iv. chaps. 1-3, bk. vi. chaps. 20-22 (vol. i. pp. 292-299, vol. ii.
pp. 155-164, Markham’s translation); P. de Cieza de Leon, _Travels_,
p. 134 (Markham’s translation); _id._, _Second Part of the Chronicle
of Peru_, pp. 85 _sq._ (Markham’s translation); Acosta, _Natural and
Moral History of the Indies_, bk. v. chap. 15 (vol. ii. pp. 331-333,
Hakluyt Society). Professor E. B. Tylor discredits Garcilasso’s
description of these Peruvian priestesses on the ground that it
resembles Plutarch’s account of the Roman Vestals (_Numa_, 9 _sq._)
too closely to be independent; he thinks that “the apparent traces of
absorption from Plutarch invalidate whatever rests on Garcilasso de la
Vega’s unsupported testimony.” See his _Researches into the Early
History of Mankind_, 3rd Ed., pp. 249-253. In particular, he stumbles
at the statement that an unfaithful Peruvian priestess was buried
alive. But that statement was made by Cieza de Leon, who travelled in
Peru when Garcilasso was a child, and whose book, or rather the first
part of it, containing the statement, was published more than fifty
years before that of Garcilasso. Moreover, when we understand that the
punishment in question was based on a superstition which occurs
independently in many parts of the world, the apparent improbability
of the coincidence vanishes. As to the mode of kindling the sacred
fire, Professor Tylor understands Plutarch to say that the sacred fire
at Rome was kindled, as in Peru, by a burning-glass. To me it seems
that Plutarch is here speaking of a Greek, not a Roman usage, and this
is made still clearer when his text is read correctly. For the words
ὑπὸ Μήδων, περὶ δὲ τὰ Μιθριδιατικά should be altered to ὑπὸ Μαίδων
περὶ τὰ Μιθριδιατικά. See H. Pomtow in _Rheinisches Museum_, N. F. li.
(1896) p. 365, and my note on Pausanias, x. 19. 4 (vol. v. p. 331).
Thus Plutarch gives two instances when a sacred fire was extinguished
and had to be relit with a burning-glass; but both instances are
Greek, neither is Roman. The Greek mode of lighting a sacred fire by
means of a crystal is described also in the Orphic poem on precious
stones, verses 177 _sqq._ (_Orphica_, ed. E. Abel, p. 115). Nor were
the Greeks and Peruvians peculiar in this respect. The Siamese and
Chinese have also been in the habit of kindling a sacred fire by means
of a metal mirror or burning-glass. See Pallegoix, _Description du
royaume Thai ou Siam_, ii. 55; A. Bastian, _Die Völker des östlichen
Asien_, iii. 516; J. H. Plath, “Die Religion und der Cultus der alten
Chinesen,” _Abhandlungen der k. bayer. Akademie der Wissen_, i. Cl.
ix. (1863) pp. 876 _sq._ Again, the full description of the golden
garden of the Peruvian Vestals, which may sound to us fabulous, is
given by Cieza de Leon in a work (the _Second Part of the Chronicle of
Peru_) which it is unlikely that Garcilasso ever saw, since it was not
printed till 1873, centuries after his death. Yet Garcilasso’s brief
description of the garden agrees closely with that of Cieza de Leon,
differing from it just as that of an independent witness naturally
would—namely, in the selection of some other details in addition to
those which the two have in common. He says that the virgins “had a
garden of trees, plants, herbs, birds and beasts, made of gold and
silver, like that in the temple” (vol. i. p. 298, Markham’s
translation). Thus the two accounts are probably independent and
therefore trustworthy, for a fiction of this kind could hardly have
occurred to two romancers separately. A strong confirmation of
Garcilasso’s fidelity is furnished by the close resemblance which the
fire customs, both of Rome and Peru, present to the well-authenticated
fire customs of the Herero at the present day. There seems to be every
reason to think that all three sets of customs originated
independently in the simple needs and superstitious fancies of the
savage. On the whole, I see no reason to question the good faith and
accuracy of Garcilasso.
Footnote 793:
B. de Sahagun, _Histoire des choses de la Nouvelle Espagne_, pp. 196
_sq._, 386; Acosta, _Natural and Moral History of the Indies_, bk. v.
ch. 15 (vol. ii. pp. 333 _sq._, Hakluyt Society); A. de Herrera,
_General History of the vast Continent and Islands of America_, iii.
209 _sq._, Stevens’s translation (London, 1725, 1726); Clavigero,
_History of Mexico_, i. 264, 274 _sq._; Brasseur de Bourbourg,
_Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique et de l’Amérique
Centrale_, i. 289, iii. 661; H. H. Bancroft, _Native Races of the
Pacific States_, ii. 204 _sqq._, 245, 583, iii. 435 _sq._ However,
Sahagun (pp. 186, 194), Acosta (vol. ii. p. 336) and Herrera seem to
imply that the duty of maintaining the sacred fire was discharged by
men only.
Footnote 794:
Brasseur de Bourbourg, _op. cit._ ii. 6; H. H. Bancroft, _op. cit._
iii. 473. Fire-worship seems to have lingered among the Indians of
Yucatan down to about the middle of the nineteenth century, and it may
still survive among them. See D. G. Brinton, “The Folk-lore of
Yucatan,” _Folk-lore Journal_, i. (1883) pp. 247 _sq._
Footnote 795:
Letter of the Rev. J. Roscoe, dated Kampala, Uganda, 9th April 1909.
Footnote 796:
Aulus Gellius, x. 15. 22; Ateius Capito, cited by Plutarch, _Quaest.
Rom._ 50. On the other hand, Servius on Virgil, _Aen._ iv. 29, says
that the Flamen might marry another wife after the death of the first.
But the statement of Aulus Gellius and Ateius Capito is confirmed by
other evidence. See J. Marquardt, _Römische Staatsverwaltung_, iii.
2nd Ed., 329, note 8. As to the rule see my note, “The Widowed
Flamen,” _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, Second Edition, pp. 407 _sqq._
Footnote 797:
Aulus Gellius, x. 15. 7; Festus, p. 106, ed. C. O. Müller.
Footnote 798:
Livy, v. 52. 13 _sq._ In later times the rule was so far relaxed that
he was allowed to be absent from Rome for two nights or even longer,
provided he got leave from the chief pontiff on the score of
ill-health. See Aulus Gellius, x. 15. 14; Tacitus, _Annals_, iii. 71.
Footnote 799:
Tacitus, _Annals_, iii. 58; Dio Cassius, liv. 36. As to the honours
attached to the office, see Livy, xxvii. 8. 8; Plutarch, _Quaest.
Rom._ 113.
Footnote 800:
See _The Golden Bough_, Second Edition, i. 241 _sqq._
Footnote 801:
P. Kretschmer, _Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache_
(Göttingen, 1896), pp. 127 _sqq._; O. Schrader, _Reallexikon der
indogermanischen Altertumskunde_, pp. 637 _sq._ For a different
derivation of the name Flamen see above, p. 235. Being no philologer,
I do not pretend to decide between the rival etymologies. My friend
Prof. J. H. Moulton prefers the equation _Flamen_ = _Brahman_, which
he tells me is philologically correct, because if _Flamen_ came from
_flare_ we should expect a form like _flator_ rather than _flamen_.
The form _flator_ was used in Latin, though not in this sense.
Footnote 802:
W. Crooke, _The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and
Oudh_, i. 30-32. Compare Monier Williams, _Religious Thought and Life
in India_, pp. 364, 365, 392.
Footnote 803:
Aulus Gellius, x. 15.
Footnote 804:
Homer, _Iliad_, xvi. 233-235; Sophocles, _Trachiniae_, 1166 _sq._;
Callimachus, _Hymn to Delos_, 284-286.
Footnote 805:
Ch. Hartknoch, _Selectae dissertationes historicae de variis rebus
Prussicis_, p. 163 (bound up with his edition of Düsburg’s _Chronicon
Prussiae_, Frankfort and Leipsic, 1679); Simon Grunau, _Preussischer
Chronik_, ed. M. Perlbach, i. (Leipsic, 1876) p. 95.
Footnote 806:
W. Crooke, _op. cit._ i. 31-33.
Footnote 807:
W. Crooke, _Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India_
(Westminster, 1896), ii. 194 _sq._
Footnote 808:
J. C. Nesfield, in _Panjab Notes and Queries_, ii. p. 12, § 77.
Footnote 809:
_Rigveda_, iii. 29, translated by R. T. H. Griffith (Benares,
1889-1892), vol. ii. pp. 25-27; _Satapatha Brâhmana_, translated by J.
Eggeling, part i. p. 389, note 3, part ii. pp. 90 _sq._, part v. pp.
68-74; _Hymns of the Atharva-Veda_, translated by M. Bloomfield, pp.
91, 97 _sq._, 334, 460; W. Caland, _Altindisches Zauberritual_, pp.
115 _sq._; A. Kuhn, _Herabkunft des Feuers_, 2nd Ed., pp. 40, 64-78,
183-185; H. Zimmer, _Altindisches Leben_, pp. 58, 59. The _sami_ wood
is sometimes identified with the _Acacia Suma_ (_Mimosa Suma_); but
the modern Bengalee name of _Prosopis spicigera_ is _shami_ or _somi_,
which seems to be conclusive evidence of the identity of _Prosopis
spicigera_ with _sami_. The _Prosopis spicigera_ is a deciduous thorny
tree of moderate size, which grows in the arid zones of the Punjaub,
Rajputana, Gujarat, Bundelcund, and the Deccan. The heart of the wood
is of a purplish brown colour and extremely hard. It is especially
valued for fuel, as it gives out much heat. See G. Watt, _Dictionary
of the Economic Products of India_, _s.v._ “Prosopis spicigera.” For a
reference to this work I am indebted to the kindness of the late
Professor H. Marshall Ward.
Footnote 810:
A. Kuhn, _op. cit._ pp. 40, 66, 175.
Footnote 811:
_Hymns of the Atharva-Veda_, translated by M. Bloomfield, pp. 97
_sq._, 460; W. Caland, _Altindisches Zauberritual_, pp. 115 _sq._
Footnote 812:
See above, pp. 195 _sqq._, 230 _sqq._
Footnote 813:
_Rigveda_, x. 95, translated by R. T. H. Griffith, _Satapatha
Brâhmana_, translated by J. Eggeling, part v. pp. 68-74. Compare H.
Oldenberg, _Die Literatur des alten Indien_ (Stuttgart and Berlin,
1903), pp. 53-55. On the story see A. Kuhn, _Herabkunft des Feuers_,
2nd Ed., pp. 71 _sqq._; F. Max Müller _Selected Essays on Language,
Religion, and Mythology_ (London, 1881), i. 408 _sqq._; Andrew Lang,
_Custom and Myth_ (London, 1884), pp. 64 _sqq._; K. F. Pischel and
Geldner, _Vedische Studien_, i. (Stuttgart, 1889), pp. 243-295. It
belongs to the group of tales which describe the marriage of a human
with an animal mate, of a mortal with a fairy, and often, though not
always, their unhappy parting. The story seems to have its roots in
totemism. See my _Totemism and Exogamy_, ii. 566 _sqq._ It will be
illustrated more at length in a later part of _The Golden Bough_.
Footnote 814:
Homer, _Hymn to Mercury_, 108-111 (where a line has been lost; see the
note of Messrs. Allen and Sikes); Theophrastus, _Histor. plant._ v. 9.
6; _id._, _De igne_, ix. 64; Hesychius, _s.v._ στορεύς; Schol. on
Apollonius Rhodius, _Argon._ i. 1184; Pliny, _Nat. Hist._ xvi. 208;
Seneca, _Nat. Quaest._ ii. 22; A. Kuhn, _Herabkunft des Feuers_, 2nd
Ed., pp. 35-41; H. Blumner, _Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe
und Künste_, ii. 354-356. Theophrastus gives the name of _athragene_
to the plant which, next to or equally with ivy, makes the best board;
he compares it to a vine. Pliny (_l.c._) seems to have identified it
with a species of wild vine. According to Sprengel, the _athragene_ is
the _Clematis cirrhosa_ of Linnaeus, the French _clématite à vrilles_.
See Dioscorides, ed. C. Sprengel, vol. ii. p. 641. As to the kinds of
wood employed by the Romans in kindling fire we have no certain
evidence, as Pliny and Seneca may have merely copied from
Theophrastus.
Footnote 815:
Pausanias, i. 31. 6, with my note.
CHAPTER XVII
THE ORIGIN OF PERPETUAL FIRES
[Sidenote: The custom of maintaining a perpetual fire probably
originated in the difficulty of making fire by friction.] Whatever
superstitions may have gathered about it in the course of ages, the
custom of maintaining a perpetual fire probably sprang from a simple
consideration of practical convenience. The primitive mode of making
fire by the friction of wood is laborious at all times, and it is
especially so in wet weather. Hence the savage finds it convenient to
keep a fire constantly burning or smouldering in order to spare himself
the troubling of kindling it. This convenience becomes a necessity with
people who do not know how to make fire. That there have been such
tribes down to our own time is affirmed by witnesses whose evidence we
have no reason to doubt. Thus Mr. E. H. Man, who resided eleven years in
the Andaman Islands and was intimately acquainted with the natives,
tells us that, being ignorant of [Sidenote: Some races said to be
ignorant of the means of making fire.] the art of making fire, they take
the utmost pains to prevent its extinction. When they leave a camp
intending to return in a few days, they not only take with them one or
more smouldering logs, wrapped in leaves if the weather be wet, but they
also place a large burning log or faggot of suitable wood in some
sheltered spot, where it smoulders for several days and can be easily
rekindled when it is needed. While it is the business of the women to
gather the wood, the duty of keeping up the fires both at home and in
travelling by land or sea is not confined to them, but is undertaken by
persons of either sex who have most leisure or are least burdened.[816]
The Russian traveller, Baron Miklucho-Maclay, who lived among the
natives of the Maclay coast of northern New Guinea at a time when they
had hardly come into contact with Europeans, writes: “It is remarkable
that here almost all the inhabitants of the coast possess no means
whatever of making fire, hence they always and everywhere carry burning
or glowing brands about with them. If they go in the morning to the
plantation they carry a half-burnt brand from their hearth in order to
kindle a fire at the corner of the plantation. If they go on a longer
journey into the mountains, they again take fire with them for the
purpose of smoking, since their cigars, wrapped in green leaves,
continually go out. On sea voyages they usually keep glowing coals in a
half-broken pot partly filled with earth. The people who remain behind
in the village never forget to keep up the fire.” They repeatedly told
him that they had often to go to other villages to fetch fire when the
fires in all the huts of their own village had chanced to go out. Yet
the same traveller tells us that the mountain tribes of this part of New
Guinea, such as the Englam-Mana and Tiengum-Mana, know how to make fire
by friction. They partially cleave a log of dry wood with a stone axe
and then draw a stout cord, formed of a split creeper, rapidly to and
fro in the cleft, till sparks fly out and set fire to a tinder of dry
coco-nut fibres.[817] It is odd that the people of the coast should not
have learned this mode of producing fire from their neighbours in the
mountains. The Russian explorer’s observations, however, have been
confirmed by German writers. One of them, a Mr. Hoffmann, says of these
people: “In every house care is taken that fire burns day and night on
the hearth. For this purpose they choose a kind of wood which burns
slowly, but glimmers for a long time and retains its glow. When a man
sets out on a journey or goes to the field he has always a glimmering
brand with him. If he wishes to make fire, he waves the smouldering wood
to and fro till it bursts into a glow.” On frequented paths, crossways,
and so forth, you may often see trunks of trees lying which have been
felled for the purpose of being ignited and furnishing fire to
passers-by. Such trees continue to smoulder for weeks.[818] Similarly
the dwarf tribes of Central Africa “do not know how to kindle a fire
quickly, and in order to get one readily at any moment they keep the
burning trunks of fallen trees in suitable spots, and watch over their
preservation like the Vestals of old.”[819] It seems to be at least
doubtful whether these dwarfs of the vast and gloomy equatorial forests
are acquainted with the art of making fire at all. A German traveller
observes that the care which they take to preserve fire is extremely
remarkable. “It appears,” he says, “that the pygmies, as other
travellers have reported, do not know how to kindle fire by rubbing
sticks against each other. Like the Wambuba of the forest, in leaving a
camp, they take with them a thick glowing brand, and carry it, often for
hours, in order to light a fire at their next halting place.”[820]
[Sidenote: Fire kindled by natural causes was probably used by men long
before they learned to make it for themselves.] Whether or not tribes
ignorant of the means of making fire have survived to modern times, it
seems likely that mankind possessed and used fire long before they
learned how to kindle it. In the violent thunderstorms which accompany
the end of the dry season in Central and Eastern Africa, it is not
uncommon for the lightning to strike and ignite a tree, from which the
fire soon spreads to the withered herbage, till a great conflagration is
started. From a source of this sort a savage tribe may have first
obtained fire, and the same thing may have happened independently in
many parts of the world.[821] Other people, perhaps, procured fire from
volcanoes, the lava of which will, under favourable circumstances,
remain hot enough to kindle shavings of wood years after an eruption has
taken place.[822] Others again may have lit their first fire at the jets
of inflammable gas which spring from the ground in various parts of the
world, notably at Baku on the Caspian, where the flames burn day and
night, summer and winter, to a height of fifteen or twenty feet.[823] It
is harder to conjecture how man first learned the great secret of making
fire by friction. The discovery was perhaps made by jungle or forest
races, who saw dry bamboos or branches thus ignited by rubbing against
each other in a high wind. Fires are sometimes started in this way in
the forests of New Zealand.[824] It has also been suggested that savages
may have accidentally elicited a flame for the first time in the process
of chipping flints over dry moss, or boring holes with hard sticks in
soft wood.[825]
[Sidenote: Many savages carry fire constantly with them as a matter of
convenience.] But even when the art of fire-making has been acquired,
the process itself is so laborious that many savages keep fire always
burning rather than be at the trouble of extracting it by friction.
