hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit, aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis. iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis dira loci: iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant. "hoc nemus, hunc," inquit, "frondoso vertice collem, (quis deus, incertum est) habitat deus."

This is a passage on which I shall have to comment again: at present I will content myself with noting how accurately the poet, who of all others best understood the instincts of the less civilised Italians of his own day, has used his knowledge to express the antique feeling that there were places which man must shrink from entering—a feeling far older than the invention of legal consecratio by the authorities of a City-state.

Lastly, the principle of taboo, or religio, if we use the Latin word, affected certain times as well as places. Just as under the ius divinum of the fully-developed State certain spots were made over to the deities for their habitation and rendered inviolable by consecratio, so certain days were also appointed as theirs which the human inhabitants might not violate by the transaction of profane business. But I have just pointed out that the consecration of holy places in this legal fashion was a late development of a primitive feeling or religio; exactly the same, if I am not mistaken, was the case with regard to the holy days. These were called nefasti, and belong to the life of the State; but there were others, called religiosi, which I believe to have been tabooed days long before the State arose.

When we come to examine the ancient religious calendar, it will be found that I shall not then be called upon to deal with dies religiosi, for the very good reason that they are not indicated in that calendar—there is no mark for them as religiosi, and some of them are not even dies nefasti, as we might naturally have expected.[67] What, then, is the history of them? We may be able to make a fair guess at this by noting exactly what these days were; Dr. Wissowa has put them together for us in a very succinct passage.[68] He begins the list with the 18th of Quinctilis (July), on which two great disasters had happened to Roman armies, the defeats on the Cremera and the Allia; and also the 16th, the day after the Ides, because, according to the legend, the Roman commander had sacrificed on that day with a view to gaining the favour of the gods in the battle. We may regard the story about the 18th as historical; but then we are told that all days following on Kalends, Nones, and Ides were likewise made religiosi (or atri, vitiosi, which have the same meaning) as being henceforward deemed unlucky by pronouncement of senate and pontifices;[69] thus all dies postriduani, as they were called, were put out of use, or at any rate declared unlucky, for many purposes, both public and private, e.g. marriages, levies, battles, and sacred rites,[70] simply because on one occasion disaster had followed the offering of a sacrifice on the 16th of Quinctilis. It is difficult to believe that thirty-six days in the year were thus tabooed, by a Roman senate and Roman magistrates, in a period when the practical wisdom of the government was beginning to be a marked characteristic of the State. Some people, we are told, went so far as to treat the fourth day before Kalends, Nones, and Ides in the same way; but Gellius declares that he could find no tradition about this except a single passage of Claudius Quadrigarius, in which he said that the fourth day before the Nones of Sextilis was that on which the battle of Cannae was fought.[71]

I am strongly inclined to suggest that the traditional explanation of the tabooing of these thirty-six, or possibly seventy-two days was neither more nor less than an aetiological myth, like hundreds of others which were invented to account for Roman practices, religious and other; and this supposition seems to be confirmed as we go on with the list of dies religiosi as given by Wissowa. The three days—Sextilis 24, October 5, November 8—on which the Manes were believed to come up from the underworld through the mundus (to which I shall return later on) were religiosi;[72] so were those when the temple of Vesta remained open (June 7 to 15),[73] those on which the Salii performed their dances in March and October,[74] two days following the feriae Latinae (a movable festival),[75] and the days of the Parentalia in February and the Lemuria in May, which were concerned with the cult and the memory of the dead.[76] Now the religio or taboo on these days obviously springs either from a feeling of anxiety suggested by very primitive notions of the dead and of departed spirits; or in the case of the temple of Vesta, by some mystical purification or disinfection preparatory to the ingathering of the crops, which I noticed in my Roman Festivals (p. 152 foll.); or again in the case of the Salii, by some danger to the crops from evil spirits, etc., which might be averted by their peculiar performances. In fact, all these dies religiosi date as such, we may be pretty sure, from a very primitive period before the genesis of the City-state, and were not recognised—for what reason we will not at present attempt to guess—as religiosi by the authorities who drew up the Calendar. Some of them appear in that calendar as dies nefasti, but not all; and I am entirely at one with Wissowa, whose knowledge of the Roman religious law is unparalleled for exactness, in believing that a religio affecting a day had nothing whatever to do with its character as fastus or nefastus.[77]

If all these last-mentioned dies religiosi are such because ancient popular feeling attached the religio to them, we may infer, I think, that the same was really the case also with the dies postriduani. The fact that the authorities of the State had made one or two days religiosi as anniversaries of disasters, supplied a handy explanation for a number of other dies religiosi of which the true explanation had been entirely lost; but that there was such a true explanation, resting on very primitive beliefs, I have very little doubt. Lucky and unlucky days are found in the unwritten calendars of primitive peoples in many parts of the world. An old pupil, now a civil servant in the province of Madras, has sent me an elaborate account of the notions of this kind existing in the minds of the Tamil-speaking people of his district of southern India. The Celtic calendar recently discovered at Coligny in France contains a number of mysterious marks, some of which may have had a meaning of this kind.[78] Dr. Jevons has collected some other examples from various parts of the world, e.g. Mexico.[79] The old Roman superstition about the luckiness of odd days and the unluckiness of even ones, which appears, as we shall see, in the arrangement of the calendar, was probably at one time a popular Italian notion, not derived, as used to be thought, from Pythagoras and his school.

I therefore conclude that we may add times and seasons to the list of those objects, animate and inanimate, which were affected by the practice of taboo in primitive Rome; and I hold that the word religiosus, as applied both to times and places, exactly expresses the feeling on which that practice is based. The word religiosus came to have another meaning (though it retained the old one as well) in historical times, and the Romans could be called religiosissimi mortalium in the sense of paying close attention to worship and all its details. But the original meaning of religio and religiosus may after all have been that nervous anxiety which is a special characteristic of an age of taboo.[80] To discover the best methods of soothing that anxiety, or, in other words, the methods of disinfection, was the work of the organised religious life of family and State which we are going to study. But I must first devote a lecture to another class of primitive survivals.

NOTES TO LECTURE II

[23] Renel, Les Enseignes, p. 43 foll. For the contrary view, Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 490.

[24] On taboo in general, Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, ch. vi.; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 142 foll.; Frazer, Golden Bough (ed. 2), i. 343; Crawley, The Mystic Rose, passim. On the relation of taboo to magic, Marett, Threshold of Religion, p. 85 foll. Lately M. van Gennep in his Rites de passage has attempted to classify and explain the various rites resulting from taboo.

[25] See the Transactions of the Congress (Oxford University Press), vol. i. p. 121 foll. M. Reinach had alleged that the gens Fabia was originally a totem clan, Mythes et cultes, i. p. 47.

[26] Marett, On the Threshold of Religion, p. 137 foll. "In taboo the mystic thing is not to be lightly approached (negative aspect); qua mana, it is instinct with mystic power (positive aspect)": so Mr. Marett states the distinction in a private letter.

[27] Evolution of Religion, p. 94.

[28] Introduction, ch. viii.; Westermarck, Origin and Development of Ethical Ideas, i. 233 foll.

[29] See a paper by the author in the Transactions of the Congress of the History of Religions, 1908, ii. 169 foll.

[30] Macrobius, Sat. i. 16. 36; De Marchi, La Religione nella vita domestica, i. p. 169 foll.; Samter, Familienfeste der Griechen und Roemer, p. 62 foll., where the dies lustricus is compared with the Greek [Greek: amphidromia]. Unfortunately the details of the Roman rite are unknown to us, which seems to indicate that the primitive or magical character of it had disappeared. Van Gennep, op. cit. ch. v., reviews and classifies our present knowledge of this kind of rite. See also Crawley, Mystic Rose, p. 435 foll.

