Nor is it quite safe to argue back from that calendar to the life of the familia and the pagus, except in general terms. As we shall see, the calendar is based on the life and work of an agricultural folk, and we may by all means guess that its many agricultural rites existed beforehand in the earlier social life; but into detail we may not venture. As Varro, however, has mentioned the Saturnalia in the same sentence with the Compitalia, we may guess that that famous jovial festival was a part of the rustic winter rejoicing. And here, too, I may mention another festa of that month, of which a glimpse is given us by Horace, another country-loving poet, who specially mentions the pagus as taking part in it. Faunus and Silvanus were deities or spirits of the woodland among which these pagi lay, and in which the farmers ran their cattle in the summer;[169] by Horace's time Faunus had been more or less tarred with a Greek brush, but in the beautiful little ode I am alluding to he is still a deity of the Italian farmer,[170] who on the Nones of December besought him to be gracious to the cattle now feeding peacefully on the winter pasture:—

ludit herboso pecus omne campo cum tibi Nonae redeunt Decembres: festus in pratis vacat otioso cum bove pagus.

There is one more rite of familia or pagus, or both, of which I must say a word before I return for a while to the house and its inhabitants. One of the most important matters for the pagus, as for the landholding household, was the fixing of the boundaries of their land, whether as against other pagi or households, or as separating that land from unreclaimed forest. This was of course, like all these other operations of the farm, a matter of religious care and anxiety—a matter in which the feeling of anxiety and awe (religio) brought with it, to use an expression of Cicero's, both cura and caerimonia.[171] The religio terminorum is known to us in some detail, as it existed in historical times, from the Roman writers on agrimetatio; and with their help the whole subject has been made intelligible by Rudorff in the second volume of the Gromatici.[172] We know that many different objects might serve as boundary marks, according to the nature of the land, especially trees and stones; and in the case of the latter, which would be the usual termini in agricultural land at some distance from forest, we have the religious character of the stone and its fixing most instructively brought out. "Fruits of the earth, and the bones, ashes, and blood of a victim were put into a hole in the ground by the landholders whose lands converged at the point, and the stone was rammed down on the top and carefully fixed."[173] This had the practical effect—for all Latin religion has a practical side—of enabling the stone to be identified in the future. But Ovid[174] gives us a picture of the yearly commemorative rite of the same nature, from which we see still better the force of the religio terminorum. The boundary-stone is garlanded, and an altar is built; the fire is carried from the hearth of the homestead by a materfamilias, the priestess of the family; a young son of the family holds a basket full of fruits of the earth, and a little daughter shakes these into the fire and offers honey-cakes. Others stand by with wine, or look on in silence, clothed in white. The victims are lamb and sucking-pig, and the stone is sprinkled with their blood, an act which all the world over shows that an object is holy and tenanted by a spirit.[175] And the ceremony ends with a feast and hymns in honour of holy Terminus, who in Ovid's time in the rural districts, and long before on the Capitolium of Rome, had risen from the spirit sanctifying the stone to become a deity, closely connected with Jupiter himself, and to give his name to a yearly city festival on February 23.

These festivals on the land were, some of them at least, scenes of revelry, accompanied with dancing and singing, as the poets describe them, the faces of the peasants painted red with minium,[176] according to an old Italian custom which survived in the case of the triumphator of the glorious days of the City-state. But if we may now return for a moment to the homestead, there were events of great importance to the family which were celebrated there in more serious and sober fashion, with rites that were in part truly religious, yet not without some features that show the prevailing anxiety, rooted in the age of taboo, which we learnt to recognise under the word religio. Marriage was a religious ceremony, for we can hardly doubt that the patrician confarreatio, in which a cake made of the anciently used grain called far was offered to Jupiter, and perhaps partaken of sacramentally by bride and bridegroom, was the oldest form of marriage, and had its origin in an age before the State came into being. We must remember that the house was a sacred place, with religious duties carried on within it, and the abode of household spirits; and when a bride from another family or gens was to be brought into it, it was essential that such introduction should be carried out in a manner that would not disturb the happy relations of the human and divine inhabitants of the house. It was essential, too, that the children expected of her should be such as should be able to discharge their duties in the household without hurting the feelings of these spirits. Some of the quaint customs of the deductio of later times strongly suggest an original anxiety about matters of such vital interest; the torch, carried by a boy whose parents were both living, was of whitethorn (Spina alba), which was a powerful protective against hostile magic, and about which there were curious superstitions.[177] Arrived at the house, the bride smeared the doorposts with wolf's fat and oil, and wound fillets of wool around them—so dangerous was the moment of entrance, so sacred the doorway; and finally, she was carried over the threshold, and then, and then only, was received by her husband into communion of fire and water, symbolic of her acceptance as materfamilias both by man and deity.[178]

When the new materfamilias presented her husband with a child, there was another perilous moment; the infant, if accepted by the father (sublatus, i.e. raised from the earth on which it had been placed),[179] did not immediately become a member of the family in the religious sense, and was liable to be vexed by evil or mischievous spirits from the wild woodland, or, as they phrased it in later days, by Silvanus. I have already alluded to the curious bit of mummery which was meant to keep them off. Three men at night came to the threshold and struck it with an axe, a pestle, and a besom, so that "by these signs of agriculture Silvanus might be prevented from entering." The hostile spirits were thus denied entrance to a dwelling in which friendly spirits of household life and of settled agricultural pursuits had taken up their abode. Nothing can better show the anxiety of life in those primitive times, especially in a country like Italy, full of forest and mountain, where dwelt mischievous Brownies who would tease the settler if they could. But on the ninth day after the birth (or the eighth in the case of a girl) the child was "purified" and adopted into the family and its sacra, and into the gens to which the family belonged, and received its name—the latter a matter of more importance than we can easily realise.[180] From this time till it arrived at the age of puberty it was protected by amulet and praetexta; the tender age of childhood being then passed, and youth and maiden endued with new powers, the peculiar defensive armour of childhood might be dispensed with.[181]

Lastly, the death of a member of the family was an occasion of extreme anxiety, which might, however, be allayed by the exact performance of certain rites (iusta facere). The funeral ceremonies of the City-state were of a complicated character, and the details are not all of them easy to interpret. But the principle must have been always the same—that the dead would "walk" unless they had been deposited with due ceremony in the bosom of Mother Earth, and that their natural tendency in "walking" was to find their way back to the house which had been their home in life. Whether buried or burnt, the idea was the same: if burnt, as seems to have been common Roman practice from very early times, at least one bone had to be buried as representing the whole body. We have seen that certain precautions were taken to prevent the dead man from finding his way back, such as carrying him out of the house feet foremost; and if he were properly buried and the house duly purified afterwards, the process of prevention was fairly complete. His ghost, shade, or double then passed beneath the earth to join the whole body of Manes in the underworld,[182] and could only return at certain fixed times—such at least was the idea expressed in the customs of later ages. But if a paterfamilias or his representative had omitted iusta facere, or if the dead man had never been buried at all, carried off by an enemy or some wild beast, he could never have descended to that underworld, and was roaming the earth disconsolately, and with an evil will. The primitive idea of anxiety is well expressed in the Roman festival of the Lemuria in May, when the head of a household could get rid of the ghosts by spitting out black beans[183] from his mouth and saying, "With these I redeem me and mine." Nine times he says this without looking round: then come the ghosts behind him and gather up the beans unseen. After other quaint performances he nine times repeats the formula, "Manes exite paterni," then at last looks round, and the ghosts are gone.[184] This is plainly a survival from the private life of the primitive household, and well illustrates its fears and anxieties; but the State provided, as we shall see, another and more religious ceremony, put limitations on the mischievous freedom of the ghosts, and ordained the means of expiation for those who had made a slip in the funeral ceremonies, or whose dead had been buried at sea or had died in a far country.

I have thus tried to sketch the life of the early Latin family in its relations with the various manifestations of the Power in the universe. We have seen enough, I think, to conclude that it had a strong desire to be in right relations with that Power, and to understand its will; but we may doubt whether that desire had as yet become very effective. The circumstances of the life of the Latin farmer were hardly such as to rid him of much of the religio that he had inherited from his wilder ancestors, or had found springing up afresh within him as he contended with the soil, the elements, and the hostile beings surrounding him, animal, human, and spiritual. He is living in an age of transition; he is half-way between the age of magic and a new age of religion and duty.

