the calendar which I was explaining in the last lecture, which gives us
the names of the festivals of the religious year; (2) the names of the
deities concerned in these festivals, so far as we know them from later
additions to the calendar, from Roman literature, and from evidence,
chiefly epigraphical, of the names of deities among kindred Italian
peoples; (3) the fragments of information, now most carefully collected
and sifted, about what the Romans did in the worship of their deities.
The names and order of the festivals, the names of the deities
themselves, the cult, or detail of worship, including priesthoods and
holy places,--these are the only real materials we possess, and our only
safe guides. To trust to legends is fatal, because such legends as there
were in Italy were never written down until the Greeks turned their
attention to them, colouring them with their own fancy and with
reminiscences of their own mythology. For example, no sane investigator
would now make use of the famous story told by Ovid and Plutarch about
Numa's interview with Jupiter, and the astute way in which he deceived
the god, as an illustration of the Roman's ideas of the divine; we know
that it can be traced back to the greatest liar among all Roman
annalists,[219] that it was in part derived from a Greek story, and in
part invented to explain a certain piece of ritual, the _procuratio
fulminis_. Even what was done in the cult must be handled with knowledge
and discretion. Dr. Frazer has a theory that the Roman kings personated
Jupiter, and uses as evidence of this the fact that in the triumph the
triumphator was dressed after the fashion of the statue of the god in
the Capitoline temple, with his face reddened with _minium_: forgetting
that the temple, its cult and its statue, all date from the very end of
the period of the kingship, and were the work of an Etruscan monarch,
almost beyond doubt. There may be truth in his theory, but this is not
the way to prove it; this is not the way to arrive at a true
understanding of Roman religious ideas.
What did the old Romans know about the nature of the objects of their
worship? All religion is in its development a process of gaining such
knowledge: if it makes no progress it is doomed. It is because the Jews
made such wonderful progress in this path, in spite of formalism and
backsliding, that they were chosen to produce a Teacher whose life and
doctrine revealed the will and the nature of His Father for the eternal
benefit of mankind. The fear of the Lord is imperfect knowledge, it is
but the beginning of wisdom; but it could become, in a Jew like St.
Paul, the perfect knowledge of His will. It may seem absurd to think of
two such religions as the Jewish and the Roman side by side; but the
absurdity vanishes when we begin to understand the humble beginnings of
the Jewish religion as scientific research has already laid it bare.
Knowledge of the Power manifesting itself in the universe is open to all
peoples alike, and some few have made much progress in it beside the
Jews. The Romans were not among these, at any rate in all the later
stages of their history; but we have to ask how far they got in the
process, and later on again to ask also why they could go no
farther.[220]
We have seen how one great forward step in the attainment of this
knowledge was made in the religion of the household, when the house had
become a kind of temple, being the dwelling of divine as well as human
beings, and when the cultivated land had been separated by a sacred
boundary from the mountain or forest beyond, with their wild and unknown
spiritual inhabitants. We met, however, with nothing in the house or on
the land that we can properly call a god, if we may use that word for
the moment in the sense of a personality as well as a name, and a
personality perfectly distinct from the object in which it resides.
Vesta seems to be the fire, Penates the store, or at least spirits
undistinguishable from the substance composing the store. But inasmuch
as the farmer knew how to serve these spirits and address them, looking
upon them as friends and co-habitants of his own dwelling, we may go so
far as to guess that they were somewhat advanced in their career as
spirits, and might possibly develop into powers of a more definite kind,
if not into gods, real _dei_ conceived as persons.[221] In other
words--for it is better to keep as far as we can to the subjective or
psychological aspect of them--the Roman might realise the Power better
by getting to think of his nameless spirits as _dei_ at work for his
benefit if rightly propitiated. There are some signs in the calendar and
the other sources I mentioned just now that such a process had been
going on before the State arose; and it is certain that the whole field
of divine operation had been greatly widened by that time, as we might
expect from the enlarged sphere of man's experience and activity.
