Chapter 3

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 röm. 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; Bücheler, _Umbrica_, p. 136.

[178] The details are fully set forth in Marquardt, _Röm. Privataltertümer_, 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 Wünsch). 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] Hülsen-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 Blätter_, 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 études 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. Döllinger (_The Gentile and the Jew_, vol. ii. p. 72) with his usual insight was inclined to see in this Flamen the "ruins of an older system of ceremonial ordinances."

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

LECTURE VI

THE DIVINE OBJECTS OF WORSHIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ipse deum tibi me claro demittit Olympo regnator, caelum ac terras qui numine torquet.

Or in the fourth _Eclogue_ (47)--

concordes stabili fatorum numine Parcae,

where Servius explains it as "potestate, divinatione, ac maiestate." But beyond doubt this use is a product of the literary age, and the word originally indicated the being himself who exercised the will--a sense familiar to us in the opening lines of the _Aeneid_ ("quo numine laeso") and in innumerable other passages. Thus von Domaszewski in his collected papers (p. 157) is undoubtedly right in defining a _numen_ as a being with a will--"ein wollendes Wesen"; though his account of its evolution, and of the way in which in its turn it may produce a _deus_, may be open to criticism.

The word thus suggests that the Roman divine beings were functional spirits with will-power, their functions being indicated by their adjectival names. Proper names they had not as a rule, but they are getting cult-titles under the influence of a priesthood, which titles may in time perhaps attain to something of the definiteness of substantival names. This indeed could hardly have been so in the mind of the ordinary Roman even at a later age; and it is quite possible that if an intelligent Greek traveller of the sixth century B.C. had given an account of the gods of Rome,[225] he would have said, as Strabo said of an Iberian people in the time of Augustus, that they were without gods, or worshipped gods without names. But the name, even as a cult-title, is of immense importance in the development of a spirit into a deity, and in most cases, at any rate at Rome, it was the work of officials, of a state priesthood, not of the people. To address a deity rightly was matter of no small difficulty: how were you to know how he would wish to be addressed? Servius tells us that the pontifices addressed even Jupiter himself thus: "Iupiter optime maxime, _sive quo alio nomine te appellari volueris_." On the other hand, in the same comment he tells us that "iure pontificio cautum est, ne suis nominibus di Romani appellarentur, ne exaugurari possent," _i.e._ lest they should be enticed away from the city by enemies. This last statement seems indeed to me to be a doubtful one,[226] but it will serve to illustrate the nervousness about divine names, of which there is no doubt whatever. We know for certain that those religious lawyers the pontifices were greatly occupied with the task of drawing up lists of names by which _numina_ should be invoked,--formularising the ritual of prayer, as we shall see in another lecture; and this must have become at one time almost a craze with them, to judge by the lists of Indigitamenta preserved in their books, to which Varro had access, and which were copied from him by St. Augustine.[227] But after all it needed the stimulus given by actual contact with a polytheistic system to turn a Roman numen into a full-fledged personal deity: the pontifices might carry the process some way, but they never could have completed it themselves without the help of the Greeks.

One deity seems to stand alone in the list--Tellus or Terra Mater, Mother Earth.[228] We are coming directly to the great deity of the heaven, and we might naturally expect that an agricultural folk would be much concerned with her who is his counterpart among so many peoples. She does not give her name to any of the festivals of the calendar; but at one of them, the Fordicidia in April, at a time when the earth is teeming with mysterious power, and when the festivals are of a peculiarly agricultural character, she has her own special sacrifice--a pregnant cow, whose young are torn from her womb, burnt by the _Virgo vestalis maxima_, and their ashes used in certain mystic rites, _e.g._ at the Parilia which followed on the 21st.[229] She seems to have had her function in human life as well; but about this we are much in the dark in spite of Dieterich's attempts to elucidate it in his _Mutter Erde_.[230] Whether she played a part at the birth of a child we cannot be sure; but at marriage there is little doubt that she was originally an object of worship, though in later days she gave way before Ceres and Juno.[231] And as at death the body was laid in her embrace, we are not surprised to find her prominent here also: she was the home of the dead whether buried or burnt, and of the whole mass of the Manes. We shall presently see how a Roman commander might devote himself and the whole army of the enemy to Tellus and the Manes; and it is interesting to find that a similar formula of _devotio_, of later date, combines Tellus with Jupiter, the speaker touching the ground when he mentions her name, and holding his hands upwards to heaven when he names the god.[232] Very curious, too, is the rite of the _porca praecidanea_, which in historical times was offered to Ceres as well as Tellus immediately before harvest; in case a man had wittingly or unwittingly omitted to pay the proper rites (_iusta facere_) to his own dead, it was his duty to make this offering, lest as a result of the neglect the earth-power should not yield him a good harvest.[233] Originally, we need hardly doubt, Tellus was alone concerned in this; but Ceres, who at all times represented rather the ripening and ripened corn than the seed in the bosom of the earth, gradually took her place beside her, and the idea gained ground that the offering was more immediately concerned with the harvest than with the Manes.[234] When Cato wrote his book on agriculture, he included in it the proper formula for this sacrifice, without any indication that Tellus or the Manes had any part in the business.[235] Tellus was not a deity whose life would be vigorous in a busy City-state destined gradually to lose its agricultural outlook; there the supply of grain, from whatever quarter it might come, was a far more important matter than the process of producing it, and it was natural that Ceres and her April festival should become more popular than Tellus and her Fordicidia, and that the Cerealia should eventually develop into _ludi_ of no less than eight days' duration. Yet Tellus survived in such forms as that of the _devotio_; and even under the Empire we find her as Terra on sepulchral monuments, _e.g._--

ereptam viro et matri mater me Terra recepit,

or

terra mater rerum quod dedit ipsa teget.

And there is a curious story, noticed by Wissowa and by Dieterich after him, that on the death of Tiberius the plebs shouted not only "Tiberius in Tiberim," but "Terram matrem deosque Manes," in order that his lot might be among the _impii_ beneath the earth.[236]

So far we have met with nothing to suggest that the Roman idea of divinity had passed much beyond an advanced type of animism; we have found little or no trace of personal deities of a polytheistic cast. There is, however, a fact of importance now to be considered, which has some bearing upon this difficult subject. Some of the _numina_ of the calendar had special priests attached to their cults; _e.g._ among those I have already mentioned, Volcanus, Furrina, Portunus, and Volturnus, to which we may now add Pales, Flora, Carmenta, Pomona, and a wholly unknown deity, Falacer. These nine all had flamines, a word which is generally derived from _flare_, _i.e._ they were the kindlers of the sacrificial fire.[237] Sacrificing priests they undoubtedly always were, each limited to the sacrificial rites of a particular cult, unless authorised by religious law to undertake those of some other deity whose name he did not bear, and who was destitute, like Robigus, of a priest of his own.[238] We have no certain evidence that all these flamines were of high antiquity; but those attached to deities of the calendar were probably of earlier origin than that document, and as we have no record of the creation of a new flaminium in historical times until the era of Caesar-worship, it is fair to conclude that the others I have mentioned were not younger.

Now what bearing has this fact on the question as to how the early Romans conceived the objects of their worship? There are, of course, so-called priests all the world over, even among the lowest fetishistic and animistic peoples, who exercise power over the various kinds of spirits by potent charms and spells; these should rather be called wizards, medicine-men, magicians, and so on.[239] But the flamines as we know them were not such; they were officials of a State, entrusted with the performance of definite ritualistic duties, more particularly with sacrifice, and therefore, as we may assume from universal Roman practice so far as we know it, also with prayer. If they did not actually slay the victims themselves--and in historical times this was done by an assistant--they superintended the whole process and were responsible for its correct performance.[240] Does the existence of such priests come into relation with the development of the idea of a _deus_ out of a numen or a spirit? What is the influence of the sacrificing priest on the divinity whom he serves? This last is a question to which it is not easy to find a ready answer; the history of priesthood, and of the moral and intellectual results of the institution, has yet to be written. Even Dr. Westermarck, in his recently published great work on the development of moral ideas, has little to say of it. It is greatly complicated by the undoubted fact that among many peoples, perhaps to some extent even among the Latins, the earliest real priests had a tendency to personate the deity themselves, to be considered as the deity, or in some sense divine.[241] But in regard to Roman priests we may, I think, go at least as far as this. When a spirit was named and localised as a friendly being at a particular spot within the walls of the city, which is made over to him, and where he has his _ara_; when the ritual performed at this spot is laid down in definite detail, and undertaken by an individual appointed for this purpose by the head of the community with solemn ceremony; then the spirit, hitherto but vaguely conceived, must in course of time become individualised. The priestly if not the popular conception of him is fixed; there is now no question who he is or how he should be called; "quis deus incertum est"[242] can no longer be said of him. Once provided with a flamen and an ordered cult of sacrifice and prayer, I conceive that he had now in him the possibility of turning into a _deus_ personally conceived, if he came by the chance.[243] A few did get the chance; others did not; Volcanus, for example, became a god after the model of the Greek Hephaestus, while Volturnus remained a numen and made no further progress, though he was doubtless ready to "take" the Graecising epidemic when it came. I do not say that he or any other numen was the better for the change. But I must not now pursue the story of this strange double fate of the old Roman deities; I have perhaps said enough to show that city life, with its priesthoods and its ordered ritual, had some appreciable effect on the deities who were admitted to it.

Among these deities there were four of whom I have as yet said nothing at all, though they are the most famous of all the divine inhabitants of Rome. I have mentioned nine flamines; there were in all twelve, and besides these there was in historical times a priest known as the _rex sacrorum_, the republican successor to some of the religious functions of the civil king. This rex, and the three _flamines maiores_, so called in contra-distinction to the other nine, were specially attached to the cults of Janus, Jupiter (_Flamen Dialis_), Mars (_Flamen Martialis_), and Quirinus (_Flamen Quirinalis_). I have kept these deities apart from the others already mentioned, not only because their priests stand apart from the rest, but because they themselves seem from the first to have been more really gods (_dei_); Quirinus is the only one who has an adjectival name. Two of them, Jupiter and Mars, remained throughout Roman history of real importance to the State, and in Jupiter there were at least some germs of possible development into a deity capable of influencing conduct and enforcing morality. Of Janus this cannot possibly be said; and as he is historically the least important of the four, I will begin by saying a few words about him as a puzzle and a curiosity only.

Janus, ever since he ceased to be an intelligible deity, has been the sport of speculators; and this happened long before the Roman religion came to an end. In the last century B.C. philosophic writers about the gods got hold of him, and Varro tells us that some made him out to be the heaven, others the universe (_mundus_).[244] Ovid amused himself with this uncertainty of the philosophers, and in the first book of his _Fasti_ "interviewed" the god, whose answers are unluckily of little value for us.[245] At various times and in different hands Janus has been pronounced a sun-god, a heaven-god, a year-god, a wind-god; and now a Cambridge school of speculators, to whose learning I am in many ways indebted, has claimed him as an oak-god, the mate of Diana, the Jupiter of aboriginal Latium, and so on.[246] We have fortunately long left behind us the age when it was thought necessary to resolve the Greek and Roman gods into personifications of natural phenomena, and to try to explain all their attributes on one principle; but my learned friends at Cambridge have of late been showing a tendency to return to methods not less dangerous; they hanker, for example, after etymological evidence, which in the case of deities is almost sure to be misleading unless it is absolutely certain, and supported by the history of the name. This is unluckily not the case with Janus; his etymology is matter of dispute,[247] and he is therefore open, and always will be so, to the inquirer who is hunting a scent, and more concerned to prove a point than to discover what the early Romans really thought about a god. In this lecture I am but humbly trying to do this last, and I may therefore leave etymology, with the mythology and philosophy of a later age, and confine myself to such facts of the cult of Janus as are quite undisputed. They will admit of being put together very shortly.

The first and leading fact is that Janus was the first deity to be addressed in all prayers and invocations; of this we have abundant evidence, as also of the corresponding fact that Vesta came last.[248] Secondly, we know that he was the object of worship on the Kalends of January, and probably of every month, and that the sacrificing priest was in this case the _rex sacrorum_. Thirdly, we know that he had no temple until the year 260 B.C., but that he was associated with the famous gateway at the north-east end of the Forum--not a gate in the wall, but a symbolic entrance to the heart of the city, as the round temple of Vesta at the opposite end, with its eternal fire, was symbolic of the common life of the community. Fourthly, we know a few cult-titles of Janus, among them Clusius (or Clusivius), and Patulcius, in which the connection with gates is obvious; Junonius, which may have originated in the fact that Juno also was worshipped on the Kalends; Matutinus, which seems to be a late reference to the dawn as the opening or gate of the day, and Quirinus, which last is also almost certainly of late origin. Clusius and Patulcius are genuine old titles, if the text of the Salian hymn is rightly interpreted; so too is another, Curiatius, for it was used of the god only as residing in an ancient gateway near the Subura called the _tigillum sororium_.[249] These are all the most important facts we have to go upon; the double head of Janus on the earliest Roman _as_ is of uncertain origin, and Wissowa seems to have conclusively shown that this representation was not admitted to the gate called Janus Geminus until towards the close of the republican period.[250] The connection of the god with the fortress on the hill across the Tiber, which still bears his name, admits of no quite satisfactory explanation.

Now if we recall the fact that the entrance to the house and the entrance to a city were points of great moment, and the cause of constant anxiety to the early Italian mind, we may naturally infer that they would be in the care of some particular numen, and that his worship would be in the care of the head of the family or community--in the case of the city, in the care of the _rex_, whose duties of this kind were afterwards taken over by the priest called _rex sacrorum_. The fact that the word for an entrance was _ianus_ confirms this conjecture; Janus was perhaps the spirit guarding the entrance to the real wall of the earliest city, but when the city was enlarged in the age from which the calendar dates, a symbolic gateway was set up where you entered the forum from the direction of Latium, answering to the symbolic hearth in the _aedes Vestae_, and this very naturally took the name of the deity associated with entrances. Two other _iani_ probably existed in the forum, and the name was later on transferred as a substantive to similar objects in Roman colonies, while a feminine form, _ianua_, came to be used for ordinary house entrances.[251] Whether there ever was a cult of the god at the real gateway of a city we do not know; there was none at the symbolic gateway of Rome, which was in no sense a temple. But the idea of entrance stuck to the old spirit of the doorway long after the reconstruction of the city, and the rex now sacrifices to him on the entrance-day of each month, and more particularly on the entrance-day of the month which bears his name and is the beginning of the natural year after the winter solstice. This is the best account to be had of the original Janus,[252] a deity, let it be remembered, of a simple agricultural and warlike people, without literature or philosophy. But it is not difficult to see how, when philosophy and literature did at last come in a second-hand form to this people, they might well have overlaid with cobwebs of story and speculation a deity for whom they had no longer any real use, who was best known to them by the mysterious double-head on the _as_ and the gateway, and for whom they could find no conclusive parallel among the gods of Greece.

Next in order of invocation to Janus came Jupiter, and his priest, the Flamen Dialis, was likewise the second in rank, according to ancient rule, after the _rex sacrorum_. Unlike Janus, Jupiter (to use the spelling familiar in England) was at all times a great power for the Roman people, and one who could be all the more valued because he was intelligible. No one doubted then, and no one doubts now, that he was the god of the light and of heaven, _Diovis pater_, or rather perhaps the heaven itself[253] with all its manifestations of rain and thunder, of blessing and damage to the works of man; the common inheritance of the Italian peoples, dwelling and worshipped in their woods and on their hills; and, as we know now, also the common inheritance of all Aryan stocks, the "European Sky-god," as Mr. A. B. Cook has traced him with learning and ingenuity from the Euxine to Britain.[254]

Jupiter must have had a long and important history in Latium before the era of the Roman City-state; Dr. Frazer has seen this, and set it forth in his lectures on the early history of the kingship, though basing his conclusions on evidence much of which will not bear a close examination.[255] The one substantial proof of it lies in the unique and truly extraordinary character of the taboos placed on his flamen, and to some extent on the flamen's wife, by the Roman _ius divinum_. Even if we suppose that some of these may have been later inventions of an ecclesiastical college like the pontifices (and this is hardly probable), many of them are obviously of remote antiquity, and can only have originated at a time when the magical power of the man responsible for the conduct of Jupiter was so precious that it had to be safeguarded in these many curious ways. I have already suggested that the scene of the early paramount importance of Jupiter and his flamen, in that age perhaps a king of some kind, was Alba Longa, which by universal tradition was the leading city of Latium before Rome rose to importance, and where the sky-god was worshipped on his holy mountain as the religious centre of Latium from the earliest times. I have also suggested that when the new warlike city on the Tiber took the place of Alba, the worship was transferred thither, but lost its strength in the process, and that the flamen was little more than a survival even in the most primitive period of what we may call for the moment Roman history. This can be accounted for by the fact that the traditions of primitive Rome were connected much more closely with Mars than with Jupiter. Not till Etruscan kings founded the great temple on the Capitol, which was to endure throughout all later ages of Roman dominion, did the sky-god become the supreme guardian deity of his people, under the titles of Optimus Maximus, the best and greatest of all her deities.

But Jupiter was there; and we know certain facts of his cult which give us a pretty clear idea of what the Romans of the pre-Etruscan period thought about him. In the calendar all Ides belonged to him, were _feriae Iovis_;[256] he seems to be the source of light, whether of sun or moon, for neither of which the Romans had any special divinity; in the hymn of the Salii he is addressed as Lucetius, the giver or source of light. The festivals of the vintage belonged to him, since the production of wine specially needed the aid of sun and light, and his flamen was employed in the cult on these occasions.[257] When rain was sorely needed, the aid of the sky-god was sought under the cult-title Elicius, and as Fulgur or Summanus[258] he was the Power who sent the lightning by day and by night. The ideas thus reflected in the Roman cult were common to all Italian peoples of the same stock; everywhere we find him worshipped on the summits of hills, and in woods of oak, ilex, or beech,[259] where nothing but the trees he loved intervened between the heaven and the earth.

His oldest cult at Rome was on the Capitoline hill, but at all times quite distinct from that which became so famous afterwards; he was known here as Feretrius, a cult-title of which the meaning is uncertain,[260] and here, so far as we can guess, there must have been an ancient oak regarded either as the dwelling of the numen or as the numen himself, upon which Romulus is said to have hung the _spolia opima_ taken from the king of the Caeninenses;[261] here we may see the earliest trace of the triumphal procession that was to be. Doubtless an _ara_ was here from the first, and then followed a tiny temple, only fifteen feet wide as Dionysius describes it from personal knowledge in the time of Augustus,[262] who restored it. There was no image of the god, but in the temple was kept a _silex_, probably a stone celt believed to have been a thunderbolt;[263] this stone the Fetiales took with them on their official journeys, and used it in the oath, _per Iovem lapidem_, with which they ratified their treaties. As the Romans thought of Jupiter, not as a personal deity living in the sky like Zeus, but rather as the heaven itself, so they could think of him as immanent in this stone, _Iuppiter lapis_. And the use of the flint in treaty-making suggests another aspect of the god, which he retained in one way or another throughout Roman history; it is his sanction that is called in to the aid of moral and legal obligations, resulting from treaties, oaths, and contracts such as that of marriage. As Dius Fidius he was invoked in the common Roman oath _medius fidius_; as Farreus (if this were an old cult-title) he gave his sanction to the solemn contract entered into in the ancient form of marriage by _confarreatio_, where his flamen had to be present, and where in all probability the cake of _far_ was eaten as a kind of sacrament by the parties to the covenant.[264] In much of this it is tempting to see, as we can see nowhere else in the Roman religion, faint traces of a feeling about the heaven-god brought from a remote pastoral life under the open sky, where neither forest nor mountain intervened to shelter man from the great Presence;[265] and it is also tempting to think that there was here, even for Latins who had learnt to worship Jupiter under the form of stocks and stones in the land of their final settlement, some chance of the development of a deity "making for righteousness."