This, for example, was true of the roving Australian aborigines before
they obtained matches from the whites. On their wanderings they carried
about with them pieces of smouldering bark or cones of the Banksia tree
wherewith to kindle their camp fires.[826] The duty of thus transporting
fire from one place to another seems commonly to have fallen to the
women. “A stick, a piece of decayed wood, or more often the beautiful
seed-stem of the Banksia, is lighted at the fire the woman is leaving;
and from her bag, which, in damp weather, she would keep filled with dry
cones, or from materials collected in the forest, she would easily,
during her journey, preserve the fire got at the last encampment.”[827]
Another writer tells us that the Australian native always had his
fire-stick with him, and if his wife let it go out, so much the worse
for her. The dark brown velvety-looking core of the Banksia is very
retentive of fire and burns slowly, so that one of these little
fire-sticks would last a considerable time, and a bag of them would
suffice for a whole day.[828] The Tasmanians knew how to make fire by
twirling the point of a stick in a piece of soft bark; “but as it was
difficult at times to obtain fire by this means, especially in wet
weather, they generally, in their peregrinations, carried with them a
fire-stick lighted at their last encampment.”[829] With them, as with
the Australians, it was the special task of the women to keep the
fire-brand alight and to carry it from place to place.[830] When the
natives of Materbert, off New Britain, are on a voyage they carry fire
with them. For this purpose they press some of the soft fibrous husk of
the ripe coco-nut into a coco-nut shell, and then place a red-hot ember
in the middle of it. This will smoulder for three or four days, and from
it they obtain a light for their fires wherever they may land.[831] The
Polynesians made fire by the friction of wood, rubbing a score in a
board with a sharp-pointed stick till the dust so produced kindled into
sparks, which were caught in a tinder of dry leaves or grass. While they
rubbed, they chanted a prayer or hymn till the fire appeared. But in wet
weather the task of fire-making was laborious, so at such times the
natives usually carried fire about with them in order to avoid the
trouble of kindling it.[832] The Fuegians make fire by striking two
lumps of iron pyrites together and letting the sparks fall on birds’
down or on dry moss, which serves as tinder. But rather than be at the
pains of doing this they carry fire with them everywhere, both by sea
and land, taking great care to prevent its extinction.[833] The Caingua
Indians of Paraguay make fire in the usual way by the fire-drill, but to
save themselves trouble they keep fire constantly burning in their huts
by means of great blocks of wood.[834] The Indians of Guiana also
produce fire by twirling the point of one stick in the hole of another,
but they seldom need to resort to this laborious process, for they keep
fire burning in every house, and on long journeys they usually carry a
large piece of smouldering timber in their canoes. Even in walking
across the savannah an Indian will sometimes take a fire-brand with
him.[835] The Jaggas, a Bantu tribe in the Kilimanjaro district of East
Africa, keep up fire day and night in their huts on account of their
cattle. If it goes out, the women fetch glowing brands from a
neighbour’s house; these they carry wrapped up in banana leaves. Thus
they convey fire for great distances, sometimes the whole day long.
Hence they seldom need to kindle fire, though the men can make it
readily by means of the fire-drill.[836] The tribes of British Central
Africa also know how to produce fire in this fashion, but they do not
often put their knowledge in practice. For there is sure to be a burning
brand on one or other of the hearths of the village from which a fire
can be lit; and when men go on a journey they take smouldering sticks
with them and nurse the glowing wood rather than be at the trouble of
making fire by friction.[837] In the huts of the Ibos on the lower Niger
burning embers are always kept and never allowed to go out.[838] And
this is the regular practice among all the tribes of West Africa who
have not yet obtained matches. If the fire in a house should go out, a
woman will run to a neighbour’s hut and fetch a burning stick from the
hearth. Hence in most of their villages fire has probably not needed to
be made for years and years. Among domesticated tribes, like the Effiks
or Agalwa, when the men are going out to the plantation they will
enclose a burning stick in a hollow piece of a certain kind of wood,
which has a lining of its pith left in it, and they will carry this
“fire-box” with them.[839]
[Sidenote: The theft of fire by Prometheus.] Before the introduction of
matches Greek peasants used to convey fire from place to place in a
stalk of giant fennel. The stalks of the plant are about five feet long
by three inches thick, and are encased in a hard bark. The core of the
stalk consists of a white pith which, when it is dry, burns slowly like
a wick without injury to the bark.[840] Thus when Prometheus, according
to the legend, stole the first fire from heaven and brought it down to
earth hidden in a stalk of giant fennel,[841] he carried his fire just
as every Greek peasant and mariner did on a journey.
[Sidenote: When people settled in villages, it would be convenient to
keep up a perpetual fire in the house of the head man.] When a tribe
ceased to be nomadic and had settled in more or less permanent villages,
it would be a convenient custom to keep a fire perpetually burning in
every house. Such a custom, as we have seen, has been observed by
various peoples, and it appears to have prevailed universally among all
branches of the Aryans.[842] Arnobius implies that it was formerly
practised by the Romans, though in his own time the usage had fallen
into abeyance.[843] But it would be obviously desirable that there
should be some one place in the village where every housewife could be
sure of obtaining fire without having to kindle it by friction, if her
own should chance to go out. The most natural spot to look for it would
be the hearth of the head man of the village, who would come in time to
be regarded as responsible for its maintenance. This is what seems to
have happened not only among the Herero of South Africa and the Latin
peoples of Italy, but also among the ancestors of the Greeks; for in
ancient Greece the perpetual fire kept up in the Prytaneum, or
town-hall, was at first apparently the fire on the king’s hearth.[844]
From this simple origin may have sprung the custom which in various
parts of the world associates the maintenance of a perpetual fire with
chiefly or royal dignity. Thus it was a distinguishing mark of the
[Sidenote: Hence the maintenance of a perpetual fire came to be
associated with chiefly or royal dignity.] chieftainship of one of the
Samoan nobility, that his fire never went out. His attendants had a
particular name, from their special business of keeping his fire ablaze
all night long while he slept.[845] Among the Gallas the maintenance of
a perpetual fire, even when it serves no practical purpose, is a
favourite mode of asserting high rank, and the chiefs often indulge in
it.[846] The Chitomé, a grand pontiff in the kingdom of Congo, of whom
we shall hear more hereafter, kept up in his hut, day and night, a
sacred fire, of which he dispensed brands to such as came to ask for
them and could pay for them. He is said to have done a good business in
fire, for the infatuated people believed that it preserved them from
many accidents.[847] In Uganda a perpetual sacred fire, supposed to have
come down to earth with the first man Kintu, is maintained by a chief,
who is put to death if he suffers it to be extinguished. From this
sacred fire the king’s fire (_gombolola_) is lighted and kept constantly
burning at the gate of the royal enclosure during the whole of his
reign. By day it burns in a small hut, but at night it is brought out
and set in a little hole in the ground, where it blazes brightly till
daybreak, whatever the weather may be. When the king journeys the fire
goes with him, and when he dies it is extinguished. The death of a king
is indeed announced to the people by the words, “The fire has gone out.”
A man who bears a special title is charged with the duty of maintaining
the fire, and of looking after all the fuel and torches used in the
royal enclosure. When the king dies the guardian of his fire is
strangled near the hearth.[848] Similarly in Dageou, a country to the
west of Darfur, it is said that a custom prevailed of kindling a fire on
the inauguration of a king and keeping it alight till his death.[849]
Among the Mucelis of Angola, when the king of Amboin or Sanga dies, all
fires in the kingdom are extinguished. Afterwards the new king makes new
fire by rubbing two sticks against each other.[850] Such a custom is
probably nothing more than an extension of the practice of putting out a
chief’s own fire at his death. Similarly, when a new Muata Jamwo, a
great potentate in the interior of Angola, comes to the throne, one of
his first duties is to make a new fire by the friction of wood, for the
old fire may not be used.[851] Before the palace gate of the king of
Siam there burns, or used to burn, a perpetual fire, which was said to
have been lit from heaven with a fiery ball.[852]
[Sidenote: Perpetual fire maintained by the chief called the Great Sun
among the Natchez Indians.] Among the Natchez Indians of the lower
Mississippi a perpetual fire, supposed to have been brought down from
the sun, was maintained in a square temple which stood beside the hut of
the supreme chief of the nation. He bore the title of the Great Sun, and
believed himself to be a descendant or brother of the luminary his
namesake. Every morning when the sun rose he blew three whiffs of his
pipe towards it, and raising his hands above his head, and turning from
east to west, he marked out the course which the bright orb was to
pursue in the sky. The sacred fire in the temple was fed with logs of
walnut or oak, and the greatest care was taken to prevent its
extinction; for such an event would have been thought to put the whole
nation in jeopardy. Eight men were appointed to guard the fire, two of
whom were bound to be always on watch; and the Great Sun himself looked
to the maintenance of the fire with anxious attention. If any of the
guardians of the fire failed to do his duty, the rule was that he should
be put to death. When the great chief died his bones were deposited in
the temple, along with the bones of many attendants who were strangled
in order that their souls might wait upon him in the spirit land. On
such an occasion the chief’s fire was extinguished, and this was the
signal for putting out all the other fires in the country. Every village
had also its own temple in which a perpetual fire was maintained under
the guardianship of a subordinate chief. These lesser chiefs also bore
the title of Suns, but acknowledged the supremacy of the head chief, the
Great Sun. All of these Suns were supposed to be descended from a man
and woman who had come down from the luminary from which they took their
names. There were female Suns as well as male Suns, but they might not
marry among themselves; they had always to mate with a woman or a man of
lower rank. Their nobility was transmitted in the maternal line; that
is, the children of a female Sun, both sons and daughters, were Suns,
but the children of a male Sun were not. Hence a chief was never
succeeded by his own son, but always by the son either of his sister or
of his nearest female relation. The Natchez knew how to produce fire by
means of the fire-drill; but if the sacred fire in the temple went out,
they relit it, not by the friction of wood, but by a brand brought from
another temple or from a tree which had been ignited by lightning.[853]
In these customs of the Natchez we have clearly fire-worship and
sun-worship of the same general type which meets us again at a higher
state of evolution among the Incas of Peru. Both sets of customs
probably sprang originally from the perpetual fire on the chief’s
domestic hearth.
[Sidenote: Fire carried before chiefs and kings as a symbol of royalty.]
When a perpetual fire has thus become a symbol of royalty, it is natural
that it should be carried before the king or chief on the march. Among
the Indians of the Mississippi a lighted torch used to be borne in front
of a chief, and no commoner would dare to walk between a chief and his
torch-bearer.[854] A sacred fire, supposed to have descended from
heaven, was carried in a brazier before the Persian kings,[855] and the
custom was adopted as a badge of imperial dignity by later Roman
emperors.[856] The practice appears to have been especially observed in
time of war. Amongst the Ovambo of South Africa the chief appoints a
general to lead the army to battle, and next to the general the greatest
officer is he who carries a fire-brand at the head of the warriors. If
the fire goes out on the march, it is an evil omen and the army beats a
retreat.[857] When the king of Monomotapa, or Benomotapa, was at war, a
sacred fire was kept burning perpetually in a hut near his tent.[858] In
old days it is said that the king of Mombasa in East Africa could put an
army of eighty thousand men in the field. On the march his guards were
preceded by men carrying fire.[859] High above the tent of Alexander the
Great hung a fiery cresset on a pole, and “the flame of it was seen by
night, and the smoke by day.”[860] When a Spartan king was about to lead
an army abroad he first sacrificed at home to Zeus the Leader. Then a
man called the fire-bearer took fire from the altar and marched with it
at the head of the troops to the frontier. There the king again
sacrificed to Zeus and Athena, and if the omens were favourable, he
crossed the border, preceded by the fire from the sacrifices, which
thenceforth led the way and might not be quenched. To perform such
sacrifices the king always rose very early in the morning, while it was
still dark, in order to get the ear of the god before the enemy could
forestall him.[861]
[Sidenote: The custom of keeping up a perpetual fire during a king’s
reign and extinguishing it at his death, might lead to a belief that his
life was bound up with the fire.] A custom of maintaining a fire during
a king’s reign and extinguishing it at his death, even if it did not
originate in a superstition, would naturally lend itself to a
superstitious interpretation. The distinction between the sign and the
cause of an event is not readily grasped by a dull mind; hence the
extinction of the king’s fire, from being merely a signal of his death,
might come in time to be regarded as a cause of it. In other words, a
vital connexion might be supposed to exist between the king and the
fire, so that if the fire were put out the king would die. That a
sympathetic bond of some sort united the king’s life with the fire on
his hearth was apparently believed by the ancient Scythians. For their
most solemn oath was by the king’s hearth, and if any man who had taken
this oath forswore himself, they believed that the king would fall
ill.[862] The story of Meleager,[863] whose life was said to be bound up
with a brand plucked from the fire on the hearth, belongs to the same
class of ideas, which will be examined at large in a later part of this
work. Wherever a superstition of this sort gathered round the king’s
hearth, it is obvious that he would be moved to watch over the fire with
redoubled vigilance. On a certain day the Vestal Virgins at Rome used to
go to the King of the Sacred Rites, the successor of the old Roman
kings, and say to him, “Watchest thou, O King? Watch.”[864] The ceremony
may have been a reminiscence or survival of a time when the king’s life
as well as the general safety was supposed to hang on the maintenance of
the fire, to the guardianship of which he would thus be impelled by the
motive of self-preservation as well as of public duty. When natives of
the Kei Islands in the East Indies are away on a long voyage, a sacred
fire is kept up the whole time of their absence by their friends at
home. Three or four young girls are appointed to feed it and watch over
it day and night with a jealous care lest it should go out; its
extinction would be deemed a most evil omen, for the fire is the symbol
of the life of the absent ones.[865] This belief and this practice may
help us to understand the corresponding beliefs and practices concerned
with the maintenance of a perpetual fire at Rome.
Footnote 816:
E. H. Man, _On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands_
(London, N.D.), p. 82. Mr. Man’s evidence is confirmed by a German
traveller, Mr. Jagor, who says of the Andaman Islanders: “The fire
must never go out. Here also I am again assured that the Andamanese
have no means of making fire.” See _Verhandlungen der Berliner
Gesellschaft für Anthropologie_, 1877, p. (54) (bound with
_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, ix.). I regret that on this subject I
did not question Mr. A. R. Brown, Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge, who resided for about two years among the Andaman
Islanders, studying their customs and beliefs. Mr. Brown is now
(December 1910) in West Australia.
