laying down the rules for the maintenance of right relations between the
citizens and their deities; as ordaining what things are to be done or
avoided in order to keep up a continual _pax_, or quasi-legal covenant,
between these two parties. The two words _ius_ and _pax_, we may note,
are continually meeting us in Roman religious documents. In a prayer
sanctioned by the pontifices for use at the making of a new clearing, we
read: "Si deus, si dea sit cuius illud sacrum est, _ut tibi ius siet_
porco piaculo facere illiusce sacri coercendi ergo,"[341] _i.e._ "O
unknown deity, whether god or goddess, whose property this wood is, let
it be legally proper to sacrifice to thee this pig as an expiatory
offering, for the sake of cutting down trees in this wood of thine."
"Pacem deorum exposcere" (or "petere") is a standing formula, as all
readers of Virgil know;[342] and it occurs in many other authors and
religious documents. When Livy wants to express the horror of the old
patrician families at the idea of plebeians being consuls--men who had
no knowledge of the _ius divinum_ and no right to have any--he makes
Appius Claudius exclaim, "Nunc nos, tanquam iam nihil pace deorum opus
sit, omnes caerimonias polluimus."[343] How can we maintain our right
relations with the gods, if plebeians have the care of them?
Thus it is not going too far to describe the whole Roman religion of the
city-state as a _Rechtsverkehr_,[344] a legal process going on
continually. When a _colonia_ was founded, _i.e._ a military outpost
which was to be a copy in all respects of the Roman State, it was
absolutely essential that its _ius divinum_ should be laid down; it must
have a religious charter as well as a civil one. Even at the very end of
the life of the Republic, when Caesar founded a colony in Spain, he
ordained that, within ten days of its first magistrates taking office,
they should consult the Senate "quos et quot dies festos esse et quae
sacra fieri publice placeat et quos ea sacra facere placeat," _i.e._ as
to the calendar, the ritual, and the priesthood.[345] The Romans, of
course, assumed that Numa, their priest-king, had done the same thing
for Rome; Livy describes him as ordaining a pontifex to whom he
entrusted the care of all these matters, with written rules to
follow.[346] This was the imaginary religious charter of the Roman
State. Without it the citizen, or rather his official representative,
would not know with the necessary accuracy the details of the _cura_ and
_caerimonia_; without it, too, the deities could not be expected to
perform their part of advancing the interests of the State, and indeed,
as I think we shall find, could not be expected to retain the strength
and vitality which they needed for the work. Support was needed on each
side; the State needed the help of the gods, and the gods needed the
help of the State's care and worship.
The ways and means towards the maintenance of this _pax_ were as
follows. First, the deities must be duly placated, and their powers kept
in full vigour, by the ritual of sacrifice and prayer, performed at the
proper times and places by authorised persons skilled in the knowledge
of that ritual. Secondly, there must be an exact fulfilment of all vows
or solemn promises made to the deities by the State or its magistrates,
or by such private persons as might have made similar engagements.
Thirdly, the city, its land and its people, must be preserved from all
evil or hostile influences, whether spiritual or material or both, by
the process broadly known as _lustratio_, which we commonly translate
_purification_. Lastly, strict attention must be paid to all outward
signs of the will of the gods, as shown by omens and portents of various
kinds. This last method of securing the _pax_ became specially prominent
much later in Roman history, and I prefer to postpone detailed
discussion of it for the present; but the other three we will now
examine, with the help of evidence mainly derived from facts of cult,
not from the fancies of mythologists.
First, then, I take sacrifice, dealing only with the general principles
of sacrificial rites, so far as we can discern them in the numerous
details which have come down to us. The word _sacrificium_, let us note,
in its widest sense, may cover any religious act in which something is
made _sacrum_, _i.e._ (in its legal sense) the property of a deity;[347]
I am not now concerned to conjecture what exactly may have been the
meaning of this immortal word before it was embodied in the _ius
divinum_. "Sacrificium" is limited in practical use by the Romans
themselves to offerings, animal or cereal, made on the spot where the
deity had taken up his residence, or at some place on the boundary of
land or city (_e.g._ the gate) which was under his protection, or (in
later times at least) at a temporary altar erected during a campaign.