Third and fourth in the order of invocation came Mars and Quirinus, and the same order held good for their flamines. These two priests may have been subject to some of the taboos which restricted the Flamen Dialis;[266] they too, that is, may have been to some extent precious, and have been endowed in a lost period of history with magical powers; but if so, the memory and importance of such disabilities was rapidly forgotten in the City-state, and they were early allowed to fill civil offices, a privilege which the Dialis did not attain till the second century B.C.[267] Of the sacrificial duties of the Martialis we know nothing for certain, and can get no help from him as to the ideas of the early Romans about their great deity Mars.

Mars is in some ways the most interesting of all the Roman deities; but except as the familiar war-god of Roman history he remains a somewhat doubtful conception. Like Jupiter and Janus he has attained to a real name; but of that name, which in various forms is still so often on our lips, no convincing account has ever been given. Comparative mythology used to be much occupied with him, and he has been compared with Indra, Apollo, Odin, and others. But as M. Reinach said, it is time to attend more closely to differences; and Mars seems to stand best by himself, as a genuine Italian religious conception. His name is found all over ancient Italy in various forms--Mavors, Mamers, Marmor, and as Cerfus Martius at Iguvium. His wild and warlike character, his association with the wolf and the spear, seem to suggest the struggle for existence that must have gone on among the tribes that pushed down into a peninsula of rugged mountain and dense forest, abounding with the wolves which are not yet wholly extinct there. Whether or no his antecedents are to be found in other lands, we shall not be far wrong in assuming that the Roman Mars was the product of life and experience in Italy, and Italy only.

There is an excellent general account of him in Roscher's article in his _Lexicon_, which, like that on Janus, has the advantage of being the result of a second elaborate study, free from the enticements of the comparative method. What we know for certain about his cult at Rome in early times can be very briefly stated. First, we have the striking fact that he is conspicuous, together with the Lares, in the _carmen_ which has come down to us as sung by the Arval Brethren in their lustration of the cultivated land of the Roman city:[268] "Neve luerve Marmor sins incurrere in pleores, satur fu fere Mars!" One is naturally inclined to ask how this wild and warlike spirit can have anything to do with cultivation and crops. But there is no mistake; the connection is confirmed by the fact that he is also the chief object of invocation in the private _lustratio_ of the farm, which Cato has preserved for us.[269] In each case the victims are the same, the _suovetaurilia_ of ox, sheep, and pig, the farmer's most valuable property. Again, let us remember that the month which bears his name is that not only of the opening of the war season, but of the springing up of vegetation, and that the dances and singing of the Salii at this time may probably have been meant, like similar performances of savage peoples,[270] to frighten away evil demons from the precious cultivated land and its growing produce, and to call on the Power to wake to new life. The clue to the mystery is perhaps to be found in the cult-title Silvanus which we find in the prayer set down by Cato as proper for the protection of the cattle when they are on their summer pasture (_in silva_): "Marti Silvano in silva interdius in capita singula boum facito."[271] We know that wealth in early Italy consisted chiefly of sheep and cattle; we know that these were taken in the warm months, as they still are, into the forest (_saltus_) to feed;[272] and from this passage of Cato we know that Mars was there. It is only going one step farther if we conjecture that Mars, like Silvanus, who may have been an offshoot of his own being, was for the early settler never a peaceful inhabitant of the farm or the dwelling, but a spirit of the woodland of great importance for the cattle-owner, and of great importance, too, in all circumambulation of the boundaries which divided the woodland from the cultivated land.[273]

But with conjecture I deal on principle but sparingly. It is time to turn to the Mars of the City-state of Rome; and it is at once interesting to find that until the age of Augustus, who introduced a new form of Mars-worship, he had no temple within the walls, and even outside only two _fana_, one an altar in his own field the Campus Martius, the other a temple dedicated in 388 B.C. outside the Porta Capena. "He was always worshipped outside the city," says Dr. J. B. Carter in his _Religion of Numa_, "as a god who must be kept at a distance." Should we not rather say that the god was unwilling to come within those sacred boundaries encircling the works of man? So stated, we may see in this singular fact a reminiscence of the time when Mars was really the wild spirit of the "outland," where wolves and human enemies might be met with; he was perhaps in some sense a _hostis_, a stranger, like the many other deities originally strange to Rome who, until the second Punic war, were never allowed to settle within the sacred precincts.[274] In one sense, however, Mars was actually resident in the very heart of the city. In a _sacrarium_ or chapel of the regia,[275] the ancient dwelling of the king, were kept the spears and shields which the Salii carried in their processions in March and October; and that the deity was believed to be there too must be inferred from the fact, if it be correctly stated by Servius, that the consul who was about to take the field entered the chapel and shook these spears and shields together, saying, "Mars vigila." I am, however, rather disposed to think that this practice belongs to a time when Mars was more distinctly recognised as a god of war, and when the weapons of the Salii were thought of rather as symbols of his activity than as objects in which he was immanent.[276]

These are the salient facts in the oldest cult of Mars, and they are entirely in keeping with all we know of the early history and economy of the Roman people--a people economically dependent on agriculture, and especially on cattle-breeding, living in settlements in the midst of a wilder country, and constantly liable to the attacks of enemies who might raid their cattle and destroy their crops. I do not see in him only a deity of agriculture, or only a god of war; in my view he is a spirit of the wilder regions, where dwell the wolf and woodpecker which are connected with him in legend: a spirit who dwells on the outskirts of civilisation, and can with profit be propitiated both for help against the enemies beyond, and for the protection of the crops and cattle within, the boundaries of human activity.

Fourth in invocations came Quirinus, and fourth in order of precedence was his flamen. But of Quirinus I need say little; there is, on the whole, a consensus of opinion that he was a form of Mars belonging to the community settled on the hill that still bears his name. The most convincing proof of his identity with Mars (though identity is doubtless too strong a word) lies in the well-known fact that there were twelve Salii Collini, _i.e._ belonging to the Collis Quirinalis, occupied with the cult of Quirinus, answering to the twelve Salii Palatini of the cult of Mars. "Quid de ancilibus vestris," Camillus says in Livy's glowing rhetoric, "Mars Gradive (the particular cult-title of the warlike Mars), tuque Quirine pater?"[277] Now the Quirinal was, of course, _within_ the walls, and the Romans who identified the two deities noted this point of contrast with the Mars-cult; for Servius writes, "Quirinus est Mars qui praeest paci et _intra civitatem_ colitur, nam belli Mars _extra civitatem_ templum habet." In keeping with this is the use of the word Quirites of the Romans in their civil capacity; but unluckily we are altogether uncertain as to the etymology and history of both Quirites and Quirinus.[278] And as Quirinus never became, like Mars, an important property of the Roman people, but was speedily obscured and only revived by the legend of late origin which identified him with Romulus, he is not of importance for my subject, and I may leave him to etymologists and speculators.

There is one other deity of whom I might naturally be expected to say something; I mean Juno. But our familiarity with Juno in Roman literature must not be allowed to lead us into believing too rashly that she was one of those great _numina_ of the early Roman State with whom I have just been dealing. She had no special festival in the calendar;[279] her connection with the Kalends she shared, as we have seen, with Janus. She had no special priest of her own; for in spite of all assertions that the flaminica Dialis was attached to her cult, I am convinced that I was right some years ago in maintaining that this is an error, though a natural one.[280] It cannot be proved that she had any ancient temple in the city; for the oldest known to us as strictly indigenous, that of Juno Moneta on the arx, was not dedicated till 344 _B.C._, and we do not know that there was an older altar on the same spot.[281] Assuredly Rome was not in early times a great centre of the Juno cult, as were some of the cities in her neighbourhood, _e.g._ Lanuvium, Falerii, and Veii;[282] and the gradual establishment of her position as a truly Roman goddess may be explained by her appearance in the trias of deities in the Capitoline temple at the end of the regal period, and by the removal to Rome of Juno Regina of Veii still later, after the destruction of that city.

What, then, was Juno originally to the Roman religious mind? There is no more difficult question than this in our whole subject; as we probe carefully in those dark ages she baffles us continually. Undoubtedly she was a woman's deity, and we may aptly say of her "varium et mutabile semper femina." The most singular fact we know about her cult is that women used to speak of their Juno as men spoke of their Genius;[283] and it is not by any means impossible that this may be the clue to the original Italian conception of her.[284] In that case we should have to explain her appearance as a well-defined goddess in so many Latin towns, as the anthropomorphising result of that penetration of Greek ideas into Latium from the south, of which I shall have something to say later on. Such ideas, when they reached Rome, may have produced the notion that she was the consort of Jupiter, for which I must confess that I can find no sufficient evidence in the early cult of either.[285] But I must here leave her, for in truth she does not belong to this lecture; and it would need at least one whole lecture to discuss her adequately in all her later aspects. The latest German discussion of her occupied sixty closely printed pages; and instructive as it was in some ways, arrived at the apparently impossible conclusion that she was a deity of the earth.

Last in the order of invocation, even to the latest days of Rome, came Vesta, "the only female deity among the highest gods of the most ancient State,"[286] for Juno can hardly be reckoned among them, and Tellus had no special cult or priesthood of her own. We have already noticed Vesta as the religious centre of the house, making it into a _home_ in a sense almost more vivid than that in which we use the sacred word. Through all stages of development from house to city this religious centre must have been preserved, and in the Rome of historical times Vesta was still there, inherent in her sacred hearth-fire, which was tended by her six virgin priestesses, and renewed on the Roman New Year's day (March 1) by the primitive method of friction.[287] The Vestals beyond doubt represented the unmarried daughters of the primitive Latin family, and the _penus Vestae_, a kind of Holy of Holies of the Roman State, recalled the _penus_ or store-closet of the agricultural home; this _penus_ was cleansed on June 15 for the reception of the first fruits of the harvest, and then closed until June 7 of the following year.[288] These and other simple duties of the Vestals, all of them traceable to the old life on the farm, together with their own sex and maidenhood, preserved this beautiful cult throughout Roman history from all contamination. Vesta in her _aedes_, a round dwelling which was never a temple in the technical sense, was represented by no statue, and her title of Mater never suggested to the true Roman worshipper anything but her motherly grace and beneficence.[289] Far more than any other cult, that of Vesta represents the reality and continuity of Roman religious feeling; and the remains of her latest dwelling, and the statues of her priestesses with no statue of herself among them, may still give the visitor to the Forum some dim idea of the spirit of Roman worship.[290]

NOTES TO LECTURE VI

[219] Arnobius (v. 155) fortunately mentions that this story came from the second book of Valerius Antias, whose bad reputation is well known. It was plainly meant to account for the cult-title of Jupiter Elicius, and the origin of the _procuratio fulminis_, and was invented by Greeks or Graecising Romans at a time (2nd century B.C.) when all reverence for the gods had vanished as completely as in Greece. Yet Dr. Frazer writes of Numa as "an adept at bringing down lightning from heaven" (_Early History of Kingship_, p. 204).

[220] On this subject, the evolution of the knowledge of God, I may refer to Professor Gwatkin's _Gifford Lectures_ of 1904-5, published by Messrs. T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh.

[221] The meaning of _deus_ is well put by Mr. C. Bailey in his sketch of _Roman Religion_ (Constable & Co.), p. 12.

[222] Guesses can be made about these, but little or nothing is to be learnt from them to help us in this lecture.

[223] I adhere to what was said in _R.F._ p. 312 foll. We do not know, and probably never shall know, the original deity concerned in that festival. The ritual is wholly unlike that of the _rustica Faunalia_ (_R.F._ p. 256 foll.). I believe that it dates from a time anterior to the formation of real gods--possibly from an aboriginal people who did not know any. (I am glad to see this view taken in the latest summary of German learning on this subject, _Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft_, by Gaercke and Norden, vol. ii. p. 262.) At the moment of printing an interesting discussion of the Lupercalia, by Prof. Deubner, who treats it as a historical growth, in which are embodied ideas and rites of successive ages, has appeared in _Archiv_ (1910, p. 481 foll.). See Appendix B.

[224] Wissowa, _R.K._ pp. 170 and 250 foll.

[225] Strabo, p. 164. Cp. Usener, _Götternamen_, p. 277, whose comment is, "Die Götter aller dieser Stämme waren 'namenlos,' weil sie nicht mit Eigennamen sondern durch Eigenschaftsworte benannt wurden. Für einen griechischen Reisenden vorchristlicher Zeit waren sie nicht fassbar." Arnobius iii. 43, Gellius ii. 28. 2 are good passages for the principle. The latter alludes to the anxiety of _veteres Romani_ on this point, "ne alium pro alio nominando falsa religione populum alligarent." Hence the formulae "si deus si dea," or "sive quo alio nomine fas est nominare," Serv. _Aen._ ii. 351; "quisquis es," _Aen._ iv. 576. See also Farnell, _Evolution of Religion_, 184 foll.; Dieterich, _Eine Mithrasliturgie_, p. 110 foll.

[226] Serv. _Aen._ ii. 351. I am inclined to think it is only an inference from the want of substantival names in so many Roman deities; surely, it would be argued, the pontifices must have had some reason for this. It is contradicted by the fact that in such ancient formulae as that of the _devotio_ (Livy viii. 9) the great gods are called by their own names, though the army was in the field and in presence of the enemy. There was, however, an old idea that the name of the special tutelary god of the city was never divulged, lest he should become _captivus_, and that the true name of the city itself was unknown; see Macrob. iii. 9. 2 foll. I believe that these ideas were encouraged by the pontifices, but were not founded on fact.

[227] For the Indigitamenta see below, p. 159; _R.F._ p. 341; R. Peter's able article in _Myth. Lex._, _s.v._ Scholars do not seem to me to have reckoned sufficiently with the tendency of a legal priesthood, devoted to the strict maintenance of religious minutiae, to elaborate and organise the material for god-making which was within their reach. To judge by the elaboration of the ritual at Iguvium, the same tendency must have existed in other kindred Italian communities, both to develop ritualistic priesthoods, and through them to elaborate the ritual. This is, I think, the weak point of Usener's reasoning in his _Götternamen_, and as applied to Roman deities it is the weak point of an interesting article by von Domaszewski, reprinted in his _Abhandlungen zur röm. Religion_, p. 155 foll.

[228] The best account of Tellus is in Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 159 foll.

[229] _R.F._ p. 71; Ovid, _Fasti_, iv. 631 foll. This was a festival of the populus as a whole, and also of each Curia, like the Fornicalia in February. Both were clearly agricultural in origin, though the Curia as we know it was probably an institution of the city. I must own that I am quite uncertain as to what the thing was which was originally meant by the word Curia; my friend Dr. J. B. Carter may have something to say on the subject in his book on the Roman religion in the Jastrow series.

[230] Dieterich, _Mutter Erde_, pp. 11 and 73 foll.

[231] Virg. _Aen._ iv. 166, "prima et Tellus et pronuba Iuno Dant signum"; commenting on which Servius wrote, "quidam sane etiam Tellurem praeesse nuptiis tradunt; nam et in auspiciis nuptiarum invocatur: cui etiam virgines, vel cum ire ad domum mariti coeperint, vel iam ibi positae, diversis nominibus vel ritu sacrificant." There is little doubt that Tellus is frequently concealed under the names of Ceres, Dea Dia, etc. For Ceres and Juno in marriage rites, see Marquardt, _Privatleben_, p. 49.

[232] See below, p. 206 foll.; Macrob. iii. 9. 11; Deubner in _Archiv_, 1905, p. 66 foll.

[233] See De Marchi, _La Religione_, _etc._, i. p. 188 and reff. (The reference to Gellius should be iv. 6. 7, not iv. 67.) Like some other operations of the Roman religion, this became a form, and was used as a kind of insurance, whether or no there had been any omission; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 160.

[234] That Ceres represented the _fructus_ is shown by the fact that in the XII. Tables the man who raided a field of standing corn at night was made _sacer_ to her; Pliny, _N.H._ xviii. 12.

[235] Cato, _R.R._ 134. De Marchi, _op. cit._ p. 135. Janus, Jupiter, and Juno are concerned in this rite, Ceres coming last. Varro has preserved the part of Tellus for us: "quod humatus non sit, heredi porca praecidanea suscipienda Telluri et Cereri, aliter familia non pura est" (_ap. Nonium_, p. 163).

[236] The verses are quoted by Dieterich, _Mutter Erde_, p. 75, among others from Buecheler's _Anthology of Roman Epitaphs_, Nos. 1544 and 1476. The story is told in Suetonius' _Life of Tib._ c. 75, and again of Gallienus by Aurelius Victor (_Caes._ c. 33).

[237] Marquardt, p. 326, who notes that the Romans themselves derived the word from _filum_, a fillet; _e.g._ Varro, _L.L._ v. 84, "quod in Latio capite velato erant semper, ac caput cinctum habebant _filo_." Modern etymologists equate the word with _Brahman_.

[238] Thus the Flamen Quirinalis sacrificed at the Robigalia, _R.F._ p. 89, and with the Pontifices and Vestals took part in the Consualia, Marq. 335.

[239] We may note here that the most general Latin name for a priest was _sacerdos_, which seems to have excluded all magic, etc.; it means an office sanctioned by the State. On the general question of the origin of priesthood see Jevons, _Introduction_, _etc._, ch. xx., with whose explanations, however, I cannot entirely agree. I should prefer to keep the word priest for an official who sacrifices and prays to his god. In this view I am at one with E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Altertums_, i.^2 p. 121 foll. God and priest go together as permanent, regular in function, and entrusted by a community with certain duties.

[240] Marquardt, p. 180; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 427. The popa or victimarius is seen in many artistic representations of sacrifice, _e.g._ Schreiber, _Atlas of Classical Antiquities_, plate xvii. figs. 1 and 3.

[241] Jevons, ch. xx.; Frazer, _G.B._ i. 245 foll., and _Lectures on Early History of Kingship_, Lectures ii. and v.

[242] Virg. _Aen._ viii. 352.

[243] In a valuable paper in his _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_ (p. 284) Wissowa says that "personal conception of deity is absolutely strange to the old Roman religion of the _di indigetes_." I believe this to be essentially true; but my point is that localisation and ritual prepared the way for the reception of Greek ideas of personality. The process had already begun in the religion of the house; but it was not likely there to come in contact with foreign germs. When Janus and Vesta, who were in every house (Wissowa, p. 285), were localised in certain points in a city, they would be far more likely to acquire personality, if such an idea came in their way, than in the worship of the family.