Footnote 817:
N. von Miklucho-Maclay, “Ethnologische Bemerkungen über die Papuas der
Maclay-Küste in Neu-Guinea,” _Natuurkundig Tijdschrift voor
Nederlandsch Indie_, xxxv. (1875), pp. 82, 83. Compare C. Hager,
_Kaiser Wilhelms-Land und der Bismarck-Archipel_, p. 69; M. Krieger,
_Neu-Guinea_, p. 153. The natives of the Maclay Coast are said to have
traditions of a time when they were ignorant even of the use of fire;
they ate fruits raw, which set up a disease of the gums, filling their
mouths with blood; they had a special name for the disease. See N. von
Miklucho-Maclay, in _Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für
Anthropologie_, 1882, p. (577) (bound with _Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, xiv.). The reports of people living in ignorance of the
use of fire have hitherto proved, on closer examination, to be fables.
See E. B. Tylor, _Researches into the Early History of Mankind_, 3rd
Ed., pp. 229 _sqq._ The latest repetition of the story that I know of
is by an American naturalist, Mr. Titian R. Peale, who confirms the
exploded statement that down to 1841 the natives of Bowditch Island
had not seen fire. See _The American Naturalist_, xviii. (1884) pp.
229-232.
Footnote 818:
B. Hagen, _Unter den Papuas_ (Wiesbaden, 1899), pp. 203 _sq._ Mr.
Hagen’s account applies chiefly to the natives of Astrolabe Bay. He
tells us that for the most part they now use Swedish matches.
Footnote 819:
G. Casati, _Ten Years in Equatoria_ (London and New York, 1891), i.
157. Another writer says that these dwarfs “keep fire alight
perpetually, starting it in some large tree, which goes on smouldering
for months at a time” (Captain Guy Burrows, _The Land of the Pigmies_
(London, 1898), p. 199).
Footnote 820:
F. Stuhlmann, _Mit Emin Pascha ins Herz von Afrika_ (Berlin, 1894),
pp. 451 _sq._
Footnote 821:
Sir Harry H. Johnston, _British Central Africa_ (London, 1897), p.
439; _id._, _The Uganda Protectorate_ (London, 1902), ii. 540. If we
may trust Diodorus Siculus (i. 13. 3), this was the origin of fire
alleged by the Egyptian priests. Among the Winamwanga and Wiwa tribes
of East Africa, to the south of Lake Tanganyika, “when lightning sets
fire to a tree, all the fires in a village are put out, and fireplaces
freshly plastered, while the head men take the fire to the chief, who
prays over it. It is then sent to all his villages, the people of the
villages rewarding his messengers.” See Dr. J. A. Chisholm, “Notes on
the Manners and Customs of the Winamwanga and Wiwa,” _Journal of the
African Society_, No. 36 (July 1910), p. 363. The Parsees ascribe
peculiar sanctity to fire which has been obtained from a tree struck
by lightning. See D. J. Karaka, _History of the Modern Parsis_
(London, 1884), ii. 213. In Siam and Cambodia such fire is carefully
preserved and used to light the funeral pyres of kings and others. See
Pallegoix, _Description du royaume Thai ou Siam_, i. 248; J. Moura,
_Le Royaume du Cambodge_, i. 360.
Footnote 822:
Oscar Peschel, _Völkerkunde_ 6th Ed. (Leipsic, 1885), p. 138. Mr. Man
thinks it likely that the Andaman Islanders got their fire from one of
the two volcanoes which exist in their island (_On the Aboriginal
Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands_, p. 82). The Creek Indians of
North America have a tradition that some of their ancestors procured
fire from a volcano. See A. S. Gatschet, _A Migration Legend of the
Creek Indians_, ii. (St. Louis, 1888) p. 11 (43).
Footnote 823:
O. Peschel, _loc. cit._ As to the fires of Baku see further, _Adonis,
Attis, Osiris_, Second Edition, p. 159.
Footnote 824:
R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants_, 2nd
Ed., p. 367; W. Crooke, _Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern
India_ (Westminster, 1896), ii. 194; A. Kuhn, _Herabkunft des Feuers_,
2nd Ed., pp. 92, 102. Lucretius thought that the first fire was
procured either from lightning or from the mutual friction of trees in
a high wind (_De rerum natura_, v. 1091-1101). The latter source was
preferred by Vitruvius (_De architectura_, ii. 1. 1).
Footnote 825:
Sir Harry H. Johnston, _ll.cc._ Professor K. von den Steinen
conjectures that savages, who already possessed fire, and were wont to
use tinder to nurse a smouldering brand into a blaze, may have
accidentally discovered the mode of kindling fire in an attempt to
make tinder by rubbing two dry sticks or reeds against each other. See
K. von den Steinen, _Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens_, pp.
219-228.
Footnote 826:
J. Dumont D’Urville, _Voyage autour du monde et à la recherche de la
Perouse_, i. (Paris, 1832) pp. 95, 194; Scott Nind, “Description of
the Natives of King George’s Sound,” _Journal of the Royal
Geographical Society_, i. (1832) p. 26; E. J. Eyre, _Journals of
Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia_, ii. 357; A.
Oldfield, “The Aborigines of Australia,” _Transactions of the
Ethnological Society of London_, N.S., iii. (1865) pp. 283 _sq._; J.
Dawson, _Australian Aborigines_, p. 15; _Annales de la Propagation de
la Foi_, xvii. (1845) pp. 76 _sq._
Footnote 827:
R. Brough Smyth, _The Aborigines of Victoria_, i. 396.
Footnote 828:
R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants_, 2nd
Ed., p. 567. Other writers confirm the statement that the carrying of
the fire-sticks is the special duty of the women. See W. Stanbridge,
“On the Aborigines of Victoria,” _Transactions of the Ethnological
Society of London_, N.S., i. (1861) p. 291; J. F. Mann, “Notes on the
Aborigines of Australia,” _Proceedings of the Geographical Society of
Australasia_, i. (1885) p. 29.
Footnote 829:
Melville, quoted by H. Ling Roth, _The Aborigines of Tasmania_
(London, 1890), p. 97. It has sometimes been affirmed that the
Tasmanians did not know how to kindle fire; but the evidence collected
by Mr. Ling Roth (_op. cit._, pp. xii. _sq._, 96 _sq._), proves that
they were accustomed to light it both by the friction of wood and by
striking flints together.
Footnote 830:
Mr. Dove, quoted by James Bonwick, _Daily Life and Origin of the
Tasmanians_, p. 20.
Footnote 831:
Wilfred Powell, _Wanderings in a Wild Country_ (London, 1883), p. 196.
Footnote 832:
Captain J. Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_
(London, 1799), p. 357.
Footnote 833:
J. G. Wood, _Natural History of Man_, ii. 522; J. G. Garson, “On the
Inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego,” _Journal of the Anthropological
Institute_, xv. (1886). p. 145; _Mission scientifique du Cap Horn_,
1882-1883, vii. (Paris, 1891) p. 345.
Footnote 834:
J. B. Ambrosetti, “Los Indios Caingua del alto Paraná (misiones),”
_Boletino del Instituto Geografico Argentino_, xv. (1895) pp. 703
_sq._
Footnote 835:
E. F. im Thurn, _Among the Indians of Guiana_, pp. 257 _sq._
Footnote 836:
A. Widenmann, _Die Kilimandscharo-Bevölkerung_ (Gotha, 1899), pp. 68
_sq._ (_Petermann’s Mittheilungen: Ergänzungsheft_, No. 129).
Footnote 837:
Sir Harry H. Johnston, _British Central Africa_ (London, 1897), p.
438.
Footnote 838:
A. F. Mockler-Ferryman, _Up the Niger_ (London, 1892), p. 37.
Footnote 839:
Miss Mary H. Kingsley, _Travels in West Africa_, pp. 599 _sq._
Footnote 840:
P. de Tournefort, _Relation d’un voyage du Levant_ (Amsterdam, 1718),
i. 93 (Lettre vi.); Sibthorp, in R. Walpole’s _Memoirs relating to
European and Asiatic Turkey_ (London, 1817), pp. 284 _sq._; W. G.
Clark, _Peloponnesus_ (London, 1858), p. 111; J. T. Bent, _The
Cyclades_ (London, 1885), p. 365. The giant fennel (_Ferula communis_,
L.) is still known in Greece by its ancient name, hardly modified
(_nartheka_ instead of _narthex_), though W. G. Clark says the modern
name is _kalami_. Bent speaks of the plant as a reed, which is a
mistake. The plant is described by Theophrastus (_Histor. plant._ vi.
2. 7 _sq._).
Footnote 841:
Hesiod, _Works and Days_, 50-52; _id._, _Theogony_, 565-567;
Aeschylus, _Prometheus Bound_, 107-111; Apollodorus, _Bibliotheca_, i.
7. 1; Hyginus, _Fabulae_, 144; _id._, _Astronomica_, ii. 15.
Footnote 842:
See my article, “The Prytaneum, the Temple of Vesta, the Vestals,
Perpetual Fires,” _Journal of Philology_, xiv. (1885) pp. 169-171.
Footnote 843:
Arnobius, _Adversus nationes_, ii. 67.
Footnote 844:
See my article, “The Prytaneum, the Temple of Vesta, the Vestals,
Perpetual Fires,” _Journal of Philology_, xiv. (1885) pp. 145 _sqq._
Footnote 845:
G. Turner, _Nineteen Years in Polynesia_ (London, 1861), p. 326.
Footnote 846:
Ph. Paulitschke, _Ethnographie Nordost-Afrikas, die materielle Cultur
der Danâkil, Galla und Somâl_ (Berlin, 1893), p. 145.
Footnote 847:
J. B. Labat, _Relation historique de l’Éthiopie Occidentale_, i. 256
_sq._
Footnote 848:
J. Roscoe, “Further Notes on the Manners and Customs of the Baganda,”
_Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) pp. 43, 51
_sq._; _id._, in a letter to me dated Mengo, Uganda, 3rd August 1904.
Footnote 849:
W. G. Browne, _Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria_ (London, 1799), p.
306.
Footnote 850:
J. J. Monteiro, _Angola and the River Congo_ (London, 1875), ii. 167.
Footnote 851:
P. Pogge, _Im Reiche des Muata Jamwo_ (Berlin, 1880), p. 234.
Footnote 852:
A. Bastian, _Die Völker des östlichen Asien_, iii. 515 _sq._
Footnote 853:
Du Pratz, _History of Louisiana_ (London, 1774), pp. 330-334, 346
_sq._, 351-358; Charlevoix, _Histoire de la Nouvelle France_, vi. 172
_sqq._; Lafitau, _Mœurs des sauvages Ameriquains_, i. 167 _sq._;
_Lettres édifiantes et curieuses_, Nouvelle Édition, vii. (Paris,
1781) pp. 7-16 (reprinted in _Recueil de voyages au nord_, ix.
Amsterdam, 1737, pp. 3-13); “Relation de la Louisianne,” _Recueil de
voyages au Nord_, v. (Amsterdam, 1734) pp. 23 _sq._; Bossu, _Nouveaux
Voyages aux Indes Occidentales_ (Paris, 1768), i. 42-44;
Chateaubriand, _Voyage en Amérique_ (Paris, 1870), pp. 227 _sqq._; H.
R. Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, v. 68. The accounts differ from each
other in some details. Thus Du Pratz speaks as if there were only two
fire-temples in the country, whereas the writer in the _Lettres
édifiantes_ says that there were eleven villages each with its
fire-temple, and that formerly there had been sixty villages and
temples. The account in the text is based mainly on the authority of
Du Pratz, who lived among the Natchez on terms of intimacy for eight
years, from the end of 1718 to 1726.
Footnote 854:
Hennepin, _Nouvelle Découverte d’un très grand pays situé dans
l’Amérique_ (Utrecht, 1697), p. 306.
Footnote 855:
Xenophon, _Cyropaedia_, viii. 3. 12; Ammianus Marcellinus, xxiii. 6.
34; Quintus Curtius, iii. 3. 7.
Footnote 856:
Dio Cassius, lxxi. 35. 5; Herodian, i. 8. 4, i. 16. 4, ii. 3. 2, ii.
8. 6, vii. 1. 9, vii. 6. 2.
Footnote 857:
H. Schinz, _Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika_, p. 320.
Footnote 858:
O. Dapper, _Description de l’Afrique_ (Amsterdam, 1686), p. 392.
Footnote 859:
O. Dapper, _op. cit._ p. 400.
Footnote 860:
Quintus Curtius, v. 2. 7. Curtius represents this as a signal adopted
by Alexander, because the sound of the bugle was lost in the trampling
and hum of the great multitude. But this maybe merely the historian’s
interpretation of an old custom.
Footnote 861:
Xenophon, _Respublica Lacedaemoniorum_, xiii. 2 _sq._; Nicolaus
Damascenus, quoted by Stobaeus, _Florilegium_, xliv. 41 (vol. ii. p.
188 ed. Meineke); Hesychius, _s.v._ πυρσοφόρος.
Footnote 862:
Herodotus, iv. 68.
Footnote 863:
Aeschylus, _Choëph._ 604 _sqq._; Apollodorus, _Bibliotheca_, i. 8. 2
_sq._; Diodorus Siculus, iv. 34. 6 _sq._; Ovid, _Metamorph._ viii. 445
_sqq._; Hyginus, _Fab._ 171 and 174.
Footnote 864:
Servius, on Virgil, _Aen._ x. 228.
Footnote 865:
Le P. H. Geurtjens, “Le Cérémonial des Voyages aux Îles Keij,”
_Anthropos_, v. (1910) pp. 337 _sq._
CHAPTER XVIII
THE SUCCESSION TO THE KINGDOM IN ANCIENT LATIUM
[Sidenote: The Vestal fire and the great priesthoods appear to have been
institutions common to the whole Latin race.] Thus it appears that a
variety of considerations combined to uphold, if not to originate, the
custom of maintaining a perpetual fire. The sanctity of the wood which
fed it, the belief in the generative virtue of the process by which it
was kindled, the supposed efficacy of fire in repelling the powers of
evil, the association of the hearth with the spirits of the dead and
with the majesty or even the life of the king all worked together to
invest the simple old custom with a halo of mystery and romance. If this
was so at Rome we may assume that matters were not very different in the
other Latin towns which kept up a Vestal fire. These too had their kings
of the Sacred Rites, their flamens, and their pontiffs, as well as their
Vestal Virgins.[866] All the great priesthoods of Rome appear, in fact,
to have had their doubles in the other ancient cities of Latium; all
were probably primitive institutions common to the whole Latin
race.[867]
[Sidenote: Priestly or divine functions of the Roman kings, including
the maintenance of the Vestal fire.] Accordingly, whatever is true or
probable of the Roman priesthoods, about which we know most, may
reasonably be regarded as true or probable of the corresponding
priesthoods elsewhere in Latium, about which for the most part we know
nothing more than the names. Now in regard to the Roman king, whose
priestly functions were inherited by his successor the king of the
Sacred Rites, the foregoing discussion has led us to the following
conclusions. He represented and indeed personated Jupiter, the great god
of the oak, the sky, and the thunder, and in that character made rain,
thunder, and lightning for the good of his subjects, like many more
kings of the weather in other parts of the world. Further, he not only
mimicked the oak-god by wearing an oak wreath and other insignia of
divinity, but he was married to an oak-nymph Egeria, who appears to have
been merely a local form of Diana in her character of a goddess of
woods, of waters, and of childbirth. Moreover, he was descended from the
oak, since he was born of a virgin who conceived by contact with a fire
of sacred oak-wood. Hence he had to guard the ancestral fire and keep it
constantly burning, inasmuch as on its maintenance depended the
continuance of the royal family. Only on certain stated occasions was it
lawful and even necessary to extinguish the old fire in order to revive
it in a purer and more vigorous form by the friction of the sacred wood.
This was done once a year on the first of March,[868] and we may
conjecture that it was also done by the new king on his accession to
power; for, as we have seen, it has been customary in [Sidenote: But the
fire was formally extinguished and rekindled on certain occasions,
perhaps on the death of the king.] various places to extinguish the
king’s fire at his death.[869] Among the ancient Persians the perpetual
sacred fire was put out on the death of a king and remained unlit until
after his funeral.[870] It is a common practice to extinguish the fire
in any house where a death has taken place,[871] apparently from a fear
that the ghost may scorch or singe himself at it, like a moth at the
flame of a candle; and the custom of putting out the king’s fire at his
decease may in its origin have been nothing more than this. But when the
fire on the king’s hearth came to be viewed as bound up in a mysterious
fashion with his life, it would naturally be extinguished at his death,
not to spare his fluttering ghost the risk and pain of falling into it,
but because, as a sort of life-token or external soul, it too must die
at his death and be born again from the holy tree. At all events, it
seems probable that whenever and from whatever cause it became necessary
to rekindle the royal and sacred fire by the friction of wood, the
operation was performed jointly by the king and the Vestals, one or more
of whom may have been his daughters or the daughters of his predecessor.
