entrance to a city were points of great moment, and the cause of
constant anxiety to the early Italian mind, we may naturally infer that
they would be in the care of some particular numen, and that his
worship would be in the care of the head of the family or community--in
the case of the city, in the care of the _rex_, whose duties of this
kind were afterwards taken over by the priest called _rex sacrorum_. The
fact that the word for an entrance was _ianus_ confirms this conjecture;
Janus was perhaps the spirit guarding the entrance to the real wall of
the earliest city, but when the city was enlarged in the age from which
the calendar dates, a symbolic gateway was set up where you entered the
forum from the direction of Latium, answering to the symbolic hearth in
the _aedes Vestae_, and this very naturally took the name of the deity
associated with entrances. Two other _iani_ probably existed in the
forum, and the name was later on transferred as a substantive to similar
objects in Roman colonies, while a feminine form, _ianua_, came to be
used for ordinary house entrances.[251] Whether there ever was a cult of
the god at the real gateway of a city we do not know; there was none at
the symbolic gateway of Rome, which was in no sense a temple. But the
idea of entrance stuck to the old spirit of the doorway long after the
reconstruction of the city, and the rex now sacrifices to him on the
entrance-day of each month, and more particularly on the entrance-day of
the month which bears his name and is the beginning of the natural year
after the winter solstice. This is the best account to be had of the
original Janus,[252] a deity, let it be remembered, of a simple
agricultural and warlike people, without literature or philosophy. But
it is not difficult to see how, when philosophy and literature did at
last come in a second-hand form to this people, they might well have
overlaid with cobwebs of story and speculation a deity for whom they had
no longer any real use, who was best known to them by the mysterious
double-head on the _as_ and the gateway, and for whom they could find no
conclusive parallel among the gods of Greece.
Next in order of invocation to Janus came Jupiter, and his priest, the
Flamen Dialis, was likewise the second in rank, according to ancient
rule, after the _rex sacrorum_. Unlike Janus, Jupiter (to use the
spelling familiar in England) was at all times a great power for the
Roman people, and one who could be all the more valued because he was
intelligible. No one doubted then, and no one doubts now, that he was
the god of the light and of heaven, _Diovis pater_, or rather perhaps
the heaven itself[253] with all its manifestations of rain and thunder,
of blessing and damage to the works of man; the common inheritance of
the Italian peoples, dwelling and worshipped in their woods and on their
hills; and, as we know now, also the common inheritance of all Aryan
stocks, the "European Sky-god," as Mr. A. B. Cook has traced him with
learning and ingenuity from the Euxine to Britain.[254]
Jupiter must have had a long and important history in Latium before the
era of the Roman City-state; Dr. Frazer has seen this, and set it forth
in his lectures on the early history of the kingship, though basing his
conclusions on evidence much of which will not bear a close
examination.[255] The one substantial proof of it lies in the unique and
truly extraordinary character of the taboos placed on his flamen, and to
some extent on the flamen's wife, by the Roman _ius divinum_. Even if we
suppose that some of these may have been later inventions of an
ecclesiastical college like the pontifices (and this is hardly
probable), many of them are obviously of remote antiquity, and can only
have originated at a time when the magical power of the man responsible
for the conduct of Jupiter was so precious that it had to be safeguarded
in these many curious ways. I have already suggested that the scene of
the early paramount importance of Jupiter and his flamen, in that age
perhaps a king of some kind, was Alba Longa, which by universal
tradition was the leading city of Latium before Rome rose to importance,
and where the sky-god was worshipped on his holy mountain as the
religious centre of Latium from the earliest times. I have also
suggested that when the new warlike city on the Tiber took the place of
Alba, the worship was transferred thither, but lost its strength in the
process, and that the flamen was little more than a survival even in the
most primitive period of what we may call for the moment Roman history.
This can be accounted for by the fact that the traditions of primitive
Rome were connected much more closely with Mars than with Jupiter. Not
till Etruscan kings founded the great temple on the Capitol, which was
to endure throughout all later ages of Roman dominion, did the sky-god
become the supreme guardian deity of his people, under the titles of
Optimus Maximus, the best and greatest of all her deities.