The deities originally belonging to the city of the four regions, _i.e._
to the city of the calendar of Numa, were known to Roman antiquarians as
_di indigetes_, in contra-distinction from the _di novensiles_ or
imported deities, with which at present we have nothing to do. On the
basis of the calendar, and of the names of the most ancient priesthoods
attached to particular cults, the Rex and the Flamines, Wissowa (_R.K._
p. 16) has constructed a list of these _di indigetes_ which may be
accepted without any further reservation than he himself applies to it.
They are thirty-three in number, but in two cases we have groups instead
of individuals, viz. the Lares and the Lemures: the plurality of the
Lares (_compitales_) we have already explained, and the Lemures, the
ghosts of departed ancestors, we may also for the present leave out of
account. Others are too obscure to help us, _e.g._ Carna, Angerona,
Furrina, Neptunus, Volturnus,[222] except in so far as their very
obscurity, and the neglect into which they and their cults fell in later
times, is proof that they were not thought of as lively personal
deities. Then, again, there are others whose names are suggested by
certain festivals, Terminus, Fons, Robigus, who seem to be simply
survivals from the animistic period--spirits inherent in the
boundary-stone, the spring, or the mildew, and incapable of further
development in the new conditions of city life. Faunus, the rural
semi-deity, perhaps representing a group of such beings, appears in the
list as the deity of the Lupercalia; but this is a point in which I
cannot agree with Wissowa and the majority of modern authorities.[223]
We are struck, as we examine the list further, by the adjectival
character of many of the names--Neptunus, Portunus, Quirinus, Saturnus,
Volcanus, Volturnus: these are not proper names, but clearly express
some character or function exercised by the power or _numen_ to whom the
name is given. Saturnus is the most familiar example; the word suggests
no personality, but rather a sphere of operations (whether we take the
name as referring to sowing or to seed maturing in the soil) in which a
certain _numen_ is helpful. Saturnus, Volcanus, Neptunus were indeed
identified later on with Greek gods of a ripe polytheistic system, and
have thus become quite familiar to us, far too familiar for a right
understanding of early Roman ideas. We might naturally expect that the
identification of Saturnus with Kronos, of Neptunus with Poseidon, would
give us some clue to the original Roman conception of the _numen_ thus
Graecised, but it is not so. Neptunus may have had some connection with
water, rain, or springs, but we have no real proof of it, and it is
impossible to say why Saturnus became Kronos.[224] The only certain
result that we can win from the study of these adjectival titles is that
they represent a transition between animism and polytheism, a transition
exactly expressed by the one word _numen_.
_Numen_ is so important a word in the Roman religion that it is
necessary to be perfectly clear as to what was meant by it. It must be
formed from _nuere_ as _flumen_ from _fluere_, with a sense of activity
inherent in the verb. As _flumen_ is that which actively flows, so
_numen_ is that which actively does whatever we understand by the word
_nuere_; and so far as we can determine, that was a manifestation of
will. _Adnuere_ is to consent, to give your good will to some act
proposed or completed, and is often so used of Jupiter in the _Aeneid_.
_Nuere_ should therefore express a simple exercise of will-power, and
_numen_ is the being exercising it. In time it came to be used for the
will of a god as distinct from himself, as in the fourth _Aeneid_
(269)--
ipse deum tibi me claro demittit Olympo
regnator, caelum ac terras qui numine torquet.
Or in the fourth _Eclogue_ (47)--
concordes stabili fatorum numine Parcae,
where Servius explains it as "potestate, divinatione, ac maiestate." But
beyond doubt this use is a product of the literary age, and the word
originally indicated the being himself who exercised the will--a sense
familiar to us in the opening lines of the _Aeneid_ ("quo numine laeso")
and in innumerable other passages. Thus von Domaszewski in his collected
papers (p. 157) is undoubtedly right in defining a _numen_ as a being
with a will--"ein wollendes Wesen"; though his account of its evolution,
and of the way in which in its turn it may produce a _deus_, may be open
to criticism.