Regarded as impersonations of Mother Vesta herself, these priestesses
would be the chosen vessels, not only to bring to birth the seed of fire
in working the fire-drill, but also to receive the seed of the fire-god
in their chaste wombs, and so to become the mothers of fire-begotten
kings.
[Sidenote: What is true of the Roman kings is probably true of the Latin
kings in general.] All these conclusions, which we have reached mainly
by a consideration of the Roman evidence, may with great probability be
applied to the other Latin communities. They too probably had of old
their divine or priestly kings, who transmitted their religious
functions, without their civil powers, to their successors the kings of
the Sacred Rites.
[Sidenote: What was the rule of succession to the Latin kingship?] But
we have still to ask, What was the rule of succession to the kingdom
among the old Latin tribes? We possess two lists of Latin kings both
professedly complete. One is the list of the kings of Alba, the other is
the list of the [Sidenote: The list of the Alban kings seems to imply
that the kingship was hereditary in the male line.] kings of Rome. If we
accept as authentic the list of the Alban kings, we can only conclude
that the kingdom was hereditary in the male line, the son regularly
succeeding his father on the throne.[872] But this list, if it is not,
as Niebuhr held, a late and clumsy fabrication, has somewhat the
appearance of an elastic cord which ancient historians stretched in
order to link Aeneas to Romulus.[873] Yet it would be rash to set these
names wholly aside as a chronological stop-gap deliberately foisted in
by later annalists. In early monarchies, before the invention of
writing, tradition is remarkably retentive of the names of kings. The
Baganda of Central Africa, for example, remember the names of more than
thirty of their kings in an unbroken chain of twenty-two
generations.[874] Even the occurrence of foreign names among the Alban
kings is not of itself sufficient to condemn the list as a forgery; for,
as I shall shew presently, this feature is explicable by a rule of
descent which appears to have prevailed in many ancient monarchies,
including that of Rome. Perhaps the most we can say for the history of
the Alban kings is that their names may well be genuine, and that some
general features of the monarchy, together with a few events which
happened to strike the popular imagination, may have survived in the
memory of the people till they found their way into written history. But
no dependence can be placed either on the alleged years of their reigns,
or on the hereditary principle which is assumed to have connected each
king with his predecessor.
When we come to the list of the Roman kings we are on much firmer,
though still slippery ground. According to tradition there were in all
eight kings of Rome,[875] and with regard to the five last of them, at
all events, we can hardly doubt that they actually sat on the throne,
and that the traditional history of their reigns is, in its main
outlines, correct.[876] Now it is very remarkable that though the first
king of Rome, Romulus, is said to have been descended from the royal
house of Alba, in which the kingship is represented as hereditary in the
male line, not one of the [Sidenote: On the other hand none of the Roman
kings was immediately succeeded by his son, but three were succeeded by
their sons-in-law, who were foreigners.] Roman kings was immediately
succeeded by his son on the throne. Yet several left sons or grandsons
behind them.[877] On the other hand, one of them was descended from a
former king through his mother, not through his father,[878] and three
of the kings, namely Tatius, the elder Tarquin, and Servius Tullius,
were succeeded by their sons-in-law,[879] who were all either foreigners
or of foreign descent.[880] This [Sidenote: This suggests that the
kingship was transmitted in the female line and was held by foreigners
who married the royal princesses.] suggests that the right to the
kingship was transmitted in the female line, and was actually exercised
by foreigners who married the royal princesses. To put it in technical
language, the succession to the kingship at Rome and probably in Latium
generally would seem to have been determined by certain rules which have
moulded early society in many parts of the world, namely exogamy,
_beena_ marriage, and female kinship or mother-kin. Exogamy is the rule
which obliges a man to marry a woman of a different clan from his own;
_beena_ marriage is the rule that he must leave the home of his birth
and live with his wife’s people;[881] and female kinship or mother-kin
is the system of tracing relationship and transmitting the family name
through women instead of through men.[882] If these principles regulated
descent of the kingship among the ancient Latins, the state of things in
this respect would be somewhat as follows. The political and religious
centre of each community would be the perpetual fire on the king’s
hearth tended by Vestal Virgins of the royal clan. The king would be a
man of another clan, perhaps of another town or even of another race,
who had married a daughter of his predecessor and received the kingdom
with her. The children whom he had by her would inherit their mother’s
name, not his; the daughters would remain at home; the sons, when they
grew up, would go away into the world, marry, and settle in their wives’
country, whether as kings or commoners. Of the daughters who stayed at
home, some or all would be dedicated as Vestal Virgins for a longer or
shorter time to the service of the fire on the hearth, and one of them
would in time become the consort of her father’s successor.
[Sidenote: This hypothesis explains some obscure features in the
traditional history of the Latin kings, such as the stories of their
miraculous birth.] This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining in a
simple and natural way some obscure features in the traditional history
of the Latin kingship. Thus the legends which tell how Latin kings were
born of virgin mothers and divine fathers become at least more
intelligible. For, stripped of their fabulous element, tales of this
sort mean no more than that a woman has been gotten with child by a man
unknown; and this uncertainty as to fatherhood is more easily compatible
with a system of kinship which ignores paternity than with one which
makes it all-important. If at the birth of the Latin kings their fathers
were really unknown,[883] the fact points either to a general looseness
of life in the royal family or to a special relaxation [Sidenote: The
Latin kings perhaps begotten at a Saturnalia.] of moral rules on certain
occasions, when men and women reverted for a season to the licence of an
earlier age. Such Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of social
evolution. In our own country traces of them long survived in the
practices of May Day and Whitsuntide, if not of Christmas. Children born
of the more or less promiscuous intercourse which characterises
festivals of this kind would naturally be fathered on the god to whom
the particular festival was dedicated.
[Sidenote: The Roman festival of Midsummer was a kind of Saturnalia, and
was specially associated with the fire-born King Servius Tullius.] In
this connexion it may not be without significance that a festival of
jollity and drunkenness was celebrated by the plebeians and slaves at
Rome on Midsummer Day, and that the festival was specially associated
with the fire-born King Servius Tullius, being held in honour of
Fortuna, the goddess who loved Servius as Egeria loved Numa. The popular
merrymakings at this season included foot-races and boat-races; the
Tiber was gay with flower-wreathed boats, in which young folk sat
quaffing wine.[884] The festival appears to have been a sort of
Midsummer Saturnalia answering to the real Saturnalia which fell at
Midwinter. In modern Europe, as we shall learn later on, the great
Midsummer festival has been above all a festival of lovers and of fire;
one of its principal features is the pairing of sweethearts, who leap
over the bonfires hand in hand or throw flowers across the flames to
each other. And many omens of love and marriage are drawn from the
flowers which bloom at this mystic season.[885] It is the time of the
roses and of love. Yet the innocence and beauty of such festivals in
modern times ought not to blind us to the likelihood that in earlier
days they were marked by coarser features, which were probably of the
essence of the rites. Indeed, among the rude Esthonian peasantry these
features seem to have lingered down to our own generation, if not to the
present day. One other feature in the Roman celebration of Midsummer
deserves to be specially noticed. The custom of rowing in flower-decked
boats on the river on this day proves that it was to some extent a water
festival; and, as we shall learn later on, water has always, down to
modern times, played a conspicuous part in the rites of Midsummer Day,
which explains why the Church, in throwing its cloak over the old
heathen festival, chose to dedicate it to St. John the Baptist.[886]
[Sidenote: But the uncertainty as to the paternity of the Roman kings
may only mean that in later times the names of their fathers were
forgotten.] The hypothesis that the Latin kings may have been begotten
at an annual festival of love is necessarily a mere conjecture, though
the traditional birth of Numa on the festival of the Parilia, when
shepherds leaped across the spring bonfires,[887] as lovers leap across
the Midsummer fires, may perhaps be thought to lend it a faint colour of
probability. But it is quite possible that the uncertainty as to their
fathers may not have arisen till long after the death of the kings, when
their figures began to melt away into the cloudland of fable, assuming
fantastic shapes and gorgeous colouring as they passed from earth to
heaven. If they were alien immigrants, strangers and pilgrims in the
land they ruled over, it would be natural enough that the people should
forget their lineage, and forgetting it should provide them with
another, which made up in lustre what it lacked in truth. The final
apotheosis, which represented the kings as not merely sprung from gods
but as themselves deities incarnate, would be much facilitated if in
their lifetime, as we have seen reason to think, they had actually laid
claim to divinity.
[Sidenote: Where descent is traced through women only, girls of the
highest rank may be married to men of humble birth, even to aliens and
slaves.] If among the Latins the women of royal blood always stayed at
home and received as their consorts men of another stock, and often of
another country, who reigned as kings in virtue of their marriage with a
native princess, we can understand not only why foreigners wore the
crown at Rome, but also why foreign names occur in the list of the Alban
kings. In a state of society where nobility is reckoned only through
women—in other words, where descent through the mother is everything,
and descent through the father is nothing—no objection will be felt to
uniting girls of the highest rank to men of humble birth, even to aliens
or slaves, provided that in themselves the men appear to be suitable
mates. What really matters is that the royal stock, on which the
prosperity and even the existence of the people is supposed to depend,
should be perpetuated in a vigorous and efficient form, and for this
purpose it is necessary that the women of the royal family should bear
children to men who are physically and mentally fit, according to the
standard of early society, to discharge the important duty of
procreation. Thus the personal qualities of the kings at this stage of
social evolution are deemed of vital importance. If they, like their
consorts, are of royal and divine descent, so much the better; but it is
not essential that they should be so.
[Sidenote: In Ashantee, where the kingdom descends through women, the
rank of the king’s father is not regarded.] The hypothesis which we have
been led to frame of the rule of succession to the Latin kingship will
be confirmed by analogy if we can shew that elsewhere, under a system of
female kinship, the paternity of the kings is a matter of
indifference—nay, that men who are born slaves may, like Servius
Tullius, marry royal princesses and be raised to the throne. Now this is
true of the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast in West Africa. Thus
in Ashantee, where the kingdom descends in the female line to the king’s
brothers and afterwards to the sons of his sister in preference to his
own sons, the sisters of the reigning monarch are free to marry or
intrigue with whom they please, provided only that their husband or
lover be a very strong and handsome man, in order that the kings whom he
begets may be men of finer presence than their subjects. It matters not
how low may be the rank and position of the king’s father. If the king’s
sisters, however, have no sons, the throne will pass to the king’s own
son, and failing a son, to the chief vassal or the chief slave. But in
the Fantee country the principal slave succeeds to the exclusion of the
son. So little regard is paid by these people to the lineage, especially
the paternal lineage, of their kings.[888] Yet Ashantee has attained a
barbaric civilisation as high perhaps as that of any negro state, and
probably not at all inferior to that of the petty Latin kingdoms at the
dawn of history.
[Sidenote: Traces of a similar state of things in Uganda.] A trace of a
similar state of things appears to survive in Uganda, another great
African monarchy. For there the queen dowager and the queen sister are,
or were, allowed to have as many husbands as they choose, without going
through any marriage ceremony. “Of these two women it is commonly said
all Uganda is their husband; they appear to be fond of change, only
living with a man for a few days and then inviting some one else to take
his place.” We are reminded of the legends of the lustful queen
Semiramis, and the likeness may be more than superficial. Yet these
women are not allowed, under pain of death, to bear children; hence they
practise abortion.[889] Both the licence and the prohibition may be
explained if we suppose that formerly the kingdom descended, as it still
does in Ashantee, first to the king’s brothers and next to the sons of
his sisters. For in that case the next heirs to the throne would be the
sons of the king’s mother and of his sisters, and these women might
accordingly be allowed, as the king’s sisters still are allowed in
Ashantee, to mate with any handsome men who took their fancy, in order
that their offspring might be of regal part. But when the line of
descent was changed from the female to the male line, in other words,
when the kings were succeeded by their sons instead of by their brothers
or their sisters’ sons, then the king’s mother and his sisters would be
forbidden to bear children lest the descent of the crown to the king’s
own children should be endangered by the existence of rivals who,
according to the old law of the kingdom, had a better right to the
throne. We may surmise that the practice of putting the king’s brothers
to death at the beginning of his reign, which survived till Uganda
passed under English protection,[890] was instituted at the same time as
the prohibition of child-bearing laid on the king’s mother and sisters.
The one custom got rid of existing rivals; the other prevented them from
being born. That the kingship in Uganda was formerly transmitted in the
female line is strongly indicated by the rule that the kings and the
rest of the royal family take their totems from their mothers, whereas
all the other people of the country get their totems from their
fathers.[891]
[Sidenote: In Loango also, where the blood royal is traced in the female
line, the princesses are free to cohabit with whom they please, and
their consorts are practically their slaves.] In Loango the blood royal
is traced in the female line, and here also the princesses are free to
choose and divorce their husbands at pleasure, and to cohabit at the
same time with other men. These husbands are nearly always plebeians,
for princes and princesses, who are very numerous and form a ruling
caste in the country, may not marry each other. The lot of a prince
consort is not a happy one, for he is rather the slave and prisoner than
the mate of his imperious princess. In marrying her he engages never
more to look at a woman during the whole time he cohabits with his royal
spouse. When he goes out he is preceded by guards who drive away all
females from the road where he is to pass. If in spite of these
precautions he should by ill-luck cast his eyes on a woman, the princess
may have his head chopped off, and commonly exercises, or used to
exercise, the right. This sort of libertinism, sustained by power, often
carries the princesses to the greatest excesses, and nothing is so much
dreaded as their anger. No wonder that commoners in general avoid the
honour of a royal alliance. Only poor and embarrassed men seek it as a
protection against their creditors and enemies. All the children of such
a man by such a wife are princes and princesses, and any one of the
princes may in time be chosen king; for in Loango the crown is not
hereditary but elective.[892] Thus it would seem that the father of the
King of Loango is nearly always a plebeian, and often little better than
a slave.
[Sidenote: Similar rights enjoyed by queens in Central Africa.] Near the
Chambezi river, which falls into Lake Bengweolo in Central Africa, there
is a small state governed by a queen who belongs to the reigning family
of Ubemba. She bears the title of _Mamfumer_ or Mother of Kings. “The
privileges attached to this dignity are numerous. The most singular is
that the queens may choose for themselves their husband among the common
people. The chosen man becomes prince-consort without sharing in the
administration of affairs. He is bound to leave everything to follow his
royal and often but little accommodating spouse. To shew that in these
households the rights are inverted and that a man may be changed into a
woman, the queen takes the title of _Monsieur_ and her husband that of
_Madame_.”[893]
[Sidenote: Traces of female descent of the kingship in ancient Greece.]
At Athens, as at Rome, we find traces of succession to the throne by
marriage with a royal princess; for two of the most ancient kings of
Athens, namely Cecrops and Amphictyon, are said to have married the
daughters of their predecessors.[894] This tradition is confirmed by the
evidence, which I shall adduce presently, that at Athens male kinship
was preceded by female kinship.
[Sidenote: With this rule of descent of the kingship males rule over
different kingdoms in successive generations.] Further, if I am right in
supposing that in ancient Latium the royal families kept their daughters
at home and sent forth their sons to marry princesses and reign among
their wives’ people, it will follow that the male descendants would
reign in successive generations over different kingdoms. Now this seems
to have happened both in ancient Greece and in ancient Sweden; from
which we may legitimately infer that it was a custom practised by more
than one branch of the Aryan stock in Europe. Take, for instance, the
great house of Aeacus, the grandfather of Achilles and Ajax. Aeacus
himself reigned in Aegina, but his descendants, as has been justly
observed, “from the beginning went forth to other lands.”[895] His son
Telamon migrated to the [Sidenote: Migrations of the male descendants of
Aeacus.] island of Salamis, married the king’s daughter, and reigned
over the country.[896] Telamon’s son Teucer, in his turn, migrated to
Cyprus, wedded the king’s daughter, and succeeded his father-in-law on
the throne.[897] Again, Peleus, another son of Aeacus, quitted his
native land and went away to Phthia in Thessaly, where he received the
hand of the king’s daughter, and with her a third of the kingdom.[898]
Of Achilles, the son of Peleus, we are told that in his youth he was
sent to the court of Lycomedes, King of Scyros, where he got one of the
princesses with child.[899] The tradition seems to shew that Achilles
followed the custom of his family in seeking his fortune in a foreign
land. His son Neoptolemus, after him, went away to Epirus, where he
settled and became the ancestor of the kings of the country.[900]
[Sidenote: Migrations of the male descendants of Tydeus and Pelops.]
