direction, is that such a calendar as this implies rigidity and routine
in religious duties. A well-ordered city life under a strong government
must, of course, be subject to routine; law, religious or civil, written
or unwritten, forces the individual into certain stereotyped ways of
life, subjects him to a certain amount of wholesome discipline. The
value of such routine to an undisciplined people has been well pointed
out by Bishop Stubbs, in writing of the effect of the rule of the Norman
and Angevin kings on the English people,[205] where it was also a
religious as well as a legal discipline that was at work. In neither
case was it the ignorant and superstitious routine of savage life, which
of late years we have had to substitute for old fancies about the
freedom of the savage; it is the willing obedience of civilised man for
his own benefit. But if it means a routine of religious rites which are
beginning to lose their meaning; if the relation between them and man's
life and work is lost; and lastly, if, as was probably the case, the
Fasti were not published, but remained in the hands of a priesthood or
an aristocracy,[206]--then there is serious loss as well as gain. You
begin sooner or later to cease to feel your dependence on the divine
beings around you for your daily bread, to get out of right relation
with the Power manifesting itself in the universe.
But, in the third place, we must believe that at first, and indeed
perhaps for ages, this very routine had an important psychological
result in producing increased comfort, convenience, and confidence in
the Roman's relations with the divine inhabitants of his city. A certain
number of deities have taken up their abode within the walls of the
city, and are as much its inhabitants, its citizens, as the human beings
who live there; and all the relations between the divine and human
citizens are regulated now by law, by a _ius divinum_, of which the
calendar is a very important part. _Religio_, the old feeling of doubt
and scruple, arising from want of knowledge in the individual, is still
there; it is, in fact, the feeling which has given rise to all this
organisation and routine, the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, as Cicero phrases
it. But it must be already losing its strength, its life; it was, so to
speak, a constitutional weakness, and the _ius divinum_ is already
beginning to act on it as a tonic. Doubt has passed into fixed usage,
tradition has given place to organisation. Time, place, procedure in all
religious matters, are guaranteed by those skilled in the _ius divinum_;
they know what to do as the festival of each deity comes round, and at
the right time and place they do it with scrupulous attention to every
detail. Thus the organisation of which the calendar is our best example
would have as its first result the destruction of fear and doubt in the
mind of the ordinary Roman; it would tend to kill, or at least to put to
sleep, the _religio_ which was the original motive cause of this very
organisation. As the State in our own day has a tendency to relieve
families of such duties as the care and education of children, so the
State at Rome relieved the family of constant anxiety about matters in
which they were ever in danger from the spirit-world. The State and its
authorities have taken the whole responsibility of adjusting the
relations of the human and divine citizens.[207]
Entirely in keeping with this psychological result of the calendar is
the fact, to which I have already alluded, that it supplies us with
hardly any evidence of the existence of magic, or of those "beastly
devices of the heathen" which may roughly be included under that word;
to use the language of Mr. Lang, we find none of those "distressing
vestiges of savagery and barbarism which meet us in the society of
ancient Greece." It is true enough that we do not know much about what
was done at the various festivals of the calendar, but what we do know,
with one or two exceptions, suggests an idea of worship as clean and
rational as that of the Homeric poems, which stands in such striking
contrast to that reflected in later Greek literature.[208] When we do
read of any kind of grossness in worship or the accompanying
festivities, it is almost always in the case of some rite which is _not_
among those in the Fasti. Such was the old festival of Anna Perenna in
March, where the plebs in Ovid's time spent the day in revelry and
drinking, and prayed for as many years of life as they could drink cups
of wine. Such again was that of the October horse, when after a
chariot-race in the Campus the near horse of the winning team was
sacrificed, and his tail carried in hot haste to the Regia, where the
blood was allowed to drip on the sacred hearth; while the head was the
object of a fight between the men of the Via Sacra and those of the
Subura.[209] We may perhaps include in the list the ritual of the Argei,
if it was indeed, as I believe, of great antiquity;[210] on May 15, as
we have seen, twenty-seven puppets of reeds or straw were thrown into
the Tiber from the _pons sublicius_, possibly with the object of
procuring rain for the growing crops. Let us also note that _dies
religiosi_ were not marked in the Fasti, _i.e._ days on which some
uncomfortable feeling prevailed, such as the three days on which the
_mundus_ was open to allow the Manes to come up from their shadowy abode
below the earth; with the character of such days as "uncanny" the
calendar has simply nothing to do. It is a document of religious law,
not of _superstitio_, a word which in Roman usage almost invariably
means what is outside that religious law, outside the _ius divinum_; and
it is a document of _religio_ only so far as it is meant to organise and
carry out the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, the natural results of that
feeling which the Romans called _religio_. It stands on exactly the same
footing as the Law of the Israelites, which supplied them in full detail
with the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, and rigidly excluded all foreign and
barbarous rites and superstitions.
