the introduction of new rites and ideas of the divine, the anxious attempts of the religious authorities to put off the evil day by stretching to the uttermost the capacity of the old forms, and the final victory of the new ideas as Roman life and thought became gradually hellenised.
I propose to divide the story thus. In the latter part of this first lecture I will deal with the first introduction 249of Greek rites into the State worship under the directions of the so-called Sibylline books. Then I will turn to the efforts of the lay priesthoods, pontifices and augurs, to meet the calls of new experience by formalising the old religion still more completely in the name of the State, until it became a mere skeleton of dry bones, without life and power. That will bring us to the great turning-point in Roman history, the war with Hannibal, to the religious history of which I shall devote my fourth lecture; and the fifth will pursue the subject into the century that followed. In the next lecture I hope to sketch the influence on Roman religious ideas of the Stoic school of philosophy, and in the seventh to discuss, so far as I may be able, the tendency towards mysticism prevalent in the last period of the life of the Republic. My eighth lecture I intend to devote to the noble attempt of Virgil to combine religion, legend, philosophy, and consummate art in a splendid appeal to the conscience of the Roman of that day. Then I turn to the more practical attempt of Augustus to revive the dying embers of the old religion; and in my last lecture I shall try to estimate the contribution, such as it was, of the religious experience we have been discussing, to the early Christian church.
We shall shortly hear so much of petrifaction and disintegration, that it may be as well, before I actually begin my story, to convince ourselves that the old religion was in its peculiar way a real expression of religious feeling, and not merely a set of meaningless conventions and formulae. It was the positive belief of the later Romans that both they and their ancestors were religiosissimi mortales,510 full to the brim, that is, of religious instinct, and most scrupulous in fulfilling its claims upon them; for the word religio had come, by the time (and probably long before the time) when it was used by men of letters, to mean the fulfilment of ritualistic obligation quite as much as the anxious feeling which had originally suggested it.511 Cicero, writing in no rhetorical mood, declared that, 250as compared with other peoples, the Romans were far superior "in religione, id est cultu."512 This is in his work on the nature of the gods; in an oration he naturally puts it more strongly: "We have overcome all the nations of the world, because we have realised that the world is directed and governed by the will of the gods."513 Sallust, Livy, and other Roman prose writers have said much the same thing514; the Aeneid as a whole might be adduced as evidence, and in a less degree all the poets of the Augustan age. Foreigners, too, were struck with the strange phenomenon, in an age of philosophic doubt. Polybius in the second century B.C. declared his opinion that what was reckoned among other peoples as a thing to be blamed, deisidaimonia, both in public and private life, was really what was holding together the Roman state.515 Even in the wild century that followed, Posidonius could repeat the assertion of Polybius, and in the age of Augustus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, then resident at Rome, looking back on the early history of Rome, stated his conviction that one needed to know the pietas of the Romans in order to understand their wonderful career of conquest.516 Aulus Gellius, in a curious passage in which he notes that the Romans had no deity to whose activity they could with certainty ascribe earthquakes, describes them as "in constituendis religionibus atque in dis immortalibus animadvertendis castissimi cautissimique,"—a rhetorical but happy conjunction of epithets. He means that they would order religious rites, though ignorant of the numen to whom they were due.517
It might be argued that these later writers knew really little or nothing about the primitive Romans, and that these passages only prove that this people had an extraordinary scrupulosity about forms and ceremonies in this as in other departments of action. But the argument will not hold; the survival of all this formalism into an age of disintegration really proves beyond a doubt that there must have been a time when these forms really expressed anxieties, fears, convictions, the earliest germs of conscience.
251May we not take the constant occurrence in literature of such phrases as dis faventibus, dis iuvantibus or volentibus, as evidence of an idea deeply rooted at one time in the Roman mind, that nothing should be undertaken until the will of the deities concerned had been ascertained and that early form of conscience satisfied? Let us remember that the whole story of the Aeneid is one of the bending of the will of the hero, as a type of the ideal Roman, to the ascertainable will of the powers in the universe.