[31] Crawley, op. cit. p. 436; Frazer, G.B. i. 403 foll. From this point of view Roman names need a closer examination than they have yet received. See, however, Marquardt, Privatleben der Roemer, pp. 10 and 81, and Mommsen, Roem. Forschungen, i. 1 foll. Marquardt must be wrong in stating (p. 10) that only the praenomen was given on the dies lustricus; children dying before that day usually, as he says on p. 82 note, have no name in inscriptions, and that ceremony must surely have introduced the child to the gens of its parents. Certainly that introduction had not to wait till the toga virilis was taken; though Tertull. de Idol. 16 looks at first a little like it. The same statement is made in the Dict. of Antiq., s.v. "nomen." Macr. Sat. i. 16. 36, and Fest. 120, simply speak of nomen.

[32] Fowler, R.F. p. 56; De Marchi, op. cit. p. 176. For the primitive ideas about puberty, Crawley, Mystic Rose, ch. xiii. The idea of the Romans seems to have been simply that the child, who had so far needed special protection from evil influences (of what kind in particular it is impossible to say) by purple-striped toga and amulet (see below, p. 60), was now entering a stage when these were no longer needed. All notions of taboo seem to have vanished.

[33] Marquardt, Privataltertuemer, p. 337 foll.

[34] Serv. Aen. ii. 714, and especially iii. 64. Other references in Marq. op. cit. p. 338, note 5, and De Marchi, La Religione nella vita domestica, p. 190. For similar usages of prohibition see van Gennep, op. cit. ch. ii.

[35] Festus, p. 3, "itaque funus prosecuti redeuntes ignem supragradiebantur aqua aspersi, quod purgationis genus vocabant suffitionem." For the possibly magic influence of these elements, see Jevons, op. cit. p. 70.

[36] Frazer, G.B. i. 325, iii. 222 foll.; Jevons, p. 59.

[37] Cato, R.R. 83, "mulier ad eam rem divinam ne adsit neve videat quomodo fiat."

[38] Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 60. Dogs were also excluded (ib. 90); Gellius xi. 6. 2; Wissowa, R.K. p. 227; Fowler, R.F. p. 194, where the private and public taboos are compared.

[39] Festus, s.v. "exesto." For similar taboos in Greece, Farnell in Archiv for 1904, p. 76.

[40] Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 143 foll. Cp. Westermarck, Origin, etc., vol. i. ch. xxvi., especially p. 652 foll.

[41] G.B. i. 298 foll.

[42] Festus, s.v. "exesto."

[43] Buecheler, Umbrica, p. 94 foll. Cp. Livy v. 50, where it is said that, after the Gauls had left Rome, all the temples, quod ea hostis possedisset, were to be restored, to have their bounds laid down afresh (terminarentur) and to be disinfected (expiarentur). Digest, xi. 7. 36, "cum loca capta sunt ab hostibus, omnia desinunt religiosa vel sacra esse, sicut homines liberi in servitutem perveniunt; quod si ab hac calamitate fuerint liberata, quasi quodam postliminio reversa pristino statui restituerentur." Cp. Plutarch, Aristides, 20. A friend reminds me that Bishop Berkeley, when in Italy, had his bedroom sprinkled with holy water by his landlady.

[44] See Marquardt, p. 420, notes 5 and 6. The verbenarius is mentioned in Serv. Aen. xii. 120, and Pliny N.H. xxii. 5. For the disinfecting power of verbena (myrtea verbena) see Pliny xv. 119, where it is said to have been used by Romans and Sabines after the rape of the Sabine virgins.

[45] See Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 192 foll., based on the famous essay of Mommsen in his Roemische Forschungen, i. 319 foll. The passages quoted from Livy for the practice in early times (i. 45, v. 50) are not, of course, historical evidence; but we may fairly argue back from the more explicit evidence of later times, e.g. the Senatusconsultum de Asclepiade of 78 B.C. (C.I. Graec. 5879).

There is a good example of the feeling in modern Italy in a book called In the Abruzzi, by Anne Macdonell, p. 275. I have experienced it in remote parts of South Wales long ago. Moritz, the German pastor who travelled on foot in England towards the end of the eighteenth century, noted that even the innkeepers were constantly unwilling to take him in. His book was reprinted in Cassell's National Library some years ago.

[46] See the very interesting chapter in The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, vol. i. p. 570 foll., especially p. 590 foll. Dr. Westermarck aptly points out that hospitality is almost universal among "rude" peoples, and loses its hold as they become more civilised. M. van Gennep in his recently published work, Les Rites de Passage, has attempted to classify the various rites relating to taboo of strangers; see ch. iii., especially p. 38 foll.

[47] Jevons, Introduction, p. 70.

[48] Gellius x. 15. 8, "vinctum, si aedes eius introierit, solui necessum est." (In hot countries chains still usually, or in some degree, take the place of bolts and bars, e.g. in the Soudan, as I am told by an old pupil now in the Soudan civil service.) The regular Latin phrase for imprisonment is "in vincula conicere": Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "carcer."

[49] Gellius, l.c.; Serv. Aen. ii. 57, a curious passage, in which the release of Sinon from his bonds by King Priam is compared with that of the prisoner who enters the flaminia (house of the Flamen Dialis). That there was something in the iron which interfered with the religious efficacy of the Flamen seems likely; cp. the rule that he might wear no ring unless it were broken, and have no knot about his dress. But the latter restriction suggests that binding may have been originally the object of the taboo (cp. Ovid, Fasti, v. 432), and that the iron taboo came in with the iron age. Appel, de Romanorum precationibus, p. 82, note 2, seems so to understand it. Cp. Eurip. Iph. Taur. 468, where Orestes and Pylades are unbound before entering the temple.

[50] There has been much discussion of this question; I entirely agree with Wissowa (R.K. p. 354, where references are given for the opposite opinion) that there is no evidence for human sacrifice in the old Roman religion or law, except in the rule that a condemned criminal was made over to a deity (sacer), which may have been a legal survival of an original form of actual sacrifice. The alleged sacrifice by Julius Caesar of two mutinous soldiers in the Campus Martius (Dio Cass. xliii. 24) is of the same nature as the sacrifice of captives to Orcus in Aen. xi. 81, i.e. it is outside of the civil life and religious law; this is shown in the latter case by the mention of blood in the ritual (caeso sparsurus sanguine flammas), and in the former by the beheading of the mutineers.

[51] Mommsen, Strafrecht, p. 917 foll.; Livy x. 9; Cic. de Rep. ii. 31. 65. All other methods of execution were bloodless. Decollatio remained in use in the army (as in the case just mentioned), but the axe disappeared from the fasces in the city with the abolition of kingship. As further illustration of the dislike of all bloodshed, cp. the rule of XII. Tables, "mulieres genas ne radunto," i.e. at funerals, Cic. de Legibus, ii. 59, and Serv. Aen. iii. 67 from Varro, and v. 78. The gladiatorial ludi may have been a revival of an old custom akin to human sacrifice of captives in the field. See Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 304, note 3.

We may also note in this connection that there is no distinct trace of the blood-feud in old Roman law; see Zum aeltesten Strafrecht der Kulturvoelker, p. 38 (questions of comparative law suggested by Mommsen and answered by various specialists). Doubtless it once existed, but vanished at an early date.

[52] Fowler, R.F. p. 242. The tail of the sacrificed horse was carried to the Regia, where the blood was allowed to drip on the sacred hearth (participandae rei divinae gratia), Festus, p. 178.

[53] R.F. p. 311 foll., from Plutarch, Rom. 21.

[54] For this practice in many ancient religions, and its substitute, the smearing of the stone with turmeric or other red stain, see Jevons, Introduction, p. 139 foll.; Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 415.

[55] This is found in Zosimus ii. 1. 5; Diels, Sibyllinische Blaetter, 132, and 73 note. Cp. Virg. Aen. viii. 106; also a Greek rite.

[56] G.B. ed. 2, i. 241 foll.

[57] The bronze and iron ages, of course, overlap; see Helbig, Italiker in der Poebene, p. 78 foll.

[58] Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. pp. 22 and 128 foll. Other examples are collected by Helbig, op. cit. p. 80.

