The practice which is the subject of this lecture was a comparatively
late growth in the religious history of ancient Italy. We commonly
and vaguely translate _lustratio_ by ‘purification’, _lustrare_ by
‘purify’; but in Latin literature there is another sense of the word,
which shows well how one particular kind of purification had become
associated with it--I mean the sense of a slow ordered movement in
procession. This stately processional movement, so characteristic of
the old Roman character, so characteristic still of the grandeur and
discipline of the Roman Church in Italy, impressed itself for ever
on the Latin language in the word _lustrare_. Let me quote a single
beautiful example of it. When Aeneas first sees and addresses Dido he
says:
In freta dum fluvii current, _dum montibus umbrae
Lustrabunt convexa_, polus dum sidera pascet,
Semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt,
Quae me cumque vocant terrae.[115]
‘So long as the cloud-shadows move slowly over the hollows on the
hills.’ Long ago, when fishing in Wales, I watched this procession of
the shadows, and ever since then it has been associated in my mind with
the many ancient Italian processions which I have had to study. Such is
the magical power of a great poet of nature.
But before we go on to examine the nature and meaning of these
processions it is necessary to go much further back, in order to get
some idea of the primitive Italian ideas of ‘purification’ out of
which they were developed. We know them only in the farm and the city
of historical times; they belong at the earliest to the comparatively
settled and civilized life of the Italian agricultural community, and
reached their highest development in the highly organized City-State.
But there is much to be said--much more than I have time to say
now--about the ideas to which they owe their origin.
There are certain words in Latin bearing the sense of purification,
which are older, if I am not mistaken, than _lustrare_ and _lustratio_,
and which belong, I should be inclined to believe, to a ‘pre-animistic’
period: to a period, that is, when the thing to be got rid of by what
we call purification was not so much evil influences in the form of
spirits as some mysterious miasmatic contamination. These words are
_februum_, _februare_, _februatio_, from which the name of our second
month, the month of purification, is derived. _Februum_ is a material
object with magical purifying power, which the late Romans might call
_piamen_, or _purgamen_ (Ovid, _Fast._ ii. 19 foll.), using a word
belonging to the priestly ritual of the fully developed State. A number
of such objects were in use at Rome on particular occasions, all called
generically by this name _februum_--water, fire, sulphur, laurel, wool,
pine-twigs, cakes made of certain ‘holy’ ingredients, and at the
Lupercalia, strips of the skin of a victim. These belong to the region
of magic, and are intimately connected with charms and amulets, which
were and still are so popular and universal in Italy. They belong
to the same category, psychologically considered, as the _bulla_ of
children, the _apex_ of the _flamines_, a pointed twig fixed on the
head or head-dress, and the _galerus_, the cap of the Flamen Dialis,
made of the skin of a white victim which had been sacrificed to
Jupiter. These are all survivals from an older stratum of religious
thought than the processional rites which we are going to study: they
date from a period when magical processes were the rule and religious
processes the exception.
I am not going to let myself be drawn here into the vexed question of
the relation of religion to magic--two words which, simply by virtue of
their being words with constantly shifting connotation--are very apt
to mislead us. But putting aside this controversy, it is helpful, I
think, to suggest that _februum_ and _februare_ belong to an age when
material contamination, e. g. of a corpse or of blood--in other words,
of things ‘taboo’--could be got rid of by magical means, _lustrare_
and _lustratio_ to an age when the thing to be driven and kept away is
spiritual mischief--the influence of spirits that may be hostile--and
when the means used are sacrifices and prayer, with processional
movement. To draw the line clearly, however, between a magical period
and a religious period is in Roman history quite impossible, as indeed
it is and must be everywhere. Magical and quasi-magical processes are
taken up into the processes of a period which may be called religious,
and survive in an amphibious condition for which it is difficult to
find a name. The Flamen Dialis, for example, was priest of Jupiter,
and as such in all his duties was an official of a highly organized
religious system, yet he was afflicted with an extraordinary number
of taboos--now familiar to all readers of _The Golden Bough_--which
survived from a period long anterior to that of religion in the true
sense of the word. The purification of new-born children on the _dies
lustricus_ is an essential part of the religion of the family, and the
word _lustricus_ is itself, in my view, a mark of a period of religion;
but the original meaning of the ceremony is probably to be found in
pre-animistic ideas. So too with the purification of the family after a
funeral, where the original horror of a corpse common to all primitive
peoples is still just discernible in the religious ritual of historical
times.[116] And, as we shall presently see, the belief that he who has
shed blood, even of an enemy, needs purification, is still to be found
lurking in the form of one of those acts of _lustratio_ with which we
are about to occupy ourselves.