[244] Aug. _Civ. Dei_, vii. 28, "quem alii caelum, alii dixerunt esse mundum." Dr. Frazer, citing this passage (_Kingship_, p. 286) in support of his view that Janus was a duplicate of Jupiter, has omitted to notice that some theorisers fancied he was the _universe_, which by itself is enough to betray the delusive nature of this kind of theological speculation. Varro elsewhere gives us a clue to the liability of Janus to be exalted in this unnatural fashion, _L.L._ vii. 27, "divum deo" (in the Salian hymn), if this be taken as referring to Janus, as it may be, comparing Macrob. i. 9. 14. But this is easily explained by the position of Janus in prayers; cp. Cic. _Nat. Deor._ ii. 27. 67, "cum in omnibus rebus vim haberent maximam prima et extrema, principem in sacrificando Ianum esse voluerunt." The phrase "Deorum" or "Divum deus" is indeed remarkable, and unparalleled in Roman worship; but no one acquainted with Roman or Italian ritual will for a moment suspect it of meaning "God of gods" in either a Christian or metaphysical sense. I shall have occasion to notice the peculiar use of the genitive case and of genitival adjectives in worship later on. See below, p. 153 foll.

[245] _Fasti_, i. 89 foll.; _R.F._ p. 281 foll.

[246] Frazer, _l.c._ (a page of which every line appears to me to be written under a complete misapprehension of the right methods of research into the nature of Roman gods); A. B. Cook, _Classical Review_, vol. xviii. 367 foll.; Professor Ridgeway, _Who were the Romans?_ p. 12, where, among other remarkable statements, Janus is confidently said to have been introduced at Rome by the Sabine Numa, and therefore to have been a Sabine deity, an assumption quite irreconcilable with those of Dr. Frazer and Mr. Cook. In striking contrast with such speculations is a sensible paper on Janus in M. Toutain's _Études de mythologie et d'histoire_, p. 195 foll. (Paris, 1909).

[247] Dr. Frazer is aware of this; see his _Kingship_, p. 285, note 1. See also Roscher in _Myth. Lex._, _s.v._ "Janus," p. 45 foll.

[248] For the evidence for this and the following facts, see Roscher's article just cited, or Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 91 foll.; cp. _R.F._ p. 280 foll. The cult epithets of Janus are thus explained by von Domaszewski, _Abhandlungen_, p. 223, note 1, "Bei Ianus tritt regelmässig der Begriff des Wesens hinzu, dessen Wirkung er von Anfang an bestimmt, so I. Consevius der Anfang der in Consus wirkenden Kraft, und in derselbe Weise I. Iunonius, Matutinus," etc. This is reasonable, but it does not suit with I. Patulcius-Clusius, and I cannot accept it with confidence at present.

[249] Roscher, _op. cit._ p. 34.

[250] Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 284 foll.

[251] Festus, p. 185.

[252] It is due to the good sense and learning of Dr. Roscher; he had previously, when working on the old methods, tried to prove that Janus was a "wind-god" (_Hermes der Windgott_, Leipzig, 1878); but a more searching inquiry into the Roman evidence, when the prepossessions had left him which the comparative method is so likely to produce, brought him to the view I have explained in outline, which has been adopted in the main by Wissowa, Aust, and J. B. Carter, as well as by myself in _R.F._ The last word about so puzzling a deity can of course never be said; but if we indulge in speculations about him we must use the Roman evidence with adequate knowledge of the criticism it needs.

[253] This difference between Zeus and Jupiter has been pointed out by Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 100; Jupiter stands for the heaven even in classical Latin literature, as we all know.

[254] See his papers in the _Classical Review_, vol. xvii. 270 and xviii. 365 foll., and in _Folklore_, vol. xv. 301; xvi. 260 foll.

[255] _Kingship_, p. 196 foll.

[256] Macrobius i. 15. 14. In historical times a white victim, _ovis idulis_, was taken to the Capitol by the _via sacra_ in procession (Ov. _Fasti_, i. 56. 588). Festus says that some derived the term _via sacra_ from this procession (p. 290); and to this Horace may be alluding in _Ode_ iii. 30. 8, "dum Capitolium Scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex."

[257] _R.F._ pp. 86, 204.

[258] _R.F._ p. 160.

[259] No doubt Jupiter was specially connected with the oak, as Mr. Cook has shown with great learning in the paper cited above, note 36; but at Rome he had an ancient shrine among beeches, and was known as I. Fagutalis: Varro, _L.L._ v. 152; Paulus 87. For I. Viminalis, see _R.F._ p. 229.

[260] See Aust's article "Jupiter" in _Myth. Lex._ p. 673.

[261] Aust gives a cut of a coin of the consul Claudius Marcellus (223 B.C.) dedicating _spolia opima_ in this little temple, according to the ancient fashion, supposed to be initiated by Romulus, Livy i. 10.

[262] Dionys. Hal. ii. 34.

[263] _R.F._ p. 230.

[264] See De Marchi's careful investigation, _La Religione_, _etc._, i. p. 156 foll.; Gaius i. 112. The cult-title should indicate that the god was believed to be immanent in the cake of _far_, rather than that it was offered to him (so I should also take I. Dapalis, though in later times the idea had passed into that of sacrifice, Cato, _R.R._ 132), and if so, the use of the cake was sacramental; cp. the rite at the Latin festival, _R.F._ p. 96.

[265] There are distinct traces of a practice of taking oaths in the open air, _i.e._ under the sky; of Dius Fidius, unquestionably a form of Jupiter, Varro says (_L.L._ v. 66), "quidam negant sub tecto per hunc deiurare oportere." Cp. Plutarch, _Quaest. Rom._ 28; _R.F._ p. 138. For the conception of a single great deity as primitive, see Lang, _The Making of Religion_, ch. xii.; Flinders Petrie, _Religion of Egypt_ (in Constable's shilling series), ch. i.; Ross, _The Original Religion of China_, p. 128 foll.; Warneck, _Die Lebenskräfte des Evangeliums_, p. 20 (of the Indian Archipelago). The last reference I owe to Professor Paterson, of Edinburgh University.

[266] Serv. _Aen._ viii. 552, "more enim veteri sacrorum neque Martialis flamen neque Quirinalis omnibus caerimoniis tenebantur quibus flamen Dialis, neque diurnis sacrificiis distinebatur." It is, however, possible that under the word _caerimonia_ Servius is not here including taboos, but active duties only.

[267] See my paper, "The Strange History of a Flamen Dialis," in _Classical Review_, vol. vii. p. 193.

[268] Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ p. 26.

[269] Cato, _R.R._ 141; Henzen, _op. cit._ p. 48.

[270] Frazer, _G.B._ iii. 123, note 3; _R.F._ p. 40, for further examples. It may be worth while to point out here that the coupling of all farm animals except goats took place in spring or early summer; Varro, _R.R._ ii. 2 foll. Isidorus (_Orig._ v. 33), who embodies Varro and Verrius to some extent, derived the name Mars from _mares_, because in the month of March "cuncta animalia ad mares aguntur."

[271] I prefer, with De Marchi, to take Silvanus here as a cult-title, though we do not meet with it elsewhere; see _La Religione_, _etc._, p. 130 note; but Wissowa, who has a prejudice against the view that Mars was connected with agriculture, insists on taking Marti Silvano as a case of asyndeton, _i.e._ as two deities.

[272] See, _e.g._, Varro, _L.L._ v. 36, "quos agros non colebant propter silvas aut id genus, ubi pecus possit pasci, et possidebant, ab usu salvo saltus nominarunt."

[273] Cato, _R.R._ 141. Mars is there invoked as able to keep off (_averruncare_) evil influences and to make the crops grow, etc.; he has become in the second century B.C. a powerful deity in the actual processes of husbandry, just as he became in the city a powerful deity of war. But as he was not localised either on the farm or in the city, I prefer to think that he was originally conceived as a Power outside the boundary in each case, but for that very reason all the more to be propitiated by the settlers within it.

[274] See below, p. 235.

[275] So Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 131. Cp. _R.F._ p. 39, note 4. Deubner in _Archiv_, 1905, p. 75.

[276] Servius, commenting on line 3 of _Aen._ viii. (_utque impulit arma_) writes: "nam is qui belli susceperat curam, sacrarium Martis ingressus, primo ancilia commovebat, post hastam simulacri ipsius, dicens, Mars vigila." The mention of a statue shows that this account belongs to a late period. But Varro seems to have stated that there was originally only a spear; see a passage of Clement of Alexandria in the fragments of the _Ant. rer. div._, Agahd, p. 210, to which Deubner (_l.c._) adds Arnobius vi. 11. Deubner calls this spear a fetish, which is not the right word if the deity were immanent in it in the sense suggested by "Mars vigila." See above, p. 116. If Servius correctly reports the practice, it must be compared with the clashing of shields and spears by the Salii, which may thus have had a positive as well as negative object.

[277] Livy v. 52.

[278] Mr. A. B. Cook (_Classical Review_, 1904, p. 368) has tried to connect both names with the Greek word [Greek: prinos], and Professor Conway, quoted by him, is inclined to lend the weight of his great authority to the conjecture. Thus Quirinus would be an oak-god, and Quirites oak-spearmen. We must, however, remember that Mr. Cook is, so to speak, on an oak scent, and his keenness as a hunter leads him sometimes astray. One is a little perplexed to understand why Jupiter, Janus, Mars, and Quirinus should all be oak-gods (and all in origin identical as such!). On the other hand, it is fair to note that the original spear was probably of wood, with the point hardened in the fire, like the _hasta praeusta_ of the Fetiales: Festus, p. 101. If _quiris_ has really anything to do with oaks, it would be more natural to explain the two words as springing from an old place-name, Quirium, as Niebuhr did long ago, and to derive that again from the oaks among which it may have stood. But I am content to take _quiris_ as simply a spear, as Buecheler did; see Deubner, _op. cit._ p. 76. Since the above was written, the article "Quirinus" by Wissowa in the _Myth. Lex._ has appeared. Naturally it does not add anything to our knowledge; but Wissowa holds to the opinion that the most probable derivation of the name Quirinus is from Quirium, possibly the name of the settlement on the Quirinal; and compares _Q. pater_ (_e.g._ Livy v. 52. 7) with the _Reatinus pater_ of _C.I.L._ ix. 4676.

[279] The Nonae Caprotinae (July 7), the day when women sacrificed to Juno Caprotina under a wild fig-tree in the Campus Martius, is not known to us except from Varro. See _R.F._ p. 178, where (note 8) is a suggestion that the festival had to do with the _caprificatio_, or method of ripening the figs, which Dr. Frazer has expanded in his _Lectures on Kingship_, p. 270, believing the process to be that of fertilisation.

[280] _Classical Review_, vol. ix. p. 474 foll. The same view has recently been taken independently by W. Otto in _Philologus_, 1905, pp. 215 foll., 221. It is perfectly clear that the monthly sacrifice to Juno was the duty of the wife of the _rex sacrorum_; a pontifex minor is also mentioned (Macrob. i. 15. 19).

[281] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 116.

[282] _Ib._ p. 114.

[283] See Ihm's article "Iunones" in _Myth. Lex._ vol. ii. 615; Pliny, _N.H._ ii. 16.

[284] Dr. J. B. Carter tells me that he has abandoned this explanation of the evolution of Juno. On the other hand, von Domaszewski seems in some measure to accept it (_Abhandlungen_, p. 169 foll.), when he says that "similar functions, when exercised by different _numina_, can eventually produce a god. _Auf diese Weise ist Iuno geworden._" He means that the creative power is called Juno in a woman, or in a people (Iuno Populonia), or in the curiae (Iuno Curitis), and that an independent deity, Juno _par excellence_, emerges from all these. But so far I cannot follow him.

[285] There is no real evidence from purely Roman sources of this fancied conjugal or other relation, if we exclude that of the alleged cult of Juno by the Flaminica Dialis. This has been well seen and expressed by W. Otto, _l.c._ p. 215 foll.; see also _Classical Review_ as quoted above. As we shall see in the next lecture, Dr. Frazer is much concerned to show that Jupiter and Juno are actually a married pair, and consequently he will have nothing to do with my opinion on this point: _Early History of Kingship_, p. 214 foll., and _Adonis_, _Attis,_ _Osiris_, ed. 2, p. 410, note 1.

[286] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 141.

[287] Festus, p. 106; Macrob. i. 12. 6.

[288] I have discussed the Vestalia and the nature of Vesta and her cult in _R.F._ p. 145 foll. See also Marquardt, p. 336 foll., and Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 141 foll.

[289] Ovid, _Fasti_, vi. 296, says that he had been stupid enough to believe that there was a statue in the _aedes Vestae_, but found out his mistake:--

esse diu stultus Vestae simulacra putavi; mox didici curvo nulla subesse tholo.

The passage is interesting as showing how natural it was for a Roman of the Graeco-Roman period to suppose that his deities must be capable of taking iconic form. For anthropomorphic representations of Vesta in other places and at Pompeii, see Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 67 foll.

[290] See Lanciani, _Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome_, p. 223 foll. The statues of the _virgines vestales maximae_, discovered in the Atrium Vestae, all belong to the period of the Empire. They are now in the museum of the Baths of Diocletian.

LECTURE VII

THE DEITIES OF THE EARLIEST RELIGION: GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

In the last lecture we interrogated the calendar as to the deities whose festivals are recorded in it, with the aid of what we know of the most ancient priesthoods attached to particular cults. The result may be stated thus: we found a number of impersonal _numina_, with names of adjectival form, such as Saturnus, Vertumnus, and so on; others with substantival names, Tellus, Robigus, Terminus; the former apparently functional deities, concerned in the operations of nature or man, and the latter spirits immanent in objects--Mother Earth herself, a stone, the mildew, or (like Janus and Vesta) the entrance and the hearth-fire of human dwellings or cities. Lastly, we found from the evidence, chiefly of the priesthoods, that certain more important divinities stand out from the crowd of spirits, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and Vesta; and we found some reason to think that these, and possibly a few of the others, by becoming the objects of priestly _cura_ and _caerimonia_ at particular spots in the city, were not unlikely to become also in some sense personal deities, to acquire a quasi-human personality, if they came by the chance. In the present lecture I must go rather more closely into such evidence as we possess bearing on the mental conception which these early Romans had formed of the divine beings whom they had admitted within their city.

And, first, we must be quite clear that in those early ages there was nothing in Rome which we can call a temple, as we understand the word; nor was there any such representation of a deity as we can call an image or _eidolon_. The deities were settled in particular spots of ground, which were made _loca sacra_, _i.e._ handed over to the deity by the process of _consecratio_ authorised by the _ius divinum_.[291] It was matter of no moment what might be erected on this bit of ground; there might be a rude house like that of Vesta, round in shape like the oldest Italian huts; there might be a gateway like that of Janus; or the spot might be a grove, or a clearing within it (_lucus_), as in the case of Robigus or the Dea Dia of the Arval Brethren. All such places might be called by the general name _fanum_; and as a rule no doubt each _fanum_ contained a _sacellum_, _i.e._ a small enclosure without a roof, containing a little altar (_ara_). These "altars" may at first have been nothing more than temporary erections of turf and sods; permanent stone altars were probably a later development. Servius tells us that in later times it was the custom to place a sod (_caespes_) on the top of such a stone altar, which must be one of the many survivals in cult of the usages of a simpler age.[292]

With such spots as these we cannot associate anything in the nature of an image of the deity established there; and we have every reason to believe that no such thing was known at Rome until the Etruscan temple of the Capitoline trias was built near the end of the regal period. Varro expressly declared that the Romans remained for more than 170 years without any images of their gods, and added that those who first introduced such images "civitatibus suis et metum dempsisse et errorem addidisse."[293] What he had in his mind is clear; he had indeed no direct knowledge of those early times, but he is thinking of a definite traditional date in the kingly period--the last year of the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, who, according to Varro's own account, built the temple on the Capitol and placed in it a statue of Jupiter.[294] That was the oldest image of which he knew anything; and, as Wissowa has remarked, his belief is entirely corroborated by the fact that in every single case in which the image of a god has any part in his cult, it is always either this Capitoline Jupiter or some deity of later introduction and non-Roman origin. It is also borne out by another significant and interesting fact--that the next image to be introduced, that of Diana in the temple on the Aventine, was a copy of the [Greek: xoanon] of Artemis at Massilia, itself a copy of the famous one at Ephesus.[295] Let us note that these two earliest statues were placed in roofed temples which were the dwelling-places of gods in an entirely new sense; so far no Roman deity of the city had been so housed, because he could not be thought of in terms of human life, as visible in human form and needing shelter. But this later and foreign notion of divinity so completely took possession of the minds of the Romans of the cosmopolitan city that Varro is the only writer who has preserved the tradition of the older way of thinking. In the religion of the family Ovid indeed has charmingly expressed it, perhaps on the authority of some lost passage of Varro[296]:--

ante focos olim scamnis considere longis mos erat, et mensae credere adesse deos.

Tibullus in one passage has mentioned what seems to be some rude attempt to give outward shape and form to an ancient pastoral deity[297]:--

lacte madens illic suberat Pan ilicis umbrae et facta agresti lignea falce Pales.

And Propertius hints at a like representation of Vertumnus, the garden deity. But without some corroborative evidence it is hardly safe to take these as genuine examples of early iconic worship.

Thus we may take it as certain that even the greater deities of the calendar, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and Vesta, were not thought of as existing in any sense in human form, nor as personal beings having any human characteristics. The early Romans were destitute of mythological fancy, and as they had never had their deities presented to them in visible form, could hardly have invented such stories about them as sprang up in a most abundant crop when Greek literature and Greek art had changed their mental view of divinity. Roman legends were occupied with practical matters, with kings and the foundation of cities; and even among these it is hardly possible to detect those which may be really Roman, for they are hidden away, like rude ancient frescoes, under the elaborate decorations of the Greek artists, who seized upon everything that came to hand, including the old deities themselves, to amuse themselves and win the admiration of their dull pupils at Rome. He who would appreciate the difficulty of getting at the original rude drawings must be well acquainted with the decorative activity of the Alexandrian age.

Thus we might well presume _a priori_ that the old Roman gods were not conceived as married pairs, nor as having children; and this is indeed the conclusion at which we have arrived after half a century or more of most careful and conscientious investigation by a series of German scholars. But quite recently in this country the contrary view has been put forward by an author of no less weight than Dr. Frazer; and another eminent Cambridge scholar, Mr. A. B. Cook, evidently inclines to the same view. I should in any case be reluctant to engage in controversy with two valued personal friends; but it is just possible that in what follows I may be able to throw some faint light on the evolution of the idea of marriage among divine beings; and on the strength of this I am content for the moment to be controversial. Dr. Frazer's arguments, with strictures on my opinions, will be found in an appendix to his book on _Adonis,_ _Attis_, _Osiris_, 2nd edition.