But Jupiter was there; and we know certain facts of his cult which give
us a pretty clear idea of what the Romans of the pre-Etruscan period
thought about him. In the calendar all Ides belonged to him, were
_feriae Iovis_;[256] he seems to be the source of light, whether of sun
or moon, for neither of which the Romans had any special divinity; in
the hymn of the Salii he is addressed as Lucetius, the giver or source
of light. The festivals of the vintage belonged to him, since the
production of wine specially needed the aid of sun and light, and his
flamen was employed in the cult on these occasions.[257] When rain was
sorely needed, the aid of the sky-god was sought under the cult-title
Elicius, and as Fulgur or Summanus[258] he was the Power who sent the
lightning by day and by night. The ideas thus reflected in the Roman
cult were common to all Italian peoples of the same stock; everywhere we
find him worshipped on the summits of hills, and in woods of oak, ilex,
or beech,[259] where nothing but the trees he loved intervened between
the heaven and the earth.
His oldest cult at Rome was on the Capitoline hill, but at all times
quite distinct from that which became so famous afterwards; he was known
here as Feretrius, a cult-title of which the meaning is uncertain,[260]
and here, so far as we can guess, there must have been an ancient oak
regarded either as the dwelling of the numen or as the numen himself,
upon which Romulus is said to have hung the _spolia opima_ taken from
the king of the Caeninenses;[261] here we may see the earliest trace of
the triumphal procession that was to be. Doubtless an _ara_ was here
from the first, and then followed a tiny temple, only fifteen feet wide
as Dionysius describes it from personal knowledge in the time of
Augustus,[262] who restored it. There was no image of the god, but in
the temple was kept a _silex_, probably a stone celt believed to have
been a thunderbolt;[263] this stone the Fetiales took with them on their
official journeys, and used it in the oath, _per Iovem lapidem_, with
which they ratified their treaties. As the Romans thought of Jupiter,
not as a personal deity living in the sky like Zeus, but rather as the
heaven itself, so they could think of him as immanent in this stone,
_Iuppiter lapis_. And the use of the flint in treaty-making suggests
another aspect of the god, which he retained in one way or another
throughout Roman history; it is his sanction that is called in to the
aid of moral and legal obligations, resulting from treaties, oaths, and
contracts such as that of marriage. As Dius Fidius he was invoked in the
common Roman oath _medius fidius_; as Farreus (if this were an old
cult-title) he gave his sanction to the solemn contract entered into in
the ancient form of marriage by _confarreatio_, where his flamen had to
be present, and where in all probability the cake of _far_ was eaten as
a kind of sacrament by the parties to the covenant.[264] In much of this
it is tempting to see, as we can see nowhere else in the Roman religion,
faint traces of a feeling about the heaven-god brought from a remote
pastoral life under the open sky, where neither forest nor mountain
intervened to shelter man from the great Presence;[265] and it is also
tempting to think that there was here, even for Latins who had learnt to
worship Jupiter under the form of stocks and stones in the land of their
final settlement, some chance of the development of a deity "making for
righteousness."
Third and fourth in the order of invocation came Mars and Quirinus, and
the same order held good for their flamines. These two priests may have
been subject to some of the taboos which restricted the Flamen
Dialis;[266] they too, that is, may have been to some extent precious,
and have been endowed in a lost period of history with magical powers;
but if so, the memory and importance of such disabilities was rapidly
forgotten in the City-state, and they were early allowed to fill civil
offices, a privilege which the Dialis did not attain till the second
century B.C.[267] Of the sacrificial duties of the Martialis we know
nothing for certain, and can get no help from him as to the ideas of the
early Romans about their great deity Mars.
Mars is in some ways the most interesting of all the Roman deities; but
except as the familiar war-god of Roman history he remains a somewhat
doubtful conception. Like Jupiter and Janus he has attained to a real
name; but of that name, which in various forms is still so often on our
lips, no convincing account has ever been given. Comparative mythology
used to be much occupied with him, and he has been compared with Indra,
Apollo, Odin, and others. But as M. Reinach said, it is time to attend
more closely to differences; and Mars seems to stand best by himself, as
a genuine Italian religious conception. His name is found all over
ancient Italy in various forms--Mavors, Mamers, Marmor, and as Cerfus
Martius at Iguvium. His wild and warlike character, his association with
the wolf and the spear, seem to suggest the struggle for existence that
must have gone on among the tribes that pushed down into a peninsula of
rugged mountain and dense forest, abounding with the wolves which are
not yet wholly extinct there. Whether or no his antecedents are to be
found in other lands, we shall not be far wrong in assuming that the
Roman Mars was the product of life and experience in Italy, and Italy
only.