NOTES TO LECTURE IV

[131] Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, lect. viii. Dr. Frazer finds traces of Mutterrecht only in the succession to the kingship of Alba and Rome, of which the evidence is of course purely legendary. If the legends represent fact in any sense, they point, if I understand him rightly, to a kingship held by a non-Latin race, or, as he calls it, plebeian. Binder, Die Plebs, p. 403 foll., believes that the original Latin population, i.e. the plebs of later times, lived under Mutterrecht.

[132] Aust, Religion der Roemer, p. 212.

[133] In historical times the household deities were often represented by images of Greek type: e.g. the Penates by those of the Dioscuri. Wissowa, Rel. und Kult. p. 147, and Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 95 foll., and 289. See also De Marchi, La Religione nella vita privata, i. p. 41 foll. and p. 90 foll.

[134] De Marchi, op. cit. i. 13 foll. In the ordinary and regular religion of the family the State, i.e. the pontifices, did not interfere; but they might do so in matters such as the succession of sacra, the care of graves, or the fulfilment of vows undertaken by private persons. See Cicero, de Legibus, ii. 19. 47.

[135] Mucius Scaevola, the great lawyer, defined gentiles as those "qui eodem nomine sunt, qui ab ingenuis oriundi sunt, quorum maiorum nemo servitutem servivit, qui capite non sunt deminuti," Cic. Topica, vi. 29. This is the practical view of a lawyer of the last century B.C., and does not take account of the sacra gentilicia, which had by that time decayed or passed into the care of sodalitates: Marquardt, p. 132 foll.; De Marchi, ii. p. 3 foll. The notion of descent from a common ancestor is of course ideal, but none the less a factor in the life of the gens; it crops up, e.g., in Virgil, Aen. v. 117, 121, and Servius ad loc.

[136] Crawley, The Tree of Life, p. 47.

[137] For the alleged extinction of the gens Potitia, and the legend connected with it, Livy i. 7, Festus 237.

[138] See Marquardt, Privataltertuemer, p. 56, and note 6.

[139] There is, I believe, no doubt that the etymological affinities of the word familia point to the idea of settlement and not that of kin; e.g. Oscan Faama, a house, and Sanscrit dha, to settle.

[140] The exact meaning and origin of the word has been much discussed. It is tempting to connect it with pax, paciscor, and make it a territory within whose bounds there is pax; see Rudorff, Gromatici veteres, ii. 239, and Nissen, Italische Landeskunde, ii. 8 foll.

[141] See Rudorff, Grom. vet. ii. 236 foll.; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. 116 foll.; Kornemann in Klio, vol. v. (1905) p. 80 foll.; Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 1 foll.

[142] Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. 22 foll.; Kornemann, l.c.; Roby in Dict. of Antiquities, s.v. "Agrimetatio," p. 85. The view that there was freehold garden land attached to the homestead gains strength from a statement of Pliny (N.H. xix. 50) that the word used in the XII. Tables for villa, which was the word in classical times for the homestead, was hortus, a garden, and that this was heredium, private property. See Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. 23. It would indeed be strange if the house had no land immediately attached to it; we know that in the Anglo-Saxon village community the villani, bordarii and cotagii, had their garden croft attached to their dwellings, apart from such strips as they might hold from the lord of the manor in the open fields. See Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, p. 148. For the centuriatus ager, Roby l.c. We have no direct knowledge of the system in the earliest times, but it is almost certain that it was old-Italian in outline, and not introduced by the Etruscans, as stated, e.g., by Deecke-Mueller, Etrusker, ii. 128.

[143] For Latium this is proved by the sepulchral hut-urns found at Alba and also on the Esquiline. One of these in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford shows the construction well. See article "Domus" in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopaedie; Helbig, Die Italiker in der Poebene, p. 50 foll. Later there was an opening in the roof.

[144] Von Duhn in Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1896, p. 125 foll., and article "Domus" in Pauly-Wissowa.

[145] This is Aust's admirable expression, Religion der Roemer, p. 214.

[146] See the author's Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 242.

[147] Serv. Aen. i. 270; Marquardt, p. 126.

[148] Ap. Gellium, iv. 1. 17. For the sacredness of food and meals, see below (Lect. VIII. p. 172).

[149] See a paper by the author in Classical Rev. vol. x. (1896) p. 317, and references there given. Cp. the passage of Servius quoted above (Aen. i. 730), where a boy is described as announcing at the daily meal that the gods were propitious. For the purity necessary I may refer to Hor. Odes, iii. 23 ad fin., "Immunis aram si tetigit manus," etc.

[150] Primitive Culture, i. 393.

[151] The feminine counterpart of Genius was Juno, of which more will be said later on. Each woman had her Juno; but this "other-soul" has little importance as compared with Genius.

[152] See J. B. Carter in Hastings' Dict. of Religion and Ethics, i. 462 foll. For Genius in general, Birt in Myth. Lex. s.v.; Wissowa, R.K. p. 154 foll.; Stewart, Myths of Plato, p. 450, for the connexion of souls with ancestry.

[153] See the fifth of Plutarch's Quaestiones Romanae, and Dr. Jevons' interesting comments in his edition of Phil. Holland's translation, pp. xxii. and xxxv. foll. Cp. the throwing the fetters of a criminal out by the roof of the Flamen's house.

[154] Civ. Dei, vi. 9. These are deities of the Indigitamenta; see below, p. 84.

[155] De Marchi, La Religione, etc. i. 188 foll.; Marquardt, Privatleben der Roemer, p. 336, "la porte est la limite entre le monde etranger et le monde domestique" (A. van Gennep, Rites de passage, p. 26, where other illustrations are given).

[156] See below, Lect. XII. p. 281.

[157] Wissowa, R.K. p. 96; Aust, Rel. der Roemer, p. 117; Roscher in Myth. Lex. s.v. "Janus"; J. B. Carter, Religion of Numa, p. 13. Cp. Von Domaszewski in Archiv, 1907, p. 337.

[158] Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship, p. 286 foll.; A. B. Cook in Classical Review, 1904, p. 367 foll.

[159] Gromat. vet. i. 302, line 20 foll., describes the chapels, but without mentioning the Lares. Varro (L.L. vi. 25) supplies the name: "Compitalia dies attributus Laribus Compitalibus; ideo ubi viae competunt tum in competis sacrificatur." Cp. Wissowa, R.K. p. 148. But the nature of the land thus marked off is not clear to me, nor explained (for primitive times) by Wissowa in Real-Encycl., s.vv. "Compitum" and "Compitalia."

[160] "Enos Lases juvate." See Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 26 foll.

[161] Cato, R.R. 5. Cp. Dion. Hal. iv. 13. 2. In Cato 143 the vilica is to put a wreath on the focus on Kalends, Nones and Ides, and to pray to the Lar familiaris pro copia (at the compita?).

[162] Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 172.

[163] The controversy about the Lar may be read in the Archiv fuer Religionswissenschaft, 1904, p. 42 foll. (Wissowa), and 1907, p. 368 foll. (Samter in reply). De Marchi (La Religione, etc. i. 28 foll.) takes the same view as Samter, who originally stated it in his Familienfesten, p. 105 foll., in criticism of Wissowa's view. See also a note by the author in the Archiv, 1906, p. 529.

[164] Wissowa, R.K. p. 148; the details as to the altar occur in Gromatici vet. i. 302. It was on this occasion that maniae and pilae were hung on the house and compitum ("pro foribus," Macr. i. 7. 35); see above, p. 61. For the religio Larium, Cic. de Legg., ii. 19 and 27. That the Compitalia was an old Latin festival is undoubted; but as we are uncertain about the exact nature of the earliest form of landholding, we cannot be sure about the nature of the compita in remote antiquity. The passage from the Gromatici (Dolabella), quoted above, refers to the fines templares of possessiones, i.e. the boundaries marked by these chapels in estates of later times. See Rudorff in vol. ii. p. 263; Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Compitum."

[165] Varro, L.L. vi. 26. I have discussed this passage in R.F. p. 294; it is still not clear to me whether Varro is identifying his Paganicae with the Sementivae, but on the whole I think he uses the latter word of a city rite (dies a pontificibus dictus), and the former of the country festivals of the same kind.

[166] Fasti, i. 663.

[167] Cl. Rev., 1908, p. 36 foll.

[168] Georg. i. 338 foll.