In pure animism the spirits are nameless; when their residence and functions are more clearly recognised they acquire names, and these names are naturally masculine or feminine among peoples whose language is not genderless, as was the case with the Sumerians of Babylonia.[298] This would seem to be the first step on the path to a personal conception of divinity. But there are signs that the Romans had not got very far on this path when we begin to know anything about their religion. I have already alluded to the formula "Sive deus sive dea," which occurs in the ritual of the Fratres Arvales, in the formula given by Cato for making a new clearing, and elsewhere;[299] and indeed there seems to have been always some uncertainty about the sex of one or two well-known deities, such as Pales and Pomonus or Pomona.[300] It is not, therefore, _a priori_ probable that the process of personalisation (if I may coin the word) should have proceeded, at the period we are treating of, so far as to ascribe to these named deities of both sexes the characteristics of human beings in social life and intercourse. Yet Varro, as Dr. Frazer points out, is quoted by St. Augustine as saying that his ancestors (that is, as Augustine adds), "veteres Romanos," believed in the marriage of gods and in their procreative power.[301] If Varro wrote "maiores meos," as he seems to have done, of whom was he really thinking? Was Augustine's comment based on the rest of Varro's text, or was he jumping to a conclusion which would naturally serve his own purpose? Varro, of course, was not a Roman, but from Reate in the Sabine country. But even if he were thinking of Rome, how far back would his knowledge extend? The Romans had known Greek married gods for three or four centuries before his time, and he may quite well be thinking of these. Of the _di indigetes_ of an earlier period he could hardly know more than we do ourselves; his only sources of information were the facts of the cult and the books of the pontifices. The facts of the cult, so far as he and others have recorded them, suggest no pairing of deities, no "sacred marriage."[302] The pontifical books, which contained rules and formulae for the proper invocation of deities by their right names, do indeed seem to have suggested a certain conjunction of male and female divine names; and it is just possible that this is what Varro had in his mind when he wrote the passage seized upon by Augustine. I will proceed at once to examine this evidence, as it is incidentally of great interest in the history of Italian religion; and Dr. Frazer will probably allow that his conclusion must stand or fall by it.

The evidence to which I allude is preserved in the 13th book of the _Noctes Atticae_ of Aulus Gellius (ch. xxiii.), and extracted from "libri sacerdotum populi Romani," as "comprecationes deorum immortalium"; these also occur, he says, in _plerisque antiquis orationibus_, _i.e._ in the invocations to the gods made by the orator at the beginning or end of his speech.[303] Among these Gellius found the following conjunctions of divine names: Lua Saturni, Salacia Neptuni, Hora Quirini, Virites Quirini, Maia Volcani, Herie Iunonis, Moles Martis, and Neriene Martis, or Nerio Martis. Now among these conjunctions there are three which obviously do not express pairs of deities, married or other, viz. Virites Quirini, Moles Martis, and Herie Iunonis; the first two of which plainly mean the strength or force of Quirinus and Mars, and the third conjoins two female names. The question is whether the others are to be understood as giving us the names of the "wives" of Saturnus, Neptunus, Quirinus, Volcanus, and Mars. The fact that these are associated with others which cannot mean anything of the kind is itself against this conclusion; but I have carefully examined each pair by the light of such stray information about them as we possess, and have failed to find anything to suggest Dr. Frazer's emphatic conclusion that these are married pairs. I should be tedious if I were to go through the evidence in detail in a lecture like this; but I will take the pair which Gellius himself discusses, and on which Dr. Frazer chiefly relies, Neriene or Nerio Martis: it is the pair about which we know most, and in every way is the most interesting of the set.[304]

After giving the list of names, Gellius goes on to express his own opinion that _Nerio Martis_ means (like _Moles Martis_) the _virtus_ or _fortitudo_ of Mars, _Nerio_ being a Sabine word meaning strength or courage;[305] and a little further he sums up his view thus: "Nerio igitur Martis vis et potentia et maiestas quaedam esse Martis demonstratur." This seems to fit in very comfortably with what can be guessed of the meaning of two of the other pairs, Virites Quirini and Maia Volcani: Maia was explained by another Roman scholar as equivalent to Maiestas.[306]

But Gellius goes on to quote three passages from old Latin authors in which Nerio (or Neria) appears positively as the wife of Mars; and again concludes that there was also a tradition that these two were _coniuges_. Of these passages we luckily have the context of one, for it occurs in the _Truculentus_ of Plautus: turning this out (line 515) we find that a rough soldier, arriving at Athens, salutes his sweetheart with the words "Mars peregre adveniens salutat Nerienen uxorem suam"--words which Plautus must have adapted from his Greek original in such a way as to make them intelligible to a Roman audience. Gellius says that he had often heard a learned friend blame Plautus for thus putting a false notion about Mars (that he had a wife) into the mouth of his soldier--"nimis comice"--merely to produce a comic effect. But, he adds, there was some justification for it; for if you read the third book of the annals of Gellius (a namesake who lived in the second century B.C.) you will find that he puts into the mouth of Hersilia, pleading for peace before Ti. Tatius, words which actually make Nerio the wife of Mars: "De tui, inquit, coniugis consilio, Martem scilicet significans." Little, I fear, can be said to the credit of this Gellius;[307] he lived in an age when annalists were many and inventive, and long after the Romans had grown accustomed to Greek ideas of the gods; but we may take this passage as evidence of what may have been in his day a popular idea of Mars and his consort. Lastly, Aulus Gellius quotes a brace of lines from one Licinius Imbrex, an old comic writer of the same century, who, in a _fabula palliata_ called Neaera, wrote:--

nolo ego Neaeram te vocent, aut Nerienem, cum quidem Marti es in connubium data.

The real question is whether these passages from comic writers and an annalist of no reputation combine to prove that there was an ancient popular idea of Mars as a married god; as to the priestly view of the matter they can, of course, prove nothing. It seems to me that Dr. Frazer is entitled to argue that in the second century B.C. such a popular idea existed,[308] which the Roman state religion did not recognise, and which Aulus Gellius, as we have seen, could not agree with. I do not, however, think him entitled to go farther, and to infer that this was an idea of divinity native to Italy or of very old standing. Is it not much simpler to suppose, with a cool-headed scholar whom Dr. Frazer is willing to follow when it suits his turn, that pairs or conjunctions of this kind, the true meaning of which I hope to explain directly, were easily mistaken by the vulgar mind for married god and goddess?[309] In those degenerate days of the Roman religion, after the war with Hannibal, to which these writers belong--and all are later than Ennius, the first to make mischief by ridiculing the gods--nothing could be easier than to take advantage of what looked like married life to invent comic passages to please a Roman audience, now consisting largely of semi-educated men who had lost faith in their own religion, and of a crowd of smaller people of mixed descent and nationality. Such passages, in fact, cannot safely be used as evidence of religious ideas, apart from the tendencies of the age in which they were written. Had there really been religious beliefs, rooted in the old Roman mind, about the wedded life of gods and goddesses, it would even then have been dangerous to use them mockingly in comedy. And once more, had there been such genuinely Roman ideas, why, in an age that made for anthropomorphism, did they not find their way into the Roman Pantheon,--why did they survive only in literary allusions, to the bewilderment of scholars like Aulus Gellius?

The real explanation of these curious conjunctions of masculine and feminine names is, I think, not very hard to come by. Let us remember, in the first place, that they were found in the books of the priests, and that they belonged to forms of prayer--_comprecationes deorum immortalium_; in other words, they do not represent popular ideas of the deities, but ritualistic forms of invocation. As such they may indeed no doubt be regarded as expressing, or as growing out of, a popular way of thinking of the Power manifesting itself in the universe; but they are themselves none the less, like those strange lists of divine names called _Indigitamenta_, with which I shall deal directly, the creations of an active professional priesthood, working upon the principle that every deity must be addressed in precisely the correct way and no other, and accounting the name of the deity, as indicating his or her exact function, the most vitally important thing in the whole invocation. I have already pointed out how difficult the early Latin must have found it to discover how to address the _numina_ at work around him, and I shall return to the subject in another lecture; at present all I want to insist upon is that the priests of the City-state relieved him of this anxiety, and indeed must have carried the work so far as to develop a kind of science of divine nomenclature. Every one who has studied the history of religions knows well how strong the tendency is, when once invocation has become ritualised, for the names and titles of the objects of worship to abound and multiply. The Roman Church of to-day still shows this tendency in its elaborate invocation of the Virgin.

With the old Romans the common method of elaboration lay in the invention of cult-titles, of which the different kinds have been distinguished and explained by Dr. J. B. Carter in his treatise "de Deorum Romanorum cognominibus."[310] Most of them are suggestive of function or character, as, _e.g._, Janus Patulcius Clusivius, or Jupiter Lucetius, Ops Opifera; sometimes they doubled the idea, as in Aius Locutius, or Anna Perenna, or Fors Fortuna; and in one or two cases they seem to have combined two deities together in rather puzzling conjunctions, which usually, however, admit of some possible explanation, as Janus Junonius, or Ops Consiva (_i.e._ Ops belonging to Consus).[311] In the Iguvian ritual, which is the highly-elaborated work of a priesthood as active as the Roman, we find combinations of not less than four names:[312] Cerfe Martie, Praestita Cerfia Cerfi Martii, Tursa Cerfia Cerfi Martii, which may perhaps be rendered "Spirit of Mars, protecting (female) spirit of the (male) spirit of Mars, fear-inspiring (female) spirit of the (male) spirit of Mars."

Such strange multiple combinations as these suggest that expressions like Moles Martis or Virites Quirini are only another form of the usual cult-title, expressing adoration of the power of the deity addressed; and it is only reasonable to explain the others of the same group on the same principle. As we have seen, Roman scholars themselves explained Nerio Martis as equivalent to Virtus Martis; Herie Iunonis probably means something of the same kind; the others are not so easily explained, and guesswork about them is unprofitable. But I hope I have said enough to show that there is absolutely no good ground for supposing that these combinations of names in nominative and genitive indicate a relationship of any kind except a qualitative one. Abstract qualities, let us note, are usually feminine in Latin, and I think it is not improbable that abstractions such as Fides and Salus, which were deified at a very early period at Rome, may have reached divinity by attachment to some god from whom they subsequently became again separated.[313] And lastly, we can trace the same tendency to combine names and ideas together far down the course of Roman history; witness the combination of Genius with cities, legions, gods, etc., as well as with the individual man, and again such expressions as Pietas Legionis, by analogy with which von Domaszewski, wrongly as I think, would explain those we have been discussing.[314]

Before leaving this complicated and cloudy system of divine nomenclature, it is as well to ask the question once more, even if we cannot answer it, whether if left to itself it might have developed into a polytheistic system of personal deities. I will give my own opinion for what it is worth. I do not think that such a result could have been reached without the magic touch of the Greek poet and artist, or the arrival of Greek deities and their images in Latium. Professor Sayce, in his Gifford lectures on the religion of Babylonia, has shown how the non-Semitic Sumerians knew only of spirits and demons until the Semite arrived in the Persian Gulf with his personal gods of both sexes;[315] and I gather that he does not suppose that without such immigration the Sumerian ideas of divinity could have become personalised. The question is not exactly the same at Rome; for there the spirit world had passed into the hands of an organised priesthood occupied with ritual, and especially with its terminological aspect; and the chance of personalisation, if it were there at all, lay in the importance of the functional name. But the question is after all beside the mark; we shall see what happened when the Greeks arrived. We may be content at present to note the fact that they found the functional terminology sufficiently advanced to take advantage of it, and to revolutionise the whole Roman conception of the divine.

Dr. Frazer gives me an opportunity of adverting to another point bearing on the question we are discussing,--the way in which the old Roman thought of his deities. "It is difficult," he says,[316] "to deny that the epithets Pater and Mater, which the Romans bestow on so many of their gods, do really imply paternity and maternity; if this implication be admitted, the inference appears to be inevitable that these divine beings were supposed to exercise sexual functions, etc." In a footnote he adds a number of formidable-looking references, meant, I suppose, to prove this point. I have closely examined these passages; what they do prove is simply that many deities were called Pater and Mater. Not one even suggests that paternity and maternity were in such cases to be understood literally and, so to speak, physically. The two that come nearest to what he is looking for are those from Varro and Lactantius. Varro says[317] that Ops was called Mater because she was identical with Terra, who was, of course, Terra Mater: "Haec enim--

'terris gentes omnes peperit et resumit denuo,

quae dat cibaria,' ut ait Ennius."[318] It is clear, then, that neither Varro nor Ennius understood this title of Ops and Terra in Dr. Frazer's sense of the word. The quotation from the early Christian father Lactantius, which contains three well-known lines of Lucilius, might possibly deceive those who neglect to turn it out and read the context; there we find at once that not even Lactantius could attribute to these epithets the meaning which Dr. Frazer wishes to put on them. He would have been as glad to do so as Dr. Frazer himself, though for a very different reason; but what he actually wrote is this:--

"Omnem Deum qui ab homine colitur, necesse est inter solennes ritus et precationes patrem nuncupari, non tantum honoris gratia, verum etiam rationis; quod et antiquior est homine, et quod vitam, salutem, victum praestat, ut pater. Itaque ut Iuppiter a precantibus pater vocatur, etc."[319]

Dr. Frazer's quotation begins with this last sentence; it is a pity that he did not read the context. If he had read it, his candour would have compelled him to confess that not even a Christian father, with a keen sense of what was ridiculous or degrading in the pagan religion, understood the fatherhood of the gods as he wishes to understand it.

But I am wasting time in pressing this point. Dr. Frazer would hardly have used such an argument if he had not been hard put to it. The figurative use of human relationships is surely a common practice, when addressing their deities, of all peoples who have reached the stage of family life. As another distinguished anthropologist says: "The very want of an object tends to supply an object through the imagination; and this will be either the vital energy inherent in things, or the reflex of the human father, who once satisfied his needs (_i.e._ of the worshipper). So, in Aryan religions, the supreme god is father, [Greek: Zeus patêr], Diespiter, Marspiter. Ahura-Mazda is a father.... Another analogy shows the relationship of brother and friend, as in the case of Mithra."[320] The Romans themselves were familiar from the first with such figurative use of relationship, as was natural to a people in whom the family instinct was so strong; we have but to think of the _pater patratus_ of the Fetiales,[321] of the Fratres Arvales, or the Fratres Attiedii of Iguvium. What exactly they understood by Pater and Mater when applied to deities is not so easy to determine: we have not the necessary data. They were never applied, I believe, to imported deities, _di novensiles_; always to _di indigetes_, those on whom the original Roman stock looked as their fellow-citizens and guardians. And we shall not be far wrong if we conclude that in general they imply the dependence of the human citizen upon his divine protector, and thus bring the usage into line with that of other Aryan peoples. Behind this feeling of dependence there may have been the idea, handed down from remote ages, that Father Sky and Mother Earth were in a sense the parents of all living things; but there is nothing in the Roman religion to suggest that the two were thought of as personally uniting in marriage or a sexual act.

I will sum up this part of the discussion by translating an admirable passage in Aust's book on the Roman religion, with which I am in cordial agreement[322]:--

"The deities of Rome were deities of the cult only. They had no human form; they had not the human heart with its virtues and vices. They had no intercourse with each other, and no common or permanent residence; they enjoyed no nectar and ambrosia ... they had no children, no parental relation. They were indeed both male and female, and a male and female deity are often in close relations with each other; but this is not a relation of marriage, and rests only on a similarity in the sphere of their operations.... These deities never become independent existences; they remain cold, colourless conceptions, _numina_ as the Romans called them, that is, supernatural beings whose existence only betrays itself in the exercise of certain powers."

They were, indeed, cold and colourless conceptions as compared with the Greek gods of Olympus, whose warmth and colour is really that of human life, of human passions; but the one remarkable and interesting thing about these Roman and Italian numina is the life and force for good or evil which is the very essence of their being. The puzzling combinations we have just been studying are quite enough to illustrate this character. Moles, Virites, Nerio, and perhaps others too, seem to mean the strength or force inherent in the numen; Cerfius, or Cerus, as the Latins called it, Liber, Genius, all are best interpreted as meaning a functional or creative force. Jupiter is the sky or heaven itself, with all its manifestations of activity; Tellus is Mother Earth, full of active productive power. At the bottom of these cold and colourless conceptions there is thus a real idea of power, not supernatural but rather natural power, which may both hurt and benefit man, and which he must attempt to enlist on his side. This enlistment was the task of the Roman priesthood and the Roman government, and so effectually was it carried out that the divine beings lost their vitality in the process.

We shall be better able to follow out this curious fate of the Roman deities in later lectures; here I wish to note one other aspect of the Roman idea of divinity, which will help to explain what I have just been saying about the life and force inherent in these numina.

In most cursory accounts of the Roman religion it has been the practice to lay particular stress upon an immense number of "gods," as they used to be called, each of which is supposed to have presided over some particular act or suffering of the Roman from the cradle to the grave--from Cunina, the "goddess" of his cradle, to Libitina who looked after his interment. I have as yet said nothing about all these. I will now briefly explain why I have not done so, and why I hesitate to include them, at any rate in the uncompromising form in which they are usually presented, among the genuine religious conceptions of the earliest period. Later on I shall have further opportunity of discussing them; at the end of this lecture I can only sum up the results of recent research into this curious cloud of so-called deities.

We know of them mainly, but not entirely, from Tertullian, and the _de Civitate Dei_ of St. Augustine.[323] These scholarly theologians, wishing to show up the absurdity of the heathen religions, found a mine of material in the great work of Varro on the Roman religious antiquities; and though they found him by no means so elegant a writer as Cicero, they studied him with pains, and have incidentally added immensely to our knowledge both of Varro himself and of the Roman religion. St. Augustine tells us that it was in the last three books of his work that Varro treated of the Roman deities, and that he divided them under the heads of _di certi_, _di incerti_, and _di selecti_. In the first of these he dealt chiefly with those with which we are now concerned: they were _certi_ because their names expressed their supposed activity quite clearly.[324] We know for certain that Varro found these names in the books of the pontifices, and that they were there called Indigitamenta:[325] a word which has been variously interpreted, and has been the subject of much learned disputation. I believe with Wissowa that it means "forms of invocation," _i.e._ the correct names by which gods should be addressed.