[59] Dion. Hal. iii. 45; Mommsen in C.I.L. i. p. 177. It may be as well to point out that iron, like wheat in the taboos of the Flamen, was considered dangerous, as being a novelty. The old Italian grain was not true wheat but far, which continued to be used in religious rites; R.F. p. 304, and Marquardt, Privatleben der Roemer, p. 399 foll.

[60] Varro, L.L. vii. 84; Ovid, Fasti, i. 629; Petronius, Sat. 44. There are many parallels in Greek ritual.

[61] See below, p. 146. Mr. Marett suggests to me a comparison with the rongo (sacred) of the Melanesians, and tapu as used of a place by them, i.e. set apart by a human authority; Codrington, Melanesians, p. 77.

[62] Wissowa, R.K. p. 408 foll.; cp. 323 and notes.

[63] The fullest account of this will be found in Marquardt, p. 262 foll. For the case of a man killed by lightning, see note 4 on p. 263; the body was not burnt but buried, and the grave became a bidental, and religiosum.

[64] For the intricate pontifical law of burial-places see Wissowa, p. 409. The quotation from Masurius is in Gellius iv. 9. 8, "M. Sabinus in commentariis quos de indigenis composuit." The word sanctitas is here used merely by way of explanation and not in a technical sense; for which see Marq. p. 145 and references; but it seems to have had a special use in the cult of the dead. (See below, p. 470.)

[65] Quoted by Macrobius, Sat. iii. 3. 8. For Sulpicius see Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 118 foll.

[66] Festus, p. 278. This Aelius lived at the end of the Republican period, and belonged to the school of Sulpicius; Schanz, Gesch. der roem. Lit. i. pt. 2, p. 486.

[67] e.g. the three days on which the mundus was open were all comitiales, though at the same time religiosi.

[68] R.K. pp. 376, 377.

[69] The authorities for the story are Verrius Flaccus, ap. Gell. v. 17, and Macrobius, Sat. i. 16. 21.

[70] For the extent of the taboo see Gell. iv. 9. 5; Macr. i. 16. 18.

[71] Gell. v. 17. 3 foll. (annalium quinto).

[72] Festus, p. 278.

[73] R.F. p. 151.

[74] Wissowa, R.K. p. 377, note 6.

[75] Cic. ad Qu. Fratr. ii. 4. 2.

[76] Wissowa, R.K. pp. 187, 189.

[77] R.K. p. 377. Gell. iv. 9. 5 says that the multitudo imperitorum confused the dies religiosi and dies nefasti. The distinction is most clearly seen in the fact that on dies religiosi the temples were (or ought to be) shut, and "res divinas facere" was ill-omened (Gell., ib.), while on dies nefasti the latter was regular, such days being made over to the gods. No wonder that Gellius brands the popular ignorance with such words as prave and perperam.

[78] See Prof. Rhys's paper read before the British Academy, "Notes on the Coligny Calendar," p. 33 and elsewhere.

[79] Introduction, p. 65 foll.

[80] Since writing this sentence I have read the paper by W. Otto on "Religio and Superstitio" in Archiv fuer Religionswissenschaft, 1909, p. 533 foll.; in which at p. 544 he hints at a connection of religio with the practice of taboo. With some of his conclusions, however, I cannot agree. The same explanation of the origin of religio, i.e. in an age of taboo, has also been suggested since my lecture was written by Maximilianus Kobbert, De verborum "religio atque religiosus" usu apud Romanos, p. 31 (Koenigsberg, 1910).



LECTURE III

ON THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION: MAGIC

Taboo, the traces of which at Rome we examined in the last lecture, is, as we saw, closely allied to magic, even if it be not, as Dr. Frazer thinks, magic in a negative form. We have now to see what traces are to be found of magic in the proper or usual sense of the word—active or positive magic, as we may call it. By this we are to understand the exercise of a mysterious mechanical power by an individual on man, spirit, or deity, to enforce a certain result. In magic there is no propitiation, no prayer. "He who performs a purely magical act," says Dr. Westermarck,[81] "utilises such mechanical power without making any appeal at all to the will of a supernatural being." Religion, on the other hand, is an attitude of regard and dependence; in a religious stage man feels himself in the hands of a supernatural power with whom he desires to be in right relation.

If we accept this distinction, as I think we may (though one school of anthropologists is hardly disposed to do so), it is plain that magical practices are of a totally different kind from religious practices, as being the result of a different mental attitude towards the supernatural; they belong to a ruder and more rudimentary idea of the relation of Man to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. True, they have their origin in the same kind of human experience, in the difficulties man meets with in his struggle for existence, and his desire to overcome these; but unlike religion, magic is a wholly inadequate attempt to overcome them. This inadequacy was long ago well explained by Dr. Jevons.[82] He showed that man in that early stage of his experience did not understand the true relation of cause and effect; that, "turned loose as it were among innumerable possible causes (of a given effect), with nothing to guide his choice, the chances against his making the right choice were considerable." As a matter of fact he usually made the wrong one, and is still apt to do so. There is probably more magic going on behind the scenes even in civilised countries, and more especially both in Greece and Italy, than either men of science or men of religion have any idea of. In its various forms as they are now classified,[83] e.g. contagious magic, and homoeopathic magic, the exercise of the mysterious will-power, real or imaginary, is to be found all the world over, accompanied usually with a spell or incantation which is believed to enforce and increase that power—a kind of telepathy, which seems to be the psychological basis, so far as there is one, of the whole system. In these rites the virtue resides in some action, which, together with the spell or incantation, enforces the desired result by calling out the will-power, or mana, if we adopt the convenient Melanesian word lately brought into use. Whatever percentage of psychological truth may lie at the root of such performances, it is obvious that they must in the main be wholly inadequate, and must constantly tend to pass into mere quackery and become discredited; and it was the special function of the religious organisation of early society to eliminate and discredit them.

But it was a long stage in the evolution of society before man arrived at a better knowledge of his relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe; before he reached the idea of a god or spirit realisable and nameable, and thus capable of being addressed, placated, worshipped. When this stage is reached, there supervenes almost always a strong tendency to regulate and systematise the methods of address, placation, and worship; and among some peoples, e.g. the Romans, for reasons which it is by no means easy to explain, this tendency is much stronger than among others. Wherever it has been strong, wherever these methods of putting oneself in right relation with the Power have been systematised by a central authority or priesthood, and thus made into religious law, there, as we might naturally expect, the performances and performers of magic have been most vigorously discountenanced and outlawed. The interests of religion and its officials are wholly antagonistic to those of magic and magicians. In civilised communities and in historical times magic is in the main individualistic, not social; magical ceremonies for the good of the community seem to be confined to races in a very early stage of development. The examples on which Dr. Frazer relies for his theory of the development of the public magician into a king[84] are of this primitive kind, or are mere survivals of magic in a higher stage of civilisation—such survivals as there will always be among forms and ceremonies, of which it is man's nature to be tenacious. But religion, once firmly established, invariably seeks to exclude magic; and the priest does his best to discredit the magician, as claiming to exercise mysterious powers outside the pale of the legally recognised methods of propitiation and worship. As Dr. Tylor observed long ago, the more civilised the race, the more apt it is to associate magic with men of inferior civilisation.[85] In the Jewish law, though magic was well known to the Jews and privately practised, there is no recognition of it; the magical books attributed to Solomon were suppressed, according to tradition, by the pious king Hezekiah.[86] So too at Rome, where the outward forms of religion were also very highly systematised, magic, as it seems to me, was rigorously excluded from the State ritual, though it continued in use in private life under certain precautions taken by the State; in the few genuine examples of it in the rites belonging to the ius divinum (i.e. those used and sanctioned for the purposes of the community), it is nothing more than a survival of which the magical meaning was unknown to the writers from whom we hear of it.