I do not, of course, mean to say that the State did not recognise or
allow the festivals which are not marked in the calendar; the pontifices
and Vestals were present at the ceremony of the Argei, and the Regia was
the scene of a part of that of the October horse. But those who drew up
the calendar as the fundamental charter of the _ius divinum_ must have
had their reasons for the selection of forty-five days as made over to
the deities who were specially concerned with the State's welfare. And
on these days, so far as we know, there was a regular ordered routine of
sacrifice and prayer, with but little trace of the barbarous or
grotesque. The ritual of the Lupercalia is almost a solitary exception.
The Luperci had their foreheads smeared with the blood of the victims,
which were goats, and then this was wiped off with wool dipped in milk;
after this they were obliged to laugh, probably as a sign that the god
(whoever he was) was in them, or that they were identified with
him.[211] They then girt themselves with the skins of the victims and
ran round the ancient pomoerium, striking at any women they met with
strips of the same victims in order to produce fertility. This was
perhaps a rite taken over from aboriginal settlers on the Palatine, and
so intimately connected with that hill that it could not be omitted from
the calendar. The ritual of the three days of Lemuria in May, when
ghosts were expelled from the house, as Ovid describes the process, by
means of beans,[212] seems also to have been a reminiscence of ideas
about the dead more primitive than those which took effect in the more
cheerful Parentalia of February: here again we may perhaps see a
concession to the popular tradition and prejudice of a primitive
population. On the other hand, the revelry of the Saturnalia in
December, of which Dr. Frazer has made so much in the second edition of
the _Golden Bough_,[213] is nothing more than the licence of the
population of a great cosmopolitan city, an out-growth, under Greek
influence, from the rude winter rejoicings of the farmer and his
_familia_; and for his conjecture that a human victim was sacrificed on
this occasion in ancient Rome there is simply no evidence whatever.
There is, indeed, not a trace of human sacrifice at Rome so long as the
_ius divinum_ was the supreme religious law of the State; in the whole
Roman literature of the Republic hardly anything of the kind is alluded
to;[214] it is only when we come to an age when the taste for bloodshed
was encouraged by the shows of the amphitheatre, and when the
blood-loving religions of the East were pressing in, that we hear of
human sacrifice, and then only from Christian writers, who would
naturally seize on anything that came to hand to hold up paganism to
derision, without inquiring into the truth or the history of the alleged
practice.[215]
Thus we may take it as highly probable that those who drew up the
calendar had the deliberate intention of excluding from the State
ritual, as far as was possible, everything in the nature of barbarism
and magic. For the religious purposes of a people occupied in
agriculture and war, and already beginning to develop some idea of law
and order, there was no need of any religious rites except such as would
serve, in decency and order, to propitiate the deities concerned with
the fertilisation of man, beast, and crop, and with the safety and
efficacy of the host in its struggle with the enemies of the city. The
Roman people grew up, in their city life as in the life of the family,
in self-restraint, dignity, and good order, confident in the course of
_cura_ and _caerimonia_, itself decent and stately, if soulless, which
the religious authorities had drawn up for them.
We should naturally like to know something about those authorities, who
thus placed the religion of the State on a comparatively high level of
ritualistic decency, if not of theological subtlety. The Romans
themselves attributed the work to a priest-king, Numa Pompilius, and
probably their instinct was a right one. Names matter little in such
matters; but there is surely something in the universal Roman tradition
of a great religious legislator, something too, it may be, in the
tradition that he was a Sabine, a representative of the community on the
Quirinal which had been embodied in the Roman city before the calendar
was drawn up, and of the sturdy, serious stock of central Italy, which
retained its _virtus_ longer than any other Italian people.[216] We are
quite in the dark as to all this, unless we can put any kind of
confidence in the traditional belief of the Romans themselves. But there
is one point on which I should like to make a suggestion--a new one so
far as I know. Numa was said to have been the first Flamen Dialis; but
that is absolutely impossible, for the ancient taboos on that priesthood
would have made it impossible for him to become supreme legislator.