And we have abundant evidence that as a matter of fact the good-will of the divine inhabitants of house and city was asked for whenever any kind of work was undertaken,—even the ordinary routine work of the farm or of government. In the household every morning some offering with prayer was made to the Lar familiaris in historical times, and again before the cena, the chief meal of the day.518 On Kalends, Nones, Ides, and on all dies festi a corona was placed on the hearth, and prayer was made to the Lar; we know that this was so in the old Roman home, because in the second century B.C. Cato instructs the vilicus to discharge these duties on behalf of the absent or non-resident owner.519 Before the flocks were taken out to summer pasture, and doubtless when they returned, some religious service (so we should call it) was held,520 just as in the Catholic cantons of Switzerland the blessing of God is asked when the cows first ascend to the alpine pastures, and again when they leave them for the valleys. Before a journey the later Romans prayed for good fortune;521 in the old times travelling was of course unusual, and when it did occur the traveller was surrounded by so many spiritual as well as material dangers that special religious measures must have been taken, as by fetials or armies on entering foreign territory. The survival of the same kind of belief and practice is also seen in private life in the religious commendations of some authors at the outset of their literary work; Varro, for example, at the beginning of his work on agriculture, calls on all the agrarian deities (iis deis ad venerationem advocatis)252 before he goes on to mention even the bibliography of his subject.522 Livy in the last sentence of his preface would fain imitate the poets in calling on the gods to bless and favour his undertaking. And in all time of their tribulation, even if not in all time of their wealth, the pious Romans sought help from the deities from whom help might be expected; if, at least, the many instances occurring in Roman poetry may point to a practice of the ordinary individual and family.523 So too, if we may judge by many passages in the plays of Plautus and Terence,524—if here we have genuine Roman usage, as is probable,—the feeling of dependence on a Power manifesting itself in the affairs of daily life is shown also in the expression of thankfulness which followed success or escape from peril. Gratitude was not a prominent characteristic of the Roman, but I have already remarked on the presence of it in the practice of the votum, and there is at least some evidence that it was recognised as due to benignant deities as well as human beings.525
In public life, throughout Roman history, the forms of religious rites were maintained on all important occasions. When Varro wrote a little manual of Senatorial procedure for the benefit of the inexperienced Pompeius when consul in 70 B.C., he was careful to mention the preliminary sacrifice and auspicatio, performed by the presiding magistrate, who also had to see that the business de rebus divinis came first on the paper of agenda.526 At one time every speaker invoked the gods at the beginning of his oration, as well indeed he might in a situation so unusual and trying for a Roman before the days of Greek education; and the earliest speeches preserved in the literary age, e.g. those of Cato and the Gracchi, retained the religious exordium.527 We have a trace of the Gracchan practice in a famous passage at the end of the work called Rhetorica ad Herennium of circ. 82 B.C., where the death of Ti. Gracchus is graphically described.528 But there is no need to multiply examples of public religious formalism on occasions of all kinds, on entering on an office, founding 253a colony, leaving Rome for a provincia, and so on; some of them I have already mentioned, others are familiar to all classical students.
So let us not hesitate for a moment to give this people credit for their religiousness. True, their neighbours, Greeks like Polybius, approved of it only with an ironical smile on their lips, as we may smile at the devoted formalism of extreme Catholic or Protestant, while we secretly—if we have some sympathy with strangely varying human nature—admire the confidence and regularity that we cannot ourselves claim. At the moment where I have thus paused before beginning my second story, at the end, that is, of the regal period, I believe that this religious system, though perhaps beginning to harden, still meant a profound belief in the Power thus manifested in many forms, and an ardent and effective desire to be in right relation to it. I believe that it contained the germ of a living and fruitful growth; but that growth was at this very moment arrested by the beginning of a process of which I shall have much to say in the next two or three lectures.
But it is hard to realise this better side of the religion of a hard and practical people, and all the more so since it is the worse side that is almost always presented to us in modern books. It is hard to realise that it was not merely a system of insurance, so to speak, against all kinds of material evils,—and here again all the more so because there is a tendency just now to reduce both religion and law to an origin in magic, leaving the religious instinct, the feeling of dependence, the progenitor of conscience, quite out of account. One must indeed be thoroughly familiar with Roman literature and antiquities to overcome these difficulties, to discover the spiritual residuum in the Roman character beneath all its hardness and utilitarianism. Before we pass on to the task before us, let me make two suggestions for the help of those who would endeavour to find this spiritual residuum. The first is that they should consider 254the history and true meaning of three great words which Latin language has bequeathed to modern speech,—religio, the feeling of awe, taking practical shape in the performance of authorised ceremonies; sacrum, that which by authoritative usage is made over without reserve to the divine inhabitants of the city; and last but not least, pietas, the sense of duty to god and man alike, to all divine and human beings having an authorised claim upon you. And this word pietas shall introduce my second suggestion—that there is no better way of getting to understand the spirit of the Roman religion than by continual study of the Aeneid, where the hero is the ideal Roman, pius in the best and widest sense. What makes the Aeneid so helpful in this way is the poet's intimate and sympathetic knowledge of the religious ideas of the Italians, in which we may see reflected those of the Roman of the age we are now dealing with: his love too of antiquity and of all ancient rites and legends; and his conviction that the great work of Rome in the world had been achieved not only by virtus but by pietas. What has been won by virtus must be preserved by pietas, by the sense of duty in family and State,—that is the moral of the Aeneid. In no other work of Roman genius is this idea found in anything like the same degree of prominence and consistency; and when a student has steeped his mind well in the details of the Roman worship, and begins to weary of what must seem its soulless Pharisaism, let him take up the Aeneid and read it right through for the story and the characters. I will venture to say that he will think better both of the Romans and their poet than he ever did before. But of the Aeneid I shall have more to say later on; at present let us turn to the less inspiring topics which must occupy us for the next few lectures.