Again, Tydeus was a son of Oeneus, the King of Calydon in Aetolia, but
he went to Argos and married the king’s daughter.[901] His son Diomede
migrated to Daunia in Italy, where he helped the king in a war with his
enemies, receiving as his reward the king’s daughter in marriage and
part of the kingdom.[902] As another example we may take the family of
the Pelopidae, whose tragic fortunes the Greek poets never wearied of
celebrating. Their ancestor was Tantalus, King of Sipylus in Asia Minor.
But his son Pelops passed into Greece, won Hippodamia, the daughter of
the King of Pisa, in the famous chariot-race, and succeeded his
father-in-law on the throne.[903] His son Atreus did not remain in Pisa,
but migrated to Mycenae, of which he became king;[904] and in the next
generation Menelaus, son of Atreus, went to Sparta, where he married
Helen, the king’s daughter, and himself reigned over the country.[905]
Further, it is very notable that, according to the old lyric poets,
Agamemnon himself, the elder brother of Menelaus, reigned not at Mycenae
but in Lacedaemon, the native land of his wife Clytaemnestra, and that
he was buried at Amyclae, the ancient capital of the country.[906]
[Sidenote: These migrations not understood in later times.] Various
reasons are assigned by ancient Greek writers for these migrations of
the princes. A common one is that the king’s son had been banished for
murder. This would explain very well why he fled his own land, but it is
no reason at all why he should become king of another. We may suspect
that such reasons are afterthoughts devised by writers who, accustomed
to the rule that a son should succeed to his father’s property and
kingdom, were hard put to it to account for so many traditions of kings’
sons who quitted the land of their birth to reign over a foreign
kingdom.
[Sidenote: Traces of similar migrations in Scandinavian tradition.] In
Scandinavian tradition we meet with traces of similar customs. For we
read of daughters’ husbands who received a share of the kingdoms of
their royal fathers-in-law, even when these fathers-in-law had sons of
their own; in particular, during the five generations which preceded
Harold the Fair-haired, male members of the Ynglingar family, which is
said to have come from Sweden, are reported in the _Heimskringla_ or
_Sagas of the Norwegian_ Kings to have obtained at least six provinces
in Norway by marriage with the daughters of the local kings.[907]
[Sidenote: A reminiscence of the transmission of the kingship through
women is preserved in popular tales.] Thus it would seem that among some
Aryan peoples, at a certain stage of their social evolution, it has been
customary to regard women and not men as the channels in which royal
blood flows, and to bestow the kingdom in each successive generation on
a man of another family, and often of another country, who marries one
of the princesses and reigns over his wife’s people. A common type of
popular tale, which relates how an adventurer, coming to a strange land,
wins the hand of the king’s daughter and with her the half or the whole
of the kingdom, may well be a reminiscence of a real custom.[908]
[Sidenote: Where such customs prevail, the kingship is an appanage of
marriage with a princess.] Where usages and ideas of this sort prevail,
it is obvious that the kingship is merely an appanage of marriage with a
woman of the blood royal. The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts
this view of the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a
legendary queen of Scotland, and her statement is all the more
significant because, as we shall see presently, it reflects the actual
practice of the Pictish kings. “Indeed she was a queen,” says
Hermutrude, “and but that her sex gainsaid it, might be deemed a king;
nay (and this is yet truer), whomsoever she thought worthy of her bed
was at once a king, and she yielded her kingdom with herself. Thus her
sceptre and her hand went together.”[909] Wherever a custom of this sort
is observed, a man may clearly acquire the kingdom just as well by
marrying the widow as the daughter of his predecessor. This is what
Aegisthus did at Mycenae, and what Hamlet’s uncle Feng and Hamlet’s
successor Wiglet did in Denmark; all three slew their predecessors,
married their widows, and then sat peacefully on the throne.[910] The
tame submission of the people to their rule would be intelligible, if
they regarded the assassins, in spite of their crime, as the lawful
occupants of the throne by reason of their marriage with the widowed
queens. Similarly, Gyges murdered Candaules, King of Lydia, [Sidenote:
The Lydian kingship apparently transmitted through women.] married his
queen, and reigned over the country.[911] Nor was this the only instance
of such a succession in the history of Lydia. The wife of King Cadys
conspired against his life with her paramour Spermus, and though her
husband recovered from the dose of poison which she administered to him,
he died soon afterwards, and the adulterer married his leman and
succeeded to the throne.[912] These cases excite a suspicion that in the
royal house of Lydia descent was traced in the female line, and the
suspicion is strengthened by the legendary character of Omphale, the
ancestress of the dynasty. For she is represented as a masculine but
dissolute queen of the Semiramis type, who wore male attire and put all
her favoured lovers to death, while on the other hand her consort
Hercules was her purchased slave, was treated with indignity, and went
about dressed as a woman.[913] This plainly implies that the queen was a
far more powerful and important personage than the king, as would
naturally happen wherever it is the queen who confers royalty on her
consort at marriage instead of receiving it from him. The story that she
prostituted the daughters of the Lydians to their male slaves[914] is of
a piece with the tradition that she herself married her slave Hercules.
It may mean little more than that the Lydians were indifferent to
paternity, and that the children of freewomen by slaves ranked as free.
Such an indifference to fatherhood, coupled with the ancient accounts of
the loose morals of the Lydian girls, who were accustomed to earn a
dowry by prostitution,[915] is a mark of the system of female kinship.
Hence we may conjecture that Herodotus was wrong in saying that from
Hercules to Candaules the crown of Lydia had descended for twenty-two
generations from father to son.[916] The old mode of transmitting the
crown of Lydia through women probably did not end with Candaules. At
least we are told that his murderer and successor Gyges, like Hercules,
the mythical founder of the dynasty, gave himself and his kingdom into
the hands of the woman he loved, and that when she died he collected all
the slaves from the country round about and raised in her memory a mound
so lofty that it could be seen from every part of the Lydian plain, and
for centuries after was known as the Harlot’s Tomb.[917]
[Sidenote: Marriage of Canute with the widow of his predecessor.] When
Canute the Dane had been acknowledged King of England, he married Emma,
the widow of his predecessor Ethelred, whose throne he had overturned
and whose children he had driven into exile. The marriage has not
unnaturally puzzled the historians, for Emma was much older than her
second husband, she was then living in Normandy, and it is very doubtful
whether Canute had ever seen her before she became his bride. All,
however, becomes plain if, as the cases of Feng and Wiglet seem to shew,
it was an old Danish custom that marriage with a king’s widow carried
the kingdom with it as a matter of right. In that case the young but
prudent Canute married the mature widow merely out of policy in order to
clinch, according to Danish notions, by a legal measure his claim to
that crown which he had already won for himself by the sword.[918] Among
the Saxons and their near kinsmen the Varini it appears to have been a
regular custom for the new king to marry his stepmother. Thus
Hermegisclus, King of the Varini, on his deathbed enjoined his son
Radigis to wed his stepmother in accordance with their ancestral
practice, and his injunction was obeyed.[919] Edbald, King of Kent,
married his stepmother after the death of his father Ethelbert;[920] and
as late as the ninth century Ethelbald, King of the West Saxons, wedded
Judith, the widow of his father Ethelwulf.[921] Such marriages are
intelligible if we suppose that old Saxon as well as old Danish law gave
the kingdom to him who married the late king’s widow.
[Sidenote: Traces of the system of female kinship among the Aryans.] To
the view that the right to the Latin kingship was derived from women and
not from men, it may be objected that the system of female kinship or
mother-kin is unknown among the Aryans,[922] and that even if faint
traces of it may be met with elsewhere, the last place in the world
where we should look for it would be Rome, the stronghold of the
patriarchal family. To meet this objection it is necessary to point to
some facts which appear to be undoubted survivals among Aryan peoples of
a custom of tracing descent through the mother only.
[Sidenote: Female kinship among the Athenians, the Epizephyrian
Locrians, the Cantabrians, and the Germans.] In Attica tradition ran
that of old the women were the common property of the men, who coupled
with them like beasts, so that while every one knew his mother, nobody
knew who his father was. This system of sexual communism was abolished
by Cecrops, the first King of Athens, who introduced individual marriage
in its place.[923] Little weight could be attached to this tradition, if
it were not supported to a certain extent by the Attic usage which
always allowed a man to marry his half-sister by the same father but not
his half-sister by the same mother.[924] Such a rule seems clearly to be
a relic of a time when kinship was counted only through women. Again,
the Epizephyrian Locrians in Italy traced all ancestral distinction in
the female, not the male line. Among them the nobles were the members of
the hundred houses from whom were chosen by lot the maidens to be sent
to Troy.[925] For in order, it is said, to expiate the sacrilege
committed by the Locrian Ajax when he violated Cassandra in the
sanctuary of Athena at Troy, the cities of Locris used annually to send
to the Trojan goddess two maidens, whom the Trojans slew, and, burning
their bodies on the wood of certain trees which bore no fruit, threw the
ashes into the sea. If the maidens contrived to escape they took refuge
in the sanctuary of Athena, which they thenceforth swept and washed,
never quitting it except at night, and always going barefoot, shorn, and
clad in a single garment. The custom is said to have been observed for a
thousand years down to the fourth century before our era.[926] Among the
Locrians, as elsewhere, the system of female kinship would seem to have
gone hand in hand with dissolute morals; for there is reason to think
that of old the Locrians, like the Lydians and Armenians, had been wont
to prostitute their daughters before marriage, though in later times the
custom fell into abeyance.[927] The Cantabrians of Spain seem also to
have had mother-kin; for among them it was the daughters who inherited
property and who portioned out their brothers in marriage.[928] Again,
the ancient Germans deemed the tie between a man and his sister’s
children as close as that between a father and his children; indeed some
regarded the bond as even closer and more sacred, and therefore in
exacting hostages they chose the children of a man’s sister rather than
his own children, believing that this gave them a firmer hold on the
family.[929] The superiority thus assigned to the maternal uncle over
the father is an infallible mark of mother-kin, either present or past,
as may be observed, for instance, in very many African tribes to this
day, among whom both property and political power pass, not from father
to son, but from the maternal uncle to his nephews.[930] Similarly, in
Melanesia the close relation of the mother’s brother to his nephew is
maintained even where the system of relationship has become
patriarchal.[931] Amongst the Germans in the time of Tacitus, it is
true, a man’s heirs were his own children,[932] but the mother’s brother
could never have attained the position he held except under a system of
maternal descent. Another vestige of mother-kin among a Teutonic people
appears to be found in the Salic law. For it was a custom with the
Salian Franks that when a widow married again, a price had to be paid to
her family, and in laying down the order in which her kinsmen were
entitled to receive this payment the law gave a decided preference to
the female over the male line; thus the first person entitled to claim
the money was the eldest son of the widow’s sister.[933]
[Sidenote: Among the Picts the kingship was transmitted through women.]
It is a moot point whether the Picts of Scotland belonged to the Aryan
family or not;[934] but among them the kingdom was certainly transmitted
through women. Bede tells us that down to his own time, in the early
part of the eighth century, whenever a doubt arose as to the succession,
the Picts chose their king from the female rather than the male
line.[935] The statement is amply confirmed by historical evidence. For
we possess a list of the Pictish kings and their fathers which was drawn
up in the reign of Cenaed, King of the Scots, towards the end of the
tenth century; and for the period from the year 583 to the year 840 the
register is authenticated by the Irish Annals of Tigernach and Ulster.
Now, it is significant that in this list the fathers of the kings are
never themselves kings; in other words, no king was succeeded on the
throne by his son. Further, if we may judge by their names, the fathers
of the Pictish kings were not Picts but foreigners—men of Irish, Cymric,
or English race. The inference from these facts seems to be that among
the Picts the royal family was exogamous, and that the crown descended
in the female line; in other words, that the princesses married men of
another clan or even of another race, and that their issue by these
strangers sat on the throne, whether they succeeded in a prescribed
order according to birth, or whether they were elected from among the
sons of princesses, as the words of Bede might be taken to imply.[936]
[Sidenote: Female kinship among the Etruscans.] Another European, though
apparently not Aryan, people among whom the system of female kinship
appears to have prevailed were the Etruscans. For in Etruscan sepulchral
inscriptions the name of the mother of the deceased is regularly
recorded along with or even without the name of the father; and where
the names of both father and mother are mentioned, greater prominence is
given to the mother’s name by writing it in full, whereas the father’s
name is, in accordance with Roman usage, merely indicated by an
initial.[937] The statement of Theopompus that among the Etruscans
sexual communism was a recognised practice, and that paternity was
unknown,[938] may be only an exaggerated way of saying that they traced
their descent through their mothers and not through their fathers. Yet
apparently in Etruria, as elsewhere, this system of relationship was
combined with a real indifference to fatherhood and with the dissolute
morals which that indifference implies; for Etruscan girls were wont to
earn a dowry by prostitution.[939] In these customs the Etruscans
resembled the Lydians, and the similarity confirms the common opinion of
antiquity, which modern historians have too lightly set aside, that the
Etruscans were of Lydian origin.[940] However that may be, in
considering the vestiges of mother-kin among the Latins, we shall do
well to bear in mind that the same archaic mode of tracing descent
appears to have prevailed among the neighbouring Etruscans, who not only
exercised a powerful influence on Rome, but gave her two, if not three,
of her kings.[941]
[Sidenote: Mother-kin may survive in the royal family after it has been
exchanged for father-kin in all others.] It would be neither unnatural
nor surprising if among the ancient Latins mother-kin survived in the
royal family after it had been exchanged for father-kin in all others.
For royalty, like religion, is essentially conservative; it clings to
old forms and old customs which have long vanished from ordinary life.
Thus in Uganda persons of royal blood still inherit their totems from
their mothers, while other people inherit them from their fathers. So in
Denmark and Scandinavia, as we have seen, the kingdom would appear to
have been transmitted through women long after the family name and
property had become hereditary in the male line among the people.
Sometimes the difference in custom between kings and commoners is
probably based rather on a distinction of race than on varying degrees
of social progress; for a dynasty is often a family of alien origin who
have imposed their rule on their subjects by force of arms, as the
Normans did on the Saxons, and the Manchus on the Chinese. More rarely,
perhaps, it may have happened that from motives of policy or
superstition a [Sidenote: Sometimes a conquering race may have left a
nominal kingship to members of the old royal house.] conquering tribe
has left a nominal kingship to the members of the old royal house. Such
a concession would be most likely to be made where the functions of the
king were rather religious than civil, and where the prosperity of the
country was supposed to depend on the maintenance of the established
relations between the people and the gods of the land. In that case the
new-comers, knowing not how to appease and conciliate these strange
deities, might be glad to let the priestly kings of the conquered race
perform the quaint rites and mumble the venerable spells, which had been
found to answer their purpose time out of mind.[942] In a commonwealth
like the Roman, formed by the union of different stocks, the royal
family might thus belong either to the conquerors or to the conquered;
in other words, either to the [Sidenote: This perhaps happened at Rome,
where many of the kings seem to have been plebeians.] patricians or to
the plebeians. But if we leave out of account Romulus and Tatius, who
are more or less legendary figures, and the two Tarquins, who came of a
noble Etruscan house, all the other Roman kings appear from their names
to have been men of plebeian, not patrician, families.[943] Hence it
seems probable that they belonged to the indigenous race, who may have
retained mother-kin, at least in the royal succession, after they had
submitted to invaders who knew father-kin only.