[169] See my discussion of Faunus in R.F. p. 258 foll. I am still unable to agree with Wissowa in his view of Faunus (R.K. p. 172 foll.). I may here mention a passage of the gromatic writer Dolabella (Gromatici, i. 302), in which he says that there were three Silvani to each possessio or large estate of later times: "S. domesticus, possessioni consecratus: alter agrestis, pastoribus consecratus: tertius orientalis, cui est in confinio lucus positus, a quo inter duo pluresque fines oriuntur." Faunus never became domesticated, but he belongs to the same type as Silvanus. Von Domaszewski, in his recently published Abhandlungen zur roem. Religion, p. 61, discredits the passage about the three Silvani, following a paper of Mommsen. But his whole interesting discussion of Silvanus shows well how many different forms that curious semi-deity could take.

[170] Odes, iii. 18.

[171] Cic. de Inventione, ii. 161.

[172] pp. 236-284.

[173] R.F. 325, condensed from Siculus Flaccus (Gromatici, i. 141).

[174] Fasti, ii. 641 foll.

[175] See, e.g., Jevons, Introduction, etc., p. 138; Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 321.

[176] See, e.g., Tibullus ii. 1. 55; Virg. Ecl. vi. 22, x. 27, and Servius on both these passages. Pliny, N.H. xxxiii. 111; and cp. below, p. 177. For primitive ideas about the colour red see Jevons, Introd. pp. 67 and 138; Samter, Familienfeste, p. 47 foll. Cp. also the very interesting paper of von Duhn in Archiv, 1906, p. 1 foll., esp. p. 20: "Es soll eben wirklich pulsierendes kraftvolles Leben zum Ausdruck gebracht werden." His conclusions are based on the widespread custom of using red in funerals, coffins, and for colouring the dead man himself: the idea being to give him a chance of new life—which is what he wants—red standing for blood.

[177] I am not sure that I am right in calling this whitethorn. For the qualities of the Spina alba see Ovid, Fasti, vi. 129 and 165, "Sic fatus spinam, quae tristes pellere posset A foribus nexas, haec erat alba, dedit." In line 165 he calls it Virga Janalis. See also Festus, p. 289, and Serv. ad Ecl. viii. 29; Buecheler, Umbrica, p. 136.

[178] The details are fully set forth in Marquardt, Roem. Privataltertuemer, p. 52 foll. The religious character of confarreatio and its antiquity are fully recognised by Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 427. Some interesting parallels to the smearing of the doorposts from modern Europe will be found collected in Samter, Familienfeste, p. 81 foll. The authority for the wolf's fat was Masurius Sabinus, quoted by Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 142 (cp. 157), who adds from the same author, "ideo novas nuptas illo perungere postes solitas, ne quid mali medicamenti inferretur." The real reason was, no doubt, that it was a charm against evil spirits, not against poison; but it is worth while to quote here another passage of Pliny (xx. 101), where he says that a squill hung in limine ianuae had the same power, according to Pythagoras. Some may see a reminiscence of totemism in the wolf's fat: in any case the mention of the animal as obtainable is interesting.

[179] Dieterich, Mutter Erde, p. 6 foll. The idea is that the child comes from mother earth, and will eventually return to her.

[180] For Roman names Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 7 foll., and Mommsen, Forschungen, i. I foll., are still the most complete authorities. For the importance of the name among wild and semi-civilised peoples, Frazer, G.B. i. 403 foll.; Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. 430 foll. All these ceremonies of birth, naming, and initiation (puberty) have recently been included by M. van Gennep in what he calls Rites de passage (see his book with that title, which appeared after these lectures were prepared, especially chapters v. and vi.). In all these ceremonies he traces more or less successfully a sequence of rites of separation (i.e. from a previous condition), of margin, where the ground is, so to speak, neutral, and of "aggregation," when the subject is introduced to a new state or condition of existence. If I understand him rightly, he looks on this as the proper and primitive explanation of all such rites, and denies that they need to be accounted for animistically, i.e. by assuming that riddance of evil spirits, or purification of any kind, is the leading idea in them. They are, in fact, quasi-dramatic celebrations of a process of going over from one status to another, and may be found in connection with all the experiences of man in a social state. But the Roman society, of which I am describing the religious aspect, had beyond doubt reached the animistic stage of thought, and was in process of developing it into the theological stage; hence these ceremonies are marked by sacrifices, as marriage, the dies lustricus (see De Marchi, p. 169, and Tertull. de Idol. 16) most probably, and puberty (R.F. p. 56). I do not fully understand how far van Gennep considers sacrifice as marking a later stage in the development of the ideas of a society on these matters (see his note in criticism of Oldenburg, p. 78); but I see no good reason to abandon the words purification and lustration, believing that even if he is right in his explanation of the original performances, these ideas had been in course of time engrafted on them.

[181] In historical times the toga pura was assumed when the parents thought fit; earlier there may have been a fixed day (R.F. p. 56, "Liberalia"). In any case there was, of course, no necessary correspondence between "social and physical puberty"; van Gennep, p. 93 foll.

[182] Wissowa, R.K. p. 191; J. B. Carter in Hastings' Dict. of Religion and Ethics, i. 462 foll.; Dieterich, Mutter Erde, p. 77. The whole question of the so-called cult of the dead at Rome calls for fresh investigation in the light of ethnological and archaeological research. The recent work of Mr. J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, seems to throw grave doubt on some of the most important conclusions of Rohde's Psyche, the work which most writers on the ideas of the Greeks and Romans have been content to follow. Mr. Lawson seems to me to have proved that the object of both burial and cremation (which in both peninsulas are found together) was to secure dissolution for the substance of the body, so that the soul might not be able to inhabit the body again, and the two together return to annoy the living (see especially chapters v. and vi.). But his answer to the inevitable question, why in that case sustenance should be offered to the dead at the grave, is less satisfactory (see pp. 531, 538), and I do not at present see how to co-ordinate it with Roman usage. But I find hardly a trace of the belief that the dead had to be placated like the gods by sacrifice and prayer, except in Aen. iii. 63 foll. and v. 73 foll. In the first of these passages Polydorus had not been properly buried, as Servius observes ad loc. to explain the nature of the offerings; the second presents far more difficulties than have as yet been fairly faced.

[183] For recent researches about beans as tabooed by the Pythagoreans and believed to be the food of ghosts, see Gruppe, Mythologische Literatur, p. 370 (Samter and Wuensch). Cp. R.F., p. 110.

[184] Ov. Fasti, v. 421 foll.; R.F. p. 107.



LECTURE V

THE CALENDAR OF NUMA

The religion of the household had two main characteristics. First, it was a perfectly natural and organic growth, the result of the Roman farmer's effective desire to put himself and his in right relations with the spiritual powers at work for good or ill around him. His conception of these powers I shall deal with more fully in the next lecture; but I have said enough to prove that it was not a degrading one. The spirits of his house and his land and his own Genius were friendly powers, all of them of the greatest importance for his life and his work, and their claims were attended to with regularity and devotion. From Vesta and the Penates, the Lar, the Genius, the Manes, and the spirits of the doorway and the spring, there was nothing to fear if they were carefully propitiated; and as his daily life and comfort depended on this propitiation, they were really divine members of the familia, and might become, and perhaps did become, the objects of real affection as well as worship. In this well-regulated practical life of the early agricultural settlers, with its careful attention to the claims of its divine protectors, we may perhaps see the germs of a real religious expression of human life.

Secondly, there was doubtless at the same time constant cause for anxiety. Beyond the house and the land there were unreclaimed spirits of the woodland which might force an entrance into the sacred limits of the house; the ghosts of the dead members were constantly wishing to return; the crops might be attacked by strange diseases, by storms or drought, and man himself was liable to seasonal disease or sudden pestilence. The cattle and sheep might stray into the remote forest and become the prey of evil beasts, if not of evil spirits. How was the farmer to meet all these troubles, caused, as he supposed, by spirits whose ways he did not understand? How were they to be propitiated as they themselves would wish? How were the omens to be interpreted from which their will might be guessed? How were the proper times and seasons for each religious operation to be discovered? If my imagination is not at fault, I seem to see that the Latin farmer must have had to shift for himself in most of his dealings with the supernatural powers about him; religio, the sense of awe and of dependence, must have been constantly with him. But even here we may see, I think, a possible germ of religious development; for without this feeling of awe religious forms tend to become meaningless: lull religio to sleep, and the forms cease to represent effectively man's experience of life. We have to see later on how this paralysis of the religious instinct did actually take place in early Roman history.