There is an excellent general account of him in Roscher's article in
his _Lexicon_, which, like that on Janus, has the advantage of being the
result of a second elaborate study, free from the enticements of the
comparative method. What we know for certain about his cult at Rome in
early times can be very briefly stated. First, we have the striking fact
that he is conspicuous, together with the Lares, in the _carmen_ which
has come down to us as sung by the Arval Brethren in their lustration of
the cultivated land of the Roman city:[268] "Neve luerve Marmor sins
incurrere in pleores, satur fu fere Mars!" One is naturally inclined to
ask how this wild and warlike spirit can have anything to do with
cultivation and crops. But there is no mistake; the connection is
confirmed by the fact that he is also the chief object of invocation in
the private _lustratio_ of the farm, which Cato has preserved for
us.[269] In each case the victims are the same, the _suovetaurilia_ of
ox, sheep, and pig, the farmer's most valuable property. Again, let us
remember that the month which bears his name is that not only of the
opening of the war season, but of the springing up of vegetation, and
that the dances and singing of the Salii at this time may probably have
been meant, like similar performances of savage peoples,[270] to
frighten away evil demons from the precious cultivated land and its
growing produce, and to call on the Power to wake to new life. The clue
to the mystery is perhaps to be found in the cult-title Silvanus which
we find in the prayer set down by Cato as proper for the protection of
the cattle when they are on their summer pasture (_in silva_): "Marti
Silvano in silva interdius in capita singula boum facito."[271] We know
that wealth in early Italy consisted chiefly of sheep and cattle; we
know that these were taken in the warm months, as they still are, into
the forest (_saltus_) to feed;[272] and from this passage of Cato we
know that Mars was there. It is only going one step farther if we
conjecture that Mars, like Silvanus, who may have been an offshoot of
his own being, was for the early settler never a peaceful inhabitant of
the farm or the dwelling, but a spirit of the woodland of great
importance for the cattle-owner, and of great importance, too, in all
circumambulation of the boundaries which divided the woodland from the
cultivated land.[273]
But with conjecture I deal on principle but sparingly. It is time to
turn to the Mars of the City-state of Rome; and it is at once
interesting to find that until the age of Augustus, who introduced a new
form of Mars-worship, he had no temple within the walls, and even
outside only two _fana_, one an altar in his own field the Campus
Martius, the other a temple dedicated in 388 B.C. outside the Porta
Capena. "He was always worshipped outside the city," says Dr. J. B.
Carter in his _Religion of Numa_, "as a god who must be kept at a
distance." Should we not rather say that the god was unwilling to come
within those sacred boundaries encircling the works of man? So stated,
we may see in this singular fact a reminiscence of the time when Mars
was really the wild spirit of the "outland," where wolves and human
enemies might be met with; he was perhaps in some sense a _hostis_, a
stranger, like the many other deities originally strange to Rome who,
until the second Punic war, were never allowed to settle within the
sacred precincts.[274] In one sense, however, Mars was actually resident
in the very heart of the city. In a _sacrarium_ or chapel of the
regia,[275] the ancient dwelling of the king, were kept the spears and
shields which the Salii carried in their processions in March and
October; and that the deity was believed to be there too must be
inferred from the fact, if it be correctly stated by Servius, that the
consul who was about to take the field entered the chapel and shook
these spears and shields together, saying, "Mars vigila." I am, however,
rather disposed to think that this practice belongs to a time when Mars
was more distinctly recognised as a god of war, and when the weapons of
the Salii were thought of rather as symbols of his activity than as
objects in which he was immanent.[276]
These are the salient facts in the oldest cult of Mars, and they are
entirely in keeping with all we know of the early history and economy
of the Roman people--a people economically dependent on agriculture, and
especially on cattle-breeding, living in settlements in the midst of a
wilder country, and constantly liable to the attacks of enemies who
might raid their cattle and destroy their crops. I do not see in him
only a deity of agriculture, or only a god of war; in my view he is a
spirit of the wilder regions, where dwell the wolf and woodpecker which
are connected with him in legend: a spirit who dwells on the outskirts
of civilisation, and can with profit be propitiated both for help
against the enemies beyond, and for the protection of the crops and
cattle within, the boundaries of human activity.