But on the whole it may be said of the Romans, as Dr. Farnell has said
of our Teutonic ancestors (_Evolution of Religion_, p. 108), that
cathartic ritual did not weigh heavily on their consciences. Assuredly
it may be so said of the Romans of historical times, subjected to the
quieting influences of priestly law and ritual, which found infallible
remedies for the conscience of the individual, for his fear of evil
powers material or spiritual--expedients to emancipate him from the
bondage of taboo[117]--in the religious action of the State as a whole.
It may perhaps be guessed that even in an age long before the State
arose the conscience of the Latin was never ‘intensified’ as regards
purification from bloodshed or other mischance or misdeed. The impurity
or holiness of blood, as conceived by all primitive peoples, has left
no obvious trace in Roman ideas, legends, or literature; it is to be
found, but it does not attract our attention as it does in Greece. I
believe that the explanation of this lies in the genius of the Roman
for law, and in his early and very distinct conception of the State and
of the authority of its officials. It may, indeed, be also due to the
invasion of Latium by a people of advanced culture, who had but little
to say to the grosser material ideas of an aboriginal population;
but this is still merely speculation, into which I cannot enter now.
Whatever the cause, the religion of the Romans as we know it shows
no horror, no fear, so long as the worship of the gods is performed
exactly and correctly according to the rules of the State priesthoods:
there is no sense of sin or of pollution, of taboo irremediably broken,
haunting the mind of the individual: all is cheerfully serious,
regular, ordered, ritualistic; and nowhere can we see this better than
in the public and private lustral processions of the Roman people.
A word, however, in the first place about the original meaning of the
word _lustratio_. _Lustrare_ is a strong form of _luere_: and _luere_
is explained by Varro as equivalent to _solvere_ (De Ling. Lat. vi.
11): ‘Lustrum nominatum tempus quinquennale a luendo, id est solvendo;
quod quinto quoque anno vectigalia et ultro tributa per censores
persolvebantur.’ He is followed by Servius, who explains such
expressions as ‘paena commissa luere’, ‘peccata luere’, ‘supplicium
luere’,[118] on the same principle. We might, therefore, be tempted to
think that the root-meaning of _lustrare_ is to perform a duty or an
obligation, and so to rid oneself of it--to go through a religious
rite as due to a deity. But this would be to misconceive the original
meaning of the word as completely as Varro did when he explained
_luere_ by reference to the payment of taxes. We have not yet arrived
at a period in Roman thought when we can speak of a sense of religious
duty: it is not a money obligation or a ritualistic one that has to be
got ‘rid of’, in the earliest ages of the Latin farm or City-State, but
those ubiquitous spirits, presumably hostile until they are reclaimed,
which haunt the life of man in the animistic stage. Varro and his
successors do, however, give us the right clue; they see that the
idea lurking in the word is that of purging yourself or getting rid
of something, but they understand that something in the light, not of
primitive man’s intelligence, but of the relation of man to man in a
civilized state.
If, then, _lustrare_ originally embodies this sense of ridding
oneself of something, we can now go on to examine the oldest forms
of _lustratio_. I will not here go into the further question whether
_lues_, a pest, and the shadowy deity _Lua_ Mater, who was the consort
or companion in some antique sense of Saturnus, are words belonging to
the same group and explicable on the same principle.