Thus these lists of names come down to us at third hand: Varro took them from the pontifical books, and the Christian fathers took them from Varro. It is obvious that this being the case they need very careful critical examination; and till recently they were accepted in full without hesitation, and without reflection on such questions as, _e.g._, whether they are psychologically probable, or whether they can be paralleled from the religious experience of other peoples. Some preliminary critical attempts were made about fifty years ago in this direction,[326] but the first thoroughgoing examination of the subject was published by R. Peter in the article "Indigitamenta" in Roscher's _Mythological Lexicon_. This most industrious scholar, though his interpretation of the word Indigitamenta is probably erroneous,[327] was the first to reach the definite conclusion that the lists are not really primitive, and do not, as we have them, represent primitive religious thought. It was after a very careful study of this article, which is long enough to fill a small volume, that I wrote in my _Roman Festivals_ of the Indigitamenta as "based on"--not actually representing, I might have added--"old ideas of divine agency, now systematised by something like scientific terminology and ordered classification by skilled legal theologians"; and as "an artificial priestly exaggeration of a primitive tendency to see a world of nameless spirits surrounding and influencing all human life."[328]

I was not then specially concerned with the Indigitamenta, and only alluded to them in passing. But before my book was published there had already appeared a most interesting work on the names of deities (_Götternamen_) by H. Usener, a brilliant investigator, which drew fresh attention to the subject. Usener found in mediaeval records of the religion of the heathen Lithuanians what seemed to be a remarkable parallel with this old Roman theology, and he also compared these records with certain facts in what we may call the pre-Olympian religious ideas of the Greeks. "The conclusion which he draws," writes Dr. Farnell[329]--and I cannot state it better--"is that the Indo-Germanic peoples, on the way to the higher polytheism, passed through an earlier stage when the objects of cult were beings whom he designated by the newly-coined words 'Augenblickgötter' and 'Sondergötter'" (gods of momentary or limited function). He went further than this, and claimed that the anthropomorphic gods of Greece and Italy, of the Indo-Iranians, Persians, and Slavs, were developed out of these spirits presiding over special functions and particular moments of human life; but with this latter part of his theory I am not now concerned. What we want to know now is whether in writing thus of the Roman Indigitamenta Usener was using a record which really represents an early stage of religious thought in Italy; and I may add that we should be glad to know whether his Lithuanian records are also to be unhesitatingly relied on.[330] As regards Greece, Dr. Farnell has criticised his theories with considerable effect.

The most recent contribution to the discussion of the Roman part of the subject is that of Wissowa, who in 1904 published a paper on "True and False Sondergötter at Rome";[331] this is a piece of most valuable and weighty criticism, but extremely difficult to follow and digest. I here give only the main results of it. Wissowa takes two genuine examples of Sondergötter which have come down to us from other sources, and more directly than those mentioned above: the first from Fabius Pictor, the oldest Roman historian,[332] and the other from the Acta Fratrum Arvalium.[333] Fabius said that the flamen (Cerealis?), when sacrificing to Tellus and Ceres, also invoked the following deities: Vervactor, for the first ploughing, as Wissowa interprets it; Redarator, for the second ploughing; Imporcitor, for the harrowing; Insitor, for the sowing; Oberator, for the top-dressing; Occator, Sarritor, Subrincator, Messor, Convector, Conditor, Promitor, for subsequent operations up to the harvest and actual distribution of the corn for food. Secondly, in the Acta of the Arval Brethren we find, on the occasion of a _piaculum_ caused by the growth of a fig-tree on the roof of the temple of Dea Dia, at the end of a long list of deities invoked, and before the names of the _divi_ of the Imperial families, the names of three Sondergötter, Adolenda Commolenda Deferunda, and on another occasion, Adolenda and Coinquenda; these seem beyond doubt to refer to the process of getting the obnoxious tree down from the roof, of breaking it up, and burning it.

In both these examples, which have come down to us more directly than the lists in the Fathers, Wissowa sees assistant or subordinate deities (if such they can be called) grouped around a central idea, that of the main object of sacrifice in each case;[334] these are the result of the _cura_ and _caerimonia_ supervised and over-elaborated by pontifical law and ritual. It is, I may add on my own account, most unlikely, and psychologically almost impossible, that any individual farmer should have troubled himself to remember and enumerate by name twelve deities representing the various stages of an agricultural process; and Cato, in fact, says nothing of such ritual. It was the flamen of the City-state, who, when sacrificing to Tellus and Ceres before harvest,[335] pictured, or recalled to mind, the various processes of a year of what we may call high farming rather than primitive, under the names of deities plainly invented out of the words which express those processes--words which themselves are certainly not all antique. And in the second example, which dates from the second century A.D., we see that the process of destroying the intruding fig-tree is represented in ritual in exactly the same curious way: the names of the deities, Deferunda and the rest, being invented for the occasion out of the words which express the several acts of the process of destruction. These Arval Brethren of the second century inherited the traditions of their predecessors of an earlier age, and carried out the work of amplification in their invocations by pedantically imitating the pontifices of five or six centuries earlier. They held, in a way which to us is ludicrous, to the old notion that you should try and cover as much ground as possible in worship, and to cover it in detail, so that no chance might be missed of securing the object for which you were taking so much trouble.

Now to return to Varro and his lists of names. What is Dr. Wissowa's conclusion about these, after examining the two examples of Sondergötter which have not come down to us through so much book-learning as the rest?

Varro's _di certi_, he says[336]--and I think there is no doubt that he is right--included the name of every deity, great or small, of which he could feel sure that he knew something, as he found it in the books of the pontifices; and the part of those books in which he found these names, known as Indigitamenta, probably contained formulae of invocation, _precationum carmina_,[337] of the same kind as the _comprecationes deorum immortalium_ from which Gellius quoted the pairs of male and female deities which we discussed above. Varro arranged all these names in groups of principal and subordinate or assistant deities, the latter amplifying in detail the meaning and scope of the former, as we have just seen; and of this grouping some traces are still visible in the accounts of Augustine and Tertullian. But the good Fathers tumbled the whole collection about sadly in their search for material for their mockery, having no historical or scientific object in view; with the result that it now resembles the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, and can no longer be re-arranged on the original Varronian plan. The difficulty is increased by the etymologies and explanations which they offer of the divine names, which, as a rule, are even more absurd than the divinities themselves.[338]

But, in the last place, the question must be asked whether these Sondergötter of the real kind, such, for example, as those twelve agricultural ones invoked by the flamen at the Cereale sacrum, had their origin in any sense in popular usage or belief. At the end of his paper Wissowa emphatically says that he does not believe it. For myself, I would only modify this conclusion so far as this: they must, I think, have been the theological, or perhaps rather the ritualistic outcome, of a psychological tendency rooted in the popular mind. I have already noticed that curious bit of folklore in which three spirits of cultivation were invoked with a kind of acted parable at the birth of a child;[339] and I cannot regard this custom as a piece of pontifical ritualism, though the names may have been invented by the priests to suit the practice. The old Roman seems to have had a tendency to ascribe what for want of a better word we may call divinity, not only to animate and inanimate objects, but to actions and abstractions; this, I take it, is an advanced stage of animism, peculiar, it would seem, to a highly practical agricultural people, and it is this stage which is reflected in the ritualistic work of the priests. They turned dim and nameless powers into definite and prehensible deities with names, and arranged them in groups so as to fall in with the life of the city as well as the farm. What was the result of all this ingenuity, or whether it had any popular result at all, is a question hardly admitting of solution. What is really interesting in the matter, if my view is the right one, is the curious way in which the early Roman seems to have looked upon all life and force and action, human or other, as in some sense associated with, and the result of, divine or spiritual agency.

NOTES TO LECTURE VII

[291] For _loca sacra_ and _consecratio_ see Marquardt, p. 148 foll.; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 400.

[292] Serv. _ad Aen._ xii. 119, "Romani moris fuerat cespitem arae super imponere, et ita sacrificare." Cp. some valuable remarks of Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ p. 23. The altar of the Fratres was in front of their grove; they used also a movable one (_foculus_) of silver, but _cespiti ornatus_ (_ib._ p. 21): this was for the preliminary offering of wine and incense (Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 351).

[293] In Aug. _Civ. Dei_, iv. 31; Agahd's edition of the fragments of Varro's _Ant. rer. div._ p. 164.

[294] Aug. _Civ. Dei_, iv. 23; Agahd, p. 159. See Wissowa, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 280 foll.

[295] Strabo iv. 180.

[296] _Fasti_, vi. 305.

[297] Tibull. ii. 5. 27. The lines of Propertius are iv. (v.) 2. 59, "Stipes acernus eram, properanti falce dolatus, Ante Numam grata pauper in urbe deus." The question is whether these are genuine examples of the natural evolution of a "stock or stone" into something in the nature of an anthropomorphic image of a deity, or whether they are the result of the introduction of Greek statues acting on the popular mind in rustic parts of Italy. The passages, so far as I know, stand alone, and we have no means of deciding whether the anthropomorphic tendency was native or foreign. Vortumnus was, however, undoubtedly of Etruscan origin; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 233. The subject of iconic development of this kind is well summarised in E. Gardner's little volume on _Religion and Art in Ancient Greece_, ch. i.

[298] See Sayce, _Gifford Lectures on the Religions of Egypt and Babylonia_, p. 302. An interesting paper on the evolution of _dei_ at Rome out of functional _numina_ will be found in von Domaszewski's _Abhandlungen zur röm. Religion_, p. 155 foll., based on Usener's theory of Sondergötter. It is ingenious and imaginative, but in my view does not square with the facts as far as we know them. His stages are: (1) momentary function of _numina_, _e.g._ lightning; (2) elevation of this into a permanent power or function; (3) consequent limitation of the numen to a special well-marked function; (4) elevation of the numen to a _deus_, conceived in the likeness of man, and male or female, because man cannot think of power otherwise than on the analogy of male or female creative energy. Lastly, when the _deus_ is complete, the functions of the former numen become attributes or qualities, traces of which we find in the pairs of deities in Gellius, xiii. 23, which are discussed later on in this lecture. Some of these, of course, eventually became separate deities--Salacia, Maia, Lua. As I cannot accept the view that the earliest Roman idea of the supernatural is to be found in _comprecationes_ of a comparatively late period, _i.e._ in the so-called Indigitamenta, this charmingly symmetrical account has no charm for me beyond its symmetry.

[299] Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ pp. 144, 146; Cato, _R.R._ 139; _C.I.L._ vi. 110 and 111. Other references are given by Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 33, note 2.

[300] For Pales, _R.F._ p. 80 note; for Pomona, Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 165.

[301] The passage runs thus (Aug. _C.D._ iv. 32): "Dicit enim (Varro) de generationibus deorum magis ad poetas quam ad physicos fuisse populos inclinatos, et ideo et sexum et generationes deorum maiores suos (id est veteres credidisse Romanos) et eorum constituisse coniugia." There is an amusing passage in Lactantius, i. 17 (_de Falsa Religione_), which Dr. Frazer might read with advantage. It begins, "Si duo sunt sexus deorum, sequitur concubitus." Then he goes on mockingly to argue that the gods must have houses, cities, lands which they plough and sow, which proves them mortal. Finally he takes the whole series of inferences backwards, finishing with "si domibus carent, ergo et concubitu. Si concubitus ab his abest, et sexus igitur foemineus," etc. All this, he means, can be inferred from the fact that gods are of both sexes; but that they have _concubitus_ can no more be inferred from his argument than that they plough and sow.

[302] Dr. Frazer conjectures a sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno under the forms of Janus and Diana, in _Kingship_, p. 214; but he is well aware that it is pure guesswork. There was, indeed, at Falerii such a marriage of Juno with an unknown deity (Ovid, _Amores_, iii. 13), of which, however, we do not know the history. Falerii was one of those cities, like Praeneste, where Etruscan, Greek, and Latin influences met. The "Orci nuptiae" on which Frazer lays stress was simply the Greek marriage of Pluto and Proserpine: "Orci coniux Proserpina," Aug. _C.D._ vii. 23 and 28, Agahd, p. 152. Wissowa shows this conclusively, _R.K._ p. 246. Orcus was Graecised as Plutus, but was himself totally without personality.

[303] Dr. Frazer wrongly translates this as "ancient prayers" (p. 411), adding "the highest possible authority on the subject." _Oratio_ is never used in this sense until Christian times: the word is always _precatio_. All scholars are agreed that what is meant is invocations to deities in old speeches, such as occur once or twice in Cicero (_e.g._ at the end of the _Verrines_); cp. Livy xxix. 15. As the recording of speeches cannot be assumed to have begun before the third century B.C., this does not carry us very far back. That century is also the age in which the pontifices were probably most active in drawing up _comprecationes_; see below, p. 285 foll.

[304] See Appendix B at end of volume.

[305] Cp. Ovid, _Fasti_, iii. 850, "_forti_ sacrificare deae." In _R.F._ p. 60 foll., I have criticised the attempts, ancient and modern, to make this Nerio the subject of myths.

[306] Macrob. i. 12. 18. This word Maiestas shows the doubtful nature of these feminine names, and probably betrays the real meaning of Maia. I may mention here that Bellona instead of Nerio is ascribed as wife to Mars by Seneca ap. Aug. _C.D._ vi. 10; also Venus to Volcanus instead of Maia. Neither have any connection, so far as we know, with the gods to whom Seneca ascribes them as wives: Venus-Vulcan is, of course, Greek. Both Augustine and Dr. Frazer might with advantage have abstained from citing Seneca on such a point: as a Spaniard by birth he was not likely to know much about technical questions of Roman ritual.

[307] See Schanz, _Gesch. der röm. Literatur_, i. 274.

[308] In the Graeco-Roman age Mars seems to have been rather a favourite subject of myth-making; see Usener's article on Italian myths in _Rhein. Mus._ vol. xxx.; Roscher in _Myth. Lex._ for works of Graeco-Etruscan art in which he appears in certain mythical scenes.

[309] H. Jordan, quoted in _R.F._ p. 61 note. I relegate to an appendix what needs to be said about the other pairs of deities mentioned by Gellius.

[310] Leipzig, 1898, p. 7 foll.

[311] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 168. Carter, _op. cit._ p. 21.

[312] See Buecheler, _Umbrica_, pp. 22 and 98.

[313] So Fides is usually explained, as originally belonging to Jupiter (Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 103 foll.); but a different view is taken by Harold L. Axtell in his work on the _Deification of Abstract Ideas at Rome_ (Chicago, 1907), p. 20.

[314] In the Festschrift f. O. Hirschfeld, p. 243 foll.

[315] _Religion of the Babylonians_, introductory chapter.

[316] _Op. cit._ p. 412.

[317] _L.L._ v. 64.

[318] This fragment is No. 503 in Baehrens, _Fragm. Poet. Rom._

[319] Lactantius, _Div. inst._ iv. 3.

[320] Crawley, _The Tree of Life_, p. 256; Farnell, _Evolution of Religion_, p. 180; von Domaszewski, _Abhandlungen_, p. 166, "Man ruft sie an im Gebete als pater und mater zum Zeichen der Unterwerfung unter ihren Willen, wie der Sohn dem Gebote des paterfamilias sich fügt. Der sittlich strenge Gehorsam, der das Familienleben der Römer beherrscht, die pietas, ist der Sinn der römischen religio." Cp. also Appel, _de Rom. precationibus_, pp. 102-3, who thinks that they regarded the gods "velut patriarchas sive patres familias." He quotes Preller-Jordan i. 55 and Dieterich, _Eine Mithrasliturgie_, p. 142 sq. So too with mater--"velut mater familias."

[321] The expression seems to mean "a father made for the purpose of the embassy." Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 477, note 3.

[322] p. 19. This was written, it may be noted, several years after Aust had thoroughly investigated the cult of Jupiter for his article in the _Mythological Lexicon_; in which cult, if anywhere, one may be tempted to see evidence of a personal conception of deities. As Dr. Frazer has referred to the cult of Jupiter at Praeneste, to which I referred him as evidence of a possibly personal conception of the god in that Latin city, I may say here that I adhere to what I said about this in _R.F._ p. 226 foll.; no piece of antique cult has occupied my attention more than this, and I have tried to lay open every source of confirmation or criticism. Wissowa has expressed himself in almost exactly the same terms in _R.K._ p. 209: we arrived at our conclusions independently.

[323] Tertullian, _ad Nationes_ 11, and _de Anima_, 37 foll.; Aug. _de Civ. Dei_, iv. _passim_, and especially ch. xi.; R. Peter compiled a complete list (_Myth. Lex._, _s.v._ "Indigitamenta," p. 143) from these and other sources.

[324] Aug. _C.D._ vii. 17. That this was what Varro meant by _di certi_ was first affirmed by Wissowa in a note to his edition of Marquardt, p. 9; it has been generally accepted as the true account. A full discussion will be found in Agahd's edition of the fragments of Varro's work, p. 126 foll.; cf. Peter's article quoted above, and Wissowa, _R.K._ pp. 61 and 65. A somewhat different view is given in Domaszewski's article in _Archiv_ for 1907, p. 1 foll., suggested by Usener's _Götternamen_.

[325] The evidence for this will be found in Marquardt's note 4 on p. 9. I have no doubt that Wissowa is right in explaining Indigitamenta as "Gebetsformeln," formulae of invocation; in which the most important matter, we may add, would be the name of the deity. See his _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 177 foll. The Indigitamenta contained, as one section, the invocations of _di certi_.

[326] Chiefly by Ambrosch in his _Religionsbücher der Römer_. Peter's article contains a useful account of the whole progress of research on this subject.

[327] _Lex._ p. 137; it was that of his master Reifferscheid. Cp. Wissowa, _op. cit._ (_Ges. Abhandl._ p. 306 foll.).

[328] _R.F._ pp. 191, 341.

[329] "The place of the Sondergötter in Greek Polytheism," printed in _Anthropological Essays addressed to E. B. Tylor_, p. 81. Usener's discussion of the Roman and Lithuanian Sondergötter is in his _Götternamen_, p. 73 foll.

[330] Wissowa writes (_Ges. Abhandl._ p. 320 note) that he has reason to believe that a great number of the Lithuanian Sondergötter only became such through the treatment of the subject by the mediaeval writers on whom Usener relied!

[331] _Ges. Abhandl._ p. 304 foll.

[332] Servius (Interpol.) _ad Georg._ i. 21.

[333] Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ p. 147; _C.I.L._ vi. 2099 and 2107.

[334] _Op. cit._ p. 323 foll.; for _famuli_ and _anculi divi_, Henzen, _op. cit._ p. 145.

[335] See above, p. 121.

[336] p. 312; cp. 320, where he further asserts his belief that Varro is responsible himself for the creation of a great number of these Sondergötter, owing to his extreme desire to fix and define the function of every deity in relation to human life; just as the mediaeval writers Laskowski and Pretorius may have created many Lithuanian Sondergötter. As I am not quite clear on this point, I have not mentioned it in the text.

[337] _Op. cit._ p. 314, note 1. See above, note 33.

[338] _e.g._ Vaticanus, "qui infantum vagitibus praesidet"; _Rusina_ from _rus_; _Consus_ from _consilium_, etc.

[339] See above, p. 84.

LECTURE VIII

RITUAL OF THE _IUS DIVINUM_

I have already frequently mentioned the _ius divinum_, the law governing the relations between the divine and human inhabitants of the city, as the _ius civile_ governed the relations between citizen and citizen.[340] When we examined the calendar of Numa, we were in fact examining a part of this law; we began with this our studies of the religion of the Roman city-state, because it is the earliest document we possess which illuminates the dark ages of city life, so far as religion is concerned. The study of the calendar naturally led us on to consider the evidence it yields, taken together with other sources of information, as to the nature of the deities for whose worship it fixes times and seasons, or, more accurately, the amount of knowledge to which the Romans had attained about their divine beings. But we must now return to the _ius divinum_, and study it in another aspect, for which the calendar itself does not suffice as evidence.