A good example of such survivals is the curious ceremony of the aquaelicium, without doubt a genuine case of magical "rain-making"—one of the many inadequate and blundering attempts on the part of primitive man to obtain what he needs. Probably it may be classed under the head of "sympathetic magic," but the evidence as to what was done in the ceremony is not quite explicit enough to allow us to do this confidently.[87] It was, of course, not included in the religious calendar, as it would be only occasionally called for, and could not be fixed to a day; but there is clear evidence that it was sanctioned by the State, for the pontifices took part in it, and the magistrates without the toga praetexta, and the lictors carrying the fasces reversed.[88] A stone, which lay outside the walls near the Porta Capena, was brought into the city by the pontifices, so far as we can make out the details, and it has been conjectured that it was taken to an altar of Jupiter Elicius on the Aventine hard by, this cult-title of the god of the sky having possibly some relation to the technical name of the ceremony. What was done with the stone we unluckily do not know; but it has been reasonably conjectured that it was a hollow one, and that it was filled with water which was allowed to run over the edge, as a means of inducing the rain-god to suffer the heavens to overflow.[89] It was called lapis manalis; and the epithet here can have nothing to do with the Manes, as in the case of another lapis manalis, of which I shall have a word to say later on, but must mean "pouring" or "overflowing." One or two other fragments of evidence point in the same direction, and I think we may fairly conclude that the rite was originally one of sympathetic magic—that as the stone overflowed, so the sky would pour down rain. In my Roman Festivals I have pointed out a remarkable parallel to this in the collections of the Golden Bough; in a Samoan village a stone represented the god of rain, and in a drought his priests carried it in procession and dipped it in a stream.

This parallel I owe to Dr. Frazer's wide knowledge of all such practices among savage peoples. But this ever helpful and friendly guide, in treating of the Jupiter Elicius concerned in this ceremony, has gone beyond the evidence, and attributed to the Romans another kind of magic of which I believe they were quite innocent. He has been led to this by his theory that kings were developed out of successful magicians. In his lectures on the early history of the Kingship[90] he maintains that the Roman kings practised the magical art of bringing down lightning from heaven. "The priestly king Numa passed for an adept in the art of drawing down lightning from the sky.... Tullus Hostilius is reported to have met with the same end (as Salmoneus, king of Elis) in an attempt to draw down Jupiter in the form of lightning from the clouds." To support these statements Dr. Frazer quotes Pliny, Livy, Ovid, Plutarch, Arnobius, Aurelius Victor, and Zonaras—truly a formidable list of authorities; but without any attempt to discover where any of these late writers found the stories. Yet he had but to read Aust's admirable article "Jupiter" in the Mythological Lexicon[91] to assure himself that legends which cannot be traced farther back than the middle of the second century B.C. cannot seriously be assumed to be genuinely Roman. Pliny happens to mention Calpurnius Piso as his authority; this was the man who is well known in Roman history as the author of the first lex de repetundis of the year 149 B.C., a good statesman, but as an annalist much given to indulging a mythological fancy.[92] We happen to know that he wrote with happy confidence about the life and habits of Romulus, and a story about wine-drinking which he attributes to that king is obviously transferred to him from some more historical personage. Romulus would not drink wine one day because he was going to be very busy on the next. Then they said to him, "If we all did so, Romulus, wine would be cheap." "Nay, dear," he replied, "if every one drank as much as he wished; and that is exactly what I am doing."[93] I quote the story simply as a good example of the way in which Roman historians could deal with their kings, and of the absolute necessity of acquainting oneself with their methods before building hypotheses upon their statements. I hardly need to add that another of Dr. Frazer's authorities, Arnobius, informs us that he took the story from the second book of Valerius Antias, a later writer than Piso, whose name is a byword even with the uncritical Livy for shameless exaggeration and mis-statement.[94]

But how did these writers come by such legends, which, as Dr. Frazer shows, are to be found also in Greece and in other parts of the world? Why should they have wished to make Roman kings into magicians? Rain-making we can understand at Rome,—it had a practical end in view, the procuring of rain for the crops,—but why lightning and thunder, which were so much dreaded that every bit of damage done by a thunderstorm had to be carefully expiated by a religious process? Rome is not in the tropics, where rain and thunder so often come together, and where an attempt to produce rain by magic might naturally include thunder, as in some of Dr. Frazer's examples from tropical lands. I entirely agree with the latest and most sober investigators of Roman ritual that this kind of magic is quite foreign to Roman ideas and practice;[95] there is no vestige of it in the Roman cult; these stories must have come from outside. And there is every probability that they came from Etruria, where the lore of lightning had become a pseudo-science, a waste of human ingenuity, for the origin of which we must look, as we are now beginning to understand, to Babylonia and the Eastern magic.[96] The Jupiter Elicius of the Aventine had nothing to do with lightning; he took his cult-title from the rite of aquaelicium; but as soon as the Romans began to interest themselves in the Etruscan lightning-lore, of which this electrical magic was only a part,[97] they perverted the meaning of the epithet to suit their new studies, and began to attribute to their legendary kings powers which properly belonged to Etruscan or Oriental magicians. The second century B.C., when Piso wrote his Annals, is exactly the period when we should naturally expect such studies to come into fashion, and with such perversions of "history" as their consequence.[98]

I go on to note one or two more examples of real magic in the State religion; but they are hard to find. Pliny tells that even in his day people believed that a runaway slave who had not escaped out of the city might be arrested by a spell uttered by the Vestal virgins.[99] I take this to mean that any one who had lost his slave might get the Vestals to use the spell as a means of keeping the runaway within the city. The word for spell is here precatio, i.e. a prayer, not carmen, which is the usual word for a spell; and Pliny evidently thinks of it as addressed to some god. But no doubt it was originally at least a genuine spell, of the same kind as others used in private life, which we shall notice directly; and it implies a belief in some magical power inherent in the Vestals, of whom we are told that if they accidentally met a criminal being led to punishment they might secure his release.[100] As the spell in this case seems to be telepathic, i.e. an exercise of will-power projected from a distance, it may perhaps be paralleled with certain mystical powers exercised by women, especially when their husbands are at war, among some savage peoples;[101] but we have no information about it beyond the passage in Pliny, and further guessing would be useless.

This last is a case of genuine magic, but it is outside the ritual of the State, though exercised by a State priesthood. Within that ritual there is one other very curious case of what must be classed as a magical process, and one that has accidentally become famous. At the Lupercalia on February 15, the two young men called Luperci, or, more strictly, belonging respectively as leaders to the two collegia of Luperci, girt themselves with the skins of the slaughtered victims, which were goats, and then ran round the base of the Palatine hill, striking at all the women who came near them or offered themselves to their blows, with strips of skin cut from the hides of these same victims. The object was to produce fertility; on this point our authorities are explicit.[102] Thus this particular feature of the whole extraordinary ritual of the Lupercalia is unmistakably within the region of magic rather than of religion. Some potency was believed to work in the act of striking, though apparently without a spoken spell or carmen, such as usually accompanies acts of this kind; and this part of the rite, grotesque though it was, was allowed to survive by the grave religious authorities who drew up the calendar of religious festivals. It was probably a superstition too deeply rooted in the minds of the people to admit of being excluded; and, strange to say, it survived, in outward form at least, until Rome had become cosmopolitan and even Christian. The Lupercalia has always been a puzzle to students of early religion, and as each new theory is advanced, this strange festival is seized on for fresh interpretation;[103] but for our present purposes it must suffice to point out that we clearly find embedded in it a piece of genuine magic, dating beyond doubt from a very primitive stage of thought.