For we now have to leave the religion of the household, and to study that of the earliest form of the City-state. We have enjoyed a glint of light reflected from later times on the religion of the early Roman family, and are about to enjoy another glint—nay, a gleam of real light, and not merely a reflected one—which the earliest religious document we possess casts on the religion of the City-state of Rome. Between the two there is a long period of almost complete darkness. We know hardly anything as yet, and it is not likely that we shall ever know anything definite, about the stages of development which must have been passed before Rome became the so-called city of the Four Regions, when her history may be said really to begin. The pagus hardly helps us here; it was not an essential advance on the family, and its religion was comprehensive, not intensive. Each pagus, however, seems to have had within its bounds an oppidum, or stronghold on a hill; and such oppida were the seven montes of early Rome, which, with the pagi belonging to them, survived in name to the end of the Republic, with some kind of a religious festival uniting them together, about which we have hardly any knowledge.[185] This looks like a stage in the process of change from farm to city, and it has generally been believed to mark one. Unfortunately nothing to our purpose can be founded on it. We must be content with the undoubted fact that about the eighth or seventh century B.C. the site of Rome was occupied and strengthened as a bulwark against the Etruscan people who were pressing down from the north upon the valley of the Tiber;[186] we may take it that the old central fortress of Latium, on the Alban hill, was not in the right position for defence, and that it was seen to be absolutely necessary to make a stronghold of the position offered by the hills which abut on the river twenty miles above its mouth—the only real position of defence for the Latin settlements in its rear. Here an urbs was made with murus and pomoerium, i.e. material and spiritual boundaries, taking in a space sufficient to hold the threatened rural population with their flocks and herds, with the river in the front and a common citadel on the Capitoline hill, and including the Palatine, Quirinal, Esquiline, Caelian and Aventine hills, though the last named remained technically outside the pomoerium.[187]

It is to this city that our earliest religious document, the so-called Calendar of Numa, belongs. That calendar includes the cult of Quirinus on the hill which still bears his name, and that hill was an integral part of the city as just described. On the other hand, it tells us nothing of the great cult of the trias on the Capitoline—Jupiter, Juno, Minerva—which by universal tradition was instituted much later by the second Tarquinius, i.e. under an Etruscan dynasty; nor does Diana appear in it, the goddess who was brought from Latium and settled on the Aventine before the end of the kingly period. We have, then, a terminus ex quo for the date of the calendar in the inclusion in the city of the Quirinal hill, and a terminus ad quem in the foundation of the Diana temple on the Aventine.[188] We cannot date these events precisely; but it is sufficient for our purpose if it be taken as proved that the Fasti belong to the fully developed city, and yet were drawn up before that conquest by the Etruscans which we may regard as a certainty, and which is marked by the foundations of Etruscan masonry which served to support the great Capitoline temple. And this is also borne out by the undoubted fact that the calendar itself shows no trace of Etruscan influence. But I must now go on to explain exactly what this calendar is.

The Fasti anni Romani exist chiefly on stone as inscriptions, and date from the Early Empire, between 31 B.C. and A.D. 51. They give us, in fact, the calendar as revised by Caesar; but no one now doubts that Mommsen was right in detecting in these inscriptions the skeleton of the original calendar which the Romans ascribed to Numa.[189] This is distinguished from later additions by the large capital letters in which it is written or inscribed in all the fragments we possess; it gives us the days of the month with their religious characteristics as affecting state business, the names of the religious festivals which concern the whole state, and the Kalends, Nones, and Ides in each month. Excluding these last, we have the names, in a shortened form, of forty-five festivals; and these festivals, thus placed by an absolutely certain record in their right place in each month and in the year, must be the foundation of all scientific study of the religious practice of the Roman state, taken together with certain additions in smaller capitals, and with such information about them as we can obtain from literary sources.[190]

The smaller capitals give us such entries as feriae Iovi, feriae Saturno, i.e. the name of a deity to whom a festival was sacred, the foundation days of temples, generally with the name of the deity in the dative and the position of the temple in the city, and certain ludi and memorial days, which belong to a much later age than the original festivals. But the names of those which are inscribed in large letters bear witness beyond all question to their own antiquity; for among them there is not one which has anything to do, so far as we know, with a non-Roman deity, and we know that foreign deities began to arrive in Rome before the end of the kingly period. Here, then, we have genuine information about the oldest religious doings of the City-state, in what indeed is, as Mommsen said, the most ancient source of our knowledge about Roman antiquity generally.

The first point we notice in studying this calendar (putting aside for the present the question as to the agency by which it was drawn up) is this: it exactly reflects a transition from the life of a rural population engaged in agriculture, to the highly-organised political and military life of a City-state. In other words, the State, whose religious needs and experience it reflects, was one whose economic basis was agriculture, whose life included legal and political business, and whose activity in the season of arms was war.

This last characteristic is discernible chiefly, if not entirely, in the months of March and October; and the former of these bears the name of the great deity, who, whatever may have been his origin or the earliest conception of him, was throughout Roman history the god of war. All through March up to the 23rd the Salii, the warlike priests of Mars, were active, dancing and singing those hymns of which an obscure fragment has come down to us, and clashing and brandishing the sacred spears and shields of the god (ancilia).[191] On the 19th these ancilia were lustrated—a process to which I shall recur in another lecture; and on the 23rd we find in the calendar the festival Tubilustrium, which suggests the lustration of the trumpets of the host before it took the field. On the 14th of March,[192] and also on the 27th of February, we find Equirria in the calendar, which must be understood as lustrations of the horses of the host, accompanied with races. If we may take the ancilia as symbolising the arms of the host, we see in the festivals of this month a complete religious process preparing the material of war for the perils inevitably to be met with beyond the ager Romanus, whether from human or spiritual enemies; and that the warriors themselves were subjected to a process of the same kind we know from the historical evidence of later times.[193] Now in October, when the season of arms was over, we find indications of a parallel process, which Wissowa was the first to point out clearly, but without fully recognising its religious import.[194] It was not so much thanksgiving (Dankfest) after a campaign that was necessary on the return of the army, as purification (or disinfection) from the taint of bloodshed, and from contact with strange beings human and spiritual.[195] On October 15, the Ides, there was a horse-race in the Campus Martius, with a sacrifice of the winning horse to Mars with peculiar primitive ritual; this, however, for some reason which I shall presently try to discover, was not embodied in the calendar under any special name. On the 19th, however, we find the entry ARMILUSTRIUM, which tells its own tale. The Salii, too, were active again in these days of October, and on the day of the Armilustrium, as it would seem, put their shields away (condere) in their sacrarium until the March following. As Wissowa says, the ritual of the Salii is thus a symbolic copy of the procedure of war.[196] From these indications in the calendar, helped out by information drawn from the later entries and from literary evidence, we see quite plainly that we are dealing with the religion of a state which for half the year is liable to be engaged in war. Rome was, in fact, a frontier fortress on the Tiber against Etruscan enemies; she is destined henceforward to be continually in arms, and she has already expressed this great fact in her religious calendar.

The legal and political significance of the calendar consists in the division of the days of the year into two great groups, dies fasti and nefasti: the former are those on which it is fas, i.e. religiously permissible, to transact civil business, the latter those on which it would be nefas to do so, i.e. sacrilege, because they are given over to the gods. We need not, indeed, assume that these marks F and N descend in every case from the very earliest times into the pre-Julian calendar, or that the few days which have other marks stood originally as we find them; but of the primitive character of the main division we can have no doubt. In the calendar as we have it 109 days belong to the divine, 235 to the human inhabitants of the city. All but two of the former are days of odd numbers in the month, and it is reasonable to suppose that these two exceptions were later alterations. The belief that odd numbers are lucky is a very widely-spread superstition, and we do not need to have recourse to Pythagoras to explain it; in this rule, as in others, e.g. their taboo on eating beans, the Pythagoreans were only following a native prejudice of southern Italy. "The idea of luck in odd numbers," says Mr. Crooke,[197] writing of the Hindus, "is universal." Thus the simpler odd numbers, three, five, seven, and nine, all recur constantly in folklore; and the result is visible in this calendar. Where a festival occupies more than one day in a month, there is an interval between the two of one or three days, making the whole number three or five. Thus Carmentalia occur on 11th and 15th January, and the Lemuria in May are on the 9th, 11th, and 13th; the Lucaria in July on 19th and 21st. In some months, too, e.g. August and December, perhaps also July and February, there seem to be traces of an arrangement by which festivals which probably had some connection with each other are thus arranged; e.g. in August six festivals, all concerned in some way with the fruits of the earth and the harvest, occur on the 17th, 19th, 21st, 23rd, 25th, and 27th. It has recently been suggested[198] that these are arranged round one central festival, which gives a kind of colouring to the others, as the Volcanalia in August, the Saturnalia in December. But the reasons von Domaszewski gives for the arrangement, and the further speculation that where it does not occur we may find traces of an older system, as yet unaffected by the so-called Pythagorean prejudice, do not seem to me satisfactory. We may be content with the general principle as I have stated it, and note that while religious duties must be performed on days of odd number, civil duties were not so restricted: the days belonging to the gods, which were, so to speak, taboo days, were more important than those belonging to men. There are, as I have said, but two days marked in the large letters as festivals, which are on days of even number, 24th February and 14th March, the Regifugium and the second Equirria; and about these we know so little that it is almost useless to speculate as to the reason for their exception from the rule. Two others, 24th March and 24th May, were partly the property of the gods and partly of men, and are marked QRCF (quando rex comitiavit fas); but the sense in which they partially belonged to the gods is not the same as in the case of sacrificial festivals.

