Chapter V: Genii

No form of religion is easily or at once rooted out, even by a new religion. A _modus vivendi_ has to be found between the old faith and the new. The animal, which was once itself worshipped, is tolerated merely as the symbol of some divine attribute. The nixies continue to ply their old calling under the new name of Old Nick. The sacrifices to the dead, condemned by the Indiculus Superstitionum, are subsequently licensed by the Church as the Feast of All Souls.[45] Hence it comes about that what means one thing to the apostle of the new religion is long understood as something very different by the reluctant convert. The devil of folk-lore has attributes quite different from those assigned to him in any scheme of Christian theology.

If, therefore, polytheism was, as I have suggested, an importation into Italy, forced by the State on a people not yet prepared for anything higher than animism and ancestor-worship, we should expect to find the borrowed worship of a Greek loan-god sometimes concealing a native Italian cult of very dissimilar nature. Instances of the kind are forthcoming, and this section will be devoted to some of them.

The spirits which after the death of the body were termed _manes_ by the Romans, were during its life called _genii_ (or in the case of women _Junones_). The belief in genii was not borrowed from Greece. How primitive it is may be seen from two facts. First, it is itself the essence of animism, for not only had every man a genius, but every place and every thing had, in the belief of the Romans, a soul, to which the same name, genius, was given.[46] Next, the genius was, I submit, the "external soul," which, as Mr. Frazer has shown, appears in the folk-tales of every Aryan nation, and in the religions of many savage peoples. The genius of a man did not reside inside the man. Amongst the Romans, as amongst the Zulus, it resided in a serpent. As, according to the Banks Islanders, "the life of the man is bound up with the life of his tamanin,"[47] so with the Romans, the man's health depended on his genius.[48] When the serpent which was the genius of the father of the Gracchi was killed, Tiberius died;[49] and, as all Romans were liable to the same mischance, these snakes were carefully protected from all harm, were reared in the house and the bed-chamber, and consequently grew so numerous, that Pliny says, had their numbers not been kept down by occasional conflagrations, they would have crowded out the human inhabitants of Rome.[50]

This belief in the genius, however etherealised and spiritualised the form in which it appears in Horace or was held by highly-educated Romans, continued even in Imperial times amongst all other classes as primitive as it was tenacious. Its hold over the ordinary Italian mind was much greater than the Hellenised gods ever secured; for, in order to make them even comprehensible, the average Italian had to suppose that these fashionable, State-ordained gods were really worked by genii—just as it is self-evident to the savage that, if a locomotive engine moves, it is because it has horses inside. This, I suggest, is the explanation, in accord with the principle laid down at the beginning of this section, which must be given of the remarkable fact that, beginning from B.C. 58,[51] and in ever-increasing numbers afterwards, inscriptions are found which ascribe a genius to Apollo, Asclepius, Mars, Juno, Jupiter, &c.

