Part 12

[91] _Suppl._ 244-5.

[92] _Suppl._ 279 ff.

[93] viii. 144 αὖτις δὲ τὸ Ἑλληνικόν, ἐὸν ὅμαιμόν τε καὶ ὁμόγλωσσον, καὶ θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινά καὶ θυσίαι ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα, τῶν προδότας γενέσθαι Ἀφηναίους οὐκ ἂν εὖ ἔχοι.

[94] _Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt_, pp. 18-20.

[95] Herodotus iv. 23 ἄνθρωποι λεγόμενοι εἶναι (1) πάντες φαλακροὶ ἐκ γενετῆς γινόμενοι, καὶ ἔρσενες καὶ φήλεαι ὁμοίως, καὶ γένεια ἔχροντες μεγάλα, (2) φονὴν δὲ ἰδίης ἱέντες, (3) ἐσθῆτι δὲ χρεώμενοι Σκυθικῇ, (4) ζῆντες δὲ ἀπο δενδρέον. An exactly similar series of adversatives follows in the very next sentence, about the _Pontikon_ tree.

[96] Herodotus vii. 183.

[97] Herodotus vii. 181.

[98] Herodotus iv. 110.

[99] The phrase of Herodotus i. 105, if interpreted strictly, means that the Scythians of _Scythia_ themselves suffered from this defect, and gave as the reason for it the story which he relates.

[100] Hippocrates, περι ἱερῆς vούσου (ed. Kuhn, Leipzig, p. 561), ἐμοὶ δὲ καὶ αὐτέῳ δοκεῖ ταῦτα τὰ πάθεα θεῖα εἶναι καὶ τἆλλα πάντα, καὶ οὐδὲν ἕτερος ἑτέρου θειότερος οὐδὲ ἀντθρωπίνωτερον, ἀλλὰ πάντα θεῖα· ἕκαστον καὶ ἔχει φύσιν τῶν τοιουτέων, καὶ οὐδὲν ἄνευ φύσιος γίγνεται.

[101] Herodotus v. 9.

[102] Murray, _The Rise of the Greek Epic_, p. 69.

[103] Egypt, of course, had done great things in this direction under the earliest dynasties.

[104] Hippocrates, περὶ Ἀέρων (ed. Kuhn), p. 551.

[105] Hippocrates, περὶ Ἀέρων (ed. Kuhn), p. 550.

[106] Diogenes Laertius ii. 16 (R. P. 169).

[107] Simpl. _in Arist. Phys._ fol. 6 (R. P. 170).

[108] Choerilus is the only early authority for the theory, criticized by Hdt. iii. 115, that the Eridanus is in Germany. Serv. ad Virg. _G._ i. 482 ‘Thesias (Ctesias) hunc (Eridanum) in Media esse, Choerilus in Germania, in quo flumine Edion (Phaethon) extinctus est.’ Fr. 13 (Didot). Choerilus fr. 3 (Didot):

μηλονόμοι δὲ Σάκαι, γενεῇ Σκύθαι, αὐτὰρ ἔναιον Ἀσίδα πυροφόρον, νομάδων γε μὲν ἦσαν ἄποικοι ἀνθρὠπων νομίμων.

[109] Fragment 189 ἀλλ’ ἱππάκης βρωτῆρες εὔνομιοι Σκύται. Fragment 184:

ἔπειτα δ’ ἥξει δῆμον ἐνδικώτατον ... ἁπάντων καὶ φιλοξενώτατον Γαβίους, ἵν οὔτ’ ἄροτρον οὔτε γατόμος τέμνει δίκελλ’ ἄρουραν, ἀλλ’ αὐτόσποροι γύαι φέρουσι βίοτον ἄφθονον βρότοις.

[110] Plato, _Rep._ 370-2.

[111] Plato, _Rep._ 373.

[112] Far more explicit and detailed is the comparative study of foreign customs which _underlies_ Socratic doctrine in the _Laws_. The stock examples of the fifth century, Sarmatians (804 E), Amazons (806 A), Thracians (805 D), and the like, are all there, side by side with the Spartans and the Cretans, the Persians, the Egyptians, and the Phoenicians (750 C). But the anthropological basis of fourth-century thought is a distinct subject, and would require a whole chapter to itself.