Evidently this Flamen, who could hardly leave his own house, might never
leave the city, and was at every turn hedged in by restrictions on his
activity, was a survival of those magician-kings who make rain and do
other useful things, but would lose their power if they were exposed to
certain contingencies; the number of possible contingencies increases
till the unfortunate owner of the powers becomes powerless by virtue of
the care so painfully taken of him.[217] The priest of Jupiter and his
taboos carry us back, beyond a doubt, into the far-away dim history of
primitive Latium. By the time the eternal city was founded on the Tiber,
he must have been already practically obsolete. My suggestion is that he
is the representative in the Roman religious system of another and more
primitive system which existed in Latium, probably at Alba, where
Jupiter was worshipped on the mountain from time immemorial. When the
strength of Latium was concentrated at the best strategical point on the
Tiber, the priest of Jupiter was transferred to the new city, because he
was too "precious" to be left behind, though even then a relic of
antiquity. There he became what he was throughout Roman history, a
practically useless personage, about whom certain sacred traditions had
gathered, but placed in complete subjection to the new legal and
religious king, and afterwards to the Pontifex maximus.[218]
If there be any truth in this--and I believe it to be a legitimate
inference from the legal position of this Flamen, and his permanent
state of taboo--then I think we may see a great religious change in the
era of the "calendar of Numa." Inspired with new ideas of the duty and
destiny of the new city of the four regions, a priest-king, doubtless
with the help and advice of a council, according to the true Roman
fashion, put an end for ever to the reign of the old magician-kingship,
but preserved the magician-king as a being still capable of
wonder-working in the eyes of the people. As religious law displaced
magic in the State ritual, so the new kings, with their collegia of
legal priests, pontifices and augurs, neutralised and gradually
destroyed the prestige of the effete survivor of an age of barbarism.
NOTES TO LECTURE V.
[185] Kornemann, _op. cit._ p. 87; Wissowa, _Gesammelte
Abhandlungen_, p. 230 foll.; Mommsen, _Staatsrecht_,
iii. p. 790, note 1. For the festival of the
Septimontium, Varro, _L.L._ vi. 24; Plutarch, _Quaest.
Rom._ 69; Fowler, _R.F._ p. 265 foll. This festival does
not appear in the calendar, as not being "feriae populi,
sed montanorum modo" (Varro, _l.c._). There are some
interesting remarks on the relation between agricultural
life and the origin of towns in von Jhering's _Evolution
of the Aryan_ (Eng. trans.), p. 86 foll., with special
reference to Rome.
[186] Von Duhn in _J.H.S._ xvi. 126 foll. The latest
research (Korte in Pauly-Wissowa, _s.v._ "Etrusker," p.
747) concludes that the arrival of the Etruscans on the
west coast of Italy cannot be safely put earlier than
the eighth century.
[187] Huelsen-Jordan, _Rom. Topogr._ iii. 153. In a brief
but masterly paper in the publications of the _American
School at Rome_, 1908, p. 173 foll., J. B. Carter deals
with the whole problem of the pomoerium and the
pre-Servian city.
[188] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 27.
[189] In _C.I.L._ i.^2, p. 297 foll. See _R.F._ p. 14
foll.
[190] See the Fasti in _R.F._ p. 21 foll.; or in
Wissowa, _R.K._, at end of the book.
[191] _R.F._ p. 38 foll. Marindin's article "Salii,"
_Dict. of Antiqq._, is very useful and sensible. There
is little doubt that the dress and armour of the Salii
represented that of the primitive Latin warrior,
calculated to frighten away evil spirits as well as
enemies, and that their dances in procession had some
object of this kind. It is noticeable that there were
two gilds or collegia of them belonging to the Palatine
and Quirinal cities respectively; and they are also
found at Tibur, Alba, Lanuvium, and other Latin cities.
