_Dict. of Religion and Ethics_, i. 462 foll.; Dieterich,
_Mutter Erde_, p. 77. The whole question of the
so-called cult of the dead at Rome calls for fresh
investigation in the light of ethnological and
archaeological research. The recent work of Mr. J. C.
Lawson, _Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek
Religion_, seems to throw grave doubt on some of the
most important conclusions of Rohde's _Psyche_, the work
which most writers on the ideas of the Greeks and Romans
have been content to follow. Mr. Lawson seems to me to
have proved that the object of both burial and cremation
(which in both peninsulas are found together) was to
secure dissolution for the substance of the body, so
that the soul might not be able to inhabit the body
again, and the two together return to annoy the living
(see especially chapters v. and vi.). But his answer to
the inevitable question, why in that case sustenance
should be offered to the dead at the grave, is less
satisfactory (see pp. 531, 538), and I do not at present
see how to co-ordinate it with Roman usage. But I find
hardly a trace of the belief that the dead had to be
placated like the gods by sacrifice and prayer, except
in _Aen._ iii. 63 foll. and v. 73 foll. In the first of
these passages Polydorus had not been properly buried,
as Servius observes _ad loc._ to explain the nature of
the offerings; the second presents far more difficulties
than have as yet been fairly faced.
[183] For recent researches about beans as tabooed by
the Pythagoreans and believed to be the food of ghosts,
see Gruppe, _Mythologische Literatur_, p. 370 (Samter
and Wuensch). Cp. _R.F._, p. 110.
[184] Ov. _Fasti_, v. 421 foll.; _R.F._ p. 107.
LECTURE V
THE CALENDAR OF NUMA
The religion of the household had two main characteristics. First, it
was a perfectly natural and organic growth, the result of the Roman
farmer's effective desire to put himself and his in right relations with
the spiritual powers at work for good or ill around him. His conception
of these powers I shall deal with more fully in the next lecture; but I
have said enough to prove that it was not a degrading one. The spirits
of his house and his land and his own Genius were friendly powers, all
of them of the greatest importance for his life and his work, and their
claims were attended to with regularity and devotion. From Vesta and the
Penates, the Lar, the Genius, the Manes, and the spirits of the doorway
and the spring, there was nothing to fear if they were carefully
propitiated; and as his daily life and comfort depended on this
propitiation, they were really divine members of the _familia_, and
might become, and perhaps did become, the objects of real affection as
well as worship. In this well-regulated practical life of the early
agricultural settlers, with its careful attention to the claims of its
divine protectors, we may perhaps see the germs of a real religious
expression of human life.
Secondly, there was doubtless at the same time constant cause for
anxiety. Beyond the house and the land there were unreclaimed spirits of
the woodland which might force an entrance into the sacred limits of the
house; the ghosts of the dead members were constantly wishing to
return; the crops might be attacked by strange diseases, by storms or
drought, and man himself was liable to seasonal disease or sudden
pestilence. The cattle and sheep might stray into the remote forest and
become the prey of evil beasts, if not of evil spirits. How was the
farmer to meet all these troubles, caused, as he supposed, by spirits
whose ways he did not understand? How were they to be propitiated as
they themselves would wish? How were the omens to be interpreted from
which their will might be guessed? How were the proper times and seasons
for each religious operation to be discovered? If my imagination is not
at fault, I seem to see that the Latin farmer must have had to shift for
himself in most of his dealings with the supernatural powers about him;
_religio_, the sense of awe and of dependence, must have been constantly
with him. But even here we may see, I think, a possible germ of
religious development; for without this feeling of awe religious forms
tend to become meaningless: lull _religio_ to sleep, and the forms cease
to represent effectively man's experience of life. We have to see later
on how this paralysis of the religious instinct did actually take place
in early Roman history.
For we now have to leave the religion of the household, and to study
that of the earliest form of the City-state. We have enjoyed a glint of
light reflected from later times on the religion of the early Roman
family, and are about to enjoy another glint--nay, a gleam of real
light, and not merely a reflected one--which the earliest religious
document we possess casts on the religion of the City-state of Rome.
