calendar, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and Vesta, were not thought of
as existing in any sense in human form, nor as personal beings having
any human characteristics. The early Romans were destitute of
mythological fancy, and as they had never had their deities presented to
them in visible form, could hardly have invented such stories about
them as sprang up in a most abundant crop when Greek literature and
Greek art had changed their mental view of divinity. Roman legends were
occupied with practical matters, with kings and the foundation of
cities; and even among these it is hardly possible to detect those which
may be really Roman, for they are hidden away, like rude ancient
frescoes, under the elaborate decorations of the Greek artists, who
seized upon everything that came to hand, including the old deities
themselves, to amuse themselves and win the admiration of their dull
pupils at Rome. He who would appreciate the difficulty of getting at the
original rude drawings must be well acquainted with the decorative
activity of the Alexandrian age.
Thus we might well presume _a priori_ that the old Roman gods were not
conceived as married pairs, nor as having children; and this is indeed
the conclusion at which we have arrived after half a century or more of
most careful and conscientious investigation by a series of German
scholars. But quite recently in this country the contrary view has been
put forward by an author of no less weight than Dr. Frazer; and another
eminent Cambridge scholar, Mr. A. B. Cook, evidently inclines to the
same view. I should in any case be reluctant to engage in controversy
with two valued personal friends; but it is just possible that in what
follows I may be able to throw some faint light on the evolution of the
idea of marriage among divine beings; and on the strength of this I am
content for the moment to be controversial. Dr. Frazer's arguments, with
strictures on my opinions, will be found in an appendix to his book on
_Adonis,_ _Attis_, _Osiris_, 2nd edition.
In pure animism the spirits are nameless; when their residence and
functions are more clearly recognised they acquire names, and these
names are naturally masculine or feminine among peoples whose language
is not genderless, as was the case with the Sumerians of
Babylonia.[298] This would seem to be the first step on the path to a
personal conception of divinity. But there are signs that the Romans had
not got very far on this path when we begin to know anything about their
religion. I have already alluded to the formula "Sive deus sive dea,"
which occurs in the ritual of the Fratres Arvales, in the formula given
by Cato for making a new clearing, and elsewhere;[299] and indeed there
seems to have been always some uncertainty about the sex of one or two
well-known deities, such as Pales and Pomonus or Pomona.[300] It is not,
therefore, _a priori_ probable that the process of personalisation (if I
may coin the word) should have proceeded, at the period we are treating
of, so far as to ascribe to these named deities of both sexes the
characteristics of human beings in social life and intercourse. Yet
Varro, as Dr. Frazer points out, is quoted by St. Augustine as saying
that his ancestors (that is, as Augustine adds), "veteres Romanos,"
believed in the marriage of gods and in their procreative power.[301] If
Varro wrote "maiores meos," as he seems to have done, of whom was he
really thinking? Was Augustine's comment based on the rest of Varro's
text, or was he jumping to a conclusion which would naturally serve his
own purpose? Varro, of course, was not a Roman, but from Reate in the
Sabine country. But even if he were thinking of Rome, how far back would
his knowledge extend? The Romans had known Greek married gods for three
or four centuries before his time, and he may quite well be thinking of
these. Of the _di indigetes_ of an earlier period he could hardly know
more than we do ourselves; his only sources of information were the
facts of the cult and the books of the pontifices. The facts of the
cult, so far as he and others have recorded them, suggest no pairing of
deities, no "sacred marriage."[302] The pontifical books, which
contained rules and formulae for the proper invocation of deities by
their right names, do indeed seem to have suggested a certain
conjunction of male and female divine names; and it is just possible
that this is what Varro had in his mind when he wrote the passage seized
upon by Augustine. I will proceed at once to examine this evidence, as
it is incidentally of great interest in the history of Italian religion;
and Dr. Frazer will probably allow that his conclusion must stand or
fall by it.