The last fact of Roman religious history which I mentioned last year was the building of the great Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and I then explained why this constituted a religious revolution. 255The next temple of which tradition tells us was destined for another trias, Ceres, Liber, and Libera; the traditional date was 493 B.C., the cause a famine, and the site was at the foot of the Aventine, the plebeian quarter outside the pomoerium, close to the river where corn-ships might be moored.529 Ceres, Liber, and Libera are plainly neither more nor less than the three Greek corn deities, Demeter, Dionysus, and Persephone, in a Latin form,530 whose worship was prominent in South Italy and Sicily; and unless we throw tradition overboard entirely, as indeed has often been done, the inference is obvious that this trias came from the Greeks of the south with an importation of corn to relieve a famine which pressed especially on the plebs. It is a fact that the temple and its cult remained always closely connected with the plebs; they were under the charge of the plebeian aediles, who also in historical times had the care of the corn-supply necessary for the city population.531 Thus, though we need not accept in full Livy's statement that the very next year corn was imported from Etruria, Cumae, and Sicily, it cannot be denied that there is a strong consensus in the various traditions about the temple, which taken together suggest a Greek, non-patrician, and early origin. That the cult had at all times a Greek character is undisputed fact.
But I am not so much concerned with the temple itself as with the date and the manner of its foundation. It was said to have been founded in the year 496, and dedicated in 493, in obedience to directions found in "the Sibylline books," which books, according to the well-known tradition, had been acquired by the last Tarquin, after some haggling, from an old woman, and placed in the charge of duoviri sacris faciundis. The story itself is worthless in detail; but the question for us is whether it can be taken as showing that the Sibylline influence then pervading the Greek world gained a footing at Rome in any form so early as this. Was the temple really founded in 496, or at some time thereabout? And was it founded in obedience to some Sibylline direction? These questions 256are of real importance, for upon our answer to them depends the date of the beginning of a gradual metamorphosis of the Roman religious practice. The so-called Sibylline books and their keepers were responsible, as we shall see directly, for the introduction at Rome of what was known as the Graecus ritus,—for the foundation of temples to deities of Greek origin, and for other rites which initiated an entirely new type of religious feeling. We need to be sure when all this began.
In the first place, so far as I can judge, it is almost impossible to dissociate the origin of the temple from Sibylline influence. As we have seen, the cult was Greek, and all such Greek cults of later times were introduced by the keepers of the Sibylline books; and further, the records of temple foundations were among the most carefully preserved facts in Roman annals.532 I think it is hardly possible to suppose that a cult which came, not from Latium or southern Etruria, like those of Diana, Minerva, and the Capitoline deities, but from some Greek region to the south, and probably from Sicily, could have been introduced by Roman authorities unaided by Greek influence. If that be so, and if we can show that the temple really belongs to this early age, then we have a strong probability that the Sibylline influence gained a footing at Rome at the very beginning of the republican period.533
There is one curious fact in connection with the temple that in my opinion goes far to prove that the traditional date is not far out. Pliny tells us explicitly that the two Greek artists who decorated the temple, Damophilus and Gorgasus, inscribed their names on the walls, and he added that the work of the former would be found on the right and that of the latter on the left.534 Nothing more is known about them; but I am assured that the fact that they signed their names and added these statements suits the character of Greek art in the archaic age 580 to 450 B.C. No signatures of artists are known earlier than about 580; then comes a period when signatures are found, sometimes 257with statements such as these. And lastly, about 450, we begin to find simple signatures without any other words.535 Thus the presumption is a strong one that the temple belongs to a time earlier than 450; and if that be so, then I think the inference holds good that the Sibyl first gained a footing at Rome about the same time. There are indeed some reasons why we should not put this event in the period of the kings;536 but if we accept the traditional date of the temple we may put it any time between 509 and 496.