This calendar thus shows obvious signs of both military and political development; in other words, its witness to the religious experience of the Romans proves that they had successfully adjusted the forms and seasons of their worship to the processes of government at home and of military service in the field. But the most conspicuous feature in it is the testimony it bears to the agricultural habits of the people—to the fact that agriculture and not trade, of which there is hardly a trace, was the economic basis of their life. At the time when it was drawn up, the Romans must have been able to subsist upon the ager Romanus, though, as we shall see later on, it was probably not long before they began commercial relations with other peoples; for their food, which was almost entirely vegetarian, and their clothing, which was entirely of wool and leather,[199] they depended on their crops, flocks, and herds; and the perils to which these were liable remain for the State, as for the farming household, the main subject of the propitiation of the gods, the main object of their endeavours to keep themselves in right relation with the Power manifest in the universe.

We can trace the series of agricultural operations in the calendar without much difficulty all through the year. The Roman year, we must remember, began with March, and March, as we have seen, had under the military necessities of the State become peculiarly appropriated to the religious preparation of the burgher host for warlike activity. But the festivals of April, when crops were growing, cattle bringing forth young or seeking summer pasture, all have direct reference to the work of agriculture.[200] At the Fordicidia, on the 15th, pregnant cows were sacrificed to the Earth-goddess, and their unborn calves burnt, apparently with the object of procuring the fertility of the corn; and the Cerealia on the 19th, to judge by the name, must have had an object of the same kind, though the supersession of Ceres by the Greek Demeter had obscured this in historical times. The Parilia on the 19th, recently illuminated by Dr. Frazer,[201] was a lustration of the cattle and sheep before they left their winter pasture to encounter the dangers of wilder hill or woodland, and may be compared with the lustratio of the host before a campaign. On the 23rd the Vinalia tells its own tale, and shows that the cultivation of the vine was already a part of the agricultural work. On the 25th the spirit of the red mildew, Robigus, was the object of propitiation, at the time when the ear was beginning to be formed in the corn, and was particularly liable to attack from this pest.

The religious precautions thus taken in April were not renewed in May; but at the end of that month of ripening the whole of the ager Romanus was lustrated by the Fratres Arvales. This important rite, for some reason which we cannot be sure of, was a movable feast, left to the discretion of the brethren, and therefore does not appear in the calendar. In June the sacred character of the new crops, now approaching their harvest, becomes apparent; the penus Vestae, the symbolic receptacle of the grain-store of the State, after remaining open from the 7th to the 15th, was closed on that day for the rest of the year, after being carefully cleansed: the refuse was religiously deposited in a particular spot. Thus all was made ready for the reception of the new grain, which, as is now well known, has a sacred character among primitive peoples, and must be stored and eaten with precaution.[202] This was the chief religious work of June; in July, the month when the harvest was actually going on, the festivals are too obscure to delay us; they seem to have some reference to water, rain, storms, but it is not clear to me whether the object was to avert stormy weather during the cutting of the crops, or, on the other hand, to avert a drought in the hottest time of the year. The true harvest festivals begin in August; the Consualia on 21st and Opiconsiva on 25th both seem to suggest the operation of storing up (condere) the grain, and between them we find the Volcanalia, of which the object was perhaps to propitiate the fire-spirit at a time when the heat of the sun might be dangerous to the freshly-gathered crops.

After the crops were once harvested, ploughing and sowing chiefly occupied the farming community until December; and as these operations were not accompanied by the same perils which beset the agriculturist in spring and summer, they have left no trace in the calendar. Special religious action was not necessary on their behalf. It is not till the autumn sowing was over, and the workers could rest from their labours, that we find another set of festivals, of which the centre-point is the Saturnalia on the 17th, Saturnus being the deity, I think, both of the operation of sowing and of the sown seed, now reposing in the bosom of mother earth.[203] A second Consualia on the 15th, and the Opalia on the 19th, like the corresponding August festivals, seem to be concerned with the housed grain harvested in the previous August; I am disposed to think that in all three we should see not only the natural rejoicing after the labours of the autumn, but the opening of the granaries and, perhaps, the first eating of the grain. For on the Saturnalia there was a sacrifice at Saturnus' altar, followed by a feast, which was afterwards Graecised, but doubtless originally represented the primitive feasting of the farm, in which the whole familia took part. This brings us practically to the end of the agricultural year as represented in the calendar; for spring sowing was exceptional, the joyful feasts of pagus and compitum are not to be found in our document, and the month of February is specially occupied with the care and cult of the dead (Manes).

At this point I wish to notice one or two results of the adoption of a religious calendar such as I have been describing, which are more to the purpose of these lectures than some of the details I have had to point out. First, let us remember that agricultural operations necessarily vary in date according to the season, and that most of the rural festivals of ancient Italy were not fixed to a particular day, but were feriae conceptivae, settled perhaps according to the decision of some meeting of heads of families or officers of a pagus. That this was so we may conjecture from the fact that those which survived into historical times, e.g. Compitalia and Paganalia, and were celebrated in the city, though not as sacra pro populo,[204] were of varying date. But all the festivals of the calendar were necessarily fixed, and the days on which they were held were made over to the gods. Now by being thus fixed they would soon begin to get out of relation to agricultural life; just as, if the harvest festivals of our churches were fixed to one day throughout the country, the meaning of the religious service would sooner or later begin to lose something of its force. And how much the more would this be so if the calendar itself, from ignorance or mismanagement, began to get out of relation with the true season, as in course of time was frequently the case? When once under such circumstances the meaning of a religious rite is lost, where is its psychological efficacy? In the life of the old Latin farmer, as we saw, his religion was a reality, an organic growth, coincident at every point with the perils he encountered in his daily toil; here, in the City-state, it must from the beginning have had a tendency to become an unreality, and it ended by becoming one entirely. Some of the old rites may have attached new meanings to themselves; it is possible, for example, that beneath the military rites of March there was an original agricultural significance; the Saturnalia became a merry mid-winter festival for a town population. But a great number wholly lost meaning, and were so forgotten or neglected in course of time that even learned men like Varro do not seem to have been able to explain them. The only practical question about them for the later Romans was whether their days were dies fasti or nefasti or comitiales,—what work might or might not be done on them.

Another point, closely connected with the last, and tending in the same direction, is that such a calendar as this implies rigidity and routine in religious duties. A well-ordered city life under a strong government must, of course, be subject to routine; law, religious or civil, written or unwritten, forces the individual into certain stereotyped ways of life, subjects him to a certain amount of wholesome discipline. The value of such routine to an undisciplined people has been well pointed out by Bishop Stubbs, in writing of the effect of the rule of the Norman and Angevin kings on the English people,[205] where it was also a religious as well as a legal discipline that was at work. In neither case was it the ignorant and superstitious routine of savage life, which of late years we have had to substitute for old fancies about the freedom of the savage; it is the willing obedience of civilised man for his own benefit. But if it means a routine of religious rites which are beginning to lose their meaning; if the relation between them and man's life and work is lost; and lastly, if, as was probably the case, the Fasti were not published, but remained in the hands of a priesthood or an aristocracy,[206]—then there is serious loss as well as gain. You begin sooner or later to cease to feel your dependence on the divine beings around you for your daily bread, to get out of right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe.