Now, in order to understand clearly how this necessity of getting rid
of hostile spirits came to suggest those solemn processional rites
which we associate with the word _lustratio_, we must fully appreciate
the fact that the earliest settlers in Italy who had any knowledge
of agriculture found it a country of forest-clad hills; the river
valleys were marshy and unhealthy, and the earliest settlements were
in clearings made in the woodland. This fact was dimly appreciated by
the Romans themselves, and is proved by the archaeological evidence
available to-day. The first thing, then, to be done was to make a
clearing; and this was a most perilous task, for when you cut down
trees and dug up the soil, how were you to tell what unknown spirits
you might be disturbing and aggravating? They might be in the trees and
the plants, they might be in the animals whose homes were in the trees
and the ground, the rocks and the springs. In the later Roman ritual we
can still see traces of this old feeling of peril. Cato has preserved
for us the formula used by the farmer in historical times when making
a new clearing; the prayer accompanying his sacrifice began with ‘Si
deus, si dea’--for how was he to know the name or sex of the spirit of
the wood he was invading? When digging up the soil he had to offer an
expiatory sacrifice; and the ancient gild of the Fratres Arvales had to
offer special _piacula_ for the falling of a bough in their grove, or
for any injury to a tree in it.[119]
And when your clearing was complete, and you had settled down with your
own household spirits, e. g. of the hearth-fire and the store-cupboard
(Vesta and Penates), or had induced some of the native spirits to
be friendly and serviceable to you--those especially of the land
and the springs,--there was yet another difficulty of the greatest
importance, viz. to keep those wild ones still dwelling in the woodland
around you from encroaching on your clearing or annoying you in your
dwelling. That they really could be thus annoying is proved by a
curious bit of folklore of which Varro knew, and which has luckily been
preserved by St. Augustine, a student of Varro’s works, as an example
of Pagan absurdity (_Civ. Dei_, vi. 9). After the birth of a child,
three spirits were invoked--Intercidona, Pilumnus, and Deverra--to
prevent Silvanus (the later representative of the woodland spirits
generally) from coming into the house and making mischief by night.
These three spirits, as their names show, represented the life of
settled agriculture: the cutting and pruning of trees (Intercidona),
the pounding of corn for the daily meal (Pilumnus), and the raking
and sweeping up of the grain (Deverra); and Varro says that they were
represented by three men, who imitated the action of axe, pestle, and
broom. The real significance of this delightful bit of mummery has
never, I think, been correctly understood, simply because the vital
difference to the earliest settler between the benevolent spirits of
the reclaimed clearing and the hostile spirits of the wild woodland has
never been quite fully appreciated.
But this device was one to which you need only have recourse on a
particular occasion; the permanent difficulty was to mark off your
cultivated land from the forest and its dangerous spiritual population,
in some way by which the latter might be prevented from making itself
unpleasant. You must draw a definite line between good spirits and bad,
between white spirits and black. Here it is that we find the origin of
a practice which lasted all through Roman history, passed on into the
ritual of the Church, and still survives, as at Oxford on Ascension
Day, in the beating of parish bounds. The boundary of the cultivated
land was marked out in some material way, perhaps by stones placed
at intervals, like the _cippi_ of the old Roman _pomerium_, from the
woodland lying around it; and this boundary-line was made sacred by the
passage round it (_lustratio_) at some fixed time of the year--in May
as a rule, when the crops were ripening and especially liable to be
attacked by hostile influences--of a procession occupied with sacrifice
and prayer. I must dwell for a moment on this procession as it is
described by old Cato; but at this point I may just interpolate the
remark that the object of its mysterious influence was the arable land
only and the crops.[120] The sheep and cattle were otherwise protected,
when, after their seclusion within the boundary during the winter, they
were driven out in April to pasture beyond it, where they would be in
far greater peril from enemies spiritual and other. If you wish to see
how this was done, read Ovid’s account of the Parilia in the fourth
book of his _Fasti_, and Dr. Frazer’s illuminating commentary on it
(St. George and the Parilia) in the _Revue des Études Ethnographiques
et Sociologiques_ for 1908, p. 1 foll.
Cato in his treatise on agriculture has left us, in the form of
instructions to a real or imaginary bailiff, the formula of the
lustratio as it was used in the second century B.C. It is obviously
applicable in detail rather to the estate of that period than to a farm
of primitive Latium: there are, for example, words which suggest that
it was not necessary in those days to go in procession round the whole
of the boundary; as was the case afterwards with the lustratio of the
ager Romanus, the form survived accommodated to the great increase
of the land concerned. But the two main features of the whole rite
are no doubt identical with those of the earliest form of it--i. e.