[Sidenote: The abolition of the monarchy at Rome may have been a
revolution whereby the patricians wrested the shadow of sovereignty from
the plebeians and transferred it to themselves, who already wielded the
substance.] If that was so, it confirms the view that the old Roman
kingship was essentially a religious office; for the conquerors would be
much more ready to leave an office of this sort in the hands of the
conquered than a kingship of the type with which we are familiar. “Let
these puppets,” they might think, “render to the gods their dues, while
we rule the people in peace and lead them in war.” Of such priestly
kings Numa was the type. But not all of his successors were willing to
model themselves on his saintly figure and, rejecting the pomps and
vanities of earth, to devote themselves to communion with heaven. Some
were men of strong will and warlike temper, who could not brook the dull
routine of the cloister. They longed to exchange the stillness and gloom
of the temple or the sacred grove for the sunshine, the dust, and the
tumult of the battlefield. Such men broke bounds, and when they
threatened to get completely out of hand and turn the tables on the
patricians, it was time that they should go. This, we may conjecture,
was the real meaning of the abolition of the kingship at Rome. It put an
end to the solemn pretence that the state was still ruled by the ancient
owners of the soil: it took the shadow of power from them and gave it to
those who had long possessed the substance. The ghost of the monarchy
had begun to walk and grow troublesome: the revolution laid it for
centuries.
[Sidenote: At first the intention seems to have been to leave the annual
kingship or consulship to the old royal family.] But though the effect
of the revolution was to substitute the real rule of the patricians for
the nominal rule of the plebeians, the break with the past was at the
outset less complete than it seems. For the first two consuls were both
men of the royal blood. One of them, L. Junius Brutus, was sister’s son
of the expelled King Tarquin the Proud.[944] As such he would have been
the heir to the throne under a strict system of mother-kin. The other
consul, L. Tarquinius Collatinus, was a son of the late king’s cousin
Egerius.[945] These facts suggest that the first intention of the
revolutionaries was neither to abolish the kingship nor to wrest it from
the royal family, but, merely retaining the hereditary monarchy, to
restrict its powers. To achieve this object they limited the tenure of
office to a year and doubled the number of the kings, who might thus be
expected to check and balance each other. But it is not impossible that
both restrictions were merely the revival of old rules which the growing
power of the kings had contrived for a time to set aside in practice.
The legends of Romulus and Remus, and afterwards of Romulus and Tatius,
may be real reminiscences of a double kingship like that of Sparta;[946]
and in the yearly ceremony of the _Regifugium_ or Flight of the King we
seem to detect a trace of an annual, not a life-long, tenure of
office.[947] The same thing may perhaps be true of the parallel change
which took place at Athens when the people deprived the Medontids of
their regal powers and reduced them from kings to responsible
magistrates, who held office at first for life, but afterwards only for
periods of ten years.[948] Here, too, the limitation of the tenure of
the kingship may have been merely the reinforcement of an old custom
which had fallen into abeyance. At Rome, however, the attempt to
maintain the hereditary principle, if it was made at all, was almost
immediately abandoned, and the patricians openly transferred to
themselves the double kingship, which thenceforth was purely elective,
and was afterwards known as the consulship.[949]
[Sidenote: The abolition of the monarchy at Rome seems to have been
hastened by an attempt of the last king to shift the succession from the
female to the male line.] The history of the last king of Rome, Tarquin
the Proud, leads us to suspect that the offence which he gave by his
ambitious and domineering character was heightened by an attempt to
shift the succession of the kingship from the female to the male line.
He himself united both rights in his own person; for he had married the
daughter of his predecessor, Servius Tullius, and he was the son or
grandson of Tarquin the Elder,[950] who preceded Servius Tullius on the
throne. But in asserting his right to the crown, if we can trust Roman
history on this point, Tarquin the Proud entirely ignored his claim to
it through women as the son-in-law of his predecessor, and insisted only
on his claim in the male line as the son or grandson of a former
king.[951] And he evidently intended to bequeath the kingdom to one of
his sons; for he put out of the way two of the men who, if the
succession had been through women in the way I have indicated, would
have been entitled to sit on the throne before his own sons, and even
before himself. One of these was his sister’s husband, the other was her
elder son. Her younger son, the famous Lucius Junius Brutus, only
escaped the fate of his father and elder brother by feigning, like
Hamlet, imbecility, and thus deluding his wicked uncle into the belief
that he had nothing to fear from such a simpleton.[952] This design of
Tarquin to alter the line of succession from the female to the male side
of the house may have been the last drop which filled his cup of
high-handed tyranny to overflowing. At least it is a strange
coincidence, if it is nothing more, that he was deposed by the man who,
under a system of female kinship, was the rightful heir, and who in a
sense actually sat on the throne from which he pushed his uncle. For the
curule chair of the consul was little less than the king’s throne under
a limited tenure.
[Sidenote: The hereditary principle does not necessarily exclude the
elective in the succession to a monarchy; many African chieftainships or
kingships are both hereditary and elective.] It has often been asked
whether the Roman monarchy was hereditary or elective. The question
implies an opposition between the two modes of succession which by no
means necessarily exists. As a matter of fact, in many African tribes at
the present day the succession to the kingdom or the chieftainship is
determined by a combination of the hereditary and the elective
principle, that is, the kings or chiefs are chosen by the people or by a
body of electors from among the members of the royal family. And as the
chiefs have commonly several wives and many children by them, the number
of possible candidates may be not inconsiderable. For example, we are
told that “the government of the Banyai is rather peculiar, being a sort
of feudal republicanism. The chief is elected, and they choose the son
of the deceased chief’s sister in preference to his own offspring. When
dissatisfied with one candidate, they even go to a distant tribe for a
successor, who is usually of the family of the late chief, a brother, or
a sister’s son, but never his own son or daughter. When first spoken to
on the subject, he answers as if he thought himself unequal to the task
and unworthy of the honour, but, having accepted it, all the wives,
goods, and children of his predecessor belong to him, and he takes care
to keep them in a dependent position.” Among these people “the children
of the chief have fewer privileges than common free men. They may not be
sold, but, rather than choose any one of them for a chief at any future
time, the free men would prefer to elect one of themselves who bore only
a very distant relationship to the family.”[953]
[Sidenote: Chiefs and kings in Africa elected from several families in
rotation.] Sometimes the field of choice is extended still further by a
rule that the chief may or must be chosen from one of several families
in a certain order. Thus among the Bangalas of the Cassange Valley in
Angola the chief is elected from three families in rotation.[954] And
Diagara, a country bordering on Senegambia, is ruled by an absolute
monarch who is chosen alternately from two families, one of which lives
in Diapina and the other in Badumar.[955] In the Winamwanga tribe, to
the south of Lake Tanganyika, “the first male child born to a chief
after he succeeds to the chieftainship is the natural heir, but many
years ago there were two claimants to the throne, whose supporters were
about equal, and to avoid a civil war the following arrangement was
made. One of them was allowed to reign, but the other claimant or his
son was to succeed him. This was carried out, so that now there are
continually alternate dynasties.”[956] So in the Matse tribe of Togoland
in West Africa, there are two royal families descended from two women,
which supply a king alternately. Hence the palm forest which belongs to
the crown is divided into two parts; the reigning king has the right to
one part, and the representative of the other royal house has a right to
the other part.[957] Among the Yorubas in western Africa the sovereign
chief is always taken from one or more families which have the
hereditary right of furnishing the community with rulers. In many cases
the succession passes regularly from one to a second family alternately;
but in one instance, apparently unique, the right of succession to the
sovereignty seems to be possessed by four princely families, from each
of which the head chief is elected in rotation. The principle of
primogeniture is not necessarily followed in the election, but the
choice of the electors must always fall on one who is related to a
former chief in the male line. For paternal descent alone is recognised
in Yorubaland, where even the greatest chief may take to wife a woman of
the lowest rank. Sometimes the choice of the ruling chief is made by
divine authority, intimated to the people through the high priest of the
principal god of the district.[958] Among the Igaras, on the lower
Niger, the royal family is divided into four branches, each of which
provides a king in turn. The capital and its district, both of which
bear the name of Idah, are always occupied by the reigning branch of the
royal family, while the three other branches, not being allowed to live
there, retreat into the interior. Hence at the death of a king a double
change takes place. On the one hand the late reigning family, with all
their dependants, have to leave the homes in which many of them have
been born and brought up, and to migrate to towns in the forest, which
they know only by name. On the other hand, the new reigning family come
into the capital, and their people settle in the houses occupied by
their forefathers four reigns ago. The king is generally elected by the
leading men of his branch of the royal family; they choose the richest
and most powerful of their number.[959]
[Sidenote: Among the Khasis of Assam, also, the succession to the
kingdom is partly hereditary and partly elective.] Again, among the
Khasis of Assam we meet with the same combination of the hereditary with
the elective principle in the succession to the kingdom. Indeed, in this
people the kingship presents several features of resemblance to the old
Latin kingship as it appears to have existed at the dawn of history. For
a Khasi king is the religious as well as the secular head of the state;
along with the sooth-sayers he consults the auspices for the public
good, and sometimes he has priestly duties to perform. Succession to the
kingship always runs in the female line, for the Khasis have a regular
system of mother-kin as opposed to father-kin; hence it is not the
king’s sons, but his uterine brothers and the sons of his uterine
sisters who succeed him on the throne in order of birth. But this
hereditary principle is controlled by a body of electors, who have the
right of rejecting unsuitable claimants to the throne. Generally the
electors are a small body composed of the heads of certain priestly
clans; but in some Khasi states the number of the electors has been
greatly increased by the inclusion of representative headmen of certain
important lay clans, or even by the inclusion of village headmen or of
the chief superintendents of the village markets. Nay, in the Langrim
state all the adult males regularly vote at the election of a monarch;
and here the royal family is divided into two branches, a Black and a
White, from either of which, apparently, the electors are free to choose
a king. Similarly, in the Nobosohpoh state there are two royal houses, a
Black and a White, and the people may select the heir to the throne from
either of them.[960]
[Sidenote: Thus the Roman monarchy may have combined the hereditary with
the elective principle.] Thus the mere circumstance that all the Roman
kings, with the exception of the two Tarquins, appear to have belonged
to different families, is not of itself conclusive against the view that
heredity was one of the elements which determined the succession. The
number of families from whom the king might be elected may have been
large. And even if, as is possible, the electors were free to chose a
king without any regard to his birth, the hereditary principle would
still be maintained if, as we have seen reason to conjecture, it was
essential that the chosen candidate should marry a woman of the royal
house, who would generally be either the daughter or the widow of his
predecessor. In this way the apparently disparate principles of
unfettered election and strict heredity would be combined; the marriage
of the elected king with the hereditary princess would furnish the link
between the two. Under such a system, to put it otherwise, the kings are
elective and the queens hereditary. This is just the converse of what
happens under a system of male kinship, where the kings are hereditary
and the queens elective.
In the later times of Rome it was held that the custom had been for the
people to elect the kings and for the senate to ratify the
election.[961] But we may suspect, with Mommsen, that this was no more
than an inference from the mode of electing the consuls. The magistrates
who, under the republic, represented the kings most closely were the
dictator and the King of the Sacred Rites, and neither of these was
elected by the people. Both were nominated, the dictator by the consul,
and the King of the Sacred Rites by the chief pontiff.[962] Accordingly
it seems probable that under [Sidenote: The king was probably nominated
either by his predecessor or by an interim king.] the monarchy the king
was nominated either by his predecessor or, failing that, by an interim
king (_interrex_) chosen from the senate.[963] Now if, as we have been
led to think, an essential claim to the throne was constituted by
marriage with a princess of the royal house, nothing could be more
natural than that the king should choose his successor, who would
commonly be also his son-in-law. If he had several sons-in-law and had
omitted to designate the one who was to reign after him, the election
would be made by his substitute, the interim king.
[Sidenote: Personal qualities which commended a man for marriage with a
princess and succession to the throne.] The personal qualities which
recommended a man for a royal alliance and succession to the throne
would naturally vary according to the popular ideas of the time and the
character of the king or his substitute, but it is reasonable to suppose
that among them in early society physical strength and beauty would hold
a prominent place.[964] We have seen that in Ashantee the husbands or
paramours of the princesses must always be men of fine presence, because
they are to be the fathers of future kings. Among the Ethiopians in
antiquity, as among the Ashantees and many other African tribes to this
day, the crown passed in the female line to the son of the king’s
sister, but if there was no such heir they chose the handsomest and most
valiant man to reign over them.[965] We are told that the Gordioi
[Sidenote: Fat kings.] elected the fattest man to the kingship,[966] nor
is this incredible when we remember that in Africa corpulence is still
regarded as a great distinction and beauty, and that both the chiefs and
their wives are sometimes so fat that they can hardly walk. Thus among
the Caffres chiefs and rich men attain to an enormous bulk, and the
queens fatten themselves on beef and porridge, of which they partake
freely in the intervals of slumber. To be fat is with them a mark of
riches, and therefore of high rank; common folk cannot afford to eat and
drink and lounge as much as they would like to do.[967] The Syrakoi in
antiquity are reported to have bestowed the crown on the tallest man or
on the man with [Sidenote: Long-headed kings and chiefs.] the longest
head in the literal, not the figurative, sense of the word.[968] They
seem to have been a Sarmatian people to the north of the Caucasus,[969]
and are probably the same with the long-headed people described by
Hippocrates, who says that among them the men with the longest heads
were esteemed the noblest, and that they applied bandages and other
instruments to the heads of their children in infancy for the sake of
moulding them into the shape which they admired.[970] Such reports are
probably by no means fabulous, for among the Monbuttu or Mang-bettou of
Central Africa down to this day “when the children of chiefs are young,
string is wound round their heads, which are gradually compressed into a
shape that will allow of the longest head-dress. The skull thus treated
in childhood takes the appearance of an elongated egg.”[971] Similarly
[Sidenote: Heads artificially moulded as a mark of high rank.] some of
the Indian tribes on the north-west coast of America artificially mould
the heads of their children into the shape of a wedge or a sugar-loaf by
compressing them between boards; some of them regard such heads as a
personal beauty, others as a mark of high birth.[972] For instance, “the
practice among some of the Salish seems to have had a definite social,
as well as aesthetic, significance. There appear to have been recognised
degrees of contortion marking the social status of the individual. For
example slaves, of which the Salish kept considerable numbers, were
prohibited from deforming the heads of their children at all,
consequently a normal, undeformed head was the sign and badge of
servitude. And in the case of the base-born of the tribes the heads of
their children were customarily but slightly deformed, while the heads
of the children born of wealthy or noble persons, and particularly those
of chiefs, were severely and excessively deformed.”[973]
[Sidenote: Among the Bororos the best singers are the chiefs.] Among the
Bororos of Brazil at the present day the title to chieftaincy is neither
corpulence nor an egg-shaped head, but the possession of a fine musical
ear and a rich baritone, bass, or tenor voice. The best singer, in fact,
becomes the chief. There is no other way to supreme power but this.
Hence in the education of the Bororo youth the main thing is to train,
not their minds, but their voices, for the best of the tuneful quire
will certainly be chief. In this tribe, accordingly, there is no such
thing as hereditary chieftainship; for if the son of a chief has an
indifferent ear or a poor voice, he will be a commoner to the end of his
days. When two rival songsters are found in the same village, they sing
against each other, and he who is judged to have acquitted himself best
in the musical contest mounts the throne. His defeated rival sometimes
retires in a huff with his admirers and founds a new village. Once
seated in the place of power, the melodious singer is not only highly
honoured and respected, but can exact unconditional obedience from all,
and he gives his orders, like an operatic king or hero, in a musical
recitativo. It is especially at eventide, when the sun has set and the
labours of the day are over, that he pours out his soul in harmony. At
that witching hour he takes up his post in front of the men’s
club-house, and while his subjects are hushed in attention he bursts
into sacred song, passing from that to lighter themes, and concluding
the oratorio by chanting his commands to each individual for the next
day.[974] When Addison ridiculed the new fashion of the Italian opera,
in which generals sang the word of command, ladies delivered their
messages in music, and lovers chanted their billet-doux, he little
suspected that among the backwoods of Brazil a tribe of savages in all
seriousness observed a custom which he thought absurd even on the
stage.[975]
[Sidenote: Succession to the throne determined by a race.] Sometimes
apparently the right to the hand of the princess and to the throne has
been determined by a race. The Alitemnian Libyans awarded the kingdom to
the fleetest runner.[976] Amongst the old Prussians, candidates for
nobility raced on horseback to the king, and the one who reached him
first was ennobled.[977] According to tradition the earliest games at
Olympia were held by Endymion, who set his sons to run a race for the
kingdom. His tomb was said to be at the point of the racecourse from
which the runners started.[978] The famous story of Pelops and
Hippodamia [Sidenote: Greek traditions of princesses whose hands were
won in a race.] is perhaps only another version of the legend that the
first races at Olympia were run for no less a prize than a kingdom. For
Oenomaus was king of Pisa, a town close to Olympia; and having been
warned by an oracle that he would die by the hand of the man who married
his daughter Hippodamia, he resolved to keep her a maid. So when any one
came a-wooing her, the king made the suitor drive away in a chariot with
Hippodamia, while he himself pursued the pair in another car drawn by
fleet horses, and, overtaking the unlucky wight, slew him. In this way
he killed twelve suitors and nailed their heads to his house, the ruins
of which were shewn at Olympia down to the second century of our era.