Thus it was as much a sacrificium when the paterfamilias threw at each
meal a portion of the food into the fire, the residence of Vesta, as
when the consul offered a victim to Mars on the eve of a battle.
Sacrifices have generally been divided into the three classes of (1)
honorific, where the offering is believed to be in some sense a gift to
the deity; (2) piacular, or sin-offerings, where the victim was usually
burnt whole, no part being retained for eating (though this was not the
case at Rome); (3) sacramental sacrifices, where the worshippers enter
into communion with the deity by partaking of the sacred offering
together with him.[348] The two former are constant and typical in the
Roman religion; but traces of the sacramental type, which Robertson
Smith believed to be the oldest, are also found, and it will clear the
ground if I refer to them at once. By far the most interesting example
is that of the Latin festival on the Alban mount, where the flesh of the
victim, a white heifer that had never felt the yoke, was partaken of by
the deputies of all the cities of the Latin league, great importance
being attached to the due distribution.[349] Here the Latin race "yearly
acknowledges its common kinship of blood, and seals it by partaking in
the common meal of a sacred victim," thus entering into communion with
Jupiter, the ancient god of the race, and with each other, by
participation in the flesh of the sacred animal. "This common meal is
perhaps a survival from the age when cattle were sacred animals, and
were never slain or eaten except on the solemn annual occasions when the
clan or race renewed its kinship and its mutual obligations by a solemn
sacrament." It is tempting to compare with this great sacrament the
_epulum Iovis_ on the Ides of September, the dedication-day of the
Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, which three deities
seem to have been present in visible form to share the meal with the
magistrates and senate.[350] But we have not yet arrived at the age when
this temple was built, and we have no evidence enabling us to carry the
rite back in any form to the pre-Etruscan period. There are, however,
faint indications that the old Italians believed the deities to be in
some sense present at their meals, though not in visible form; and at
one festival, the Fornacalia, which was a concern not of the State as a
whole, but of the thirty _curiae_ into which it was divided,[351] there
seems to be no doubt that a common meal took place in which the gods
were believed to have a part, or at any rate to be present though
invisible. Yet the _ius divinum_ of the Roman State assuredly did not
encourage this kind of sacrament; for in the regular round of State
festivals, in which we cannot include even the _feriae Latinae_, the
sacrifices, so far as we are informed, were all honorific or piacular.
If I am not mistaken, the idea of participation by the people in solemn
sacred rites was discouraged by the Roman priesthood; in the _ius
divinum_ the line drawn between _sacrum_ and _profanum_ was clear;
scenes of gluttony or revelry, like the Greek hecatombs, were eliminated
from the _sacra publica_, as I have already pointed out. Not till the
advent of the Sibylline books and the _Graecus ritus_ did the people
take an active part in the State religion; their duty was merely to
abstain from disturbance during the performance of sacred rites. "Feriis
iurgia amovento" is the only reference in Cicero's imaginary sketch of
the _ius divinum_ to the conduct of the citizen on festival days.[352]
Within the family, the curia, the gens, there might be direct and active
participation in daily or yearly ceremonies, but it was an essential
principle of the life of the city-state that its business, religious as
well as civil, should be carried out for the citizens by officials
specially appointed.
In the typical and organised worship of the State, _i.e._ sacrifice
honorific and piacular, sanctioned by the _ius divinum_, the utmost care
was taken that the whole procedure should be in every sense acceptable
to the deity; that nothing _profanum_ should cross the threshold of the
divine; hence it was quiet, orderly, dignified. The feeling that
communication with the deity invoked was impossible save under such
conditions was very strong in the Roman mind, stronger perhaps than with
any other people whose religious practice is known to us; and the sense
of obligation and duty, _pietas_, as they called it, was thus very early
developed, and of infinite value to the State in its youth. This is
entirely in keeping with what we have learnt in the last two lectures of
the ideas of the Romans about the nature of their deities, and throws
additional light on those ideas. They did not as yet know too much about
the divine beings and their powers and wishes; familiarity had not yet
bred contempt; _religio_, as we saw, was still strong among them--the
feeling of awe that is likely to diminish or disappear when you have
your god before you in the form of an idol. It is a principle of human
nature that where knowledge is imperfect, care must be taken to be on
the safe side; this is true of all practical undertakings, and as the
religion of the Romans was that of a practical people with a practical
end in view, it was particularly true of them.