[192] Or 15th (Ides), according to the conjecture of
Wissowa; see _R.F._ p. 44 and _R.K._ p. 131. It is
almost incredible that this should originally have been
on a day of even number, contrary to the universal rule
of the Fasti.
[193] See below, p. 212 foll., for further consideration
of this so-called purification.
[194] _R.K._ p. 131.
[195] See below, p. 217.
[196] _R.K._ p. 131.
[197] _Popular Religion and Folklore of India_, ii. 51.
For the sacredness of the number three and its
multiples, see Diels, _Sibyllinische Blaetter_, p. 40
foll.; but he limits it too much to chthonic religious
ritual. See also H. Usener, "Dreizahl," in _Rheinisches
Museum_, vol. 58, pp. 1 foll., 161 foll., and 321 foll.
There is a summary of the results of these papers in
Gruppe's _Mythologische Literatur_, 1898-1905, p. 360
foll. I may also refer to my friend Prof. Goudy's very
interesting _Trichotomy in Roman Law_ (Oxford, 1910), p.
8 foll.
[198] By von Domaszewski in _Archiv_ for 1907, p. 333
foll. The learned author's reasoning is often based on
mere hypotheses as to the meaning of the festivals or
the gods concerned in them, and his ideas as to the
agricultural features of the months July, August,
December seem to me doubtful; but the paper is one that
all students of the calendar must reckon with.
[199] Marquardt, _Privatleben_, pp. 459 and 569 foll.
[200] For the festivals mentioned in the following
paragraphs see _R.F._, _s.v._, and Wissowa, _R.K._,
section 63.
[201] "St. George and the Parilia," in _Revue des etudes
ethnographiques et sociologiques_ for Jan. 1908. I owe
my knowledge of this admirable study to the kindness of
its author.
[202] Frazer, _G.B._ ii. 318 foll.
[203] Varro, _L.L._ v. 64, says, "Ab _satu_ dictus
Saturnus." And in Augustine (_Civ. Dei_, vi. 8) he is
quoted as holding the opinion "quod pertineat Saturnus
ad semina, quae in terram de qua oriuntur iterum
recidunt." He was probably the _numen_ of the
seed-sowing (Saeturnus), and as his festival comes
after the end of sowing, we may presume that he was the
_numen_ of the sown as well as of the unsown seed. In
the article "Saturnus" in Roscher's _Lexicon_, which has
appeared since the above note was written, Wissowa
provisionally accepts Varro's etymology.
[204] Festus, p. 245a, "Publica sacra quae publico
sumptu pro populo fiunt, quaeque pro montibus, pagis,
curiis, sacellis." See article "Sacra" in _Dict. of
Antiqq._ ii. 577.
[205] "Routine is the only safeguard of a people under a
perfect autocracy" (_Select Charters_, Introduction, p.
19).
[206] The annalists believed that the publication first
took place in the year 304 B.C.: Livy ix. 46. Mommsen
(_Chronologie_, p. 31) thought it possible that it had
already been done by the Decemvirs in one of the two
last of the XII. Tables, but again withdrawn. The object
of keeping the Fasti secret was, of course, to control
the times available for legal and political business.
[207] This paragraph is abridged from a passage in the
author's paper in the _Hibbert Journal_ for 1907, p.
848.
[208] See _Anthropology and the Classics_ (Oxford,
1908), p. 44.
[209] _R.F._ p. 241 foll.
[210] Wissowa holds that it dates from the third century
B.C.: Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._, _s.v._ "Argei." I
endeavoured to refute this view in the _Classical
Review_ for 1902, p. 115 foll., and Dr. Wissowa
criticised my criticism in his _Gesammelte
Abhandlungen_, p. 222. It is dealt with at length in
_R.F._ p. 111 foll. See below, p. 321 foll.
[211] This is not exactly the view expressed in _R.F._
p. 315 foll., where I was inclined to adopt that of
Mannhardt that the laughing symbolised the return to
life after sacrificial death. I am now disposed to think
of it as parallel with the ecstasy of the Pythoness and
other inspired priests, or the shivering and convulsive
movements which denote that a human being is "possessed"
by a god or spirit. See Jevons, _Introduction_, p. 174.
Mannhardt's view seems, however, to gain support from
Pausanias' description of the ordeal he underwent
himself at the cave of Trophonius, after which he could
laugh again: Paus. ix. 39. See also Miss Harrison,
_Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, p. 580.
