Chapter V: The Worship of Sacred Utensils 489 (5)

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, a _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 _ludi_ 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, accompanied 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 great 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 suggested[198] that these are arranged round one central festival, which gives a kind of colouring to the others, as the Volcanalia 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, 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 not 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 housed 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 the 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; 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 Rome 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 uncomfortable 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 aboriginal 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, 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 so 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 festival 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] Huelsen-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 Blaetter_, 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 as 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 etudes
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 god 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. Doellinger (_The Gentile and the Jew_, vol.
ii. p. 72) with his usual insight was inclined to see
in 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.

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 the 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 it 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, if 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 contra-distinction 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 of 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 being 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,