[113] Hdt. i. 59.

[114] P. Ure, _Journ. Hell. Studies_, xxvi. pp. 134 ff.

LECTURE VI

LUSTRATIO

The practice which is the subject of this lecture was a comparatively late growth in the religious history of ancient Italy. We commonly and vaguely translate _lustratio_ by ‘purification’, _lustrare_ by ‘purify’; but in Latin literature there is another sense of the word, which shows well how one particular kind of purification had become associated with it--I mean the sense of a slow ordered movement in procession. This stately processional movement, so characteristic of the old Roman character, so characteristic still of the grandeur and discipline of the Roman Church in Italy, impressed itself for ever on the Latin language in the word _lustrare_. Let me quote a single beautiful example of it. When Aeneas first sees and addresses Dido he says:

In freta dum fluvii current, _dum montibus umbrae Lustrabunt convexa_, polus dum sidera pascet, Semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt, Quae me cumque vocant terrae.[115]

‘So long as the cloud-shadows move slowly over the hollows on the hills.’ Long ago, when fishing in Wales, I watched this procession of the shadows, and ever since then it has been associated in my mind with the many ancient Italian processions which I have had to study. Such is the magical power of a great poet of nature.

But before we go on to examine the nature and meaning of these processions it is necessary to go much further back, in order to get some idea of the primitive Italian ideas of ‘purification’ out of which they were developed. We know them only in the farm and the city of historical times; they belong at the earliest to the comparatively settled and civilized life of the Italian agricultural community, and reached their highest development in the highly organized City-State. But there is much to be said--much more than I have time to say now--about the ideas to which they owe their origin.

There are certain words in Latin bearing the sense of purification, which are older, if I am not mistaken, than _lustrare_ and _lustratio_, and which belong, I should be inclined to believe, to a ‘pre-animistic’ period: to a period, that is, when the thing to be got rid of by what we call purification was not so much evil influences in the form of spirits as some mysterious miasmatic contamination. These words are _februum_, _februare_, _februatio_, from which the name of our second month, the month of purification, is derived. _Februum_ is a material object with magical purifying power, which the late Romans might call _piamen_, or _purgamen_ (Ovid, _Fast._ ii. 19 foll.), using a word belonging to the priestly ritual of the fully developed State. A number of such objects were in use at Rome on particular occasions, all called generically by this name _februum_--water, fire, sulphur, laurel, wool, pine-twigs, cakes made of certain ‘holy’ ingredients, and at the Lupercalia, strips of the skin of a victim. These belong to the region of magic, and are intimately connected with charms and amulets, which were and still are so popular and universal in Italy. They belong to the same category, psychologically considered, as the _bulla_ of children, the _apex_ of the _flamines_, a pointed twig fixed on the head or head-dress, and the _galerus_, the cap of the Flamen Dialis, made of the skin of a white victim which had been sacrificed to Jupiter. These are all survivals from an older stratum of religious thought than the processional rites which we are going to study: they date from a period when magical processes were the rule and religious processes the exception.

I am not going to let myself be drawn here into the vexed question of the relation of religion to magic--two words which, simply by virtue of their being words with constantly shifting connotation--are very apt to mislead us. But putting aside this controversy, it is helpful, I think, to suggest that _februum_ and _februare_ belong to an age when material contamination, e. g. of a corpse or of blood--in other words, of things ‘taboo’--could be got rid of by magical means, _lustrare_ and _lustratio_ to an age when the thing to be driven and kept away is spiritual mischief--the influence of spirits that may be hostile--and when the means used are sacrifices and prayer, with processional movement. To draw the line clearly, however, between a magical period and a religious period is in Roman history quite impossible, as indeed it is and must be everywhere. Magical and quasi-magical processes are taken up into the processes of a period which may be called religious, and survive in an amphibious condition for which it is difficult to find a name. The Flamen Dialis, for example, was priest of Jupiter, and as such in all his duties was an official of a highly organized religious system, yet he was afflicted with an extraordinary number of taboos--now familiar to all readers of _The Golden Bough_--which survived from a period long anterior to that of religion in the true sense of the word. The purification of new-born children on the _dies lustricus_ is an essential part of the religion of the family, and the word _lustricus_ is itself, in my view, a mark of a period of religion; but the original meaning of the ceremony is probably to be found in pre-animistic ideas. So too with the purification of the family after a funeral, where the original horror of a corpse common to all primitive peoples is still just discernible in the religious ritual of historical times.[116] And, as we shall presently see, the belief that he who has shed blood, even of an enemy, needs purification, is still to be found lurking in the form of one of those acts of _lustratio_ with which we are about to occupy ourselves.