First then, in order that the worship might be entirely acceptable to
the deity invoked, it was essential that the person who conducted it
should be also acceptable. At the head of the whole system was the rex,
who was priest as well as king. We do not know, of course, exactly how
the rex was appointed; but in the case of the typical priest-king Numa,
Livy has described his _inauguratio_ in terms of the _ius divinum_ of
later times for the appointment of priests, and we may take it as fairly
certain that the same principle held good from the earliest times.[353]
After being summoned (so the story ran) from the Sabine city of Cures by
the Senate, he consulted the gods about his own fitness. He was then
conducted by the augur to the arx on the Capitol, and sat down on a
stone facing the south. The augur took his seat on his left hand (the
lucky side) with veiled head, holding the _lituus_[354] of his office
in his right hand, with which, after a prayer, he marked out the
_regiones_ from east to west, the north being to the left, the south to
the right, and silently noted some object in the extreme distance of the
_ager Romanus_, as the farthest point where the appearance of an omen
might be accepted. Then, passing the _lituus_ to his left hand, he laid
his right on the head of Numa, and uttered this prayer: "Father Jupiter,
if it be thy will (_fas_) that this Numa Pompilius, on whose head my
hand is laid, be king of Rome, I pray thee give us clear token within
the limits which I have marked out." Then he said aloud what auspicia he
sought for (_i.e._ whether of birds, lightning, or what); and when they
appeared, Numa descended as rex from the citadel. This process was
called _inauguratio_; it is attested for the confirmation of the
election of the three flamines maiores, the rex, and the augurs, in
historical times,[355] whatever was the method of that election, and
without it the priest was not believed to be acceptable to the gods. It
is not mentioned by Roman writers in connection with the Pontifices or
the Vestals; if this be not merely from dearth of evidence, it is not
easy to account for, unless the reason were that neither body was
specially concerned with sacrifice. But the principle is perfectly
clear--that the person who is to represent the community in worship must
be one of whom the _numina_ openly express approval.
A priest, _sacerdos_, is thus a person set apart by special ritual for
the service of the _sacra populi Romani_. The rex no doubt himself made
the selection and supervised the inauguratio of the other priests at
whose head he was. When the kingship came to an end, his powers of this
kind passed to the pontifex maximus; and it may be as well to add at
once that his sacrificial powers, though they were in a special sense
inherited by a priest who took his title, the _rex sacrorum_, passed
with the civil power to all magistrates _cum imperio_, who wore the
_toga praetexta_ symbolic of priestly function, and had the right of
presiding at sacrificial rites both at home and in the field. Thus
magistrate and priest, though quite distinct under the Republic from the
point of view of public law, have certain characteristics in common as
deriving from a common source in the powers of the rex.[356]
But to return to the period of Numa and the calendar: it was not only
necessary that the priest should be acceptable to the gods, but that he
should be marked off from the rest of the community as being dedicated
to their service. As Dr. Jevons says,[357] in all early religions
priests are marked off from other worshippers, partly by what they do,
and partly by what they may not do; and what he means is (1) that the
priest originally was the person who alone could slay a victim; (2) that
in consequence of his sacredness he was subject to a great number of
restrictions. I have already spoken of these restrictions or priestly
taboos in my second lecture; and as I believe that in the period we are
now dealing with they were little more than a survival, I shall not
return to them now. But of the outward insignia, which marked off the
priest as alone entitled to perform the essential act of worship, the
sacrifice, and which bring him out of the region of the _profanum_ into
that of _sacrum_, I must say a few words before going farther.