The word thus suggests that the Roman divine beings were functional
spirits with will-power, their functions being indicated by their
adjectival names. Proper names they had not as a rule, but they are
getting cult-titles under the influence of a priesthood, which titles
may in time perhaps attain to something of the definiteness of
substantival names. This indeed could hardly have been so in the mind of
the ordinary Roman even at a later age; and it is quite possible that if
an intelligent Greek traveller of the sixth century B.C. had given an
account of the gods of Rome,[225] he would have said, as Strabo said of
an Iberian people in the time of Augustus, that they were without gods,
or worshipped gods without names. But the name, even as a cult-title, is
of immense importance in the development of a spirit into a deity, and
in most cases, at any rate at Rome, it was the work of officials, of a
state priesthood, not of the people. To address a deity rightly was
matter of no small difficulty: how were you to know how he would wish
to be addressed? Servius tells us that the pontifices addressed even
Jupiter himself thus: "Iupiter optime maxime, _sive quo alio nomine te
appellari volueris_." On the other hand, in the same comment he tells us
that "iure pontificio cautum est, ne suis nominibus di Romani
appellarentur, ne exaugurari possent," _i.e._ lest they should be
enticed away from the city by enemies. This last statement seems indeed
to me to be a doubtful one,[226] but it will serve to illustrate the
nervousness about divine names, of which there is no doubt whatever. We
know for certain that those religious lawyers the pontifices were
greatly occupied with the task of drawing up lists of names by which
_numina_ should be invoked,--formularising the ritual of prayer, as we
shall see in another lecture; and this must have become at one time
almost a craze with them, to judge by the lists of Indigitamenta
preserved in their books, to which Varro had access, and which were
copied from him by St. Augustine.[227] But after all it needed the
stimulus given by actual contact with a polytheistic system to turn a
Roman numen into a full-fledged personal deity: the pontifices might
carry the process some way, but they never could have completed it
themselves without the help of the Greeks.
One deity seems to stand alone in the list--Tellus or Terra Mater,
Mother Earth.[228] We are coming directly to the great deity of the
heaven, and we might naturally expect that an agricultural folk would be
much concerned with her who is his counterpart among so many peoples.
She does not give her name to any of the festivals of the calendar; but
at one of them, the Fordicidia in April, at a time when the earth is
teeming with mysterious power, and when the festivals are of a
peculiarly agricultural character, she has her own special sacrifice--a
pregnant cow, whose young are torn from her womb, burnt by the _Virgo
vestalis maxima_, and their ashes used in certain mystic rites, _e.g._
at the Parilia which followed on the 21st.[229] She seems to have had
her function in human life as well; but about this we are much in the
dark in spite of Dieterich's attempts to elucidate it in his _Mutter
Erde_.[230] Whether she played a part at the birth of a child we cannot
be sure; but at marriage there is little doubt that she was originally
an object of worship, though in later days she gave way before Ceres and
Juno.[231] And as at death the body was laid in her embrace, we are not
surprised to find her prominent here also: she was the home of the dead
whether buried or burnt, and of the whole mass of the Manes. We shall
presently see how a Roman commander might devote himself and the whole
army of the enemy to Tellus and the Manes; and it is interesting to find
that a similar formula of _devotio_, of later date, combines Tellus with
Jupiter, the speaker touching the ground when he mentions her name, and
holding his hands upwards to heaven when he names the god.[232] Very
curious, too, is the rite of the _porca praecidanea_, which in
historical times was offered to Ceres as well as Tellus immediately
before harvest; in case a man had wittingly or unwittingly omitted to
pay the proper rites (_iusta facere_) to his own dead, it was his duty
to make this offering, lest as a result of the neglect the earth-power
should not yield him a good harvest.[233] Originally, we need hardly
doubt, Tellus was alone concerned in this; but Ceres, who at all times
represented rather the ripening and ripened corn than the seed in the
bosom of the earth, gradually took her place beside her, and the idea
gained ground that the offering was more immediately concerned with the
harvest than with the Manes.[234] When Cato wrote his book on
agriculture, he included in it the proper formula for this sacrifice,
without any indication that Tellus or the Manes had any part in the
business.[235] Tellus was not a deity whose life would be vigorous in a
busy City-state destined gradually to lose its agricultural outlook;
there the supply of grain, from whatever quarter it might come, was a
far more important matter than the process of producing it, and it was
natural that Ceres and her April festival should become more popular
than Tellus and her Fordicidia, and that the Cerealia should eventually
develop into _ludi_ of no less than eight days' duration. Yet Tellus
survived in such forms as that of the _devotio_; and even under the
Empire we find her as Terra on sepulchral monuments, _e.g._--
ereptam viro et matri mater me Terra recepit,
or
terra mater rerum quod dedit ipsa teget.
