The "fashions and customes of Rome," which prompted Plutarch's questions,
are directly or indirectly associated with the worship of the gods, while
the solutions which he suggests contain occasionally myths. It is not,
however, all Roman gods, cults, and myths that are discussed by Plutarch:
he limits himself, on the whole, to those which are purely Roman, or rather
purely Italian. This limitation is not accidental, and it is significant.
It does not indeed appear that Plutarch designed to confine himself thus:
the fact seems rather to be that, long before his time, the Romans had
borrowed the myths, the ritual, and the gods of Greece, and that Plutarch,
as a Greek, found nothing strange or unintelligible in the resemblances
which the Roman ritual of his day bore to the religion of his native land.
It was the points of difference which caught his attention.
And here we must note a further limitation of the subject of the _Romane
Questions_ and of this Introduction. Surprise and inquiry are excited not
by the familiar, but by the unusual; so Plutarch's attention was arrested
not by customs which, though purely Italian, were universal in Italy,
_e.g._, the practice of covering the head during worship, but by fashions
for which he could find no analogy or parallel in the stage of religion
with which alone he was acquainted. In such isolated customs, out of
harmony with their surroundings, modern science sees "survivals" from an
earlier stage of culture; and it is as survivals that they will be treated
in this Introduction. Now, the stage of religion with which Plutarch was
familiar, and in which he could find no analogies for those "fashions and
customes," was polytheism; and if those practices are survivals, they must
be survivals from a stage of religion earlier than polytheism.
Here, however, a difficulty meets us. If the teaching of the Solar
Mythologists be true, the Aryans, having a mythology, were already
polytheists: much more, therefore, must the Italians have been polytheists
from the beginning. I am sorry to say that I cannot meet this difficulty: I
can only frankly warn the reader that it exists. But in an Introduction
which professes to confine itself to myths and cults which are purely
Italian, it is impossible to discuss Solar Mythology, for the simple reason
that there is no such thing in existence as an Italian solar myth, or
indeed Nature-myth of any kind. The only story which is seriously claimed
as a Nature-myth is that of Hercules and Cacus. Cacus, a monster or giant,
stole some cows from Hercules, and hid them in his cave. Hercules
discovered them, according to some accounts, by the aid of Caca, the sister
of Cacus, according to other accounts, by the lowing which the cows in the
cave set up when Hercules went by with the rest of his oxen. Hercules
forced his way into the cave, and, in spite of the fire and flames which
Cacus spat at him, killed the monster with his club. Then Hercules, in
commemoration of the discovery of his cattle, erected an altar to Jupiter
the Discoverer (_Jupiter Inventor_). Now a similar story, it would appear,
is to be found in the Vedas. Vritra, a three-headed snake, steals cows from
Indra, who discovers them in a cave by their lowing, and kills Vritra with
a club. And the Vaidic story must be a Nature-myth, because the Vedas
expressly explain that the cows are clouds, the lowing is thunder, the club
is the lightning, and Indra, on this occasion, the blue sky. But why is the
interpretation given by the Vaidic philosophers to be accepted without
examination, when we reject the teaching of the Stoics, who interpreted
Rhea as matter, and Zeus, Posidon, and Hades as fire, water, and air
respectively, in accordance with the Stoic philosophy of the universe? I
submit it as a possibility, worth consideration at least, that we have here
an ordinary folk-tale: the trick of using the bulls to make the cows reveal
their hiding-place is like the trick in the folk-tale about the groom of
Darius who caused his master's horse to neigh and so secured the Persian
empire to Darius. The story may have been told of some clever fellow (not
necessarily or probably of a god) in pro-ethnic Aryan times, or it may have
been hit on by Hindoo and Italian story-tellers independently. Once
invented, however, it was used by each of these two peoples in a
characteristic manner. The learned Roman, whose object was to explain the
origin of the customs, cults, institutions, &c., of Rome, seized on it as
the obvious explanation of two facts which required explanation, viz.,
first, how the altar to Jupiter Inventor came into existence; and second,
why the offering made in gratitude for the recovery of lost property, was
an ox. The learned Hindoo, on the other hand, had the satisfaction of
showing that even the stories with which (alone or chiefly) the common
people were acquainted bore unsuspected witness to the truth of the
religion he taught. But to return to our interpretation of the "fashions
and customes" of Rome as survivals of a stage of religion earlier than
polytheism.
A second difficulty remains. Distinguished writers on the philosophy of
religion hold that polytheism is not developed out of fetichism or animism,
but is primitive and underived from any earlier stage. The survivals, then,
which Plutarch records, could not point to the existence of an earlier
stage. Here, again, it is not for me to handle such high themes as the
philosophy of religion. I am bound down to the humbler task of noting the
simple fact that, until borrowed from Hellas, polytheism was unknown in
Italy.
This is a very bare statement—so naked as almost to amount to a literary
impropriety. I must, therefore, take three sections to clothe it.