In this case Italian animism has held its own, not unsuccessfully, against imported polytheism. Our second instance, however, will show it less successful. When polytheism was spreading from Hellas over Italy, there would be no difficulty in adding the myths and cult of the Greek god Zeus bodily on to the worship of the Italian sky-spirit Jupiter. Nor would the process be much harder even when the Greek god and the Italian spirit were of totally different origin (as _e.g._ Hermes and Mercury, Kronos and Saturn), provided that some point of resemblance, in attribute or function, could be discovered between them. It was only one, and the least important of Hermes' functions, to protect traders, but it was quite enough to lead to the identification of the Greek god with the Italian spirit of gain (_Mercurius_, from _merces_). The case of Heracles, however, presented more difficulty; he was a hero, and the very conception of a hero was new to the Italians. Being new, it was, not unnaturally, misunderstood. The nearest parallel which Italian religion offered to a being who was in a way a man and yet was also a sort of god was the genius, who also was in a way the man himself, and yet was worshipped like a god. Heracles, therefore, was identified with the genius, his name was Latinised into the form _Hercules_ (cf. _Æsculapius_, from _Asclepios_), and the cults of the two were amalgamated. This amalgamation is the source and the explanation of some of Plutarch's _Roman Questions_. Plutarch was puzzled by the fact that on the one hand some elements in the cult of Hercules had counterparts in the worship of the Greek god, while on the other hand there were elements which received no explanation from a comparison of the cult of the Greek Heracles. Thus Plutarch is surprised to find an altar common to Hercules and to the Muses (_R. Q._ 59); but this is simply a loan from the ritual of the Greek Heracles, Musagêtês. On the other hand, as Plutarch informs us (_R. Q._ 60), there was an altar of Hercules from which women were excluded. This is a non-Greek element in the cult of Hercules, with which we may safely compare the fact, that whereas a man might swear "by his Hercules," a woman might not. Here the imported god has taken the place of the native genius both in the oath and at the altar; for the reason why the oath "me hercule" was restricted to men is that, until Hercules and the genius were identified, a man swore by his genius and a woman by her Juno. Again, in the time before Italy was invaded by the gods of Greece, in the time when temples were as yet unknown, the genius was worshipped and invoked, like other spirits, in the open air; and even after the Italians had learned from the Greeks that the gods were shaped in the likeness of men, and, like men, must have houses, an oath was felt to be more sacred and more binding if taken in the open air in the old fashion, than if sworn in the new way under a roof.[52] Eventually, however, the old custom died out, and in Plutarch's day it was only children who were told that they must go out of doors if they wanted to swear "by Hercules" (_R. Q._ 28). Plutarch's attention was also arrested by the custom of giving tithes to Hercules (_R. Q._ 18). The practice is undoubtedly purely and characteristically Italian; but there is no evidence to show whether it was ever the custom to offer tithes to the genius. Another point, however, which is noted by Plutarch (_R. Q._ 90) in the cult of Hercules, may be more satisfactorily explained. When sacrifice was being offered to Hercules, no dog was suffered _to be seene, within the purprise and precinct of the place where the sacrifice is celebrated_. Now, if Hercules represents the genius, and if the dog was the shape in which a departed spirit appears, then the danger lest the genius should be tempted away by the Manes is great enough to account for the prohibition.

This identification of Heracles with the genius shows in a striking way how far the Italians were from having reached the belief in personal individual gods at the time when Greek religion found its way into Italy, and how artificially Greek polytheism was superimposed on native beliefs. There were as many _genii virorum_ as there were living men, and yet they were identified with Heracles.[53] To the Italian convert, doubtless, it seemed nothing strange that every man should have his Hercules; while his Greek teacher probably never fully realised the catechumen's point of view.

The case is parallel to that of Hestia and Vesta. Both before and after the appearance in Italy of the anthropomorphised Hestia, every Roman household revered its own "hearth-spirit;" yet this class of spirits came to be identified with the personal individual goddess from Greece. Doubtless, also, in course of time Romans who shook off animism and became true polytheists explained the relation between their "hearth-spirits" and the State-goddess by regarding the former as so many manifestations of the latter. But it is, I submit, a mistake on the part of modern mythologists to accept this piece of late theology as primitive—unless, indeed, we are also prepared to say that the Lares were regarded as so many manifestations of one Lar, or all the many Manes as manifestations of one dead man. The _genii virorum_, at any rate, were not, in the first instance, so many manifestations of Hercules: on the contrary, they existed (in Italy), to begin with, and Heracles afforded them a collective name and a Greek cult.

In the same way, I submit, the original Italian Juno was no Nature-deity, no moon-goddess—the name was that of a class of spirits, like the correlative term _genii virorum_. There were many Junones, as there were many fauns in Italy, many satyrs and nymphs in Greece, many Pucks and fairies in England. When the Italians learnt that Hera was the goddess under whose protection the Greek women were, they naturally thought of the Juno who was the guardian-spirit of each Italian woman, and applied to Juno the cult and myths that belonged to Hera. Hence the answer to Plutarch's question, why were the months sacred to Juno? (_R. Q._ 77). Because they were sacred to Hera.

But there were other spirits whom Italian women invoked besides their Junones, such as Juga, who yoked man and wife, Matrona, Pronuba, Domiduca, Unxia, Cinxia, Fluonia, Lucina, and other departmental spirits or _indigetes_, whose names appear in the _Indigitamenta_. These spirits, when once Juno had become a personal individual deity, came to be explained as special manifestations of the goddess, who was consequently called Juno Juga, Juno Matrona, &c.[54]