Perhaps the simplest way of explaining this _ius_ is to describe it as laying down the rules for the maintenance of right relations between the citizens and their deities; as ordaining what things are to be done or avoided in order to keep up a continual _pax_, or quasi-legal covenant, between these two parties. The two words _ius_ and _pax_, we may note, are continually meeting us in Roman religious documents. In a prayer sanctioned by the pontifices for use at the making of a new clearing, we read: "Si deus, si dea sit cuius illud sacrum est, _ut tibi ius siet_ porco piaculo facere illiusce sacri coercendi ergo,"[341] _i.e._ "O unknown deity, whether god or goddess, whose property this wood is, let it be legally proper to sacrifice to thee this pig as an expiatory offering, for the sake of cutting down trees in this wood of thine." "Pacem deorum exposcere" (or "petere") is a standing formula, as all readers of Virgil know;[342] and it occurs in many other authors and religious documents. When Livy wants to express the horror of the old patrician families at the idea of plebeians being consuls--men who had no knowledge of the _ius divinum_ and no right to have any--he makes Appius Claudius exclaim, "Nunc nos, tanquam iam nihil pace deorum opus sit, omnes caerimonias polluimus."[343] How can we maintain our right relations with the gods, if plebeians have the care of them?

Thus it is not going too far to describe the whole Roman religion of the city-state as a _Rechtsverkehr_,[344] a legal process going on continually. When a _colonia_ was founded, _i.e._ a military outpost which was to be a copy in all respects of the Roman State, it was absolutely essential that its _ius divinum_ should be laid down; it must have a religious charter as well as a civil one. Even at the very end of the life of the Republic, when Caesar founded a colony in Spain, he ordained that, within ten days of its first magistrates taking office, they should consult the Senate "quos et quot dies festos esse et quae sacra fieri publice placeat et quos ea sacra facere placeat," _i.e._ as to the calendar, the ritual, and the priesthood.[345] The Romans, of course, assumed that Numa, their priest-king, had done the same thing for Rome; Livy describes him as ordaining a pontifex to whom he entrusted the care of all these matters, with written rules to follow.[346] This was the imaginary religious charter of the Roman State. Without it the citizen, or rather his official representative, would not know with the necessary accuracy the details of the _cura_ and _caerimonia_; without it, too, the deities could not be expected to perform their part of advancing the interests of the State, and indeed, as I think we shall find, could not be expected to retain the strength and vitality which they needed for the work. Support was needed on each side; the State needed the help of the gods, and the gods needed the help of the State's care and worship.

The ways and means towards the maintenance of this _pax_ were as follows. First, the deities must be duly placated, and their powers kept in full vigour, by the ritual of sacrifice and prayer, performed at the proper times and places by authorised persons skilled in the knowledge of that ritual. Secondly, there must be an exact fulfilment of all vows or solemn promises made to the deities by the State or its magistrates, or by such private persons as might have made similar engagements. Thirdly, the city, its land and its people, must be preserved from all evil or hostile influences, whether spiritual or material or both, by the process broadly known as _lustratio_, which we commonly translate _purification_. Lastly, strict attention must be paid to all outward signs of the will of the gods, as shown by omens and portents of various kinds. This last method of securing the _pax_ became specially prominent much later in Roman history, and I prefer to postpone detailed discussion of it for the present; but the other three we will now examine, with the help of evidence mainly derived from facts of cult, not from the fancies of mythologists.

First, then, I take sacrifice, dealing only with the general principles of sacrificial rites, so far as we can discern them in the numerous details which have come down to us. The word _sacrificium_, let us note, in its widest sense, may cover any religious act in which something is made _sacrum_, _i.e._ (in its legal sense) the property of a deity;[347] I am not now concerned to conjecture what exactly may have been the meaning of this immortal word before it was embodied in the _ius divinum_. "Sacrificium" is limited in practical use by the Romans themselves to offerings, animal or cereal, made on the spot where the deity had taken up his residence, or at some place on the boundary of land or city (_e.g._ the gate) which was under his protection, or (in later times at least) at a temporary altar erected during a campaign. Thus it was as much a sacrificium when the paterfamilias threw at each meal a portion of the food into the fire, the residence of Vesta, as when the consul offered a victim to Mars on the eve of a battle.

Sacrifices have generally been divided into the three classes of (1) honorific, where the offering is believed to be in some sense a gift to the deity; (2) piacular, or sin-offerings, where the victim was usually burnt whole, no part being retained for eating (though this was not the case at Rome); (3) sacramental sacrifices, where the worshippers enter into communion with the deity by partaking of the sacred offering together with him.[348] The two former are constant and typical in the Roman religion; but traces of the sacramental type, which Robertson Smith believed to be the oldest, are also found, and it will clear the ground if I refer to them at once. By far the most interesting example is that of the Latin festival on the Alban mount, where the flesh of the victim, a white heifer that had never felt the yoke, was partaken of by the deputies of all the cities of the Latin league, great importance being attached to the due distribution.[349] Here the Latin race "yearly acknowledges its common kinship of blood, and seals it by partaking in the common meal of a sacred victim," thus entering into communion with Jupiter, the ancient god of the race, and with each other, by participation in the flesh of the sacred animal. "This common meal is perhaps a survival from the age when cattle were sacred animals, and were never slain or eaten except on the solemn annual occasions when the clan or race renewed its kinship and its mutual obligations by a solemn sacrament." It is tempting to compare with this great sacrament the _epulum Iovis_ on the Ides of September, the dedication-day of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, which three deities seem to have been present in visible form to share the meal with the magistrates and senate.[350] But we have not yet arrived at the age when this temple was built, and we have no evidence enabling us to carry the rite back in any form to the pre-Etruscan period. There are, however, faint indications that the old Italians believed the deities to be in some sense present at their meals, though not in visible form; and at one festival, the Fornacalia, which was a concern not of the State as a whole, but of the thirty _curiae_ into which it was divided,[351] there seems to be no doubt that a common meal took place in which the gods were believed to have a part, or at any rate to be present though invisible. Yet the _ius divinum_ of the Roman State assuredly did not encourage this kind of sacrament; for in the regular round of State festivals, in which we cannot include even the _feriae Latinae_, the sacrifices, so far as we are informed, were all honorific or piacular. If I am not mistaken, the idea of participation by the people in solemn sacred rites was discouraged by the Roman priesthood; in the _ius divinum_ the line drawn between _sacrum_ and _profanum_ was clear; scenes of gluttony or revelry, like the Greek hecatombs, were eliminated from the _sacra publica_, as I have already pointed out. Not till the advent of the Sibylline books and the _Graecus ritus_ did the people take an active part in the State religion; their duty was merely to abstain from disturbance during the performance of sacred rites. "Feriis iurgia amovento" is the only reference in Cicero's imaginary sketch of the _ius divinum_ to the conduct of the citizen on festival days.[352] Within the family, the curia, the gens, there might be direct and active participation in daily or yearly ceremonies, but it was an essential principle of the life of the city-state that its business, religious as well as civil, should be carried out for the citizens by officials specially appointed.

In the typical and organised worship of the State, _i.e._ sacrifice honorific and piacular, sanctioned by the _ius divinum_, the utmost care was taken that the whole procedure should be in every sense acceptable to the deity; that nothing _profanum_ should cross the threshold of the divine; hence it was quiet, orderly, dignified. The feeling that communication with the deity invoked was impossible save under such conditions was very strong in the Roman mind, stronger perhaps than with any other people whose religious practice is known to us; and the sense of obligation and duty, _pietas_, as they called it, was thus very early developed, and of infinite value to the State in its youth. This is entirely in keeping with what we have learnt in the last two lectures of the ideas of the Romans about the nature of their deities, and throws additional light on those ideas. They did not as yet know too much about the divine beings and their powers and wishes; familiarity had not yet bred contempt; _religio_, as we saw, was still strong among them--the feeling of awe that is likely to diminish or disappear when you have your god before you in the form of an idol. It is a principle of human nature that where knowledge is imperfect, care must be taken to be on the safe side; this is true of all practical undertakings, and as the religion of the Romans was that of a practical people with a practical end in view, it was particularly true of them.

First then, in order that the worship might be entirely acceptable to the deity invoked, it was essential that the person who conducted it should be also acceptable. At the head of the whole system was the rex, who was priest as well as king. We do not know, of course, exactly how the rex was appointed; but in the case of the typical priest-king Numa, Livy has described his _inauguratio_ in terms of the _ius divinum_ of later times for the appointment of priests, and we may take it as fairly certain that the same principle held good from the earliest times.[353] After being summoned (so the story ran) from the Sabine city of Cures by the Senate, he consulted the gods about his own fitness. He was then conducted by the augur to the arx on the Capitol, and sat down on a stone facing the south. The augur took his seat on his left hand (the lucky side) with veiled head, holding the _lituus_[354] of his office in his right hand, with which, after a prayer, he marked out the _regiones_ from east to west, the north being to the left, the south to the right, and silently noted some object in the extreme distance of the _ager Romanus_, as the farthest point where the appearance of an omen might be accepted. Then, passing the _lituus_ to his left hand, he laid his right on the head of Numa, and uttered this prayer: "Father Jupiter, if it be thy will (_fas_) that this Numa Pompilius, on whose head my hand is laid, be king of Rome, I pray thee give us clear token within the limits which I have marked out." Then he said aloud what auspicia he sought for (_i.e._ whether of birds, lightning, or what); and when they appeared, Numa descended as rex from the citadel. This process was called _inauguratio_; it is attested for the confirmation of the election of the three flamines maiores, the rex, and the augurs, in historical times,[355] whatever was the method of that election, and without it the priest was not believed to be acceptable to the gods. It is not mentioned by Roman writers in connection with the Pontifices or the Vestals; if this be not merely from dearth of evidence, it is not easy to account for, unless the reason were that neither body was specially concerned with sacrifice. But the principle is perfectly clear--that the person who is to represent the community in worship must be one of whom the _numina_ openly express approval.

A priest, _sacerdos_, is thus a person set apart by special ritual for the service of the _sacra populi Romani_. The rex no doubt himself made the selection and supervised the inauguratio of the other priests at whose head he was. When the kingship came to an end, his powers of this kind passed to the pontifex maximus; and it may be as well to add at once that his sacrificial powers, though they were in a special sense inherited by a priest who took his title, the _rex sacrorum_, passed with the civil power to all magistrates _cum imperio_, who wore the _toga praetexta_ symbolic of priestly function, and had the right of presiding at sacrificial rites both at home and in the field. Thus magistrate and priest, though quite distinct under the Republic from the point of view of public law, have certain characteristics in common as deriving from a common source in the powers of the rex.[356]

But to return to the period of Numa and the calendar: it was not only necessary that the priest should be acceptable to the gods, but that he should be marked off from the rest of the community as being dedicated to their service. As Dr. Jevons says,[357] in all early religions priests are marked off from other worshippers, partly by what they do, and partly by what they may not do; and what he means is (1) that the priest originally was the person who alone could slay a victim; (2) that in consequence of his sacredness he was subject to a great number of restrictions. I have already spoken of these restrictions or priestly taboos in my second lecture; and as I believe that in the period we are now dealing with they were little more than a survival, I shall not return to them now. But of the outward insignia, which marked off the priest as alone entitled to perform the essential act of worship, the sacrifice, and which bring him out of the region of the _profanum_ into that of _sacrum_, I must say a few words before going farther.

In historical times the actual slaying of the victim was done by subordinates, _popae_, _victimarii_, etc.; but there is no doubt whatever that it was originally the work of the priest, for he seems at all times to have used one gesture which is clearly symbolic of it,[358] and there are traces also of a practice of wearing the toga in such a way as to leave the right arm free for the act.[359] That toga, or any other special robe worn by the priest, was always in whole or part red or purple. The purple-edged _toga praetexta_ was worn both by priests and magistrates, and by children under age; and I think there is good reason to believe that in all these cases the original idea was the same--that they took part, directly or indirectly, as primary or secondary agents in sacrificial acts. The Salii and the augurs wore the _trabea_, which was of purple or red, or both; the flamines had a special robe about the colour of which we are not informed, but the Flaminica Dialis wore a purple garment called _rica_, and a red veil called _flammeum_, which was also worn by the bride in the religious ceremony of marriage. Whether we are to see in this prevalence of red or purple any symbolism of the shedding of blood in sacrifice I cannot be sure, but the inference is a tempting one, and has been put forward with confidence by some recent investigators. It is worth noting that the Vestals, who did not sacrifice animals, wore white only.[360] If the red colour has anything to do with blood-shedding, it is probably more than merely symbolic; it may mean that the sacrificing priest partakes of that life and strength which he passes on to the god through the blood, that is the life, of the victim.[361]

The Roman priests had also other insignia, of which the original meaning is less evident. The Flamen Dialis, and probably all the flamines, wore a cap with an olive-twig fastened to the top of it; this is well shown in the sculptures of the Ara Pacis of Augustus.[362] The flaminicae had a head-dress called _tutulus_, which consisted in part, at least, of a purple fillet or ribbon. The flamines, when actually sacrificing, wore a _galerus_, or hood of some kind made of the skin of a victim, and the Flamen Dialis in particular wore one made of the skin of a white heifer sacrificed to Jupiter.[363] In these various ways all priests were outwardly shown to be holy men, _sacerdotes_, marked off from the _profanum vulgus_. Only for the pontifices we have no information as to a special dress, just as we also have none as to their inauguratio.[364]

Thus there is no question that the priests were chosen and separated from the people in such a way as to meet with the approval of the gods; and even the acolytes, _camilli_ and _camillae_, boys and girls who frequently appear in sacrificial scenes on monuments, wore the _toga praetexta_, and, in order to be acceptable, must be the children of living parents.[365] This rule has lately been the subject of a discussion by Dr. Frazer, on which he has brought to bear, as usual, a great range of learning. He regards the restriction not so much as a matter of good omen, _i.e._ of freedom from contamination by the death of a parent, but as pointing to a notion that they were "fuller of life and therefore luckier than orphans."[366] Whether or no this explanation is the right one, it is quite consistent, as we shall see directly, with the general idea of sacrifice at Rome, and the learning by which it is supported is in any case of interest and value.

There is abundant evidence from historical times that all worshippers, and therefore _a fortiori_ all priests, when sacrificing, had to be personally clean and free from every kind of taint; a rule which also held good for the utensils used in the worship, which in many cases at least were of primitive make and material, not such as were in common use.[367] The need of personal purity is well expressed by Tibullus in his description of a rural festival[368]:--

vos quoque abesse procul iubeo, discedat ab aris cui tulit hesterna gaudia nocte Venus. casta placent superis: pura cum veste venite et manibus puris sumite fontis aquam.

These lines indicate an approach at least to the idea of mental as well as material purity; and Cicero in his _ius divinum_ in the _de Legibus_[369] actually reaches that idea: "caste iubet lex adire ad deos, animo videlicet, in quo sunt omnia: nec tollit castimoniam corporis," etc. But this is the language of a later age, and does not reflect the notions of the old Roman, but rather those of the religious philosophy of the Greek. The personal purity which the Roman rule required was a survival from a set of primitive ideas, closely connected with taboo, which we are only now beginning to understand fully. They are common to all or almost all peoples who have made any progress in systematising their sacrificial worship. As Dr. Westermarck has recently expressed it,[370] "they spring from the idea that the contact of a polluting substance with anything holy is followed by injurious consequences. It is supposed to deprive a deity or holy being of its holiness.... So also a sacred act is believed to lose its sacredness by being performed by an unclean individual." And in the next sentence he goes still farther back in the history of the belief, pointing out that a polluting substance is itself held to contain mysterious energy of a baneful kind. But I must leave this interesting subject now; the story of the evolution of the habit of cleanliness from these ancient ideas will be found in the thirty-ninth chapter of his _Origin and Development of Moral Ideas_.

Coming next to the act of sacrifice itself, it is needless to say that the victim must be as exactly fitted to please the deity--if that be the right way to express the obligation--as the priest who sacrificed it. It must be of the right kind, sex, age, colour; it must go willingly to the slaughter, adorned with fillets and ribbons (_infulae_, _vittae_), in order to mark it off from other animals as holy; in the case of oxen, we hear also of the gilding of the horns, but this must have been costly and unusual.[371] All these details were doubtless laid down in the _ius divinum_, and in later times, when the deities dwelt in roofed temples, they were embodied in the _lex_ or charter of each temple.[372] I do not need to go into them here minutely; for my present purpose, the elucidation of the meaning which the Romans attached to sacrificial worship, it will be sufficient to point out that all victims, so far as we know, were domestic animals, and in almost all cases they were valuable property (_pecunia_), such as belonged to the stock of the Latin farmer, ox, sheep, pig, varying according to age and sex. Goats were used at the Lupercalia, and a horse was sacrificed to Mars, as we have seen, on October 15, and at the Robigalia in April a red dog was offered to the spirit of the mildew. But though time forbids me to explain all these rules, a careful study of the evidence for them is most useful for any one who wishes to understand the influence of the _ius divinum_ on the mind of the early Roman. In the family what rules were needed were matter of tradition; deities were few, and offerings limited. But in the city-state it was very different; here even the _di indigetes_ were many, with diverse wishes and likings as well as functions: how were these to be ascertained and remembered at the right moment? Here, as in all methods of securing the _pax deorum_, a central supervising authority was needed, in whose knowledge and wisdom the whole community had confidence; and he was found in the rex, as is clearly shown in the whole traditional account of the priest-king Numa. Very naturally tradition also ascribed to Numa the institution of the pontifices, whom the historical Romans knew as succeeding the rex in the supervision of religious law.[373]

If all went well, the victim going willingly and no ill omen supervening, the actual slaughter followed at the altar. During the whole operation silence was enjoined; the priests' heads were veiled with the folds of the toga;[374] pipers (_tibicines_) continued to play, in order that no unlucky sound or word might be heard which would make it necessary to start afresh with another victim (_instauratio_). Immediately before the slaughter the victim was made holier than ever by sprinkling upon it fragments of sacred cake made of _far_ (_immolatio_), and by pouring on it libations of wine from a _foculus_ or movable altar containing this holy condiment, together with incense if that were used in the rite. As soon as it was dead, the internal organs were examined to make sure that there was no physical defect or abnormal growth, for it was, of course, quite as necessary that the animal should be "purus" within as without; this was the only object of the examination, until the Etruscan art of _extipicina_ made its way to Rome. What became of the blood we are not told; I have already remarked that blood has curiously little part in Roman ritual and custom.[375] But the _exta_, _i.e._ internal organs of life, were separated from the rest of the carcase, and carefully cooked in holy vessels, before being laid upon the altar (_porrectio_), together with certain slices of flesh called _magmenta_, or increase-offerings, while the rest of the flesh, which had now lost its holiness, was retained for the use of the priests.[376] The time occupied in the actual slaughter and inspection of the organs was not long; but the cooking of these must have been often a lengthy process. Ovid tells us how on April 25 he met the Flamen Quirinalis carrying out the exta of a dog and a sheep, which had been sacrificed at Rome to Robigus that morning, in order to lay them on the altar of that deity at the fifth milestone on the Via Claudia.[377] Certain days in the calendar, called _endotercisi_, which were _nefasti_ in morning and evening, were _fasti_ in the middle of the day, between the slaying of a victim and the placing of its exta on the altar (_inter hostiam caesam et exta porrecta_).[378]

I have so far purposely omitted one important detail--the prayer which, so far as we know, invariably accompanied the sacrifice. It is not absolutely certain at what moment of the rite it was said at Rome; in the ritual of Iguvium we find it occurring immediately before the placing of the exta on the altar;[379] but as that ritual is a processional one, concerned with sacrifices at several spots, the two chief parts of the rite, the slaughter and the _porrectio_, probably followed closely on one another. We may perhaps guess that where these two parts were separated by a considerable interval, as in the majority of Roman festivals, the prayer was said by the priest also at the moment of _porrectio_. The prayer is so important a detail as to need separate handling--important because it helps us to interpret the ideas of the Romans about their sacrifices, and the attitude in which they conceived themselves as standing towards the deities whom they thus approached. I propose to occupy the rest of this lecture in considering this most interesting topic. I wish first to draw attention to a particular feature, or rather expression, which occurs in the authentic wording of certain prayers which we are lucky enough to possess, because I think it throws some light on the meaning which the Romans attached to the sacrifice it accompanied; and secondly, to consider the character of Roman prayers generally, in view of a question now being largely discussed, _i.e._ whether prayer is a development from spell or charm, belonging in its origin to the region of magic.