There is one other very curious performance, occurring each year on the ides of May, which in my view is rather magical than religious, though the ancients themselves looked upon it as a kind of purification: I mean the casting into the Tiber from the pons sublicius of twenty-four or twenty-seven straw puppets by the Vestal virgins, in the presence of the magistrates and pontifices. Recently an attempt has been made by Wissowa to prove that this strange ceremony was not primitive, but simply a case of the substitution of puppets for real human victims as late as the age of the Punic wars.[104] These puppets were called Argei, which word naturally suggests Greeks; and Wissowa has contrived to persuade himself not only that a number of Greeks were actually put to death by drowning in an age when everything Greek was beginning to be reverenced at Rome, but (still more extraordinary to an anthropologist) that the primitive device of substitution was had in requisition at that late date in order to carry on the memory of the ghastly deed. And the world of German learning has silently followed their leader, without taking the trouble to test his conclusions by a careful and independent examination of the evidence. It happens that this fascinating puzzle of the Argei was the first curiosity that enticed me into the study of the Roman religion, and for some thirty years I have been familiar with every scrap of evidence bearing on it; and after going over that evidence once more I can emphatically state my conviction that Wissowa's theory will not hold water for a moment. I shall return to the subject in a later lecture dealing with the religious history of the second Punic war; at present I merely express a belief that, whatever be the history of the accessories of the rite,—and they are various and puzzling,—the actual immersion of the puppets is the survival of a primitive piece of sympathetic magic, the object being possibly to procure rain. It is, in my opinion, quite impossible to resist the anthropological evidence for this conclusion, though we cannot really be certain about the object; for this evidence I must refer you to my Roman Festivals, and to the references there given.[105]

This rite of the Argei, then, was a case of genuine magic, and exercised by a State priesthood, virgins to whom certain magical powers were supposed to be attached; it was, I think, a popular performance, like one or two others which are also outside the limit of the Fasti,[106] and was embodied in a more complicated ceremonial long after that calendar had been drawn up. In the ritual authorised by the State, with public objects in view, i.e. for the benefit of society as a whole, there is hardly a trace of anything that we can call genuine magic apart from the examples I have just been explaining. There were, I need not say, many survivals of magical processes of which the true magical intent had long been lost—ancient magical deposits in a social stratum of religion, which I shall notice in their proper place. This is not peculiar to the religion of the Romans; it is a phenomenon to be found in all religions, even in those of the most highly developed type, and it is one apt to cause some confusion as to the true distinction between magic and religion.[107] It is easy to find magical processes even in Christian worship, if we have the will to do so; but if we steadily bear in mind that the true test of magic is not the nature of an act, but the intent or volition which accompanies it, the search will not be an easy one.

The modern French school of sociologists, which now has to be reckoned with in investigating the early history of religion, claims that magic was not originally, as we now see it, a matter of individual skill, but a sociological fact, i.e. it was used for the benefit of the community, as religion came to be in a later age. If this be true, as it very possibly is, we see at once how the dead bones of magical processes might survive, with their original meaning entirely lost, into an age in which higher and more reasonable ideas had been developed about the relation of Man to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. To take a single example from Rome, divination by the examination of a victim's entrails was originally a magical process, according to the opinion of most modern authorities;[108] but it ceases to be magic when it is used simply to determine in the State ritual whether in a religious process the victim is perfect and agreeable to the deity. In fact magical formulae, magical instruments, unless they are used in the true spirit of magic, to compel, not to propitiate a deity, are no longer magic, and may be passed over here. When we come to discuss the ritual of sacrifice and prayer, of lustratio, of vows, of divination, we may find it necessary to recall what has here been said. On the whole, we may conclude that organised religious cult, from its very nature and object, everywhere excluded magic in the true sense of the word; it implies prayer and propitiation, both of which are absolutely inconsistent with the object and methods of magic. Religion is the product of a higher stage of social development; it is the expression of a real advance of human thought; and in telling the story of the religious experience of the Roman people we are but indirectly concerned with those more rude and rudimentary ideas which it displaced.

But in private life, outside of the organised cult of the State and the family, magic was all through Roman history abundant, even over-abundant, and in this form I cannot pass it over entirely. Though the State authorities seem to have taken pains to exclude it rigidly from the public rites, and though there is little trace of it in the religious life of family and gens, yet there is evidence that it was deeply rooted in the nature of the people, and that they must have passed through an age in which it was an important factor in their social life. This fact, taken together with its almost complete elimination from the public religion, throws into relief the persistent efforts of the State authorities, from the framing of the old religious calendar to the time of the Augustan revival, to keep their relations with the Power clear of all that they believed to be unworthy or injurious. No better example can be found of the inherent antagonism between religion and magic.

Private magic may be divided into two kinds, according as it was used to damage another, or only to benefit oneself. In the former case the State interfered to protect the person threatened with damage, and treated this kind of magic as a crime. The commonest form of it was that of the spell, or carmen, no doubt often sung, and accompanied by some action which would bring it under the head of sympathetic magic; but the spell alone is taken cognisance of by the State. Pliny has preserved three words from the XII. Tables which tell their own tale: "qui fruges excantassit."[109] Servius, commenting on the line of Virgil's 8th Eclogue, "atque satas alio vidi traducere messes," writes, "magicis quibusdam artibus hoc fiebat, unde est in XII. Tabb. 'Neve alienam segetem pellexeris.'" These last words, with the verb in the second person, are probably not quoted exactly from the ancient text,[110] but they help to show us the nature of this hostile spell. There must have been a belief that the spirit, or life, or fructifying power of your neighbour's crops could be enticed away and transferred to your own. This is confirmed by a remark of St. Augustine in the de Civitate Dei;[111] after quoting the same line from Virgil, he adds, "eo quod hac pestifera scelerataque doctrina fructus alieni in alias terras transferri perhibentur, nonne in XII. Tabulis, id est Romanorum antiquissimis legibus, Cicero commemorat esse conscriptum et ei qui hoc fecerit supplicium constitutum?" Given the belief, the temptation can be well understood if we reflect that the arable land of the old Romans was divided in sections of a square, and that each man's allotment would have that of a neighbour on two sides at least.[112] If one man's corn were found to be more flourishing than that of his neighbours, what more likely than that he should have enticed away the spirit of their crops? The process reminds us, as it reminded Pliny, of the evocatio of the gods of foreign communities, a rite which belongs to religion and not to magic, though it doubtless had its origin in the same class of ideas as the excantatio.

In more general terms the old Roman law (i.e. originally the ius divinum) forbade the use of evil spells, as we see in another fragment of the Tables, "qui malum carmen incantassit." In later times this was usually taken as referring to libel and slander, but there can be no doubt that the carmina here alluded to were originally magical, and became carmina famosa in the course of legal interpretation. Cicero seems to combine the two meanings in the de Rep. (iv. 10. 2) when he says that the Tables made it a capital offence "si quis occentavisset, sive carmen condidisset quod infamiam faceret flagitiumve alteri" (to bring shame or criminal reproach on another). In the later sense these carmina have a curious history, into which I cannot enter now.[113] In the earlier sense they existed and flourished without doubt, in spite of the law; or it may be that, as the words of the Tables were interpreted in the new sense, the old form of offence was tolerated in private. "We are all afraid," says Pliny, "of being 'nailed' (defigi) by spells and curses" (diris precationibus).[114] These dirae, and all the various forms of love-charms, defixiones, accompanied by the symbolic actions which are found all the world over, lie outside my present subject, and are so familiar to us all in Roman literature that I do not need to dwell on them.[115]

Nor of the common harmless kind of magic need I say much now. It survived, of course, alongside of the religion of the family and State, from the earliest times to the latest, as it survives at the present day in all countries civilised and uncivilised; and being harmless the State took no heed of it. Some assortment of charms and spells for the cure of diseases will be found in Cato's book on agriculture, and one or two incidentally occur in that of Varro.[116] They performed the work of insurance against both fire and accident, and even such a man as Julius Caesar was not independent of such arts. Pliny tells us that after experiencing a carriage accident he used to repeat a certain spell three times as soon as he had taken his seat in a vehicle, and adds significantly, "id quod plerosque nunc facere scimus."[117] Such carmina were written on the walls of houses to insure them against fire.[118] Pliny has a large collection of small magical delusions and superstitions, many of which have an interest for anthropologists, in the 28th book of his Natural History.