But on the whole it may be said of the Romans, as Dr. Farnell has said of our Teutonic ancestors (_Evolution of Religion_, p. 108), that cathartic ritual did not weigh heavily on their consciences. Assuredly it may be so said of the Romans of historical times, subjected to the quieting influences of priestly law and ritual, which found infallible remedies for the conscience of the individual, for his fear of evil powers material or spiritual--expedients to emancipate him from the bondage of taboo[117]--in the religious action of the State as a whole. It may perhaps be guessed that even in an age long before the State arose the conscience of the Latin was never ‘intensified’ as regards purification from bloodshed or other mischance or misdeed. The impurity or holiness of blood, as conceived by all primitive peoples, has left no obvious trace in Roman ideas, legends, or literature; it is to be found, but it does not attract our attention as it does in Greece. I believe that the explanation of this lies in the genius of the Roman for law, and in his early and very distinct conception of the State and of the authority of its officials. It may, indeed, be also due to the invasion of Latium by a people of advanced culture, who had but little to say to the grosser material ideas of an aboriginal population; but this is still merely speculation, into which I cannot enter now. Whatever the cause, the religion of the Romans as we know it shows no horror, no fear, so long as the worship of the gods is performed exactly and correctly according to the rules of the State priesthoods: there is no sense of sin or of pollution, of taboo irremediably broken, haunting the mind of the individual: all is cheerfully serious, regular, ordered, ritualistic; and nowhere can we see this better than in the public and private lustral processions of the Roman people.

A word, however, in the first place about the original meaning of the word _lustratio_. _Lustrare_ is a strong form of _luere_: and _luere_ is explained by Varro as equivalent to _solvere_ (De Ling. Lat. vi. 11): ‘Lustrum nominatum tempus quinquennale a luendo, id est solvendo; quod quinto quoque anno vectigalia et ultro tributa per censores persolvebantur.’ He is followed by Servius, who explains such expressions as ‘paena commissa luere’, ‘peccata luere’, ‘supplicium luere’,[118] on the same principle. We might, therefore, be tempted to think that the root-meaning of _lustrare_ is to perform a duty or an obligation, and so to rid oneself of it--to go through a religious rite as due to a deity. But this would be to misconceive the original meaning of the word as completely as Varro did when he explained _luere_ by reference to the payment of taxes. We have not yet arrived at a period in Roman thought when we can speak of a sense of religious duty: it is not a money obligation or a ritualistic one that has to be got ‘rid of’, in the earliest ages of the Latin farm or City-State, but those ubiquitous spirits, presumably hostile until they are reclaimed, which haunt the life of man in the animistic stage. Varro and his successors do, however, give us the right clue; they see that the idea lurking in the word is that of purging yourself or getting rid of something, but they understand that something in the light, not of primitive man’s intelligence, but of the relation of man to man in a civilized state.

If, then, _lustrare_ originally embodies this sense of ridding oneself of something, we can now go on to examine the oldest forms of _lustratio_. I will not here go into the further question whether _lues_, a pest, and the shadowy deity _Lua_ Mater, who was the consort or companion in some antique sense of Saturnus, are words belonging to the same group and explicable on the same principle.