We have various forms of prayer surviving in Roman literature: some of them are versified by the poets, and therefore give us a general impression of the contents without the actual and genuine wording; we have also two fragments of ancient _carmina_ which have the form of prayers, those of the Salii and the Fratres Arvales; and we have certain forms used on special occasions, such as the _evocatio_ of the gods of a hostile community, or the formulae of vows (_vota_) which I must postpone to the next lecture. But the only unquestionably genuine old Roman prayers used at sacrifice, taken from the books of the pontifices and preserved word for word, are those which Cato embodied in his treatise on agriculture in the second century B.C., as proper to be used with sacrifice on certain occasions in the agricultural year.[380] It is here that we meet with the phrase, familiar in another form to all Latin scholars, on which I wish to lay stress now. It occurs in all the four forms of prayer which Cato copied down. The first is at the time of the flowering of the pear-trees, on behalf of the oxen: "Iuppiter dapalis, quod tibi fieri oportet in domo familia mea culignam vini dapi eius rei[381] ergo, _macte hac illace dape polucenda esto_." And again, when the wine is offered: "Iuppiter dapalis, _macte istace dape polucenda esto. Macte vino inferio esto_." So in the piacular sacrifice when a clearing is made, the unknown deity is addressed in the last words of the prayer thus: "harum rerum ergo _macte hoc porco piaculo immolando esto_." We find this _macte esto_ again in the prayer for the ceremony of lustratio, at the end of the formula: "_macte hisce suovetaurilibus lactentibus immolandis esto_." In the rite of the _porca praecidanea_, to which I have already referred, the instruction for the invocation of Jupiter runs: "_Fertum_ (_i.e._ a kind of cake) _Iovi obmoveto et mactato sic, Iuppiter, te hoc ferto_ obmovendo bonas preces precor, uti sies volens propitius mihi liberisque meis domo familiaeque meae _mactus hoc ferto_." Janus gets another kind of cake (_strues_) and a wine-offering, and is addressed in the same way. Then we read, "Iovi fertum obmoveto _mactatoque item_, ut prius feceris."

What is the real meaning of this phrase _macte esto_, which must surely have been in universal use at sacrifices, not only at private rites like those of Cato, since it came to be used in common speech of congratulation or felicitation, e.g. _macte virtute esto_?[382] Servius in commenting on Virgil has made it sufficiently clear. He explains it as _magis aucte_, and connects it with _magmentum_, increase-offering, _quasi magis augmentum_, and adds that when the victims had been slain and their exta placed on the altar, they were said to be _mactatae_. So, too, in another comment he seems to connect the word with the victim rather than with the deity. But he is quite clear as to the meaning of the word, as signifying an increase or addition of some kind; and though his etymology is wrong, we may be sure that he was right in this respect, for it is beyond doubt built on a base, _mac_ or _mag_, which produced _magnus_, _maius_, _maiestas_, and so on. "Macte nova virtute puer" means "Be thou increased, strengthened in _virtus_"; a fragment of Lucilius (quoted by Servius) brings this out well, "_Macte inquam virtute simulque his viribus esto_," and another from Ennius, "Livius inde redit magno _mactatus_ triumpho."[383] We might almost translate it in these passages by "glorified"; but it most certainly includes the meaning of "strengthened" or "increased in might."

Now in the formulae of Cato we have seen that it is applied to the deity and not to the victim; this naturally did not occur to Servius, whose mind was occupied rather with Virgil and the literary use of the word than with the original use and meaning of the language of prayer. Undoubtedly he has made a mistake here, which Cato's piety has enabled us to detect. It was, in fact, the deity whose strength was to be increased by the offerings; so much at least seems to me to be beyond doubt. There is, indeed, no certain trace in the ritual, or in Roman literature, that the gods were supposed to consume the exta, or the cakes and wine offered them; that primitive notion must have been excluded from the _ius divinum_. But instead of it we find the more spiritual idea that by placing on the altar the organs of the life of the victim, with ancient forms of sacred cake and offerings of wine, the vitality of the deity, his power to help his worshippers, to make the corn grow and the cattle bring forth young, to aid the State against enemies, or what not, was really increased in this semi-mystic way. Let us remember that the Roman numina were powers constantly at work in their own sphere; they are the various manifestations of the one Power as conceived in immediate relation to man and his wants; they are sometimes addressed in prayer, as we have seen, by additional titles which suggest their strength and vitality: Virites Quirini, Nerio Martis, Moles Martis, Maia or Maiestas Volcani. What, then, could be more natural than that the Roman should call upon his divine fellow-citizen to accept that which, according to ancient tradition and practice, will keep up his strength, and at the same time increase his glory and his goodwill towards his worshippers? This is, then, the idea which I believe to have been at the root of Roman sacrificial ritual, and it seems to confirm the dynamic theory of sacrifice recently propounded by some French anthropologists, _i.e._ that a mystic current of _religious force_ passed through the victim, from priest to deity, and perhaps back again.[384] I believe that we have here a transitional idea of the virtue of sacrifice--an idea that bridges over the gulf between the crude notion that the gods actually partake of the offering, and the later more spiritual view that the offering is an honorary gift "to the glory of God." It seems also to be found in the Vedic religion. Dr. Farnell writes: "In the Vedic ritual we find a pure and spiritual form of prayer; yet a certain spell-power may attach even to the highest types, for we find not infrequently the conception that not only the power of the worshipper, but the power of the deity also is nourished and strengthened by prayer, and the prayer itself is usually accompanied by a potent act (such as that of sacrifice). "May our prayers increase Agni": "The prayers fill thee with power and strengthen thee, like great rivers the Sindhu."[385]

I must now turn to the form and manner of Roman prayers, in order to gain further light on the question as to the mental attitude of the worshipper towards the deity invoked. Of late years there has been a strong tendency to find the origin of prayer in spell; or, in other words, to discover a bridge between that mental attitude which believes that a deity can be forced into a certain course of action by magical formulae, and the humble attitude of the petitioner in prayer, which assumes that the power of the deity altogether transcends that of his worshipper. The evidence of Roman prayers is, I think, of considerable value in dealing with this question; but it needs to be carefully studied and handled. The general impression conveyed by those who have written on the subject is that Roman prayers were dull, dry formulae, which were believed to have a constraining influence on the deity simply as formulae, if they were repeated with perfect precision the right number of times. Dr. Westermarck, for example, has no shadow of a doubt about this; quoting Renan, he says that "in the Roman, as in the majority of the old Italian cults, prayer is a magic formula, producing its effect by its own inherent quality." And again, he writes that the Romans were much more addicted to magic than to religion; "they wanted to compel the gods rather than to be compelled by them. Their _religio_ was probably near akin to the Greek [Greek: katadesmos], which meant not only an ordinary tie, but also a magic tie or knot or a bewitching thereby."[386] I need not stop to point out the misconception of the word _religio_ which suggested the whole of this passage; the supposed derivation from _ligare_ was quite enough to suggest magic to those who are on the trail of it.[387] Let us go on to examine the prayers themselves; I think we shall find that though there is much truth in the common view of them, it is not quite the whole truth.

The oldest Roman prayers we possess are usually called hymns, because the Latin word for them was _carmen_, viz. the _Carmen Saliare_, which is too obscure and fragmentary to be of use to us, and the _Carmen_ of the Arval Brethren, which is preserved on stone and is quite intelligible.[388] The word _carmen_, let us notice, was used by the old Romans for any kind of metrical formula, whether hymn, prayer, or spell. Pliny, when writing of magic and incantations, plainly includes prayer among them;[389] and Dr. Jevons has recently pointed out that singing, and especially singing in a low voice or muttered tones, is a characteristic of magic not only in Greece and Rome, but in many parts of the world at the present day.[390] The evidence of the word is thus strongly in favour of the view that these ancient _carmina_ of Roman worship were really spells; and the _Carmen Arvalium_ itself does not contradict it. After an elaborate sacrificial ceremonial the priests, using a written copy of the _carmen_ (_libellis acceptis_), danced in triple rhythm (_tripodaverunt_) while they sang it; it consisted of six clauses, each repeated three times. "_Enos Lases iuvate! Neve luerve Marmar sins incurrere in pleores! Satur fu fere Mars, limen sali, sta berber! Semunes alternei advocapit cunctos! Enos Marmar iuvato! Triumpe!_" With the precise interpretation of these words I am not now concerned; but they obviously contain invocations to the Lares and Mars, which may be either petitions or commands, and which perhaps are really on the borderland between the two; and as thrice repeated, and accompanied with dancing and gesticulation, they seem certainly to belong rather to the region of magic than of religion proper.

It is interesting to compare with this _carmen_ the prayers of the guild of brethren (_Attiedii_) at Iguvium; these are the best preserved of all old Italian prayers, and though not Roman, are the product of the same race. In the lustratio of the _arx_ (_Ocris Fisius_) of Iguvium we find three several deities invoked, with elaborate sacrificial ritual, at three gates, and a long prayer addressed to each deity, thrice repeated, as in the _Carmen Arvale_. It is to be said under the breath (_tacitus precator totum_, vi. A. 55), which was a common practice also at Rome, and is believed to be characteristic of the magical spell;[391] and except in the case of the first prayer, which is addressed to the chief deity Jupiter Grabovius, it is accompanied by some kind of dancing or rhythmical movement (_tripodatio_).[392] Thus in outward form this ritual seems to show but little advance on the Roman prayer of the Arvales, and indeed it may in substance go back to a time as remote as that in which the latter had its origin. But when we examine the matter of the prayer, we find that it is cast in the language of petition beyond all doubt--if it be rightly interpreted, as we may believe it is:--

"Te invocavi invoco divum Grabovium pro arce Fisia, pro urbe Iguvina, pro arcis nomine, pro urbis nomine: _volens sis, propitius sis_ arci Fisiae, urbi Iguvinae, arcis nomini, urbis nomini. Sancte, te invocavi invoco divum Grabovium. Sancti fiducia te invocavi invoco divum Grabovium. Dive Grabovie te hoc bove opimo piaculo pro arce Fisia, etc. Dive Grabovi, illius anni quiquomque in arce Fisia ignis ortus est, in urbe Iguvina ritus debiti omissi sunt, pro nihilo ducito. Dive Grabovi, quicquid tui sacrificii vitiatum est, peccatum est, peremptum est, fraudatum est, demptum est, tui sacrificii visum invisum vitium est, dive Grabovi, quicquid ius sit, hoc bove opimo piaculo piando.... Dive Grabovi, piato arcem Fisiam, piato urbem Iguvinam. Dive Grabovi, piato arcis Fisiae, urbis Iguvinae, nomen, magistratus, ritus, viros, pecora, fundos, fruges: piato, _esto volens propitius pace tua_ arci Fisiae, etc. Dive Grabovi, salvam servato arcem Fisiam salvam servato urbem Iguvinam .... Dive Grabovi, te hoc bove opimo piaculo pro arce Fisia, pro urbe Iguvina, pro arcis nomine, pro urbis nomine, Dive Grabovi, te invocavi."[393]

That in this prayer, and the others which accompany it, exactness of wording was believed to be essential, as in the ritual which preceded it exactness of performance, there is no doubt; for at the end of the whole document (vi. B. 48) we find that if there had been any slip in the ritual, the Brethren had to go back to the first gate and begin all over again. There is plainly present the idea, surviving from an age of magic, that the deities had strong feelings about the right way of invocation, and would not respond to the performance unless those feelings were understood and appealed to; that they would miss something and decline to do their part. Yet are we justified in going on to assume that they were bound, as by a solemn contract, to perform their part, if there were no slip in the ritual? I confess it is difficult for me to take this further step, in view of the language of the prayers, which is so clearly that of petition, nay, of humble petition. We are not dealing here with _vota_, to which I shall come in the next lecture, and in which there is a kind of legal contract between the man and the god--the former undertaking to do something pleasing to the deity, if the latter shall have faithfully performed what is asked of him. These _vota_, so abundant in historical times, are really responsible for the idea that Roman prayer is simply a binding formula--a magical spell, let us say, which in the hands of a city priesthood has become a quasi-legal formula. But these prayers are not _vota_; they do not contain any language which betrays the notion of binding the deity. They seem to me to mark a process of transition between the age of spell and magic and the age of prayer and religion; they retain some of the outward characteristics of spell, but internally, _i.e._ in the spirit in which they were intended, they have the real characteristics of prayer.[394] The numina to whom they were addressed were powerful spirits, unknown, unfamiliar, until their wishes were discovered by the organised priesthood which handed down these forms of petition.

To return to Rome, and to the prayers in Cato's book, to which I referred just now when discussing the word _macte_. Attempts have been made to prove that these were originally written in metre;[395] and this is quite possible. If so, it only means that they retained the outward form of the primitive spell; it must not lead us on to fancy that the sacrifice which accompanied the prayer was a magical act, or that the whole process was believed to compel the deity. No doubt there was believed to be efficacy in the exact repetition, as is shown by the directions for piacular sacrifices in case of error of any kind.[396] But the language is the language of prayer, not of compulsion, nor even of bargaining: "Eius rei ergo te hoc porco piaculo immolando bonas preces precor, ut sies volens propitius mihi, domo familiaeque meis."[397] "Mars pater, te precor quaesoque uti sies volens propitius mihi, domo," etc.[398] No amount of vain repetition or scruple can deprive this language of its natural meaning. The god is powerful in his own sphere of action, and man has no control over him; man is fully recognised as liable to misfortune unless the god helps him; but he can worship in full assurance of faith that his prayer will be answered, if it be such as the authorities of the State have laid down as the right wording, and if the ritual accompanying it is equally in order. The faith is, indeed, thus founded upon man's devices rather than the god's good-will as such; it is a belief in the State and its authorities and _ius divinum_, which is conceived, not indeed as constraining the deity, but as calling upon him (_invocare_) to perform his part, in formulae which he cannot well neglect, simply because it would be unreasonable to do so, contrary to his nature as a deity of the Roman State and its _ager_.

It is obvious in all this sacrificial ritual that the officiating person or persons were expected to observe the traditional forms with the utmost care and exactness. Any slip or omission was, in fact, a _piaculum_, or _sacrum commissum_--terms of the _ius divinum_ which seem to suggest, if I may use the expression, the obverse side of holiness. It is now well known that cleanness and uncleanness, holiness and its opposite, can be expressed in religious vocabulary by the same terms, for in both cases there is something beyond the ordinary, something dangerous, uncanny; thus we are not surprised to find that such words as I have just mentioned can be used to express some kind of impurity caused by a breach of ritual as well as that ritual itself. If we accept the latest theory of sacrifice, _i.e._ the dynamic theory, as it is called, we explain this intense nervousness about a ritualistic flaw as occasioned by the consciousness of a breach in the current of "religious force" (the expression is that of Messrs. Hubert and Mauss[399]), which must pass in regular sequence from the sacrificer through the victim to the deity, or vice versa. If this is the true explanation--and at present it may be said to hold the field--then the extreme exactness of the Roman ritual was a survival from an age when this strange feeling was a reality; but no more than a survival, for, so far as I can discover, the Roman idea was rather that the deity to whom the ritual was addressed was in some way offended by the omission.[400] The dynamic notion is lost, if it ever were there, and its place has been taken by one that we may perhaps call theological. But however that may be, the culprit was regarded as in a state of sin or impurity, "un être sacré," and had to get rid of this sin or impurity by another sacrifice before the whole ritual could be started afresh (_instaurare_).

According to the "dynamic" theory of sacrifice, we might naturally expect that the victim, as being destined to carry away the unholiness (or whatever we choose to call it) of the culprit, would be burnt whole, not offered to the deity in the form of exta, or eaten by the sacrificers.[401] But this does not seem to have been the case in the Roman practice; in all the examples of _piacula_ of which we have details, the exta are laid on the altar as in the typical sacrifice.[402] The inference seems to be that the theological idea of sacrifice had established itself completely ever since the formation of the _ius divinum_; the victim is not a scapegoat in any sense, but really an expiatory offering; and not only does the sacrificer yield up something of value, but he offers it to increase the strength of the deity as well as to appease his anger.

A curious point may be noticed in the last place. The practical Roman mind seems to have invented a kind of sacrificial insurance, by which a piacular sacrifice might be offered beforehand to atone for any omission in the ritual which was to follow. Thus the Fratres Arvales, if they had to take an iron implement into their sacred grove, offered a piaculum before as well as after this breach of religious rule.[403] Again, the _porca praecidanea_, which I have already mentioned as offered before harvest, was an example of the same system of insurance; for the first cutting of the corn was a sacred rite, and one in which it was easy to take a false step. Writing of this, Gellius says in general terms that _hostiae praecidaneae_ are those which are offered the day before _sacrificia solennia_.[404]

The term "piacular sacrifice" (_piaculum_) had a wide range of meaning, apart from the examples here given. With one important form of it I shall deal in the next lecture:[405] others we shall come across later on.

NOTES TO LECTURE VIII

[340] See Appendix C.

[341] Cato, _R.R._ 139, where the language suggests that as the deity was unknown, the _ius_ of the religious act was also uncertain, _i.e._ the ritual was not laid down. De Marchi translates (_La Religione_ _nella vita domestica_, i. 132) "sia a te fatto il debito sacrificio," etc., which sufficiently expresses the anxiety of the situation. Keil reads here "ut tibi ius _est_," and gives no variant in his critical note; but the words just below, "uti id recte factum siet," seem to me to suggest the subjunctive. In any case there is no doubt about _ius._ In _Tab. Iguv._ vi. A. 28 (_Umbrica_, p. 58) Buecheler translates the Umbrian _persei mersei_ by "quicquid ius sit," and compares this passage of Cato, together with Gellius i. 12. 14, where the phrase is used of the duties of a Vestal under the _ius divinum_ in the formula used by the Pontifex Maximus, _cum virginem capiat_: "Sacerdotem Vestalem, quae sacra faciat, quae ius siet sacerdotem Vestalem facere pro pop. Rom." etc.