But, in the third place, we must believe that at first, and indeed perhaps for ages, this very routine had an important psychological result in producing increased comfort, convenience, and confidence in the Roman's relations with the divine inhabitants of his city. A certain number of deities have taken up their abode within the walls of the city, and are as much its inhabitants, its citizens, as the human beings who live there; and all the relations between the divine and human citizens are regulated now by law, by a ius divinum, of which the calendar is a very important part. Religio, the old feeling of doubt and scruple, arising from want of knowledge in the individual, is still there; it is, in fact, the feeling which has given rise to all this organisation and routine, the cura and caerimonia, as Cicero phrases it. But it must be already losing its strength, its life; it was, so to speak, a constitutional weakness, and the ius divinum is already beginning to act on it as a tonic. Doubt has passed into fixed usage, tradition has given place to organisation. Time, place, procedure in all religious matters, are guaranteed by those skilled in the ius divinum; they know what to do as the festival of each deity comes round, and at the right time and place they do it with scrupulous attention to every detail. Thus the organisation of which the calendar is our best example would have as its first result the destruction of fear and doubt in the mind of the ordinary Roman; it would tend to kill, or at least to put to sleep, the religio which was the original motive cause of this very organisation. As the State in our own day has a tendency to relieve families of such duties as the care and education of children, so the State at Rome relieved the family of constant anxiety about matters in which they were ever in danger from the spirit-world. The State and its authorities have taken the whole responsibility of adjusting the relations of the human and divine citizens.[207]

Entirely in keeping with this psychological result of the calendar is the fact, to which I have already alluded, that it supplies us with hardly any evidence of the existence of magic, or of those "beastly devices of the heathen" which may roughly be included under that word; to use the language of Mr. Lang, we find none of those "distressing vestiges of savagery and barbarism which meet us in the society of ancient Greece." It is true enough that we do not know much about what was done at the various festivals of the calendar, but what we do know, with one or two exceptions, suggests an idea of worship as clean and rational as that of the Homeric poems, which stands in such striking contrast to that reflected in later Greek literature.[208] When we do read of any kind of grossness in worship or the accompanying festivities, it is almost always in the case of some rite which is not among those in the Fasti. Such was the old festival of Anna Perenna in March, where the plebs in Ovid's time spent the day in revelry and drinking, and prayed for as many years of life as they could drink cups of wine. Such again was that of the October horse, when after a chariot-race in the Campus the near horse of the winning team was sacrificed, and his tail carried in hot haste to the Regia, where the blood was allowed to drip on the sacred hearth; while the head was the object of a fight between the men of the Via Sacra and those of the Subura.[209] We may perhaps include in the list the ritual of the Argei, if it was indeed, as I believe, of great antiquity;[210] on May 15, as we have seen, twenty-seven puppets of reeds or straw were thrown into the Tiber from the pons sublicius, possibly with the object of procuring rain for the growing crops. Let us also note that dies religiosi were not marked in the Fasti, i.e. days on which some uncomfortable feeling prevailed, such as the three days on which the mundus was open to allow the Manes to come up from their shadowy abode below the earth; with the character of such days as "uncanny" the calendar has simply nothing to do. It is a document of religious law, not of superstitio, a word which in Roman usage almost invariably means what is outside that religious law, outside the ius divinum; and it is a document of religio only so far as it is meant to organise and carry out the cura and caerimonia, the natural results of that feeling which the Romans called religio. It stands on exactly the same footing as the Law of the Israelites, which supplied them in full detail with the cura and caerimonia, and rigidly excluded all foreign and barbarous rites and superstitions.

I do not, of course, mean to say that the State did not recognise or allow the festivals which are not marked in the calendar; the pontifices and Vestals were present at the ceremony of the Argei, and the Regia was the scene of a part of that of the October horse. But those who drew up the calendar as the fundamental charter of the ius divinum must have had their reasons for the selection of forty-five days as made over to the deities who were specially concerned with the State's welfare. And on these days, so far as we know, there was a regular ordered routine of sacrifice and prayer, with but little trace of the barbarous or grotesque. The ritual of the Lupercalia is almost a solitary exception. The Luperci had their foreheads smeared with the blood of the victims, which were goats, and then this was wiped off with wool dipped in milk; after this they were obliged to laugh, probably as a sign that the god (whoever he was) was in them, or that they were identified with him.[211] They then girt themselves with the skins of the victims and ran round the ancient pomoerium, striking at any women they met with strips of the same victims in order to produce fertility. This was perhaps a rite taken over from aboriginal settlers on the Palatine, and so intimately connected with that hill that it could not be omitted from the calendar. The ritual of the three days of Lemuria in May, when ghosts were expelled from the house, as Ovid describes the process, by means of beans,[212] seems also to have been a reminiscence of ideas about the dead more primitive than those which took effect in the more cheerful Parentalia of February: here again we may perhaps see a concession to the popular tradition and prejudice of a primitive population. On the other hand, the revelry of the Saturnalia in December, of which Dr. Frazer has made so much in the second edition of the Golden Bough,[213] is nothing more than the licence of the population of a great cosmopolitan city, an out-growth, under Greek influence, from the rude winter rejoicings of the farmer and his familia; and for his conjecture that a human victim was sacrificed on this occasion in ancient Rome there is simply no evidence whatever. There is, indeed, not a trace of human sacrifice at Rome so long as the ius divinum was the supreme religious law of the State; in the whole Roman literature of the Republic hardly anything of the kind is alluded to;[214] it is only when we come to an age when the taste for bloodshed was encouraged by the shows of the amphitheatre, and when the blood-loving religions of the East were pressing in, that we hear of human sacrifice, and then only from Christian writers, who would naturally seize on anything that came to hand to hold up paganism to derision, without inquiring into the truth or the history of the alleged practice.[215]

Thus we may take it as highly probable that those who drew up the calendar had the deliberate intention of excluding from the State ritual, as far as was possible, everything in the nature of barbarism and magic. For the religious purposes of a people occupied in agriculture and war, and already beginning to develop some idea of law and order, there was no need of any religious rites except such as would serve, in decency and order, to propitiate the deities concerned with the fertilisation of man, beast, and crop, and with the safety and efficacy of the host in its struggle with the enemies of the city. The Roman people grew up, in their city life as in the life of the family, in self-restraint, dignity, and good order, confident in the course of cura and caerimonia, itself decent and stately, if soulless, which the religious authorities had drawn up for them.

We should naturally like to know something about those authorities, who thus placed the religion of the State on a comparatively high level of ritualistic decency, if not of theological subtlety. The Romans themselves attributed the work to a priest-king, Numa Pompilius, and probably their instinct was a right one. Names matter little in such matters; but there is surely something in the universal Roman tradition of a great religious legislator, something too, it may be, in the tradition that he was a Sabine, a representative of the community on the Quirinal which had been embodied in the Roman city before the calendar was drawn up, and of the sturdy, serious stock of central Italy, which retained its virtus longer than any other Italian people.[216] We are quite in the dark as to all this, unless we can put any kind of confidence in the traditional belief of the Romans themselves. But there is one point on which I should like to make a suggestion—a new one so far as I know. Numa was said to have been the first Flamen Dialis; but that is absolutely impossible, for the ancient taboos on that priesthood would have made it impossible for him to become supreme legislator. Evidently this Flamen, who could hardly leave his own house, might never leave the city, and was at every turn hedged in by restrictions on his activity, was a survival of those magician-kings who make rain and do other useful things, but would lose their power if they were exposed to certain contingencies; the number of possible contingencies increases till the unfortunate owner of the powers becomes powerless by virtue of the care so painfully taken of him.[217] The priest of Jupiter and his taboos carry us back, beyond a doubt, into the far-away dim history of primitive Latium. By the time the eternal city was founded on the Tiber, he must have been already practically obsolete. My suggestion is that he is the representative in the Roman religious system of another and more primitive system which existed in Latium, probably at Alba, where Jupiter was worshipped on the mountain from time immemorial. When the strength of Latium was concentrated at the best strategical point on the Tiber, the priest of Jupiter was transferred to the new city, because he was too "precious" to be left behind, though even then a relic of antiquity. There he became what he was throughout Roman history, a practically useless personage, about whom certain sacred traditions had gathered, but placed in complete subjection to the new legal and religious king, and afterwards to the Pontifex maximus.[218]

If there be any truth in this—and I believe it to be a legitimate inference from the legal position of this Flamen, and his permanent state of taboo—then I think we may see a great religious change in the era of the "calendar of Numa." Inspired with new ideas of the duty and destiny of the new city of the four regions, a priest-king, doubtless with the help and advice of a council, according to the true Roman fashion, put an end for ever to the reign of the old magician-kingship, but preserved the magician-king as a being still capable of wonder-working in the eyes of the people. As religious law displaced magic in the State ritual, so the new kings, with their collegia of legal priests, pontifices and augurs, neutralised and gradually destroyed the prestige of the effete survivor of an age of barbarism.