Now, in order to understand clearly how this necessity of getting rid of hostile spirits came to suggest those solemn processional rites which we associate with the word _lustratio_, we must fully appreciate the fact that the earliest settlers in Italy who had any knowledge of agriculture found it a country of forest-clad hills; the river valleys were marshy and unhealthy, and the earliest settlements were in clearings made in the woodland. This fact was dimly appreciated by the Romans themselves, and is proved by the archaeological evidence available to-day. The first thing, then, to be done was to make a clearing; and this was a most perilous task, for when you cut down trees and dug up the soil, how were you to tell what unknown spirits you might be disturbing and aggravating? They might be in the trees and the plants, they might be in the animals whose homes were in the trees and the ground, the rocks and the springs. In the later Roman ritual we can still see traces of this old feeling of peril. Cato has preserved for us the formula used by the farmer in historical times when making a new clearing; the prayer accompanying his sacrifice began with ‘Si deus, si dea’--for how was he to know the name or sex of the spirit of the wood he was invading? When digging up the soil he had to offer an expiatory sacrifice; and the ancient gild of the Fratres Arvales had to offer special _piacula_ for the falling of a bough in their grove, or for any injury to a tree in it.[119]

And when your clearing was complete, and you had settled down with your own household spirits, e. g. of the hearth-fire and the store-cupboard (Vesta and Penates), or had induced some of the native spirits to be friendly and serviceable to you--those especially of the land and the springs,--there was yet another difficulty of the greatest importance, viz. to keep those wild ones still dwelling in the woodland around you from encroaching on your clearing or annoying you in your dwelling. That they really could be thus annoying is proved by a curious bit of folklore of which Varro knew, and which has luckily been preserved by St. Augustine, a student of Varro’s works, as an example of Pagan absurdity (_Civ. Dei_, vi. 9). After the birth of a child, three spirits were invoked--Intercidona, Pilumnus, and Deverra--to prevent Silvanus (the later representative of the woodland spirits generally) from coming into the house and making mischief by night. These three spirits, as their names show, represented the life of settled agriculture: the cutting and pruning of trees (Intercidona), the pounding of corn for the daily meal (Pilumnus), and the raking and sweeping up of the grain (Deverra); and Varro says that they were represented by three men, who imitated the action of axe, pestle, and broom. The real significance of this delightful bit of mummery has never, I think, been correctly understood, simply because the vital difference to the earliest settler between the benevolent spirits of the reclaimed clearing and the hostile spirits of the wild woodland has never been quite fully appreciated.

But this device was one to which you need only have recourse on a particular occasion; the permanent difficulty was to mark off your cultivated land from the forest and its dangerous spiritual population, in some way by which the latter might be prevented from making itself unpleasant. You must draw a definite line between good spirits and bad, between white spirits and black. Here it is that we find the origin of a practice which lasted all through Roman history, passed on into the ritual of the Church, and still survives, as at Oxford on Ascension Day, in the beating of parish bounds. The boundary of the cultivated land was marked out in some material way, perhaps by stones placed at intervals, like the _cippi_ of the old Roman _pomerium_, from the woodland lying around it; and this boundary-line was made sacred by the passage round it (_lustratio_) at some fixed time of the year--in May as a rule, when the crops were ripening and especially liable to be attacked by hostile influences--of a procession occupied with sacrifice and prayer. I must dwell for a moment on this procession as it is described by old Cato; but at this point I may just interpolate the remark that the object of its mysterious influence was the arable land only and the crops.[120] The sheep and cattle were otherwise protected, when, after their seclusion within the boundary during the winter, they were driven out in April to pasture beyond it, where they would be in far greater peril from enemies spiritual and other. If you wish to see how this was done, read Ovid’s account of the Parilia in the fourth book of his _Fasti_, and Dr. Frazer’s illuminating commentary on it (St. George and the Parilia) in the _Revue des Études Ethnographiques et Sociologiques_ for 1908, p. 1 foll.