In historical times the actual slaying of the victim was done by
subordinates, _popae_, _victimarii_, etc.; but there is no doubt
whatever that it was originally the work of the priest, for he seems at
all times to have used one gesture which is clearly symbolic of it,[358]
and there are traces also of a practice of wearing the toga in such a
way as to leave the right arm free for the act.[359] That toga, or any
other special robe worn by the priest, was always in whole or part red
or purple. The purple-edged _toga praetexta_ was worn both by priests
and magistrates, and by children under age; and I think there is good
reason to believe that in all these cases the original idea was the
same--that they took part, directly or indirectly, as primary or
secondary agents in sacrificial acts. The Salii and the augurs wore the
_trabea_, which was of purple or red, or both; the flamines had a
special robe about the colour of which we are not informed, but the
Flaminica Dialis wore a purple garment called _rica_, and a red veil
called _flammeum_, which was also worn by the bride in the religious
ceremony of marriage. Whether we are to see in this prevalence of red or
purple any symbolism of the shedding of blood in sacrifice I cannot be
sure, but the inference is a tempting one, and has been put forward with
confidence by some recent investigators. It is worth noting that the
Vestals, who did not sacrifice animals, wore white only.[360] If the red
colour has anything to do with blood-shedding, it is probably more than
merely symbolic; it may mean that the sacrificing priest partakes of
that life and strength which he passes on to the god through the blood,
that is the life, of the victim.[361]
The Roman priests had also other insignia, of which the original meaning
is less evident. The Flamen Dialis, and probably all the flamines, wore
a cap with an olive-twig fastened to the top of it; this is well shown
in the sculptures of the Ara Pacis of Augustus.[362] The flaminicae had
a head-dress called _tutulus_, which consisted in part, at least, of a
purple fillet or ribbon. The flamines, when actually sacrificing, wore a
_galerus_, or hood of some kind made of the skin of a victim, and the
Flamen Dialis in particular wore one made of the skin of a white heifer
sacrificed to Jupiter.[363] In these various ways all priests were
outwardly shown to be holy men, _sacerdotes_, marked off from the
_profanum vulgus_. Only for the pontifices we have no information as to
a special dress, just as we also have none as to their inauguratio.[364]
Thus there is no question that the priests were chosen and separated
from the people in such a way as to meet with the approval of the gods;
and even the acolytes, _camilli_ and _camillae_, boys and girls who
frequently appear in sacrificial scenes on monuments, wore the _toga
praetexta_, and, in order to be acceptable, must be the children of
living parents.[365] This rule has lately been the subject of a
discussion by Dr. Frazer, on which he has brought to bear, as usual, a
great range of learning. He regards the restriction not so much as a
matter of good omen, _i.e._ of freedom from contamination by the death
of a parent, but as pointing to a notion that they were "fuller of life
and therefore luckier than orphans."[366] Whether or no this explanation
is the right one, it is quite consistent, as we shall see directly, with
the general idea of sacrifice at Rome, and the learning by which it is
supported is in any case of interest and value.
There is abundant evidence from historical times that all worshippers,
and therefore _a fortiori_ all priests, when sacrificing, had to be
personally clean and free from every kind of taint; a rule which also
held good for the utensils used in the worship, which in many cases at
least were of primitive make and material, not such as were in common
use.[367] The need of personal purity is well expressed by Tibullus in
his description of a rural festival[368]:--
vos quoque abesse procul iubeo, discedat ab aris
cui tulit hesterna gaudia nocte Venus.
casta placent superis: pura cum veste venite
et manibus puris sumite fontis aquam.
These lines indicate an approach at least to the idea of mental as well
as material purity; and Cicero in his _ius divinum_ in the _de
Legibus_[369] actually reaches that idea: "caste iubet lex adire ad
deos, animo videlicet, in quo sunt omnia: nec tollit castimoniam
corporis," etc. But this is the language of a later age, and does not
reflect the notions of the old Roman, but rather those of the religious
philosophy of the Greek. The personal purity which the Roman rule
required was a survival from a set of primitive ideas, closely connected
with taboo, which we are only now beginning to understand fully. They
are common to all or almost all peoples who have made any progress in
systematising their sacrificial worship. As Dr. Westermarck has
recently expressed it,[370] "they spring from the idea that the contact
of a polluting substance with anything holy is followed by injurious
consequences. It is supposed to deprive a deity or holy being of its
holiness.... So also a sacred act is believed to lose its sacredness by
being performed by an unclean individual." And in the next sentence he
goes still farther back in the history of the belief, pointing out that
a polluting substance is itself held to contain mysterious energy of a
baneful kind. But I must leave this interesting subject now; the story
of the evolution of the habit of cleanliness from these ancient ideas
will be found in the thirty-ninth chapter of his _Origin and Development
of Moral Ideas_.
