Part 13

Just as it was necessary to keep hostile spirits out of the homestead and its land, so it was necessary to keep them out of the city and its land. The walls of the Italian city were sacred, and so was a certain space outside them, called the _pomerium_. This is well illustrated in the rite used in the foundation of a city even in historical times, as described by Varro, Servius, and Plutarch:[123] it was believed to be of Etruscan origin, like so many other Roman rites, but it is now generally considered to be old Italian in a general sense. A white ox and a white cow were harnessed to a plough, of which the share must be made of bronze, and (on an auspicious day) drew a rectangular furrow where the walls of the city were to be: the earth was turned inwards to indicate the line of the wall, and the furrow represented the future pomerium. When the plough came to the place where there was to be a gate, it was lifted over it and the ploughing resumed beyond it. This meant that though the walls were sacred, the gates were profane; for, as Plutarch says, had the gates been holy, scruple would have been felt about the passage in and out of them of unholy things. The result of this religious process was to keep outside the sacred boundary of the wall all evil and strange spirits (or, as we may now say, seeing that we are entering an era of higher civilization, strange _gods_); and inside it there dwelt only those who belonged to the place and its inhabitants (_indigetes_), and whose alliance and protection had become assured. Inside it, too, and only within its limits, could the auspicia of the city be taken.

We might naturally expect that this sacred wall and boundary would have its holiness and efficacy secured by an annual lustratio of the same kind as that of the farm and pagus; and so it was. We know that there was at Rome a lustral rite called Amburbium, which probably took place at the beginning of the month of purification (February); but it is for us unluckily little more than a name. Later on in the same month we find the extraordinary rite of the Lupercalia (15th), in which the pomerium is so far concerned as that the Luperci, or young men who served as priests on the occasion, ran round the ancient boundary of the Palatine settlement, girt with the skins of the victims, striking at all women who came near them with strips cut from these same skins, in order to produce fertility. But was this really a _lustratio urbis_? In my _Roman Festivals_ I treated it as such (p. 319), on the ground that Varro uses the word lustrare in alluding to it. I am now, however, disposed to think that Varro was here using the word in a general and not a technical sense, and that the object of it was not, as in the rites we have been discussing, to keep evil spirits away from the city as a whole. It seems to be a survival of some very primitive magico-religious ideas, into which I will not enter now. Certain it is that the leading feature of the true lustratio is absent from it; instead of a slow and stately procession of worshippers and victims, we have the wild running of almost naked youths, apparently personating or embodying a deity.

Fortunately we can illustrate the real lustratio of a city from a different source, and in this case most luckily a documentary one, but from an Umbrian city instead of a Latin one. The town of Gubbio, the modern form of Iguvium, still preserves the priestly instructions, drawn up from older sources probably at the beginning of the last century B. C., for the lustratio of its citadel, the arx (_ocris Fisia_), by a guild of priests called the Fratres Attiedii.[124] Here the ceremony has been developed under priestly influence into a series of ritualistic acts of the highest exactness and complexity; but the main features of the lustratio stand out quite clearly. The procession goes solemnly round the arx, with the victims, which are the same as those of the Latin lustratio; at each gate it stops, and offers sacrifice and prayer on behalf of the citadel, the city, and the whole people of Iguvium. The gates, three in number, are the scene of the actual sacrifice and prayer, because they are the weak points in the wall, as we have seen, and they need to be spiritually strengthened by annual religious operations, though not such as would make them permanently sacred like the wall itself. Doubtless the Fratres Attiedii would have been unable to explain this as I am explaining it; the sense of a hostile spiritual world outside the sacred boundary had vanished from the Italian mind when these elaborate liturgical formulae were drawn up. The prayers are cast in language that hardly differs from those of a Church of to-day which asks for a blessing on a community. The deities of the city are asked to preserve the name, the magistrates, rites, men, cattle, land, and crops--a list in which the _name_ is the only item which carries us clearly back to pre-Christian times. The ideas and the deities have been developed into a religious system of considerable complexity, but the actual proceedings, the procession and the prayers at the gates, still remind us of the rock whence all this ritual was hewn.