I have purposely used vague terms, such as Sibylline influence, instead of speaking in the old manner of Sibylline books or oracles, because it is almost incredible that at so early a date it could have been possible to divulge any contents of a store of writings such as must have been most carefully treasured and concealed. This has been shown conclusively to be out of the question in Diels' now famous little book "Sibylline Leaves." But we may also follow Diels in assuming that about the end of the sixth century some kind of Greek oracle or oracular saying did actually arrive at Rome, purporting to be an utterance of the famous Sibyl of Cumae.537
But what was this Sibylline influence which thus penetrated to Rome, if I am right, at the beginning of the fifth century? It is no part of my design to discuss the history of Greek mysticism, though we shall hear something more of it in a later lecture. It will be enough to remind you that in the sixth century Greece was not only full of Orphism and Pythagoreanism, but of floating oracular dicta believed to emanate from a mystic female figure, a weird figure of whom it is hard to say how far she was human or divine; and of whose origin we know nothing, except that her original home was, as we might expect, Asia Minor. She was inspired by Apollo,538 it was said, like the Pythia, and like her too became ἔνθεοϛ (possessed) when uttering her prophecies; this is the earliest fact we know about her, for a famous fragment of Heracleitus represents her as uttering sayings 258"with frenzied lips,"539—a tradition of which Virgil has made good use in the sixth Aeneid:
non vultus, non color unus,
non comptae mansere comae; sed pectus anhelum,
et rabie fera corda tument.
But more to our purpose is the sober judgment of Plato a century after the first Roman experience of her, who in the Phaedrus classes her among those who have wrought much good by their inspired utterances.540 This passage may help us to understand how ready men were at that time to turn for aid in tribulation to what they believed to be divine help, to an inspired wisdom beyond the range of the local deities of their own city-states.
This Sibyl became gradually localised in certain Greek cities, and thereby broke up, as it were, into several Sibyls. One of these Sibylline homes was at Cumae in Campania, the oldest Greek city in Italy, and this enables us to explain easily how the name and fame of the Sibyl reached Rome. Dim as is all early Roman history, the one clear fact of the sixth century is, as we have seen, the rapid advance of the Etruscans, their occupation of Rome, Praeneste, and other Latin cities, and their conquest of Campania, which is now ascribed to that same age.541 Legend told in later days how the last Etruscan king had taken refuge at Cumae after his expulsion from Rome, and it is just possible that it may here be founding upon some dim recollection of a fact. However this may be, it is plain that it was through the great Etruscan disturbance of that period that Rome came to make trial of Sibylline utterances. In a moment of distress—the famine of which I spoke just now, and which I take to be historical because the remedy, the temple under the Aventine, was so closely connected with the corn-supply—she sent for or admitted an utterance of the Sibyl of Cumae, with whom she had come into some kind of contact through her Etruscan kings.
Let us consider that this foreign dynasty must have 259brought a new population to the city on the Tiber, the chief strategic point of middle Italy,—a new element of plebs, whatever the old one may have been.542 We have seen signs, even in the religious history of this age, that commerce and industry were increasing, and that their increase was due to a movement from without, rather than to the old patrician gentes. When the Etruscan dynasty fell and the old patrician influence was restored, the government must have been face to face with new difficulties, and among them the supply of corn for an increasing population in years of bad harvest. With a fresh source of supply from the south came the cult of the Greek corn-deities at the bidding of a Sibylline utterance; and henceforward that remedy was available for other troubles. But the patrician rulers of Rome were true, it would seem, as far as was possible, to the old ways, and for a long time they used this foreign remedy very sparingly. At what date the utterances were collected in "books" and deposited in the Capitoline temple we do not know, nor have we any certain knowledge of their original nature or form. Tradition said that the collection dated from the last king's reign, and that it was placed in the care of duoviri sacris faciundis, as we have seen, who in 367 B.C. gave way to decemviri, five of whom might be members of the plebs. I am myself inclined to conjecture that this comparatively late date may be the real date of the origin of a permanent collection and a permanent college of keepers, and that the earlier duoviri were only temporary religious officers, sacris faciundis, i.e. for the carrying out of the directions of Sibylline utterances specially sought for at Cumae. They would thus be of the same class as other special commissions appointed by the Senate for administrative purposes;543 while the decemviri, though retaining the old title, were permanent religious officers appointed to collect and take charge of a new and important set of regulations for the benefit of the community, and one which concerned the plebs at least as much as the patricians.
