appear as a fact of importance for our purpose. Such operations as the
building of a permanent house, the clearing and cultivation of a piece
of land, can best be carried out by a smaller union than the gens, and
this smaller union is ready to hand in the shape of a section of the
gens comprising the living descendants of a _living_ ancestor, whether
of two, three, or even four generations.[138] This union, clearly
visible to mortal eye, and realisable in every-day work, settles
together in one house, tends its own cattle and sheep, cultivates its
own land with the help of such dependants as it owns, slave or other,
and is known by the word _familia_. This famous word, so far as we know,
does not contain the idea of kinship, at any rate as its leading
connotation; it is inseparable from the idea of land-settlement,[139]
and is therefore essentially _das Hauswesen_, the house itself, with the
persons living in it, free or servile, and with their land and other
property, all governed and administered by the paterfamilias, the master
of the household, who is always the oldest living male ancestor. The
familia is thus an economic unit, developed out of the gens, which is a
unit of kin and little more. And thus the religion of the familia will
be a religion of practical utility, of daily work, of struggle with
perils to which the shepherd and the tiller of the soil are liable; it
is not the worship of an idea of kinship expressed in some dimly
conceived common ancestor; the familia, as I hope to show, had no common
ancestor who could be the object of worship, except that of the gens
from which it had sprung. The life of the familia was a realisation of
the present and its needs and perils, without the stimulus to take much
thought about the past, or indeed about the future; for it, sufficient
for the day was the evil thereof; for what had been and what was to come
it could look to the gens to which it owed its existence. But in
practical life the gens was not of much avail; and instead of it,
exactly as we might expect, we find an artificial union of familiae, a
union of which the essential thing is not the idea of kin, but that of
the land occupied, and known all over Italy by the word _pagus_.[140]
Before I go on to describe the religion of the family, it is necessary
to put the familia into its proper relation with this territorial union.
The pagus is the earliest Italian administrative unit of which we know
anything; a territory, of which the essential feature was the boundary,
not any central point within the boundary. In all probability it was
originally the land on which a gens had settled, though settlement
produces changes, and the land of gens and pagus was not identical in
later times. But within this boundary line, of which we shall hear
something more presently, how were the component parts, the familiae of
the gens, settled down on the land? Of the village community so familiar
to us in Teutonic countries, there is no certain trace in Latium.
_Vicus_, the only word which might suggest it, is identical with the
Greek [Greek: oikos], a house; later it is used for houses standing
together, or for a street in a town. But the vicus in the country has
left no trace of itself as a distinct administrative union like our
village community; the vico-magistri of the Roman city were urban
officers; and what is more important, we know of no religious festivals
of the vicus, like those of the pagus, of which there are well-attested
records. The probability then is that the unit within the pagus was not
the village but the homestead, and that these stood at a distance from
each other, as they do in Celtic countries, not united together in a
village, and each housing a family group working its own land and owning
its own cattle.[141] The question of the amount and the tenure of the
land of this group is a very difficult one, into which it is not
necessary to enter closely here. There can, however, be no doubt that it
possessed in its own right a small piece of garden ground (_heredium_),
and also an allotment of land in the arable laid out by the settlers in
common--_centuriatus ager_; whether the ownership of this was vested in
the individual paterfamilias or in the gens as a whole, does not greatly
matter for our purposes.[142] Lastly, as it is certain that the familia
owned cattle and sheep, we may be sure that it enjoyed the right of
common pasture on the land not divided up for tillage.
We see all this through a mist, and a mist that is not likely ever to
lift; but yet the outlines of the picture are clear enough to give us
the necessary basis for a study of the religion of the familia. The
religious points, if I may use the expression--those points, that is,
which are the object of special anxiety (_religio_)--lie in the
boundaries, both of the pagus as a whole, and of the arable land of the
familia, in the house itself and its free inhabitants, and in the family
burying-place; and to these three may no doubt be added the spring which
supplied the household with water. Boundaries, house, burying-place,
spring,--all these are in a special sense sacred, and need constant and
regular religious care.