The evidence to which I allude is preserved in the 13th book of the
_Noctes Atticae_ of Aulus Gellius (ch. xxiii.), and extracted from
"libri sacerdotum populi Romani," as "comprecationes deorum
immortalium"; these also occur, he says, in _plerisque antiquis
orationibus_, _i.e._ in the invocations to the gods made by the orator
at the beginning or end of his speech.[303] Among these Gellius found
the following conjunctions of divine names: Lua Saturni, Salacia
Neptuni, Hora Quirini, Virites Quirini, Maia Volcani, Herie Iunonis,
Moles Martis, and Neriene Martis, or Nerio Martis. Now among these
conjunctions there are three which obviously do not express pairs of
deities, married or other, viz. Virites Quirini, Moles Martis, and Herie
Iunonis; the first two of which plainly mean the strength or force of
Quirinus and Mars, and the third conjoins two female names. The question
is whether the others are to be understood as giving us the names of the
"wives" of Saturnus, Neptunus, Quirinus, Volcanus, and Mars. The fact
that these are associated with others which cannot mean anything of the
kind is itself against this conclusion; but I have carefully examined
each pair by the light of such stray information about them as we
possess, and have failed to find anything to suggest Dr. Frazer's
emphatic conclusion that these are married pairs. I should be tedious if
I were to go through the evidence in detail in a lecture like this; but
I will take the pair which Gellius himself discusses, and on which Dr.
Frazer chiefly relies, Neriene or Nerio Martis: it is the pair about
which we know most, and in every way is the most interesting of the
set.[304]
After giving the list of names, Gellius goes on to express his own
opinion that _Nerio Martis_ means (like _Moles Martis_) the _virtus_ or
_fortitudo_ of Mars, _Nerio_ being a Sabine word meaning strength or
courage;[305] and a little further he sums up his view thus: "Nerio
igitur Martis vis et potentia et maiestas quaedam esse Martis
demonstratur." This seems to fit in very comfortably with what can be
guessed of the meaning of two of the other pairs, Virites Quirini and
Maia Volcani: Maia was explained by another Roman scholar as equivalent
to Maiestas.[306]
But Gellius goes on to quote three passages from old Latin authors in
which Nerio (or Neria) appears positively as the wife of Mars; and again
concludes that there was also a tradition that these two were
_coniuges_. Of these passages we luckily have the context of one, for it
occurs in the _Truculentus_ of Plautus: turning this out (line 515) we
find that a rough soldier, arriving at Athens, salutes his sweetheart
with the words "Mars peregre adveniens salutat Nerienen uxorem
suam"--words which Plautus must have adapted from his Greek original in
such a way as to make them intelligible to a Roman audience. Gellius
says that he had often heard a learned friend blame Plautus for thus
putting a false notion about Mars (that he had a wife) into the mouth of
his soldier--"nimis comice"--merely to produce a comic effect. But, he
adds, there was some justification for it; for if you read the third
book of the annals of Gellius (a namesake who lived in the second
century B.C.) you will find that he puts into the mouth of Hersilia,
pleading for peace before Ti. Tatius, words which actually make Nerio
the wife of Mars: "De tui, inquit, coniugis consilio, Martem scilicet
significans." Little, I fear, can be said to the credit of this
Gellius;[307] he lived in an age when annalists were many and inventive,
and long after the Romans had grown accustomed to Greek ideas of the
gods; but we may take this passage as evidence of what may have been in
his day a popular idea of Mars and his consort. Lastly, Aulus Gellius
quotes a brace of lines from one Licinius Imbrex, an old comic writer of
the same century, who, in a _fabula palliata_ called Neaera, wrote:--
nolo ego Neaeram te vocent, aut Nerienem,
cum quidem Marti es in connubium data.
The real question is whether these passages from comic writers and an
annalist of no reputation combine to prove that there was an ancient
popular idea of Mars as a married god; as to the priestly view of the
matter they can, of course, prove nothing. It seems to me that Dr.
