p. 50 foll. Lanciani, _Ruins and Excavations of Ancient
Rome_, p. 132. It is worth noting that in a passage
quoted by Helbig, Plutarch (_Numa_ 8) uses for some of
the most ancient Roman attempts at temple building the
same word by which he describes the booths at the feast
of tabernacles ([Greek: kaliades]).
[1008] Whether there was in later days any special
religious signification in the use of green foliage and
branches I will not undertake to say, but I have been
struck by the constant use of them in cases of
religious seclusion, even where the person is secluded
in some part of the house, and not outside it. See _e.g.
G. B._ ii. pp. 205-214.
[1009] Prof. Anwyl, _Celtic Religion_ (Constable's
series), p. 10. Mr. Baring-Gould told Mr. Anwyl that he
had seen in some of the Dartmoor circles central holes
which seemed meant for the fixing of this pole. I will
add here that it has occurred to me that these huts
must, in one sense at least, be a survival (like other
points of ritual), from the days of pastoral life, and
of the migration of the Aryans. Temporary huts are
characteristic of pastoral as contrasted with
agricultural life, and must have been used during the
wanderings, as by the Israelites. See Schrader,
_Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_ (Eng.
Trans., London, 1890), p. 404.
APPENDIX II
PROF. DEUBNER'S THEORY OF THE LUPERCALIA
(See pp. 34 and 106)
In the _Archiv fuer Religionswissenschaft_, 1910, p. 481 foll., Prof.
Deubner has published an interesting study of this puzzling festival, to
which I wish to invite attention, though it has reached me too late for
use in my earlier lectures.
It has long been clear to me that any attempt to explain the details of
the Lupercalia on a single hypothesis must be a failure. If all the
details belong to the same age and the same original festival, we cannot
recover the key to the whole ceremonial, though we may succeed in
interpreting certain features of it with some success. Is it, however,
possible that these details belong to _different_ periods,--that the
whole rite, as we know it, with all the details put together from
different sources of knowledge, was the result of an accretion of
various features upon an original simple basis of ceremonial? Prof.
Deubner answers this question in the affirmative, and works out his
answer with much skill and learning.
He begins by explaining the word _lupercus_ as derived from _lupus_ and
_arceo_, and meaning a "keeper off of wolves." The _luperci_ were
originally men chosen from two gentes or families to keep the wolves
from the sheepfolds, in the days when the Palatine was a shepherd's
settlement, and they did it by running round the base of the hill in a
magical circle (if I understand him rightly). If that be so, we need not
assume a deity Lupercus, nor in fact any deity at all, nor need we see
in the runners a quasi-dramatic representation of wolves as
vegetation-spirits, as Mannhardt proposed (see my _Roman Festivals_, p.
316 foll.). This view has the advantage of making the rite a simple and
practical one, such as would be natural to primitive Latins; and the
etymology is apparently unexceptionable, though it will doubtless be
criticised, as in fact it has been long ago.
But in course of time, Prof. Deubner goes on, there came to be engrafted
on this simple rite of circumambulation without reference to a deity, a
festival of the rustic god Faunus; and now there was added a sacrifice
of goats, which seem to have been his favourite victims (kids in Hor.
_Odes_, iii. 18). The _luperci_, who had formerly run round the hill
quite naked, as in many rites of the kind (see p. 491), now girt
themselves with the skins of the goats, in order to increase their
"religious force" in keeping away the wolves, with strength derived from
the victims.
But the _luperci_ also carried in their hands, in the festival as we
know it, strips of the skins of the victims, with which they struck at
women who offered themselves to the blows, in order to make them
fertile. This, Prof. Deubner thinks, was a still later accretion. Life
in a city had obliterated the original meaning of the rite--the keeping
off wolves; but a new meaning becomes attached to it, presumably growing
out of the use of the skins as magical instruments of additional force.