And there is a curious story, noticed by Wissowa and by Dieterich after
him, that on the death of Tiberius the plebs shouted not only "Tiberius
in Tiberim," but "Terram matrem deosque Manes," in order that his lot
might be among the _impii_ beneath the earth.[236]
So far we have met with nothing to suggest that the Roman idea of
divinity had passed much beyond an advanced type of animism; we have
found little or no trace of personal deities of a polytheistic cast.
There is, however, a fact of importance now to be considered, which has
some bearing upon this difficult subject. Some of the _numina_ of the
calendar had special priests attached to their cults; _e.g._ among those
I have already mentioned, Volcanus, Furrina, Portunus, and Volturnus, to
which we may now add Pales, Flora, Carmenta, Pomona, and a wholly
unknown deity, Falacer. These nine all had flamines, a word which is
generally derived from _flare_, _i.e._ they were the kindlers of the
sacrificial fire.[237] Sacrificing priests they undoubtedly always were,
each limited to the sacrificial rites of a particular cult, unless
authorised by religious law to undertake those of some other deity whose
name he did not bear, and who was destitute, like Robigus, of a priest
of his own.[238] We have no certain evidence that all these flamines
were of high antiquity; but those attached to deities of the calendar
were probably of earlier origin than that document, and as we have no
record of the creation of a new flaminium in historical times until the
era of Caesar-worship, it is fair to conclude that the others I have
mentioned were not younger.
Now what bearing has this fact on the question as to how the early
Romans conceived the objects of their worship? There are, of course,
so-called priests all the world over, even among the lowest fetishistic
and animistic peoples, who exercise power over the various kinds of
spirits by potent charms and spells; these should rather be called
wizards, medicine-men, magicians, and so on.[239] But the flamines as we
know them were not such; they were officials of a State, entrusted with
the performance of definite ritualistic duties, more particularly with
sacrifice, and therefore, as we may assume from universal Roman practice
so far as we know it, also with prayer. If they did not actually slay
the victims themselves--and in historical times this was done by an
assistant--they superintended the whole process and were responsible for
its correct performance.[240] Does the existence of such priests come
into relation with the development of the idea of a _deus_ out of a
numen or a spirit? What is the influence of the sacrificing priest on
the divinity whom he serves? This last is a question to which it is not
easy to find a ready answer; the history of priesthood, and of the moral
and intellectual results of the institution, has yet to be written. Even
Dr. Westermarck, in his recently published great work on the development
of moral ideas, has little to say of it. It is greatly complicated by
the undoubted fact that among many peoples, perhaps to some extent even
among the Latins, the earliest real priests had a tendency to personate
the deity themselves, to be considered as the deity, or in some sense
divine.[241] But in regard to Roman priests we may, I think, go at least
as far as this. When a spirit was named and localised as a friendly
being at a particular spot within the walls of the city, which is made
over to him, and where he has his _ara_; when the ritual performed at
this spot is laid down in definite detail, and undertaken by an
individual appointed for this purpose by the head of the community with
solemn ceremony; then the spirit, hitherto but vaguely conceived, must
in course of time become individualised. The priestly if not the popular
conception of him is fixed; there is now no question who he is or how he
should be called; "quis deus incertum est"[242] can no longer be said of
him. Once provided with a flamen and an ordered cult of sacrifice and
prayer, I conceive that he had now in him the possibility of turning
into a _deus_ personally conceived, if he came by the chance.[243] A few
did get the chance; others did not; Volcanus, for example, became a god
after the model of the Greek Hephaestus, while Volturnus remained a
numen and made no further progress, though he was doubtless ready to
"take" the Graecising epidemic when it came. I do not say that he or any
other numen was the better for the change. But I must not now pursue the
story of this strange double fate of the old Roman deities; I have
perhaps said enough to show that city life, with its priesthoods and its
ordered ritual, had some appreciable effect on the deities who were
admitted to it.