Frazer is entitled to argue that in the second century B.C. such a
popular idea existed,[308] which the Roman state religion did not
recognise, and which Aulus Gellius, as we have seen, could not agree
with. I do not, however, think him entitled to go farther, and to infer
that this was an idea of divinity native to Italy or of very old
standing. Is it not much simpler to suppose, with a cool-headed scholar
whom Dr. Frazer is willing to follow when it suits his turn, that pairs
or conjunctions of this kind, the true meaning of which I hope to
explain directly, were easily mistaken by the vulgar mind for married
god and goddess?[309] In those degenerate days of the Roman religion,
after the war with Hannibal, to which these writers belong--and all are
later than Ennius, the first to make mischief by ridiculing the
gods--nothing could be easier than to take advantage of what looked like
married life to invent comic passages to please a Roman audience, now
consisting largely of semi-educated men who had lost faith in their own
religion, and of a crowd of smaller people of mixed descent and
nationality. Such passages, in fact, cannot safely be used as evidence
of religious ideas, apart from the tendencies of the age in which they
were written. Had there really been religious beliefs, rooted in the old
Roman mind, about the wedded life of gods and goddesses, it would even
then have been dangerous to use them mockingly in comedy. And once more,
had there been such genuinely Roman ideas, why, in an age that made for
anthropomorphism, did they not find their way into the Roman
Pantheon,--why did they survive only in literary allusions, to the
bewilderment of scholars like Aulus Gellius?
The real explanation of these curious conjunctions of masculine and
feminine names is, I think, not very hard to come by. Let us remember,
in the first place, that they were found in the books of the priests,
and that they belonged to forms of prayer--_comprecationes deorum
immortalium_; in other words, they do not represent popular ideas of the
deities, but ritualistic forms of invocation. As such they may indeed no
doubt be regarded as expressing, or as growing out of, a popular way of
thinking of the Power manifesting itself in the universe; but they are
themselves none the less, like those strange lists of divine names
called _Indigitamenta_, with which I shall deal directly, the creations
of an active professional priesthood, working upon the principle that
every deity must be addressed in precisely the correct way and no other,
and accounting the name of the deity, as indicating his or her exact
function, the most vitally important thing in the whole invocation. I
have already pointed out how difficult the early Latin must have found
it to discover how to address the _numina_ at work around him, and I
shall return to the subject in another lecture; at present all I want to
insist upon is that the priests of the City-state relieved him of this
anxiety, and indeed must have carried the work so far as to develop a
kind of science of divine nomenclature. Every one who has studied the
history of religions knows well how strong the tendency is, when once
invocation has become ritualised, for the names and titles of the
objects of worship to abound and multiply. The Roman Church of to-day
still shows this tendency in its elaborate invocation of the Virgin.
With the old Romans the common method of elaboration lay in the
invention of cult-titles, of which the different kinds have been
distinguished and explained by Dr. J. B. Carter in his treatise "de
Deorum Romanorum cognominibus."[310] Most of them are suggestive of
function or character, as, _e.g._, Janus Patulcius Clusivius, or Jupiter
Lucetius, Ops Opifera; sometimes they doubled the idea, as in Aius
Locutius, or Anna Perenna, or Fors Fortuna; and in one or two cases
they seem to have combined two deities together in rather puzzling
conjunctions, which usually, however, admit of some possible
explanation, as Janus Junonius, or Ops Consiva (_i.e._ Ops belonging to
Consus).[311] In the Iguvian ritual, which is the highly-elaborated work
of a priesthood as active as the Roman, we find combinations of not less
than four names:[312] Cerfe Martie, Praestita Cerfia Cerfi Martii, Tursa
Cerfia Cerfi Martii, which may perhaps be rendered "Spirit of Mars,
protecting (female) spirit of the (male) spirit of Mars, fear-inspiring
(female) spirit of the (male) spirit of Mars."