the procession of the victims, ox, sheep, and pig, the farmer’s most
valuable property, with the sacrificer and his helps, in this case the
bailiff and his assistants: and secondly the prayer to Mars pater,
after libations to Janus and Jupiter, asking for his kindly protection
of the whole _familia_ of the farm, together with the crops of every
kind, and the cattle within the boundary-line. Though it is not
explicitly told us, we can hardly doubt that originally the procession
followed the boundary-line, and thus served to keep it clear in the
memory as well as to preserve everything within it from hostile spirits
outside of it. In Cato’s formula it is disease, calamity, dearth, and
infertility, that the farmer seeks to ward off--that is the language
of the second century B.C.: and it is Mars pater who is invoked, i.
e. a great god who has long ago emerged from the crowd of impersonal
spirits; but we need not doubt that the primitive farmer used language
of a different kind, and addressed the spirits of disease and dearth
themselves, of whom one survived into historic times--Robigus, the
spirit of mildew. In the ritual of the Arval Brethren, who perhaps
retained some details more antique than those of Cato’s instructions,
it is a nameless deity, the Dea Dia, who is the chief object of
petition (_Acta Fratr. Arv._, p. 48).
At this point it may be well to ask what was the original idea of the
virtue conveyed by going round a piece of land with victims to be
sacrificed at the end of the circuit. Such circuitous processions,
with or without victims, are to be found in all countries: perhaps
the instance most familiar to all of us is that round the walls of
Jericho, repeated seven times--the mystic number--in order to destroy
their defensive power. But Roman folklore itself, preserved in great
abundance by Pliny, supplies an example which goes some way, I think,
to show the original nature of the process. Pliny tells us that if
a woman in a certain condition, with bare feet and streaming hair,
walked round a field, it was completely protected against insects.[121]
The act of passing round a crop served as a charm to keep off noxious
things--live insects in historical times, noxious spirits, if I am
right, in the dawn of agriculture. The charm lay in the condition of
the woman, as Dr. Frazer has abundantly shown in _The Golden Bough_
(iii, ed. 2, p. 232 foll.), where he has quoted this passage of
Pliny and others from the Roman writers on agriculture. Some power
of a similar kind there must have been also in the victims about to
be slain; they were chosen according to rule, and under favourable
auspices (if we may argue back from the ritual of the city to that of
the farm): they were therefore holy, and their blood was about to be
shed at one point in the line of circuit. We have here, indeed, passed
beyond the region of magic, but we are still in that early stage of
religion when a magical idea is at the bottom of the ceremony, though
fast losing itself in ideas more advanced and rational.
This religious process, the fencing out of hostile spirits by a
boundary-line, and the discovery of the proper formulae for preserving
it and all within it, may and indeed must have been the work of ages.
But once discovered, the principle of it could be applied to any land
or other property of man, and also to man himself. Let us now take some
examples of such extensions of the simple practice of the farm.
The farms and homesteads of the early Latins were grouped together
in associations called _pagi_; and these were subjected to the same
process of lustratio as the farms themselves. So at least we can hardly
doubt, though we have no explicit account of the processional character
of the _lustratio pagi_. When Ovid, under date of the Paganalia (Jan.
24-6), describes the lustratio, he writes:
Pagus agat festum: pagum lustrate, coloni,
Et date paganis annua liba focis:
but does not make it clear that he uses _lustrare_ in the sense of
a procession with the suovetaurilia. Nor can we be sure that the
beautiful passage in the first _Georgic_ (338 foll.), beginning, ‘In
primis venerare deos,’ refers to a _lustratio pagi_, though Wissowa
seems to imply it,[122] and the lines
Terque novas circum felix eat hostia fruges,
Omnis quam chorus et socii comitentur ovantes
Et Cererem clamore vocent in tecta ...
give a charming picture of a lustratio of this kind, without enabling
us to decide whether he has the farm or the pagus in his mind. Let
us go on to the beginnings of the city, where we shall find the same
principle and process applied in most striking fashion.