Another kind of harmless magic, to which the Romans, like all Italians ancient and modern, were peculiarly addicted, is the use of amulets. Here there is no spell, or obvious and expressed exercise of will-power on the part of the individual, but the potent influence, mana, or whatever we choose to call it, resides in a material object which brings good luck, like the cast horse-shoe of our own times, or protects against hostile will-power, and especially against the evil eye. This curious and widely-spread superstition was probably the raison d'etre of most of the amulets worn or carried by Romans. A modern Italian, even if he be a complete sceptic and materialist, will probably be found to have some amulet about him against the evil eye, "just to be on the safe side."[119] A list of amulets, both Greek and Roman, will be found in the Dictionary of Antiquities, and in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopaedie, s.v. "amulet," and it is not necessary here to explain the various kinds in use in Italy; but I must dwell for a moment on one type, which had been taken up into the life of the family, and in one sense into that of the State, viz. the bulla worn by children, both boys and girls.

The bulla was a small object, enclosed in historical times in a capsule, and suspended round the child's neck. It was popularly believed to have been originally an Etruscan custom,[120] and borrowed by the Romans, like so many other ornaments. It is, however, much more probable that the custom was old Italian (as indeed the "medicine-bag" is world-wide), and that the Etruscan contribution to it was merely the case or capsule, which was of gold where the family could afford it—gold itself being supposed to have some potency as a charm.[121] The object within the case was, as Pliny tells us, a res turpicula as a rule,[122] and this may remind us that a fascinum was carried in the car of the triumphator as medicus invidiae, to use Pliny's pregnant expression. The triumphing general needed special protection; he appeared in the guise of Jupiter himself, and was for the moment lifted above the ordinary rank of humanity. Some feeling of the same kind must have originally suggested similar means for the protection of children under the age of puberty. They also wore the toga praetexta, which, though associated by us with secular magistrates, had undoubtedly a religious origin. There are distinct signs that children were in some sense sacred, and at the same time that they needed special protection against the all-abounding evil influences to be met with in daily life.[123] Thus this particular form of amulet became a recognised institution of family life, and in due time little more than a mark of childhood.

Yet another kind of charm must be mentioned here which was used at certain festivals, though apparently not at any of those belonging to the authorised calendar. At the Compitalia, Paganalia, and feriae Latinae we are told that small images of the human figure, or masks, or simply round balls (pilae), were hung up on trees or doorways, and left to swing in the wind.[124] At the Compitalia the images had a special name, maniae, of which the meaning is lost; but inasmuch as the charms were hung up at cross-roads on that occasion, where the Lares compitales of the various properties had their shrine, it was not difficult to manufacture out of them a goddess, Mania, mother of the Lares.[125] The common word for these figures was oscilla, and the fact of their swinging in the wind suggested a verb oscillare, which survives in our own tongue with the same meaning. Until lately it used to be believed that they were substitutes for original human sacrifices: a view for which there is not a particle of evidence, though it was originated by Roman scholars.[126] Modern anthropology has found another explanation, which is by no means improbable. Dr. Frazer, in an appendix to the 2nd volume of the Golden Bough, has collected a number of examples of the practice of swinging by human beings as a magical rite; they come from many parts of the world, including ancient Athens, and even modern Calabria. He also points out that at the feriae Latinae the swingers seem to have been human beings, if we accept the evidence of Festus, s.v. "oscillantes"; thus we are left with the possibility that the oscilla were really imitations of men and women, though not of human sacrificial victims.

Dr. Frazer is obviously hard put to it to explain the original meaning and object of this curious custom. In the Paganalia, as described by Virgil in the second Georgic,[127] the object would seem to be the prosperity of the vine-crop.

coloni versibus incomptis ludunt risuque soluto, oraque corticibus sumunt horrenda cavatis, et te Bacche vocant per carmina laeta, tibique oscilla ex alta suspendunt mollia pinu. hinc omnis largo pubescit vinea fetu, etc.[128]

But here we must leave a question which is still unsolved. All we can say is that the old idea of substitutes for human sacrifice must be finally given up, and that the oscilla, whether or not they were substitutes for human swingers, were probably charms intended to ward off evil influences from the crops. I am not disposed to put any confidence in what Servius tells us, that this was a purification by means of air, just as fire and water were also purifying agents; this looks like the ingenious explanation of a later and a religious age.[129]

So much, then, for magical charms and spells, and the survivals of them in the fully developed Roman religion.[130] It might seem hardly worth while to spend even so much time on them as I have done, and I cannot deny that I am glad now to be able to leave them. My object has simply been to show how little of this kind of practice, which meets us on the threshold of religion, was allowed to survive by the religious authorities of the State; in other words, I wished to make clear that in our inquiries into the nature of the Roman religion it is really religion and not magic that we have to do with.

It is really religion; it is desire, beginning already to be effective, to be in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The Romans, as I hope to show in the next lecture, when we can begin to know and feel an interest in them, had not only begun to recognise this Power in various forms and functions as one that must be propitiated, because they were dependent on it for their daily needs, but to regulate and make permanent the methods of propitiation. What was the relation between this simple religion and morality—between ritual and conduct—is a very difficult question, to which I shall return later on. Dr. Westermarck has recently come to the conclusion that the religion of primitive man has no true relation to morality, that it is not apt to give a sanction to good action, or to develop the germs of a conscience. But so far as I can discern, the idea of active duty, and therefore the germ of conscience, must have been so intimately connected with the religious practice of the old Latin family that it is to me impossible to think of the one apart from the other. Surely it is in that life that the famous word "pius" must have originated, which throughout Roman history meant the sense of duty towards family, State, and gods, as every reader of the Aeneid knows. That the formalised religion of later times had become almost entirely divorced from morality there is indeed no doubt; but in the earliest times, in the old Roman family and then in the budding State, the whole life of the Roman seems to me so inextricably bound up with his religion that I cannot possibly see how that religion can have been distinguishable from his simple idea of duty and discipline.

NOTES TO LECTURE III

[81] Westermarck, Origin etc. of Moral Ideas, ii. 584.

[82] Jevons, Introduction, p. 33.

[83] A useful summary of the whole subject, embodying the results and terminology of Tylor, Frazer, and other anthropologists, is Dr. Haddon's Magic and Fetishism, in Messrs. Constable's series, Religions Ancient and Modern. See also Marett, On the Threshold of Religion, passim.

[84] Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, p. 89 foll. For an example not mentioned in the text (devotio) see below, p. 206 foll. This may have been originally practised by the Latin kings. I may here draw attention to the almost dogmatic conclusions of the modern French sociological school of research; e.g. M. Huvelin, in L'Annee sociologique for 1907, begins by asserting as a fundamental law, proved by MM. Hubert et Mauss, that magic is just as much a social fact as religion: "Les uns et les autres sont des produits de l'activite collective" (Magie et droit individuel, p. 1). But M. Huvelin's paper is to some extent a modification of this dogma. He seeks to explain the fact that magic is both secret and private, not public and social, in historical times; and in the domain of law, with which he is specially concerned, he concludes that "a magical rite is only a religious rite twisted from its proper social end, and employed to realise the will or belief of an individual" (p. 46). This is the only form in which we shall find magic at Rome, except in so far as a few of its forms survive in the ritual of religion with their meaning changed. In early Roman law, as a quasi-religious body of rules and practices, there are a few magical survivals which will be found mentioned by M. Huvelin in this article; but they are of no importance for our present subject.

[85] Primitive Culture, vol. i. ch. iv. See also Jevons, Introduction, p. 36 foll.

[86] See Schuerer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ (Eng. trans.), Division II. vol. iii. p. 151 foll.

[87] Fowler, R.F. p. 232; Wissowa, R.K. p. 106. The most careful examination of the rite and the evidence for it is that of Aust in Mythological Lexicon, s.v. "Iuppiter," p. 656 foll. See also M.H. Morgan in vol. xxxii. of Transactions of the American Philological Association, p. 104.