260But I must turn to the more important question how far, down to the war with Hannibal, when I shall take up the subject afresh, the Roman religion was affected for good or harm by these utterances and their keepers. They took effect in two ways: either by introducing new deities and settling them in new temples, or by ordering and organising new ceremonies such as Rome had never seen before.
The introduction of a new deity now and again was not of great account from the point of view of religion, except in so far as it encouraged the new ceremonies; the Romans had never taken much personal interest in their deities, and the arrival (outside the pomoerium in each case) of Hermes under the name of Mercurius, or Poseidon bearing the name of the old Roman water numen Neptunus, or even of Asclepios with a Romanised name Aesculapius, would not be likely to affect greatly their ideas of the divine. These facts have rather a historical than a religious significance; Hermes Empolaios, for example, suggests trade with Greek cities, perhaps in grain,544 and belongs therefore to the same class as Ceres, Liber, Libera, of whom I have already spoken. The arrival of Poseidon-Neptune may mean, as Dr. Carter has suggested, a kind of "marine insurance" for the vessels carrying the grain from Greek ports.545 The settling of Aesculapius in the Tiber island in 293, as the result of a terrible pestilence, is interesting as being the first fact known to us in the history of medicine at Rome; the temple became a kind of hospital on the model of Epidaurus, where the god had been brought in the form of a snake by an embassy sent for the purpose, and the priests who served it were probably Greeks skilled in the healing art.546 This last case is a curious example of new Roman religious experience, but it can hardly be said to have any deep significance in the religious history of Rome. Of the obliteration of the old numen Neptunus by the Greek god who took his name we know nothing for good or ill; we are ignorant of the real meaning of the old numen, 261and cannot tell whether the loss of him was compensated by the usefulness of his name in Roman literature to represent the Greek god of the sea.
Let us turn to the much more important subject of the new ceremonies ordered by the Sibylline "books." The first authentic case of such innovation occurred in 399 B.C., during the long and troublesome siege of the dangerous neighbour city Veii; I call it authentic because all the best modern authorities so reckon it, though it occurred before the destruction of old records during the capture of the city by the Gauls. The circumstances were such as to fix themselves in the memory of the people, and in one way or another they found their way into the earliest annals, probably those of Fabius Pictor, composed during the Second Punic War.547
The previous winter, Livy tells us,548 was one of extraordinary severity; the roads were blocked with snow, and navigation on the Tiber stopped by the ice. This miserable winter was followed too suddenly by a hot season, in which a plague broke out which consumed both man and beast, and continued so persistently that the Senate ordered the Sibylline books to be consulted. This persistence is the first point we should notice; "Cuius insanabili pernicie quando nec causa nec finis inveniebatur,"—so wrote Livy, evidently meaning to express an extremity of trouble which would not give way to ordinary religious remedies. We may compare his account of the next recorded consultation of the books (Livy vii. 2), when neither the old rites nor even the new ones were sufficient to secure the pax deorum and abate another pestilence, and recourse was had to yet another remedy in the form of ludi scenici. The times were out of joint,—the peace of the gods was broken, and thus the community was no longer in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The result was a revival of religio, of the feeling of alarm and anxiety out of which the whole religious system had grown. The old deities might seem to be forsaking their functions, since the old rites had 262ceased to appeal to them. Mysterious and persistent pestilence is a great tamer of human courage; it is a new experience that man knows not how to meet, and in ancient life it was also a new religious experience.
The remedy was as new as the pestilence, and almost as pernicious. During eight days Rome saw three pairs of deities reclining in the form of images on couches, before which were spread tables covered with food and drink. Whether in this first case they were taken out of the temples and exposed to view in certain places, e.g. the forum, is not clear; later on, in the days of supplicationes, of which more will be said presently, they were visited in procession. The three pairs were Apollo and Latona, Diana and Hercules, Mercurius and Neptunus; all of them Greek, or, as in the case of Diana, Mercurius, and Neptunus, Roman deities in their new Greek form. We cannot trace the special applicability of all of them to the trouble they were thus invoked to appease,—another point that suggests a complete revolution in the Roman ways of contemplating divine beings. These are not functional numina, but foreigners whose ways were only known to the manipulators of the Sibylline utterances. They seem like quack remedies, of which the action is unknown to the consumer.