Just as it was necessary to keep hostile spirits out of the homestead
and its land, so it was necessary to keep them out of the city and its
land. The walls of the Italian city were sacred, and so was a certain
space outside them, called the _pomerium_. This is well illustrated in
the rite used in the foundation of a city even in historical times,
as described by Varro, Servius, and Plutarch:[123] it was believed to
be of Etruscan origin, like so many other Roman rites, but it is now
generally considered to be old Italian in a general sense. A white ox
and a white cow were harnessed to a plough, of which the share must be
made of bronze, and (on an auspicious day) drew a rectangular furrow
where the walls of the city were to be: the earth was turned inwards to
indicate the line of the wall, and the furrow represented the future
pomerium. When the plough came to the place where there was to be a
gate, it was lifted over it and the ploughing resumed beyond it. This
meant that though the walls were sacred, the gates were profane; for,
as Plutarch says, had the gates been holy, scruple would have been
felt about the passage in and out of them of unholy things. The result
of this religious process was to keep outside the sacred boundary of
the wall all evil and strange spirits (or, as we may now say, seeing
that we are entering an era of higher civilization, strange _gods_);
and inside it there dwelt only those who belonged to the place and its
inhabitants (_indigetes_), and whose alliance and protection had become
assured. Inside it, too, and only within its limits, could the auspicia
of the city be taken.
We might naturally expect that this sacred wall and boundary would have
its holiness and efficacy secured by an annual lustratio of the same
kind as that of the farm and pagus; and so it was. We know that there
was at Rome a lustral rite called Amburbium, which probably took place
at the beginning of the month of purification (February); but it is
for us unluckily little more than a name. Later on in the same month
we find the extraordinary rite of the Lupercalia (15th), in which the
pomerium is so far concerned as that the Luperci, or young men who
served as priests on the occasion, ran round the ancient boundary of
the Palatine settlement, girt with the skins of the victims, striking
at all women who came near them with strips cut from these same skins,
in order to produce fertility. But was this really a _lustratio urbis_?
In my _Roman Festivals_ I treated it as such (p. 319), on the ground
that Varro uses the word lustrare in alluding to it. I am now, however,
disposed to think that Varro was here using the word in a general and
not a technical sense, and that the object of it was not, as in the
rites we have been discussing, to keep evil spirits away from the
city as a whole. It seems to be a survival of some very primitive
magico-religious ideas, into which I will not enter now. Certain it
is that the leading feature of the true lustratio is absent from it;
instead of a slow and stately procession of worshippers and victims, we
have the wild running of almost naked youths, apparently personating or
embodying a deity.
Fortunately we can illustrate the real lustratio of a city from a
different source, and in this case most luckily a documentary one, but
from an Umbrian city instead of a Latin one. The town of Gubbio, the
modern form of Iguvium, still preserves the priestly instructions,
drawn up from older sources probably at the beginning of the last
century B. C., for the lustratio of its citadel, the arx (_ocris
Fisia_), by a guild of priests called the Fratres Attiedii.[124] Here
the ceremony has been developed under priestly influence into a series
of ritualistic acts of the highest exactness and complexity; but the
main features of the lustratio stand out quite clearly. The procession
goes solemnly round the arx, with the victims, which are the same
as those of the Latin lustratio; at each gate it stops, and offers
sacrifice and prayer on behalf of the citadel, the city, and the whole
people of Iguvium. The gates, three in number, are the scene of the
actual sacrifice and prayer, because they are the weak points in the
wall, as we have seen, and they need to be spiritually strengthened
by annual religious operations, though not such as would make them
permanently sacred like the wall itself. Doubtless the Fratres Attiedii
would have been unable to explain this as I am explaining it; the
sense of a hostile spiritual world outside the sacred boundary had
vanished from the Italian mind when these elaborate liturgical formulae
were drawn up. The prayers are cast in language that hardly differs
from those of a Church of to-day which asks for a blessing on a
community. The deities of the city are asked to preserve the name, the
magistrates, rites, men, cattle, land, and crops--a list in which the
_name_ is the only item which carries us clearly back to pre-Christian
times. The ideas and the deities have been developed into a religious
system of considerable complexity, but the actual proceedings, the
procession and the prayers at the gates, still remind us of the rock
whence all this ritual was hewn.
I said that human beings might be subjected to the lustral process
_en masse_, as well as land and city. Before we return from Iguvium
to Rome, I may mention that the Iguvian documents also contain
instructions for the lustratio of the people.[125] So far as we can
gather from the Umbrian text, the people was brought together in a
particular spot in its military divisions, and round them a procession
went three times; at the end of each circuit there was sacrifice and
prayer (the former not apparently with the usual suovetaurilia), and
Mars and two female consorts or representatives of his power were
entreated to confound and frighten certain enemies of the city, in
language which reminds me of the prayer in time of war, now happily
abandoned, which I can remember as a child being read in the days
of the Crimean war--‘abate their pride, assuage their malice, and
confound their devices’. Then followed of course a prayer for blessing
on the Iguvini. This may conveniently bring us back to Rome; for in
the account of the census and lustrum in the Campus Martius given by
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (iv. 22), we find the suovetaurilia driven
three times round the assembled host with sacrifice to Mars. This was
no doubt really the early form of the census, which had a military
meaning and origin.