Here, too, Juno first appears on the scene as the deity of women, for
the strips were known as _amicula Iunonis_ (_R.F._ 321 and note). The
strips may have been substituted for something carried in the hand to
drive away the wolves; the goat, it should be noted, is prominent in the
cult of Juno, _e.g._ at Lanuvium. The mystical meaning of striking or
flogging has been sufficiently explained in this instance by Mannhardt
(_R.F._ p. 320), and is now familiar to anthropologists in other
contexts.
In the period when the fertilisation of women became the leading feature
of the rite, the State took up the popular festival, and it gained
admittance to the religious calendar, which was drawn up for the city of
the four regions (see above, Lect. IV., p. 106). The State was
represented, as we learn from Ovid, by the Flamen Dialis (_Fasti_, ii.
282).
But we still have to account for some strange detail, which has never
been satisfactorily explained in connection with the rest of the
ceremony. The runners had their foreheads smeared with the blood of the
victims, which was then wiped off with wool dipped in milk; after which,
says Plutarch (_Romulus_, 21), they were obliged to laugh. These
details, as Prof. Deubner remarks, seem very un-Roman; we have no
parallel to them in Roman ritual, and I have remarked more than once in
these lectures on the absence of the use of blood in Roman ceremonial. I
have suggested that they were allowed to survive in the religion of the
city-state, though actually belonging to that of a primitive population
living on the site of Rome. Prof. Deubner's explanation is very
different, and at first sight startling. These, he thinks, are Greek
cathartic details added by Augustus when he re-organised the Lupercalia,
as we may guess that he did from Suet. _Aug._ 31. They can all be
paralleled from Greek religion. We know of them only from Plutarch, who
quotes a certain Butas as writing Greek elegiacs in which they were
mentioned; but of the date of this poet we know nothing. Ovid does not
mention these details, nor hint at them in the stories he tells about
the festival. (It is certainly possible that Augustus's revision may
have been made after Ovid wrote the second book of the _Fasti_; it could
not have been done until he became Pont. Max. in 12 B.C., and perhaps
not till long after that, and the _Fasti_ was written some time before
Ovid's banishment in A.D. 9.) That Augustus should insert Greek
cathartic details in the old Roman festival is certainly surprising, but
not impossible. We know that in the _ludi saeculares_ he took great
pains to combine Greek with Roman ritual.
The above is a mere outline of Prof. Deubner's article, but enough, I
hope, to attract the attention of English scholars to it. Whether or no
it be accepted in whole or part by learned opinion, it will at least
have the credit of suggesting a way in which not only the Lupercalia,
but possibly other obscure rites, may be compelled ultimately to yield
up their secrets.
APPENDIX III
THE PAIRS OF DEITIES IN GELLIUS xiii. 23 (see page 150)
The first paired deity mentioned by Gellius is _Lua Saturni_, also known
as _Lua Mater_, of whom Dr. Frazer writes (p. 412), "In regard to Lua we
know that she was spoken of as a mother, which makes it not improbable
that she was also a wife." We are not surprised to find him claiming
that because Vesta is addressed as Mater in the _Acta Fratr. Arv._
(Henzen, p. 147), that virgin deity was also married. This he does in
his lectures on Kingship (p. 222), quoting Ennius and Lactantius as
making Vesta mother of Saturnus and Titan. No comment on this is needed
for any one conversant with Graeco-Roman religion and literature from
Ennius onward. The title Mater here means simply that Vesta was to her
worshippers in a maternal position: "quamvis virginem, indole tamen
quadam materna praeditam fuisse nuper exposuit Preunerus," says Henzen,
quoting Preuner's _Hestia-Vesta_, an old book but a good one (p. 333).