New also, but better in its effect, was the publicity of these proceedings, and the part taken in them by the whole population, patrician and plebeian, men, women, and children. If we can trust Livy's further statements, every one left his door open and kept open house, inviting all to come in, whether known or unknown; all old quarrels were made up, and no new ones suffered to begin; prisoners were freed from their chains, and universal good-will prevailed. These eight days were in fact kept as holidays, and doubtless by the novelty of the whole scene the astute authorities hoped to inspire fresh hope and confidence, and to divert attention from the prevailing misery, just as our soldiers in India are induced to forget the presence of cholera in a station by 263constant games and amusements. That this was really one leading object of the whole show is not generally recognised by historians; but it seems fully explained by the fact I mentioned just now, that in the similar trouble of 349 B.C. recourse was had for the first time to ludi scenici in order to amuse the people. In the history of the Hannibalic war we shall have plenty of opportunity of noting this kind of expedient. The Roman people, we must remember, were getting more and more to be inhabitants of a large city, and, as such, to seek for entertainment, like all citizens in all ages. The religious rites of the old calendar were perhaps by this time getting too familiar, losing their original meaning; whether they had ever been very entertaining to a city population may be doubted. Something more showy was needed; processions had always been to the taste of the Roman, and banquets, such as the epulum Iovis, which I have already noticed, often accompanied the processions.
Now, this love of show and novelty, of which we have abundant evidence later on as a Roman characteristic, taken together with the anxiety and alarm—the new religio—arising from the pestilence, will sufficiently explain the lectisternia, as these shows were called. We have here in fact the first appearance, constantly recurring in later Roman history, of a tendency to seek not only for novelty, but for a more emotional expression of religious feeling than was afforded by the old forms of sacrifice and prayer, conducted as they were by the priest on behalf of the community without its active participation. Those old forms might do for the old patrician community of farmers and warriors, but not so well for the new and ever-increasing population of artisans and other workmen, whether of Roman or foreign descent. It would seem, indeed, as if the sensitiveness of the human fibre of a primitive community increases with its increasing complexity, and with the greater variety of experience to which it is exposed; and in the case of Rome, as if the simple ancient methods of dealing with 264the divine inhabitants of the city were no longer adequate to the needs of a State which was steering its way to empire among so many difficulties and perils. It is not indeed certain that the new rites, or some points in them, may not have had their prototypes in old Italian usage, though the lectisternia, the actual display of gods in human form and in need of food like human beings, are almost certainly Greek in origin.549 But so far as we can guess, the emotional element was wholly new. True, Livy tells us in two passages of his third book of occasions when men, women, and children flocked to all the shrines (omnia delubra) seeking for the pax deorum at the invitation of the senate; but the early date, the great improbability of the senate taking any such step, and the absence of any mention of the priesthoods, makes it difficult to believe that these assertions are based on any genuine record. We must be content to mark the first lectisternia in 399 as the earliest authentic example of the emotional tendency of the Roman plebs.550
If we can judge of this period of Roman religious history by the general tendency of the policy of the Roman government, we may see here a deliberate attempt to include the new population in worship of a kind that would calm its fears, engage its attention, and satisfy its emotion, while leaving uncontaminated the old ritual that had served the State so long. If this conclusion be a right one, then we must allow that the new ceremonial had its use. Dr. Frazer has lately told us in his eloquent and persuasive way, of how much value superstition has been in building up moral habits and the instinct of submission to civil order. His thesis might be illustrated adequately from the history of Rome alone. But from a purely religious point of view the story of the lectisternia is a sad one. The old Roman invisible numen, working with force in a particular department of human life and its environment, was a far nobler mental conception, and far more likely to grow into a power for good, than the miserable images of Graeco-Roman full-blown gods and 265goddesses reclining on their couches and appearing to partake of dinner like a human citizen. Such ideas of the divine must have forced men's religious ideas clean away from the Power manifesting itself in the universe, and must have dragged down the Roman numina with them in their corrupting degradation. According to our definition of it, religion was now in a fair way to disappear altogether; what was destined to take its place was not really religion at all. Nor did it in any way assist the growth of an individual conscience, as perhaps did some of the later religious forms introduced from without. It was of value for the moment to the State, in satisfying a population greatly disturbed by untoward events; and that was all.