Such strange multiple combinations as these suggest that expressions
like Moles Martis or Virites Quirini are only another form of the usual
cult-title, expressing adoration of the power of the deity addressed;
and it is only reasonable to explain the others of the same group on the
same principle. As we have seen, Roman scholars themselves explained
Nerio Martis as equivalent to Virtus Martis; Herie Iunonis probably
means something of the same kind; the others are not so easily
explained, and guesswork about them is unprofitable. But I hope I have
said enough to show that there is absolutely no good ground for
supposing that these combinations of names in nominative and genitive
indicate a relationship of any kind except a qualitative one. Abstract
qualities, let us note, are usually feminine in Latin, and I think it is
not improbable that abstractions such as Fides and Salus, which were
deified at a very early period at Rome, may have reached divinity by
attachment to some god from whom they subsequently became again
separated.[313] And lastly, we can trace the same tendency to combine
names and ideas together far down the course of Roman history; witness
the combination of Genius with cities, legions, gods, etc., as well as
with the individual man, and again such expressions as Pietas Legionis,
by analogy with which von Domaszewski, wrongly as I think, would explain
those we have been discussing.[314]
Before leaving this complicated and cloudy system of divine
nomenclature, it is as well to ask the question once more, even if we
cannot answer it, whether if left to itself it might have developed into
a polytheistic system of personal deities. I will give my own opinion
for what it is worth. I do not think that such a result could have been
reached without the magic touch of the Greek poet and artist, or the
arrival of Greek deities and their images in Latium. Professor Sayce, in
his Gifford lectures on the religion of Babylonia, has shown how the
non-Semitic Sumerians knew only of spirits and demons until the Semite
arrived in the Persian Gulf with his personal gods of both sexes;[315]
and I gather that he does not suppose that without such immigration the
Sumerian ideas of divinity could have become personalised. The question
is not exactly the same at Rome; for there the spirit world had passed
into the hands of an organised priesthood occupied with ritual, and
especially with its terminological aspect; and the chance of
personalisation, if it were there at all, lay in the importance of the
functional name. But the question is after all beside the mark; we shall
see what happened when the Greeks arrived. We may be content at present
to note the fact that they found the functional terminology sufficiently
advanced to take advantage of it, and to revolutionise the whole Roman
conception of the divine.
Dr. Frazer gives me an opportunity of adverting to another point bearing
on the question we are discussing,--the way in which the old Roman
thought of his deities. "It is difficult," he says,[316] "to deny that
the epithets Pater and Mater, which the Romans bestow on so many of
their gods, do really imply paternity and maternity; if this implication
be admitted, the inference appears to be inevitable that these divine
beings were supposed to exercise sexual functions, etc." In a footnote
he adds a number of formidable-looking references, meant, I suppose, to
prove this point. I have closely examined these passages; what they do
prove is simply that many deities were called Pater and Mater. Not one
even suggests that paternity and maternity were in such cases to be
understood literally and, so to speak, physically. The two that come
nearest to what he is looking for are those from Varro and Lactantius.
Varro says[317] that Ops was called Mater because she was identical with
Terra, who was, of course, Terra Mater: "Haec enim--
'terris gentes omnes peperit et resumit denuo,
quae dat cibaria,' ut ait Ennius."[318] It is clear, then, that neither
Varro nor Ennius understood this title of Ops and Terra in Dr. Frazer's
sense of the word. The quotation from the early Christian father
Lactantius, which contains three well-known lines of Lucilius, might
possibly deceive those who neglect to turn it out and read the context;
there we find at once that not even Lactantius could attribute to these
epithets the meaning which Dr. Frazer wishes to put on them. He would
have been as glad to do so as Dr. Frazer himself, though for a very
different reason; but what he actually wrote is this:--
"Omnem Deum qui ab homine colitur, necesse est inter solennes ritus et
precationes patrem nuncupari, non tantum honoris gratia, verum etiam
rationis; quod et antiquior est homine, et quod vitam, salutem, victum
praestat, ut pater. Itaque ut Iuppiter a precantibus pater vocatur,
etc."[319]
Dr. Frazer's quotation begins with this last sentence; it is a pity that
he did not read the context. If he had read it, his candour would have
compelled him to confess that not even a Christian father, with a keen
sense of what was ridiculous or degrading in the pagan religion,
understood the fatherhood of the gods as he wishes to understand it.