I said that human beings might be subjected to the lustral process _en masse_, as well as land and city. Before we return from Iguvium to Rome, I may mention that the Iguvian documents also contain instructions for the lustratio of the people.[125] So far as we can gather from the Umbrian text, the people was brought together in a particular spot in its military divisions, and round them a procession went three times; at the end of each circuit there was sacrifice and prayer (the former not apparently with the usual suovetaurilia), and Mars and two female consorts or representatives of his power were entreated to confound and frighten certain enemies of the city, in language which reminds me of the prayer in time of war, now happily abandoned, which I can remember as a child being read in the days of the Crimean war--‘abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices’. Then followed of course a prayer for blessing on the Iguvini. This may conveniently bring us back to Rome; for in the account of the census and lustrum in the Campus Martius given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (iv. 22), we find the suovetaurilia driven three times round the assembled host with sacrifice to Mars. This was no doubt really the early form of the census, which had a military meaning and origin.

The explanation of this lustration of the host, the male population in arms, of a community, is not quite the same as that of the rite as applied to a city; yet it takes us back to the same animistic period and the same class of ideas. These armies were likely to have to march against enemies living far beyond the pale of the _ager Romanus_, and therefore among spirits with whom the Romans or Iguvians, as the case might be, had no peaceful relations, and of whose ways and freaks they were in fact entirely ignorant. They must, therefore, be protected against such evil influences by some special device and ritual. Of this kind of practice Dr. Frazer has collected some examples in _Golden Bough_, i. 304 foll., both from savage tribes and from Greek usage. As we are dealing here with Rome only, we may content ourselves with a parallel from the pen of a Roman historian, which, as it happens, Dr. Frazer has not mentioned. Livy tells us that the method in Macedonia was to march the whole host in spring before a campaign between the severed limbs of a dog (xl. 6 init.). This only differs from the Italian plan in method, not in principle: the object in each case is to subject the whole army without exception to the salutary influence of the victim: but in Macedonia it is made to pass between the two parts of a slain victim, while in Italy the live victims are made to pass round the army, and afterwards sacrificed. That each Roman army was thus lustrated is almost certain (_Dict. Ant._, vol. ii. 102): in fact the word lustratio came to mean a review of troops for this reason, without religious signification: so at least we are used to take such expressions as Cicero uses of his army in Cilicia, ‘exercitum lustravi’ (_Att._ v. 20. 2). Even the fleets were subjected to the same process: and in Livy xxix. 27 we have a prayer addressed by Scipio to the deities of the sea before sailing for Africa, which may remind us of those used during the lustration of the people at Iguvium.

Further, at this same time, in spring, before the season of arms, all the appurtenances of the army were ‘purified’--the horses, the arms, and the trumpets. So at least we may gather from the fact that there was a festival in the oldest religious calendar at the end of February called Equirria, and another of the same name on March 14 following; though the real meaning of the word was lost in later times, this explanation is strongly suggested by the dates, and also by the place, i. e. the Campus Martius. (If this was flooded it took place on the Caelian hill.) The details of the festival, which must have included horse racing, are unfortunately lost. The Equirria of March 14 seems to correspond to a curious rite, of which the date is October 15, i.e. after the season of arms; on that day there was a two-horse chariot-race in the Campus Martius, and the near horse of the winning chariot was sacrificed to Mars, with peculiar ritual following the slaughter. It is tempting to refer this rite to a lustratio of the horses after their return from a campaign: but here again the details of a true lustratio are not forthcoming. It may have originally been, as Wissowa suggests, a cathartic rite purifying the army from the taint of bloodshed (cf. _G. B._ i. 332 foll.); the blood of the sacrificed horse was allowed to drip upon the sacred hearth of the Regia, and it is probable that it was used in the making of certain sacred cakes (_mola salsa_) of great cathartic value. But it is remarkable that this rite was not included in the festivals of the ancient calendar: we know of it only from other sources. I am inclined to hazard a guess that it belonged to a type of ceremony which the earliest pontifical legislators were unwilling to recognize; their efforts, as it seems to me, must have been directed to make the worship of the people as pure and orderly as possible.[126]