Deubner in _Archiv_, 1910, p. 501.
[212] _R.F._ p. 109; Ov. _Fasti_, v. 421 foll. Ovid's
account is of a private rite in the house, as elsewhere
he tells us of things done by private persons on
festival days. We do not know whether there was any
public ritual for these days. For further discussion of
the contrast between the two festivals of the dead, see
below, Lect. XVII. p. 393.
[213] _G.B._ iii. 138 foll. The attempt to connect the
so-called Saturnalia of the army of the Danube in the
third century A.D. with the early practice of Roman
Saturnalia seems to me to fail entirely, even after
reading Prof. Cumont's paper in the _Revue de
philologie_, 1897, p. 133 foll. I should imagine that
Cumont would now admit that the Saturn who was
sacrificed on the Danube as described in the _Martyrdom
of St. Dasius_ must have been of Oriental origin, and
that the soldiers concerned were in no sense Roman or
Italian. For the hellenisation of the Saturnalia, see
Wissowa in Roscher's _Lexicon_, _s.v._ "Saturnus," p.
432. Wissowa, I may note, does not believe in the
accuracy of the account of the "Martyrdom."
[214] Nothing, that is, in the regular ritual of the
Roman State--except in so far as the killing of a
criminal who was _sacer_ to a god can be so regarded;
and the only instance of any kind that can be quoted is
that of the two pairs of Gaulish and Greek men and women
who in the stress of the second Punic war and afterwards
were buried alive, as it was said, in the Forum Boarium.
Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 355 and notes. I shall return to this
in Lecture XIV.
[215] The earliest mention of the slaying of a victim
(_bestiarius_) to Jupiter is in Minucius Felix, _Octav._
22 and 30, _i.e._ towards the end of the second century
A.D. or even later. Cp. Tertull. _Apol._ 9, Lactantius
i. 21. I do not go so far as to say with Wissowa (p.
109, note 3) that this story is "ganz gewiss apokryph,"
but I take it as simply a case of degeneracy under the
influence of the amphitheatre and of Orientalism.
[216] For Numa see Schwegler, _Rom. Gesch._ i. 551 foll.
[217] See Dr. Frazer's most recent account of this
subject, in his _Lectures on the Early History of the
Kingship_, chaps, iii.-v. Prof. Ridgeway's idea that the
Flamen Dialis was really a Numan institution is of
course simply impossible, and the arguments he founds on
it fall to the ground. Ovid, probably reflecting Varro,
speaks of the Flamen Dialis as belonging to the
Pelasgian religion, which at least means that he was
aware of the extreme antiquity of the office; _Fasti_,
ii. 281. Dr. Doellinger (_The Gentile and the Jew_, vol.
ii. p. 72) with his usual insight was inclined to see
in this Flamen the "ruins of an older system of
ceremonial ordinances."
[218] He was _sui iuris_ (Gaius i. 130), as soon as he
was chosen or taken (_captus_) by the Pontifex maximus;
but he was subject to the authority of the P.M., like
all the other flamines and the Vestals. See Wissowa,
_R.K._ p. 438; Tac. _Ann._ iv. 16.
LECTURE VI
THE DIVINE OBJECTS OF WORSHIP
We must now turn our attention to what is the most difficult part of our
subject, the ideas of the early Romans about "the Power manifesting
itself in the universe." In my first lecture I indicated in outline what
the difficulties are which beset us all through our studies; they are in
no part of it so insurmountable as in this. Material fails us, because
there was no contemporary literature; because the Romans were not a
thinking people, and probably thought very little about the divine
beings whom they propitiated; and again, because comparative religion,
as it is called, is of scant value in such a study. We have to try and
get rid of our own ideas about God or gods, to keep our minds free of
Greek ideas and mythology, and, in fact, to abstain from bringing the
ideas of any other peoples to bear upon the question until we are pretty
sure that we have some sort of understanding of those Roman ideas with
which we are tempted to compare them. The first duty of the student of
any system of religion is to study that religion in and by itself. As M.
S. Reinach observed in an address at the Congress for the History of
Religions at Oxford, it is time that we began to attend to differences
as well as similarities; and this can only be done by the conscientious
use of such materials as are available for the study of each particular
religion.