The explanation of this lustration of the host, the male population
in arms, of a community, is not quite the same as that of the rite as
applied to a city; yet it takes us back to the same animistic period
and the same class of ideas. These armies were likely to have to march
against enemies living far beyond the pale of the _ager Romanus_, and
therefore among spirits with whom the Romans or Iguvians, as the case
might be, had no peaceful relations, and of whose ways and freaks they
were in fact entirely ignorant. They must, therefore, be protected
against such evil influences by some special device and ritual. Of this
kind of practice Dr. Frazer has collected some examples in _Golden
Bough_, i. 304 foll., both from savage tribes and from Greek usage. As
we are dealing here with Rome only, we may content ourselves with a
parallel from the pen of a Roman historian, which, as it happens, Dr.
Frazer has not mentioned. Livy tells us that the method in Macedonia
was to march the whole host in spring before a campaign between the
severed limbs of a dog (xl. 6 init.). This only differs from the
Italian plan in method, not in principle: the object in each case is to
subject the whole army without exception to the salutary influence of
the victim: but in Macedonia it is made to pass between the two parts
of a slain victim, while in Italy the live victims are made to pass
round the army, and afterwards sacrificed. That each Roman army was
thus lustrated is almost certain (_Dict. Ant._, vol. ii. 102): in fact
the word lustratio came to mean a review of troops for this reason,
without religious signification: so at least we are used to take such
expressions as Cicero uses of his army in Cilicia, ‘exercitum lustravi’
(_Att._ v. 20. 2). Even the fleets were subjected to the same process:
and in Livy xxix. 27 we have a prayer addressed by Scipio to the
deities of the sea before sailing for Africa, which may remind us of
those used during the lustration of the people at Iguvium.
Further, at this same time, in spring, before the season of arms,
all the appurtenances of the army were ‘purified’--the horses, the
arms, and the trumpets. So at least we may gather from the fact that
there was a festival in the oldest religious calendar at the end of
February called Equirria, and another of the same name on March 14
following; though the real meaning of the word was lost in later times,
this explanation is strongly suggested by the dates, and also by the
place, i. e. the Campus Martius. (If this was flooded it took place
on the Caelian hill.) The details of the festival, which must have
included horse racing, are unfortunately lost. The Equirria of March
14 seems to correspond to a curious rite, of which the date is October
15, i.e. after the season of arms; on that day there was a two-horse
chariot-race in the Campus Martius, and the near horse of the winning
chariot was sacrificed to Mars, with peculiar ritual following the
slaughter. It is tempting to refer this rite to a lustratio of the
horses after their return from a campaign: but here again the details
of a true lustratio are not forthcoming. It may have originally been,
as Wissowa suggests, a cathartic rite purifying the army from the taint
of bloodshed (cf. _G. B._ i. 332 foll.); the blood of the sacrificed
horse was allowed to drip upon the sacred hearth of the Regia, and it
is probable that it was used in the making of certain sacred cakes
(_mola salsa_) of great cathartic value. But it is remarkable that
this rite was not included in the festivals of the ancient calendar:
we know of it only from other sources. I am inclined to hazard a guess
that it belonged to a type of ceremony which the earliest pontifical
legislators were unwilling to recognize; their efforts, as it seems to
me, must have been directed to make the worship of the people as pure
and orderly as possible.[126]
The old calendar also supplies strong evidence that the arms and the
trumpets of the host were lustrated, both before and after a campaign.
On March 19, called _Quinquatrus_, because it was the fifth day after
the Ides, the _ancilia_, or shields of the war-priests of Mars, were
thus purified; and it is a good guess that they stood for the arms of
the fighting men generally. For on October 19 we find the festival
Armilustrium, which tells its own tale. On that day it seems clear
that both arma and ancilia were lustrated, and that the Salii for this
purpose went round the armed host in a place called by the same name as
the rite, in or near the Circus maximus (Varro, _L.L._ 6. 22: cf. 5.