Between the two there is a long period of almost complete darkness. We
know hardly anything as yet, and it is not likely that we shall ever
know anything definite, about the stages of development which must have
been passed before Rome became the so-called city of the Four Regions,
when her history may be said really to begin. The pagus hardly helps us
here; it was not an essential advance on the family, and its religion
was comprehensive, not intensive. Each pagus, however, seems to have
had within its bounds an _oppidum_, or stronghold on a hill; and such
oppida were the seven _montes_ of early Rome, which, with the pagi
belonging to them, survived in name to the end of the Republic, with
some kind of a religious festival uniting them together, about which we
have hardly any knowledge.[185] This looks like a stage in the process
of change from farm to city, and it has generally been believed to mark
one. Unfortunately nothing to our purpose can be founded on it. We must
be content with the undoubted fact that about the eighth or seventh
century B.C. the site of Rome was occupied and strengthened as a bulwark
against the Etruscan people who were pressing down from the north upon
the valley of the Tiber;[186] we may take it that the old central
fortress of Latium, on the Alban hill, was not in the right position for
defence, and that it was seen to be absolutely necessary to make a
stronghold of the position offered by the hills which abut on the river
twenty miles above its mouth--the only real position of defence for the
Latin settlements in its rear. Here an _urbs_ was made with _murus_ and
_pomoerium_, _i.e._ material and spiritual boundaries, taking in a space
sufficient to hold the threatened rural population with their flocks and
herds, with the river in the front and a common citadel on the
Capitoline hill, and including the Palatine, Quirinal, Esquiline,
Caelian and Aventine hills, though the last named remained technically
outside the pomoerium.[187]
It is to this city that our earliest religious document, the so-called
Calendar of Numa, belongs. That calendar includes the cult of Quirinus
on the hill which still bears his name, and that hill was an integral
part of the city as just described. On the other hand, it tells us
nothing of the great cult of the _trias_ on the Capitoline--Jupiter,
Juno, Minerva--which by universal tradition was instituted much later by
the second Tarquinius, _i.e._ under an Etruscan dynasty; nor does Diana
appear in it, the goddess who was brought from Latium and settled on the
Aventine before the end of the kingly period. We have, then, a
_terminus ex quo_ for the date of the calendar in the inclusion in the
city of the Quirinal hill, and a _terminus ad quem_ in the foundation of
the Diana temple on the Aventine.[188] We cannot date these events
precisely; but it is sufficient for our purpose if it be taken as proved
that the Fasti belong to the fully developed city, and yet were drawn up
before that conquest by the Etruscans which we may regard as a
certainty, and which is marked by the foundations of Etruscan masonry
which served to support the great Capitoline temple. And this is also
borne out by the undoubted fact that the calendar itself shows no trace
of Etruscan influence. But I must now go on to explain exactly what this
calendar is.
The _Fasti anni Romani_ exist chiefly on stone as inscriptions, and date
from the Early Empire, between 31 B.C. and A.D. 51. They give us, in
fact, the calendar as revised by Caesar; but no one now doubts that
Mommsen was right in detecting in these inscriptions the skeleton of the
original calendar which the Romans ascribed to Numa.[189] This is
distinguished from later additions by the large capital letters in which
it is written or inscribed in all the fragments we possess; it gives us
the days of the month with their religious characteristics as affecting
state business, the names of the religious festivals which concern the
whole state, and the Kalends, Nones, and Ides in each month. Excluding
these last, we have the names, in a shortened form, of forty-five
festivals; and these festivals, thus placed by an absolutely certain
record in their right place in each month and in the year, must be the
foundation of all scientific study of the religious practice of the
Roman state, taken together with certain additions in smaller capitals,
and with such information about them as we can obtain from literary
sources.[190]
The smaller capitals give us such entries as _feriae Iovi_, _feriae
Saturno_, _i.e._ the name of a deity to whom a festival was sacred, the
foundation days of temples, generally with the name of the deity in the
dative and the position of the temple in the city, and certain _ludi_
and memorial days, which belong to a much later age than the original
festivals. But the names of those which are inscribed in large letters
bear witness beyond all question to their own antiquity; for among them
there is not one which has anything to do, so far as we know, with a
non-Roman deity, and we know that foreign deities began to arrive in
Rome before the end of the kingly period. Here, then, we have genuine
information about the oldest religious doings of the City-state, in what
indeed is, as Mommsen said, the most ancient source of our knowledge
about Roman antiquity generally.