But to return to Lua: I freely confess that I cannot explain why she was
styled Mater. We only know of her, apart from the list in Gellius and
one passage of Servius, from the two passages of Livy quoted without
comment by Dr. Frazer. The first of these (viii. 1), which may be taken
from the pontifical books, seems to let in a ray of light on her nature
and function. In 338 B.C. the Volscians had been beaten, and "armorum
magna vis" was found in their camp. "Ea Luae Matri se dare consul dixit,
finesque hostium usque ad maritimam oram depopulatus est." That is, as I
understand the words, he dedicated the enemy's spoils to the _numen_ who
was the enemy of his own crops.[1010] For if Lua be connected
etymologically with _lues_, she may be the hurtful aspect of Saturnus,
like _Tursa_ Cerfia Cerfii Martii as Buecheler explains it (_Umbrica_,
p. 98).
A curious passage of Servius may be quoted in support of this view, in
which Luae is an almost certain correction for Lunae (see Jordan's
edition of Preller's _Rom. Mythol._ vol. ii. p. 22). Commenting on
Virgil's "Arboribusque satisque lues" (_Aen._ iii. 139), he writes:
"quidam dicunt, diversis numinibus vel bene vel male faciendi potestatem
dicatam, ut Veneri coniugia, Cereri divortia, Iunoni procreationem
liberorum: sterilitatem horum tam Saturno quam Luae, hanc enim sicut
Saturnum orbandi potestatem habere." Whatever Lua may originally have
been, she seems to have been regarded as a power capable of working for
evil in the crops and in women; if you could get her to work on your
enemy's crops (cp. the _excantatio_, above p. 58), so much the better,
and the better would her claim be to the title of Mater (but Dr. Frazer
supplies us with examples of a _hostile_ spirit being called by a
family name, _e.g._, Grandfather Smallpox, _G.B._ iii. p. 98). When the
consul had dedicated the spoils to her he proceeded to assist her in her
functions by ravaging the crops of the enemy; thus she became later on a
deity of spoils. In the Macedonian triumph of B.C. 167 we find her in
company with Mars and Minerva as one of the deities to whom "spolia
hostium dicare ius fasque est" (Livy xlv. 33).
I may add here that Dr. Frazer has another arrow in his quiver to prove
that Saturnus was married: if Lua was not his wife (which no Roman
asserts) certainly (he says) Ops was. He quotes a few words from
Macrobius (i. 13. 19) in which these two are mentioned as husband and
wife. If he had quoted the whole passage, his reader would have been
better able to judge of the value of the writers of whom Macrobius says
that they "crediderunt" that Ops was wife of Saturn. For it appears that
some of them fancied that Saturnus was "a satu dictus _cuius causa de
caelo est_"--(a desperate attempt to make the old spirit of the seed
into a heaven-god), while Ops, whose name speaks for itself, was the
earth. But the real companion deity to Ops was not Saturnus, but Consus.
This has been placed beyond all reasonable doubt by Wissowa in his _de
Feriis_ (reprinted in _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 154 foll.). See also
my _R.F._ p. 212. The names Ops and Consus obviously refer to stored
corn, and everything in their cult points the same way. Saturnus'
connection with Ops is a late and a mistaken one, derived from the
Graecising tendency, which brought Cronos and Rhea to bear on them.
Next a word about Hora Quirini. As this coupling of names is followed by
Virites Quirini, in the characteristic method explained in the text (cp.
Cic. _Nat. Deor._ ii. 27 of Vesta, "_vis_ eius ad aras et focos
pertinet"), it is hardly necessary to comment on it. Hora is perhaps
connected with Umbrian Heris (cp. Buecheler, _Umbrica_, index), which
with kindred forms means will, willingness. Thus in "Nerienem Mavortis
et Herem" (Ennius, fragm. 70, in Baehrens, _Fragm. Poet. Lat._) we may
see the strength and the will of Mars (cp. Herie Iunonis). Hora is also
connected in legend with Hersilia (Ov. _Met._ 14. 829), and this helps
to show how the Alexandrian erotic legend-making faculty got hold of
her. But, says Dr. Frazer, Ennius regarded her as wife of Quirinus:
"Teque Quirine pater veneror, Horamque Quirini" (fragm. 71 of the
_Annales_). This is Dr. Frazer's interpretation of the words, but Ennius
says nothing of conjugal relations; and even if he had, his evidence as
to ancient Roman conceptions would be worthless. Ennius was not a Roman;
he came from Magna Graecia; and if Dr. Frazer will read _all_ that is
said about him, _e.g._ in Schanz's history of Roman literature, he will
allow that every statement of such a man about old Roman ideas of the
divine must be regarded with suspicion and subjected to careful
criticism.