The old calendar also supplies strong evidence that the arms and the trumpets of the host were lustrated, both before and after a campaign. On March 19, called _Quinquatrus_, because it was the fifth day after the Ides, the _ancilia_, or shields of the war-priests of Mars, were thus purified; and it is a good guess that they stood for the arms of the fighting men generally. For on October 19 we find the festival Armilustrium, which tells its own tale. On that day it seems clear that both arma and ancilia were lustrated, and that the Salii for this purpose went round the armed host in a place called by the same name as the rite, in or near the Circus maximus (Varro, _L.L._ 6. 22: cf. 5. 153). Again, we have March 23 marked in the calendar as Tubilustrium; and though the old explanations confine these _tubae_ to such as were used _in sacris_, I believe, with Wissowa, that included in these were the trumpets of the host.[127]

Lastly, we may believe that the army was purified from the taint of bloodshed after its return from a campaign, just as the Hebrew warriors and their captives were purified before re-entering the camp after a battle (Num. xxi. 19). I have just now suggested that the sacrifice of the October horse may have originally had this object. But in Roman pontifical law the idea of the taint of bloodshed is only faintly discernible, as is also the case in the Homeric poems (Farnell, _Evolution_, p. 133); and the only distinct trace of it that I can find in regard to the army is a statement of Festus that the soldiers who followed the general’s car in a triumph wore laurel wreaths ‘ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem’ (_Fest._ 117). Laurel was a powerful purgative of such taint.

I have now given some brief account of the most remarkable examples of the characteristic type of lustration in Italy, and more especially at Rome; and it only remains for me to sum up in outline what I have been saying. We began with the ideas of purification which were common to the Italians and other primitive peoples, and which have left traces here and there in the public and private ritual of the Romans, but without showing any great vital force, such as might enable them to develop into matters of religious or ethical importance in Roman life. We then saw how the nature of the Italian peninsula as it was in the dawn of civilization, and the universal belief in a world of spirits haunting mountain and woodland, compelled the early Latin farmer to draw a well-defined boundary line between the land he had reclaimed and the forest beyond it, within which he and his familia and his friendly spirits or deities might be at peace; and how he sought to render this boundary impermeable to the hostile spirits outside it by a yearly ceremony consisting of a procession around it of victims for sacrifice. Then we saw how this same practice was retained in the service of the State, and applied to the foundation of a city, to its land, to the circuit of its walls, to its people in the form of the men capable of carrying arms, to the horses, the arms, and the trumpets of this host.

In conclusion, I must ask the question whether this impressive ritual of lustratio ever came to have any religious or moral import for the Roman people. Undoubtedly the idea which lay at the root of it, the protection of the city and its inhabitants from hostile spirits or strange gods, disappeared from the Roman mind at an early period among the governing and better educated classes. In one point only, so far as I know, can we detect a survival of it,--namely, in the persistence of the pontifices in refusing to admit new gods within the sacred circle of the pomerium; they might be taken into the Society of Roman deities, but they must be settled in temples placed _outside_ that boundary line. But as early as the second Punic war this old rule began to be broken, and in 205 B.C. even the mystic stone of the Magna Mater of the Phrygians was brought within the pomerium and settled in the heart of the city on the Palatine. And from that time onwards, whatever may have been the notions about such things of the ignorant Latin population, the old ideas assuredly vanished utterly from the minds of those who were in charge of the State and its religion.