The first point we notice in studying this calendar (putting aside for
the present the question as to the agency by which it was drawn up) is
this: it exactly reflects a transition from the life of a rural
population engaged in agriculture, to the highly-organised political and
military life of a City-state. In other words, the State, whose
religious needs and experience it reflects, was one whose economic basis
was agriculture, whose life included legal and political business, and
whose activity in the season of arms was war.
This last characteristic is discernible chiefly, if not entirely, in the
months of March and October; and the former of these bears the name of
the great deity, who, whatever may have been his origin or the earliest
conception of him, was throughout Roman history the god of war. All
through March up to the 23rd the Salii, the warlike priests of Mars,
were active, dancing and singing those hymns of which an obscure
fragment has come down to us, and clashing and brandishing the sacred
spears and shields of the god (_ancilia_).[191] On the 19th these
ancilia were lustrated--a process to which I shall recur in another
lecture; and on the 23rd we find in the calendar the festival
Tubilustrium, which suggests the lustration of the trumpets of the host
before it took the field. On the 14th of March,[192] and also on the
27th of February, we find Equirria in the calendar, which must be
understood as lustrations of the horses of the host, accompanied with
races. If we may take the ancilia as symbolising the arms of the host,
we see in the festivals of this month a complete religious process
preparing the material of war for the perils inevitably to be met with
beyond the _ager Romanus_, whether from human or spiritual enemies; and
that the warriors themselves were subjected to a process of the same
kind we know from the historical evidence of later times.[193] Now in
October, when the season of arms was over, we find indications of a
parallel process, which Wissowa was the first to point out clearly, but
without fully recognising its religious import.[194] It was not so much
thanksgiving (_Dankfest_) after a campaign that was necessary on the
return of the army, as purification (or disinfection) from the taint of
bloodshed, and from contact with strange beings human and
spiritual.[195] On October 15, the Ides, there was a horse-race in the
Campus Martius, with a sacrifice of the winning horse to Mars with
peculiar primitive ritual; this, however, for some reason which I shall
presently try to discover, was not embodied in the calendar under any
special name. On the 19th, however, we find the entry ARMILUSTRIUM,
which tells its own tale. The Salii, too, were active again in these
days of October, and on the day of the Armilustrium, as it would seem,
put their shields away (_condere_) in their _sacrarium_ until the March
following. As Wissowa says, the ritual of the Salii is thus a symbolic
copy of the procedure of war.[196] From these indications in the
calendar, helped out by information drawn from the later entries and
from literary evidence, we see quite plainly that we are dealing with
the religion of a state which for half the year is liable to be engaged
in war. Rome was, in fact, a frontier fortress on the Tiber against
Etruscan enemies; she is destined henceforward to be continually in
arms, and she has already expressed this great fact in her religious
calendar.
The legal and political significance of the calendar consists in the
division of the days of the year into two great groups, _dies fasti_
and _nefasti_: the former are those on which it is _fas_, _i.e._
religiously permissible, to transact civil business, the latter those on
which it would be _nefas_ to do so, _i.e._ sacrilege, because they are
given over to the gods. We need not, indeed, assume that these marks F
and N descend in every case from the very earliest times into the
pre-Julian calendar, or that the few days which have other marks stood
originally as we find them; but of the primitive character of the main
division we can have no doubt. In the calendar as we have it 109 days
belong to the divine, 235 to the human inhabitants of the city. All but
two of the former are days of odd numbers in the month, and it is
reasonable to suppose that these two exceptions were later alterations.