Fourth in invocations came Quirinus, and fourth in order of precedence
was his flamen. But of Quirinus I need say little; there is, on the
whole, a consensus of opinion that he was a form of Mars belonging to
the community settled on the hill that still bears his name. The most
convincing proof of his identity with Mars (though identity is doubtless
too strong a word) lies in the well-known fact that there were twelve
Salii Collini, _i.e._ belonging to the Collis Quirinalis, occupied with
the cult of Quirinus, answering to the twelve Salii Palatini of the cult
of Mars. "Quid de ancilibus vestris," Camillus says in Livy's glowing
rhetoric, "Mars Gradive (the particular cult-title of the warlike Mars),
tuque Quirine pater?"[277] Now the Quirinal was, of course, _within_ the
walls, and the Romans who identified the two deities noted this point of
contrast with the Mars-cult; for Servius writes, "Quirinus est Mars qui
praeest paci et _intra civitatem_ colitur, nam belli Mars _extra
civitatem_ templum habet." In keeping with this is the use of the word
Quirites of the Romans in their civil capacity; but unluckily we are
altogether uncertain as to the etymology and history of both Quirites
and Quirinus.[278] And as Quirinus never became, like Mars, an important
property of the Roman people, but was speedily obscured and only revived
by the legend of late origin which identified him with Romulus, he is
not of importance for my subject, and I may leave him to etymologists
and speculators.
There is one other deity of whom I might naturally be expected to say
something; I mean Juno. But our familiarity with Juno in Roman
literature must not be allowed to lead us into believing too rashly that
she was one of those great _numina_ of the early Roman State with whom I
have just been dealing. She had no special festival in the
calendar;[279] her connection with the Kalends she shared, as we have
seen, with Janus. She had no special priest of her own; for in spite of
all assertions that the flaminica Dialis was attached to her cult, I am
convinced that I was right some years ago in maintaining that this is an
error, though a natural one.[280] It cannot be proved that she had any
ancient temple in the city; for the oldest known to us as strictly
indigenous, that of Juno Moneta on the arx, was not dedicated till 344
_B.C._, and we do not know that there was an older altar on the same
spot.[281] Assuredly Rome was not in early times a great centre of the
Juno cult, as were some of the cities in her neighbourhood, _e.g._
Lanuvium, Falerii, and Veii;[282] and the gradual establishment of her
position as a truly Roman goddess may be explained by her appearance in
the trias of deities in the Capitoline temple at the end of the regal
period, and by the removal to Rome of Juno Regina of Veii still later,
after the destruction of that city.
What, then, was Juno originally to the Roman religious mind? There is no
more difficult question than this in our whole subject; as we probe
carefully in those dark ages she baffles us continually. Undoubtedly she
was a woman's deity, and we may aptly say of her "varium et mutabile
semper femina." The most singular fact we know about her cult is that
women used to speak of their Juno as men spoke of their Genius;[283] and
it is not by any means impossible that this may be the clue to the
original Italian conception of her.[284] In that case we should have to
explain her appearance as a well-defined goddess in so many Latin towns,
as the anthropomorphising result of that penetration of Greek ideas
into Latium from the south, of which I shall have something to say later
on. Such ideas, when they reached Rome, may have produced the notion
that she was the consort of Jupiter, for which I must confess that I can
find no sufficient evidence in the early cult of either.[285] But I must
here leave her, for in truth she does not belong to this lecture; and it
would need at least one whole lecture to discuss her adequately in all
her later aspects. The latest German discussion of her occupied sixty
closely printed pages; and instructive as it was in some ways, arrived
at the apparently impossible conclusion that she was a deity of the
earth.