The bodies of the suitors were buried under a lofty mound, and it is
said that in former days sacrifices were offered to them yearly. When
Pelops came to win the hand of Hippodamia, he bribed the charioteer of
Oenomaus not to put the pins into the wheels of the king’s chariot. So
Oenomaus was thrown from the car and dragged by his horses to death. But
some say he was despatched by Pelops according to the oracle. Anyhow, he
died, and Pelops married Hippodamia and succeeded to the kingdom.[979]
The grave of Oenomaus was shown at Olympia; it was a mound of earth
enclosed with stones.[980] Here, too, precincts were dedicated to Pelops
and Hippodamia, in which sacrifices were offered to them annually; the
victim presented to Pelops was a black ram, whose blood was poured into
a pit.[981] Other traditions were current in antiquity of princesses who
were offered in marriage to the fleetest runner and won by the victor in
the race. Thus Icarius at Sparta set the wooers of his daughter Penelope
to run a race; Ulysses won and wedded her. His father-in-law is said to
have tried to induce him to take up his abode in Sparta; which seems to
shew that if Ulysses had accepted the invitation he would have inherited
the kingdom through his wife.[982] So, too, the Libyan King Antaeus
placed his beautiful daughter Barce or Alceis at the end of the
racecourse; her many noble suitors, both Libyans and foreigners, ran to
her as the goal, and Alcidamus, who touched her first, gained her in
marriage.[983] Danaus, also, at Argos is said to have stationed his many
daughters at the goal, and the runner who reached them first had first
choice of the maidens.[984] Somewhat different from these traditions is
the story of Atalante, for in it the wooers are said to have contended,
not with each other, but with the coy maiden herself in a foot-race. She
slew her vanquished suitors and hung up their heads in the racecourse,
till Hippomenes gained the race and her hand by throwing down the golden
apples which she stooped to pick up.[985]
[Sidenote: Custom of racing for a bride among the Kirghiz and Calmucks.]
These traditions may very well reflect a real custom of racing for a
bride, for such a custom appears to have prevailed among various
peoples, though in practice it has degenerated into a mere form or
pretence. Thus “there is one race, called the ‘Love Chase,’ which may be
considered a part of the form of marriage among the Kirghiz. In this the
bride, armed with a formidable whip, mounts a fleet horse, and is
pursued by all the young men who make any pretensions to her hand. She
will be given as a prize to the one who catches her, but she has the
right, besides urging on her horse to the utmost, to use her whip, often
with no mean force, to keep off those lovers who are unwelcome to her,
and she will probably favour the one whom she has already chosen in her
heart. As, however, by Kirghiz custom, a suitor to the hand of a maiden
is obliged to give a certain _kalym_, or purchase-money, and an
agreement must be made with the father for the amount of dowry which he
gives his daughter, the ‘Love Chase’ is a mere matter of form.”[986]
Similarly “the ceremony of marriage among the Calmucks is performed on
horseback. A girl is first mounted, who rides off in full speed. Her
lover pursues; and if he overtakes her, she becomes his wife, and the
marriage is consummated on the spot, after which she returns with him to
his tent. But it sometimes happens that the woman does not wish to marry
the person by whom she is pursued, in which case she will not suffer him
to overtake her; and we were assured that no instance occurs of a
Calmuck girl being thus caught unless she has a partiality for her
pursuer. If she dislikes him she rides, to use the language of English
sportsmen, ‘neck or nothing,’ until she has completely escaped, or until
the pursuer’s horse is tired out, leaving her at liberty to return, to
be afterwards chased by some more favoured admirer.”[987] The race for
the bride is found also among the Koryaks of north-eastern Asia. It
takes place in a large tent, round which many separate compartments
called _pologs_ are arranged in a continuous circle. The girl gets a
start and is clear of the marriage if she can run through all the
compartments without being caught by the bridegroom. The women of the
encampment place every obstacle in the man’s way, tripping him up,
belabouring him with switches, and so forth, so that he has little
chance of succeeding unless the girl wishes it and waits for him.[988]
Among some of the rude indigenous tribes of the Malay Peninsula
“marriage is preceded by a singular ceremony. An old man presents the
future couple to the assembled guests, and, followed by their families,
he leads them to a great circle, round which the girl sets off to run as
fast as she can. If the young man succeeds in overtaking her, she
becomes his mate; otherwise he loses all rights, which happens
especially when he is not so fortunate as to please his bride.”[989]
Another writer tells us that among these savages, when there is a river
at hand, the race takes place on the water, the bride paddling away in
one canoe and pursued by the bridegroom in another.[990] Before the
wedding procession starts for the [Sidenote: Caffre race for bride.]
bridegroom’s hut, a Caffre bride is allowed to make one last bid for
freedom, and a young man is told off to catch her. Should he fail to do
so, she is theoretically allowed to return to her father, and the whole
performance has to be repeated; but the flight of the bride is usually a
pretence.[991]
[Sidenote: The bride-race among Teutonic peoples, and its traces in
modern Europe.] Similar customs appear to have been practised by all the
Teutonic peoples; for the German, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse languages
possess in common a word for marriage which means simply
bride-race.[992] Moreover, traces of the custom survived into modern
times. Thus in the Mark of Brandenburg, down to the first half of the
nineteenth century at least, it was the practice for bride and
bridegroom to run a race on their wedding day in presence of all the
guests. Two sturdy men took the bride between them and set off. The
bridegroom gave them a start and then followed hot-foot. At the end of
the course stood two or three young married women, who took from the
bride her maiden’s crown and replaced it by the matron’s cap. If the
bridegroom failed to overtake his bride, he was much ridiculed.[993] In
other parts of Germany races are still held at marriage, but the
competitors are no longer the bride and bridegroom. Thus in Hesse at the
wedding of a well-to-do farmer his friends race on horseback to the
house of the bride, and her friends similarly race on horseback to the
house of the bridegroom. The prize hangs over the gate of the farmyard
or the door of the house. It consists of a silken or woollen
handkerchief, which the winner winds round his head or fastens to his
breast. The victors have also the right to escort the marriage
procession.[994] In Upper Bavaria, down at least to some fifty years
ago, a regular feature of a rustic wedding used to be what was called
the “bride-race” or the “key-race.” It generally took place when the
bridal party was proceeding from the church to the alehouse. A course
was marked out and two goals, consisting of heaps of straw, were set up
at distances of three and four hundred yards respectively. The strongest
and fleetest of the young fellows raced barefoot, clad only in shirt and
trousers. He who first reached the further goal received the first
prize; this was regularly a key of gilt wood, which the winner fastened
to his hat. Often, as in some of the Greek legends, the bride herself
was the goal of the race. The writers who record the custom suggest that
the race was originally for the key of the bridechamber, and that the
bridegroom ran with the rest.[995] In Scotland also the guests at a
rustic wedding used to ride on horseback for a prize, which sometimes
consisted of the bride’s cake set up on a pole in front of the
bridegroom’s house. The race was known as the _broose_.[996] At
Weitensfeld, in Carinthia, a festival called the Bride-race is still
held every year. It is popularly supposed to commemorate a time when a
plague had swept away the whole people except a girl and three young
men. These three, it is said, raced with each other in order that the
winner might get the maiden to wife, and so repeople the land. The race
is now held on horseback. The winner receives as the prize a garland of
flowers called the Bride-wreath, and the man who comes in last gets a
wreath of ribbons and pig’s bristles.[997] It seems not impossible that
this custom is a relic of a fair at which the marriageable maidens of
the year were assigned in order of merit to the young men who
distinguished themselves by their feats of strength and agility. A
practice of this sort appears to have prevailed [Sidenote: Assignment of
brides to picked young men among the Samnites.] among the ancient
Samnites. Every year the youths and maidens were tested publicly, and
the young man who was adjudged best had first choice of the girls; the
second best had the next choice, and so on with the rest.[998] “They
say,” writes Strabo, “that the Samnites have a beautiful custom which
incites to virtue. For they may not give their daughters in marriage to
whom they please, but every year the ten best maidens and the ten best
youths are picked out, and the best of the ten maidens is given to the
best of the ten youths, and the second to the second, and so on. But if
the man who wins one of these prizes should afterwards turn out a knave,
they disgrace him and take the girl from him.”[999] The nature of the
test to which the young men and women were subjected is not mentioned,
but we may conjecture that it was mainly athletic.
[Sidenote: Contests for a bride other than races.] The contests for a
bride may be designed to try the skill, strength, and courage of the
suitors as well as their horsemanship and speed of foot. Speaking of
King’s County, Ireland, in the latter part of the eighteenth century,
Arthur Young says: “There is a very ancient custom here, for a number of
country neighbours among the poor people, to fix upon some young woman
that ought, as they think, to be married; they also agree upon a young
fellow as a proper husband for her; this determined, they send to the
fair one’s cabin to inform her that on the Sunday following ‘she is to
be horsed,’ that is, carried on men’s backs. She must then provide
whisky and cyder for a treat, as all will pay her a visit after mass for
a hurling match. As soon as she is horsed, the hurling begins, in which
the young fellow appointed for her husband has the eyes of all the
company fixed on him: if he comes off conqueror, he is certainly married
to the girl; but if another is victorious, he as certainly loses her,
for she is the prize of the victor. These trials are not always finished
in one Sunday, they take sometimes two or three, and the common
expression when they are over is, that ‘such a girl was goal’d.’
Sometimes one barony hurls against another, but a marriageable girl is
always the prize. Hurling is a sort of cricket, but instead of throwing
the ball in order to knock down a wicket, the aim is to pass it through
a bent stick, the ends stuck in the ground.”[1000] In the great Indian
epic the _Mahabharata_ it is [Sidenote: The Indian _Svayamvara_.]
related that the hand of the lovely Princess Draupadi or Krishna,
daughter of the King of the Panchalas, was only to be won by him who
could bend a certain mighty bow and shoot five arrows through a
revolving wheel so as to hit the target beyond. After many noble wooers
had essayed the task in vain, the disguised Arjun was successful, and
carried off the princess to be the wife of himself and his four
brothers.[1001] This was an instance of the ancient Indian practice of
_Svayamvara_, in accordance with which a maiden of high rank either
chose her husband from among her assembled suitors or was offered as the
prize to the conqueror in a trial of skill. The custom was occasionally
observed among the Rajputs down to a late time.[1002] The Tartar king
Caidu, the cousin and opponent of Cublay Khan, is said to have had a
beautiful daughter named Aijaruc, or “the Bright Moon,” who was so tall
and brawny that she outdid all men in her father’s realm in feats of
strength. She vowed she would never marry till she found a man who could
vanquish her in wrestling. Many noble suitors came and tried a fall with
her, but she threw them all; and from every one whom she had overcome
she exacted a hundred horses. In this way she collected an immense
stud.[1003] In the _Nibelungenlied_ the fair Brunhild, Queen of Iceland,
was only to be won in marriage by him who could beat her in three trials
of strength, and the unsuccessful wooers forfeited their heads. Many had
thus perished, but at last Gunther, King of the Burgundians, vanquished
and married her.[1004] It is said that Sithon, King of the Odomanti in
Thrace, had a lovely daughter, Pallene, and that many [Sidenote:
Hippoclides at Sicyon, and how he danced away his marriage.] men came
a-wooing her not only from Thrace but from Illyria and the country of
the Don. But her father said that he who would wed his daughter must
first fight himself and pay with his life the penalty of defeat. Thus he
slew many young men. But when he was grown old and his strength had
failed, he set two of the wooers, by name Dryas and Clitus, to fight
each other for the kingdom and the hand of the princess. The combat was
to take place in chariots, but the princess, being in love with Clitus,
bribed his rival’s charioteer to put no pins in the wheels of his
chariot; so Dryas came to the ground, and Clitus slew him and married
the king’s daughter.[1005] The tale agrees closely with that of Pelops
and Hippodamia. Both stories probably contain, in a legendary form,
reminiscences of a real custom. Within historical times Clisthenes,
tyrant of Sicyon, made public proclamation at the Olympian games that he
would give his daughter Agariste in marriage to that suitor who, during
a year’s trial, should prove himself the best. So many young men who
prided themselves on their persons and on their lineage assembled at
Sicyon from all parts of the Greek world. The tyrant had a racecourse
and a wrestling school made on purpose for them, and there he put them
through their paces. Of all the suitors none pleased him so much as
Hippoclides, the handsomest and richest man of Athens, a scion of the
old princely house of Cypselus. And when the year was up and the day had
come on which the award was to be made, the tyrant sacrificed a hundred
oxen and entertained the suitors and all the people of Sicyon at a
splendid banquet. Dinner being over, the wine went round and the suitors
fell to wrangling as to their accomplishments and their wit. In this
feast of reason the gay Hippoclides outshone himself and them all until,
flushed with triumph and liquor, he jumped on a table, danced to music,
and then, as a finishing touch, stood on his head and sawed the air with
his legs. This was too much. The tyrant in disgust told him he had
danced away his marriage.[1006]
[Sidenote: The annual flight of the king (_regifugium_) at Rome may have
been a relic of his contest for the kingdom and for the hand of the
princess.] Thus it appears that the right to marry a girl, and
especially a princess, has often been conferred as a prize in an
athletic contest. There would be no reason, therefore, for surprise if
the Roman kings, before bestowing their daughters in marriage, should
have resorted to this ancient mode of testing the personal qualities of
their future sons-in-law and successors. If my theory is correct, the
Roman king and queen personated Jupiter and his divine consort, and in
the character of these divinities went through the annual ceremony of a
sacred marriage for the purpose of causing the crops to grow and men and
cattle to be fruitful and multiply. Thus they did what in more northern
lands we may suppose the King and Queen of May were believed to do in
days of old. Now we have seen that the right to play the part of the
King of May and to wed the Queen of May has sometimes been determined by
an athletic contest, particularly by a race.[1007] This may have been a
relic of an old marriage custom of the sort we have examined, a custom
designed to test the fitness of a candidate for matrimony. Such a test
might reasonably be applied with peculiar rigour to the king in order to
ensure that no personal defect should incapacitate him for the
performance of those sacred rites and ceremonies on which, even more
than on the despatch of his civil and military duties, the safety and
prosperity of the community were believed to depend. And it would be
natural to require of him that from time to time he should submit
himself afresh to the same ordeal for the sake of publicly demonstrating
that he was still equal to the discharge of his high calling. A relic of
that test perhaps survived in the ceremony known as the Flight of the
King (_regifugium_), continued to be annually observed at Rome down to
imperial times. On the twenty-fourth day of February a sacrifice used to
be offered in the Comitium, and when it was over the King of the Sacred
Rites fled from the Forum.[1008] We may conjecture that the Flight of
the King was originally a race for an annual kingship, which may have
been awarded as a prize to the fleetest runner. At the end of the year
the king might run again for a second term of office; and so on, until
he was defeated and deposed or perhaps slain. In this way what had once
been a race would tend to assume the character of a flight and a
pursuit. The king would be given a start; he ran and his competitors ran
after him, and if he were overtaken he had to yield the crown and
perhaps his life to the lightest of foot among them. In time a man of
masterful character might succeed in seating himself permanently on the
throne and reducing the annual race or flight to the empty form which it
seems always to have been within historical times.[1009] The rite was
sometimes interpreted as a commemoration of the expulsion of the kings
from Rome; but this appears to have been a mere afterthought devised to
explain a ceremony of which the old meaning was forgotten. It is far
more likely that in acting thus the King of the Sacred Rites was merely
keeping up an ancient custom which in the regal period had been annually
observed by his predecessors the kings. What the original intention of
the rite may have been must probably always remain more or less a matter
of conjecture. The present explanation is suggested with a full sense of
the difficulty and obscurity in which the subject is involved.