Among these deities there were four of whom I have as yet said nothing
at all, though they are the most famous of all the divine inhabitants of
Rome. I have mentioned nine flamines; there were in all twelve, and
besides these there was in historical times a priest known as the _rex
sacrorum_, the republican successor to some of the religious functions
of the civil king. This rex, and the three _flamines maiores_, so called
in contra-distinction to the other nine, were specially attached to the
cults of Janus, Jupiter (_Flamen Dialis_), Mars (_Flamen Martialis_),
and Quirinus (_Flamen Quirinalis_). I have kept these deities apart from
the others already mentioned, not only because their priests stand apart
from the rest, but because they themselves seem from the first to have
been more really gods (_dei_); Quirinus is the only one who has an
adjectival name. Two of them, Jupiter and Mars, remained throughout
Roman history of real importance to the State, and in Jupiter there were
at least some germs of possible development into a deity capable of
influencing conduct and enforcing morality. Of Janus this cannot
possibly be said; and as he is historically the least important of the
four, I will begin by saying a few words about him as a puzzle and a
curiosity only.
Janus, ever since he ceased to be an intelligible deity, has been the
sport of speculators; and this happened long before the Roman religion
came to an end. In the last century B.C. philosophic writers about the
gods got hold of him, and Varro tells us that some made him out to be
the heaven, others the universe (_mundus_).[244] Ovid amused himself
with this uncertainty of the philosophers, and in the first book of his
_Fasti_ "interviewed" the god, whose answers are unluckily of little
value for us.[245] At various times and in different hands Janus has
been pronounced a sun-god, a heaven-god, a year-god, a wind-god; and now
a Cambridge school of speculators, to whose learning I am in many ways
indebted, has claimed him as an oak-god, the mate of Diana, the Jupiter
of aboriginal Latium, and so on.[246] We have fortunately long left
behind us the age when it was thought necessary to resolve the Greek and
Roman gods into personifications of natural phenomena, and to try to
explain all their attributes on one principle; but my learned friends at
Cambridge have of late been showing a tendency to return to methods not
less dangerous; they hanker, for example, after etymological evidence,
which in the case of deities is almost sure to be misleading unless it
is absolutely certain, and supported by the history of the name. This is
unluckily not the case with Janus; his etymology is matter of
dispute,[247] and he is therefore open, and always will be so, to the
inquirer who is hunting a scent, and more concerned to prove a point
than to discover what the early Romans really thought about a god. In
this lecture I am but humbly trying to do this last, and I may therefore
leave etymology, with the mythology and philosophy of a later age, and
confine myself to such facts of the cult of Janus as are quite
undisputed. They will admit of being put together very shortly.
The first and leading fact is that Janus was the first deity to be
addressed in all prayers and invocations; of this we have abundant
evidence, as also of the corresponding fact that Vesta came last.[248]
Secondly, we know that he was the object of worship on the Kalends of
January, and probably of every month, and that the sacrificing priest
was in this case the _rex sacrorum_. Thirdly, we know that he had no
temple until the year 260 B.C., but that he was associated with the
famous gateway at the north-east end of the Forum--not a gate in the
wall, but a symbolic entrance to the heart of the city, as the round
temple of Vesta at the opposite end, with its eternal fire, was symbolic
of the common life of the community. Fourthly, we know a few cult-titles
of Janus, among them Clusius (or Clusivius), and Patulcius, in which the
connection with gates is obvious; Junonius, which may have originated in
the fact that Juno also was worshipped on the Kalends; Matutinus, which
seems to be a late reference to the dawn as the opening or gate of the
day, and Quirinus, which last is also almost certainly of late origin.
Clusius and Patulcius are genuine old titles, if the text of the Salian
hymn is rightly interpreted; so too is another, Curiatius, for it was
used of the god only as residing in an ancient gateway near the Subura
called the _tigillum sororium_.[249] These are all the most important
facts we have to go upon; the double head of Janus on the earliest Roman
_as_ is of uncertain origin, and Wissowa seems to have conclusively
shown that this representation was not admitted to the gate called Janus
Geminus until towards the close of the republican period.[250] The
connection of the god with the fortress on the hill across the Tiber,
which still bears his name, admits of no quite satisfactory explanation.