[342] _e.g._ _Aen._ iv. 56, x. 31 ("si sine pace tua atque invito numine," etc.). Cp. _Tab. Iguv._ vi. 30, 33, etc. (_Umbrica_, p. 59), "esto volens propitiusque pace tua arci Fisiae."

[343] Livy vi. 41 _ad fin._

[344] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 318, and p. 319 for the illustrations that follow. Cp. Cicero, _Part. Or._ xxii. 78, where _religio_ is explained as "iustitia erga deos."

[345] _Lex Coloniae Genetivae_, cap. 64; _C.I.L._ ii., supplement No. 5439.

[346] Livy i. 20. 5.

[347] This follows from the definition in Festus, p. 321, and in Macrobius iii. 3. 2. This last is quoted from Trebatius _de religionibus_: "sacrum est quicquid est quod deorum habetur." In common use _sacrificium_ seems to be reserved for animal sacrifice, but the verb _sacrificare_ is not so limited. Festus, p. 319: "mustum quod Libero sacrificabant pro vineis ... sicut praemetium de spicis, quas primum messuissent, sacrificabant Cereri." It has been suggested to me by Mr. Marett that the termination of the word _sacrificium_ may have reference to the use of _facere_ for animal sacrifice, as in Greek [Greek: rhezein, erdein, dran]; but on the whole I doubt this. _Facere_ and _fieri_ are in that sense, I think, euphemisms, occasioned by the mystic character of the act (examples are collected in Brissonius _de formulis_, p. 9). _Rem divinam facere_ seems to be the general expression, as in Cato, _R.R._ 83; or the particular victim is in the ablative, _e.g. agna Iovi facit_ (Flamen Dialis) in Varro, _L.L._ vi. 16; cp. Virg. _Ecl._ iii. 77.

[348] This classification, originally due to R. Smith, article "Sacrifice" in _Encycl. Brit._, ed. 10, has lately been criticised by Hubert et Mauss, in _Mélanges d'histoire des religions_, p. 9 foll.; but it is sufficiently complete for our purposes. At the same time it is well to be aware that no classification of the various forms of sacrifice can be complete at present; that which these authors prefer, _i.e._ constant and occasional sacrifices, is, however, a useful one.

[349] _R.F._ p. 95 foll. Cp. Robertson Smith, _Rel. of Semites_, Lect. VIII.

[350] _R.F._ p. 217 foll.

[351] _R.F._ p. 302 foll. Meals in connection with sacrifice are also found at the Parilia (_R.F._ p. 81, and Ovid, _Fasti_, iv. 743 foll.) and Terminalia (Ovid, _Fasti_, ii. 657); but in both cases Ovid seems to be describing rustic rites; nor is it certain that the meal was really sacramental. What does seem proved is that the old Latins and other Italians believed the deities of the house to be present at their meals--

ante focos olim scamnis considere longis mos erat et mensae credere adesse deos (_Fasti_, vi. 307),

and thus the idea was maintained that in some sense all meals had a sacred character, _i.e._ all in which the members of a _familia_ (see above, p. 78), or of _gens_ or _curia_, met together. Cp. R. Smith, _op. cit._ p. 261 foll. We may remember that the Penates were the spirits of the food itself, not merely of the place in which it was stored; it had therefore a sacred character, which is also shown by the sanctification of the firstfruits (_R.F._ pp. 151, 195). (The _cenae collegiorum_, dinners of collegia of priests, were in no sense sacrificial meals; see Marquardt, p. 231, note 7; Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ pp. 13, 39, 40.)

[352] Cic. _de Legibus_, ii. 8. 19.

[353] Livy i. 18. For constitutional difficulties in this passage, see, _e.g._, Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, p. 50.

[354] For this and the augurs generally, see Lecture XII.

[355] The passages are collected by Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 420, note 3. There is no doubt about the inauguratio of the three great flamines and the rex sacrorum, who were all specially concerned with sacrifice, and of the augurs, who would obviously need it in order to perform the same ceremony for others--as a bishop needs consecration for the same reason. As regards the pontifices, Dionysius (ii. 73. 3) clearly thought it was needed for them, and we might a priori assume that one who might become a pontifex maximus would need it; but Wissowa discounts Dionysius' opinion, and I am unwilling to differ from him on a point of the _ius divinum_, of which he is our best exponent. If he is right, it may be that the three _flamines maiores_, who were reckoned in strict religious sense as above the pontifices, including their head (Festus, p. 185), needed "holiness" more than any pontifex, and so with the augurs. The insignia of the pontifices, as well as many historical facts, show that the pontifices were competent to perform sacrifice in a general sense (Marq. p. 248 foll.); but it is possible that they never had the right, like the flamines, actually to slay the victim. I do not feel sure that the _securis_ was really one of their symbols, though Horace seems to say so in _Ode_ iii. 23. 12. The whole question needs further investigation. It may be found that the essential distinction between the pontifices and magistrates _cum imperio_ on the one hand, and the flamines on the other, is to be sought in the ideas of holiness connected with the shedding of blood in sacrifice. The flamen is permanently holy, having charge of constant sacrifices; _e.g._ the Dialis had duties every day. He is the duly sanctified guide for all rites within his own religious range.

[356] Wissowa, _R.K._ pp. 339, 410 foll.

[357] The whole subject of the preparation of the sacrificer for his work, and of the steps by which he becomes separated from the profane, is well treated by Hubert et Mauss, _Mélanges d'histoire des religions_, p. 23 foll. The reference to Dr. Jevons is _Introduction_, ch. xx. p. 270 foll.

[358] Serv. _Aen._ xii. 173; Virgil wrote "dant fruges manibus salsas, et tempora ferro Summa notant pecudum"; to which Servius adds that the symbolic movement was a (pretended) cut from head to tail of the victim. Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 352.

[359] Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl., s.v._ "cinctus Gabinus."

[360] Marquardt, p. 340. The Vestals were never, so far as we know, directly concerned in animal sacrifice.

[361] See below, p. 190. For the colour of the garments, and the explanation referred to, see Samter, _Familienfeste_, p. 40 foll.; Diels, _Sibyllinische Blätter_, p. 70; and cp. von Duhn's paper, "Rot und Tot" in _Archiv_, 1906, p. 1 foll. That red colouring was used in various ways in sacred and quasi-sacred rites there is no doubt (see above, p. 89, note 46); but whether it can be always connected with bloodshed is by no means so certain (Rohde, _Psyche_, i. 226). In the case of women it is at least hard to understand. The idea of consecration through blood, which is very rare in Roman literature, comes out curiously in the words which Livy puts into the mouth of Virginius after the slaughter of his daughter (iii. 48): "Te Appi tuumque caput sanguine hoc consecro" (_i.e._ to a deity not mentioned). The sentence to which this note refers was written before the appearance of Messrs. Hubert et Mauss' essay on sacrifice (_Mélanges d'histoire des religions_, pp. 1-122). The theory there developed, that the victim is the intermediary in all cases between the sacrificer and the deity, and that the _force religieuse_ passes from one to the other in one direction or another, does not essentially differ from the words in the text; but the French savants would, I imagine, prefer to look on the insignia in a general sense as bringing the person wearing them within the region of the _sacrum_, the force of which would react on him still more strongly after the destruction of the victim (see p. 28 foll.).

[362] See, _e.g._, _Roman Sculpture_ by Mrs. Strong, Plates xi. and xv.

[363] For this and other insignia see Marquardt, p. 222 foll. The question is under discussion whether some of these insignia are not old Italian forms of dress (see Gruppe, _Mythologische Literatur_, 1898-1905, p. 343). For the wearing of the skin of a victim, which meets us also at the Lupercalia (_R.F._ p. 311), see Robertson Smith, _Semites_, p. 416 foll.; Jevons, _Introduction_, p. 252 foll.; Frazer, _G.B._ iii. 136 foll.

[364] They, of course, wore the _praetexta_ when performing religious acts. Cp. the Fratres Arvales, who laid aside the _praetexta_ after sacrificing. Henzen, _Acta Fr. Arv._ pp. 11, 21, and 28.

[365] Serv. _Aen._ xi. 543. The _camillae_ assisted the _flaminicae_, Marquardt, p. 227. This is one of the most beautiful features of the stately Roman ritual, and has been handed on to the Roman Church. It was, of course, derived from the worship of the household (see above, p. 74).

[366] _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, p. 413 foll. Dr. Frazer is criticising Dr. Farnell, who had touched on the subject in the _Hibbert Journal_ for 1907, p. 689, and had taken the more obvious view that death in a family disqualified for actions requiring extreme holiness.

[367] The passages are collected in Marquardt, p. 174 foll.; we may notice in particular Livy xlv. 5. 4, where, though only the washing of hands is referred to, we have the important statement that "omnis praefatio sacrorum," _i.e._ the preliminary exhortation of the priest, enjoined _purae manus_. Livy must be using the language of Roman ritual, though he is not speaking here of a Roman rite. For the material of sacred utensils see Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ p. 30.

[368] Tibullus ii. 1. 11.

[369] Cic. _de Legibus_, ii. 10. 24.

[370] Westermarck, _Origin and Development of Moral Ideas_, ii. 352 foll.; consult the index for further allusions to the subject. Cp. Farnell, _Evolution of Religion_, Lecture III. [Fehrle, _Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum_ (Giessen, 1910), has reached me too late for use in this chapter.]

[371] Full details, with the most important references quoted in full, are in Marquardt, p. 172 foll.; but some of the latter are applicable only to the Graeco-Roman period.

[372] So we may gather from the Lex Furfensis of 58 B.C. (_C.I.L._ ix. 3513), and that of the Ara Augusti at Narbo of A.D. 12 (_C.I.L._ xii. 4333).

[373] The real origin of the pontifices and their name is unknown to us. If they took their name from the bridging of the Tiber, as Varro held (_L.L._ v. 83) and as the majority of scholars believe (see O. Gilbert, _Rom. Topographie_, ii. 220, note), the difficulty remains that they are found in such a city as Praeneste, where there was no river to be bridged, and where they could not well have been merely an offshoot from the Roman college; see Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 432, note. Nor can we explain how they came to be set in charge of the _ius divinum_; and where there are no data conjecture is useless.

[374] The covering of the head (_operto capite_, as opposed to _aperto capite_ of the _Graecus ritus_) is usually explained as meant to shut out all sounds belonging to the world of the _profanum_; and the playing of the tibicines is interpreted in the same way. Hubert et Mauss explain the covered head differently: "le rituel romain prescrivit généralement l'usage du voile, signe de séparation et partant de consécration" (p. 28). Miss Harrison, _Prolegomena to_ _the Study of Greek Religion_, p. 522, also holds that it is the outward sign of consecration; cp. S. Reinach, _Cultes, mythes, et religions_, i. 300 foll. The fact, noted by Miss Harrison, that in Festus's account of the _ver sacrum_ (p. 379, ed. Müller) the children expelled were veiled, seems to point to the idea of dedication--unless, indeed, _velabant_ here means that they blindfolded them.

[375] The wine was poured over the altar as well as on the victim, which suggests a substitution for blood; Arnobius vii. 29 and 30; Dion. Hal. vii. 72. I cannot find that any one of the many utensils used in sacrifice were for pouring out blood. Blood was, however, poured on the stone at the Terminalia (_R.F._ pp. 325-326); but the rite here described by Ovid seems to be a rural one, outside the _ius divinum_. In the sacrifice of victims to Hecate in Virg. _Aen._ vi. 243 foll., which cannot be _ritus Romanus_, the warm blood is collected in _paterae_; but nothing is said of what was done with it, nor does Servius help. Cp. _Aen._ viii. 106. In Lucretius v. 1202, "aras sanguine multo spargere quadrupedum," the context shows that the ritual alluded to is not old Roman. In Livy's description of the "occulti paratus sacri" of the Samnites (ix. 41), we find "_respersae fando nefandoque sanguine arae_, et dira exsecratio ac furiale carmen." Livy seems to think of this blood-sprinkling, whether the blood be human or animal, as unusual and horrible. Ancient, no doubt, is the practice, recorded in the _Acta Fratr. Arv._ (see Henzen, pp. 21 and 23), of using the blood in a religious feast, in the process of cooking: "porcilias piaculares epulati sunt et sanguem." (There is a mention of the pouring of blood in an inscription from Lusitania in _C.I.L._ ii. 2395.) For the use of wine as a substitute for blood, see the recently published work of Karl Kircher, "Die sakrale Bedeuting des Weines," in _Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche, etc._, p. 82 foll., where, however, the subject is not worked out.

[376] According to Lübbert (_Commentarii pontificales_, p. 121 foll.) _magmentum_ is the same as _augmentum_, which word is also found (Varro, _L.L._ v. 112). Festus, p. 126, "magmentum magis augmentum"; Serv. _Aen._ iv. 57, to which passage I shall return. For the equivalent in the Vedic ritual of the cooking and offering of the exta, see Hubert et Mauss, _op. cit._ p. 60 foll.

[377] _R.F._ p. 89.

[378] _ib._ p. 10.

[379] Buecheler, _Umbrica_, pp. 60, 69, etc. Of course the prayer might be said while other operations were going on. For the constant connection of prayer and sacrifice, see Pliny, _N.H._ xxviii. 10, "quippe victimam caedi sine precatione non videtur referre aut deos rite consuli." If Macrobius is right (iii. 2. 7 foll.) in asserting that the prayer must be said while the priest's hand touches the altar, one may guess that this was done at the same time that the exta were laid on it. Ovid saw the priest at the Robigalia offer the exta and say the prayer at the same time (_Fasti_, iv. 905 foll.), but does not mention the hand touching the altar. For this see Serv. _Aen._ vi. 124; Horace, _Ode_ iii. 23. 17, and Dr. Postgate on this passage in _Classical Review_ for March 1910.

[380] Cato, _R.R._ 132, 134, 139, and 141. That these formulae were taken from the books of the pontifices is almost certain, not only from the internal evidence of the prayers themselves, but because Servius (Interpol.) on _Aen._ ix. 641 quotes the words: "macte hoc vino inferio esto," which occur in 132, introducing them thus: "et in pontificalibus sacrificantes dicebant deo...."

[381] The verb is omitted here for some ritualistic reason, as in the Iguvian prayers (_Umbrica_, p. 55).

[382] Virg. _Aen._ ix. 641, "macte nova virtute puer, sic itur ad astra," etc., and many other passages. The verb _mactare_ acquired a general sense of sacrificial slaying, as did also _immolare_, though neither had originally any direct reference to slaughter. The best account I find of the word is in H. Nettleship's _Contributions to Latin Lexicography_, p. 520. He takes _mactus_ as the participle of a lost verb _maco_ or _mago_, to make great, increase, equivalent to _augeo_, which is also a word of semi-religious meaning, as Augustus knew. Nettleship quotes Cicero _in Vatinium_, 14, "puerorum extis deos manes mactare."

[383] Baehrens, _Fragm. Poet. Lat._ 180; Lusilius fragm. 143; Nonius, 341, 28 has "versibus."

[384] It may possibly be objected that some of the deities were powerful for evil as well as good, _e.g._ Robigus, the spirit of the red mildew, and that the power of such a deity was not to be encouraged or increased. But all such deities (and I cannot mention another besides Robigus) were of course conceived as able to restrain their own harmful function; they were not invoked to go away and leave the ager Romanus in peace, but to limit their activity in the land where they had been settled for worship. We have no prayer to Robigus (or Robigo, feminine, as Ovid has it) except that which Ovid somewhat fancifully versified after hearing the Flamen Quirinalis say it (_Fasti_, iv. 911 foll.), in which of course the word _macte_ does not occur. As the victim was a dog, an uneatable one, it is possible that the ritual was not quite the usual one. But the language of the prayer is interesting and brings out my point:

aspera Robigo, parcas Cerialibus herbis. vis tua non levis est;... parce precor, scabrasque manus a messibus aufer neve noce cultis: posse nocere sat est.

It concludes by praying Robigo to direct her strength and attention to other objects, _gladios et tela nocentia_; but this is the poet's fancy.

[385] _Evolution of Religion_, p. 212, quoting _Vedic Hymns_, pt. ii. pp. 259 and 391.

[386] _Origin and Development of Moral Ideas_, vol. ii. p. 585 foll.; cp. 657. See also Farnell, _Evolution of Religion_, p. 195.

[387] See above, p. 9. _Religio_ in the sense of an obligation to perform certain ritualistic acts is in my view a secondary and later use of the word. See _Transactions of the Congress of Historical Religion for 1908_, vol. ii. p. 169 foll.

[388] Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ p. 26 foll.; _C.I.L._ vi. 2104, 32 foll.; Buecheler und Riese, _Carmina Lat._, epigr. pars ii., no. 1. All surviving Roman prayers are collected in Appel's _De Romanorum precationibus_, Giessen, 1909.

[389] Pliny, _N.H._ xxviii. 10 foll.

[390] In _Anthropology and the Classics_, p. 94.

[391] Cp. Tibullus ii. 1. 84, "vos celebrem cantate deum pecorique vocate, Voce palam pecori, clam sibi quisque vocet." This murmuring was certainly characteristic of Roman magic; see Jevons, p. 99, and especially the reference to a Lex Cornelia, which condemned those "qui susurris magicis homines occiderunt" (Justinian, _Inst._ iv. 18. 5).

[392] On the nature of this _tripodatio_ see Henzen, _op. cit._ p. 33. Buecheler, _Umbrica_, p. 69, gives the Umbrian verb a different meaning, though he translates it _tripodato_.

[393] Buecheler, _Umbrica_, pp. 13 and 52.

[394] Wissowa, _R.K._, 333, inclines to the belief that prayer had a legal binding force upon the deity; but he does not cite any text which confirms this view, and is arguing on general grounds. I gather from the language of Aust (_Religion der Römer_, p. 30) that he thinks there was a germ which might have developed into a more truly religious attitude towards the gods, if it had not been killed by priestly routine and quasi-legal formulae. With this opinion I am strongly inclined to agree. Cp. the story of Scipio Aemilianus audaciously altering and elevating the formula dictated by the priest in the censor's lustratio (Val. Max. iv. 1. 10), to which I shall return in the proper place.

[395] Westphal, quoted by De Marchi, _La Religione, etc._, i. p. 133, note.

[396] See, _e.g._, ch. 141 _ad fin._ The prayer in the Acta of the Ludi Saeculares to the Moirae is an imitation of old prayers. See below, p. 442.

[397] _ib._ ch. 139.

[398] _ib._ ch. 141.

[399] Hubert et Mauss, _Mélanges d'histoire des religions_, p. 74.

[400] So Cato, _R.R._ 141, "si minus in omnes litabit, sic verba concipito; Mars pater, quod tibi illuc porco neque satisfactum est, te hoc porco piaculo." (The word for the slaughter is here euphemistically omitted; De Marchi, p. 134.)

[401] Hubert et Mauss, _op. cit._ p. 55 foll.; Leviticus