NOTES TO LECTURE V.

[185] Kornemann, op. cit. p. 87; Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 230 foll.; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. p. 790, note 1. For the festival of the Septimontium, Varro, L.L. vi. 24; Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 69; Fowler, R.F. p. 265 foll. This festival does not appear in the calendar, as not being "feriae populi, sed montanorum modo" (Varro, l.c.). There are some interesting remarks on the relation between agricultural life and the origin of towns in von Jhering's Evolution of the Aryan (Eng. trans.), p. 86 foll., with special reference to Rome.

[186] Von Duhn in J.H.S. xvi. 126 foll. The latest research (Korte in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Etrusker," p. 747) concludes that the arrival of the Etruscans on the west coast of Italy cannot be safely put earlier than the eighth century.

[187] Huelsen-Jordan, Rom. Topogr. iii. 153. In a brief but masterly paper in the publications of the American School at Rome, 1908, p. 173 foll., J. B. Carter deals with the whole problem of the pomoerium and the pre-Servian city.

[188] Wissowa, R.K. p. 27.

[189] In C.I.L. i.^2, p. 297 foll. See R.F. p. 14 foll.

[190] See the Fasti in R.F. p. 21 foll.; or in Wissowa, R.K., at end of the book.

[191] R.F. p. 38 foll. Marindin's article "Salii," Dict. of Antiqq., is very useful and sensible. There is little doubt that the dress and armour of the Salii represented that of the primitive Latin warrior, calculated to frighten away evil spirits as well as enemies, and that their dances in procession had some object of this kind. It is noticeable that there were two gilds or collegia of them belonging to the Palatine and Quirinal cities respectively; and they are also found at Tibur, Alba, Lanuvium, and other Latin cities.

[192] Or 15th (Ides), according to the conjecture of Wissowa; see R.F. p. 44 and R.K. p. 131. It is almost incredible that this should originally have been on a day of even number, contrary to the universal rule of the Fasti.

[193] See below, p. 212 foll., for further consideration of this so-called purification.

[194] R.K. p. 131.

[195] See below, p. 217.

[196] R.K. p. 131.

[197] Popular Religion and Folklore of India, ii. 51. For the sacredness of the number three and its multiples, see Diels, Sibyllinische Blaetter, p. 40 foll.; but he limits it too much to chthonic religious ritual. See also H. Usener, "Dreizahl," in Rheinisches Museum, vol. 58, pp. 1 foll., 161 foll., and 321 foll. There is a summary of the results of these papers in Gruppe's Mythologische Literatur, 1898-1905, p. 360 foll. I may also refer to my friend Prof. Goudy's very interesting Trichotomy in Roman Law (Oxford, 1910), p. 8 foll.

[198] By von Domaszewski in Archiv for 1907, p. 333 foll. The learned author's reasoning is often based on mere hypotheses as to the meaning of the festivals or the gods concerned in them, and his ideas as to the agricultural features of the months July, August, December seem to me doubtful; but the paper is one that all students of the calendar must reckon with.

[199] Marquardt, Privatleben, pp. 459 and 569 foll.

[200] For the festivals mentioned in the following paragraphs see R.F., s.v., and Wissowa, R.K., section 63.

[201] "St. George and the Parilia," in Revue des etudes ethnographiques et sociologiques for Jan. 1908. I owe my knowledge of this admirable study to the kindness of its author.

[202] Frazer, G.B. ii. 318 foll.

[203] Varro, L.L. v. 64, says, "Ab satu dictus Saturnus." And in Augustine (Civ. Dei, vi. 8) he is quoted as holding the opinion "quod pertineat Saturnus ad semina, quae in terram de qua oriuntur iterum recidunt." He was probably the numen of the seed-sowing (Saeturnus), and as his festival comes after the end of sowing, we may presume that he was the numen of the sown as well as of the unsown seed. In the article "Saturnus" in Roscher's Lexicon, which has appeared since the above note was written, Wissowa provisionally accepts Varro's etymology.

[204] Festus, p. 245a, "Publica sacra quae publico sumptu pro populo fiunt, quaeque pro montibus, pagis, curiis, sacellis." See article "Sacra" in Dict. of Antiqq. ii. 577.

[205] "Routine is the only safeguard of a people under a perfect autocracy" (Select Charters, Introduction, p. 19).

[206] The annalists believed that the publication first took place in the year 304 B.C.: Livy ix. 46. Mommsen (Chronologie, p. 31) thought it possible that it had already been done by the Decemvirs in one of the two last of the XII. Tables, but again withdrawn. The object of keeping the Fasti secret was, of course, to control the times available for legal and political business.

[207] This paragraph is abridged from a passage in the author's paper in the Hibbert Journal for 1907, p. 848.

[208] See Anthropology and the Classics (Oxford, 1908), p. 44.

[209] R.F. p. 241 foll.

[210] Wissowa holds that it dates from the third century B.C.: Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl., s.v. "Argei." I endeavoured to refute this view in the Classical Review for 1902, p. 115 foll., and Dr. Wissowa criticised my criticism in his Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 222. It is dealt with at length in R.F. p. 111 foll. See below, p. 321 foll.

[211] This is not exactly the view expressed in R.F. p. 315 foll., where I was inclined to adopt that of Mannhardt that the laughing symbolised the return to life after sacrificial death. I am now disposed to think of it as parallel with the ecstasy of the Pythoness and other inspired priests, or the shivering and convulsive movements which denote that a human being is "possessed" by a god or spirit. See Jevons, Introduction, p. 174. Mannhardt's view seems, however, to gain support from Pausanias' description of the ordeal he underwent himself at the cave of Trophonius, after which he could laugh again: Paus. ix. 39. See also Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 580. Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 501.

[212] R.F. p. 109; Ov. Fasti, v. 421 foll. Ovid's account is of a private rite in the house, as elsewhere he tells us of things done by private persons on festival days. We do not know whether there was any public ritual for these days. For further discussion of the contrast between the two festivals of the dead, see below, Lect. XVII. p. 393.

[213] G.B. iii. 138 foll. The attempt to connect the so-called Saturnalia of the army of the Danube in the third century A.D. with the early practice of Roman Saturnalia seems to me to fail entirely, even after reading Prof. Cumont's paper in the Revue de philologie, 1897, p. 133 foll. I should imagine that Cumont would now admit that the Saturn who was sacrificed on the Danube as described in the Martyrdom of St. Dasius must have been of Oriental origin, and that the soldiers concerned were in no sense Roman or Italian. For the hellenisation of the Saturnalia, see Wissowa in Roscher's Lexicon, s.v. "Saturnus," p. 432. Wissowa, I may note, does not believe in the accuracy of the account of the "Martyrdom."

[214] Nothing, that is, in the regular ritual of the Roman State—except in so far as the killing of a criminal who was sacer to a god can be so regarded; and the only instance of any kind that can be quoted is that of the two pairs of Gaulish and Greek men and women who in the stress of the second Punic war and afterwards were buried alive, as it was said, in the Forum Boarium. Wissowa, R.K. p. 355 and notes. I shall return to this in Lecture XIV.

[215] The earliest mention of the slaying of a victim (bestiarius) to Jupiter is in Minucius Felix, Octav. 22 and 30, i.e. towards the end of the second century A.D. or even later. Cp. Tertull. Apol. 9, Lactantius i. 21. I do not go so far as to say with Wissowa (p. 109, note 3) that this story is "ganz gewiss apokryph," but I take it as simply a case of degeneracy under the influence of the amphitheatre and of Orientalism.

[216] For Numa see Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. i. 551 foll.