Next we come to Salacia Neptuni. Of this couple Dr. Frazer says that
Varro plainly implies that they were husband and wife, and that this is
affirmed by Augustine, Seneca, and Servius. The accumulation of evidence
seems strong; but Varro implies nothing of the kind (_L.L._ v. 72). He
is indulging in fancy etymologies, and derives Neptunus from _nubere_,
"quod mare terras obnubit ut nubes caelum, ab nuptu id est opertione ut
antiqui, a quo nuptiae, nuptus dictus." If he had meant to make Salacia
wife of Neptunus, this last sentence would surely have suggested it; but
he goes on after a full stop, "Salacia Neptuni a salo." It is only the
later writers, ignorant of the real nature of Roman religious ideas, who
make Salacia into a wife. It is worth noting that Varro adds another
feminine deity in his next sentence, Venilia, whom Virgil makes the
mother of Turnus (_Aen._ x. 76); and Servius, commenting on this line,
goes one better, and says she was identical with Salacia. Perhaps both
were sea or water spirits, connected with Neptunus as _famulae_ or
_anculae_ (see Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 19), but they are lost to us, and
speculation is useless. In _R.F._ p. 186, I suggested an explanation of
Salacia which I am disposed to withdraw. But for anyone wishing to study
the treatment of old Roman _numina_ by the mythologists and philosophers
of the Graeco-Roman period, I would recommend an attentive reading of
the whole chapter of Augustine from which Dr. Frazer quotes a few words
(_C.D._ vii. 22); and further a careful study of the Graeco-Roman
methods of fabricating myths about Roman divine names, for which he will
do well to read the passages referred to by Wissowa in _R.K._ pp. 250
and 251, and notes.
Lastly, comes Maia Volcani. Here for once we get a fact of cult, which
is a relief, after the loose and reckless statements of non-Roman and
Christian writers. The flamen Volcanalis sacrificed to Maia on May 1st,
which proves that there was a real and not a fancied connection between
Volcanus and Maia, but certainly not that they were husband and wife.
Dr. Frazer, however, quotes Cincius "on the _Fasti_" as (ap. Macrob. i.
12. 18) stating this, and refers us to Schanz's _Gesch. der roem. Lit._
for information about him. In the second edition of that work he will
find a discussion of the very doubtful question as to whether the
Cincius he quotes is the person whom he asserts him to be, viz., the
annalist of the second Punic War. The writer of the article "Cincius" in
Pauly-Wissowa _Real-Encycl._ is very confident that the one who wrote on
the _Fasti_ lived as late as the age of Augustus. But putting that
aside, what are we to make of the fact that another annalist, L.
