Chapter V: The Worship of Sacred Utensils 489 (4)

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 independently 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 Scaevola[148] 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_, who 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 world-wide 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 the 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 miasma 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 strange 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 Cite 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 the 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 heads 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 sowing[166]:--

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 we 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 beforehand 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 of 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 Ovid[174] 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 features 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 in 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, 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 beans[183] 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 wilder 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 Roemer_, 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, _Privataltertuemer_, 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 _dha_, to settle.

[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-Mueller,
_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-Encyclopaedie_; 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
Roemer_, 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 more 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 Roemer_, p. 336, "la porte
est la limite entre le monde etranger 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 Roemer_, 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 fuer 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 the 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 roem.
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, haec erat alba,
dedit." In line 165 he calls it _Virga Janalis_. See
also Festus, p. 289, and Serv. _ad Ecl._ viii. 29;
Buecheler, _Umbrica_, p. 136.

[178] The details are fully set forth in Marquardt,
_Roem. Privataltertuemer_, 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 his 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 Wuensch). Cp. _R.F._, p. 110.

[184] Ov. _Fasti_, v. 421 foll.; _R.F._ p. 107.

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 were 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, 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]