Cato in his treatise on agriculture has left us, in the form of instructions to a real or imaginary bailiff, the formula of the lustratio as it was used in the second century B.C. It is obviously applicable in detail rather to the estate of that period than to a farm of primitive Latium: there are, for example, words which suggest that it was not necessary in those days to go in procession round the whole of the boundary; as was the case afterwards with the lustratio of the ager Romanus, the form survived accommodated to the great increase of the land concerned. But the two main features of the whole rite are no doubt identical with those of the earliest form of it--i. e. the procession of the victims, ox, sheep, and pig, the farmer’s most valuable property, with the sacrificer and his helps, in this case the bailiff and his assistants: and secondly the prayer to Mars pater, after libations to Janus and Jupiter, asking for his kindly protection of the whole _familia_ of the farm, together with the crops of every kind, and the cattle within the boundary-line. Though it is not explicitly told us, we can hardly doubt that originally the procession followed the boundary-line, and thus served to keep it clear in the memory as well as to preserve everything within it from hostile spirits outside of it. In Cato’s formula it is disease, calamity, dearth, and infertility, that the farmer seeks to ward off--that is the language of the second century B.C.: and it is Mars pater who is invoked, i. e. a great god who has long ago emerged from the crowd of impersonal spirits; but we need not doubt that the primitive farmer used language of a different kind, and addressed the spirits of disease and dearth themselves, of whom one survived into historic times--Robigus, the spirit of mildew. In the ritual of the Arval Brethren, who perhaps retained some details more antique than those of Cato’s instructions, it is a nameless deity, the Dea Dia, who is the chief object of petition (_Acta Fratr. Arv._, p. 48).

At this point it may be well to ask what was the original idea of the virtue conveyed by going round a piece of land with victims to be sacrificed at the end of the circuit. Such circuitous processions, with or without victims, are to be found in all countries: perhaps the instance most familiar to all of us is that round the walls of Jericho, repeated seven times--the mystic number--in order to destroy their defensive power. But Roman folklore itself, preserved in great abundance by Pliny, supplies an example which goes some way, I think, to show the original nature of the process. Pliny tells us that if a woman in a certain condition, with bare feet and streaming hair, walked round a field, it was completely protected against insects.[121] The act of passing round a crop served as a charm to keep off noxious things--live insects in historical times, noxious spirits, if I am right, in the dawn of agriculture. The charm lay in the condition of the woman, as Dr. Frazer has abundantly shown in _The Golden Bough_ (iii, ed. 2, p. 232 foll.), where he has quoted this passage of Pliny and others from the Roman writers on agriculture. Some power of a similar kind there must have been also in the victims about to be slain; they were chosen according to rule, and under favourable auspices (if we may argue back from the ritual of the city to that of the farm): they were therefore holy, and their blood was about to be shed at one point in the line of circuit. We have here, indeed, passed beyond the region of magic, but we are still in that early stage of religion when a magical idea is at the bottom of the ceremony, though fast losing itself in ideas more advanced and rational.

This religious process, the fencing out of hostile spirits by a boundary-line, and the discovery of the proper formulae for preserving it and all within it, may and indeed must have been the work of ages. But once discovered, the principle of it could be applied to any land or other property of man, and also to man himself. Let us now take some examples of such extensions of the simple practice of the farm.

The farms and homesteads of the early Latins were grouped together in associations called _pagi_; and these were subjected to the same process of lustratio as the farms themselves. So at least we can hardly doubt, though we have no explicit account of the processional character of the _lustratio pagi_. When Ovid, under date of the Paganalia (Jan. 24-6), describes the lustratio, he writes:

Pagus agat festum: pagum lustrate, coloni, Et date paganis annua liba focis:

but does not make it clear that he uses _lustrare_ in the sense of a procession with the suovetaurilia. Nor can we be sure that the beautiful passage in the first _Georgic_ (338 foll.), beginning, ‘In primis venerare deos,’ refers to a _lustratio pagi_, though Wissowa seems to imply it,[122] and the lines

Terque novas circum felix eat hostia fruges, Omnis quam chorus et socii comitentur ovantes Et Cererem clamore vocent in tecta ...

give a charming picture of a lustratio of this kind, without enabling us to decide whether he has the farm or the pagus in his mind. Let us go on to the beginnings of the city, where we shall find the same principle and process applied in most striking fashion.