The belief that odd numbers are lucky is a very widely-spread
superstition, and we do not need to have recourse to Pythagoras to
explain it; in this rule, as in others, _e.g._ their taboo on eating
beans, the Pythagoreans were only following a native prejudice of
southern Italy. "The idea of luck in odd numbers," says Mr. Crooke,[197]
writing of the Hindus, "is universal." Thus the simpler odd numbers,
three, five, seven, and nine, all recur constantly in folklore; and the
result is visible in this calendar. Where a festival occupies more than
one day in a month, there is an interval between the two of one or three
days, making the whole number three or five. Thus Carmentalia occur on
11th and 15th January, and the Lemuria in May are on the 9th, 11th, and
13th; the Lucaria in July on 19th and 21st. In some months, too, _e.g._
August and December, perhaps also July and February, there seem to be
traces of an arrangement by which festivals which probably had some
connection with each other are thus arranged; _e.g._ in August six
festivals, all concerned in some way with the fruits of the earth and
the harvest, occur on the 17th, 19th, 21st, 23rd, 25th, and 27th. It has
recently been suggested[198] that these are arranged round one central
festival, which gives a kind of colouring to the others, as the
Volcanalia in August, the Saturnalia in December. But the reasons von
Domaszewski gives for the arrangement, and the further speculation that
where it does not occur we may find traces of an older system, as yet
unaffected by the so-called Pythagorean prejudice, do not seem to me
satisfactory. We may be content with the general principle as I have
stated it, and note that while religious duties _must_ be performed on
days of odd number, civil duties were not so restricted: the days
belonging to the gods, which were, so to speak, taboo days, were more
important than those belonging to men. There are, as I have said, but
two days marked in the large letters as festivals, which are on days of
even number, 24th February and 14th March, the Regifugium and the second
Equirria; and about these we know so little that it is almost useless to
speculate as to the reason for their exception from the rule. Two
others, 24th March and 24th May, were partly the property of the gods
and partly of men, and are marked QRCF (_quando rex comitiavit fas_);
but the sense in which they partially belonged to the gods is not the
same as in the case of sacrificial festivals.
This calendar thus shows obvious signs of both military and political
development; in other words, its witness to the religious experience of
the Romans proves that they had successfully adjusted the forms and
seasons of their worship to the processes of government at home and of
military service in the field. But the most conspicuous feature in it is
the testimony it bears to the agricultural habits of the people--to the
fact that agriculture and not trade, of which there is hardly a trace,
was the economic basis of their life. At the time when it was drawn up,
the Romans must have been able to subsist upon the _ager Romanus_,
though, as we shall see later on, it was probably not long before they
began commercial relations with other peoples; for their food, which was
almost entirely vegetarian, and their clothing, which was entirely of
wool and leather,[199] they depended on their crops, flocks, and herds;
and the perils to which these were liable remain for the State, as for
the farming household, the main subject of the propitiation of the gods,
the main object of their endeavours to keep themselves in right relation
with the Power manifest in the universe.
We can trace the series of agricultural operations in the calendar
without much difficulty all through the year. The Roman year, we must
remember, began with March, and March, as we have seen, had under the
military necessities of the State become peculiarly appropriated to the
religious preparation of the burgher host for warlike activity. But the
festivals of April, when crops were growing, cattle bringing forth young
or seeking summer pasture, all have direct reference to the work of
agriculture.[200] At the Fordicidia, on the 15th, pregnant cows were
sacrificed to the Earth-goddess, and their unborn calves burnt,
apparently with the object of procuring the fertility of the corn; and
the Cerealia on the 19th, to judge by the name, must have had an object
of the same kind, though the supersession of Ceres by the Greek Demeter
had obscured this in historical times. The Parilia on the 19th, recently
illuminated by Dr. Frazer,[201] was a lustration of the cattle and sheep
before they left their winter pasture to encounter the dangers of wilder
hill or woodland, and may be compared with the lustratio of the host
before a campaign. On the 23rd the Vinalia tells its own tale, and shows
that the cultivation of the vine was already a part of the agricultural
work. On the 25th the spirit of the red mildew, Robigus, was the object
of propitiation, at the time when the ear was beginning to be formed in
the corn, and was particularly liable to attack from this pest.