Closely connected with the lectisternia, and following close upon them in chronological order, were the processional ceremonies called supplicationes. The historical relation between the two is by no means clear; but if we conclude, as I am fairly sure we may, that the lectisternia were shows of a joyful character, accompanied, as Livy describes the first one, with private entertainments, and meant to keep up the spirits of the plebeian population, and if we then turn to the early supplicationes, in which men, women, and children, coronati, and carrying laurel branches, went in procession to the temples, and there prostrated themselves after the Greek fashion, the women "crinibus passis aras verrentes," we shall be disposed to look on them as, in origin at least, distinct from each other.551 We may conjecture that the appearance of the gods in human form at the doors of their temples suggested to the plebeian women a kind of emotional worship which was alien to the old Roman feeling, but familiar enough to those (and they must have been many) who knew the life of the Greek cities of Italy. It may be that they had tried it even in earlier times; but anyhow, in the fourth and third centuries B.C. advantage was taken of the pulvinaria to use them as stopping-places in the procession of a supplicatio, and the phrase becomes a 266common one in the annals, "supplicatio ad omnia pulvinaria indicta." The lectisternia were ordered five times in the fourth century;552 by that time, it would seem likely, the supplicationes had become an authorised institution, and had perhaps embodied the practice of lectisternia in the way suggested above. We shall meet with them again when we come to the religious history of the war with Hannibal.
One word more before I leave this subject for the present. In all this innovation we must not forget to note the growth of individual feeling as distinguished from the old worship of civic grouping, in which the individual, as such, was of little or no account. I pointed out the first signs of this individualism when speaking of the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter, and we shall have reason to mark its rapid growth further. We are now, in fact, and must realise that we are, in a period in which, throughout the Graeco-Roman world, the need was beginning to be felt of some new rule of individualistic morality. The Roman population, now recruited from many sources, was but reflecting this need unconsciously when it insisted on new emotional rites and expiations. The Roman authorities were forced to satisfy the demand; but in doing so they made no real contribution to the history of Roman religious experience. It was impossible that they should do so; they represented the old civic form of religion, "bound up with the life of a society, and unable to contemplate the individual except as a member of it."553 The new forms of worship, the supplicatio and lectisternium, could not be, as the old forms had in some sense been, the consecration of civic and national life. They were to the Romans as the worship of Baal to the Jews of the time of the Kings; and, unlike that poisonous cult, they could never be rooted out.554555
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NOTES TO LECTURE XI
510 This is the expression of Sallust, Catil. 12. 3.
510a This Lecture was the first of a second and separate course.
511 See my paper on the Latin history of the word religio, in Transactions of the Congress for the History of Religions, 1909, vol. ii. p. 172. W. Otto in Archiv, 1909, p. 533 foll.
512 Cic. de Nat. Deorum, ii. 8.
513 Cic. Harusp. resp. 19.
514 Livy xliv. 1. 11; Sallust, l.c.; Gellius, Noct. Att. ii. 28. 2.
515 Polyb. vi. 56.
516 Posidonius ap. Athenaeum vi. 274 A; Dion. Hal. ii. 27. 3.
517 Gell. ii. 28.
518 Marquardt, iii. 126.
519 Cato, R.R. 142.
520 Calpurnius, Eclogue, v. 24. I have described a similar scene in the Alps in A Year with the Birds, ed. 2, p. 126.
521 Petronius, Sat. 117: "His ita ordinatis, quod bene feliciterque eveniret precati deos, viam ingredimur." I owe this reference, as others in this context, to Appel's treatise de Romanorum precationibus, p. 56 foll.
522 Varro, R.R. i. 1.
523 e.g. Virg. Aen. v. 685 (Aeneas during the burning of the fleet); Aen. xii. 776 (Turnus in extremity). Cp. Tibull. iii. 5. 6 (in sickness).
524 A good example is Captivi, 922: "Iovi disque ago gratias merito magnas quom te redducem tuo patri reddiderunt," etc.
525 For gratitude to human beings see Valerius Maximus v. 2. A good example of gratitude to a deity is in Gell. N.A. iv. 18; but it is told of Scipio the elder, who was eccentric for a Roman. When accused by a tribune of peculation in Asia he said, "Non igitur simus adversum deos ingrati et, censeo, relinquamus nebulonem hunc, eamus hinc protinus Iovi Optimo Maximo gratulatum." Public gratitude to the gods is frequent in later supplicationes, e.g. Livy xxx. 17. 6.