But I am wasting time in pressing this point. Dr. Frazer would hardly
have used such an argument if he had not been hard put to it. The
figurative use of human relationships is surely a common practice, when
addressing their deities, of all peoples who have reached the stage of
family life. As another distinguished anthropologist says: "The very
want of an object tends to supply an object through the imagination; and
this will be either the vital energy inherent in things, or the reflex
of the human father, who once satisfied his needs (_i.e._ of the
worshipper). So, in Aryan religions, the supreme god is father, [Greek:
Zeus pater], Diespiter, Marspiter. Ahura-Mazda is a father.... Another
analogy shows the relationship of brother and friend, as in the case of
Mithra."[320] The Romans themselves were familiar from the first with
such figurative use of relationship, as was natural to a people in whom
the family instinct was so strong; we have but to think of the _pater
patratus_ of the Fetiales,[321] of the Fratres Arvales, or the Fratres
Attiedii of Iguvium. What exactly they understood by Pater and Mater
when applied to deities is not so easy to determine: we have not the
necessary data. They were never applied, I believe, to imported deities,
_di novensiles_; always to _di indigetes_, those on whom the original
Roman stock looked as their fellow-citizens and guardians. And we shall
not be far wrong if we conclude that in general they imply the
dependence of the human citizen upon his divine protector, and thus
bring the usage into line with that of other Aryan peoples. Behind this
feeling of dependence there may have been the idea, handed down from
remote ages, that Father Sky and Mother Earth were in a sense the
parents of all living things; but there is nothing in the Roman religion
to suggest that the two were thought of as personally uniting in
marriage or a sexual act.
I will sum up this part of the discussion by translating an admirable
passage in Aust's book on the Roman religion, with which I am in cordial
agreement[322]:--
"The deities of Rome were deities of the cult only. They had no human
form; they had not the human heart with its virtues and vices. They had
no intercourse with each other, and no common or permanent residence;
they enjoyed no nectar and ambrosia ... they had no children, no
parental relation. They were indeed both male and female, and a male and
female deity are often in close relations with each other; but this is
not a relation of marriage, and rests only on a similarity in the sphere
of their operations.... These deities never become independent
existences; they remain cold, colourless conceptions, _numina_ as the
Romans called them, that is, supernatural beings whose existence only
betrays itself in the exercise of certain powers."
They were, indeed, cold and colourless conceptions as compared with the
Greek gods of Olympus, whose warmth and colour is really that of human
life, of human passions; but the one remarkable and interesting thing
about these Roman and Italian numina is the life and force for good or
evil which is the very essence of their being. The puzzling combinations
we have just been studying are quite enough to illustrate this
character. Moles, Virites, Nerio, and perhaps others too, seem to mean
the strength or force inherent in the numen; Cerfius, or Cerus, as the
Latins called it, Liber, Genius, all are best interpreted as meaning a
functional or creative force. Jupiter is the sky or heaven itself, with
all its manifestations of activity; Tellus is Mother Earth, full of
active productive power. At the bottom of these cold and colourless
conceptions there is thus a real idea of power, not supernatural but
rather natural power, which may both hurt and benefit man, and which he
must attempt to enlist on his side. This enlistment was the task of the
Roman priesthood and the Roman government, and so effectually was it
carried out that the divine beings lost their vitality in the process.
We shall be better able to follow out this curious fate of the Roman
deities in later lectures; here I wish to note one other aspect of the
Roman idea of divinity, which will help to explain what I have just been
saying about the life and force inherent in these numina.
In most cursory accounts of the Roman religion it has been the practice
to lay particular stress upon an immense number of "gods," as they used
to be called, each of which is supposed to have presided over some
particular act or suffering of the Roman from the cradle to the
grave--from Cunina, the "goddess" of his cradle, to Libitina who looked
after his interment. I have as yet said nothing about all these. I will
now briefly explain why I have not done so, and why I hesitate to
include them, at any rate in the uncompromising form in which they are
usually presented, among the genuine religious conceptions of the
earliest period. Later on I shall have further opportunity of discussing
them; at the end of this lecture I can only sum up the results of recent
research into this curious cloud of so-called deities.