Calpurnius Piso (famous as the author of the first lex de repetundis,
149 B.C.), said that the wife of Volcanus was not Maia, but Maiestas?
Piso was not a good authority (see above, p. 51), but he seems here to
bring the "consort" of the fire-god into line with such expressions of
activity as Moles, Virites, and so on; and it seems that as early as the
second century B.C., sport and speculation with these names were
beginning. I have quoted the whole pedantic passage from Macrobius in my
_Roman Festivals_, p. 98, where the reader may enjoy it at leisure. I
shall not be surprised if he comes to the conclusion that neither
Macrobius nor his learned informers knew anything about Maia. When he
reads that she was the mother of Mercurius, he will recollect that
Mercurius was not a Roman deity of the earliest period, and did not
belong to the _di indigetes_; and when he finds that she is identified
with Bona Dea, he must not forget that that deity, as scholars are now
pretty well agreed, was introduced at Rome from Tarentum in the age of
the Punic Wars. The one fact we know is the sacrifice by the flamen
Volcanalis on May 1. Someone went to work to explain this and another,
viz. that the Ides of the month was the dedication day of the first
temple of Mercurius (B.C. 495), and also the fact that the temple of the
Bona Dea on the Aventine was dedicated on the Kalends. The result was an
extraordinary jumble of fancy and myth, which has been recognised as
such by those who have studied closely the methods of Graeco-Roman
scholarship. The unwary, of course, are taken in. A student of these
methods might do well to take as an exercise in criticism the three
"specimens of Roman mythology" which Dr. Frazer says (p. 413) have
"survived the wreck of antiquity"--the loves of Vertumnus and Pomona, of
Jupiter and Juturna, of Janus and Cardea. In the last of these
especially he will find one of the most audacious pieces of charming and
wilful invention that a Latin poet could perpetrate, in imitation of
Hellenistic love tales, and to suit the taste of a public whose
education was mainly Greek.
The above lengthy note was written before I had seen von Domaszewski's
paper on this subject ("Festschrift fuer O. Hirschfeld") reprinted in
_Abhandlungen zur roem. Religion_, p. 104 foll. cp. p. 162.) His
explanations are different in detail from mine, but rest on the same
general principle that the names Salacia, etc., indicate functions or
attributes of the male deity to whom they are attached.
[1010] For the taboo on such spoils, and their
destruction, see M. S. Reinach's interesting paper
"Tarpeia," in _Cultes, mythes, et religions_, iii. 221
foll.
APPENDIX IV
(LECTURE VIII., PAGE 169 FOLL.) IUS AND FAS
In historical times the two kinds of _ius_, _divinum_ and _humanum_,
were strongly distinguished (see Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 318, who quotes
Gaius ii. 2: "summa itaque rerum divisio in duos articulos diducitur,
nam aliae sunt divini iuris, aliae humani"). But it is almost certain
that there was originally no such clear distinction. The general opinion
of historians of Roman law is thus expressed by Cuq (_Institutions
juridiques des Romains_, p. 54): "Le droit civil n'a eu d'abord qu'une
portee fort restreinte. Peu a peu il a gagne du terrain, il a entrepris
de reglementer des rapports qui autrefois etaient du domaine de la
religion. Pendant longtemps a Rome le droit theocratique a coexiste avec
le droit civil." (See also Muirhead, _Introduction to Roman Law_, ed.
Goudy, p. 15.) Possibly the formation of an organised calendar, marking
off the days belonging to the deities from those which were not so made
over to them, first gave the opportunity for the gradual realisation of
the thought that the set of rules under which the citizen was
responsible to the divine beings was not exactly the same as that under
which he was responsible to the civil authorities. The distinction took
many ages to realise in all its aspects, and is not complete even under
the XII. Tables or later, because the sanction for civil offences
remained in great part a divine one; on this point Jhering is certainly
wrong (_Geist des roem. Rechts_, i. 267 foll.). As Cuq remarks (p. 54,
note 1), one institution of the _ius divinum_ kept its force after the
complete secularisation of law, and retains it to this day, viz. the
oath.
If there was originally no distinction between religious and civil rules
of law, it follows that there were originally no two distinguishing
terms for them. The earliest passage in which they are distinguished as
_ius divinum_ and _humanum_ (so far as I know) is Cicero's speech for
Sestius (B.C. 56), sec. 91, quoted by Wissowa, p. 319: "domicilia
coniuncta quas urbes dicimus, _invento et divino iure et humano_,
moenibus cinxerunt." But by all British writers on Roman law, and by
many foreign ones, the word _fas_ is used as equivalent to the ius
divinum, and sharply distinguished from _ius_. Thus the late Dr.