[88] Tertullian, de Jejun. 16. Petronius, Sat. 44, adds that the matrons went in the procession with bare feet and streaming hair (cp. Pliny xvii. 266); but this seems rather Greek than Roman in character, and Petronius is plainly thinking of the town (colonia he calls it) in southern Italy where the scene of Trimalchio's supper is laid; probably a Greek city by origin, Croton or Cumae. A translation of this passage will be found in Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 133. The most useful words in it for our purpose are "Jovem aquam exorabant."

[89] This suggestion was originally made by O. Gilbert, Roem. Topographie, ii. 184.

[90] p. 204 foll.

[91] p. 657. The story is mixed up with Greek fables, e.g. that of Proteus, as Wissowa has pointed out, R.K. p. 106, note 10.

[92] See Schanz, Gesch. der roem. Literatur, vol. i. (ed. 3) p. 270 foll.

[93] This fragment of Piso is preserved by Gellius, xi. 14. 1.

[94] See, e.g., Schanz, Gesch. der roem. Literatur, vol. ii. p. 106.

[95] Wissowa, l.c. Aust in Roscher's Lexicon, s.v. "Iuppiter," p. 657.

[96] Cumont, Religions Orientales dans le paganisme romain, ch. 5. I shall return to this subject in my second course of lectures.

[97] Mueller-Deecke, Etrusker, ii. ch. vii., especially p. 176 foll.

[98] Cp. below, Lecture XV.

[99] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 13: "Vestales nostras hodie credimus nondum egressa urbe mancipia fugitiva retinere in loco precationibus."

[100] Plutarch, Numa, 10. Virginity would increase the power of the spell; see Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum, p. 54 foll.

[101] See, e.g., Frazer, G.B. i. 360 foll.

[102] See R.F. p. 320, notes 6 and 7.

[103] Within the last thirty years or so the Lupercalia has been discussed (apart from writers on classical subjects exclusively) by Mannhardt in his Mythologische Studien, p. 72 foll.; Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 459; Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 481 foll.; and at the moment of writing by E. S. Hartland, Primitive Paternity, i. ch. ii. R.F. p. 310 foll. See Appendix D.

[104] This view was originally stated in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Argei." I endeavoured to confute it in the Classical Review, 1902, p. 115 foll., and Wissowa replied in Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 211 foll. Since then my conviction has become stronger that this great scholar is for once wrong. Ennius alluded to the Argei as an institution of Numa, i.e. as primitive (frag. 121, Vahlen, from Festus p. 355, and Varro, L.L. vii. 44), yet Ennius was a youth at the very time when Wissowa insists that the rite originated. Wissowa makes no attempt to explain this. See below, p. 321 foll.

[105] R.F. p. 111 foll.

[106] e.g. the October horse, which also occurred on the Ides; see R.F. p. 241 foll.; and the festival of Anna Perenna, also on Ides (March 15), R.F. p. 50 foll. It is just possible that all the three festivals were originally in the old calendar, and dropped out because the mark of the Ides had to be affixed to the day in the first place. See Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 164 foll.; R.F. p. 241.

[107] Thus Messrs. Hubert et Mauss (Melanges d'histoire des religions, Preface, p. xxiv.) maintain that there is no real antinomy between "les faits du systeme magique et les faits du systeme religieux." There is in every rite, they insist, a magical as well as a religious element. Yet on the same page we find that they exclude magic from all organised cult, because it is not obligatory, and cannot (if I understand them rightly) be laid down in a code, like religious practice. I think it would have been simpler to consider the magical element in religious rites as surviving, with its original meaning lost, from an earlier stage of thought. M. van Gennep, in his interesting work Les Rites de passage, p. 17, goes so far as to call all religious ceremonies magical, as distinguished from the theories (e.g. animism) which constitute religion. This seems to me apt to bring confusion into the discussion; for all rites are the outward expression of thought, and it is by the thought (or, as he calls it, theories) that we must trace the sociological development of mankind, the rites being used as indexes only. I cannot but think that (as indeed in these days is quite natural) this French school lays too much stress upon the outward acts, and that this tendency has led them to find real living magic where it is present only in a fossil state.

[108] e.g. Tylor, article "Magic" in Encycl. Brit., and Primitive Culture, 1. ch. iv.; Marett, Threshold of Religion, 83. See below, p. 180.

[109] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 17 and 18. For the singing or murmuring of spells in many countries, see Jevons, Anthropology and the Classics, p. 93 foll.

[110] Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani, note on this passage.

[111] Civ. Dei, viii. 19.

[112] See, e.g., Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin, p. 446, for an account of simple land measurement which will suffice to illustrate the point made here.

[113] The carmina famosa sung at a triumph by the soldiers had the same origin, but were used to avert evil from the triumphator. The best exposition of this is in H. A. J. Munro's Elucidations of Catullus, p. 76 foll.

[114] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 19. For the technical sense of defigere, defixio, see Jevons in Anthropology and the Classics, p. 108 foll.

[115] The most familiar examples are Virgil's eighth Eclogue, 95 foll.; Ovid, Met. vii. 167, and elsewhere; Fasti, iv. 551; Horace, Epode v. 72; cp. article "Magia" in Daremberg-Saglio; Falz, De poet. Rom. doctrina magica, Giessen, 1903. There is a collection of Roman magical spells in Appel's De Romanorum precationibus, p. 43 foll. Many modern Italian examples and survivals will be found in Leland's Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, pt. ii.

[116] Cato, R.R. 160; Varro, R.R. i. 3.

[117] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 21.

[118] Ib. xxviii. 20. The following sections of this book are the locus classicus for these popular superstitions.

[119] See, e.g., Italian Home Life, by Lina Duff Gordon, p. 230 foll.

[120] Juvenal v. 164. The idea probably arose, as a passage of Plutarch suggests (Rom. 25), from the fact that the triumphator, whose garb was no doubt of Etruscan origin, wore the bulla.

[121] Frazer, G.B. i. 345, note 2, where we learn that gold was taboo in some Greek worships, e.g. at the mysteries of Andania, which sufficiently proves that it possessed potency. Pliny, xxxiii. 84, mentions cases of such potency as medicine, and among them its application to children who have been poisoned.

[122] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 39.

[123] See an article by the author on the original meaning of the toga praetexta in Classical Review, vol. x. (1896) p. 317.

[124] For the Compitalia, Macrob. i. 7. 34; Festus p. 238. For the Paganalia, Probus, ad Georg. ii. 385, assuming the feriae Sementinae there mentioned to be the Paganalia (see R.F. p. 294). For the feriae Latinae, Festus, s.v. "oscillantes."

[125] Wissowa, R.K. p. 193, with whose view I entirely agree. We learn of the imaginary goddess from Varro, L.L. ix. 61. Pais, I may remark in passing, is certain that Acca Larentia was the mater Larum; see his Lectures on Ancient Legends of Roman History, p. 60 foll.

[126] 46. Wissowa, R.K. p. 354, note 5.

[127] Georg. ii. 380 foll. It is not certain that Virgil is describing the festival generally known as Paganalia, which took place early in January; but it seems probable from line 382 that he is thinking of some festival of the pagus. The oscilla may have been used at more than one.

[128] Note that Virgil writes of masks used in rude play-acting, as well as of oscilla hung on trees, and conjoins the two as though they had something in common. The evidence of an engraved onyx cup in the Louvre, of which a cut is given in the article "Oscilla" in the Dict. of Antiquities, seems to make it probable that masks worn by rustics on these occasions were afterwards hung by them on trees as oscilla. Some of these masks on the cup are adorned with horns, which may explain an interesting passage of Apuleius (Florida, i. 1): "neque enim iustius religiosam moram viatori obiecerit aut ara floribus redimita ... aut quercus cornibus onerata, aut fagus pellibus coronata," etc. See also Gromatici veteres, ii. 241.

[129] See, however, Dr. Frazer's remarks in G.B. ii. p. 454. He thinks that the air might in this way be purged of vagrant spirits or baleful ghosts, as the Malay medicine man swings in front of the patient's house in order to chase away the disease. Cp. G.B. ii. 343, where a rather different explanation is attempted of the maniae and pilae.