[217] See Dr. Frazer's most recent account of this subject, in his Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, chaps, iii.-v. Prof. Ridgeway's idea that the Flamen Dialis was really a Numan institution is of course simply impossible, and the arguments he founds on it fall to the ground. Ovid, probably reflecting Varro, speaks of the Flamen Dialis as belonging to the Pelasgian religion, which at least means that he was aware of the extreme antiquity of the office; Fasti, ii. 281. Dr. Doellinger (The Gentile and the Jew, vol. ii. p. 72) with his usual insight was inclined to see in this Flamen the "ruins of an older system of ceremonial ordinances."

[218] He was sui iuris (Gaius i. 130), as soon as he was chosen or taken (captus) by the Pontifex maximus; but he was subject to the authority of the P.M., like all the other flamines and the Vestals. See Wissowa, R.K. p. 438; Tac. Ann. iv. 16.



LECTURE VI

THE DIVINE OBJECTS OF WORSHIP

We must now turn our attention to what is the most difficult part of our subject, the ideas of the early Romans about "the Power manifesting itself in the universe." In my first lecture I indicated in outline what the difficulties are which beset us all through our studies; they are in no part of it so insurmountable as in this. Material fails us, because there was no contemporary literature; because the Romans were not a thinking people, and probably thought very little about the divine beings whom they propitiated; and again, because comparative religion, as it is called, is of scant value in such a study. We have to try and get rid of our own ideas about God or gods, to keep our minds free of Greek ideas and mythology, and, in fact, to abstain from bringing the ideas of any other peoples to bear upon the question until we are pretty sure that we have some sort of understanding of those Roman ideas with which we are tempted to compare them. The first duty of the student of any system of religion is to study that religion in and by itself. As M. S. Reinach observed in an address at the Congress for the History of Religions at Oxford, it is time that we began to attend to differences as well as similarities; and this can only be done by the conscientious use of such materials as are available for the study of each particular religion.

The only materials available in the case of the earliest Rome are (1) the calendar which I was explaining in the last lecture, which gives us the names of the festivals of the religious year; (2) the names of the deities concerned in these festivals, so far as we know them from later additions to the calendar, from Roman literature, and from evidence, chiefly epigraphical, of the names of deities among kindred Italian peoples; (3) the fragments of information, now most carefully collected and sifted, about what the Romans did in the worship of their deities. The names and order of the festivals, the names of the deities themselves, the cult, or detail of worship, including priesthoods and holy places,—these are the only real materials we possess, and our only safe guides. To trust to legends is fatal, because such legends as there were in Italy were never written down until the Greeks turned their attention to them, colouring them with their own fancy and with reminiscences of their own mythology. For example, no sane investigator would now make use of the famous story told by Ovid and Plutarch about Numa's interview with Jupiter, and the astute way in which he deceived the god, as an illustration of the Roman's ideas of the divine; we know that it can be traced back to the greatest liar among all Roman annalists,[219] that it was in part derived from a Greek story, and in part invented to explain a certain piece of ritual, the procuratio fulminis. Even what was done in the cult must be handled with knowledge and discretion. Dr. Frazer has a theory that the Roman kings personated Jupiter, and uses as evidence of this the fact that in the triumph the triumphator was dressed after the fashion of the statue of the god in the Capitoline temple, with his face reddened with minium: forgetting that the temple, its cult and its statue, all date from the very end of the period of the kingship, and were the work of an Etruscan monarch, almost beyond doubt. There may be truth in his theory, but this is not the way to prove it; this is not the way to arrive at a true understanding of Roman religious ideas.

What did the old Romans know about the nature of the objects of their worship? All religion is in its development a process of gaining such knowledge: if it makes no progress it is doomed. It is because the Jews made such wonderful progress in this path, in spite of formalism and backsliding, that they were chosen to produce a Teacher whose life and doctrine revealed the will and the nature of His Father for the eternal benefit of mankind. The fear of the Lord is imperfect knowledge, it is but the beginning of wisdom; but it could become, in a Jew like St. Paul, the perfect knowledge of His will. It may seem absurd to think of two such religions as the Jewish and the Roman side by side; but the absurdity vanishes when we begin to understand the humble beginnings of the Jewish religion as scientific research has already laid it bare. Knowledge of the Power manifesting itself in the universe is open to all peoples alike, and some few have made much progress in it beside the Jews. The Romans were not among these, at any rate in all the later stages of their history; but we have to ask how far they got in the process, and later on again to ask also why they could go no farther.[220]

We have seen how one great forward step in the attainment of this knowledge was made in the religion of the household, when the house had become a kind of temple, being the dwelling of divine as well as human beings, and when the cultivated land had been separated by a sacred boundary from the mountain or forest beyond, with their wild and unknown spiritual inhabitants. We met, however, with nothing in the house or on the land that we can properly call a god, if we may use that word for the moment in the sense of a personality as well as a name, and a personality perfectly distinct from the object in which it resides. Vesta seems to be the fire, Penates the store, or at least spirits undistinguishable from the substance composing the store. But inasmuch as the farmer knew how to serve these spirits and address them, looking upon them as friends and co-habitants of his own dwelling, we may go so far as to guess that they were somewhat advanced in their career as spirits, and might possibly develop into powers of a more definite kind, if not into gods, real dei conceived as persons.[221] In other words—for it is better to keep as far as we can to the subjective or psychological aspect of them—the Roman might realise the Power better by getting to think of his nameless spirits as dei at work for his benefit if rightly propitiated. There are some signs in the calendar and the other sources I mentioned just now that such a process had been going on before the State arose; and it is certain that the whole field of divine operation had been greatly widened by that time, as we might expect from the enlarged sphere of man's experience and activity.

The deities originally belonging to the city of the four regions, i.e. to the city of the calendar of Numa, were known to Roman antiquarians as di indigetes, in contra-distinction from the di novensiles or imported deities, with which at present we have nothing to do. On the basis of the calendar, and of the names of the most ancient priesthoods attached to particular cults, the Rex and the Flamines, Wissowa (R.K. p. 16) has constructed a list of these di indigetes which may be accepted without any further reservation than he himself applies to it. They are thirty-three in number, but in two cases we have groups instead of individuals, viz. the Lares and the Lemures: the plurality of the Lares (compitales) we have already explained, and the Lemures, the ghosts of departed ancestors, we may also for the present leave out of account. Others are too obscure to help us, e.g. Carna, Angerona, Furrina, Neptunus, Volturnus,[222] except in so far as their very obscurity, and the neglect into which they and their cults fell in later times, is proof that they were not thought of as lively personal deities. Then, again, there are others whose names are suggested by certain festivals, Terminus, Fons, Robigus, who seem to be simply survivals from the animistic period—spirits inherent in the boundary-stone, the spring, or the mildew, and incapable of further development in the new conditions of city life. Faunus, the rural semi-deity, perhaps representing a group of such beings, appears in the list as the deity of the Lupercalia; but this is a point in which I cannot agree with Wissowa and the majority of modern authorities.[223]

We are struck, as we examine the list further, by the adjectival character of many of the names—Neptunus, Portunus, Quirinus, Saturnus, Volcanus, Volturnus: these are not proper names, but clearly express some character or function exercised by the power or numen to whom the name is given. Saturnus is the most familiar example; the word suggests no personality, but rather a sphere of operations (whether we take the name as referring to sowing or to seed maturing in the soil) in which a certain numen is helpful. Saturnus, Volcanus, Neptunus were indeed identified later on with Greek gods of a ripe polytheistic system, and have thus become quite familiar to us, far too familiar for a right understanding of early Roman ideas. We might naturally expect that the identification of Saturnus with Kronos, of Neptunus with Poseidon, would give us some clue to the original Roman conception of the numen thus Graecised, but it is not so. Neptunus may have had some connection with water, rain, or springs, but we have no real proof of it, and it is impossible to say why Saturnus became Kronos.[224] The only certain result that we can win from the study of these adjectival titles is that they represent a transition between animism and polytheism, a transition exactly expressed by the one word numen.

Numen is so important a word in the Roman religion that it is necessary to be perfectly clear as to what was meant by it. It must be formed from nuere as flumen from fluere, with a sense of activity inherent in the verb. As flumen is that which actively flows, so numen is that which actively does whatever we understand by the word nuere; and so far as we can determine, that was a manifestation of will. Adnuere is to consent, to give your good will to some act proposed or completed, and is often so used of Jupiter in the Aeneid. Nuere should therefore express a simple exercise of will-power, and numen is the being exercising it. In time it came to be used for the will of a god as distinct from himself, as in the fourth Aeneid (269)—