Last in the order of invocation, even to the latest days of Rome, came
Vesta, "the only female deity among the highest gods of the most ancient
State,"[286] for Juno can hardly be reckoned among them, and Tellus had
no special cult or priesthood of her own. We have already noticed Vesta
as the religious centre of the house, making it into a _home_ in a sense
almost more vivid than that in which we use the sacred word. Through all
stages of development from house to city this religious centre must have
been preserved, and in the Rome of historical times Vesta was still
there, inherent in her sacred hearth-fire, which was tended by her six
virgin priestesses, and renewed on the Roman New Year's day (March 1) by
the primitive method of friction.[287] The Vestals beyond doubt
represented the unmarried daughters of the primitive Latin family, and
the _penus Vestae_, a kind of Holy of Holies of the Roman State,
recalled the _penus_ or store-closet of the agricultural home; this
_penus_ was cleansed on June 15 for the reception of the first fruits of
the harvest, and then closed until June 7 of the following year.[288]
These and other simple duties of the Vestals, all of them traceable to
the old life on the farm, together with their own sex and maidenhood,
preserved this beautiful cult throughout Roman history from all
contamination. Vesta in her _aedes_, a round dwelling which was never a
temple in the technical sense, was represented by no statue, and her
title of Mater never suggested to the true Roman worshipper anything but
her motherly grace and beneficence.[289] Far more than any other cult,
that of Vesta represents the reality and continuity of Roman religious
feeling; and the remains of her latest dwelling, and the statues of her
priestesses with no statue of herself among them, may still give the
visitor to the Forum some dim idea of the spirit of Roman worship.[290]
NOTES TO LECTURE VI
[219] Arnobius (v. 155) fortunately mentions that this
story came from the second book of Valerius Antias,
whose bad reputation is well known. It was plainly meant
to account for the cult-title of Jupiter Elicius, and
the origin of the _procuratio fulminis_, and was
invented by Greeks or Graecising Romans at a time (2nd
century B.C.) when all reverence for the gods had
vanished as completely as in Greece. Yet Dr. Frazer
writes of Numa as "an adept at bringing down lightning
from heaven" (_Early History of Kingship_, p. 204).
[220] On this subject, the evolution of the knowledge of
God, I may refer to Professor Gwatkin's _Gifford
Lectures_ of 1904-5, published by Messrs. T. & T. Clark,
Edinburgh.
[221] The meaning of _deus_ is well put by Mr. C. Bailey
in his sketch of _Roman Religion_ (Constable & Co.), p.
12.
[222] Guesses can be made about these, but little or
nothing is to be learnt from them to help us in this
lecture.
[223] I adhere to what was said in _R.F._ p.
312 foll. We do not know, and probably never shall know,
the original deity concerned in that festival. The
ritual is wholly unlike that of the _rustica Faunalia_
(_R.F._ p. 256 foll.). I believe that it dates from a
time anterior to the formation of real gods--possibly
from an aboriginal people who did not know any. (I am
glad to see this view taken in the latest summary of
German learning on this subject, _Einleitung in die
Altertumswissenschaft_, by Gaercke and Norden, vol. ii.
p. 262.) At the moment of printing an interesting
discussion of the Lupercalia, by Prof. Deubner, who
treats it as a historical growth, in which are embodied
ideas and rites of successive ages, has appeared in
_Archiv_ (1910, p. 481 foll.). See Appendix B.
[224] Wissowa, _R.K._ pp. 170 and 250 foll.
[225] Strabo, p. 164. Cp. Usener, _Goetternamen_, p. 277,
whose comment is, "Die Goetter aller dieser Staemme waren
'namenlos,' weil sie nicht mit Eigennamen sondern durch
Eigenschaftsworte benannt wurden. Fuer einen
griechischen Reisenden vorchristlicher Zeit waren sie
nicht fassbar." Arnobius iii. 43, Gellius ii. 28. 2 are
good passages for the principle. The latter alludes to
the anxiety of _veteres Romani_ on this point, "ne alium
pro alio nominando falsa religione populum alligarent."
Hence the formulae "si deus si dea," or "sive quo alio
nomine fas est nominare," Serv. _Aen._ ii. 351;
"quisquis es," _Aen._ iv. 576. See also Farnell,
_Evolution of Religion_, 184 foll.; Dieterich, _Eine
Mithrasliturgie_, p. 110 foll.