Coming next to the act of sacrifice itself, it is needless to say that
the victim must be as exactly fitted to please the deity--if that be the
right way to express the obligation--as the priest who sacrificed it. It
must be of the right kind, sex, age, colour; it must go willingly to the
slaughter, adorned with fillets and ribbons (_infulae_, _vittae_), in
order to mark it off from other animals as holy; in the case of oxen, we
hear also of the gilding of the horns, but this must have been costly
and unusual.[371] All these details were doubtless laid down in the _ius
divinum_, and in later times, when the deities dwelt in roofed temples,
they were embodied in the _lex_ or charter of each temple.[372] I do not
need to go into them here minutely; for my present purpose, the
elucidation of the meaning which the Romans attached to sacrificial
worship, it will be sufficient to point out that all victims, so far as
we know, were domestic animals, and in almost all cases they were
valuable property (_pecunia_), such as belonged to the stock of the
Latin farmer, ox, sheep, pig, varying according to age and sex. Goats
were used at the Lupercalia, and a horse was sacrificed to Mars, as we
have seen, on October 15, and at the Robigalia in April a red dog was
offered to the spirit of the mildew. But though time forbids me to
explain all these rules, a careful study of the evidence for them is
most useful for any one who wishes to understand the influence of the
_ius divinum_ on the mind of the early Roman. In the family what rules
were needed were matter of tradition; deities were few, and offerings
limited. But in the city-state it was very different; here even the _di
indigetes_ were many, with diverse wishes and likings as well as
functions: how were these to be ascertained and remembered at the right
moment? Here, as in all methods of securing the _pax deorum_, a central
supervising authority was needed, in whose knowledge and wisdom the
whole community had confidence; and he was found in the rex, as is
clearly shown in the whole traditional account of the priest-king Numa.
Very naturally tradition also ascribed to Numa the institution of the
pontifices, whom the historical Romans knew as succeeding the rex in the
supervision of religious law.[373]
If all went well, the victim going willingly and no ill omen
supervening, the actual slaughter followed at the altar. During the
whole operation silence was enjoined; the priests' heads were veiled
with the folds of the toga;[374] pipers (_tibicines_) continued to play,
in order that no unlucky sound or word might be heard which would make
it necessary to start afresh with another victim (_instauratio_).
Immediately before the slaughter the victim was made holier than ever by
sprinkling upon it fragments of sacred cake made of _far_ (_immolatio_),
and by pouring on it libations of wine from a _foculus_ or movable altar
containing this holy condiment, together with incense if that were used
in the rite. As soon as it was dead, the internal organs were examined
to make sure that there was no physical defect or abnormal growth, for
it was, of course, quite as necessary that the animal should be "purus"
within as without; this was the only object of the examination, until
the Etruscan art of _extipicina_ made its way to Rome. What became of
the blood we are not told; I have already remarked that blood has
curiously little part in Roman ritual and custom.[375] But the _exta_,
_i.e._ internal organs of life, were separated from the rest of the
carcase, and carefully cooked in holy vessels, before being laid upon
the altar (_porrectio_), together with certain slices of flesh called
_magmenta_, or increase-offerings, while the rest of the flesh, which
had now lost its holiness, was retained for the use of the priests.[376]
The time occupied in the actual slaughter and inspection of the organs
was not long; but the cooking of these must have been often a lengthy
process. Ovid tells us how on April 25 he met the Flamen Quirinalis
carrying out the exta of a dog and a sheep, which had been sacrificed at
Rome to Robigus that morning, in order to lay them on the altar of that
deity at the fifth milestone on the Via Claudia.[377] Certain days in
the calendar, called _endotercisi_, which were _nefasti_ in morning and
evening, were _fasti_ in the middle of the day, between the slaying of a
victim and the placing of its exta on the altar (_inter hostiam caesam
et exta porrecta_).[378]