[130] Magic in the old forms, or many of them, has survived not only into the old Roman religion, but to the present day, in many parts of Italy. "The peasants have recourse to the priests and the saints on great occasions, but they use magic all the time for everything," was said by a woman of the Romagna Toscana to the late C.G. Leland (Etruscan Roman Remains, Introduction, p. 9). This enterprising American's remarkable book, though dealing only with a small region of northern Italy, deserves more consideration than it has received. The author may have been uncritical, but beyond doubt he had the gift of extracting secrets from the peasantry. He claims to have proved that "la vecchia religione" contains much that has come down direct from pre-Christian times; and the appearance of Mr. Lawson's remarkable book on Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion may tempt some really qualified investigator to undertake a similar work in Italy before it is too late.



LECTURE IV

THE RELIGION OF THE FAMILY

Some of the survivals mentioned in the last two lectures seem to carry us back to a condition of culture anterior to the family and to the final settlement on the land. Some attempt has recently been made to discover traces of descent by the mother in early Latium;[131] if this could be proved, it would mean that the Latins were already in Latium before they had fully developed the patriarchal system on which the family is based. However this may be, the first real fact that meets us in the religious experience of the Romans is the attitude towards the supernatural, or "the Power that manifests itself in the Universe," of the family as settled down upon the land. The study of religion in the family, as we know it in historical times, is also that of the earliest organisation of religion, and of the most permanent type of ancient Italian religious thought. Aust, whose book on the Roman religion is the most masterly sketch of the subject as yet published, writes thus of this religion of the family:[132] "Here the limits of religion and superstition vanish ... and in vain we seek here for the boundary marks of various epochs." By the first of these propositions he means that the State has not here been at work, framing a ius divinum, including religion and excluding magic; in the family, magic of all kinds would be admissible alongside of the daily worship of the family deities, and thus the family would represent a kind of half-way house between the age of magic and all such superstitions, and the age of the rigid regulation of worship by the law of a City-state. By the second proposition he means that the religious experience of the family is far simpler, and therefore far less liable to change than that of the State. Greek forms and ideas of religion, for example, hardly penetrated into its worship:[133] new deities do not find their way in—the family experience did not call for them as did that of the State. It may be said without going beyond the truth that the religion of the family remained the same in all essentials throughout Roman history, and the great priesthoods of the State never interfered with it in any such degree as to affect its vitality.[134]

But in order to understand the religion of the family, we must have some idea of what the family originally was. When a stock or tribe (populus) after migration took possession of a district, it was beyond doubt divided into clans, gentes, which were the oldest kinship divisions in Italian society. All members of a clan had the same name, and were believed to descend from a common ancestor.[135] According to the later juristic way of putting it, all would be in the patria potestas of that ancestor supposing that no deaths had ever occurred in the gens; and, indeed, the idea that the gens is immortal in spite of the deaths of individuals is one which constitutes it as a permanent entity, and gives it a quasi-religious sanction. For primitive religion, as has been well said, disbelieves in death; most of the lower races believe both in a qualified immortality and in the non-reality or unnaturalness of death.[136] In regard to the kinship of a clan, death at any rate has no effect: the bond of union never breaks.

Now a little reflection will show that a clan or gens of this kind might be maintained intact in a nomadic state, or during any number of migrations; it is, in fact, manifestly appropriate to such a mobile condition of society, and expresses its natural need of union; and when the final settlement occurs, this body of kin will hold together in the process, whether or no it has smaller divisions within it. We may be certain that this was the one essential kin-division of the Latin stock when it settled in Latium, and all through Roman history it continues so, a permanent entity though families may die.[137] Every Roman lawyer will recognise this fact as true, and I need not dwell on it now.

It is when the gens has settled upon the land that the family begins to appear as a fact of importance for our purpose. Such operations as the building of a permanent house, the clearing and cultivation of a piece of land, can best be carried out by a smaller union than the gens, and this smaller union is ready to hand in the shape of a section of the gens comprising the living descendants of a living ancestor, whether of two, three, or even four generations.[138] This union, clearly visible to mortal eye, and realisable in every-day work, settles together in one house, tends its own cattle and sheep, cultivates its own land with the help of such dependants as it owns, slave or other, and is known by the word familia. This famous word, so far as we know, does not contain the idea of kinship, at any rate as its leading connotation; it is inseparable from the idea of land-settlement,[139] and is therefore essentially das Hauswesen, the house itself, with the persons living in it, free or servile, and with their land and other property, all governed and administered by the paterfamilias, the master of the household, who is always the oldest living male ancestor. The familia is thus an economic unit, developed out of the gens, which is a unit of kin and little more. And thus the religion of the familia will be a religion of practical utility, of daily work, of struggle with perils to which the shepherd and the tiller of the soil are liable; it is not the worship of an idea of kinship expressed in some dimly conceived common ancestor; the familia, as I hope to show, had no common ancestor who could be the object of worship, except that of the gens from which it had sprung. The life of the familia was a realisation of the present and its needs and perils, without the stimulus to take much thought about the past, or indeed about the future; for it, sufficient for the day was the evil thereof; for what had been and what was to come it could look to the gens to which it owed its existence. But in practical life the gens was not of much avail; and instead of it, exactly as we might expect, we find an artificial union of familiae, a union of which the essential thing is not the idea of kin, but that of the land occupied, and known all over Italy by the word pagus.[140] Before I go on to describe the religion of the family, it is necessary to put the familia into its proper relation with this territorial union.

The pagus is the earliest Italian administrative unit of which we know anything; a territory, of which the essential feature was the boundary, not any central point within the boundary. In all probability it was originally the land on which a gens had settled, though settlement produces changes, and the land of gens and pagus was not identical in later times. But within this boundary line, of which we shall hear something more presently, how were the component parts, the familiae of the gens, settled down on the land? Of the village community so familiar to us in Teutonic countries, there is no certain trace in Latium. Vicus, the only word which might suggest it, is identical with the Greek [Greek: oikos], a house; later it is used for houses standing together, or for a street in a town. But the vicus in the country has left no trace of itself as a distinct administrative union like our village community; the vico-magistri of the Roman city were urban officers; and what is more important, we know of no religious festivals of the vicus, like those of the pagus, of which there are well-attested records. The probability then is that the unit within the pagus was not the village but the homestead, and that these stood at a distance from each other, as they do in Celtic countries, not united together in a village, and each housing a family group working its own land and owning its own cattle.[141] The question of the amount and the tenure of the land of this group is a very difficult one, into which it is not necessary to enter closely here. There can, however, be no doubt that it possessed in its own right a small piece of garden ground (heredium), and also an allotment of land in the arable laid out by the settlers in common—centuriatus ager; whether the ownership of this was vested in the individual paterfamilias or in the gens as a whole, does not greatly matter for our purposes.[142] Lastly, as it is certain that the familia owned cattle and sheep, we may be sure that it enjoyed the right of common pasture on the land not divided up for tillage.

We see all this through a mist, and a mist that is not likely ever to lift; but yet the outlines of the picture are clear enough to give us the necessary basis for a study of the religion of the familia. The religious points, if I may use the expression—those points, that is, which are the object of special anxiety (religio)—lie in the boundaries, both of the pagus as a whole, and of the arable land of the familia, in the house itself and its free inhabitants, and in the family burying-place; and to these three may no doubt be added the spring which supplied the household with water. Boundaries, house, burying-place, spring,—all these are in a special sense sacred, and need constant and regular religious care.

Let us begin with the house, the central point of the economic and religious unit. The earliest Italian house was little more than a wigwam, more or less round, constructed of upright posts connected with wattles, and with a closed roof of straw or branches.[143] This would seem to have been the type of house of the immigrating people who settled on the tops of hills and lived a pastoral life; when they descended into the plains and became a settled agricultural people, they adopted a more roomy and convenient style of building, suitable for storing their grain or other products, and for the maintenance of a fire for cooking these. Whether the rectangular house, with which alone we are here concerned, was developed under Greek or Etruscan influence, or suggested 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.