526 Gellius, N.A. xiv. 7. 9.
527 Servius ad Aen. xi. 301 ("praefatus divos solio rex infit ab alto").
528 This was in a contio: "Cum Gracchus deos inciperet precari." See above, Lecture VII. note 13.
529 See R.F. p. 74 foll.; Wissowa, R.K. p. 243. For the relation of the pomoerium to the wall, see above, p. 94.
530 The process is amusingly explained by Carter in The Religion of Numa, p. 72 foll.
531 R.F. p. 75.
532 See Aust, De aedibus sacris P.R., passim.
268
533 Lately this has been denied by Pais, Storia di Roma, i. 339.
534 Pliny, N.H. 35, 154.
535 I owe the information to my friend Prof. Percy Gardner.
536 See Carter, op. cit. p. 66; but I am not sure that his reasons are conclusive.
537 Diels, Sibyllinische Blätter, p. 6 foll., and cp. 79.
538 It should be noted that the cult of Apollo in Rome was older than the introduction of Sibylline influence; so at least it is generally assumed. Wissowa, however (R.K. p. 239), puts it as "gleichzeitig." The date of the Apollinar in pratis Flaminiis, the oldest Apolline fanum in Rome (outside pomoerium), is unknown; that of the temple on the same site was 431 (Livy iv. 25 and 29). There is little doubt that the Apollo-cult spread from Cumae northwards, and was by this time well established in Italy. (The foundation of the temple of 431, consisting of opus quadratum, still in part survives: Hülsen-Jordan, Rom. Topographie, iii. 535).
539 Heracleitus, fragm. xii., ed. Bywater.
540 Phaedrus, p. 244.
541 So Korte in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl., s.v. "Etrusker."
542 The present tendency is to take the plebs as representing an older population of Latium before the arrival of the patricians; see, e.g., Binder, Die Plebs, p. 358 foll. But the plebs of later days is not to be explained on one hypothesis only.
543 e.g. in religious matters the duoviri aedi dedicandae; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, ii. 601 foll.
544 Carter, Religion of Numa, p. 77 foll. It is uncertain whether there was a Roman Mercurius of earlier origin, or whether the name Mercurius (i.e. concerned in trade) was a new invention to avoid using the Greek name, as in the case of the trias Ceres, Liber, Libera.
545 Carter, op. cit. 81. The connection of this Poseidon-Neptunus and Hermes-Mercurius is confirmed by the fact that the two were paired in the first lectisternium, 399 B.C. Livy v. 13.
546 Wissowa, R.K. p. 254.
547 See Diels, Sib. Blätter, p. 12, note 1.
548 Livy v. 13.
549 I have discussed the possibility of the epulum Iovis being an old Italian rite in R.F. p. 215 foll. For the Greek origin of these shows see Dict. of Antiquities, ed. 2, s.v. "lectisternia."
550 Livy iii. 5. 14, and 7. 7.
551 The plebeian tendencies of the time are suggested, e.g., by the fact that immediately before the first lectisternium a plebeian was elected military tribune (Livy v. 13). The fourth century is of course the period of plebeian advance in all departments, and ends with the opening of the priesthoods to the plebs by the lex Ogulnia, and the publication of the Fasti. Plebeian too, I suspect, was the keeping open house and promiscuous hospitality which is 269recorded by Livy of the first lectisternia; this was the practice of the plebs on the Cerealia (April 19), and was perhaps an old custom connected with the supply of corn and the temple of Ceres (see above, p. 255). It was not imitated by the patrician society, with its reserve and exclusiveness, till the institution of the Megalesia in 204 B.C. See Gellius xviii. 2. 11.
552 The expression crinibus demissis is found in a lex regia (Festus, s.v. "pellices"); the harlot who touches Juno's altar has to offer a lamb to Juno "crinibus demissis." This is therefore Roman practice.
553 For the supplicationes see Wissowa, R.K. 357 foll.; Marq. 48 and 188; and the author's article in Dict. of Antiquities. The passages already referred to as doubtful evidence (Livy iii. 5. 14, 7. 7) describe all the features of the supplicatio as early as the first half of the fifth century. A list of later passages in Livy will be found in Marq. 49, note 4. On the whole I doubt if much was made of these rites before the third century and the Punic wars.
554 Wissowa, R.K. 356, note 7.
555 Caird, Gifford Lectures, vol. ii. p. 46.
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