Greenidge, in his useful work on Roman public life (p. 52 and
elsewhere), makes this distinction; he writes of the _rex_ as the chief
expounder of the divine law (_fas_), and of the control exercised by
_fas_ over the citizen's life. Cp. Muirhead, ed. Goudy, p. 15 foll.,
where Mommsen is quoted thus: "Mommsen is probably near the mark when he
describes the _leges regiae_ as mostly rules of the _fas_." But Mommsen,
like Wissowa in his _Religion und Kultus_, does not use the word _fas_,
but speaks of "Sakralrecht." Sohm, on the other hand (_Roman Law_,
trans. Ledlie, p. 15, note), compares _fas_ with Sanscrit _dharma_ and
Greek _themis_, as meaning unwritten rules of divine origin, which
eventually gave way before _ius_, as in Greece before [Greek: dikaion].
(Cp. Binder, _Die Plebs_, p. 501.) But it is safer in this case to leave
etymology alone, and to try to discover what the Romans themselves
understood by _fas_, which is indeed a peculiar and puzzling word. (For
its possible connection with _fari_, _effari_ (ager effatus), _fanum_,
and _profanum_, etc., see H. Nettleship's _Contributions to Latin
Lexicography_, s.v. "Fas.")
_Fas_ was at all times indeclinable, and is rarely found even as an
accusative, as in Virg. _Aen._ ix. 96:
mortaline manu factae immortale carinae
fas habeant?
In the oldest examples of its use, _i.e._ in the ancient calendar QRCF,
on March 24 and May 24, _i.e._ "quando rex comitiavit fas" (Varro,
_L.L._ vi. 31), and QStDF on June 15, _i.e._ "Quando stercus delatum
fas" (Varro, _L.L._ vi. 32), it is hard to say whether it is a
substantive at all, and not rather an adverb like _satis_. So, too, in
the antique language of the _lex templi_ of Furfo (58 B.C.) we read,
"Utii tangere sarcire tegere devehere defigere mandare ferro oeti
promovere referre _fasque esto_" (_liceat_ should probably be inserted
before _fasque esto_). See _CIL._ i. 603, line 7; Dessau, _Inscript.
Lat. selectae_, ii. 1. 4906, p. 246. In these examples _fas_ simply
means that you may do certain acts without breaking religious law; it
does not stand for the religious law itself. To me it looks like a
technical word of the _ius divinum_, meaning that which it is lawful to
do under it; thus a _dies fastus_ is one on which it is lawful under
that _ius_ to perform certain acts of civil government, "sine piaculo"
(Varro, _L.L._ vi. 29). _Nefas_ is, therefore, in the same way a word
which conveys a prohibition under the divine law. By constant
juxtaposition with _ius_, _fas_ came in course of time to take on the
character of a substantive, and so too did its opposite _nefas_. The
dictionaries supply many examples of its use as a substantive and as
paralleled with _ius_, but the only one I can find that is earlier than
Cicero is Terence, _Hecyra_, iii. 3. 27, _i.e._ in the work of a
non-Roman.
I cannot find that it is so used by Varro, where we might naturally have
expected it. Cicero does not call his imaginary ius divinum a _fas_, but
iura religionum, constitutio religionum (_de Legibus_ ii. 10-23, 17-32).
_Ius_ is the word always used technically of particular departments of
the religious law, _e.g._ ius pontificium, ius augurale, and ius fetiale
(_CIL._ i. p. 202, is preimus ius fetiale paravit). The notion that
_fas_ could mean a kind of code of religious law is probably due to
Virgil's use of the word in "Quippe etiam festis quaeddam exercere
diebus Fas et iura sinunt," _Georg._ i. 269, and to the comment of
Servius, "id est, divina humanaque iura permittunt: nam ad religionem
fas, ad homines iura pertinent."