[Sidenote: The theory is confirmed by the evidence that at the
Saturnalia a man used to personate the god Saturn and to be put to death
in that character.] Thus, if my theory is correct, the yearly flight of
the Roman king was a relic of a time when the kingship was an annual
office awarded, along with the hand of a princess, to the victorious
athlete or gladiator, who thereafter figured along with his bride as a
god and goddess at a sacred marriage designed to ensure the fertility of
the earth by homoeopathic magic. Now this theory is to a certain extent
remarkably confirmed by an ancient account of the Saturnalia which was
discovered and published some years ago by a learned Belgian scholar,
Professor Franz Cumont of Ghent. From that account we learn that down to
the beginning of the fourth century of our era, that is, down nearly to
the establishment of Christianity by Constantine, the Roman soldiers
stationed on the Danube were wont to celebrate the Saturnalia in a
barbarous fashion which must certainly have dated from a very remote
antiquity. Thirty days before the festival they chose by lot from among
themselves a young and handsome man, who was dressed in royal robes to
resemble the god Saturn. In that character he was allowed to indulge all
his passions to the fullest extent; but when his brief reign of thirty
days was over, and the festival of Saturn was come, he had to cut his
own throat on the altar of the god he personated.[1010] We can hardly
doubt that this tragic figure, whom a fatal lot doomed to masquerade for
a short time as a deity and to die as such a violent death, was the true
original of the merry monarch or King of the Saturnalia, as he was
called, whom a happier lot invested with the playful dignity of Master
of the Winter Revels.[1011] In all probability the grim predecessor of
the frolicsome King of the Saturnalia belonged to that class of puppets
who in some countries have been suffered to reign nominally for a few
days each year merely for the sake of discharging a burdensome or fatal
obligation which otherwise must have fallen on the real king.[1012] If
that is so, we may infer that the part of the god Saturn, who was
commonly spoken of as a king,[1013] was formerly played at the
Saturnalia by the Roman king himself. And a trace of the Sacred Marriage
may perhaps be detected in the licence accorded to the human
representatives of Saturn, a licence which, if I am right, is strictly
analogous to the old orgies of May Day and other similar festivals. It
is to be observed that Saturn was [Sidenote: Saturn the god of seed, and
the Saturnalia a festival of sowing.] the god of the seed, and the
Saturnalia the festival of sowing held in December,[1014] when the
autumn sowing was over and the husbandman gave himself up to a season of
jollity after the long labours of summer and autumn.[1015] On the
principles of homoeopathic magic nothing could be more natural than
that, when the last seeds had been committed to the earth, the marriage
of the powers of vegetation should be simulated by their human
representatives for the purpose of sympathetically quickening the seed.
In short, no time could be more suitable for the celebration of the
Sacred Marriage. We have seen as a matter of fact that the sowing of the
seed has often been accompanied by sexual orgies with the express
intention of thereby promoting the growth of the crops. At all events
the view that the King’s Flight at Rome was a mitigation of an old
custom of putting him to death at the end of a year’s tenure of office,
is confirmed by the practice of annually slaying a human representative
of the divine king Saturn, which survived in some parts of the Roman
empire, though not at Rome itself, down to Christian times.
[Sidenote: If the Latin kings were begotten at the licentious festival
of the Saturnalia, we could understand why their paternity was sometimes
uncertain, and why they might be of servile parentage.] This theory
would throw light on some dark passages in the legends of the Roman
kingship, such as the obscure and humble births of certain kings and
their mysterious ends. For if the sacred marriage took place at a
licentious festival like the Saturnalia, when slaves were temporarily
granted the privileges of freemen,[1016] it might well be that the
paternity of the children begotten at this time, including those of the
royal family, was a matter of uncertainty; nay, it might be known that
the king or queen had offspring by a slave. Such offspring of a royal
father and a slave mother, or of a royal mother and a slave father,
would rank as princes and princesses according as male or female kinship
prevailed. Under a system of male kinship the union of the king with a
slave woman would give birth to a Servius Tullius, and, according to one
tradition, to a Romulus. If female kinship prevailed in the royal
family, as we have seen reason to suppose, it is possible that the
stories of the birth of Romulus and Servius from slave mothers is a
later inversion of the facts, and that what really happened was that
some of the old Latin kings were begotten by slave fathers on royal
princesses at the festival of the Saturnalia. The disappearance of
female kinship would suffice to account for the warping of the
tradition. All that was distinctly remembered would be that some of the
kings had had a slave for one of their parents; and people living under
a system of paternal descent would naturally conclude that the slave
parent of a king could only be the mother, since according to their
ideas no son of a slave father could be of royal blood and sit on the
throne.[1017]
[Sidenote: The violent ends of the Roman kings.] Again, if I am right in
supposing that in very early times the old Latin kings personated a god
and were regularly put to death in that character, we can better
understand the mysterious or violent ends to which so many of them are
said to have come. Too much stress should not, however, be laid on such
legends, for in a turbulent state of society kings, like commoners, are
apt to be knocked on the head for much sounder reasons than a claim to
divinity. Still, it is worth while to note that Romulus is said to have
vanished mysteriously like Aeneas, or to have been cut to pieces by the
patricians whom he had offended,[1018] [Sidenote: Death of Romulus on
the seventh of July, the _Nonae Caprotinae_, at a festival resembling
the Saturnalia.] and that the seventh of July, the day on which he
perished, was a festival which bore some resemblance to the Saturnalia.
For on that day the female slaves were allowed to take certain
remarkable liberties. They dressed up as free women in the attire of
matrons and maids, and in this guise they went forth from the city,
scoffed and jeered at all whom they met, and engaged among themselves in
a fight, striking and throwing stones at each other. Moreover, they
feasted under a wild fig-tree, made use of a rod cut from the tree for a
certain purpose, perhaps to beat each other with, and offered the milky
juice of the tree in sacrifice to Juno Caprotina, whose name appears to
mean either the goddess of the goat (_caper_) or the goddess of the wild
fig-tree, for [Sidenote: The _Nonae Caprotinae_ seems to have been the
festival of the fertilisation of the fig.] the Romans called a wild
fig-tree a goat-fig (_caprificus_). Hence the day was called the _Nonae
Caprotinae_ after the animal or the tree. The festival was not peculiar
to Rome, but was held by women throughout Latium.[1019] It can hardly be
dissociated from a custom which was observed by ancient husbandmen at
this season. They sought to fertilise the fig-trees or ripen the figs by
hanging strings of fruit from a wild fig-tree among the boughs. The
practice appears to be very old. It has been employed in Greece both in
ancient and modern times, and Roman writers often refer to it. Palladius
recommends the solstice in June, that is Midsummer Day, as the best time
for the operation; Columella prefers July.[1020] In Sicily at the
present day the operation is performed either on Midsummer Day (the
festival of St. John the Baptist) or in the early days of July;[1021] in
Morocco and North Africa generally it takes place on Midsummer
Day.[1022] The wild fig-tree is a male and the cultivated fig-tree is a
female, and the fertilisation is effected by insects, which are
engendered in the fruit of the male tree and convey the pollen to the
blossom of the female.[1023] Thus the placing of wild figs, laden with
pollen and insects, among the boughs of the cultivated fig-tree is, like
the artificial fertilisation of the date-palm,[1024] a real marriage of
the trees, and it may well have been regarded as such by the peasants of
antiquity long before the true theory of the process was discovered. Now
the fig is an [Sidenote: Importance of the fig as an article of diet.]
important article of diet in countries bordering on the Mediterranean.
In Palestine, for example, the fruit is not, as with us, merely an
agreeable luxury, but is eaten daily and forms indeed one of the staple
productions of the country. “To sit every man under his vine, and under
his fig tree” was the regular Jewish expression for the peaceable
possession of the Holy Land; and in the fable of Jotham the fig-tree is
invited by the other trees, next after the olive, to come and reign over
them.[1025] When Sandanis the Lydian attempted to dissuade Croesus from
marching against the Persians, he represented to him that there was
nothing to be gained by conquering the inhabitants of a barren country
who neither drank wine nor ate figs.[1026] An Arab commentator on the
Koran observes that “God swears by these two trees, the fig and the
olive, because among fruit-trees they surpass all the rest. They relate
that a basket of figs was offered to the prophet Mohammed, and when he
had eaten one he bade his comrades do the same, saying, ‘Truly, if I
were to say that any fruit had come down from Paradise, I would say it
of the fig.’”[1027] Hence it would be natural that a process supposed to
be essential to the ripening of so favourite a fruit should be the
occasion of a popular festival. We may suspect that the license allowed
to slave women on this day formed part of an ancient Saturnalia, at
which the loose behaviour of men and women was supposed to secure the
fertilisation of the fig-trees by homoeopathetic magic.
[Sidenote: At the festival of the seventh of July women were probably
thought to be fertilised by the fig as well as to fertilise it.] But it
is possible and indeed probable that the fertilisation was believed to
be mutual; in other words, it may have been imagined, that while the
women caused the fig-tree to bear fruit, the tree in its turn caused
them to bear children. This conjecture is confirmed by a remarkable
African parallel. The Akikuyu of British East Africa attribute to the
wild fig-tree [Sidenote: Supposed fertilisation of barren women by the
wild fig-tree among the Akikuyu of British East Africa.] the power of
fertilising barren women. For this purpose they apply the white sap or
milk to various parts of the body of the would-be mother; then, having
sacrificed a goat, they tie the woman to a wild fig-tree with long
strips cut from the intestines of the sacrificial animal. “This seems,”
writes Mr. C. W. Hobley, who reports the custom, “to be a case of the
tree marriage of India. I fancy there is an idea of ceremonial marriage
with the ancestral spirits which are said to inhabit certain of these
fig-trees; in fact it supports the Kamba idea of the spiritual
husbands.”[1028] The belief in spiritual husbands, [Sidenote: Belief of
the Akamba that the spirits of the dead live in wild fig-trees.] to
which Mr. Hobley here briefly refers, is as follows. The Akamba of
British East Africa imagine that every married woman is at the same time
the wife of a living man and also the wife of the spirit of some
departed ancestor (_aimu_). They are firmly convinced that the fertility
of a wife depends to a great extent on the attentions of her spiritual
husband, and if she does not conceive within six months after marriage
they take it as a sign that her spiritual husband is neglecting her; so
they offer beer and kill a goat as a propitiatory sacrifice. If after
that the woman still remains barren, they make a bigger feast and kill a
bullock. On the other hand, if a wife is found to be with child soon
after marriage, they are glad and consider it a proof that she has found
favour in the eyes of her ghostly husband. Further, they believe that at
death the human spirit quits the bodily frame and takes up its abode in
a wild fig-tree (_mumbo_); hence they build miniature huts at the foot
of those fig-trees which are thought to be haunted by the souls of the
dead, and they periodically sacrifice to these spirits.[1029]
Accordingly, we may conjecture, though we are not told, that amongst the
Akamba, as among the Akikuyu, a barren woman sometimes resorts to a wild
fig-tree in order to obtain a child, since she believes that her
spiritual spouse has his abode in the tree. The Akikuyu clearly
attribute a special power of fertilisation to the milky sap of the tree,
since they apply it to various parts of the woman who desires to become
a mother: perhaps they regard it as the seed of the fig. This may
explain why the Roman slave-women offered the milky juice of the tree to
Juno Caprotina; they may have intended thereby to add to the fecundity
of the mother goddess. And we can scarcely doubt that the rods which
they cut from the wild fig-tree, for the purpose apparently of beating
each other, were supposed to communicate the generative virtue of the
tree to the women who [Sidenote: Supposed fertilisation of women by the
wild banana-tree among the Baganda.] were struck by them. The Baganda of
Central Africa appear to ascribe to the wild banana-tree the same power
of removing barrenness which the Akikuyu attribute to the wild fig-tree.
For when a wife has no child, she and her husband will sometimes repair
to a wild banana-tree and there, standing one on each side of the tree,
partake of the male organs of a goat, the man eating the flesh and
drinking the soup and the woman drinking the soup only. This is believed
to ensure conception after the husband has gone in to his wife.[1030]
Here again, as among the Akikuyu, we see that the fertilising virtue of
the tree is reinforced by the fertilising virtue of the goat; and we can
therefore better understand why the Romans called the male wild fig-tree
“goat-fig,” and why the Messenians dubbed it simply “he-goat.”
[Sidenote: The Roman king may have celebrated a sacred marriage on the
_Nonae Caprotinae_ as a charm to make the fig-trees bear fruit.] The
association of the death of Romulus with the festival of the wild
fig-tree can hardly be accidental, especially as he and his twin-brother
Remus were said to have been suckled by the she-wolf under a fig-tree,
the famous _ficus Ruminalis_, which was shewn in the forum as one of the
sacred objects of Rome and received offerings of milk down to late
times.[1031] Indeed, some have gone so far both in ancient and modern
times as to derive the names of Romulus and Rome itself from this
fig-tree (_ficus Ruminalis_); if they are right, Romulus was “the
fig-man” and Rome “the fig-town.”[1032] Be that as it may, the clue to
the association of Romulus with the fig is probably furnished by the old
belief that the king is responsible for the fruits of the earth and the
rain from heaven. We may conjecture that on this principle the Roman
king was expected to make the fig-trees blossom and bear figs, and that
in order to do so he masqueraded as the god of the fig-tree and went
through a form of sacred marriage, either with his queen or with a
slave-woman, on the July day when the husbandmen resorted to a more
efficacious means of producing the same result. The ceremony of the
sacred marriage need not have been restricted to a single day in the
year. It may well have been repeated for many different crops and
fruits. If the Queen of Athens was annually married to the god of the
vine, why should not the King of Rome have annually wedded the goddess
of the fig?
[Sidenote: The marriage of the divine king or human god often followed
by his death.] But, as we have seen, Romulus, the first king of Rome, is
said to have perished on the day of this festival of the fig, which, if
our hypothesis is correct, was also the day of his ceremonial marriage
to the tree. That the real date of his death should have been preserved
by tradition is very improbable; rather we may suppose that the reason
for dating his death and his marriage on the same day was drawn from
some ancient ritual in which the two events were actually associated.
But we have still to ask, Why should the king’s wedding-day be also the
day of his death? The answer must be deferred for the present. All we
need say now is that elsewhere the marriage of the divine king or human
god has been regularly followed at a brief interval by his violent end.
For him, as for others, death often treads on the heels of love.[1033]
[Sidenote: Violent ends of Tatius, Tullus Hostilius, and other Roman
kings.] Another Roman king who perished by violence was Tatius, the
Sabine colleague of Romulus. It is said that he was at Lavinium offering
a public sacrifice to the ancestral gods, when some men to whom he had
given umbrage despatched him with the sacrificial knives and spits which
they had snatched from the altar.[1034] The occasion and the manner of
his death suggest that the slaughter may have been a sacrifice rather
than an assassination. Again, Tullus Hostilius, the successor of Numa,
was commonly said to have been killed by lightning, but many held that
he was murdered at the instigation of Ancus Marcius, who reigned after
him.[1035] Speaking of the more or less mythical Numa, the type of the
priestly king, Plutarch observes that “his fame was enhanced by the
fortunes of the later kings. For of the five who reigned after him the
last was deposed and ended his life in exile, and of the remaining four
not one died a natural death; for three of them were assassinated and
Tullus Hostilius was consumed by thunderbolts.”[1036] This implies that
King Ancus Marcius, as well as Tarquin the Elder and Servius Tullius,
perished by the hand of an assassin. No other ancient historian, so far
as I know, records this of Ancus Marcius, though one of them says that
the king “was carried off by an untimely death.”[1037] Tarquin the Elder
was slain by two murderers whom the sons of his predecessor, Ancus
Marcius, had hired to do the deed.[1038] Lastly, Servius Tullius came by
his end in circumstances which recall the combat for the priesthood of
Diana at Nemi. He was attacked by his successor and killed by his
orders, though not by his hand. Moreover, he lived among the oak groves
of the Esquiline Hill at the head of the Slope of Virbius, and it was
here, beside a sanctuary of Diana, that he was slain.[1039]