Let us begin with the house, the central point of the economic and
religious unit. The earliest Italian house was little more than a
wigwam, more or less round, constructed of upright posts connected with
wattles, and with a closed roof of straw or branches.[143] This would
seem to have been the type of house of the immigrating people who
settled on the tops of hills and lived a pastoral life; when they
descended into the plains and became a settled agricultural people, they
adopted a more roomy and convenient style of building, suitable for
storing their grain or other products, and for the maintenance of a fire
for cooking these. Whether the rectangular house, with which alone we
are here concerned, was developed under Greek or Etruscan influence, or
suggested independently by motives of practical convenience, is matter
of dispute, and must be left to archaeologists to decide.[144]
This is the house in which the Latin family lived throughout historical
times, the house which we know as the sacred local habitation of divine
and human beings. It consisted in its simplest form, as we all know, of
a single room or hall, the atrium, with a roof open in the middle and
sloping inwards to let the rain fall into a basin (_compluvium_). Here
the life of the family went on, and here was the hearth (_focus_), the
"natural altar of the dwelling-room of man,"[145] and the seat of Vesta,
the spirit of the fire, whose aid in the cooking of the food was
indispensable in the daily life of the settlers. This sacred hearth was
the centre of the family worship of later times, until under Greek
influence the arrangement of the house was modified;[146] and we may be
certain that it was so in the simple farm life of early Latium. In front
of it was the table at which the family took their meals, and on this
was placed the salt-cellar (_salinum_), and the sacred salt-cake, baked
even in historical times in primitive fashion by the daughters of the
family, as in all periods for the State by the Vestal virgins. After the
first and chief course of the mid-day meal, silence was enjoined, and an
offering of a part of the cake was thrown on to the fire from a small
sacrificial plate or dish (_patella_).[147] This alone is enough to
prove that Vesta, the spirit of the fire, was the central point of the
whole worship, the spiritual embodiment of the physical welfare of the
family.
Behind the hearth, _i.e._ farther at the back of the _atrium_, was the
_penus_, or storing-place of the household. _Penus_ was explained by the
learned Scaevola[148] as meaning anything that can be eaten or drunk,
but not so much that which is each day set out on the table, as that
which is kept in store for daily consumption; it is therefore in origin
the food itself, though in later times it became also the receptacle in
which that food was stored. This store was inhabited or guarded by
spirits, the _di penates_, who together with Vesta represent the
material vitality of the family; these spirits, always conceived and
expressed in the plural, form a group in a way which is characteristic
of the Latins, and their plurality is perhaps due to the variety and
frequent change of the material of the store. The religious character of
the store is also well shown by the fact, if such it be, that no impure
person was allowed to meddle with it; the duty was especially that of
the children of the family,[149] whose purity and religious capability
was symbolised throughout Roman history by the purple-striped toga which
they wore, and secured also by the amulet, within its capsule the
_bulla_, of which I spoke in the last lecture.
Vesta and the Penates represent the spiritual side of the material needs
of the household; but there was another divine inhabitant of the house,
the Genius of the paterfamilias, who was more immediately concerned with
the continuity of the family. Analogy with the world-wide belief in the
spiritual double of a man, his "other-soul," compels us to think of this
Genius, who accompanied the Latin from the cradle to the grave, as
originally a conception of this kind. The Latins had indeed, in common
with other races, what we may call the breath-idea of the soul, as we
see from the words _animus_ and _anima_, and also the shadow-idea, as is
proved by the word _umbra_ for a departed spirit. But the Genius was one
of those guardian spirits, treated by Professor Tylor as a different
species of the same genus, which accompany a man all his life and help
him through its many changes and chances;[150] and the peculiarity of
this Latin guardian is that he was specially helpful in continuing the
life of the family. The soul of a man is often conceived as the cause of
life, but not often as the procreative power itself; and that this
latter was the Latin idea is certain, both from the etymology of the
word and from the fact that the marriage-bed was called _lectus
genialis_. I am inclined to think that this peculiarity of the Latin
conception of Genius was the result of the unusually strong idea that
the Latins must have had, even when they first passed into Italy, of
kinship as determined not by the mother but by the father.[151] It is
possible, I think, that the Genius was a soul of later origin than those
I have just mentioned, and developed in the period when the gens arose
as the main group of kinsmen real or imaginary. I would suggest that we
may see in it the connecting link between that group and the individual
adult males within it; in that case the Genius would be that soul of a
man which enables him to fulfil the work of continuing the life of the
gens. We can easily imagine how it might eventually come to be his
guardian spirit, and to acquire all the other senses with which we are
familiar in Roman literature. With the development of the idea of
individuality, the individuality of a man as apart from the kin group,
the idea of the individuality of the Genius also became emphasised,
until it became possible to think of it as even living on after the
death of its companion;[152] in this way, in course of time, the Genius
came to exercise a curious influence on the idea of the Manes. The
history of the idea of Genius, and its application to places, cities,
etc., is indeed a curious one, and of no small interest in the study of
religion; but we must return to the primitive house and its divine
inhabitants. There is one more of these who calls for a word before I
pass to the land and the boundaries; we meet him on the threshold as we
leave the dwelling.