153). Again, we have March 23 marked in the calendar as Tubilustrium;
and though the old explanations confine these _tubae_ to such as were
used _in sacris_, I believe, with Wissowa, that included in these were
the trumpets of the host.[127]
Lastly, we may believe that the army was purified from the taint of
bloodshed after its return from a campaign, just as the Hebrew warriors
and their captives were purified before re-entering the camp after a
battle (Num. xxi. 19). I have just now suggested that the sacrifice of
the October horse may have originally had this object. But in Roman
pontifical law the idea of the taint of bloodshed is only faintly
discernible, as is also the case in the Homeric poems (Farnell,
_Evolution_, p. 133); and the only distinct trace of it that I can find
in regard to the army is a statement of Festus that the soldiers who
followed the general’s car in a triumph wore laurel wreaths ‘ut quasi
purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem’ (_Fest._ 117). Laurel was a
powerful purgative of such taint.
I have now given some brief account of the most remarkable examples of
the characteristic type of lustration in Italy, and more especially at
Rome; and it only remains for me to sum up in outline what I have been
saying. We began with the ideas of purification which were common to
the Italians and other primitive peoples, and which have left traces
here and there in the public and private ritual of the Romans, but
without showing any great vital force, such as might enable them to
develop into matters of religious or ethical importance in Roman life.
We then saw how the nature of the Italian peninsula as it was in the
dawn of civilization, and the universal belief in a world of spirits
haunting mountain and woodland, compelled the early Latin farmer to
draw a well-defined boundary line between the land he had reclaimed and
the forest beyond it, within which he and his familia and his friendly
spirits or deities might be at peace; and how he sought to render this
boundary impermeable to the hostile spirits outside it by a yearly
ceremony consisting of a procession around it of victims for sacrifice.
Then we saw how this same practice was retained in the service of the
State, and applied to the foundation of a city, to its land, to the
circuit of its walls, to its people in the form of the men capable of
carrying arms, to the horses, the arms, and the trumpets of this host.
In conclusion, I must ask the question whether this impressive ritual
of lustratio ever came to have any religious or moral import for the
Roman people. Undoubtedly the idea which lay at the root of it, the
protection of the city and its inhabitants from hostile spirits or
strange gods, disappeared from the Roman mind at an early period among
the governing and better educated classes. In one point only, so far as
I know, can we detect a survival of it,--namely, in the persistence of
the pontifices in refusing to admit new gods within the sacred circle
of the pomerium; they might be taken into the Society of Roman deities,
but they must be settled in temples placed _outside_ that boundary
line. But as early as the second Punic war this old rule began to be
broken, and in 205 B.C. even the mystic stone of the Magna Mater of the
Phrygians was brought within the pomerium and settled in the heart of
the city on the Palatine. And from that time onwards, whatever may have
been the notions about such things of the ignorant Latin population,
the old ideas assuredly vanished utterly from the minds of those who
were in charge of the State and its religion.
Was there any transmutation of those ideas into religious beliefs which
might help State or individual in the changes and chances of this
mortal life? The answer to this question is a most emphatic negative.
What spiritual help they needed they sought and obtained in new and
foreign rites; their own solemn processions were sights to see and
nothing more. Lustratio never really, in pagan Italy, developed an
ethical meaning, as catharsis did to some extent in Greece.[128] And the
explanation of this is a simple one; at a very early stage the State
overpowered the individual, and the State religion obliterated all
the germs of an individual religious conscience. Even in the cult of
Jupiter, where, if anywhere, we might look for an ethical significance,
this was so; ‘we do not pray to Jupiter,’ says Cicero, ‘to make us
good, but to give us material benefits.’[129]
But, meaningless as they were, the stately processions remained, and
could be watched with pride by the patriotic Roman all through the
period of the Empire. Then the Roman Church, with characteristic
adroitness, adapted them to its own ritual, and gave them a new
meaning; and the Catholic priest still leads his flock round the
fields with the prayers of the Litania major in Rogation week, not
only beating the bounds as we still do in Oxford on Ascension Day, but
begging a blessing on the crops and herds, and deprecating the anger of
the Almighty.