Was there any transmutation of those ideas into religious beliefs which might help State or individual in the changes and chances of this mortal life? The answer to this question is a most emphatic negative. What spiritual help they needed they sought and obtained in new and foreign rites; their own solemn processions were sights to see and nothing more. Lustratio never really, in pagan Italy, developed an ethical meaning, as catharsis did to some extent in Greece.[128] And the explanation of this is a simple one; at a very early stage the State overpowered the individual, and the State religion obliterated all the germs of an individual religious conscience. Even in the cult of Jupiter, where, if anywhere, we might look for an ethical significance, this was so; ‘we do not pray to Jupiter,’ says Cicero, ‘to make us good, but to give us material benefits.’[129]

But, meaningless as they were, the stately processions remained, and could be watched with pride by the patriotic Roman all through the period of the Empire. Then the Roman Church, with characteristic adroitness, adapted them to its own ritual, and gave them a new meaning; and the Catholic priest still leads his flock round the fields with the prayers of the Litania major in Rogation week, not only beating the bounds as we still do in Oxford on Ascension Day, but begging a blessing on the crops and herds, and deprecating the anger of the Almighty.

OXFORD

PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, M.A. PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

FOOTNOTES:

[115] _Aen._ i. 607 foll. Cp. _Aen._ iii. 429--

Praestat Trinacrii metas lustrare Pachyni Cessantem, longos et circumflectere cursus:

where the slow movement and circuitous course of a _lustratio_ are in the poet’s mind.

[116] Marquardt, _Staatsverwaltung_, iii. p. 175. Cp. Serv. _Aen._ iii. 67, and Virg. _Aen._ vi. 229.

[117] Iron was taboo in the grove of Dea Dia: but the Fratres Arvales had a system of _piacula_ enabling them to use it for pruning, &c., when necessary.--Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ 22.

[118] Serv. _Aen._ i. 136, x. 32, xi. 842.

[119] Cato R. R. 139, 140; Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ 136 foll.: cp. Ovid, _Fasti_ iv. 749 foll.

[120] This is my own inference from the language of Cato in chapters 83 and 141. When the cattle are in the forest, there is a special formula of prayer for them: see ch. 83. The word _ager_ could hardly, I think, be taken as including the woodland in which the flocks fed in summer; and in May, when the _lustratio agri_ took place, they would be already off the winter pasture. In the formula for this _lustratio_ (141) Cato does include the _pastores_ and _pecua_; but they are not the most conspicuous objects of the prayer, and I am inclined to think that they are mentioned only as belonging to the farm, though not at the moment within its sacred boundary.

[121] Plin. _N. H._ xvii. 266, xxviii. 78.

[122] _Relig. u. Kultus_, p. 130.

[123] Varro, _L. L._ v. 143; Serv. _Aen._ v. 755 (from Cato); Plut. _Romulus_ x.

[124] Bücheler, _Umbrica_, p. 42 foll.

[125] Bücheler, _Umbrica_, p. 84 foll.

[126] Perhaps, too, the scramble for the horse’s head between two divisions of the population was objectionable in their eyes.

[127] _Relig. u. Kultus_, p. 131. On the same day there was a sacrifice to that fortis dea, Nerio without doubt, who was in some unknown sense the consort of Mars (Ovid, _Fasti_ iii. 849).

[128] Farnell, _Evolution of Religion_, p. 136.

[129] _De Nat. Deorum_, ii. 36. 82.

ERRATA

_The author of the first lecture, being out of England, could not correct the proof; the following corrections should be made_:--

Page 10, line 11, _for_ produce in _read_ produce on " 14, line 6, _for_ Cairoan _read_ cavern " 16, line 7, _for_ palus _read_ palm " 27, line 24, _for_ act _read_ art " 28, lines 11, 13, _for_ by its ... feature _read_ by ... features " 40, line 1, _for_ in _read_ on

_Anthropology and the Classics._

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Old or antiquated spellings have been preserved.

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