It is, of course, well known to anthropologists that the door of a house
is a dangerous point, because evil spirits or the ghosts of the dead may
gain access to the house through it. Among the innumerable customs which
attest this belief there are one or two Roman ones, _e.g._ the practice
of making a man, who has returned home after his supposed death in a
foreign country, enter the house by the roof instead of the door; for
the door must be kept barred against ghosts, and this man may be after
all a ghost, or at least he may have evil spirits or miasma about
him.[153] It was at the doorway that a curious ceremony took place (to
which I shall ask your attention again) immediately after the birth of a
child, in order to prevent Silvanus, who may stand for the dangerous
spirits of the forest, from entering in and vexing the baby.[154] Again,
a dead man, as among so many other peoples, was carried out of the
doorway with his feet foremost, so that he should not find his way back;
and the old Roman practice of burial by night probably had the same
object.[155] Exactly the same anxiety (_religio_) is seen in regard to
the gates of a city; the wall was in some sense holy (_sanctus_), but
the gates, through which was destined to pass much that might be
dangerous, could not be thus sanctified. Was there, then, no protecting
spirit of these doors and gates?
St. Augustine, writing with Varro before him, finds no less than three
spirits of the entrance to a house: Forculus, of the door itself;
Limentinus, of the threshold; and Cardea, of the hinges of the door; and
these Varro seems to have found in the books of the pontifices.[156] I
must postpone the question as to what these pontifical books really
represented; but the passage will at least serve to show us the popular
anxiety about the point of entrance to a house, and its association with
the spirit world. Of late sober research has reached the conclusion that
the original door-spirit was Janus, whom we know in Roman history as
residing in the symbolic gate of the Forum, and as the god of
beginnings, the first deity to be invoked in prayer, as Vesta was the
last.[157] But Janus is also wanted for far higher purposes by some
eminent Cambridge scholars; they have their own reasons for wanting him
as a god of the sky, as a double of Jupiter, as the mate of Diana, and a
deity of the oak.[158] So, too, he was wanted by the philosophical
speculators of the last century B.C., who tried to interpret their own
humble deities in terms of Greek philosophy and Greek polytheism. The
poets too, who, as Augustine says, found Forculus and his companions
beneath their notice, played strange tricks with this hoary old god, as
any one may read in the first book of Ovid's _Fasti_. I myself believe
that the main features of the theology (if we may use the word) of the
earliest Rome were derived from the house and the land as an economic
and religious unit, and I am strongly inclined to see in Janus bifrons
of the Forum a developed form of the spirit of the house-door; but the
question is a difficult one, and I shall return to it in a lecture on
the deities of early Rome.
So far I have said nothing of the Lar familiaris who has become a
household word as a household deity; and yet we are on the point of
leaving the house of the old Latin settler to look for the spirits whom
he worships on his land. The reason is simply that after repeated
examination of the evidence available, I find myself forced to believe
that at the period of which I am speaking the Lar was not one of the
divine inhabitants of the house. When Fustel de Coulanges wrote his
brilliant book _La Cite antique_, which popularised the importance of
the worship of ancestors as a factor in Aryan civilisation, he found in
the Lar, who in historical times was a familiar figure in the house, the
reputed founder of the family; and until lately this view has been
undisputed. But if my account of the relation of the family to the gens
is correct, the family would stand in no need of a reputed founder; that
symbol of the bond of kinship was to be found in the gens of which the
family was an offshoot, a cutting, as it were, planted on the land.
Still more convincing is the fact that when we first meet with the Lar
as an object of worship he is not in the house but on the land. The
oldest Lar of whom we know anything was one of a characteristic Roman
group of which the individuals lived in the _compita_, _i.e._ the spots
where the land belonging to various households met, and where there were
chapels with as many faces as there were properties, each face
containing an altar to a Lar,--the presiding spirit of that allotment,
or rather perhaps of the whole of the land of the familia, including
that on which the house stood.[159] Thus the Lar fills a place in the
private worship which would otherwise be vacant, that of the holding and
its productive power. In this sense, too, we find the Lares in the hymn
of the Arval Brethren, one of the oldest fragments of Latin we possess;
for the spirits of the land would naturally be invoked in the lustration
of the _ager Romanus_ by this ancient religious gild.[160]
But how, it may be asked, did the Lar find his way into the house, to
become the characteristic deity of the later Roman private worship
there? I believe that he gained admittance through the slaves of the
familia, who had no part in the worship of the dwelling, but were
admitted to the Compitalia, or yearly festival of which the Lares of the
compita were the central object. Cato tells us that the vilicus, the
head of the familia of slaves, might not "facere rem divinam nisi
Compitalibus in compito aut in foco";[161] which I take to mean that he
might sacrifice for his fellow-slaves to the Lar at the compitum, or to
the Lar in the house, if the Lar were already transferred from the
compitum to the house. In the constant absence of the owner, the