The religious precautions thus taken in April were not renewed in May;
but at the end of that month of ripening the whole of the _ager Romanus_
was lustrated by the Fratres Arvales. This important rite, for some
reason which we cannot be sure of, was a movable feast, left to the
discretion of the brethren, and therefore does not appear in the
calendar. In June the sacred character of the new crops, now approaching
their harvest, becomes apparent; the _penus Vestae_, the symbolic
receptacle of the grain-store of the State, after remaining open from
the 7th to the 15th, was closed on that day for the rest of the year,
after being carefully cleansed: the refuse was religiously deposited in
a particular spot. Thus all was made ready for the reception of the new
grain, which, as is now well known, has a sacred character among
primitive peoples, and must be stored and eaten with precaution.[202]
This was the chief religious work of June; in July, the month when the
harvest was actually going on, the festivals are too obscure to delay
us; they seem to have some reference to water, rain, storms, but it is
not clear to me whether the object was to avert stormy weather during
the cutting of the crops, or, on the other hand, to avert a drought in
the hottest time of the year. The true harvest festivals begin in
August; the Consualia on 21st and Opiconsiva on 25th both seem to
suggest the operation of storing up (_condere_) the grain, and between
them we find the Volcanalia, of which the object was perhaps to
propitiate the fire-spirit at a time when the heat of the sun might be
dangerous to the freshly-gathered crops.
After the crops were once harvested, ploughing and sowing chiefly
occupied the farming community until December; and as these operations
were not accompanied by the same perils which beset the agriculturist in
spring and summer, they have left no trace in the calendar. Special
religious action was not necessary on their behalf. It is not till the
autumn sowing was over, and the workers could rest from their labours,
that we find another set of festivals, of which the centre-point is the
Saturnalia on the 17th, Saturnus being the deity, I think, both of the
operation of sowing and of the sown seed, now reposing in the bosom of
mother earth.[203] A second Consualia on the 15th, and the Opalia on the
19th, like the corresponding August festivals, seem to be concerned with
the housed grain harvested in the previous August; I am disposed to
think that in all three we should see not only the natural rejoicing
after the labours of the autumn, but the opening of the granaries and,
perhaps, the first eating of the grain. For on the Saturnalia there was
a sacrifice at Saturnus' altar, followed by a feast, which was
afterwards Graecised, but doubtless originally represented the primitive
feasting of the farm, in which the whole familia took part. This brings
us practically to the end of the agricultural year as represented in the
calendar; for spring sowing was exceptional, the joyful feasts of pagus
and compitum are not to be found in our document, and the month of
February is specially occupied with the care and cult of the dead
(_Manes_).
At this point I wish to notice one or two results of the adoption of a
religious calendar such as I have been describing, which are more to the
purpose of these lectures than some of the details I have had to point
out. First, let us remember that agricultural operations necessarily
vary in date according to the season, and that most of the rural
festivals of ancient Italy were not fixed to a particular day, but were
_feriae conceptivae_, settled perhaps according to the decision of some
meeting of heads of families or officers of a pagus. That this was so we
may conjecture from the fact that those which survived into historical
times, _e.g._ Compitalia and Paganalia, and were celebrated in the city,
though not as _sacra pro populo_,[204] were of varying date. But all the
festivals of the calendar were necessarily fixed, and the days on which
they were held were made over to the gods. Now by being thus fixed they
would soon begin to get out of relation to agricultural life; just as,
if the harvest festivals of our churches were fixed to one day
throughout the country, the meaning of the religious service would
sooner or later begin to lose something of its force. And how much the
more would this be so if the calendar itself, from ignorance or
mismanagement, began to get out of relation with the true season, as in
course of time was frequently the case? When once under such
circumstances the meaning of a religious rite is lost, where is its
psychological efficacy? In the life of the old Latin farmer, as we saw,
his religion was a reality, an organic growth, coincident at every point
with the perils he encountered in his daily toil; here, in the
City-state, it must from the beginning have had a tendency to become an
unreality, and it ended by becoming one entirely. Some of the old rites
may have attached new meanings to themselves; it is possible, for
example, that beneath the military rites of March there was an original
agricultural significance; the Saturnalia became a merry mid-winter
festival for a town population. But a great number wholly lost meaning,
and were so forgotten or neglected in course of time that even learned
men like Varro do not seem to have been able to explain them. The only
practical question about them for the later Romans was whether their
days were _dies fasti_ or _nefasti_ or _comitiales_,--what work might or
might not be done on them.