paterfamilias of Rome's stirring days, the worship of the Lar at the
compitum or in the house came to be more and more distinctly the right
of the vilicus and his wife as representing the slaves, and thus too the
Lar came to be called by the epithet _familiaris_, which plainly
indicates that in his cult the slaves were included. And as it was the
old custom that the slaves should sit at the meals of the family on
benches below the free members (_subsellia_),[162] what more natural
than that they should claim to see there the Lar whom alone of the
deities of the farm they were permitted to worship, and that they should
bring the Lar or his double from the compitum to the house, in the
frequent absence of the master?[163]
The festival of the Lar was celebrated at the compitum, and known as
Compitalia or Laralia; it took place soon after the winter solstice, on
a day fixed by the paterfamilias, in concert, no doubt, with the other
heads of families in the pagus. Like most rejoicings at this time of
year, it was free and jovial in character, and the whole familia took
part in it, both bond and free. Each familia sacrificed on its own
altar, which was placed fifteen feet in front of the compitum, so that
the worshippers might be on their own land; but if, as we may suppose,
the whole pagus celebrated this rite on the same day, there was in this
festival, as in others to be mentioned directly, a social value, a means
of widening the outlook of the familia and associating it with the needs
of others in its religious duties. This is the _religio Larium_ of which
Cicero speaks in the second book of his _de Legibus_, which was "posita
in fundi villaeque conspectu," and handed down for the benefit both of
masters and men from remote antiquity.[164]
There were other festivals in which all the familiae of a pagus took
part. Of these we know little, and what we do know is almost entirely
due to the love of the Augustan poets for the country and its life and
customs; "Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes," wrote Virgil,
contrasting himself with the philosopher poet whom he revered. Varro, in
his list of Roman festivals,[165] just mentions a festival called
Sementivae, associated with the sowing of the seed, and celebrated by
all pagi, if we interpret him rightly; but Ovid has given us a charming
picture of what must be this same rite, and places it clearly in winter,
after the autumn sowing[166]:--
state coronati plenum ad praesaepe iuvenci:
cum tepido vestrum vere redibit opus.
rusticus emeritum palo suspendit aratrum:
omne reformidat frigida volnus humus.
vilice, da requiem terrae, semente peracta:
da requiem terram qui coluere viris.
pagus agat festum: pagum lustrate, coloni,
et date paganis annua liba focis.
placentur frugum matres Tellusque Ceresque,
farre suo gravidae visceribusque suis.
Ovid may here be writing of his own home at Sulmo, and what took place
there in the Augustan age; but we may read his description into the
life of old Latium, for rustic life is tenacious of old custom,
especially where the economic conditions remain always the same. We may
do the same with another beautiful picture left us by Tibullus, also a
poet of the country, which I have recently examined at length in the
_Classical Review_.[167] The festival he describes has often been
identified with Ovid's, but I am rather disposed to see in it a
lustratio of the _ager paganus_ in the spring, of the same kind as the
famous one in Virgil's first _Georgic_, to be mentioned directly; for
Tibullus, after describing the scene, which he introduces with the words
"fruges lustramus et agros," puts into perfect verse a prayer for the
welfare of the crops and flocks, and looks forward to a time when (if
the prayer succeeds) the land shall be full of corn, and the peasant
shall heap wood upon a bonfire--perhaps one of the midsummer fires that
still survive in the Abruzzi. Virgil's lines are no less
picturesque;[168] and though he does not mention the pagus, he is
clearly thinking of a lustratio in which more than one familia takes
part--
cuncta tibi Cererem pubes agrestis adoret.
This is a spring festival "extremae sub casum hiemis, iam vere sereno";
and I shall return to it when we come to deal with the processional
lustratio of the farm. Like the descriptions of Ovid and Tibullus, it is
more valuable to us for the idea it gives us of the spirit of old
Italian agricultural religion than for exact knowledge about dates and
details. There was, of course, endless variety in Italy in both these;
and it is waste of time to try and make the descriptions of the rural
poets fit in with the fixed festivals of the Roman city calendar.
Nor is it quite safe to argue back from that calendar to the life of the
familia and the pagus, except in general terms. As we shall see, the
calendar is based on the life and work of an agricultural folk, and we
may by all means guess that its many agricultural rites existed
beforehand in the earlier social life; but into detail we may not
venture. As Varro, however, has mentioned the Saturnalia in the same
sentence with the Compitalia, we may guess that that famous jovial
festival was a part of the rustic winter rejoicing. And here, too, I may
mention another _festa_ of that month, of which a glimpse is given us by
Horace, another country-loving poet, who specially mentions the pagus as
taking part in it. Faunus and Silvanus were deities or spirits of the
woodland among which these pagi lay, and in which the farmers ran their
cattle in the summer;[169] by Horace's time Faunus had been more or less
tarred with a Greek brush, but in the beautiful little ode I am alluding
to he is still a deity of the Italian farmer,[170] who on the Nones of
December besought him to be gracious to the cattle now feeding
peacefully on the winter pasture:--
ludit herboso pecus omne campo
cum tibi Nonae redeunt Decembres:
festus in _pratis_ vacat otioso
cum bove pagus.